Teaching Access, or Freedom of Information Law

Based on the author\u27s experience developing and administering the course and materials, this article provides an introduction and resources to teach a graduate journalism or professional law school course on access to government, commonly called freedom of information law , which may be constructed as a capstone course in law school. The appendices provide supporting material and references

Overview and status of EXCLAIM, the experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping

The EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM) is a balloon-borne far-infrared telescope that will survey star formation history over cosmological time scales to improve our understanding of why the star formation rate declined at redshift z < 2, despite continued clustering of dark matter. Specifically,EXCLAIM will map the emission of redshifted carbon monoxide and singly-ionized carbon lines in windows over a redshift range 0 < z < 3.5, following an innovative approach known as intensity mapping. Intensity mapping measures the statistics of brightness fluctuations of cumulative line emissions instead of detecting individual galaxies, thus enabling a blind, complete census of the emitting gas. To detect this emission unambiguously, EXCLAIM will cross-correlate with a spectroscopic galaxy catalog. The EXCLAIM mission uses a cryogenic design to cool the telescope optics to approximately 1.7 K. The telescope features a 90-cm primary mirror to probe spatial scales on the sky from the linear regime up to shot noise-dominated scales. The telescope optical elements couple to six {\mu}-Spec spectrometer modules, operating over a 420-540 GHz frequency band with a spectral resolution of 512 and featuring microwave kinetic inductance detectors. A Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) reads out the detectors in the baseline design. The cryogenic telescope and the sensitive detectors allow EXCLAIM to reach high sensitivity in spectral windows of low emission in the upper atmosphere. Here, an overview of the mission design and development status since the start of the EXCLAIM project in early 2019 is presented.Comment: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1912.0711

Experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping: instrument design

The experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping (EXCLAIM) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to survey star formation in windows from the present to z  =  3.5. During this time, the rate of star formation dropped dramatically, while dark matter continued to cluster. EXCLAIM maps the redshifted emission of singly ionized carbon lines and carbon monoxide using intensity mapping, which permits a blind and complete survey of emitting gas through statistics of cumulative brightness fluctuations. EXCLAIM achieves high sensitivity using a cryogenic telescope coupled to six integrated spectrometers employing kinetic inductance detectors covering 420 to 540 GHz with spectral resolving power R  =  512 and angular resolution ≈4  arc min. The spectral resolving power and cryogenic telescope allow the survey to access dark windows in the spectrum of emission from the upper atmosphere. EXCLAIM will survey 305  deg2 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 field from a conventional balloon flight in 2023. EXCLAIM will also map several galactic fields to study carbon monoxide and neutral carbon emission as tracers of molecular gas. We summarize the design phase of the mission

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Initial Public Offerings and the Firm Location

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the proportion of the equity wealth is abnormally increasing with the volume of the IPOs inside the investor region. Upon nearly the universe of the 167,515 going public and private domestic manufacturing firms, we provide consistent evidence that the isolated private firms have higher probability to go public, larger IPO underpricing cross-sectional average and volatility, and less pronounced long-run under-performance. Similar but opposite evidence holds for the local concentration of the investor wealth. These effects are economically relevant and robust to local delistings, IPO market timing, agglomeration economies, firm location endogeneity, self-selection bias, and information asymmetries, among others. Findings suggest IPO waves have a strong geographic component, highlight that underwriters significantly under-estimate the local demand component thus leaving unexpected money on the table, and support state-contingent but constant investor propensity for risk

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M&gt;70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0&lt;e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM