598 research outputs found
In the Path of the Flood: Exploring Carbon-Intensive Employment and Coastal Geography as Motivators of U.S. Climate Change Denial
This thesis uses multivariate regressions of the ANES 2016 Dataset to test whether working in a carbon-intensive industry affects belief in climate change. It also uses the same dataset to test whether living in an area that would see increased flooding and displacement under a climate change scenario can affect the same attitudes. Additionally, it presents crosstabulations of climate skeptics and non-skeptics by party preference, education, and turnout habits. I find that working in a carbon-intensive industry does not reduce a respondent’s likelihood to report belief in climate science. Similarly, living in a coastal area that is likely to see significant disruption in even an optimistic climate change scenario does not affect belief in climate change. Instead, the control variables of partisanship, education, and income are highly significant predictors of climate skepticism. Lastly, I find through the use of a survey mode variable that conducting the survey online rather than in-person produces a significant increase in climate-skeptic responses, providing evidence that climate skepticism elicits a kind of Bradley Effect in individuals
Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney Slavery, Secession, and the President\u27s War Powers
Testing Constitutional Limits Taney and Lincoln Of making Lincoln books there is no end. And after so many books about Lincoln, authors face the challenge of writing something that is new and fresh. In recent years, one approach taken by several authors such as James Oakes, Dan...
New Jersey Radium Dial Workers and the Dynamics of Occupational Disease Litigation in the Early Twentieth Century, The
Between 1917 and 1923 over 800 women worked for the United States Radium Corporation ( USRC ) in Orange, New Jersey handpainting wrist-watch faces with a substance made luminescent by radioactive materials. While these workers were exposed to injurious, even mortal, levels of radiation, less than a dozen received any compensation for their injuries. These features compounded the workers\u27 legal problems once they entered the formal legal system by dramatically complicating attempts to prove causation, by raising the specter of the statute of limitations defense, and by playing a major role in the settlement negotiation process. As a consequence, even when some women did resort to the formal legal system for relief, they faced hurdles endemic to the legal process and a dynamic of litigation that favored and rewarded repeat-player defendants. This article examines the radium dial-painter episode in four main sections. The first section presents a basic, historical narrative of the dial-painter litigation. The second section identifies and explores the medical, legal, and sociological reasons why so few cases entered the legal system. In the third section, we will examine the legal doctrines that governed the workers\u27 claims against USRC. In the final section, we will examine how the basic architecture of the legal system presented conditions that dramatically affected the chances of success and recovery of the few claimants who entered the legal system and allowed powerful defendants to fashion to their benefit the overall course and outcome of the litigation
Confirmation Via the Continuum-Fitting Method that the Spin of the Black Hole in Cygnus X-1 is Extreme
In Gou et al. (2011), we reported that the black hole primary in the X-ray
binary Cygnus X-1 is a near-extreme Kerr black hole with a spin parameter
a*>0.95(3{\sigma}). We confirm this result while setting a new and more
stringent limit: a*>0.983 at the 3{\sigma}(99.7%) level of confidence. The
earlier work, which was based on an analysis of all three useful spectra that
were then available, was possibly biased by the presence in these spectra of a
relatively strong Compton power-law component: The fraction of the thermal seed
photons scattered into the power law was f_s=23-31%, while the upper limit for
reliable application of the continuum-fitting method is f_s<25%. We have
subsequently obtained six additional spectra of Cygnus X-1 suitable for the
measurement of spin. Five of these spectra are of high quality with f_s in the
range 10% to 19%, a regime where the continuum-fitting method has been shown to
deliver reliable results. Individually, the six spectra give lower limits on
the spin parameter that range from a*>0.95 to a*>0.98, allowing us to
conservatively conclude that the spin of the black hole is a*>0.983
(3{\sigma}).Comment: 14 pages in emulated ApJ format, including 6 figures and 4 tables,
ApJ in press. Discussion on the pileup effect to our spin measurement is
added, including a subsection and a new figure, to reflect the referee's
comments; the conclusions are unchange
The Extreme Spin of the Black Hole in Cygnus X-1
The compact primary in the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1 was the first black hole
to be established via dynamical observations. We have recently determined
accurate values for its mass and distance, and for the orbital inclination
angle of the binary. Building on these results, which are based on our favored
(asynchronous) dynamical model, we have measured the radius of the inner edge
of the black hole's accretion disk by fitting its thermal continuum spectrum to
a fully relativistic model of a thin accretion disk. Assuming that the spin
axis of the black hole is aligned with the orbital angular momentum vector, we
have determined that Cygnus X-1 contains a near-extreme Kerr black hole with a
spin parameter a/M>0.95 (3\sigma). For a less probable (synchronous) dynamical
model, we find a/M>0.92 (3\sigma). In our analysis, we include the
uncertainties in black hole mass, orbital inclination angle and distance, and
we also include the uncertainty in the calibration of the absolute flux via the
Crab. These four sources of uncertainty totally dominate the error budget. The
uncertainties introduced by the thin-disk model we employ are particularly
small in this case given the extreme spin of the black hole and the disk's low
luminosity.Comment: Paper III of three papers on Cygnus X-1; 21 pages including 5 figures
and 12 tables, ApJ in press. The paper is significantly restructured; two
further tests of the robustness of our spin measurement are presented, and
our error analysis has been substantially improved; the conclusions are
unchange
Tomography of X-ray Nova Muscae 1991: Evidence for ongoing mass transfer and stream-disc overflow
We present a spectroscopic analysis of the black hole binary Nova Muscae 1991
in quiescence using data obtained in 2009 with MagE on the Magellan Clay
telescope and in 2010 with IMACS on the Magellan Baade telescope at the Las
Campanas Observatory. Emission from the disc is observed in H alpha, H beta and
Ca II (8662 A). A prominent hotspot is observed in the Doppler maps of all
three emission lines. The existence of this spot establishes ongoing mass
transfer from the donor star in 2009-2010 and, given its absence in the
1993-1995 observations, demonstrates the presence of a variable hotspot in the
system. We find the radial distance to the hotspot from the black hole to be
consistent with the circularization radius. Our tomograms are suggestive of
stream-disc overflow in the system. We also detect possible Ca II (8662 A)
absorption from the donor star.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Optical-phonon resonances with saddle-point excitons in twisted-bilayer graphene
Twisted-bilayer graphene (tBLG) exhibits van Hove singularities in the
density of states that can be tuned by changing the twisting angle . A
-defined tBLG has been produced and characterized with optical
reflectivity and resonance Raman scattering. The -engineered optical
response is shown to be consistent with persistent saddle-point excitons.
Separate resonances with Stokes and anti-Stokes Raman scattering components can
be achieved due to the sharpness of the two-dimensional saddle-point excitons,
similar to what has been previously observed for one-dimensional carbon
nanotubes. The excitation power dependence for the Stokes and anti-Stokes
emissions indicate that the two processes are correlated and that they share
the same phonon.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure
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Full-Contact Practice and Injuries in College Football
Background: Despite recent restrictions being placed on practice in college football, there are little data to correlate such changes with injuries. Hypothesis: Football injuries will correlate with a team’s exposure to full-contact practice, total practice, and total games. Study Design: Descriptive epidemiological study. Methods: All injuries and athlete injury exposures (AE × Min = athletes exposed × activity duration in minutes) were recorded for an intercollegiate football team over 4 consecutive fall seasons. Weekly injuries and injury rates (injuries per athletic injury exposure) were correlated with the weekly exposures to full-contact practices, total practices, formal scrimmages, and games. Results: The preseason practice injury rate was over twice the in-season practice injury rate (P < 0.001). For preseason, injury exposures were higher for full-contact practice (P = 0.0166), total practices (P = 0.015), and scrimmages/games (P = 0.034) compared with in-season. Preseason and in-season practice injuries correlated with exposure to full-contact practice combined with scrimmages for preseason (P < 0.008) and full-contact practice combined with games for in-season (P = 0.0325). The game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate (P < 0.0001). Concussions constituted 14.5% of all injuries, and the incidence of concussions correlated with the incidence of all injuries (P = 0.0001). Strength training did not correlate with injuries. Conclusion: Decreased exposure to full-contact practice may decrease the incidence of practice injuries and practice concussions. However, the game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate and had an inverse correlation with full-contact practice
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