524 research outputs found
The Unsubstantiated Claims of Turkat’s Harmful Effects of Child-Custody Evaluations on Children
We welcome the opportunity to respond to Dr. Turkat’s article, Harmful Effects of Child-Custody Evaluations on Children. We believe that there are many flaws and unsubstantiated claims made by Dr. Turkat, and we challenge his primary thesis that child-custody evaluations are, by definition, harmful.
Dr. Turkat sets the tone in his first paragraph with his sweeping statements that “child-custody evaluations [have] no scientific validity” and “there is still no scientific evidence whatsoever that a child-custody evaluation results in beneficial outcomes for the children involved.” His article includes too many generalized, unsupported charges to allow it to pass without challenge. We hope that our comments will contribute to more informed discussion clarifying misunderstandings about the role and value of custody evaluations and how they should properly be introduced into court proceedings
The Unsubstantiated Claims of Turkat’s Harmful Effects of Child-Custody Evaluations on Children
We welcome the opportunity to respond to Dr. Turkat’s article, Harmful Effects of Child-Custody Evaluations on Children. We believe that there are many flaws and unsubstantiated claims made by Dr. Turkat, and we challenge his primary thesis that child-custody evaluations are, by definition, harmful.
Dr. Turkat sets the tone in his first paragraph with his sweeping statements that “child-custody evaluations [have] no scientific validity” and “there is still no scientific evidence whatsoever that a child-custody evaluation results in beneficial outcomes for the children involved.” His article includes too many generalized, unsupported charges to allow it to pass without challenge. We hope that our comments will contribute to more informed discussion clarifying misunderstandings about the role and value of custody evaluations and how they should properly be introduced into court proceedings
HBsAg-vectored DNA vaccines elicit concomitant protective responses to multiple CTL epitopes relevant in human disease.
Vaccines capable of controlling neoplastic and infectious diseases which depend on the cellular immune response for their resolution, have proven difficult to develop. We, and others, have previously demonstrated that the potent immunogenicity of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg), the already- licensed human vaccine for hepatitis B infection, may be exploited to deliver foreign antigens for cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) induction. In this study we demonstrate that recombinant (r) HBsAg DNA delivering a CTL polyepitope appended at the C' terminus elicits concomitant responses to multiple epitopes restricted through a diversity of MHC class I haplotypes, which are relevant in a number of human diseases. We show that the rHBsAg DNA vaccine elicits concomitant protection against neoplastic and infectious disease. These studies vindicate the use of HBsAg as a powerful vector to deliver CTL responses to foreign antigens, and have implications for a multi-disease vaccine applicable to the HLA-polymorphic human population
An anomaly detector with immediate feedback to hunt for planets of Earth mass and below by microlensing
(abridged) The discovery of OGLE 2005-BLG-390Lb, the first cool rocky/icy
exoplanet, impressively demonstrated the sensitivity of the microlensing
technique to extra-solar planets below 10 M_earth. A planet of 1 M_earth in the
same spot would have provided a detectable deviation with an amplitude of ~ 3 %
and a duration of ~ 12 h. An early detection of a deviation could trigger
higher-cadence sampling which would have allowed the discovery of an Earth-mass
planet in this case. Here, we describe the implementation of an automated
anomaly detector, embedded into the eSTAR system, that profits from immediate
feedback provided by the robotic telescopes that form the RoboNet-1.0 network.
It went into operation for the 2007 microlensing observing season. As part of
our discussion about an optimal strategy for planet detection, we shed some new
light on whether concentrating on highly-magnified events is promising and
planets in the 'resonant' angular separation equal to the angular Einstein
radius are revealed most easily. Given that sub-Neptune mass planets can be
considered being common around the host stars probed by microlensing
(preferentially M- and K-dwarfs), the higher number of events that can be
monitored with a network of 2m telescopes and the increased detection
efficiency for planets below 5 M_earth arising from an optimized strategy gives
a common effort of current microlensing campaigns a fair chance to detect an
Earth-mass planet (from the ground) ahead of the COROT or Kepler missions. The
detection limit of gravitational microlensing extends even below 0.1 M_earth,
but such planets are not very likely to be detected from current campaigns.
However, these will be within the reach of high-cadence monitoring with a
network of wide-field telescopes or a space-based telescope.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRA
The Extreme Microlensing Event OGLE-2007-BLG-224: Terrestrial Parallax Observation of a Thick-Disk Brown Dwarf
Parallax is the most fundamental technique to measure distances to
astronomical objects. Although terrestrial parallax was pioneered over 2000
years ago by Hipparchus (ca. 140 BCE) to measure the distance to the Moon, the
baseline of the Earth is so small that terrestrial parallax can generally only
be applied to objects in the Solar System. However, there exists a class of
extreme gravitational microlensing events in which the effects of terrestrial
parallax can be readily detected and so permit the measurement of the distance,
mass, and transverse velocity of the lens. Here we report observations of the
first such extreme microlensing event OGLE-2007-BLG-224, from which we infer
that the lens is a brown dwarf of mass M=0.056 +- 0.004 Msun, with a distance
of 525 +- 40 pc and a transverse velocity of 113 +- 21 km/s. The velocity
places the lens in the thick disk, making this the lowest-mass thick-disk brown
dwarf detected so far. Follow-up observations may allow one to observe the
light from the brown dwarf itself, thus serving as an important constraint for
evolutionary models of these objects and potentially opening a new window on
sub-stellar objects. The low a priori probability of detecting a thick-disk
brown dwarf in this event, when combined with additional evidence from other
observations, suggests that old substellar objects may be more common than
previously assumed.Comment: ApJ Letters, in press, 15 pages including 2 figure
A life in progress: motion and emotion in the autobiography of Robert M. La Follette
This article is a study of a La Follette’s Autobiography, the autobiography of the leading Wisconsin progressive Robert M. La Follette, which was published serially in 1911 and, in book form, in 1913. Rather than focusing, as have other historians, on which parts of La Follette’s account are accurate and can therefore be trusted, it explains instead why and how this major autobiography was conceived and written. The article shows that the autobiography was the product of a sustained, complex, and often fraught series of collaborations among La Follette’s family, friends, and political allies, and in the process illuminates the importance of affective ties as well as political ambition and commitment in bringing the project to fruition. In the world of progressive reform, it argues, personal and political experiences were inseparable
MOA-2009-BLG-387Lb: A massive planet orbiting an M dwarf
We report the discovery of a planet with a high planet-to-star mass ratio in
the microlensing event MOA-2009-BLG-387, which exhibited pronounced deviations
over a 12-day interval, one of the longest for any planetary event. The host is
an M dwarf, with a mass in the range 0.07 M_sun < M_host < 0.49M_sun at 90%
confidence. The planet-star mass ratio q = 0.0132 +- 0.003 has been measured
extremely well, so at the best-estimated host mass, the planet mass is m_p =
2.6 Jupiter masses for the median host mass, M = 0.19 M_sun. The host mass is
determined from two "higher order" microlensing parameters. One of these, the
angular Einstein radius \theta_E = 0.31 +- 0.03 mas, is very well measured, but
the other (the microlens parallax \pi_E, which is due to the Earth's orbital
motion) is highly degenate with the orbital motion of the planet. We
statistically resolve the degeneracy between Earth and planet orbital effects
by imposing priors from a Galactic model that specifies the positions and
velocities of lenses and sources and a Kepler model of orbits. The 90%
confidence intervals for the distance, semi-major axis, and period of the
planet are 3.5 kpc < D_L < 7.9 kpc, 1.1 AU < a < 2.7AU, and 3.8 yr < P < 7.6
yr, respectively.Comment: 20 pages including 8 figures. A&A 529 102 (2011
OGLE-2005-BLG-018: Characterization of Full Physical and Orbital Parameters of a Gravitational Binary Lens
We present the analysis result of a gravitational binary-lensing event
OGLE-2005-BLG-018. The light curve of the event is characterized by 2 adjacent
strong features and a single weak feature separated from the strong features.
The light curve exhibits noticeable deviations from the best-fit model based on
standard binary parameters. To explain the deviation, we test models including
various higher-order effects of the motions of the observer, source, and lens.
From this, we find that it is necessary to account for the orbital motion of
the lens in describing the light curve. From modeling of the light curve
considering the parallax effect and Keplerian orbital motion, we are able to
measure not only the physical parameters but also a complete orbital solution
of the lens system. It is found that the event was produced by a binary lens
located in the Galactic bulge with a distance kpc from the Earth.
The individual lens components with masses and are separated with a semi-major axis of AU and
orbiting each other with a period yr. The event demonstrates
that it is possible to extract detailed information about binary lens systems
from well-resolved lensing light curves.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure
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