A New Reflecting Microscope Objective with Two Concentric Spherical Mirrors

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Experience, expertise and expert-performance research in public accounting

Bibliography: p. [22-25]

Speaking of Music and the Counterpoint of Copyright: Addressing Legal Concerns in Making Oral History Available to the Public

Oral history provides society with voices and memories of people and communities experiencing events of the past first-hand. Such history is created through interviews; an interview, however, like any other type of intellectual property—once in a fixed form—is subject to copyright law. In order to make oral history available to the public, it is critically important that individuals generating and acquiring oral history materials clearly understand relevant aspects of copyright law. The varied nature of how one may create, use, and acquire oral history materials can present new, surprising, and sometimes baffling legal scenarios that challenge the experience of even the most skilled curators. This iBrief presents and discusses two real-world scenarios that raise various issues related to oral history and copyright law. These scenarios were encountered by curators at Yale University’s Oral History of American Music archive (OHAM), the preeminent organization dedicated to the collection and preservation of recorded memoirs of the creative musicians of our time. The legal concerns raised and discussed throughout this iBrief may be familiar to other stewards of oral history materials and will be worthwhile for all archivists and their counsel to consider when reviewing their practices and policies

High Formalism: The aerial view and the colour field

Laura Kurgan’s Monochrome Landscapes (2004), first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consists of four oblong Cibachrome prints derived from digital files sourced from the commercial Ikonos and QuickBird satellites. The prints are ostensibly flat, depthless fields of white, green, blue, and yellow, yet the captions provided explain that the sites represented are related to contested military, industrial, and cartographic practices. In Kurgan’s account of Monochrome Landscapes she explains that it is in dialogue with another work from the Whitney by abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly. This article pursues the relationship between formalist abstraction and satellite imaging in order to demonstrate how formalist strategies aimed at producing an immediate retinal response are bound up with contemporary uses of digital information and the truth claims such information can be made to substantiate

Analytical reliability calculation of linear dynamical systems in higher dimensions

The recent application of reliability analysis to controller synthesis has created the need for a computationally efficient method for the estimation of the first excursion probabilities for linear dynamical systems in higher dimensions. Simulation methods cannot provide an adequate solution to this specific application, which involves numerical optimization of the system reliability with respect to the controller parameters, because the total computational time needed is still prohibitive. Instead, an analytical approach is presented in this paper. The problem reduces to the calculation of the conditional upcrossing rate at each surface of the failure boundary. The correlation between upcrossings of the failure surface for the different failure events may be addressed by the introduction of a multi-dimensional integral. An efficient algorithm is adopted for the numerical calculation of this integral. Also, the problem of approximation of the conditional upcrossing rate is discussed. For the latter there is no known theoretical solution. Three of the semi-empirical corrections that have been proposed previously for scalar processes are compared and it is shown that the correction should be based on the bandwidth characteristics of the system. Finally, examples that verify the validity of the analytical approximations for systems in higher dimensions are discussed

The Call of the Anthropocene

In late 2012 a communications satellite called EchoStar XVI launched into space from Kazakhstan where it remains in a geostationary orbit around Earth. The satellite contains artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures, a collection of one hundred images, sourced from libraries and artists, microetched onto a gold-plated disc. Paglen’s project is both a continuation of, and a critical response to, the notion of the time capsule as a means of delivering, either to a terrestrial future or to some extraterrestrial destination, an abbreviated representative sample of “civilization.” The utopianism that motivates many time-capsule projects, whether it is articulated through a belief in the power to communicate with a distant future or with some cosmically remote intelligence, is also a manifestation, this article argues, of progressive modernity’s commitment to timekeeping—to the successful capture and command, interpretation and anticipation, of past and future times. Paglen’s project is considered here as a retort to the repressions and exclusions that underwrite the optimism of the conventional capsule; The Last Pictures is the futureless call of the Anthropocene

Accounting for Seismic Risk in Financial Analysis of Property Investment

A methodology is presented for making property investment decisions using loss analysis and the principles of decision analysis. It proposes that the investor choose among competing investment alternatives on the basis of the certainty equivalent of their net asset value which depends on the uncertain discounted future net income, uncertain discounted future earthquake losses, initial equity and the investor’s risk tolerance. The earthquake losses are modelled using a seismic vulnerability function, the site seismic hazard function, and an assumption that strong shaking at a site follows a Poisson process. A building-specific vulnerability approach, called assembly-based vulnerability, or ABV, is used. ABV involves a simulation approach that includes dynamic structural analyses and damage analyses using fragility functions and probability distributions on unit repair costs and downtimes for all vulnerable structural and nonstructural components in a building. The methodology is demonstrated using some results from a seven-storey reinforced-concrete hotel in Los Angeles

Transport in very dilute solutions of 3^3He in superfluid 4^4 He

Motivated by a proposed experimental search for the electric dipole moment of the neutron (nEDM) utilizing neutron-$^3$He capture in a dilute solution of $^3$He in superfluid $^4$He, we derive the transport properties of dilute solutions in the regime where the $^3$He are classically distributed and rapid $^3$He-$^3$He scatterings keep the $^3$He in equilibrium. Our microscopic framework takes into account phonon-phonon, phonon-$^3$He, and $^3$He-$^3$He scatterings. We then apply these calculations to measurements by Rosenbaum et al. [J.Low Temp.Phys. {\bf 16}, 131 (1974)] and by Lamoreaux et al. [Europhys.Lett. {\bf 58}, 718 (2002)] of dilute solutions in the presence of a heat flow. We find satisfactory agreement of theory with the data, serving to confirm our understanding of the microscopics of the helium in the future nEDM experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, v