An Endangered Necessity: A Response to Prison Visitation Policies: A Fifty-State Survey

Humans are social animals. Our very sense of our own existence depends on interaction with others who respond and react to us in myriad ways. Beyond that, some of our most important roles-as a brother, a mother, a husband, a friend are inherently relational; these terms make sense only in relation to other persons

Integrating Faculty Research Performance Evaluation And The Balanced Scorecard In AU Strategic Planning: A Collaborative Model

Quality of research is a core property that enables a university to gain and sustain credibility. The evaluation and measurement of this core property needs to include a wide range of critical factors. This paper suggests the use of the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach as a powerful tool to link faculty research activity to university strategic planning. Though widely embraced by the corporate sector, BSC has not been applied in the higher education sector of the economy, in part because of the lack of quantitative performance measures. This paper presents application of BSC to a Canadian university, including a quantified performance measurement system. The development of the system, its components, the intended outcomes, and the necessary characteristics that should enable BSC to be applied generally to any university’s overall strategic plan are described

Explicit angle structures for veering triangulations

Agol recently introduced the notion of a veering triangulation, and showed that such triangulations naturally arise as layered triangulations of fibered hyperbolic 3-manifolds. We prove, by a constructive argument, that every veering triangulation admits positive angle structures, recovering a result of Hodgson, Rubinstein, Segerman, and Tillmann. Our construction leads to explicit lower bounds on the smallest angle in this positive angle structure, and to information about angled holonomy of the boundary tori.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures. v2 contains a cleaner definition of holonomy in Section 6.1, and minor expository changes throughout. To appear in Algebraic & Geometric Topolog

A Hybrid Quantum Algorithm for Load Flow

We study a hybrid quantum algorithm for solving the AC load flow problem. The algorithm uses a quantum algorithm to compute the direction in the Newton-Raphson method. This hybrid approach offers scalability and improved convergence rates in theory

Nuclear spirals as feeding channels to the Supermassive Black Hole: the case of the galaxy NGC 6951

We report the discovery of gas streaming motions along nuclear spiral arms towards the LINER nucleus of the galaxy NGC 6951. The observations, obtained using the GMOS integral field spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope, yielded maps of the flux distributions and gas kinematics in the Halpha, [NII]6584 and [SII]6717,31 emission lines of the inner 7x5 arcsec^2 of the galaxy. This region includes a circumnuclear star-forming ring with radius 500pc, a nuclear spiral inside the ring and the LINER nucleus. The kinematics of the ionized gas is dominated by rotation, but subtraction of a kinematic model of a rotating exponential disk reveals deviations from circular rotation within the nuclear ring which can be attributed to (1) streaming motions along the nuclear spiral arms and (2) a bipolar outflow which seems to be associated to a nuclear jet. On the basis of the observed streaming velocities and geometry of the spiral arms we estimate a mass inflow rate of ionized gas of 3x10^(-4) Msun/yr, which is of the order of the accretion rate necessary to power the LINER nucleus of NGC 6951. Similar streaming motions towards the nucleus of another galaxy with LINER nucleus -- NGC 1097 -- have been reported by our group in a previous paper. Taken together, these results support a scenario in which nuclear spirals are channels through which matter is transferred from galactic scales to the nuclear region to feed the supermassive black hole.Comment: 25 pages, 6 eps figures, accepted for publication in Ap

The Shearing HI Spiral Pattern of NGC 1365

The Tremaine-Weinberg equations are solved for a pattern speed that is allowed to vary with radius. The solution method transforms an integral equation for the pattern speed to a least squares problem with well established procedures for statistical analysis. The method applied to the HI spiral pattern of the barred, grand-design galaxy NGC 1365 produced convincing evidence for a radial dependence in the pattern speed. The pattern speed behaves approximately as 1/r, and is very similar to the material speed. There are no clear indications of corotation or Lindblad resonances. Tests show that the results are not selection biased, and that the method is not measuring the material speed. Other methods of solving the Tremaine-Weinberg equations for shearing patterns were found to produce results in agreement with those obtained using the current method. Previous estimates that relied on the assumptions of the density-wave interpretation of spiral structure are inconsistent with the results obtained using the current method. The results are consistent with spiral structure theories that allow for shearing patterns, and contradict fundamental assumptions in the density-wave interpretation that are often used for finding spiral arm pattern speeds. The spiral pattern is winding on a characteristic timescale of ~ 500 Myrs.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Streaming Motions Towards the Supermassive Black Hole in NGC 1097

We have used GMOS-IFU and high resolution HST-ACS observations to map, in unprecedented detail, the gas velocity field and structure within the 0.7 kpc circumnuclear ring of the SBb LINER/Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 1097. We find clear evidence of radial streaming motions associated with spiral structures leading to the unresolved (<3.5 parsecs) nucleus, which we interpret as part of the fueling chain by which gas is transported to the nuclear starburst and supermassive black hole.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures using emulateapj. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Download high-resolution version from http://www.astro.uu.se/~kambiz/DOC/paper-N1097.pd

Local instability signatures in ALMA observations of dense gas in NGC7469

We present an unprecedented measurement of the disc stability and local instability scales in the luminous infrared Seyfert 1 host, NGC7469, based on ALMA observations of dense gas tracers and with a synthesized beam of 165 x 132 pc. While we confirm that non-circular motions are not significant in redistributing the dense interstellar gas in this galaxy, we find compelling evidence that the dense gas is a suitable tracer for studying the origin of its intensely high-mass star forming ring-like structure. Our derived disc stability parameter accounts for a thick disc structure and its value falls below unity at the radii in which intense star formation is found. Furthermore, we derive the characteristic instability scale and find a striking agreement between our measured scale of ~ 180 pc, and the typical sizes of individual complexes of young and massive star clusters seen in high-resolution images.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter