2,408 research outputs found
Misunderstood: The FIFA scandal and theextraterritorial reach of US law
Last month the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 14 FIFA officials as part of an FBI investigation into alleged collusion with football bodies in South and Central America. Many are concerned about the extraterritorial reach of the U.S. in these indictments, but Stuart H. Deming argues that the manner in which the U.S. applies territorial jurisdiction is not unique
The Potent and Broad-Ranging Implications of the Accounting and Record-Keeping Provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
The Potent and Broad-Ranging Implications of the Accounting and Record-Keeping Provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
War Crimes and International Criminal Law
My remarks will focus on three particular areas relating to war crimes and international criminal law. These will include the prospect of an international criminal court, my experience with war crimes issues in Ethiopia, and how traditional practitioners can become involved with these issues
Soil Conservation Research in the Intermountain Region
The need for better understanding of the fundamental principles which govern the natural relationship of water, soil and plant cover has long been recognized by students and workers in many fields o£ natural science. More recently the need for better understanding of just how man has modified this natural relationship in a manner detrimental to his own present and future interests has developed in the Intermountain region of the western United States
Marginalising instrument systematics in HST WFC3 transit lightcurves
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) infrared observations
at 1.1-1.7m probe primarily the HO absorption band at 1.4m, and
has provided low resolution transmission spectra for a wide range of
exoplanets. We present the application of marginalisation based on Gibson
(2014) to analyse exoplanet transit lightcurves obtained from HST WFC3, to
better determine important transit parameters such as R/R, important
for accurate detections of HO. We approximate the evidence, often referred
to as the marginal likelihood, for a grid of systematic models using the Akaike
Information Criterion (AIC). We then calculate the evidence-based weight
assigned to each systematic model and use the information from all tested
models to calculate the final marginalised transit parameters for both the
band-integrated, and spectroscopic lightcurves to construct the transmission
spectrum. We find that a majority of the highest weight models contain a
correction for a linear trend in time, as well as corrections related to HST
orbital phase. We additionally test the dependence on the shift in spectral
wavelength position over the course of the observations and find that
spectroscopic wavelength shifts , best describe the
associated systematic in the spectroscopic lightcurves for most targets, while
fast scan rate observations of bright targets require an additional level of
processing to produce a robust transmission spectrum. The use of
marginalisation allows for transparent interpretation and understanding of the
instrument and the impact of each systematic evaluated statistically for each
dataset, expanding the ability to make true and comprehensive comparisons
between exoplanet atmospheres.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, 8 tables, Accepted to Ap
Theoretical Spectral Models of the Planet HD 209458b with a Thermal Inversion and Water Emission Bands
We find that a theoretical fit to all the HD 209458b data at secondary
eclipse requires that the dayside atmosphere of HD 209458b have a thermal
inversion and a stratosphere. This inversion is caused by the capture of
optical stellar flux by an absorber of uncertain origin that resides at
altitude. One consequence of stratospheric heating and temperature inversion is
the flipping of water absorption features into emission features from the near-
to the mid-infrared and we see evidence of such a water emission feature in the
recent HD 209458b IRAC data of Knutson et al. In addition, an upper-atmosphere
optical absorber may help explain both the weaker-than-expected Na D feature
seen in transit and the fact that the transit radius at 24 m is smaller
than the corresponding radius in the optical. Moreover, it may be a factor in
why HD 209458b's optical transit radius is as large as it is. We speculate on
the nature of this absorber and the planets whose atmospheres may, or may not,
be affected by its presence.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 28, 2007, six
pages in emulateapj forma
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