The Truth about Operator and Union Relations in the Tri-State Mining District

Higher wages, fewer hours, better working conditions--that would be the general mantra of most unions in the United States during the first part of the twentieth century. After the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, which gave employees the right to bargain collectively, unions were empowered and began sending out organizers all over the country. Unfortunately, such a cookie-cutter platform would not be so easily applied in the Tri-State lead and zinc mining district of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. As union organizers mobilized in the Tri-State district, they stuck to the familiar procedure of agitating and ranting against employers, eventually initiating a strike in 1935. Although it is a common belief that the mine operators were oppressive toward unions and their workers, those claims are not entirely true. The relationship between operator and miner was much more nuanced, and much fairer, than the unions tried to insinuate. It could be argued that the inability of the unions to understand local dynamics rendered their attempts at national control of the labor force futile

Using Drones to Evaluate Revegetation Success on Natural Gas Pipelines

The Appalachian region of the United States has significant growth in the production of natural gas. Developing the infrastructure required for this resource creates significant disturbances across the landscape, as both well pads and transportation pipelines must be created in this mountainous terrain. Midstream infrastructure, which includes pipeline rights-of-way and associated infrastructure, can cause significant environmental degradation, especially in the form of sedimentation. The introduction of this non-point source pollutant can be detrimental to freshwater ecosystems found throughout this region. This ecological risk has necessitated the enactment of regulations related to midstream infrastructure development. Weekly, inspectors travel afoot along pipeline rights-of-way, monitoring the reestablishment of surface vegetation and identifying failing areas for future management. The topographically challenging terrain of West Virginia makes these inspections difficult and dangerous to the hiking inspectors. We evaluated the accuracy at which unmanned aerial vehicles replicated inspector classifications to evaluate their use as a complementary tool in the pipeline inspection process. Both RGB and multispectral sensor collections were performed, and a support vector machine classification model predicting vegetation cover were made for each dataset. Using inspector defined validation plots, our research found comparable high accuracy between the two collection sensors. This technique appears to be capable of augmenting the current inspection process, though it is likely that the model can be improved to help lower overall costs. The high accuracy thus obtained suggests valuable implementation of this widely available technology in aiding these challenging inspections

Distant Galaxy Clusters Identified From Optical Background Fluctuations

We present the first high redshift (0.3 < z < 1.1) galaxy clusters found by systematically identifying optical low surface brightness fluctuations in the background sky. Using spectra obtained with the Keck telescope and I-band images from the Palomar 1.5m telescope, we conclude that at least eight of the ten candidates examined are high redshift galaxy clusters. The identification of such clusters from low surface brightness fluctuations provides a complementary alternative to classic selection methods based on overdensities of resolved galaxies, and enables us to search efficiently for rich high redshift clusters over large areas of the sky. The detections described here are the first in a survey that covers a total of nearly 140 sq. degrees of the sky and should yield, if these preliminary results are representative, over 300 such clusters.Comment: Submitted to ApJ

Television drama series’ incorporation of film narrative innovation: the case of 24

Joyard (2003) refers to the past decade as the Golden Age of the American series, mostly in connection with their narrative features and their capacity to arouse emotions. 24 (2001) by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran illustrates perfectly these innovative capacities in dramatic series. The series concept is everything, making 24 an instant cult object. It is presented as the nearest to real time that any artistic work can achieve. The continuous flow of events from 24 enters our homes through our TV sets permitting us to follow an apparent reality, projected week by week at the same hour, but making us feel a contemporaneous experience from a use of a space/time that struggles against illusion. Creative liberty has permitted the development of new narrative trends (Thompson, 2003), just as unusual aesthetic forms new to television (Nelson, 2001) have striven to deliver greater degrees of realism. Narrative complexity is increasing, becoming more intricate not only at the plot level but also at the level of character development, which might lead us to believe that television series are positioning themselves in the vanguard of visual media narrative

Recent results of the STAR high-energy polarized proton-proton program at RHIC at BNL

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is carrying out a spin physics program colliding transverse or longitudinal polarized proton beams at $\sqrt{s}=200-500$GeV to gain a deeper insight into the spin structure and dynamics of the proton. These studies provide fundamental tests of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). One of the main objectives of the STAR spin physics program is the determination of the polarized gluon distribution function through a measurement of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry, $A_{LL}$, for various processes. Recent results will be shown on the measurement of $A_{LL}$ for inclusive jet production, neutral pion production and charged pion production at $\sqrt{s}=200$GeV. In addition to these measurements involving longitudinal polarized proton beams, the STAR collaboration has performed several important measurements employing transverse polarized proton beams. New results on the measurement of the transverse single-spin asymmetry, $A_{N}$, for forward neutral pion production and the first measurement of $A_{N}$ for mid-rapidity di-jet production will be discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, Invited talk given at the 17th International Spin Physics Symposium (SPIN 2006), October 2006, Kyoto, Japa

Selected results on Strong and Coulomb-induced correlations from the STAR experiment

Using recent high-statistics STAR data from Au+Au and Cu+Cu collisions at full RHIC energy I discuss strong and Coulomb-induced final state interaction effects on identical ($\pi-\pi$) and non-identical ($\pi-\Xi$) particle correlations. Analysis of $\pi-\Xi$ correlations reveals the strong and Coulomb-induced FSI effects allowing for the first time to estimate space extension of $\pi$ and $\Xi$ sources and average shift between them. Source imaging technique providing clean separation of these effects from effects due to the source function itself is applied to one-dimensional relative momentum correlation function of identical pions. For low momentum pions and/or non-central collisions large departure from a single-Gaussian shape is observed