The "Persuadable Middle" on Same-Sex Marriage: Formative Research to Build Support among Heterosexual College Students

Same-sex marriage is a controversial policy issue that affects the welfare of gay and lesbian couples throughout the USA. Considerable research examines opinions about same-sex marriage; however, studies have not investigated the covariates of the “persuadable middle”— those individuals who are neutral or unsure about their views. This group of people is often the target of same-sex marriage campaigns, yet they have received no empirical attention.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89607/1/Woodford et al 2011 Persuadable Middle.pd

The First Stars

The first stars to form in the Universe -- the so-called Population III stars -- bring an end to the cosmological Dark Ages, and exert an important influence on the formation of subsequent generations of stars and on the assembly of the first galaxies. Developing an understanding of how and when the first Population III stars formed and what their properties were is an important goal of modern astrophysical research. In this review, I discuss our current understanding of the physical processes involved in the formation of Population III stars. I show how we can identify the mass scale of the first dark matter halos to host Population III star formation, and discuss how gas undergoes gravitational collapse within these halos, eventually reaching protostellar densities. I highlight some of the most important physical processes occurring during this collapse, and indicate the areas where our current understanding remains incomplete. Finally, I discuss in some detail the behaviour of the gas after the formation of the first Population III protostar. I discuss both the conventional picture, where the gas does not undergo further fragmentation and the final stellar mass is set by the interplay between protostellar accretion and protostellar feedback, and also the recently advanced picture in which the gas does fragment and where dynamical interactions between fragments have an important influence on the final distribution of stellar masses.Comment: 72 pages, 4 figures. Book chapter to appear in "The First Galaxies - Theoretical Predictions and Observational Clues", 2012 by Springer, eds. V. Bromm, B. Mobasher, T. Wiklin

Indications of suppression of excited Υ states in Pb-Pb collisions at √sNN = 2.76TeV

This is the pre-print version of the Published Article which can be accessed from the link below.A comparison of the relative yields of Υ resonances in the μ+μ- decay channel in Pb-Pb and pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 2.76 TeV is performed with data collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Using muons of transverse momentum above 4  GeV/c and pseudorapidity below 2.4, the double ratio of the Υ(2S) and Υ(3S) excited states to the Υ(1S) ground state in Pb-Pb and pp collisions, [Υ(2S+3S)/Υ(1S)]Pb-Pb/[Υ(2S+3S)/Υ(1S)]pp, is found to be 0.31-0.15+0.19(stat)±0.03(syst). The probability to obtain the measured value, or lower, if the true double ratio is unity, is calculated to be less than 1%

Disaggregate and aggregate inventory to sales ratios over time: the case of German corporations 1993–2005

Although inventory reduction has been a major topic in production and operations management research for many years, there is a lack of empirically confirmed answers for questions such as: Have inventories in fully industrialized economies such as Germany decreased, overall, during the past decades? To the extent, inventory reductions were successfully realized, in which industries did they occur? Are there differences in inventory reduction achievements between raw materials, work-in-process, or finished goods? Are there measurable effects of inventory reductions upon the financial performance? To the best of our knowledge, this empirical study is the first one to investigate long-term inventory development on a firm as well as on industry level in a major European economy. It is based on data from German corporations and provides answers to the research questions stated above. The study’s findings indicate that total inventory to sales ratio decreased in a statistically significant extent in four out of six industry sectors during the time frame investigated. Further results suggest that the overall impact of inventory reductions to the financial performance of companies is only of a small degree

A hybrid algorithm for k-medoid clustering of large data sets

In this paper, we propose a novel local search heuristic and then hybridize it with a genetic algorithm for k-medoid clustering of large data sets, which is an NP-hard optimization problem. The local search heuristic selects k-medoids from the data set and tries to efficiently minimize the total dissimilarity within each cluster. In order to deal with the local optimality, the local search heuristic is hybridized with a genetic algorithm and then the Hybrid K-medoid Algorithm (HKA) is proposed. Our experiments show that, compared with previous genetic algorithm based k-medoid clustering approaches - GCA and RAR/sub w/GA, HKA can provide better clustering solutions and do so more efficiently. Experiments use two gene expression data sets, which may involve large noise components

A note on testing for complementarity and substitutability in the case of multiple practices

Complementarity, Supermodularity, Firm performance, C12, D24,