Person to Person in Ireland

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Gabrielle Leif describes her observations during her study abroad program in Galway, Ireland

Fooling Around with the Sudakov Veto Algorithm

The Sudakov veto algorithm for generating emission and no-emission probabilities in parton showers is revisited and some reweighting techniques are suggested to improve statistics by oversampling in specific cases

Does Building a Relative Sunspot Number Make Sense? A Qualified 'Yes'

Recent research has demonstrated that the number of sunspots per group ('active region') has been decreasing over the last two or three solar cycles and that the classical Relative Sunspot Number (SSN) no longer is a good representation of solar magnetic activity such as revealed by e.g. the F10.7 cm microwave flux. The SSN is derived under the assumption that the number of spots per group is constant (in fact, nominally equal to 10). When this is no longer the case (the ratio is approaching 5, only half of its nominal value) the question arises how to construct a sunspot number series that takes that into account. We propose to harmonize the SSN with the sunspot Group Count that has been shown to follow F10.7 very well, but also to include the day-to-day variations of the spot count in order to preserve both long-term and short-term variability.Comment: 4 pages, 1 Figur

At the Razor's Edge: Building Hope for America's Rural Poor

Hurricane Katrina exposed the poverty that lay in our midst, and although the images served to remind the country of its enduring inequality, the picture was one of urban poverty. What the images failed to expose is the rural face of poverty, which in the South -- and especially in the Delta -- is the face of poverty. About one-third of the area hit by Katrina is rural, and the rate of poverty in the rural South stands at nearly 18%, the highest of any region in the country. What is too often overlooked is that poverty rates nationwide are consistently higher in rural than in urban areas (as a percentage of the population), and poverty is far more persistent in rural localities.On one level, the rebuilding of the Delta and other parts of the mid-South region represents an opportune time to refocus our lens on what we know about rural poverty and to outline adaptable blueprints that poor rural counties may adopt in their quest to eradicate poverty. This brief offers an important step in outlining the causes of rural poverty and delineating strategies that can move rural areas on the path of social and economic stability.This brief is from Rural Realities; Volume 1, Issue 1. Rural Realities is published by the Rural Sociological Society. It is is a peer-reviewed, web-based series that is published four times a year. Each issue is devoted to a single topic