Production and Spectroscopy of Heavy Hadrons at the LHC

Measurements of heavy flavor production and decay have featured prominently in the early results from the four large LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb. These results provide tests of QCD models in a new energy region and point the way toward future measurements of CP violation and searches for new physics. An overview of open heavy flavor studies is presented here, focusing on how the new measurements extend our knowledge of this area of physics. Heavy quarkonia states at the LHC are summarized in other proceedings of this conference. I also discuss briefly how heavy flavor measurements are likely to evolve as LHC luminosities increase.Comment: proceedings for the XIV International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy (Hadron 2011), 13 pages, 9 figure

The Third Person of the Trinity: How the Holy Spirit Facilitates Man\u27s Walk with God

Much of the modern church knows the Father and the Son very well as part of its common worship, practice, and conversation. However, the Holy Spirit is given little more than recognition in many circles. He is referenced, talked about, and mentioned in songs and sermons, but there is often a resistance to letting Him lead the believer and the church. It is vital that the church opens its eyes to the indwelling, personal, and powerful Spirit which the Lord has sent to them. Through a study of the role of the Holy Spirit within the Scriptures, as well as a substantial consideration of the views of the Early Church Fathers, this paper seeks to kindle a renewed appreciation for, and a reliance upon the third person of the Trinity. The overarching theme revealed through this research is the marvelous reality that the God of the universe resides within the believer. The final section delves into this reality in search of the process that results in learning to truly walk with the Holy Spirit

The multiplicity of massive stars

Binaries are excellent astrophysical laboratories that provide us with direct measurements of fundamental stellar parameters. Compared to single isolated star, multiplicity induces new processes, offering the opportunity to confront our understanding of a broad range of physics under the extreme conditions found in, and close to, astrophysical objects. In this contribution, we will discuss the parameter space occupied by massive binaries, and the observational means to investigate it. We will review the multiplicity fraction of OB stars within each regime, and in different astrophysical environments. In particular we will compare the O star spectroscopic binary fraction in nearby open clusters and we will show that the current data are adequately described by an homogeneous fraction of f~0.44. We will also summarize our current understanding of the observed parameter distributions of O+OB spectroscopic binaries. We will show that the period distribution is overabundant in short period binaries and that it can be described by a bi-modal Oepik law with a break point around P~10d. The distribution of the mass-ratios shows no indication for a twin population of equal mass binaries and seems rather uniform in the range 0.2< q=M_2/M_1<1.0.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, IAU272: Active OB stars: structure, evolution, mass los

Collective Efficacy and Firearms Violence in Anchorage, Alaska: Preliminary Findings

Paper also presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the Western Society of Criminology, Scottsdale, Arizona.This paper seeks to advance the discussion of the utility of collective efficacy, as captured by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls, in understanding community levels of crime by exploring the relation between community structure, collective efficacy, and in this case firearms violence, in Anchorage, Alaska. The specific aims of this paper are to report the results of a test of the collective efficacy thesis, modeled loosely after the test presented in the 1997 Science paper by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls, as an explanation of neighborhood rates of firearms violence in Anchorage.Measures Replication and Data / Collective Efficacy and Violence in Anchorage / Discussion and Conclusions / References / Table

Energy storage apparatus

A high efficiency, flywheel type energy storage device which comprises an electronically commutated d.c. motor/generator unit having a massive flywheel rotor magnetically suspended around a ring shaped stator is presented. During periods of low energy demand, the storage devices were operated as a motor, and the flywheel motor was brought up to operating speed. Energy was drawn from the device functioning as a generator as the flywheel rotor rotated during high energy demand periods

Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.Comment: Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking, 2008 (arXiv:0908.0583

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough Community Survey, 2007: A Sourcebook of Community Attitudes

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough Community Survey (Mat-Su Survey) was a cooperative effort on the part of Mat-Su College, the University of Alaska-Anchorage (UAA) and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough which asked Mat-Su Borough residents to evaluate the quality of Borough services, provide opinions about Borough decision-making, and sum up their perceptions about a range of issues relevant to the present and future of the Mat-Su community. The survey was distributed to 2,478 residents of the Mat-Su Borough in the spring of 2007; a total of 1,388 surveys were returned, for a response rate of 56.1%. The Sourcebook provides results in five major areas: (1) evaluation of current borough services; (2) use of borough facilities; (3) life in Mat-Su neighborhoods; (4) local government access, policies, and practices; and (5) respondent background information.Matanuska Susitna BoroughIntroduction / Executive Summary / SECTION 1: DETAILED BOROUGH-WIDE RESULTS / Evaluation of Current Borough Services / Use of Borough Facilities / Life in Matanuska-Susitna Borough Neighborhoods / Local Government: Access, Policies and Practices / Respondent Background Information / SECTION 2: RESULTS FOR GEOGRAPHIC AREAS WITHIN THE BOROUGH / Evaluation of Current Borough Services / Use of Borough Facilities / Life in Matanuska-Susitna Borough Neighborhoods / Local Government: Access, Policies and Practices / APPENDIX A: Questionnair

Lensing Properties of Cored Galaxy Models

A method is developed to evaluate the magnifications of the images of galaxies with lensing potentials stratified on similar concentric ellipses. A simple contour integral is provided which enables the sums of the magnifications of even parity or odd parity or the central image to be easily calculated. The sums for pairs of images vary considerably with source position, while the signed sums can be remarkably uniform inside the tangential caustic in the absence of naked cusps. For a family of models in which the potential is a power-law of the elliptic radius, the number of visible images is found as a function of flattening, external shear and core radius. The magnification of the central image depends on the core radius and the slope of the potential. For typical source and lens redshifts, the missing central image leads to strong constraints; the mass distribution in the lensing galaxy must be nearly cusped, and the cusp must be isothermal or stronger. This is in accord with the cuspy cores seen in high resolution photometry of nearby, massive, early-type galaxies, which typically have the surface density falling like distance^{-1.3} outside a break radius of a few hundred parsecs. Cuspy cores by themselves can provide an explanation of the missing central images. Dark matter at large radii may alter the slope of the projected density; provided the slope remains isothermal or steeper and the break radius remains small, then the central image remains unobservable. The sensitivity of the radio maps must be increased fifty-fold to find the central images in abundance.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures, ApJ in pres