The Ideological Foundation of Osama bin Laden

One name is above all others when examining modern Islamic fundamentalism - Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has earned global notoriety because of his role in the September 11th attacks against the United States of America. Yet, Osama does not represent the beginning, nor the end of Muslim radicals. He is only one link in a chain of radical thought. Bin Laden's unorthodox actions and words will leave a legacy, but what factors influenced him? This thesis provides insight into understanding the ideological foundation of Osama bin Laden. It incorporates primary documents from those individuals responsible for indoctrinating the Saudi millionaire, particularly Abdullah Azzam and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Additionally, it identifies key historic figures and events that transformed bin Laden from a modest, shy conservative into a Muslim extremist

Geochemical Analysis of Surface and Ground Waters Around Cle Elum, WA; Implications for the Proposed Exempt Well Moratorium

The Yakima River drainage is one of the most heavily irrigated regions in the state, and water use has been much contested and litigated. Due to this water demand and the increase in drilling of domestic wells, a moratorium on exempt well drilling was proposed in 2007. In this study geochemical data is used to evaluate the surface-groundwater interaction in the area around Cle Elum, WA. The hydrogeology of this area is poorly understood due to the complex stratigraphy where the valley floor meets the bedrock of the Cascade Range. It is important to understand the relationship between groundwater and surface water because more than the available surface water in the Yakima drainage is appropriated and many water rights holders depend on this water for their livelihood. This study began as a class project for an Environmental Geochemistry class at Central Washington University. Students collected samples from over 30 domestic wells and nearby surface water sources in the Cle Elum/Roslyn area. Trace element and major ion data are presented for these samples and are used along with geochemical analysis to draw conclusions regarding the different sub-surface water bearing units as well as the relationship between the surface and ground waters. This report concludes that exempt wells need monitoring and suggests the current policy of over-appropriation be reviewed

Geochemical Analysis of Surface and Ground Waters Around Cle Elum, WA; Implications for the Proposed Exempt Well Moratorium

The Yakima River drainage is one of the most heavily irrigated regions in the state, and water use has been much contested and litigated. Due to this water demand and the increase in drilling of domestic wells, a moratorium on exempt well drilling was proposed in 2007. In this study geochemical data is used to evaluate the surface-groundwater interaction in the area around Cle Elum, WA. The hydrogeology of this area is poorly understood due to the complex stratigraphy where the valley floor meets the bedrock of the Cascade Range. It is important to understand the relationship between groundwater and surface water because more than the available surface water in the Yakima drainage is appropriated and many water rights holders depend on this water for their livelihood. This study began as a class project for an Environmental Geochemistry class at Central Washington University. Students collected samples from over 30 domestic wells and nearby surface water sources in the Cle Elum/Roslyn area. Trace element and major ion data are presented for these samples and are used along with geochemical analysis to draw conclusions regarding the different sub-surface water bearing units as well as the relationship between the surface and ground waters. This report concludes that exempt wells need monitoring and suggests the current policy of over-appropriation be reviewed

Path-Specific Objectives for Safer Agent Incentives

We present a general framework for training safe agents whose naive incentives are unsafe. As an example, manipulative or deceptive behaviour can improve rewards but should be avoided. Most approaches fail here: agents maximize expected return by any means necessary. We formally describe settings with 'delicate' parts of the state which should not be used as a means to an end. We then train agents to maximize the causal effect of actions on the expected return which is not mediated by the delicate parts of state, using Causal Influence Diagram analysis. The resulting agents have no incentive to control the delicate state. We further show how our framework unifies and generalizes existing proposals.Comment: Presented at AAAI 202

A Catalog of MIPSGAL Disk and Ring Sources

We present a catalog of 416 extended, resolved, disk- and ring-like objects as detected in the MIPSGAL 24 micron survey of the Galactic plane. This catalog is the result of a search in the MIPSGAL image data for generally circularly symmetric, extended "bubbles" without prior knowledge or expectation of their physical nature. Most of the objects have no extended counterpart at 8 or 70 micron, with less than 20% detections at each wavelength. For the 54 objects with central point sources, the sources are nearly always seen in all IRAC bands. About 70 objects (16%) have been previously identified, with another 35 listed as IRAS sources. Among the identified objects, those with central sources are mostly listed as emission-line stars, but with other source types including supernova remnants, luminous blue variables, and planetary nebulae. The 57 identified objects (of 362) without central sources are nearly all PNe (~90%).which suggests that a large fraction of the 300+ unidentified objects in this category are also PNe. These identifications suggest that this is primarily a catalog of evolved stars. Also included in the catalog are two filamentary objects that are almost certainly SNRs, and ten unusual compact extended objects discovered in the search. Two of these show remarkable spiral structure at both 8 and 24 micron. These are likely background galaxies previously hidden by the intervening Galactic plane

Thermal stability and topological protection of skyrmions in nanotracks

Magnetic skyrmions are hailed as a potential technology for data storage and other data processing devices. However, their stability against thermal fluctuations is an open question that must be answered before skyrmion-based devices can be designed. In this work, we study paths in the energy landscape via which the transition between the skyrmion and the uniform state can occur in interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya finite-sized systems. We find three mechanisms the system can take in the process of skyrmion nucleation or destruction and identify that the transition facilitated by the boundary has a significantly lower energy barrier than the other energy paths. This clearly demonstrates the lack of the skyrmion topological protection in finite-sized magnetic systems. Overall, the energy barriers of the system under investigation are too small for storage applications at room temperature, but research into device materials, geometry and design may be able to address this