What Missouri Thinks: An Examination of Public Attitudes

Political observers often refer to Missouri as a “bellwether” state, suggesting that the political and social attitudes of Missourians tend to reflect those of the rest of the United States. (Robertson, 2004). To better understand the opinions of Missourians on a set of important political, economic, and social issues, researchers at the Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs examined results from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES). This nationally-representative public opinion survey included a sample of 817 Missouri residents. In this report, we explore the attitudes of Missourians to examine how they differ from the rest of the nation and how they vary within the state. Given the demographic patterns of Missouri, we are particularly interested in potential differences in attitudes between residents living in urban and rural areas (see Appendix A for additional discussion.) Overall, we find that Missouri residents shared similar attitudes on major economic, social and military issues with the rest of the nation, but we also find that rural and urban Missourians held distinctly different opinions on these same issues. These differences in opinion are likely driven by factors such as partisan identification, political ideology, education, and other socioeconomic attributes.Includes bibliographical reference

Polarization Modeling and Predictions for DKIST Part 2: Application of the Berreman Calculus to Spectral Polarization Fringes of Beamsplitters and Crystal Retarders

We outline polarization fringe predictions derived from a new application of the Berreman calculus for the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) retarder optics. The DKIST retarder baseline design used 6 crystals, single-layer anti-reflection coatings, thick cover windows and oil between all optical interfaces. This new tool estimates polarization fringes and optic Mueller matrices as functions of all optical design choices. The amplitude and period of polarized fringes under design changes, manufacturing errors, tolerances and several physical factors can now be estimated. This tool compares well with observations of fringes for data collected with the SPINOR spectropolarimeter at the Dunn Solar Telescope using bi-crystalline achromatic retarders as well as laboratory tests. With this new tool, we show impacts of design decisions on polarization fringes as impacted by anti-reflection coatings, oil refractive indices, cover window presence and part thicknesses. This tool helped DKIST decide to remove retarder cover windows and also recommends reconsideration of coating strategies for DKIST. We anticipate this tool to be essential in designing future retarders for mitigation of polarization and intensity fringe errors in other high spectral resolution astronomical systems.Comment: Accepted for publication in JATI

Rapid assembly of polycyclic structures via sigmatropic rearrangement of s-propargyl xanthates

International audienceUpon heating in chlorobenzene, propargyl xanthates yield the corresponding 4,5-bis(alkylidene)-1,3-dithiolan-2-ones which are trapped by unactivated olefins in an intramolecular Diels-Alder cycloaddition yielding interesting polycyclic structures

Triple-Pomeron Matrix Model for Dispersive Corrections to Nucleon-Nucleus Total Cross Section

Dispersive corrections to the total cross section for high-energy scattering from a heavy nucleus are calculated using a matrix model, based on the triple-Pomeron behavior of diffractive scattering from a single nucleon, for the cross section operator connecting different states of the projectile nucleon . Energy-dependent effects due to the decrease in longitudinal momentum transfers and the opening of more channels with increasing energy are included. The three leading terms in an expansion in the number of inelastic transitions are evaluated and compared to exact results for the model in the uniform nuclear density approximation for the the scattering of nucleons from Pb^{208} for laboratory momenta ranging from 50 to 200 GeV/c.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, RevTex

Daytime sky polarization calibration limitations

The daytime sky has recently been demonstrated as a useful calibration tool for deriving polarization cross-talk properties of large astronomical telescopes. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and other large telescopes under construction can benefit from precise polarimetric calibration of large mirrors. Several atmospheric phenomena and instrumental errors potentially limit the technique’s accuracy. At the 3.67-m AEOS telescope on Haleakala, we performed a large observing campaign with the HiVIS spectropolarimeter to identify limitations and develop algorithms for extracting consistent calibrations. Effective sampling of the telescope optical configurations and filtering of data for several derived parameters provide robustness to the derived Mueller matrix calibrations. Second-order scattering models of the sky show that this method is relatively insensitive to multiple-scattering in the sky, provided calibration observations are done in regions of high polarization degree. The technique is also insensitive to assumptions about telescope-induced polarization, provided the mirror coatings are highly reflective. Zemax-derived polarization models show agreement between the functional dependence of polarization predictions and the corresponding on-sky calibrations

Cellular Models of Aggregation-Dependent Template-Directed Proteolysis to Characterize Tau Aggregation Inhibitors for Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Copyright © 2015, The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Acknowledgements-We thank Drs Timo Rager and Rolf Hilfiker (Solvias, Switzerland) for polymorph analyses.Peer reviewedPublisher PD