Deindustrialization and the decline of community in the coalfields: McDowell County, West Virginia, 1950--2000

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the coal industry entered McDowell County, a predominantly rural county in southern West Virginia. Because of common experiences working and living in the coalfields, workers of significantly different backgrounds created a unique, working-class community in McDowell County. Although the coal industry experienced numerous downturns during the first half of the twentieth century, there was a long-term rise in the number of workers employed by the industry. By 1950, McDowell County had a population of almost 100,000, most of which was impacted by the coal industry.;After World War II, however, the industry began to change. Competition from alternative fuels, such as oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, forced coal companies to cut costs in order to survive in a tight market. Companies first tried mechanization to cut labor costs, a phenomenon that had roots well before the post-war period. For those companies that could not, or would not, implement machinery, the only true alternative was to close the mines.;I argue that deindustrialization, the combination of mechanization and disinvestment in McDowell County, contributed to the loss of the unique coalfield community that flourished in the county during much of the twentieth century. This occurred in two ways. First, many former miners left the county in an attempt to find work; most migrated either to the Midwest or to Maryland. Second, those who remained found a county much different than before. The lack of diversification in the county\u27s economy limited the employment prospects of the people remaining, leading to a significant increase in poverty. The decline in coal employment and the increase in poverty created a society of contrasts, where some residents succeeded, while many more struggled to survive

Time Zones As Cues For Coordination: Latitude, Longitude, And Letterman

Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous determinants of timing. We develop a theory illustrating conditions under which synchronicity will vary and identify three factors — the amount of daylight, the timing of television programming, and differences in time zones — that can alter timing. Using the American Time Use Survey for 2003 and 2004, we first show that an exogenous shock to time in one area due to non-adherence to daylight-saving time leads its residents to alter their work schedules to continue coordinating their activities with those of people elsewhere. With time use data from Australia, we also demonstrate the same response to a similar shock there. We then show that both television timing and the benefits of coordinating across time zones in the U.S. generally affect the timing of market work and sleep, the two most time-consuming activities people undertake. While these impacts do not differ greatly by people's demographic characteristics,workers in industries where we would expect more coordination outside of their local areas are more responsive to the effects of time zones.banking, market discipline

Time Zones as Cues for Coordination: Latitude, Longitude, and Letterman

Market productivity is often greater, and leisure and other household activities more enjoyable, when people perform them simultaneously. Beyond pointing out the positive externalities of synchronicity, economists have not attempted to identify exogenous determinants of timing. We develop a theory illustrating conditions under which synchronicity will vary and identify three factors %u2014 the amount of daylight, the timing of television programming, and differences in time zones %u2014 that can alter timing. Using the American Time Use Survey for 2003 and 2004, we first show that an exogenous shock to time in one area due to non-adherence to daylight-saving time leads its residents to alter their work schedules to continue coordinating their activities with those of people elsewhere. With time use data from Australia, we also demonstrate the same response to a similar shock there. We then show that both television timing and the benefits of coordinating across time zones in the U.S. generally affect the timing of market work and sleep, the two most time-consuming activities people undertake. While these impacts do not differ greatly by people's demographic characteristics, workers in industries where we would expect more coordination outside of their local areas are more responsive to the effects of time zones.

Black Holes with a Generalized Gravitational Action

Microscopic black holes are sensitive to higher dimension operators in the gravitational action. We compute the influence of these operators on the Schwarzschild solution using perturbation theory. All (time reversal invariant) operators of dimension six are included (dimension four operators don't alter the Schwarzschild solution). Corrections to the relation between the Hawking temperature and the black hole mass are found. The entropy is calculated using the Gibbons-Hawking prescription for the Euclidean path integral and using naive thermodynamic reasoning. These two methods agree, however, the entropy is not equal to 1/4 the area of the horizon.Comment: plain tex(uses phyzzx.tex), 8 pages, CALT-68-185

Broadly Tunable External Cavity Quantum Cascade Laser Development

FY07 final report for Laser Development task of ITAS project

A Quantum Mechanical Model of Spherical Supermembranes

We present a quantum mechanical model of spherical supermembranes. Using superfields to represent the cartesian coordinates of the membrane, we are able to exactly determine its supersymmetric vacua. We find there are two classical vacua, one corresponding to an extended membrane and one corresponding to a point-like membrane. For the ${\mathcal N} = 2$ case, instanton effects then lift these vacua to massive states. For the ${\mathcal N} = 4$ case, there is no instanton tunneling, and the vacua remain massless. Similarities to spherical supermembranes as giant gravitons and in Matrix theory on pp-waves is discussed.Comment: 9 page

Counter-propagating entangled photons from a waveguide with periodic nonlinearity

The conditions required for spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a waveguide with periodic nonlinearity in the presence of an unguided pump field are established. Control of the periodic nonlinearity and the physical properties of the waveguide permits the quasi-phase matching equations that describe counter-propagating guided signal and idler beams to be satisfied. We compare the tuning curves and spectral properties of such counter-propagating beams to those for co-propagating beams under typical experimental conditions. We find that the counter-propagating beams exhibit narrow bandwidth permitting the generation of quantum states that possess discrete-frequency entanglement. Such states may be useful for experiments in quantum optics and technologies that benefit from frequency entanglement.Comment: submitted to Phys. Rev.

Rapid Mapping of Zebrafish Mutations With SNPs and Oligonucleotide Microarrays

Large-scale genetic screens in zebrafish have identified thousands of mutations in hundreds of essential genes. The genetic mapping of these mutations is necessary to link DNA sequences to the gene functions defined by mutant phenotypes.Here, we report two advances that will accelerate the mapping of zebrafish mutations: (1) The construction of a first generation single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) map of the zebrafish genome comprising 2035 SNPs and 178 small insertions/deletions, and (2) the development of a method for mapping mutations in which hundreds of SNPs can be scored in parallel with an oligonucleotide microarray.We have demonstrated the utility of the microarray technique in crosses with haploid and diploid embryos by mapping two known mutations to their previously identified locations.We have also used this approach to localize four previously unmapped mutations.We expect that mapping with SNPs and oligonucleotide microarrays will accelerate the molecular analysis of zebrafish mutations