134 research outputs found
Socially Distant Health Care
The COVID-19 pandemic has elucidated many problems within the American health care system, chief among them the continuing access-to-care issue. Though the Affordable Care Act increased access to health insurance, the current pandemic has demonstrated that health insurance alone is not enough. Communities need access to health care providers. Indeed, many fully insured Americans across the country are experiencing what many have faced on a daily basis: the inability to access a health care provider Rural areas and communities of color regularly battle an inability to obtain care from health care professionals and have done so for many years. Much of the care demanded during the pandemic related to COVID-19 itself; but the pandemic also created access-to-care problems due to quarantines and shut-downs instituted to slow its spread. These measures have prevented millions from receiving necessary care for chronic diseases, simple injuries, and mental health needs, among others. Despite the tragic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the bright spots has been state and federal responses designed to increase access to health care providers. One of the most important mechanisms that governments have employed to increase access to care has been telehealth. Though telehealth has been possible for decades, the federal government and many state governments maintain salient legal barriers to its use. Congress recently considered the Protecting Access to Post-COVID-19 Telehealth Act of 2021, which seeks to remove some barriers to accessing telehealth. Against this backdrop of political hungerfor continued improvement in telehealth access, this Article explores the policy experimentation catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic to make specific policy prescriptions aimed at alleviating both acute and chronic access-to-care issues. It argues that, following the pandemic, federal agencies and states should continue to dismantle barriers to telehealth as an important toolfor increasing access to health care providers among residents of rural areas and communities of color that have historically lacked reliable access to providers. Importantly, governments at both levels should make permanent many of the temporary policies they have instituted to improve access to telehealth and, therefore, health care more generally
Spin orbit alignment for KELT-7b and HAT-P-56b via Doppler tomography with TRES
We present Doppler tomographic analyses for the spectroscopic transits of
KELT-7b and HAT-P-56b, two hot-Jupiters orbiting rapidly rotating F-dwarf host
stars. These include analyses of archival TRES observations for KELT-7b, and a
new TRES transit observation of HAT-P-56b. We report spin-orbit aligned
geometries for KELT-7b (2.7 +/- 0.6 deg) and HAT-P-56b (8 +/- 2 deg). The host
stars KELT-7 and HAT-P-56 are among some of the most rapidly rotating
planet-hosting stars known. We examine the tidal re-alignment model for the
evolution of the spin-orbit angle in the context of the spin rates of these
stars. We find no evidence that the rotation rates of KELT-7 and HAT-P-56 have
been modified by star-planet tidal interactions, suggesting that the spin-orbit
angle of systems around these hot stars may represent their primordial
configuration. In fact, KELT-7 and HAT-P-56 are two of three systems in
super-synchronous, spin-orbit aligned states, where the rotation periods of the
host stars are faster than the orbital periods of the planets.Comment: 9 pages, accepted for publication in MNRA
Humanitarian Leadership
Leadership skills are essential to addressing today’s humanitarian challenges. While leadership training programs abound in the private sector and within the military, the same is not true for the humanitarian field. International donors have recognized this gap and have recently invested in formal leadership training programs for aid workers. This paper presents a protocol to evaluate the effectiveness of the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership, a leadership training course targeted to humanitarians working for national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. The protocol establishes a model for evaluating the impact of NNPHL participants’ ability to make decisions about complex challenges in a manner that is consistent with a core set of leadership competencies introduced in the course. The evaluation consists of scenario-based vignettes that the participants answer in order to assess their leadership competencies through a series of illustrative indicators. This paper also includes a discussion of the definition of leadership, both broadly and through the NNPHL course, and the study’s strengths and limitations along with avenues for future research.  
Qatar Exoplanet Survey : Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b and Qatar-5b
We report the discovery of Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b, and Qatar-5b, three new
transiting planets identified by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES). The three
planets belong to the hot Jupiter family, with orbital periods of
=2.50792 days, =1.80539 days, and =2.87923 days.
Follow-up spectroscopic observations reveal the masses of the planets to be
=4.31 , =6.10 , and
= 4.32 , while model fits to the transit light
curves yield radii of = 1.096 , =
1.135 , and = 1.107 . The
host stars are low-mass main sequence stars with masses and radii =
1.145 , = 0.896 ,
= 1.128 and = 1.272 ,
= 0.849 and = 1.076
for Qatar-3, 4 and 5 respectively. The V magnitudes of the three
host stars are =12.88, =13.60, and =12.82. All three
new planets can be classified as heavy hot Jupiters (M > 4 ).Comment: 13Pages, 8Figure
Five Planets Transiting a Ninth Magnitude Star
The Kepler mission has revealed a great diversity of planetary systems and
architectures, but most of the planets discovered by Kepler orbit faint stars.
Using new data from the K2 mission, we present the discovery of a five planet
system transiting a bright (V = 8.9, K = 7.7) star called HIP 41378. HIP 41378
is a slightly metal-poor late F-type star with moderate rotation (v sin(i) = 7
km/s) and lies at a distance of 116 +/- 18 from Earth. We find that HIP 41378
hosts two sub-Neptune sized planets orbiting 3.5% outside a 2:1 period
commensurability in 15.6 and 31.7 day orbits. In addition, we detect three
planets which each transit once during the 75 days spanned by K2 observations.
One planet is Neptune sized in a likely ~160 day orbit, one is sub-Saturn sized
likely in a ~130 day orbit, and one is a Jupiter sized planet in a likely ~1
year orbit. We show that these estimates for the orbital periods can be made
more precise by taking into account dynamical stability considerations. We also
calculate the distribution of stellar reflex velocities expected for this
system, and show that it provides a good target for future radial velocity
observations. If a precise orbital period can be determined for the outer
Jovian planet through future observations, it will be an excellent candidate
for follow-up transit observations to study its atmosphere and measure its
oblateness.Comment: Accepted by ApJL. 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
Revised Stellar Properties of Kepler Targets for the Q1-17 (DR25) Transit Detection Run
The determination of exoplanet properties and occurrence rates using Kepler
data critically depends on our knowledge of the fundamental properties (such as
temperature, radius and mass) of the observed stars. We present revised stellar
properties for 197,096 Kepler targets observed between Quarters 1-17 (Q1-17),
which were used for the final transiting planet search run by the Kepler
Mission (Data Release 25, DR25). Similar to the Q1--16 catalog by Huber et al.
the classifications are based on conditioning published atmospheric parameters
on a grid of Dartmouth isochrones, with significant improvements in the adopted
methodology and over 29,000 new sources for temperatures, surface gravities or
metallicities. In addition to fundamental stellar properties the new catalog
also includes distances and extinctions, and we provide posterior samples for
each stellar parameter of each star. Typical uncertainties are ~27% in radius,
~17% in mass, and ~51% in density, which is somewhat smaller than previous
catalogs due to the larger number of improved logg constraints and the
inclusion of isochrone weighting when deriving stellar posterior distributions.
On average, the catalog includes a significantly larger number of evolved
solar-type stars, with an increase of 43.5% in the number of subgiants. We
discuss the overall changes of radii and masses of Kepler targets as a function
of spectral type, with particular focus on exoplanet host stars.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures. ApJS in pres
Kepler's Last Planet Discoveries: Two New Planets and One Single-Transit Candidate from K2 Campaign 19
The Kepler space telescope was responsible for the discovery of over 2,700
confirmed exoplanets, more than half of the total number of exoplanets known
today. These discoveries took place during both Kepler's primary mission, when
it spent 4 years staring at the same part of the sky, and its extended K2
mission, when a mechanical failure forced it to observe different parts of the
sky along the ecliptic. At the very end of the mission, when Kepler was
exhausting the last of its fuel reserves, it collected a short set of
observations known as K2 Campaign 19. So far, no planets have been discovered
in this dataset because it only yielded about a week of high-quality data.
Here, we report some of the last planet discoveries made by Kepler in the
Campaign 19 dataset. We conducted a visual search of the week of high-quality
Campaign 19 data and identified three possible planet transits. Each planet
candidate was originally identified with only one recorded transit, from which
we were able to estimate the planets' radii and estimate the semimajor axes and
orbital periods. Analysis of lower-quality data collected after low fuel
pressure caused the telescope's pointing precision to suffer revealed
additional transits for two of these candidates, allowing us to statistically
validate them as genuine exoplanets. We also tentatively confirm the transits
of one planet with TESS. These discoveries demonstrate Kepler's exoplanet
detection power, even when it was literally running on fumes.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA
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