Tiers for Fears and Other Emotions: A Cross-Linguistic Approach to Psych Lexis and Syntax

A central issue in the comparative study of any linguistic category and its patterns is the necessity of choosing specific exponents in the target languages. This is particularly relevant for lexical domains rendering subjective and highly culturally informed phenomena such as emotions. We propose an alternative to the common solution of translating from English via native speaker inquiry and/or dictionaries. Elaborating upon current methodology in typological studies, we devised a systematic elicitation task which incorporates insights from cross-cultural psychological and anthropological research on human emotions. Our method facilitates the elicitation of extensive comparable inventories of emotion lexemes, many of which lack straightforward English equivalents and thus could not have been captured by a traditional translation-based approach. We show that this method can be used to investigate specific structural phenomena such as the psych alternation from a cross-linguistic perspective while minimizing translational bias

An on-going investigation into the ecological determinants of Lyme disease in the South Downs National Park, South East England: the potential for 'One Health' based interventions

Lyme borreliosis (LB) is a tick-borne infectious disease, with UK annual diagnoses trebling over the last two decades. The widening UK distribution of the main LB tick vector (Ixodes ricinus) has been linked to deer population expansion. However, the wider ecological determinants that affect the density of infected ticks are poorly understood. Deer have key roles in most, but not all, UK LB disease systems, but they are non-competent hosts for the pathogen itself, and small mammals or birds are usually obligatory disease reservoirs. In addition, the relapsing fever spirochete Borrelia miyomotoi was detected in the UK in 2014, but the spread and extent of this emerging human pathogen is still unknown. To date, five sites have been drag-sampled across the South Downs National Park (SDNP); with ticks being successfully obtained from all sites. In addition, ticks have been collected from a further sixteen sites where individual or multiple deer were sampled. Currently, ticks are undergoing genetic analysis to determine the host animals involved in the disease cycle, and the presence of Borrelia sp. The study aims to provide a mapped assessment of LB risk across the South Downs National Park, and identify the disease reservoir community composition. The results will help elucidate the causal factors in the SDNP, and support development of policies that avoid or minimise conflicts between public and ecosystem health

Inelastic quantum transport in superlattices: success and failure of the Boltzmann equation

Electrical transport in semiconductor superlattices is studied within a fully self-consistent quantum transport model based on nonequilibrium Green functions, including phonon and impurity scattering. We compute both the drift velocity-field relation and the momentum distribution function covering the whole field range from linear response to negative differential conductivity. The quantum results are compared with the respective results obtained from a Monte Carlo solution of the Boltzmann equation. Our analysis thus sets the limits of validity for the semiclassical theory in a nonlinear transport situation in the presence of inelastic scattering.Comment: final version with minor changes, to appear in Physical Review Letters, sceduled tentatively for July, 26 (1999

Ecological determinants of Lyme borreliosis hazard in the South Downs National Park and the potential for One Health based interventions (work in progress)

No description supplie

Increasing Workplace Diversity: Evidence from a Recruiting Experiment at a Fortune 500 Company

While many firms have set ambitious goals to increase diversity in their ranks, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on effective ways to reach them. We use a natural field experiment to test several hypotheses on effective meansto attract minority candidates for top professional careers. By randomly varying the content in recruiting materials of a major financial services corporation with more than 10,000 employees, we find that signaling explicit interest in employee diversity more than doubles the interest in openings among racial minority candidates, as well as the likelihood that they apply and are selected. Impacts on gender diversity are less sharp and generally not significan

Hyper-velocity impact test and simulation of a double-wall shield concept for the Wide Field Monitor aboard LOFT

The space mission LOFT (Large Observatory For X-ray Timing) was selected in 2011 by ESA as one of the candidates for the M3 launch opportunity. LOFT is equipped with two instruments, the Large Area Detector (LAD) and the Wide Field Monitor (WFM), based on Silicon Drift Detectors (SDDs). In orbit, they would be exposed to hyper-velocity impacts by environmental dust particles, which might alter the surface properties of the SDDs. In order to assess the risk posed by these events, we performed simulations in ESABASE2 and laboratory tests. Tests on SDD prototypes aimed at verifying to what extent the structural damages produced by impacts affect the SDD functionality have been performed at the Van de Graaff dust accelerator at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg. For the WFM, where we expect a rate of risky impacts notably higher than for the LAD, we designed, simulated and successfully tested at the plasma accelerator at the Technical University in Munich (TUM) a double-wall shielding configuration based on thin foils of Kapton and Polypropylene. In this paper we summarize all the assessment, focussing on the experimental test campaign at TUM.Comment: Proc. SPIE 9144, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 91446

Effects of impurity scattering on electron-phonon resonances in semiconductor superlattice high-field transport

A non-equilibrium Green's function method is applied to model high-field quantum transport and electron-phonon resonances in semiconductor superlattices. The field-dependent density of states for elastic (impurity) scattering is found non-perturbatively in an approach which can be applied to both high and low electric fields. I-V curves, and specifically electron-phonon resonances, are calculated by treating the inelastic (LO phonon) scattering perturbatively. Calculations show how strong impurity scattering suppresses the electron-phonon resonance peaks in I-V curves, and their detailed sensitivity to the size, strength and concentration of impurities.Comment: 7 figures, 1 tabl