Is Brazil really a catholic country? What opinions about abortion, sex between individuals who are not married to each other, and homosexuality say about the meaning of catholicism in three Brazilian cities

The idea of being a Catholic country is quite widespread throughout the nation. What does it mean to be Catholic in Brazil? Do Catholics follow the Catholic Doctrine? The objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between religion and religious involvement (measured by religious affiliation and service attendance) and opinions about abortion, sex between individuals who are not married to each other, and homosexuality in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Recife. Data come from the survey “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” carried out in 2006. Results suggest that Brazilian Catholics are a very heterogeneous group with respect to opinions about abortion and sex between individuals who are not married to each other. In addition, service attendance among Catholics and those opinions are strongly correlated, except for the case of homosexuality, a topic which Catholics tend to have the same opinions about, irrespective of their religious involvement. Committed Protestants are, by far and away, the most conservative group.Brazil

Nonlinear Diffusive Shock Acceleration with Magnetic Field Amplification

We introduce a Monte Carlo model of nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration allowing for the generation of large-amplitude magnetic turbulence. The model is the first to include strong wave generation, efficient particle acceleration to relativistic energies in nonrelativistic shocks, and thermal particle injection in an internally self-consistent manner. We find that the upstream magnetic field can be amplified by large factors and show that this amplification depends strongly on the ambient Alfven Mach number. We also show that in the nonlinear model large increases in the magnetic field do not necessarily translate into a large increase in the maximum particle momentum a particular shock can produce, a consequence of high momentum particles diffusing in the shock precursor where the large amplified field converges to the low ambient value. To deal with the field growth rate in the regime of strong fluctuations, we extend to strong turbulence a parameterization that is consistent with the resonant quasi-linear growth rate in the weak turbulence limit. We believe our parameterization spans the maximum and minimum range of the fluctuation growth and, within these limits, we show that the nonlinear shock structure, acceleration efficiency, and thermal particle injection rates depend strongly on the yet to be determined details of wave growth in strongly turbulent fields. The most direct application of our results will be to estimate magnetic fields amplified by strong cosmic-ray modified shocks in supernova remnants.Comment: Accepted in ApJ July 2006, typos corrected in this versio

3-D Model of Broadband Emission from Supernova Remnants Undergoing Non-linear Diffusive Shock Acceleration

We present a 3-dimensional model of supernova remnants (SNRs) where the hydrodynamical evolution of the remnant is modeled consistently with nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration occuring at the outer blast wave. The model includes particle escape and diffusion outside of the forward shock, and particle interactions with arbitrary distributions of external ambient material, such as molecular clouds. We include synchrotron emission and cooling, bremsstrahlung radiation, neutral pion production, inverse-Compton (IC), and Coulomb energy-loss. Boardband spectra have been calculated for typical parameters including dense regions of gas external to a 1000 year old SNR. In this paper, we describe the details of our model but do not attempt a detailed fit to any specific remnant. We also do not include magnetic field amplification (MFA), even though this effect may be important in some young remnants. In this first presentation of the model we don't attempt a detailed fit to any specific remnant. Our aim is to develop a flexible platform, which can be generalized to include effects such as MFA, and which can be easily adapted to various SNR environments, including Type Ia SNRs, which explode in a constant density medium, and Type II SNRs, which explode in a pre-supernova wind. When applied to a specific SNR, our model will predict cosmic-ray spectra and multi-wavelength morphology in projected images for instruments with varying spatial and spectral resolutions. We show examples of these spectra and images and emphasize the importance of measurements in the hard X-ray, GeV, and TeV gamma-ray bands for investigating key ingredients in the acceleration mechanism, and for deducing whether or not TeV emission is produced by IC from electrons or neutral pions from protons.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted by Apj, 24 June 200

Galactic Cosmic Rays from Supernova Remnants: II Shock Acceleration of Gas and Dust

This is the second paper (the first was astro-ph/9704267) of a series analysing the Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) composition and origin. In this we present a quantitative model of GCR origin and acceleration based on the acceleration of a mixture of interstellar and/or circumstellar gas and dust by supernova remnant blast waves. We present results from a nonlinear shock model which includes (i) the direct acceleration of interstellar gas-phase ions, (ii) a simplified model for the direct acceleration of weakly charged dust grains to energies of order 100keV/amu simultaneously with the gas ions, (iii) frictional energy losses of the grains colliding with the gas, (iv) sputtering of ions of refractory elements from the accelerated grains and (v) the further shock acceleration of the sputtered ions to cosmic ray energies. The calculated GCR composition and spectra are in good agreement with observations.Comment: to appear in ApJ, 51 pages, LaTeX with AAS macros, 9 postscript figures, also available from ftp://wonka.physics.ncsu.edu/pub/elliso

How Hidden are Hidden Processes? A Primer on Crypticity and Entropy Convergence

We investigate a stationary process's crypticity---a measure of the difference between its hidden state information and its observed information---using the causal states of computational mechanics. Here, we motivate crypticity and cryptic order as physically meaningful quantities that monitor how hidden a hidden process is. This is done by recasting previous results on the convergence of block entropy and block-state entropy in a geometric setting, one that is more intuitive and that leads to a number of new results. For example, we connect crypticity to how an observer synchronizes to a process. We show that the block-causal-state entropy is a convex function of block length. We give a complete analysis of spin chains. We present a classification scheme that surveys stationary processes in terms of their possible cryptic and Markov orders. We illustrate related entropy convergence behaviors using a new form of foliated information diagram. Finally, along the way, we provide a variety of interpretations of crypticity and cryptic order to establish their naturalness and pervasiveness. Hopefully, these will inspire new applications in spatially extended and network dynamical systems.Comment: 18 pages, 18 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/iacp2.ht

Expected gamma-ray emission of supernova remnant SN 1987A

A nonlinear kinetic theory of cosmic ray (CR) acceleration in supernova remnants is employed to re-examine the nonthermal properties of the remnant of SN 1987A for an extended evolutionary period of 5--100 yr. It is shown that an efficient production of nuclear CRs leads to a strong modification of the outer supernova remnant shock and to a large downstream magnetic field $B_\mathrm{d}\approx 20$ mG. The shock modification and the strong field are required to yield the steep radio emission spectrum observed, as well as to considerable synchrotron cooling of high energy electrons which diminishes their X-ray synchrotron flux. These features are also consistent with the existing X-ray observations. The expected \gr energy flux at TeV-energies at the current epoch is nearly $\epsilon_{\gamma}F_{\gamma}\approx 4\times 10^{-13}$ erg cm$^2$s$^{-1}$ under reasonable assumptions about the overall magnetic field topology and the turbulent perturbations of this field. The general nonthermal strength of the source is expected to increase roughly by a factor of two over the next 15 to 20 yrs; thereafter it should decrease with time in a secular form.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ, a number of changes have been made, even though these are not changing the main results of the pape

Synchronization and Control in Intrinsic and Designed Computation: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Competing Models of Stochastic Computation

We adapt tools from information theory to analyze how an observer comes to synchronize with the hidden states of a finitary, stationary stochastic process. We show that synchronization is determined by both the process's internal organization and by an observer's model of it. We analyze these components using the convergence of state-block and block-state entropies, comparing them to the previously known convergence properties of the Shannon block entropy. Along the way, we introduce a hierarchy of information quantifiers as derivatives and integrals of these entropies, which parallels a similar hierarchy introduced for block entropy. We also draw out the duality between synchronization properties and a process's controllability. The tools lead to a new classification of a process's alternative representations in terms of minimality, synchronizability, and unifilarity.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, 1 tabl

Many Roads to Synchrony: Natural Time Scales and Their Algorithms

We consider two important time scales---the Markov and cryptic orders---that monitor how an observer synchronizes to a finitary stochastic process. We show how to compute these orders exactly and that they are most efficiently calculated from the epsilon-machine, a process's minimal unifilar model. Surprisingly, though the Markov order is a basic concept from stochastic process theory, it is not a probabilistic property of a process. Rather, it is a topological property and, moreover, it is not computable from any finite-state model other than the epsilon-machine. Via an exhaustive survey, we close by demonstrating that infinite Markov and infinite cryptic orders are a dominant feature in the space of finite-memory processes. We draw out the roles played in statistical mechanical spin systems by these two complementary length scales.Comment: 17 pages, 16 figures: http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/kro.htm. Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 10-11-02

The spin temperature of high-redshift damped Lyman-α\alpha systems

We report results from a programme aimed at investigating the temperature of neutral gas in high-redshift damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers (DLAs). This involved (1) HI 21cm absorption studies of a large DLA sample, (2) VLBI studies to measure the low-frequency quasar core fractions, and (3) optical/ultraviolet spectroscopy to determine DLA metallicities and velocity widths. Including literature data, our sample consists of 37 DLAs with estimates of the spin temperature $T_s$ and the covering factor. We find a strong $4\sigma$) difference between the $T_s$ distributions in high-z (z>2.4) and low-z (z<2.4) DLA samples. The high-z sample contains more systems with high $T_s$ values, $\gtrsim 1000$ K. The $T_s$ distributions in DLAs and the Galaxy are also clearly (~$6\sigma$) different, with more high-$T_s$ sightlines in DLAs than in the Milky Way. The high $T_s$ values in the high-z DLAs of our sample arise due to low fractions of the cold neutral medium. For 29 DLAs with metallicity [Z/H] estimates, we confirm the presence of an anti-correlation between $T_s$ and [Z/H], at $3.5\sigma$ significance via a non-parametric Kendall-tau test. This result was obtained with the assumption that the DLA covering factor is equal to the core fraction. Monte Carlo simulations show that the significance of the result is only marginally decreased if the covering factor and the core fraction are uncorrelated, or if there is a random error in the inferred covering factor. We also find evidence for redshift evolution in DLA $T_s$ values even for the z>1 sub-sample. Since z>1 DLAs have angular diameter distances comparable to or larger than those of the background quasars, they have similar efficiency in covering the quasars. Low covering factors in high-z DLAs thus cannot account for the observed redshift evolution in spin temperatures. (Abstract abridged.)Comment: 37 pages, 22 figures. Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ