Travel Patterns and Expenditures of the Mature Market

Travel by persons over the age of 50 represents a key component of the leisure market. This paper examines participation in favorite activities, distance traveled, length of stay and expenditures for selected outdoor activities by this mature market based upon data from the Nationwide Recreation Survey. The paper then addresses some marketing implications suggested by these data for the development and marketing of leisure services

Symmetric Teleparallel Gravity: Some exact solutions and spinor couplings

In this paper we elaborate on the symmetric teleparallel gravity (STPG) written in a non-Riemannian spacetime with nonzero nonmetricity, but zero torsion and zero curvature. Firstly we give a prescription for obtaining the nonmetricity from the metric in a peculiar gauge. Then we state that under a novel prescription of parallel transportation of a tangent vector in this non-Riemannian geometry the autoparallel curves coincides with those of the Riemannian spacetimes. Subsequently we represent the symmetric teleparallel theory of gravity by the most general quadratic and parity conserving lagrangian with lagrange multipliers for vanishing torsion and curvature. We show that our lagrangian is equivalent to the Einstein-Hilbert lagrangian for certain values of coupling coefficients. Thus we arrive at calculating the field equations via independent variations. Then we obtain in turn conformal, spherically symmetric static, cosmological and pp-wave solutions exactly. Finally we discuss a minimal coupling of a spin-1/2 field to STPG.Comment: Accepted for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics

Dirac field in topologically massive gravity

We consider a Dirac field coupled minimally to the Mielke-Baekler model of gravity and investigate cosmological solutions in three dimensions. We arrive at a family of solutions which exists even in the limit of vanishing cosmological constant.Comment: 12 pages. Title changed. Conclusion extended. Appendix added. To appear in Gen. Rel. Gra

Beam test results for the FiberGLAST instrument

The FiberGLAST scintillating fiber telescope is a large-area instrument concept for NASA\u27s GLAST program. The detector is designed for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, and uses plastic scintillating fibers to combine a photon pair tracking telescope and a calorimeter into a single instrument. A small prototype detector has been tested with high energy photons at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. We report on the result of this beam test, including scintillating fiber performance, photon track reconstruction, angular resolution, and detector efficiency