Yale Kamisar: Up Close and Personal

Yale is larger than life. And so was his damn crim pro casebook. My first experience of Kamisar was lugging that casebook around in law school. Everyone complained. It outweighed other casebooks by 3-5 pounds on average. Like everything Yale wrote, it was thorough and also featured many excerpts from Kamisar\u27s writings. I must admit they were a pleasure and they stood out like a sore thumb from usual law school fare-for their passion, of course. But mostly because they were so well written. The good writing won me to his cause: yea beleaguered suspect, boo cops

Buying and Plundering: Exchange in Medieval Iceland

The following article is an abbreviated version of Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies in the Negotiation and Classification of Exchange in Medieval Iceland,: in Speculum 61 (1986), 18-50. Reprinted by permission

Rescue and the War Story

It is precisely in the domain of rescue that twentieth-century battle has made its peculiar addition to the styles of the heroic. Our war stories often become rescue stories even when they start out as efforts in the old genre, sonletirnes it seems, in spite of themselves

Bloodtaking and Peacemaking - Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland

In his newest book, published by University of Chicago Press in August, Professor Miller continues to throw open the world of Old Norse studies to interested readers, delving beneath the Vikings\u27 world of brutality and chaos to expose a deeper struggle for social equilibrium. His examination of ancient Iceland\u27s sagas and legal code sheds light on the society that produced them and reveals how the culture of the feud central to this stateless society, was driven by the related norms of honor, reciprocity and balance. The selections that follow are from the prologue and conclusion of Bloodtaking and Peacemaking

The first confirmed superoutburst of the dwarf nova GALEX J215818.5+241924

In 2011 October an optical transient was reported in Pegasus as a possible nova. The object had an ultraviolet counterpart, GALEX J215818.5+241924. In this paper we present follow-up photometry of the object which revealed the presence of superhumps, with peak-to-peak amplitude of up to 0.22 magnitudes, diagnostic of it being a member of the SU UMa family of dwarf novae. The outburst amplitude was 4.6 magnitudes and it lasted at least 10 days, with a maximum brightness of magnitude 14.3. We determined the mean superhump period from our first 5 nights of observations as Psh = 0.06728(21) d. However analysis of the O-C residuals showed a dramatic evolution in Psh during the outburst. During the first part of the plateau phase the period increased with dPsh/dt = +2.67(15) x 10-4. There was then an abrupt change following which the period decreased with dPsh/dt = -2.08(9)x 10-4. We found a signal in the power spectrum of the photometry which we tentatively interpret as the orbital signal with Porb = 0.06606(35) d. Thus the superhump period excess was epsilon = 0.020(8), such value being consistent with other SU UMa systems of similar orbital period.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. 10 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1005.5378. Have corrected outburst amplitude, reworded the first 2 sentences of the Abstract for clarity and solved some typo

Demonstration of Passive Fuel Cell Thermal Management Technology

The NASA Glenn Research Center is developing advanced passive thermal management technology to reduce the mass and improve the reliability of space fuel cell systems for the NASA Exploration program. The passive thermal management system relies on heat conduction within highly thermally conductive cooling plates to move the heat from the central portion of the cell stack out to the edges of the fuel cell stack. Using the passive approach eliminates the need for a coolant pump and other cooling loop components within the fuel cell system which reduces mass and improves overall system reliability. Previous development demonstrated the performance of suitable highly thermally conductive cooling plates and integrated heat exchanger technology to collect the heat from the cooling plates (Ref. 1). The next step in the development of this passive thermal approach was the demonstration of the control of the heat removal process and the demonstration of the passive thermal control technology in actual fuel cell stacks. Tests were run with a simulated fuel cell stack passive thermal management system outfitted with passive cooling plates, an integrated heat exchanger and two types of cooling flow control valves. The tests were run to demonstrate the controllability of the passive thermal control approach. Finally, successful demonstrations of passive thermal control technology were conducted with fuel cell stacks from two fuel cell stack vendors