Circular polarization of the CMB: Foregrounds and detection prospects

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the finest probes of cosmology. Its all-sky temperature and linear polarization (LP) fluctuations have been measured precisely at a level of deltaT/TCMB ~10^{-6}. In comparison, circular polarization (CP) of the CMB, however, has not been precisely explored. Current upper limit on the CP of the CMB is at a level of deltaV/TCMB ~10^{-4} and is limited on large scales. Some of the cosmologically important sources which can induce a CP in the CMB include early universe symmetry breaking, primordial magnetic field, galaxy clusters and Pop III stars (also known as the First stars). Among these sources, Pop III stars are expected to induce the strongest signal with levels strongly dependent on the frequency of observation and on the number, Np, of the Pop III stars per halo. Optimistically, a CP signal in the CMB due to the Pop III stars could be at a level of deltaV/TCMB ~ 2x10^{-7} in scales of 1 degree at 10 GHz, which is much smaller than the currently existing upper limits on the CP measurements. Primary foregrounds in the cosmological CP detection will come from the galactic synchrotron emission (GSE), which is naturally (intrinsically) circularly polarized. We use data-driven models of the galactic magnetic field (GMF), thermal electron density and relativistic electron density to simulate all-sky maps of the galactic CP in different frequencies. This work also points out that the galactic CP levels are important below 50 GHz and is an important factor for telescopes aiming to detect primordial B-modes using CP as a systematics rejection channel. Final results on detectability are summarized in Fig (11-13)

System Energy Assessment (SEA), Defining a Standard Measure of EROI for Energy Businesses as Whole Systems

A more objective method for measuring the energy needs of businesses, System Energy Assessment (SEA), identifies the natural boundaries of businesses as self-managing net-energy systems, of controlled and self-managing parts. The method is demonstrated using a model Wind Farm case study, and applied to defining a true physical measure of its energy productivity for society (EROI-S), the global ratio of energy produced to energy cost. The traceable needs of business technology are combined with assignable energy needs for all other operating services. That serves to correct a large natural gap in energy use information. Current methods count traceable energy receipts for technology use. Self-managing services employed by businesses outsource their own energy needs to operate, and leave no records to trace. Those uncounted energy demands are often 80% of the total embodied energy of business end products. The scale of this "dark energy" was discovered from differing global accounts, and corrected so the average energy cost per dollar for businesses would equal the world average energy use per dollar of GDP. Presently the energy needs of paid services that outsource their own energy needs are counted for lack of information to be "0". Our default assumption is to treat them as "average". The result is to assign total energy use and impacts to the demand for energy services, for a "Scope 4" GHG assessment level. Counting only the energy uses of technology understates the energy needs of business services, as if services were more energy efficient than technology. The result confirms a similar finding by Hall et. al. in 1981 [9]. We use exhaustive search for what a business needs to operate as a whole, locating a natural physical boundary for its working parts, to define businesses as physical rather than statistical subjects of science. :measurement, natural systemsComment: 33 pages, 15 figures, accepted as part of pending special issue on EROI organized by Charlie Hall for Sustainability (MDPI

From periphery to centre: shaping the history of the central peninsula

Southeast Asia as a regional category of analysis has long been a contested one. Debates over the nature of the cultural matrix or the ecological factors that have produced a regional identity have driven some of the most innovative research in the field of Southeast Asian studies since the Second World War. These debates have not been limited to the types of external boundaries that may help to distinguish the region sandwiched between India to the west and China to the northeast. As the latter have more or less stabilised, attention has increasingly been directed towards the internal composition of the Southeast Asian region and the conventions employed to organise a highly diverse collection of states and peoples. Historians have grown increasingly wary of the dangers in writing history as a means of justifying current political geographies and continue to seek out ways of countering the inherent biases of colonial sources that serve as such an essential window into the past. Once conventional spatial models of a distinct mainland Southeast Asia complimented by a sprawling insular landscape are today splintering as new research points towards the trade networks and patterns of mobility that paid scant attention to any such imaginary divides. In the process new spaces that have formerly existed at the margins of scholarship on the region are emerging as valid subjects of inquiry. Areas and subjects long regarded as peripheries on conventional maps of the region are moving back to the centre. This thesis examines one such ‘periphery’ that I refer to as the central peninsula region. This central peninsula is not an essentialised space with distinct territorial and cultural boundaries, but a category of analysis from which we may begin to destabilise conventional representations of that area that today comprises the southern border provinces of Thailand and the northern state of Malaysia. Rather than persist with conventional representations of a vertical civilisational fault line that represents a transitional zone between the mainland and island worlds, what I seek to present in this thesis is an extended critique of conventional colonial and nationalist narratives that have taken a distinctly vertical and centralist view of this region. My study commences from a set of basic inquiries such as whether there are there ways of writing the history of this region beyond that of civilisational/nationalist narratives that appear designed to justify patterns of conflict in the borderlands? To surmount such representations we need to ask in what ways have modern political boundaries and nationalist/civilisational identities been projected into the past to obscure interactions between non-bounded communities and narratives of peace and indigenous forms of modernity? In answering these questions, I seek to demonstrate how the critique opens up new spaces of research—new histories. In the case of this thesis, much I my interest is directed towards the interior of the central peninsula, an area that has been doubly disadvantaged by the coastal bias exhibited in many histories of the peninsula in general. In asking these types of questions, a major linking theme in this study is the question of progress and development. Given my desire to shift our attention from centre to periphery as a means of recovering a non-state history, examining the link between conventional historical narratives and western theories of progress that have privileged the role of the ‘civilised’ centre is a logical step. Modernity—that great eighteenth and nineteenth expression of technological progress and civilisational sophistication—critically shaped the way in which colonial and later nationalist observers saw the world around them and speculated its past. But as we are frequently reminded when reading contemporary revisions of Southeast Asian history, modernity was not a condition that was incubated in the centre. Modernity a condition that was fashioned through a constant engagement with external (read indigenous) regions and actors. Likewise, peripheries were not areas that had experienced but a partial experience of modernity, but a discursive Other that was required to give the supposed advancement of the centre definition and meaning. To critically deconstruct narratives of progress and modernity by showing them as a product of interaction therefore serves the duel purpose of deconstructing representations of the peripheral Other. From here we can begin to fashion alternative histories. Such a critical reflection on the role of western narratives of progress and civilisational advancement are highly timely given that many governments in Southeast Asia are currently promoting the development of various state peripheries in accordance with economic theories not unlike those that underpinned a century of colonial exploitation. The Malaysia-Thailand borderlands are one such region that has been identified as subregional development zone or growth triangle that will supposedly act as a catalyst for the re-discovery of a vibrant nonstate regional identity. Whether this will be the case or not is the question that represents the end-point of this study

Washington v. Glucksberg: Influence of the Court in Care of the Terminally Ill and Physician Assisted Suicide

This Note will examine current issues pertaining to the medical care of the terminally ill individual, particularly with respect to palliative care and how the continuum of medical care incorporates the voluntary termination of a patient\u27s life. Part II of this Note will look at the decision reached in Washington v. Glucksberg, and how the Supreme Court has contributed to the molding of care for the terminally ill. Part III will review relevant aspects of end of life care concepts and their relationship and impact upon the assisted suicide alternative. Any analysis of physician assisted suicide must include the evolution of Oregon\u27s legislative approach to the topic. Oregon is the only state which provides terminally ill citizens the option of assisted suicide by legislative intent, viz., the Death with Dignity Act. The Act will be reviewed at length in Part IV

Washington v. Glucksberg: Influence of the Court in Care of the Terminally Ill and Physician Assisted Suicide

This Note will examine current issues pertaining to the medical care of the terminally ill individual, particularly with respect to palliative care and how the continuum of medical care incorporates the voluntary termination of a patient\u27s life. Part II of this Note will look at the decision reached in Washington v. Glucksberg, and how the Supreme Court has contributed to the molding of care for the terminally ill. Part III will review relevant aspects of end of life care concepts and their relationship and impact upon the assisted suicide alternative. Any analysis of physician assisted suicide must include the evolution of Oregon\u27s legislative approach to the topic. Oregon is the only state which provides terminally ill citizens the option of assisted suicide by legislative intent, viz., the Death with Dignity Act. The Act will be reviewed at length in Part IV

See How They Run (July 25-29, 1979)

Program for See How They Run (July 25-29, 1979)

Reviews

Authoring‐Systems Software for Computer‐Based Training, edited by William D. Wilheim, Educational Technology Publications, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA, ISBN: 0–87778–274–1, 1994

Practical Natural Language Processing for Low-Resource Languages.

As the Internet and World Wide Web have continued to gain widespread adoption, the linguistic diversity represented has also been growing. Simultaneously the field of Linguistics is facing a crisis of the opposite sort. Languages are becoming extinct faster than ever before and linguists now estimate that the world could lose more than half of its linguistic diversity by the year 2100. This is a special time for Computational Linguistics; this field has unprecedented access to a great number of low-resource languages, readily available to be studied, but needs to act quickly before political, social, and economic pressures cause these languages to disappear from the Web. Most work in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on English or other languages that have text corpora of hundreds of millions of words. In this work, we present methods for automatically building NLP tools for low-resource languages with minimal need for human annotation in these languages. We start first with language identification, specifically focusing on word-level language identification, an understudied variant that is necessary for processing Web text and develop highly accurate machine learning methods for this problem. From there we move onto the problems of part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing. With both of these problems we extend the current state of the art in projected learning to make use of multiple high-resource source languages instead of just a single language. In both tasks, we are able to improve on the best current methods. All of these tools are practically realized in the "Minority Language Server," an online tool that brings these techniques together with low-resource language text on the Web. The Minority Language Server, starting with only a few words in a language can automatically collect text in a language, identify its language and tag its parts of speech. We hope that this system is able to provide a convincing proof of concept for the automatic collection and processing of low-resource language text from the Web, and one that can hopefully be realized before it is too late.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113373/1/benking_1.pd