Fluctuation Results from PHENIX

The PHENIX Experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has made measurements of event-by-event fluctuations in the net charge, the mean transverse momentum, and the charged particle multiplicity as a function of collision energy, centrality, and transverse momentum in heavy ion collisions. The results of these measurements will be reviewed and discussed.Comment: Proceedings for the Workshop on Correlations and Fluctuations in Relativistic Nuclear Collisions, April 21-23, 2005; 10 pages, 17 figure

Internet-Facilitated Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.

This bulletin summarizes findings from the Internet‐Facilitated Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (IF‐CSEC) component of the 2006 Second National Juvenile Online Victimization study. Following are some key findings from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention‐sponsored study: • An estimated 569 arrests for IF‐CSEC were made in the United States in 2006; more than half of the arrests involved the offender marketing and selling child pornography. • Most offenders (83%) purchased child pornography or sex with a minor, but an important minority (17%) profited from the exploitation. Profiteers appeared to be more seasoned offenders who were involved in larger, organized networks of criminals, such as prostitution and human trafficking rings. • Many offenders (39%) were acquaintances of the IF‐CSEC victims, 23% were family members, and 17% were people the victims had met online. The rest were mostly pimps. • Compared with victims of Internet sexual crimes that do not involve a commercial aspect, a greater per‐ centage of IF‐CSEC victims, as part of the current crime, were assaulted, given drugs or alcohol, and were the subject of child pornography

Youth Internet Safety Study (YISS): Methodology Report.

The Youth Internet Safety Surveys (YISS‐1, YISS‐2, and YISS‐3) were conducted in order to quantify and detail youth experiences with unwanted or problematic Internet experiences including sexual solicitations, harassment, and unwanted exposure to pornography on the Internet. YISS‐3 collected additional information about youth produced sexual images (YPSI) or “sexting.” The YISS‐1, YISS‐2 and YISS‐3 studies were conducted in 2000, 2005 and 2010, respectively, providing important comparative information on changes in the numbers of youth reporting unwanted or problematic Internet experiences at 5‐year intervals since 2000. This is a critical timeframe for observation given the sharp rise in the use of Internet and new technologies by youth from 2000‐2010 1 . The YISS were conducted via telephone surveys with separate national samples of 1500 youth Internet users, ages 10 to 17, and their parents. A sample size of 1,500 was pre‐determined based upon a maximum expected sampling error of +/‐2.5% at the 5% significance level. Human subject participation in the YISS studies were reviewed and approved by the University of New Hampshire Institutional Review Board (IRB) and conformed to the rules mandated for research projects funded by the U.S. Department of Justice

Serre Duality, Abel's Theorem, and Jacobi Inversion for Supercurves Over a Thick Superpoint

The principal aim of this paper is to extend Abel's theorem to the setting of complex supermanifolds of dimension 1|q over a finite-dimensional local supercommutative C-algebra. The theorem is proved by establishing a compatibility of Serre duality for the supercurve with Poincare duality on the reduced curve. We include an elementary algebraic proof of the requisite form of Serre duality, closely based on the account of the reduced case given by Serre in Algebraic Groups and Class Fields, combined with an invariance result for the topology on the dual of the space of repartitions. Our Abel map, taking Cartier divisors of degree zero to the dual of the space of sections of the Berezinian sheaf, modulo periods, is defined via Penkov's characterization of the Berezinian sheaf as the cohomology of the de Rham complex of the sheaf D of differential operators, as a right module over itself. We discuss the Jacobi inversion problem for the Abel map and give an example demonstrating that if n is an integer sufficiently large that the generic divisor of degree n is linearly equivalent to an effective divisor, this need not be the case for all divisors of degree n.Comment: 14 page

The effects on health of a publicly funded domestic heating programme: a prospective controlled study

<b>Objective</b>: To assess the effect of a publicly funded domestic heating programme on self-reported health. <b>Design, setting and participants</b>: A prospective controlled study of 1281 households in Scotland receiving new central heating under a publicly funded initiative, and 1084 comparison households not receiving new heating. The main outcome measures were self-reported diagnosis of asthma, bronchitis, eczema, nasal allergy, heart disease, circulatory problems or high blood pressure; number of primary care encounters and hospital contacts in the past year; and SF-36 Health Survey scores. <b>Results</b>: Usable data were obtained from 61.4% of 3849 respondents originally recruited. Heating recipients reported higher scores on the SF-36 Physical Functioning scale (difference 2.51; 95% CI 0.67 to 4.37) and General Health scale (difference 2.57; 95% CI 0.90 to 4.34). They were less likely to report having received a first diagnosis of heart disease (OR 0.69; 95% CI 0.52 to 0.91) or high blood pressure (OR 0.77; 95% CI 0.61 to 0.97), but the groups did not differ significantly in use of primary care or hospital services. <b>Conclusions</b>: Provision of central heating was associated with significant positive effects on general health and physical functioning; however, effect sizes were small. Evidence of a reduced risk of first diagnosis with heart disease or high blood pressure must be interpreted with caution, due to the self-reported nature of the outcomes, the limited time period and the failure to detect any difference in health service use

Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory

We present detailed instructions for constructing and operating an apparatus to produce and detect polarization-entangled photons. The source operates by type-I spontaneous parametric downconversion in a two-crystal geometry. Photons are detected in coincidence by single-photon counting modules and show strong angular and polarization correlations. We observe more than 100 entangled photon pairs per second. A test of a Bell inequality can be performed in an afternoon.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure

A REGIONAL COMPARISON OF FARM COSTS AND RETURNS AMONG TOP DAIRY PRODUCERS

The purpose of this paper is to compare costs and returns of the top dairy producers in the Upper Midwest to those in other major dairy regions of the U.S. The analysis is based on the 1989 Farm Costs and Returns Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The top dairy farmers are defined in several ways, including: (1) highest returns to capital and management, (2) lowest total cash costs, and (3) highest milk marketings per cow.Livestock Production/Industries,