Continuous Measurements of Water and Carbon Isotopes: Tools to Minimized Maritime and Coastal Vulnerabilities and Maximize Awareness (Integrating Primary-Secondary-Tertiary Systems)

United States Department of Homeland Security University of Alaska Anchorag

BLAST Autonomous Daytime Star Cameras

We have developed two redundant daytime star cameras to provide the fine pointing solution for the balloon-borne submillimeter telescope, BLAST. The cameras are capable of providing a reconstructed pointing solution with an absolute accuracy < 5 arcseconds. They are sensitive to stars down to magnitudes ~ 9 in daytime float conditions. Each camera combines a 1 megapixel CCD with a 200 mm f/2 lens to image a 2 degree x 2.5 degree field of the sky. The instruments are autonomous. An internal computer controls the temperature, adjusts the focus, and determines a real-time pointing solution at 1 Hz. The mechanical details and flight performance of these instruments are presented.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. To be published in conference proceedings for the "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy" part of the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Symposium that will be held 24-31 May 2006 in Orlando, F

Identity Protection: Copyright, Right of Publicity, and the Artist's Negative Voide

What do you value most about your voice? As ethnomusicological studies of the voice expand, so must our understanding of what voice even means. Voice must entail more than just a sonic phenomenon, but must also relate to ideology, to our very identity, even. This thesis will fuse ethnomusicological and legal perspectives to explore how American and, to a lesser extent, international copyright law and other legal mechanisms protect more than just a musician’s economic interest, but also his very identity. I will explore the right of publicity and the concept of moral rights and how they relate to voice and identity. The right of publicity is a musician’s right to protect his identity as well as his copyrighted works while moral rights is the right of a musician to prevent certain uses of his work even when he has assigned the copyright of that work to another. This thesis will suggest a theoretical framework for investigating the voice as an intangible legal marker of identity. This thesis will examine where copyright law protects identity and where it falls short and how the right of publicity fills in the gaps to provide comprehensive protection for a musician’s voice in the broadest sense. It will provide a background on the scope of copyright law, as well as how it has historically developed to protect more than just work-product, but also the musician’s very identity. It will then explore the right of publicity and moral rights and how those ideas fit into the general legal scheme of copyright protection. I will accomplish this through interviews with musicians, as well as explorations of current scholarly work on identity, copyright, voice, the right of publicity, and moral rights. I will also explore important legal cases and relevant statutes in these areas, such as Tom Waits v. Frito-Lay, Bette Midler v. Ford Motor Company and the Copyright Act of 1976. These explorations can help us understand how musicians can protect their identity by protecting their ideological, as well as their physical, voices

American jihadi terrorism: A comparison of homicides and unsuccessful plots

While the number of American jihadi terrorist attacks remains relatively rare, terrorist plots thwarted by law enforcement have increased since September 11, 2001. Although these law enforcement blocks of would-be terrorists are considered counterterrorism triumphs by the FBI, human rights and civil liberty watch groups have conversely suggested that those who plan for attacks alongside government informants and undercover agents may be unique and essentially dissimilar from terrorists. Underlying this debate is the empirical question of how planned yet unsuccessful attacks and their plotters compare to successful terrorist homicides and their perpetrators. The current study addresses this question by comparatively examining jihadi terrorist homicides and unsuccessful plots occurring in part or wholly on U.S. soil between 1990 and 2014. Data for this study come from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), an open-source database with information on terrorism and extremist crimes. Based on these data, descriptive statistics are provided for several incident, offender, and target variables across three jihadi terrorist violence categories, including homicides, plots with specified targets, and plots with non-specific targets. We find several important differences across categories of terrorist violence, suggesting that unsuccessful plotters and their intended crimes vary from their more successful terrorist counterparts

Patterns of Lone Actor Terrorism in the United States

This research explores the differences in geospatial and temporal patterns between lone actor and group-based terrorists in the United States. These include differences in demographics, precursor activities, proximity to the terrorism incidents, and longevity of conducting terrorist activities. Data for this analysis were derived from the American Terrorism Study (ATS). The ATS includes information on federal criminal cases resulting from FBI investigations for “terrorism or terrorism-related activities.” The analysis includes data from 264 prevented or completed terrorism incidents in the United States from 1980-present. These incidents involved 314 indictees charged with over 3,000 federal criminal counts. They were responsible for 1,788 recorded precursor activities that occurred at over 1,100 geocoded addresses

Utilization and spending trends for antiretroviral medications in the U.S. Medicaid program from 1991 to 2005

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>HIV/AIDS incidence and mortality rates have decreased in the U.S. since 1996. Accompanying the longer life spans of those diagnosed with the disease, however, is a tremendous rise in expenditures on medication. The objective of this study is to describe the trends in utilization of, spending on, and market shares of antiretroviral medications in the U.S. Medicaid Program. Antiretroviral drugs include nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), protease inhibitors (PIs), nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs), and fusion inhibitors (FIs).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Utilization and payment data from 1991 to 2005 are provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Descriptive summary analyses were used to assess quarterly prescription numbers and amounts of payment.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The total number of prescriptions for antiretrovirals increased from 168,914 in 1991 to 2.0 million in 1998, and 3.0 million in 2005, a 16.7-fold increase over 15 years. The number of prescriptions for NRTIs reached 1.6 million in 2005. Prescriptions for PIs increased from 114 in 1995 to 932,176 in 2005, while the number of prescriptions for NNRTIs increased from 1,339 in 1996 to 401,272 in 2005. The total payment for antiretroviral drugs in the U.S. Medicaid Program increased from US$30.6 million in 1991 to US$ 1.6 billion in 2005, a 49.8-fold increase. In 2005, NRTIs as a class had the highest payment market share. These drugs alone accounted for US$787.9 million in Medicaid spending (50.8 percent of spending on antiretrovirals). Payment per prescription for each drug, with the exception of Agenerase^®, increased, at least somewhat, over time. The relatively expensive drugs in 2005 included Trizivir^®($1040) and Combivir^®($640), as well as Reyataz^®($750), Lexiva^®($700), Sustiva^®($420), Viramune^®($370), and Fuzeon^®($1914).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The tremendous growth in antiretroviral spending is due primarily to rising utilization, secondarily to the entry of newer, more expensive antiretrovirals, and, finally, in part to rising per-prescription cost of existing medications.</p

Exact Polynomial Eigenmodes for Homogeneous Spherical 3-Manifolds

Observational data hints at a finite universe, with spherical manifolds such as the Poincare dodecahedral space tentatively providing the best fit. Simulating the physics of a model universe requires knowing the eigenmodes of the Laplace operator on the space. The present article provides explicit polynomial eigenmodes for all globally homogeneous 3-manifolds: the Poincare dodecahedral space S3/I*, the binary octahedral space S3/O*, the binary tetrahedral space S3/T*, the prism manifolds S3/D_m* and the lens spaces L(p,1).Comment: v3. Final published version. 27 pages, 1 figur

Temporal Sequencing, Incident Sophistication, and Terrorist Outcomes

There have been few efforts to examine how the planning process affects the outcome of a terrorist plot. This research brief provides some preliminary findings from an examination of the impact of the length of the planning process, the impact of multiple participants, and the volume of precursor activity on the success or failure of terrorist plots in the United States. While conventional wisdom holds true that a shorter planning process and fewer preparatory activities reduces perpetrators chances of getting caught therefore increases success rate, the new findings show that the more people involved in the planning process also increases the probability of success