To Make a Rainbow - God’s Work in Nature

The Torah lays out a rich idea of God’s governance in the Scroll of Esther: Circumstance lays the warp, but human choices weave the woof of destiny. God remains unseen. Delegation of agency, including human freedom, is implicit in the act of creation: God does not clutch efficacy jealously to his breast. Biblically, God acts through nature, making the elements his servitors. Miracles do not violate God’s covenant with nature. Maimonides, following rabbinic homilies, finds them embedded in that covenant. Divine agency is clearest today in evolution and its special case, the emergence of autonomy and the rise of consciousness and personhood

Preliminary Investigation of the Ground-Water Resources of Northern Searcy County, Arkansas

Two aquifers are extensively used by residents of small communities and rural areas in northern Searcy County, Arkansas. The Mississippian Boone-St. Joe aquifer is generally the less productive and the shallower of the two. Ground-water yields for the Boone-St. Joe range from 0.5 to 75 gpm with a median yield of 5 and a mean of 9.8 gpm. Well depths range from 100 to 754 feet with a median depth of 350 feet and a mean of 360 feet. Confined conditions are indicated by the greater depths, whereas the Boone-St. Joe aquifer is unconfined when exposed at the surface. Underlying the Boone-St. Joe aquifer is an aquifer zone composed of sands, sandy limestones, and/or dolomitic limestones below the Chattanooga Shale and above and including the Everton Formation. This aquifer can be composed of one or more of the following units: upper Everton, St. Peter, Clifty, Sylamore, Lafferty, St. Clair and/or Plattin. The range in yields for this aquifer is 1 to 80 gpm with a median yield of 9 and a mean of 17 gpm. Well depths range from 200 to 875 feet with a median and mean depth of 570 feet. A statistical correlation was found among well yields (gpm), regolith thickness, depth of well, and cave intersection by the well. The results indicate that greater yields can be obtained in areas of thicker regolith. Cave presence was also found to enhance yields. A strong relationship between cave presence and deeper regolith was observed. These three relationships demonstrate increased weathering, and thus water flow along fractures. The effect of joints closing off at depth produced a strong relationship between shallower wells and greater yields within the Boone-St. Joe aquifer

Investigation of rock behavior and strength in situ and laboratory techniques adaptability to a lunar exploration program

Rock testing techniques for lunar landing site and for lunar samples returned to earth laborator

Techniques for measuring stresses in rock on the earth - Adaptability to a lunar exploration program

Techniques and instrument developments for stress measurements in rocks on earth and moo

Helical Magnetorotational Instability in Magnetized Taylor-Couette Flow

Hollerbach and Rudiger have reported a new type of magnetorotational instability (MRI) in magnetized Taylor-Couette flow in the presence of combined axial and azimuthal magnetic fields. The salient advantage of this "helical'' MRI (HMRI) is that marginal instability occurs at arbitrarily low magnetic Reynolds and Lundquist numbers, suggesting that HMRI might be easier to realize than standard MRI (axial field only). We confirm their results, calculate HMRI growth rates, and show that in the resistive limit, HMRI is a weakly destabilized inertial oscillation propagating in a unique direction along the axis. But we report other features of HMRI that make it less attractive for experiments and for resistive astrophysical disks. Growth rates are small and require large axial currents. More fundamentally, instability of highly resistive flow is peculiar to infinitely long or periodic cylinders: finite cylinders with insulating endcaps are shown to be stable in this limit. Also, keplerian rotation profiles are stable in the resistive limit regardless of axial boundary conditions. Nevertheless, the addition of toroidal field lowers thresholds for instability even in finite cylinders.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, submitted to PR

Systematic study of the PDC speckle structure for quantum imaging applications

Sub shot noise imaging of weak object by exploiting Parametric Down Converted light represents a very interesting technological development. A precise characterization of PDC speckle structure in dependence of pump beam parameters is a fundamental tool for this application. In this paper we present a first set of data addressed to this purpose

Transforming Aggressive Prosecution Policies: Prioritizing Victims’ Long-Term Safety in the Prosecution of Domestic Violence Cases

Until fairly recently, prosecutors\u27 offices around the country ignored domestic violence cases, failing to press charges in the vast majority of situations and dropping charges prior to conviction in many others. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the battered women\u27s movement made significant efforts to improve the criminal justice system\u27s response. One way that this effort has met with substantial success is that many prosecutors\u27 offices now have adopted aggressive no-drop policies for domestic violence cases. In these jurisdictions, cases proceed regardless of the victim\u27s preferences about prosecution, even if she recants her original story and testifies for the defense

Correlations and fluctuations of a confined electron gas

The grand potential $\Omega$ and the response $R = - \partial \Omega /\partial x$ of a phase-coherent confined noninteracting electron gas depend sensitively on chemical potential $\mu$ or external parameter $x$. We compute their autocorrelation as a function of $\mu$, $x$ and temperature. The result is related to the short-time dynamics of the corresponding classical system, implying in general the absence of a universal regime. Chaotic, diffusive and integrable motions are investigated, and illustrated numerically. The autocorrelation of the persistent current of a disordered mesoscopic ring is also computed.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, to appear in Phys. Rev.

The measurement of rock deformability in bore holes on earth. Adaptability to a lunar exploration program

Dilatometers, bore hole jacks, and penetrometers, for measurement of rock deformability in bore holes on eart

The "True" Column Density Distribution in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds

We use the COMPLETE Survey's observations of the Perseus star-forming region to assess and intercompare three methods for measuring column density in molecular clouds: extinction mapping (NIR); thermal emission mapping (FIR); and mapping the intensity of CO isotopologues. The structures shown by all three tracers are morphologically similar, but important differences exist. Dust-based measures give similar, log-normal, distributions for the full Perseus region, once careful calibration corrections are made. We also compare dust- and gas-based column density distributions for physically-meaningful sub-regions of Perseus, and we find significant variations in the distributions for those regions. Even though we have used 12CO data to estimate excitation temperatures, and we have corrected for opacity, the 13CO maps seem unable to give column distributions that consistently resemble those from dust measures. We have edited out the effects of the shell around the B-star HD 278942. In that shell's interior and in the parts where it overlaps the molecular cloud, there appears to be a dearth of 13CO, likely due either to 13CO not yet having had time to form in this young structure, and/or destruction of 13CO in the molecular cloud. We conclude that the use of either dust or gas measures of column density without extreme attention to calibration and artifacts is more perilous than even experts might normally admit. And, the use of 13CO to trace total column density in detail, even after proper calibration, is unavoidably limited in utility due to threshold, depletion, and opacity effects. If one's main aim is to map column density, then dust extinction seems the best probe. Linear fits amongst column density tracers are given, quantifying the inherent uncertainties in using one tracer (when compared with others). [abridged]Comment: Accepted in ApJ. 13 pages, 6 color figures. It includes small changes to improve clarity. For a version with high-resolution figures see http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/COMPLETE/papers/Goodman_ColumnDensity.pd