WFPC2 Observations of the Hubble Deep Field-South

The Hubble Deep Field-South observations targeted a high-galactic-latitude field near QSO J2233-606. We present WFPC2 observations of the field in four wide bandpasses centered at roughly 300, 450, 606, and 814 nm. Observations, data reduction procedures, and noise properties of the final images are discussed in detail. A catalog of sources is presented, and the number counts and color distributions of the galaxies are compared to a new catalog of the HDF-N that has been constructed in an identical manner. The two fields are qualitatively similar, with the galaxy number counts for the two fields agreeing to within 20%. The HDF-S has more candidate Lyman-break galaxies at z > 2 than the HDF-N. The star-formation rate per unit volume computed from the HDF-S, based on the UV luminosity of high-redshift candidates, is a factor of 1.9 higher than from the HDF-N at z ~ 2.7, and a factor of 1.3 higher at z ~ 4.Comment: 93 pages, 25 figures; contains very long table

The Hubble Space Telescope Treasury Program on the Orion Nebula Cluster

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury Program on the Orion Nebula Cluster has used 104 orbits of HST time to image the Great Orion Nebula region with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the Wide-Field/Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) instruments in 11 filters ranging from the U-band to the H-band equivalent of HST. The program has been intended to perform the definitive study of the stellar component of the ONC at visible wavelengths, addressing key questions like the cluster IMF, age spread, mass accretion, binarity and cirumstellar disk evolution. The scanning pattern allowed to cover a contiguous field of approximately 600 square arcminutes with both ACS and WFPC2, with a typical exposure time of approximately 11 minutes per ACS filter, corresponding to a point source depth AB(F435W) = 25.8 and AB(F775W)=25.2 with 0.2 magnitudes of photometric error. We describe the observations, data reduction and data products, including images, source catalogs and tools for quick look preview. In particular, we provide ACS photometry for 3399 stars, most of them detected at multiple epochs, WFPC2 photometry for 1643 stars, 1021 of them detected in the U-band, and NICMOS JH photometry for 2116 stars. We summarize the early science results that have been presented in a number of papers. The final set of images and the photometric catalogs are publicly available through the archive as High Level Science Products at the STScI Multimission Archive hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute.Comment: Accepted for publication on the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, March 27, 201

Piecing Together the American Voting Puzzle: How Votersâ Personalities and Judgments of Issue Importance Mattered in the 2016 Presidential Election

In the wake of the 2016 election, which surprised pundits and voters on both the left and the right, there has been renewed interest in understanding what predicts American votersâ choices. In this article, we investigate the roles of personality and issue importance in how people voted in the 2016 U.S. election. In this longitudinal study of 403 MTurk workers who voted in the election, we assessed the relations between personality (openness, social dominance orientation, and national identity importance) and issue importance (group rights and social justice, economic rights, and individual and national rights), and voting for Clinton or Trump. Our results indicate that both individual differences and issue importance as measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We also found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. Implications for political psychology and the study of personality, campaign issues, and voting behavior are discussed.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146841/1/asap12157.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146841/2/asap12157_am.pd

Personalised service? Changing the role of the government librarian

Investigates the feasibility of personalised information service in a government department. A qualitative methodology explored stakeholder opinions on the remit, marketing, resourcing and measurement of the service. A questionnaire and interviews gathered experiences of personalised provision across the government sector. Potential users were similarly surveyed to discuss how the service could meet their needs. Data were analysed using coding techniques to identify emerging theory. Lessons learned from government librarians centred on clarifying requirements, balancing workloads and selective marketing. The user survey showed low usage and awareness of existing specialist services, but high levels of need and interest in services repackaged as a tailored offering. Fieldwork confirmed findings from the literature on the scope for adding value through information management advice, information skills training and substantive research assistance and the need to understand business processes and develop effective partnerships. Concluding recommendations focus on service definition, strategic marketing, resource utilisation and performance measurement

R.A.Fisher, design theory, and the Indian connection

Design Theory, a branch of mathematics, was born out of the experimental statistics research of the population geneticist R. A. Fisher and of Indian mathematical statisticians in the 1930s. The field combines elements of combinatorics, finite projective geometries, Latin squares, and a variety of further mathematical structures, brought together in surprising ways. This essay will present these structures and ideas as well as how the field came together, in itself an interesting story.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae have different environments

When massive stars exhaust their fuel they collapse and often produce the extraordinarily bright explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. On occasion, this stellar collapse also powers an even more brilliant relativistic explosion known as a long-duration gamma-ray burst. One would then expect that long gamma-ray bursts and core-collapse supernovae should be found in similar galactic environments. Here we show that this expectation is wrong. We find that the long gamma-ray bursts are far more concentrated on the very brightest regions of their host galaxies than are the core-collapse supernovae. Furthermore, the host galaxies of the long gamma-ray bursts are significantly fainter and more irregular than the hosts of the core-collapse supernovae. Together these results suggest that long-duration gamma-ray bursts are associated with the most massive stars and may be restricted to galaxies of limited chemical evolution. Our results directly imply that long gamma-ray bursts are relatively rare in galaxies such as our own Milky Way.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Nature on 22 August 2005, revised 9 February 2006, online publication 10 May 2006. Supplementary material referred to in the text can be found at http://www.stsci.edu/~fruchter/GRB/locations/supplement.pdf . This new version contains minor changes to match the final published versio

Relativistic deflection of background starlight measures the mass of a nearby white dwarf star

Based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. HST data used in this paper are available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at STScI (https://archive.stsci.edu/hst/search.php), under proposal ID 13457 and 14448. Support for this program was provided by NASA through a grant from STScI. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) have been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, NASA Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G, the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, and Eotvos Lorand University. MD thanks Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) for support by grant NPRP 09-476-1-078.Gravitational deflection of starlight around the Sun during the 1919 total solar eclipse provided measurements that confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. We have used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the analogous process of astrometric microlensing caused by a nearby star, the white dwarf Stein 2051 B. As Stein 2051 B passed closely in front of a background star, the background star's position was deflected. Measurement of this deflection at multiple epochs allowed us to determine the mass of Stein 2051 B - the sixth-nearest white dwarf to the Sun - as 0.675 ± 0.051 solar masses. This mass determination provides confirmation of the physics of degenerate matter and lends support to white dwarf evolutionary theory.PostprintPeer reviewe

Gender and sexual orientation differences in cognition across adulthood : age is kinder to women than to men regardless of sexual orientation

Despite some evidence of greater age-related deterioration of the brain in males than in females, gender differences in rates of cognitive aging have proved inconsistent. The present study employed web-based methodology to collect data from people aged 20-65 years (109,612 men; 88,509 women). As expected, men outperformed women on tests of mental rotation and line angle judgment, whereas women outperformed men on tests of category fluency and object location memory. Performance on all tests declined with age but significantly more so for men than for women. Heterosexuals of each gender generally outperformed bisexuals and homosexuals on tests where that gender was superior; however, there were no clear interactions between age and sexual orientation for either gender. At least for these particular tests from young adulthood to retirement, age is kinder to women than to men, but treats heterosexuals, bisexuals, and homosexuals just the same

Searching for Programme theories for a realist evaluation: a case study comparing an academic database search and a simple Google search

Background: Realist methodologies are increasingly being used to evaluate complex interventions in health and social care. Programme theory (ideas and assumptions of how a particular intervention works) development is the first step in a realist evaluation or a realist synthesis, with literature reviews providing important evidence to support this. Deciding how to search for programme theories is challenging and there is limited guidance available. Using an example of identifying programme theories for a realist evaluation of Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Instruments in clinical practice, the authors explore and compare several different approaches to literature searching and highlight important methodological considerations for those embarking on a programme theory review. Methods: We compared the performance of an academic database search with a simple Google search and developed an optimised search strategy for the identification primary references (i.e. documents providing the clearest examples of programme theories) associated with the use of Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Instruments (PU-RAIs). We identified the number of primary references and the total number of references retrieved per source. We then calculated the number needed to read (NNR) expressed as the total number of titles and abstracts screened to identify one relevant reference from each source. Results: The academic database search (comprising CINAHL, The Cochrane Library, EMBASE, HMIC, Medline) identified 2 /10 primary references with a NNR of 1395.The Google search identified 7/10 primary references with a NNR of 10.1. The combined NNR was 286.3. The optimised search combining Google and CINAHL identified 10/10 primary references with a NNR of 40.2. Conclusion: The striking difference between the efficiency of the review’s academic database and Google searches in finding relevant references prompted an in-depth comparison of the two types of search. The findings indicate the importance of including grey literature sources such as Google in this particular programme theory search, while acknowledging the need for transparency of methods. Further research is needed to facilitate improved guidance for programme theory searches to enhance practice in the realist field and to save researcher time and therefore resource