Challenges facing Arab journalism, freedom, safety and economic security

Court of Appeals No. $80203-CA Argument priority Classification 14-b BRIEF OF APPELLANT Appeal from the Decision of the Second Judicial District Court of Weber County, State of Utah

Plerionic Supernova Remnants

Plerions represent ideal laboratories for the search for neutron stars, the study of their relativistic winds, and their interaction with their surrounding supernova ejecta and/or the interstellar medium. As well, they are widely believed to represent efficient engines for particle acceleration up to the knee of the cosmic ray spectrum (at about 1E15 eV). Multi-wavelength observations from the radio to the highest TeV energies, combined with modelling, have opened a new window to study these objects, and particularly shed light on their intrinsic properties, diversity, and evolution. High-resolution X-ray observations are further revealing the structure and sites for shock acceleration. The missing shells in the majority of these objects remain puzzling, and the presence of plerions around highly magnetized neutron stars is still questionable. I review the current status and statistics of observations of plerionic supernova remnants (SNRs), highlighting combined radio and X-ray observations of a growing class of atypical, non Crab-like, plerionic SNRs in our Galaxy. I will also briefly describe the latest developments to our high-energy SNRs catalogue recently released to the community, and finally highlight the key questions to be addressed in this field with future high-energy missions, including Astro-H in the very near future.Comment: AIP Conference Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on High-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy, Heidelberg, July 9-13 (2012). Eds: F. Aharonian, W. Hofmann, F. Rieger. Solicited review, 8 pages, 4 colour figures. The figures resolution has been reduced for astro-ph. Original article can be found at: http://www.physics.umanitoba.ca/~samar/arxiv/safiharb-plerions-gamma2012.pd

Import Demand in Heterogeneous Panel Setting

To study the elasticities of import demand function, we build a heterogeneous panel with data of 40 counties and use panel unit root tests (Im, Pesaran and Shin, 1997) and panel cointegration tests (Pedroni, forthcoming). We test our model with two previously used activity variables: GDP and GDP minus Export for a performance comparison. To estimate our elasticities, we make use of two modified panel version of FMOLS and DOLS developed by Pedroni (1996, 2000, 2001). Our tests prove that GDP outperforms GDP minus Exports as an activity variable in the cointegration context. FMOLS and DOLS give close results when we do individual estimates. When we use between-dimension estimators, we get conflicting results. Hence, we split our sample into developed and developing groups and show that income elasticity in developing countries are not different than unity on average and are higher than in developed countries contradicting previous results in the literature.Import Demand elasticities, Time series, Panel cointegration, FMOLS, DOLS

A Multi-Wavelength Study of the Western Lobe of W50 Powered by the Galactic Microquasar SS 433

W50 remains the only supernova remnant (SNR) confirmed to harbor a microquasar: the powerful enigmatic source SS 433. Our past study of this fascinating SNR revealed two X-ray lobes distorting the radio shell as well as non-thermal X-rays at the site of interaction between the SS 433 eastern jet and the eastern lobe of W50. In this paper we present the results of a 75 ksec CHANDRA ACIS-I observation of the peak of W50-west targeted to 1) determine the nature of the X-ray emission and 2) correlate the X-ray emission with that in the radio and infrared domains. We have confirmed that at the site of interaction between the western jet of SS 433 and dense interstellar gas the X-ray emission is non-thermal in nature. The helical pattern observed in radio is also seen with CHANDRA. No correlation was found between the infrared and X-ray emission.Comment: A refereed publication, submitted Sept. 30, 2004, accepted Jan. 12, 2005, to appear in Advances in Space Research. 7 pages, including 4 figures (3 color) & 1 table (the resolution of most figures has been reduced for astro-ph submission only). A gzipped postscript or pdf version of the paper with high-resolution images can be downloaded from: http://aurora.physics.umanitoba.ca/~moldowan/Astro-Ph

Oil Exports, Non Oil GDP and Investment in the GCC Countries

This paper studies the long and short-run relationship between oil exports, non oil GDP and investment in five major oil exporting countries. Its goal is to verify the effect of natural resources exports on the economic performance. It considers the effect of cross sectional correlations and uses the corresponding panel unit root tests to study the long-run characteristics of our series. The results show that resources' exports have no long-run relationship with the macro variables. A VAR analysis is used to estimate the short-run dynamics and shows that the effect of oil exports on those variables depends on local policies.GCC, Natural Resources, Oil, Productivity, Investment, Labor Force, Unit root, Growth, Cointegration, VAR.

Approximation algorithms for wavelet transform coding of data streams

This paper addresses the problem of finding a B-term wavelet representation of a given discrete function $f \in \real^n$ whose distance from f is minimized. The problem is well understood when we seek to minimize the Euclidean distance between f and its representation. The first known algorithms for finding provably approximate representations minimizing general $\ell_p$ distances (including $\ell_\infty$) under a wide variety of compactly supported wavelet bases are presented in this paper. For the Haar basis, a polynomial time approximation scheme is demonstrated. These algorithms are applicable in the one-pass sublinear-space data stream model of computation. They generalize naturally to multiple dimensions and weighted norms. A universal representation that provides a provable approximation guarantee under all p-norms simultaneously; and the first approximation algorithms for bit-budget versions of the problem, known as adaptive quantization, are also presented. Further, it is shown that the algorithms presented here can be used to select a basis from a tree-structured dictionary of bases and find a B-term representation of the given function that provably approximates its best dictionary-basis representation.Comment: Added a universal representation that provides a provable approximation guarantee under all p-norms simultaneousl