Measurement of the atmospheric muon spectrum from 20 to 2000 GeV

The atmospheric muon spectrum between 20 and 2000 GeV was measured with the L3 magnetic muon spectrometer for zenith angles ranging from 0 to 58 degrees. Due to the large data set and the good detector resolution, a precision of 2.6% at 100 GeV was achieved for the absolute normalization of the vertical muon flux. The momentum dependence of the ratio of positive to negative muons was obtained between 20 and 630 GeV.Comment: Poster at the XXIII Physics in Collisions Conference (PIC03), Zeuthen, Germany, June 2003, 3 pages, LaTeX, 2 eps figures. PSN FRAP0

Hetch Hetchy Redux: An Effort to Turn Back the Environmental Clock

If San Francisco voters pass Measure F on November 6, the city will conduct an $8 million study on the feasibility, costs, and benefits of draining the 300-foot deep reservoir created by the O’Shaughnessy Dam in 1923. The measure’s proponents see it as a first step in restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley, sister valley to Yosemite, to its natural state. That the measure is even on the ballot is a significant indication of the shift in attitudes towards the ongoing conflict between nature preservation and traditional notions of progress

I Went to Learn, Meanings of the European Tour of Senator Robert M. La Follette, 1923

In 1923, progressive Senator Robert M. La Follette, an astute observer of government, economics, and social conditions, toured Europe in preparation for his third-party presidential bid. This article examines that trip and its legacy, particularly in relation to Daniel T. Rodgers\u27 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.

Metarepresentation, tense, aspect and narratives: the case of Behdini-Kurdish and Estonian

This paper looks at three sets of data, two from Behdini-Kurdish and one from Estonian, where a metarepresentational use analysis enhances the linguistic analysis of certain linguistic forms. The aspective marker da in Behdini is used in two ways, as a near counterfactual past and a distant habitual past: (1) ew da genim-ê çîn-in They IM wheat-OBL.M.SG grow-3PL 1. 'They set out to sow wheat (but where prevented from doing it)' 2. 'They used to grow wheat (in old times; of the people of a village)' My claim is that da encodes a procedure to embed the proposition expressed under a higher order respresentation such as 'the speaker intends the addressee to imagine a situation where P holds,' and I'll argue that the attested uses can be pragmatically explained on the basis of this semantics. Thus it appears that metarepresentations can explain some phenomena normally attributed to the category of aspect. The future marker dê in Behdini is used syntactically in a very similar way: (2) ew dê xwarin-ê çêk-in they FUT meal-OBL.F.SG prepare-3PL 'they will prepare the meal' I present arguments both from within Behdini as well as cross-linguistically that the future tense in Behdini should be analysed as procedurally encoding metarepresentational use: the proposition expressed is to be embedded under a higher-order representation of the form 'the speaker intends the addressee to imagine a situation where P holds and P has not yet occured'. This analysis raises a number of questions for the analysis of future tense markers cross-linguistically. Finally, I argue that the so-called 'quotative mood' in Estonian is better analysed as attributive interpretive use marker. One of the many advantages of this analysis is the fact that it sheds light on the use of the quotative in narratives, especially folk tales: narrative exploits metarepresentations in various ways, hence it is not surprising to find interpretive use markers used as narrative forms. This raises the question whether other so-called 'narrative verb forms' in other langauges should be re-analysed as interpretive use markers

Even Judging Woodrow Wilson by the Standards of His Own Time, He Was Deplorably Racist

The news that Princeton acquiesced to student demands that the university confront the racism of Woodrow Wilson set off a series of responses. Some protest that it is unfair to judge the 28th president by present day standards. These pundits, almost all white, proclaim that Wilson must be understood within the context of his own time. The inference of such an assertion is that in times of pervasive racism it is reasonable for a leader to perpetuate it. Setting aside the assumption that morals are relative rather than absolute, let’s examine Wilson’s actions within his times

Noise threshold for universality of 2-input gates

Evans and Pippenger showed in 1998 that noisy gates with 2 inputs are universal for arbitrary computation (i.e. can compute any function with bounded error), if all gates fail independently with probability epsilon and epsilon<theta, where theta is roughly 8.856%. We show that formulas built from gates with 2 inputs, in which each gate fails with probability at least theta cannot be universal. Hence, there is a threshold on the tolerable noise for formulas with 2-input gates and it is theta. We conjecture that the same threshold also holds for circuits.Comment: International Symposium on Information Theory, 2007, minor corrections in v

Adda F. Howie: America’s Outstanding Woman Farmer

In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”1 Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male sphere, was publicly praised for her skill in bringing traditional female values into the barns and pastures of Wisconsin. Instead of facing ridicule for her unconventional, ostentatiously feminine innovations, she was heaped with praise and her methods studied and adopted on farms across the United States and beyond

Analysis of Longitudinal Air Shower Profiles measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory

We describe the analysis of longitudinal air shower profiles as measured by the fluorescence detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory and present the measurement of the depth of maximum of extensive air showers, Xmax, with energies >10^18 eV. The measured energy evolution of the average of Xmax and its fluctuations are compared to air shower simulations for different primary particles.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Recent Progress of Ultra-high Energy Cosmic Ray Observation, Nagoya 201

Women and Gender: Useful Categories of Analysis in Environmental History

In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect, a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution on environmental history for the twenty-first century, and White, in Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature, addressed the need for further work on gender. Environmental history, Norwood noted, is just beginning to integrate gender analyses into mainstream work. 3 That assessment was particularly striking coming, as it did, after Norwood described the kind of ongoing and damaging misperceptions concerning the role of diversity, including gender, within environmental history. White concurred with Norwood, observing that environmental history in the previous fifteen years had been far more explicitly linked to larger trends in the writing of history, but he also issued a clear warning about the current trends in including the role of gender: The danger ... is not that gendering will be ignored in environmental history but that it will become predictable-an endless rediscovery that humans have often made nature female. Gender has more work to do than that. 4 Indeed it does. In 1992, the index to Carolyn Merchant\u27s The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History included three subheadings under women. Women and the egalitarian ideal and women and the environment each had only a few entries. Most entries were listed under the third subheading, activists and theorists, comprising seventeen names. 5 Nine years later Elizabeth Blum compiled Linking American Women\u27s History and Environmental History, an online preliminary historiography revealing gaps as well as strengths in the field emerging at the intersection of these two relatively new fields of study. At that time Blum noted that, with the exception of some scholarly interest being diverted to environmental justice movements and ecofeminism, most environmental history has centered on elite male concerns; generally, women\u27s involvement tends to be ignored or marginalized.