On Being Medium Nice to Prisoners

A Model Act for the Protection of Rights of Prisoners (Model Act) is a curious collection of correctional miscellanea, ranging from the necessity to prevent suicide to the necessity to permit “any other citizen” to wander about the warden’s turf with impunity. Like most committee productions, the Model Act follows a cautious middle road that will make no one either very happy or very unhappy

Research Note: The Coverage of War: Do Women Matter? A Longitudinal Content Analysis of Broadsheets in Germany

Our social consciousness reserves the role of fighter solely for men. Women are not considered as being authoritative or decisive actors in the context of war and violence. During armed conflicts or other violent crises, female acting subjects seem to leave the public (i.e. media) stage – a place where they are underrepresented even under normal circumstances. Furthermore, media coverage of war, it is said, largely assigns the role of the victim to women. However, there is not much empirical evidence to support this view due to the significant lack of longitudinal quantitative studies on media coverage of women during wartime. In order to investigate this, a framing analysis of media coverage of war between 1989 and 2000 was conducted in Germany. This article reports on the results of this framing analysis and the representation of women during wartime in quality German newspapers. It is the first longitudinal gender-specific framing analysis of war coverage ever carried out in any country

Arachidonic acid, arachidonic/eicosapentaenoic acid ratio, stearidonic acid and eicosanoids are involved in dietary-induced albinism in Senegal sole (Solea senegalensis)

Senegal sole larvae were fed live prey enriched with different amounts of arachidonic acid (ARA, 20:4n-6) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, 20:5n-3) to re-evaluate the effect of these two fatty acids on flatfish pigmentation. Echium oil, a plant derived oil rich in gamma-linolenic acid (GLA, 18:3n-6) and stearidonic acid (SDA, 18:4n-3) was also used as a component of one of the enrichment emulsions. Although ARA content did not have any effect on growth there was a clear influence on pigmentation that correlated clearly with prostaglandin production. Inclusion of Echium oil, on the contrary, exerted a positive effect on pigmentation rate even though dietary ARA levels were as high as in the other emulsions. The relationships between dietary ARA levels and dietary ARA/EPA ratio, prostaglandin production and pigmentation are discussed

The excitation spectrum of mesoscopic proximity structures

We investigate one aspect of the proximity effect, viz., the local density of states of a superconductor-normal metal sandwich. In contrast to earlier work, we allow for the presence of an arbitrary concentration of impurities in the structure. The superconductor induces a gap in the normal metal spectrum that is proportional to the inverse of the elastic mean free path l_N for rather clean systems. For a mean free path much shorter than the thickness of the normal metal, we find a gap size proportional to l_N that approaches the behavior predicted by the Usadel equation (diffusive limit). We also discuss the influence of interface and surface roughness, the consequences of a non-ideal transmittivity of the interface, and the dependence of our results on the choice of the model of impurity scattering.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures (included), submitted to PR

Problems with Time-Varying Extra Dimensions or "Cardassian Expansion" as Alternatives to Dark Energy

It has recently been proposed that the Universe might be accelerating as a consequence of extra dimensions with time varying size. We show that although these scenarios can lead to acceleration, they run into serious difficulty when taking into account limits on the time variation of the four dimensional Newton's constant. On the other hand, models of ``Cardassian'' expansion based on extra dimensions which have been constructed so far violate the weak energy condition for the bulk stress energy, for parameters that give an accelerating universe.Comment: 8 pages, minor changes. To appear in Physical Review

Biotransformation of Silver Released from Nanoparticle Coated Titanium Implants Revealed in Regenerating Bone

Antimicrobial silver nanoparticle coatings have attracted interest for reducing prosthetic joint infection. However, few studies report in vivo investigations of the biotransformation of silver nanoparticles within the regenerating tissue and its impact on bone formation. We present a longitudinal investigation of the osseointegration of silver nanoparticle-coated additive manufactured titanium implants in rat tibial defects. Correlative imaging at different time points using nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), histomorphometry, and 3D X-ray microcomputed tomography provided quantitative insight from the nano- to macroscales. The quality and quantity of newly formed bone is comparable between the uncoated and silver coated implants. The newly formed bone demonstrates a trabecular morphology with bone being located at the implant surface, and at a distance, at two weeks. Nanoscale elemental mapping of the bone−implant interface showed that silver was present primarily in the osseous tissue and colocalized with sulfur. TEM revealed silver sulfide nanoparticles in the newly regenerated bone, presenting strong evidence that the previously in vitro observed biotransformation of silver to silver sulfide occurs in vivo

Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP

We measure cosmological parameters using the three-dimensional power spectrum P(k) from over 200,000 galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in combination with WMAP and other data. Our results are consistent with a ``vanilla'' flat adiabatic Lambda-CDM model without tilt (n=1), running tilt, tensor modes or massive neutrinos. Adding SDSS information more than halves the WMAP-only error bars on some parameters, tightening 1 sigma constraints on the Hubble parameter from h~0.74+0.18-0.07 to h~0.70+0.04-0.03, on the matter density from Omega_m~0.25+/-0.10 to Omega_m~0.30+/-0.04 (1 sigma) and on neutrino masses from <11 eV to <0.6 eV (95%). SDSS helps even more when dropping prior assumptions about curvature, neutrinos, tensor modes and the equation of state. Our results are in substantial agreement with the joint analysis of WMAP and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which is an impressive consistency check with independent redshift survey data and analysis techniques. In this paper, we place particular emphasis on clarifying the physical origin of the constraints, i.e., what we do and do not know when using different data sets and prior assumptions. For instance, dropping the assumption that space is perfectly flat, the WMAP-only constraint on the measured age of the Universe tightens from t0~16.3+2.3-1.8 Gyr to t0~14.1+1.0-0.9 Gyr by adding SDSS and SN Ia data. Including tensors, running tilt, neutrino mass and equation of state in the list of free parameters, many constraints are still quite weak, but future cosmological measurements from SDSS and other sources should allow these to be substantially tightened.Comment: Minor revisions to match accepted PRD version. SDSS data and ppt figures available at http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/sdsspars.htm