“The Rise and Demise of PATCO” Reconstructed

[Excerpt] In his article The Rise and Demise of PATCO (Northrup 1984), Herbert Northrup presents a narrow and misleading explanation of the ill-fated air traffic controllers\u27 strike of 1981. Northrup\u27s thesis is that the goal of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike was to establish the right to bargain over wages within a private sector framework. He attributes the failure of the strike to the union\u27s inept leadership and praises the Reagan administration for its firm response to the challenge presented by PATCO. Although most of the facts he reports are accurate, Northrup omits crucial information regarding the management style of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the internal dynamics of PATCO. Based on this additional information, we will argue that PATCO\u27S primary goal was to address the work-related problems of the rank-and-file specifically by reducing the work week and improving the retirement system; that the primary cause of the strike was rank-and- file frustration with autocratic management; and that the Reagan administration joined forces with career FAA managers to destroy PATCO without giving sufficient consideration to less drastic alternatives

Turing degrees of limit sets of cellular automata

Cellular automata are discrete dynamical systems and a model of computation. The limit set of a cellular automaton consists of the configurations having an infinite sequence of preimages. It is well known that these always contain a computable point and that any non-trivial property on them is undecidable. We go one step further in this article by giving a full characterization of the sets of Turing degrees of cellular automata: they are the same as the sets of Turing degrees of effectively closed sets containing a computable point

Synchronizer for random binary data

Simplified binary-data transition detector, for synchronization of relatively noise-free signals, can be used with radio or cable data-control links. It permits reception of binary data in absence of clock signal or self-clocking coder

The Moses Greenleaf Primer

A childrens primer on the life of Moses Greenleaf, Maine\u27s first mapmaker.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/oml-friends-publication-op/1000/thumbnail.jp

Running coupling expansion for the renormalized ϕ44\phi^4_4-trajectory from renormalization invariance

We formulate a renormalized running coupling expansion for the $\beta$--function and the potential of the renormalized $\phi^4$--trajectory on four dimensional Euclidean space-time. Renormalization invariance is used as a first principle. No reference is made to bare quantities. The expansion is proved to be finite to all orders of perturbation theory. The proof includes a large momentum bound on the connected free propagator amputated vertices.Comment: 14 pages LaTeX2e, typos and references correcte

Topological Hall effect and Berry phase in magnetic nanostructures

We discuss the anomalous Hall effect in a two-dimensional electron gas subject to a spatially varying magnetization. This topological Hall effect (THE) does not require any spin-orbit coupling, and arises solely from Berry phase acquired by an electron moving in a smoothly varying magnetization. We propose an experiment with a structure containing 2D electrons or holes of diluted magnetic semiconductor subject to the stray field of a lattice of magnetic nanocylinders. The striking behavior predicted for such a system (of which all relevant parameters are well known) allows to observe unambiguously the THE and to distinguish it from other mechanisms.Comment: 5 pages with 4 figure

The Status of Women in Kansas: A Summary Report to United WE

United WE commissioned researchers from the Center for Science Technology & Economic Policy at the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas to study the socioeconomic status of women in Kansas. The report also highlights the status of women in the Kansas City metro area (KC Metro). We compare outcomes of women and men across many social and economic indicators: demographics, income, employment, childcare, poverty, and civic engagement. We include several layers of geographic comparisons: Kansas with the U.S., the KC metro with other Midwestern metropolitan areas, and, for some outcomes, individual Kansas counties with the state average. Our report also addresses the differential impact of the COVID-19 recession on Kansas women. Overall, our report paints a statistical portrait of the status of women in Kansas

Sampling cecal contents or ileocecal lymph nodes: is it different?

The objective of this study was to compare the prevalence of Salmonella enterica in swine populations estimated by sampling cecal contents versus ileocecal lymph nodes. In each of two abattoirs, four groups of pigs (n=30 pigs per group) were studied. Cecal contents and ileocecal lymph nodes were individually collected and processed for isolation and identification of S. enterica. The overall prevalence found by cecal contents was 40%, whereas by ileocecal lymph nodes it was 22.9% (p\u3c0.05). Combining results from both samples, the prevalence found was 50.8%. The relative sensitivity of cecal content sampling was 79.3%, whereas for ileocecal lymph node sampling it was 45.5%. The agreement (Kappa statistic) between both sample types was 13.1%. This study demonstrates that sampling either cecal contents or ileocecal lymph nodes affects results of S. enterica epidemiological studies. It is recommended that both samples be used

Exercise Completed When Young Provides Lifelong Benefit to Cortical Bone Structure and Estimated Strength

poster abstractExercise induces greatest bone gains during growth, yet reduced bone strength is an age-related phenomenon. This raises the question of whether exercise-induced bone changes when young persist into adulthood. The current studies used Major/Minor League Baseball (MLB/MiLB) players to explore whether exercise-induced gains in humeral bone structure and strength accrued when young persist lifelong. MLB/MiLB players are a unique model as the unilateral upper extremity loading associated with throwing enables the contralateral side to serve as an internal control site and former MLB/MiLB players were consistently exposed to extreme loading reducing secular variations in exercise levels between generations. Dominant-to-nondominant (D-to-ND) differences in humeral cross-sectional properties in MLB/MiLB players were normalized to matched controls to correct for side-to-side differences due to elevated habitual loading associated with arm dominance. Exercise when young induced significant skeletal benefits, with active MLB/MiLB players having nearly double the estimated ability to resist torsion (polar moment of inertia, IP) in the humerus of their dominant arm. The cortical bone mass and area benefits of exercise observed in active MLB/MiLB players were lost in former MLB players following 40-49 years of detraining as a result of elevated medullary expansion and endocortical trabecularization. However, 42% of the total bone area benefit persisted following 50+ years of detraining and contributed to the maintenance of 24% of the benefit on IP. In MLB players who continued to exercise during aging, medullary expansion and endocortical trabecularization were reduced and there was maintenance of the cortical bone mass and area benefits of exercise. These cumulative data indicate: 1) the extreme plasticity of the growing skeleton to exercise; 2) that exercise when young has lifelong benefits on cortical bone size and estimated strength, but not bone mass, and; 3) exercise continued during aging maintains the bone mass benefits of exercise

Probabilistically Accurate Program Transformations

18th International Symposium, SAS 2011, Venice, Italy, September 14-16, 2011. ProceedingsThe standard approach to program transformation involves the use of discrete logical reasoning to prove that the transformation does not change the observable semantics of the program. We propose a new approach that, in contrast, uses probabilistic reasoning to justify the application of transformations that may change, within probabilistic accuracy bounds, the result that the program produces. Our new approach produces probabilistic guarantees of the form ℙ(|D| ≥ B) ≤ ε, ε ∈ (0, 1), where D is the difference between the results that the transformed and original programs produce, B is an acceptability bound on the absolute value of D, and ε is the maximum acceptable probability of observing large |D|. We show how to use our approach to justify the application of loop perforation (which transforms loops to execute fewer iterations) to a set of computational patterns.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-0811397)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-0905244)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1036241)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-0835652)United States. Dept. of Energy (Grant DE-SC0005288