A Perspective on Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highland Prehistory

It is, from time to time, valuable to reassess and perhaps shed new light on long-held perspectives. In The \u27Northern Caddoan Area\u27 was not Caddoan, Frank Schambach provides a provocative reinterpretation of the archaeology of the Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highland regions of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. While certain comments in this paper have merit and deserve deeper consideration, the central theme and supporting arguments are severely flawed, both from conceptual and data points of view. Schambach\u27s central argument is that there were no Caddoans in the Arkansas Basin and Ozark Highlands north of Spiro. To make this point he asserts that the only Caddoan site north of the Ouachita Mountains is the Brown Mound group at Spiro. All the other sites in the region, including the Craig Mound group at Spiro, are not Caddoan, but are instead a currently undefined Mississippian manifestation. Schambach\u27s scenario goes. something like this: Mississippians moved up the Arkansas River valley in the early,Mississippian Period (presumably in the Harlan Phase, A.O. 850-1250), through western Arkansas to eastern Oklahoma where they displaced the Caddoans living at the Brown Mound group. The Caddoans moved back south to the Ouachita Mountains. The Mississippians, including people of the Plum Bayou culture ... the Spiro phase [A.O. 1250-1450] then built Craig Mound at Spiro while possibly operating a trade system to supply buffalo meat arid hides to the rapidly growing and increasingly protein poor and clothing poor Mississippian populations. . .. to the east. Later, the Mississippians, who were probably ancestral Tunica, retreated back down the Arkansas River to south of Dardenelle, where De Soto encountered them in 1541. The Caddoans then returned to the Spiro area to become the people of the Fort Coffee Phase (A.O. 1450-1500s). This sequence of events is a fascinating reinterpretation of regional culture history, unfortunately it falls flat when confronted by either contemporary theory or the data

East of Eden: A Contractual Lens for an Unsettled Area of First Amendment Shunning Jurisprudence

The Free Exercise Clause was enacted for the purpose of protecting diverse modes of religious practice. One practice that numerous religious traditions observe is shunning—the expulsion and social exclusion of noncompliant individuals from a religious community. Yet because shunning usually involves concomitant harm to religious congregants, plaintiffs often bring religious-tort claims against religious entities for the injuries they suffer. This implicates free-exercise concerns for both the plaintiff and the religious-entity defendant. Despite the utmost importance of religious freedom in American jurisprudence, courts analyze religious-tort claims in widely disparate ways. And they typically rely on consent and membership as the basis for judicial decisionmaking. But these analytical lenses are flimsy and lead to unpredictable outcomes. At times, they are underprotective of religious plaintiffs; at others, they penalize religious entities and chill religious practices. In order to clarify a muddled sphere of free-exercise jurisprudence, courts should adopt a contract paradigm for analyzing shunning claims. A contract paradigm would lead to cleaner results and would uphold the integrity of religious institutions, which are necessary for religious individuals to thrive

Research Strategies: Bibliographic Instruction for Undergraduates

published or submitted for publicatio

Improved Chebyshev series ephemeris generation capability of GTDS

An improved implementation of the Chebyshev ephemeris generation capability in the operational version of the Goddard Trajectory Determination System (GTDS) is described. Preliminary results of an evaluation of this orbit propagation method for three satellites of widely different orbit eccentricities are also discussed in terms of accuracy and computing efficiency with respect to the Cowell integration method. An empirical formula is deduced for determining an optimal fitting span which would give reasonable accuracy in the ephemeris with a reasonable consumption of computing resources

Analytical and experimental evaluation of techniques for the fabrication of thermoplastic hologram storage devices

The results of an experimental investigation on recording information on thermoplastic are given. A description was given of a typical fabrication configuration, the recording sequence, and the samples which were examined. There are basically three configurations which can be used for the recording of information on thermoplastic. The most popular technique uses corona which furnishes free charge. The necessary energy for deformation is derived from a charge layer atop the thermoplastic. The other two techniques simply use a dc potential in place of the corona for deformation energy

Gauge links, TMD-factorization, and TMD-factorization breaking

In this section, we discuss some basic features of transverse momentum dependent, or unintegrated, parton distribution functions. In particular, when these correlation functions are combined in a factorization formulae with hard processes beyond the simplest cases, there are basic problems with universality and factorization. We discuss some of these problems as well as the opportunities that they offer.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures Gluons and the quark sea at high energies: distributions, polarization, tomograph

A unified framework for Schelling's model of segregation

Schelling's model of segregation is one of the first and most influential models in the field of social simulation. There are many variations of the model which have been proposed and simulated over the last forty years, though the present state of the literature on the subject is somewhat fragmented and lacking comprehensive analytical treatments. In this article a unified mathematical framework for Schelling's model and its many variants is developed. This methodology is useful in two regards: firstly, it provides a tool with which to understand the differences observed between models; secondly, phenomena which appear in several model variations may be understood in more depth through analytic studies of simpler versions.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure

The unbiased measurement of UV spectral slopes in low luminosity galaxies at z=7

The Ultraviolet (UV) continuum slope beta, typically observed at z=7 in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3/IR bands via the J-H colour, is a useful indicator of the age, metallicity, and dust content of high-redshift stellar populations. Recent studies have shown that the redward evolution of beta with cosmic time from redshift 7 to 4 can be largely explained by a build up of dust. However, initial claims that faint z=7 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field WFC3/IR imaging (HUDF09) were blue enough to require stellar populations of zero reddening, low metallicity and young ages, hitherto unseen in star-forming galaxies, have since been refuted and revised. Here we revisit the question of how best to measure the UV slope of z=7 galaxies through source recovery simulations, within the context of present and future ultra-deep imaging from HST. We consider how source detection, selection and colour measurement have each biased the measurement of beta in previous studies. After finding a robust method for measuring beta in the simulations (via a power law fit to all the available photometry), we remeasure the UV slopes of a sample of previously published low luminosity z=7 galaxy candidates. The mean UV slope of faint galaxies in this sample appears consistent with an intrinsic distribution of normal star-forming galaxies with beta=-2, although properly decoding the underlying distribution will require further imaging from the ongoing HUDF12 programme. We therefore go on to consider strategies for obtaining better constraints on the underlying distribution of UV slopes at z=7 from these new data, which will benefit particularly from the addition of imaging in a second J-band filter: F140W. We find that a precise and unbiased measurement of beta should then be possible.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted to MNRAS with some text and figure alterations in response to referee's repor