Occultation studies of planets and satellites: The occultation of epsilon Geminorum by Mars

The occultation of epsilon Geminorum by Mars on 1976 April 8 was observed at three wavelengths and 4 ms time resolution with the 91 cm telescope. Temperature, pressure, and number density profiles of the Martian atmosphere were obtained for both the immersion and emersion events. Within the altitude range of 50 to 80 km above the mean surface, the mean temperature is 145 K, and the profiles exhibit wavelike structures with a peak to peak amplitude of 35 K and a vertical scale of about 20 km. The ratio of the refractivity of the atmosphere at 4500 A and 7500 A, determined from the time shift of the light curves for these wavelengths, is consistent with the atmospheric composition measured by Viking 1, 15 weeks later. From the central flash - a bright feature in the light curve midway between immersion and emersion - an optical depth is found at 4500 A of 3.3 plus or minus 1.7 per km atm (about 0.23 per equivalent Martian air mass) for the atmosphere about 25 km above the mean surface, near the south polar region. This large value and its weak wavelength dependence rule out Rayleigh scattering as the principal cause of the observed extinction

The Effects of Mortality Salience and Team Identification on Sports Fans\u27 Willingness to Consider Anonymous Acts of Aggression

The current study sought to understand if mortality salience and identification with the University of Kentucky men’s varsity basketball team (UK) would interact in such a way as to influence participants’ willingness to engage in anonymous acts of aggression toward fans, coaches and players of rival sport teams. A research question was also evaluated which asked if mortality salience might be a potential mediator between participants’ identification and their likelihood to engage in anonymous acts of aggression. Results indicated that mortality salience was not a significant predictor and there was no significant interaction between identification and mortality salience. As a result, subsequent mediation analysis also did not find mortality salience to be a mediator between identification and likelihood to engage in anonymous acts of aggression. Results did support previous research, which found identification to be a significant predictor of anonymous aggression. Participants who reported higher identification with UK were also more likely to report willingness to engage in anonymous aggression toward fans, players, and coaches of rival sport teams

The College of Education and Its Students - Until Death Do Us Part

The response at a large university to a recent fund request to 10,000 Education alumni was answered by only 150, and one person sent a cryptic message by pledging 12 cents. What\u27s the real meaning behind that message

Eulerian quasisymmetric functions and cyclic sieving

It is shown that a refined version of a q-analogue of the Eulerian numbers together with the action, by conjugation, of the subgroup of the symmetric group $S_n$ generated by the $n$-cycle $(1,2,...,n)$ on the set of permutations of fixed cycle type and fixed number of excedances provides an instance of the cyclic sieving phenonmenon of Reiner, Stanton and White. The main tool is a class of symmetric functions recently introduced in work of two of the authors.Comment: 30 page

Terrestrial production vs. extraterrestrial delivery of prebiotic organics to the early Earth

A comprehensive treatment of comet/asteroid interaction with the atmosphere, ensuring surface impact, and resulting organic pyrolysis is required to determine whether more than a negligible fraction of the organics in incident comets and asteroids actually survived collision with Earth. Results of such an investigation, using a smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulation of cometary and asteroidal impacts into both oceans and rock, demonstrate that organics will not survive impacts at velocities approx. greater than 10 km s(exp -1), and that even comets and asteroids as small as 100m in radius cannot be aerobraked to below this velocity in 1 bar atmospheres. However, for plausible dense (10 bar CO2) early atmospheres, there will be sufficient aerobraking during atmospheric passage for some organics to survive the ensuing impact. Combining these results with analytical fits to the lunar impact record shows that 4.5 Gyr ago Earth was accreting at least approx. 10(exp 6) kg yr(exp 1) of intact cometary organics, a flux which thereafter declined with a approx. 100 Myr half-life. The extent to which this influx was augmented by asteroid impacts, as well as the effect of more careful modelling of a variety of conservative approximations, is currently being quantified. These results may be placed in context by comparison with in situ organic production from a variety of terrestrial energy sources, as well as organic delivery by interplanetary dust. Which source dominated the early terrestrial prebiotic inventory is found to depend on the nature of the early terrestrial atmosphere. However, there is an intriguing symmetry: it is exactly those dense CO2 atmospheres where in situ atmospheric production of organic molecules should be the most difficult, in which intact cometary organics would be delivered in large amounts

Increasing spanning forests in graphs and simplicial complexes

Let G be a graph with vertex set {1,...,n}. A spanning forest F of G is increasing if the sequence of labels on any path starting at the minimum vertex of a tree of F forms an increasing sequence. Hallam and Sagan showed that the generating function ISF(G, t) for increasing spanning forests of G has all nonpositive integral roots. Furthermore they proved that, up to a change of sign, this polynomial equals the chromatic polynomial of G precisely when 1,..., n is a perfect elimination order for G. We give new, purely combinatorial proofs of these results which permit us to generalize them in several ways. For example, we are able to bound the coef- cients of ISF(G, t) using broken circuits. We are also able to extend these results to simplicial complexes using the new notion of a cage-free complex. A generalization to labeled multigraphs is also given. We observe that the de nition of an increasing spanning forest can be formulated in terms of pattern avoidance, and we end by exploring spanning forests that avoid the patterns 231, 312 and 321

Post Occupancy Evaluation in Architectural Education and Practice

Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is a research method that examines how buildings function; when the functions include social life, social science methods must be employed. This paper advocates using POE social research both in architectural practice and in architectural education to promote evidence‐based design. Based on four decades of experience teaching POE to undergraduates at the University of California Berkeley, we show how POE can be conducted and taught: gather the research questions, set up teams to collect data using different data collection techniques, and analyze the results by comparing and contrasting the findings of each team. We discuss the importance of POE research to architectural practice, education, and accumulated institutional knowledge

Examining Sport Team Identification, Social Connections, and Social Well-being among High School Students

Past research has found that sport team identification is positively correlated with social psychological health (Phua, 2012; Wann & Weaver, 2009) including work testing adolescent fans (Wann, Brasher, Thomas, & Scheuchner, in press).  The current study was designed to extend previous investigations by examining the relationship between team identification and the establishment and maintenance of social connections.  Data from 177 high school students confirmed expectations as identification with a high school football team was positively correlated with both social well-being and social connections.  However, social connections were not found to mediate the relationship between identification and well-being, contrary to the team identification – social psychological health model (Wann, 2006b)