Against `Realism'

We examine the prevalent use of the phrase ``local realism'' in the context of Bell's Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the ``realism'' in ``local realism'' supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on which the Bell inequalities rest, and (hence) which might be rejected in the face of empirical data violating the inequalities. We thus suggest that this vague and abused phrase ``local realism'' should be banned from future discussions of these issues, and urge physicists to revisit the foundational questions behind Bell's Theorem

Balancing end-to-end budgets of the Georges Bank ecosystem

Author Posting. © Elsevier, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Progress In Oceanography 74 (2007): 423-448, doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2007.05.003.Oceanographic regimes on the continental shelf display a great range in the time scales of physical exchange, biochemical processes and trophic transfers. The close surface-to-seabed physical coupling at intermediate scales of weeks to months means that the open ocean simplification to a purely pelagic food web is inadequate. Top-down trophic depictions, starting from the fish populations, are insufficient to constrain a system involving extensive nutrient recycling at lower trophic levels and subject to physical forcing as well as fishing. These pelagic-benthic interactions are found on all continental shelves but are particularly important on the relatively shallow Georges Bank in the northwest Atlantic. We have generated budgets for the lower food web for three physical regimes (well mixed, transitional and stratified) and for three seasons (spring, summer and fall/winter). The calculations show that vertical mixing and lateral exchange between the three regimes are important for zooplankton production as well as for nutrient input. Benthic suspension feeders are an additional critical pathway for transfers to higher trophic levels. Estimates of production by mesozooplankton, benthic suspension feeders and deposit feeders, derived primarily from data collected during the GLOBEC years of 1995-1999, provide input to an upper food web. Diets of commercial fish populations are used to calculate food requirements in three fish categories, planktivores, benthivores and piscivores, for four decades, 1963-2002, between which there were major changes in the fish communities. Comparisons of inputs from the lower web with fish energetic requirements for plankton and benthos indicate that we obtained reasonable agreement for the last three decades, 1973 to 2002. However, for the first decade, the fish food requirements were significantly less than the inputs. This decade, 1963-1972, corresponds to a period characterized by a strong Labrador Current and lower nitrate levels at the shelf edge, demonstrating how strong bottom-up physical forcing may determine overall fish yields.The research was done under the aegis of the U.S.-GLOBEC Northwest Atlantic Georges Bank Study, a program sponsored jointly by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We acknowledge NOAA-CICOR award NA17RJ1233 (J.H. Steele), NSF awards OCE0217399 (D.J. Gifford), OCE0217122 (J.J. Bisagni) and OCE0217257 (M.E. Sieracki). W.T. Stockhausen was supported by the NOAA Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research Program

Anthropogenic Space Weather

Anthropogenic effects on the space environment started in the late 19th century and reached their peak in the 1960s when high-altitude nuclear explosions were carried out by the USA and the Soviet Union. These explosions created artificial radiation belts near Earth that resulted in major damages to several satellites. Another, unexpected impact of the high-altitude nuclear tests was the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that can have devastating effects over a large geographic area (as large as the continental United States). Other anthropogenic impacts on the space environment include chemical release ex- periments, high-frequency wave heating of the ionosphere and the interaction of VLF waves with the radiation belts. This paper reviews the fundamental physical process behind these phenomena and discusses the observations of their impacts.Comment: 71 pages, 35 figure

Maritime aerosol network as a component of AERONET - First results and comparison with global aerosol models and satellite retrievals

The Maritime Aerosol Network (MAN) has been collecting data over the oceans since November 2006. Over 80 cruises were completed through early 2010 with deployments continuing. Measurement areas included various parts of the Atlantic Ocean, the Northern and Southern Pacific Ocean, the South Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, the Arctic Ocean and inland seas. MAN deploys Microtops hand-held sunphotometers and utilizes a calibration procedure and data processing traceable to AERONET. Data collection included areas that previously had no aerosol optical depth (AOD) coverage at all, particularly vast areas of the Southern Ocean. The MAN data archive provides a valuable resource for aerosol studies in maritime environments. In the current paper we present results of AOD measurements over the oceans, and make a comparison with satellite AOD retrievals and model simulations

Effects of sleep deprivation on neural functioning: an integrative review

Sleep deprivation has a broad variety of effects on human performance and neural functioning that manifest themselves at different levels of description. On a macroscopic level, sleep deprivation mainly affects executive functions, especially in novel tasks. Macroscopic and mesoscopic effects of sleep deprivation on brain activity include reduced cortical responsiveness to incoming stimuli, reflecting reduced attention. On a microscopic level, sleep deprivation is associated with increased levels of adenosine, a neuromodulator that has a general inhibitory effect on neural activity. The inhibition of cholinergic nuclei appears particularly relevant, as the associated decrease in cortical acetylcholine seems to cause effects of sleep deprivation on macroscopic brain activity. In general, however, the relationships between the neural effects of sleep deprivation across observation scales are poorly understood and uncovering these relationships should be a primary target in future research

Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. VII. Understanding the Ultraviolet Anomaly in NGC 5548 with X-Ray Spectroscopy

During the Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping Project observations of NGC 5548, the continuum and emission-line variability became decorrelated during the second half of the six-month-long observing campaign. Here we present Swift and Chandra X-ray spectra of NGC 5548 obtained as part of the campaign. The Swift spectra show that excess flux (relative to a power-law continuum) in the soft X-ray band appears before the start of the anomalous emission-line behavior, peaks during the period of the anomaly, and then declines. This is a model-independent result suggesting that the soft excess is related to the anomaly. We divide the Swift data into on- and off-anomaly spectra to characterize the soft excess via spectral fitting. The cause of the spectral differences is likely due to a change in the intrinsic spectrum rather than to variable obscuration or partial covering. The Chandra spectra have lower signal-to-noise ratios, but are consistent with the Swift data. Our preferred model of the soft excess is emission from an optically thick, warm Comptonizing corona, the effective optical depth of which increases during the anomaly. This model simultaneously explains all three observations: the UV emission-line flux decrease, the soft-excess increase, and the emission-line anomaly