Dollars, Defense, and the Desert: Southern Nevada’s Military Economy and the Second World War

Modern Las Vegas has come to inhabit a unique place in the American imagination. A neon mirage glittering amid the desolate Mojave Desert, “Sin City” is both celebrated and scorned as an oasis of gambling, nightlife, and entertainment. Consistently ranked among the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, Las Vegas has experienced sensational economic, infrastructural, and demographic growth in recent years. The dizzying pace of this development makes it difficult to imagine that the city was once anything other than the bustling urban playground it is today. Like many great western cities, Las Vegas came of age during the World War Two era. A mere hamlet of 8,422 residents in 1940, it had nearly tripled in size by 1950. Many believe Las Vegas to be synonymous with its gambling economy, but war, not wagering, triggered the city’s first period of dramatic growth. A sizeable military presence, established during World War Two and sustained by the Cold War, took root in southern Nevada. Though never as visible as the area’s high-profile gambling industry, this military economy was a vital factor in the development of the nascent metropolis

Higgs production in heavy quark annihilation through next-to-next-to-leading order QCD

The total inclusive cross section for charged and neutral Higgs production in heavy-quark annihilation is presented through NNLO QCD. It is shown that, aside from an overall factor, the partonic cross section is independent of the initial-state quark flavors, and that any interference terms involving two different Yukawa couplings vanish. A simple criterion for defining the central renormalization and factorization scale is proposed. Its application to the $b\bar bH$ process yields results which are compatible with the values usually adopted for this process. Remarkably, we find little variation in these values for the other initial-state quark flavors. Finally, we disentangle the impact of the different parton luminosities from genuine hard NNLO effects and find that, for the central scales, a naive rescaling by the parton luminosities approximates the full result remarkably well.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Matches published versio

Ethical Training in the Profession: The Special Challenge of the Judiciary

Although ethics for lawyers and ethics for judges have the same ultimate goal, the rules governing the two professions, the mechanisms for enforcement of these rules and the methods of training vary substantially. The National Judicial College is an institution with the specific mission to train judges

Who\u27s Afraid of the Precautionary Principle?

The precautionary principle – the notion that lack of scientific certainty should not foreclose precautionary regulation – has become enormously popular in recent years, as reflected by its endorsement in many important international declarations and agreements. Despite its growing influence, the precautionary principle recently has come under fire by critics who argue that it is incoherent, potentially paralyzing, and that it will lead regulators to make bad choices. They maintain that society faces greater peril from overly costly regulations than from exposure to sources of environmental risks whose effect on human health and the environment is not fully understood at present. This paper argues that critics of the precautionary principle are attacking a straw man. It maintains that they are confusing the precautionary principle with the separate question of how precautionary regulatory policy should be. While precaution long has been an important element of much of U.S. environmental law, in practice, only in rare circumstances have activities that generate environmental risks been subjected to strict regulatory action when the risks they generate were entirely theoretical. Although such truly precautionary regulation is rare, the essential notion embodied in the precautionary principle -- that uncertainty should not be used as an excuse to eschew cost-effective preventive measures -- is fundamental to modern environmental law’s quest to transcend the limits of its common law legacy. It does not require that innovation come to a halt whenever any risks may be conjured. The paper argues that, properly understood, the precautionary principle is neither incoherent, paralyzing, nor a prescription for overregulation. Rather it cautions that regulatory policy should be pro-active in ferreting out potentially serious threats to human health and the environment, as confirmed by the history of human exposure to substances such as lead and asbestos

Student Research Showdown: A Research Communication Competition

Student researchers are rarely trained to explain their work to a general audience but must do so throughout their careers. To assist undergraduate researchers in building this skill, the Student Research Showdown—a research video and presentation competition—was created at the University of Texas at Austin. Students create brief videos on which their peers vote, and the top video creators face off with presentations and are awarded prizes by a panel of judges. Students reflect on their experiential learning as they construct a narrative that disseminates their findings, communicates impact, and serves as a sharable testament to their success. Indirect measures indicate that students improve their research communication skills by participating in this event.Undergraduate Studie