92,815 research outputs found
Use of Spotted Knapweed/Star Thistle (Asterales: Asteraceae) as the Primary Source of Nectar by Early Migrating Monarch Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) from Beaver Island, Michigan
Recent observations over the past decade suggest that the invasive star thistle (aka spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe L.) provides much of the nectar that supports monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in their pre-migratory and early migratory flight from the Beaver Island archipelago, an isolated chain of islands located in northern Lake Michigan. With the advent and continuation of global climate change, the opportunistic evolutionary changes that may take place between migrating monarchs and their dependence on non-native nectariferous plants, prior to migration, is worth further documentation and examination
Strength in Numbers: State Spending on K-12 Assessment Systems
In the coming years, states will need to make the most significant changes to their assessment systems in a decade as they implement the Common Core State Standards, a common framework for what students are expected to know that will replace existing standards in 45 states and the District of Columbia. The Common Core effort has prompted concerns about the cost of implementing the new standards and assessments, but there is little comprehensive up-to-date information on the costs of assessment systems currently in place throughout the country. This report fills this void by providing the most current, comprehensive evidence on state-level costs of assessment systems, based on new data from state contracts with testing vendors assembled by the Brown Center on Education Policy. These data cover a combined 1.4 million per year; a state of 500,000 students saves an estimated 25 percent, or $3.9 million, by joining the same consortium.Collaborating to form assessment consortia is the strategy being pursued by nearly all of the states that have adopted the Common Core standards. But it is not yet clear how these common assessments will be sustained after federal funding for their development ends in 2014, months before the tests are fully implemented. The report identifies a lack of transparency in assessment pricing as a barrier to states making informed decisions regarding their testing systems, and recommends that consortia of states use their market power to encourage test-makers to divulge more details about their pricing models
First order resonance overlap and the stability of close two planet systems
Motivated by the population of multi-planet systems with orbital period
ratios 1<P2/P1<2, we study the long-term stability of packed two planet
systems. The Hamiltonian for two massive planets on nearly circular and nearly
coplanar orbits near a first order mean motion resonance can be reduced to a
one degree of freedom problem (Sessin & Ferraz Mello (1984), Wisdom (1986),
Henrard et al. (1986)). Using this analytically tractable Hamiltonian, we apply
the resonance overlap criterion to predict the onset of large scale chaotic
motion in close two planet systems. The reduced Hamiltonian has only a weak
dependence on the planetary mass ratio, and hence the overlap criterion is
independent of the planetary mass ratio at lowest order. Numerical integrations
confirm that the planetary mass ratio has little effect on the structure of the
chaotic phase space for close orbits in the low eccentricity (e <~0.1) regime.
We show numerically that orbits in the chaotic web produced primarily by first
order resonance overlap eventually experience large scale erratic variation in
semimajor axes and are Lagrange unstable. This is also true of the orbits in
this overlap region which are Hill stable. As a result, we can use the first
order resonance overlap criterion as an effective stability criterion for pairs
of observed planets. We show that for low mass (<~10 M_Earth) planetary systems
with initially circular orbits the period ratio at which complete overlap
occurs and widespread chaos results lies in a region of parameter space which
is Hill stable. Our work indicates that a resonance overlap criterion which
would apply for initially eccentric orbits needs to take into account second
order resonances. Finally, we address the connection found in previous work
between the Hill stability criterion and numerically determined Lagrange
instability boundaries in the context of resonance overlap.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap
Metastability and instability in holographic gauge theories
We review and extend previous results regarding the stability and
thermodynamics of Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime at finite temperature. Using a
combination of analytic and numerical techniques, we compute the energy,
temperature, and entropy of perfect fluid stars in asymptotically AdS
spacetimes. We find that at sufficiently high temperature (in the canonical
ensemble) or energy (in the microcanonical ensemble) these configurations
develop dynamical instabilities, which presumably lead to the formation of a
black hole. We extend our analysis to the case of
compactifications stabilized by flux (such as those that arise in supergravity
and string theory), and find that the inclusion of the sphere does not
substantially alter these results. We then map out the phase structure of these
theories in the canonical and microcanonical ensembles, paying attention to
inequivalence of these ensembles for global anti-de Sitter space. With a
certain scaling limit, the critical temperature can be parametrically lower
than the string temperature, so that supergravity is a good description at the
instability point. We comment on the implications of this for the unitarity of
black holes.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figure
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