Time-Evolution of the Power Spectrum of the Black Hole X-ray Nova XTE J1550-564

We have studied the time evolution of the power spectrum of XTE J1550-564, using X-ray luminosity time series data obtained by the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite. A number of important practical fundamental issues arise in the analysis of these data, including dealing with time-tagged event data, removal of noise from a highly non-stationary signal, and comparison of different time-frequency distributions. We present two new methods to understand the time frequency variations, and compare them to the dynamic power spectrum of Homan et al. All of the approaches provide evidence that the QPO frequency varies in a systematic way during the time evolution of the signal.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; 2001 IEEE - EURASIP Workshop on Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing (June 3-6, 2001), and to appear in the proceeding

Book Review of My Street Money: A Street-Level View of Managing Your Money from the Heart to the Bank

In his book, My Street Money: A Street-Level View of Managing Your Money from the Heart to the Bank, Louis Barajas delivers a set of sound principles and actionable steps for an audience who consider themselves average citizens with traditional values

Sex Abuse in the American Catholic Church and the Attempt at Redemption

The paper analyzes the apologia of Catholic leaders as they responded to accusations that surfaced in 2002 regarding priestly sex abuse in the United States. A study of the apologetic techniques used is offered, noting particularly bolstering, transcendence, and differentiation. Though it was Catholic leaders themselves who used the differentiation approach in their apologia, in their reaction to that rhetoric the audience members may have been influenced by the media and/or the leaders’ peers. Thus, rhetorical efforts by those two sources also are studied. The investigation concentrates primarily on the four-month period beginning January 9 when coverage was most intense, with some attention devoted to the remaining months of 2002

Map of mankind: Edmund Burke's image of america in an enlightened Atlantic context

This thesis re-evaluates Edmund Burke's (1730-1797) image of America by focusing on the place of colonial America in his early thought and pre-parliamentary writings. In so doing, it considers Burke's relationship to the humanist tradition, offers an appraisal of Burke's historicism, and seeks to describe the nature of his place within the Age of Enlightenment. Burke's interest in the British North American colonies emerged well before his rise to prominence as a Member of Parliament in the mid-1760s. Behind Burke's later partisan speeches was a capacious understanding of America as a European frontier with a colonial experience that also included the Spanish and the French, native inhabitants and imported slaves. His early writings are an important example of the manner in which eighteenth-century thinkers perceived that in heretofore unknown peoples and civilizations there existed an opportunity for historic comparison, as well as for working out the complex implications of particularity and universality. They suggest a way in which "the reception of America," according to David Armitage, by figures like Burke can help us to see "what uses America had within earlier intellectual projects and to what extent America shaped their distinctive features." This thesis is foremost an attempt to explore the ways in which America provided the young Burke with material that enlarged his mental horizons and fashioned his distinctive historical and political thought. Finally, the thesis seeks to make scholarly contributions to studies on the place of America in the European consciousness and to the concept of Atlantic History

A Study of Land-grant University Alumni Magazines and of Reader Responses to the Montana Collegian of Montana State University

This study was confined to the current state of affairs in alumni publishing at Land-Grant universities, for several reasons. Perhaps the main one is that the author is an alumni editor at one of these universities (Montana State University) and is also an alumnus of another one (South Dakota State University). Brought in from the newspaper field in the summer of 1967 as the Montana Collegian\u27s first professional editor, the author had a broad mandate from the president of the institution, from the alumni director and the public relations director. Change the magazine, broaden its coverage and content and improve its visual appearance. Not being familiar with alumni publications, the author wondered about the status of these magazines at similar institutions. Checking current copies of alumni magazines from other Land-Grant schools in the Western U.S. against back issues on file, It was noticed that several of these publications had also made relatively recent changes in format and content, some of them under new editorship

An elusive balance: the small community in mass society, 1940-1960

In the 1920s and 1930s, leading commentators on American culture began to express deep concern over the rate and direction of social change. As the urban-industrial order came to dominate the cultural landscape, many schools of thought arose in opposition. Some groups constituting this cultural minority position focused on what they referred to as the small community, as an alternative to the dominant cultural paradigm. The small community, usually in the form of the small town, had traditionally been the leading type of settlement in America. During the first third of the twentieth century, small communitarians tried to resist the movement of American society away from a predominantly rural culture to one increasingly driven and shaped by urban-led culture. Southern Agrarians, decentralists, regionalists, proponents of the TVA and greenbelt towns, subsistence homestead advocates, Henry Ford, Catholic ruralists, and assorted people intent on going back-to-the-land all opposed the transformation of the small community milieu from a majority position in American culture to a substantial, but nevertheless, minority position;While much of the opposition to the developing urban-industrial order lost its focus during the period of 1940 to 1960, a remaining tiny minority of cultural critics continued to resist further marginalization of the small community. New groups of regionalists, social scientists, agrarian and utopian communitarians studied, wrote, and talked about how the small community could be revitalized, and in the process, how a new balance could be established between the locale and the larger territory. Some of their themes echoed the previous period, such as decentralization, regional authorities, help to small farmers, planning at all societal levels, and cooperative enterprises, while newer concepts involved community study groups, greater use of adult education, and area development centers, increasingly funded by states;The actions of the small communitarians in the forties and fifties linked them to the cultural reformers of the twenties and thirties, and the anti-establishment protesters and radicals of the sixties and seventies whose message about community has turned into eager and renewed efforts toward the maintenance of quality of life in locales, still threatened by a highly centralized mass society