Measurements of the vertical profile of water vapor abundance in the Martian atmosphere from Mars Observer

An analysis is presented of the Pressure Modulator Infrared Radiometer (PMIRR) capabilities along with how the vertical profiles of water vapor will be obtained. The PMIRR will employ filter and pressure modulation radiometry using nine spectral channels, in both limb scanning and nadir sounding modes, to obtain daily, global maps of temperature, dust extinction, condensate extinction, and water vapor mixing ratio profiles as a function of pressure to half scale height or 5 km vertical resolution. Surface thermal properties will also be mapped, and the polar radiactive balance will be monitored

Young People’s Narratives of Media and Identity: Mediagraphy as Identity Work in Upper Secondary School

The article explores how upper secondary students use the learning activity mediagraphy to reflect on their identity and on media as constraining and enabling factors in their social practice. In mediagraphy, the students research four generations of their own families, including themselves. They write a mediagraphy essay on the differences and similarities across the generations in media use and turning points in individuals’ lives, in addition to societal and media-related developments. Data from student products and interviews are analysed through three “identity dilemmas” that any identity claim faces: the constant navigation between 1) continuity and change, 2) sameness and difference with regard to others, and 3) agency as “person-to-world” and “world-to-person”. The findings suggest that mediagraphy is a type of identity work that can potentially help students develop an agentive identity in a time of insecurity, with rapidly shifting social and cultural conditions and increasing media density. Keywords: mediagraphy, identity, agency, media use, media education, media literacyAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Rhode Island Election Tickets: A Survey

Rhode Island was the first English colony in America to issue printed election ballots, with the first issued in the mid-1740s. This survey of Rhode Island election tickets, while not exhaustive, is representative of the use of tickets in elections spanning a period of over 150 years and documents state and local politics, political factions and election results from the Ward-Hopkins controversy of the colonial period to political factions during the War of 1812, the Anti-Masonic period of the 1830s, the Law and Order coalition of the 1840s following events of the Dorr Rebellion, the temperance movement of the 1850s, the pro-Union tickets of the Civil War, and Greenback party and Prohibitory factions of the 1870s and 1880s. Statewide elections for general officers, United States congressional representatives, presidential electors, special purpose elections as well as local elections for city, town and district offices are also examined. The scope of this study includes a survey of tickets found in the collections of the University of Rhode Island Library Special Collections, Rhode Island State Archives, Warwick Historical Society as well as private collections of Henry A.L. Brown, Russell DeSimone, and Daniel Schofield. This document was last revised in 2015. The previous version (2007) can be found below as a supplemental file

Voting and the Spirit of Democracy

This book is published in conjunction with Voting and the Spirit of Democracy, an exhibition held at the University Library, University of Rhode Island 2004

Topics in the gauge/gravity correspondence.

In this thesis we study two classes of backgrounds in Typo IIB supergravity which admit interpretation in terms of dual N = 1 Supersymmetric Field Theories. The first is obtained by wrapping D5 branes on a two-cycle inside the conifold; the second is the class containing the dual to the baryonic branch of Klebanov-Strassler. These backgrounds are related via a 'solution generating procedure' (or rotation) and have a number of interesting properties. First, we study non-Supersymmetric deformations of the baryonic branch by making use of the rotation procedure. We interpret these deformations as soft-breaking through the addition of gaugino masses, and calculate various observables which support this picture. We then explore the two-dimensional solution space of supergravity solutions associated with these deformations, finding a number of interesting limiting cases. We see that much of the structure of the Supersymmetric baryonic branch survives, even for large values of the deformation. Second, we study probe-D7 branes which wrap an internal three-dimensional manifold and lie at the equator of the transverse two-sphere, in the class of wrapped D5 brane backgrounds. We employ this method to model Chiral-symmetry breaking and present a simple diagnostic tool for determining the classical stability of such embeddings, in particular cases we find that a new type of phase transition appears, putting limits on the region of parameter space which can be used to study physics of the dual field theory. Finally, we study the relationship between confinement in a Quantum Field Theory and the presence of a first-order phase transition in its Entanglement Entropy. We determine the sufficient conditions for such a phase transition and compare to the conditions on a Rectangular Wilson Loop to probe confinement. In certain backgrounds with non-local high energy behaviour, we show that new configurations (associated with the introduction of a UV cutoff) are required in order to recover the otherwise absent phase transition. We also show that a local UV-completion, obtained using the rotation procedure, to the non-local theories has a similar effect to the cutoff

I’ve heard that brand before: the role of music recognition on consumer choice

When searching for and buying new products, consumers’ knowledge is often limited, and some (but not all) options in the choice set are unrecognized. In such situations, research on the recognition heuristic shows that people tend to choose more often the recognized option over the unrecognized one, as they infer it has the higher value regarding the criterion being judged. Since humans are particularly good at rapidly recognising familiar music, this paper examines the effect of recognition to influence brand choice when using music as the recognition cue. In two experiments (N = 486), participants were familiarised with several excerpts of advertising music. Participants then performed a choosing task to decide which of two brands they would purchase when searching for different products (e.g., headphones, cameras). Brands were either presented with familiar music clips or completely novel ones. Results showed that pairing brands with music that can be recognised by the target consumers increased brand choice by 6% (d = .21). Importantly, participants’ preferences for the advertising music also influenced brand choice, increasing the effect of recognition when the music was liked and suppressing it in extreme cases when the music was most disliked. This suggests that ad practitioners should use a cue integration framework when working with music, weighing all available musical and extra-musical cues according to their impact on the target consumers. Results are discussed in terms of the practical implications of measuring brand’s ROI when working with music and the value of the heuristics-and-biases framework to study music effects on consumer behaviour