Does a holiday break disrupt pro-environmental behaviors? Using field data to test the durability of pro-environmental behaviors and the moderating effect of habit

For pro-environmental behaviors to have a meaningful impact, they need to be maintained and resilient to temporary interruptions in daily life. Yet, the effects of temporal interruptions on pro-environmental behaviors are rarely explored. The present research applied a regression discontinuity in time approach to a large field dataset from a system for reusing food containers and examined the effect of the Christmas break on 17,284 individuals’ use of the system. On average, the temporal interruption was associated with a 16.7 % drop in individuals’ use of reusable food containers. However, the interruption had a smaller effect on individuals for whom the behavior was more habitual, as measured by the extent to which the individuals used the system in consistent times and places before the interruption. This finding suggests that stronger habits promoted the durability of pro-environmental behaviors

Steady non-ideal detonations in cylindrical sticks of expolsives

Numerical simulations of detonations in cylindrical rate-sticks of highly non-ideal explosives are performed, using a simple model with a weakly pressure dependent rate law and a pseudo-polytropic equation of state. Some numerical issues with such simulations are investigated, and it is shown that very high resolution (hundreds of points in the reaction zone) are required for highly accurate (converged) solutions. High resolution simulations are then used to investigate the qualitative dependences of the detonation driving zone structure on the diameter and degree of confinement of the explosive charge. The simulation results are used to show that, given the radius of curvature of the shock at the charge axis, the steady detonation speed and the axial solution are accurately predicted by a quasi-one-dimensional theory, even for cases where the detonation propagates at speeds significantly below the Chapman-Jouguet speed. Given reaction rate and equation of state models, this quasi-one-dimensional theory offers a significant improvement to Wood-Kirkwood theories currently used in industry

Local Ferromagnetism in Microporous Carbon with the Structural Regularity of Zeolite Y

Magnetization M(H,T) measurements have been performed on microporous carbon (MC) with a three-dimensional nano-array structure corresponding to that of a zeolite Y supercage. The obtained results unambiguously demonstrate the occurrence of high-temperature ferromagnetism in MC, probably originating from a topological disorder associated with curved graphene sheets. The results provide evidence that the ferromagnetic behavior of MC is governed by isolated clusters in a broad temperature range, and suggest the occurrence of percolative-type transition with the temperature lowering. A comparative analysis of the results obtained on MC and related materials is given.Comment: To be published in Physical Review B (2003

"Author! Author!" : Shakespeare and biography

Original article can be found at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t714579626~db=all Copyright Informa / Taylor & Francis Group. DOI: 10.1080/17450910902764454Since 1996, not a year has passed without the publication of at least one Shakespeare biography. Yet for many years the place of the author in the practice of understanding literary works has been problematized, and even on occasions eliminated. Criticism reads the “works”, and may or may not refer to an author whose “life” contributed to their meaning. Biography seeks the author in the works, the personality that precedes the works and gives them their characteristic shape and meaning. But the form of literary biography addresses the unusual kind of “life” that puts itself into “works”, and this is particularly challenging where the “works” predominate massively over the salient facts of the “life”. This essay surveys the current terrain of Shakespeare biography, and considers the key questions raised by the medium: can we know anything of Shakespeare's “personality” from the facts of his life and the survival of his works? What is the status of the kind of speculation that inevitably plays a part in biographical reconstruction? Are biographers in the end telling us as much about themselves as they tell us about Shakespeare?Peer reviewe

Lifetime measurements in 184Pt and the shape coexistence picture

Lifetimes for levels in the yrast band of 184Pt have been measured up to spin 16+ using the recoil distance technique. The B(E2) values exhibit a marked increase in going from spin 2 to 10, consistent with a proposal that two bands of different deformations are mixing at low spin. This provides further support for shape coexistence occuring at low excitation energies in this region

Constraints on Dark Matter Annihilation in Clusters of Galaxies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Nearby clusters and groups of galaxies are potentially bright sources of high-energy gamma-ray emission resulting from the pair-annihilation of dark matter particles. However, no significant gamma-ray emission has been detected so far from clusters in the first 11 months of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We interpret this non-detection in terms of constraints on dark matter particle properties. In particular for leptonic annihilation final states and particle masses greater than ~200 GeV, gamma-ray emission from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons is expected to dominate the dark matter annihilation signal from clusters, and our gamma-ray limits exclude large regions of the parameter space that would give a good fit to the recent anomalous Pamela and Fermi-LAT electron-positron measurements. We also present constraints on the annihilation of more standard dark matter candidates, such as the lightest neutralino of supersymmetric models. The constraints are particularly strong when including the fact that clusters are known to contain substructure at least on galaxy scales, increasing the expected gamma-ray flux by a factor of ~5 over a smooth-halo assumption. We also explore the effect of uncertainties in cluster dark matter density profiles, finding a systematic uncertainty in the constraints of roughly a factor of two, but similar overall conclusions. In this work, we focus on deriving limits on dark matter models; a more general consideration of the Fermi-LAT data on clusters and clusters as gamma-ray sources is forthcoming.Comment: accepted to JCAP, Corresponding authors: T.E. Jeltema and S. Profumo, minor revisions to be consistent with accepted versio

Evidence of Color Coherence Effects in W+jets Events from ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV

We report the results of a study of color coherence effects in ppbar collisions based on data collected by the D0 detector during the 1994-1995 run of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, at a center of mass energy sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV. Initial-to-final state color interference effects are studied by examining particle distribution patterns in events with a W boson and at least one jet. The data are compared to Monte Carlo simulations with different color coherence implementations and to an analytic modified-leading-logarithm perturbative calculation based on the local parton-hadron duality hypothesis.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Physics Letters

Stellar activity cycles and contribution of the deep layers knowledge

It is believed that magnetic activity on the Sun and solar-type stars are tightly related to the dynamo process driven by the interaction between rotation, convection, and magnetic field. However, the detailed mechanisms of this process are still incompletely understood. Many questions remain unanswered, e.g.: why some stars are more active than others?; why some stars have a flat activity?; why is there a Maunder minimum?; are all the cycles regular? A large number of prox- ies are typically used to study the magnetic activity of stars as we cannot resolve stellar discs. Recently, it was shown that asteroseismology can also be used to study stellar activity, making it an even more powerful tool. If short cycles are not so un- common, we expect to detect many of them with missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, and possibly the PLATO mission. We will review some of the latest results obtained with spectroscopic measurements. We will show how asteroseismology can help us to better understand the complex process of dynamo and illustrate how the CoRoT and Kepler missions are revolutionizing our knowledge on stellar activity. A new window is being opened over our understanding of the magnetic variability of stars.Comment: 7 pages. To appear in Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings series of the 20th Stellar pulsation conference held in Granada (Spain) from 6 to 10 September 2011

The Caravan Rolls On

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68409/2/10.1177_107554707900100103.pd