How to Tell a Creek Story in Five Past Tenses

Creek (or Muskogee) is among a small number of languages around the world that distinguish multiple tenses based on degrees of remoteness from the time of speaking. Those working on Creek have rarely agreed on the number of tenses or on their meanings, however, and have rarely examined the seemingly intricate ways that speakers use tenses in texts. This paper argues that Creek has one future tense and five past tenses. It finds, however, that speakers may cast events within a single time frame in several different tenses based on immediacy. That is, just as English speakers will sometimes use present tense in describing past events, Creek speakers will sometimes allow tenses to creep forward from past 5 (remote past) to past 4 or even past 3 as events become more vivid. The Creek data thus provide especially clear support for observations that temporal distance in language may be extended metaphorically to express subjective distance (Dahl 1984, Fleischman 1989, and Hintz 2007)

The Full Two-Loop R-parity Violating Renormalization Group Equations for All Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model Couplings

We present the full two-loop $\beta$-functions for the minimal supersymmetric standard model couplings, extended to include R-parity violating couplings through explicit R-parity violation

Bias in culture-independent assessments of microbial biodiversity in the global ocean

On the basis of 16S rRNA gene sequencing, the SAR11 clade of marine bacteria has almost universal distribution, being detected as abundant sequences in all marine provinces. Yet SAR11 sequences are rarely detected in fosmid libraries, suggesting that the widespread abundance may be an artefact of PCR cloning and that SAR 11 has a relatively low abundance. Here the relative abundance of SAR11 is explored in both a fosmid library and a metagenomic sequence data set from the same biological community taken from fjord surface water from Bergen, Norway. Pyrosequenced data and 16S clone data confirmed an 11-15% relative abundance of SAR11 within the community. In contrast not a single SAR11 fosmid was identified in a pooled shotgun sequenced data set of 100 fosmid clones. This under-representation was evidenced by comparative abundances of SAR11 sequences assessed by taxonomic annotation; functional metabolic profiling and fragment recruitment. Analysis revealed a similar under-representation of low-GC Flavobacteriaceae. We speculate that the fosmid bias may be due to DNA fragmentation during preparation due to the low GC content of SAR11 sequences and other underrepresented taxa. This study suggests that while fosmid libraries can be extremely useful, caution must be used when directly inferring community composition from metagenomic fosmid libraries

Some Phonetic Structures of Koasati

This paper presents results of the first quantitative phonetic study of Koasati, a Muskogean language spoken in Louisiana and Texas. We examine vowel quality, length contrasts in vowels and consonants, the limited system of lexical tone contrasts in nouns, and the grammatical system of tone in verbs. We also study the realization of several word-final consonant clusters (fn, tl, lw, etc.) that are absent in related languages and that are typologically unusual due to their sonority reversals. Finally, we examine the cognates in related languages of the tones we document in Koasati nouns and verbs

Polytopes of Absolutely Wigner Positive Spin States

We carry out the first investigation of the properties of spherical Wigner negativity over unitary orbits of mixed spin states, and completely characterize, in all finite dimensions, the set of absolutely Wigner-positive (AWP) states. Employing the Birkhoff-von Neumann theorem on doubly stochastic matrices, we describe this characterization via a set of linear eigenvalue constraints, which together define a polytope in the simplex of mixed spin-j states centred on the maximally mixed state. Such constraints naturally arise from the underlying structure of the SU(2)-covariant Wigner function. In each dimension, a Hilbert-Schmidt ball representing a tight, purity-based AWP sufficiency criterion is exactly determined, while another ball representing AWP necessity is conjectured. Comparisons are made to absolute symmetric state separability and spherical Glauber-Sudarshan positivity, with additional details given for low spin quantum numbers.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Chemical NOx budget in the upper troposphere over the tropical South Pacific

The chemical NOx budget in the upper troposphere over the tropical South Pacific is analyzed using aircraft measurements made at 6-12 km altitude in September 1996 during the Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE) Pacific Exploratory Mission (PEM) Tropics A campaign. Chemical loss and production rates of NOx along the aircraft flight tracks are calculated with a photochemical model constrained by observations. Calculations using a standard chemical mechanism show a large missing source for NOx; chemical loss exceeds chemical production by a factor of 2.4 on average. Similar or greater NOx budget imbalances have been reported in analyses of data from previous field studies. Ammonium aerosol concentrations in PEM-Tropics A generally exceeded sulfate on a charge equivalent basis, and relative humidities were low (median 25% relative to ice). This implies that the aerosol could be dry in which case N2O5 hydrolysis would be suppressed as a sink for NOx. Suppression of N2O5 hydrolysis and adoption of new measurements of the reaction rate constants for NO2 + OH + M and HNO3 + OH reduces the median chemical imbalance in the NOx budget for PEM-Tropics A from 2.4 to 1.9. The remaining imbalance cannot be easily explained from known chemistry or long-range transport of primary NOx and may imply a major gap in our understanding of the chemical cycling of NOx in the free troposphere. Copyright 2000 by the American Geophysical Union

The Robertson v. Princeton Case: Too Important to Be Left to the Lawyers

Offers comments from eleven contributors on the Robertson family's donor rights suit against the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for violation of donor intent. Explores its effects on and implications for the nonprofit sector