Nuclear particle detection using a track-recording solid

The design of the nuclear particle detector located in Purdue University's Get Away Special package which was flown aboard STS-7 is detailed. The experiment consisted of a stack of particle-detecting polymer sheets. The sheets show positive results of tracks throughout the block. A slide of each sheet was made for further analysis. Recommendations for similar experiments performed in the future are discussed

The infrared fixed point of Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory: A renormalization group analysis

The infrared behavior of gluon and ghost propagators in Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory has been at the center of an intense debate over the last decade. Different solutions of the Dyson-Schwinger equations show a different behavior of the propagators in the infrared: in the so-called scaling solutions both propagators follow a power law, while in the decoupling solutions the gluon propagator shows a massive behavior. The latest lattice results favor the decoupling solutions. In this contribution, after giving a brief overview of the present status of analytical and semi-analytical approaches to the infrared regime of Landau gauge Yang-Mills theory, we will show how Callan-Symanzik renormalization group equations in an epsilon expansion reproduce both types of solutions and single out the decoupling solutions as the infrared-stable ones for space-time dimensions greater than two, in agreement with the lattice calculations.Comment: 17 pages. Talk delivered at the XIII Mexican Workshop on Particles and Fields in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, October 2011. Slightly extended version of the contribution to the conference proceeding

Religious conversion : historical aspects and modern perspective

Religious conversion has become a dangerous social and individual problem. In Latin America, a traditional Catholic area, Protestant sects are successfully con-verting more and more Catholics into their own communities. Therefore the Pope demands a strict control of these activities. In India e.g., the Catholic hierarchy is critizising the Indian governments which have forbidden conversion on non-spiritual reasons. Hindu organizations have started even very successfully to re-convert Indian Christians particularly of Dalit and tribal background. Buddhists are very successful in indirect and even direct conversion of many Westerners. Wah-habit missionaries spread their Neo-Islam in the Muslim societies and get more and more even non-Muslim converts. We should add the forcible and sometimes ex-tremely cruel conversions the atheistic states had executed since the last century. ..

Exit, Voice, and Cyclicality: A Micro-Logic of Voting Behaviour in European Parliament Elections

Unlike other classics of political economy, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” (EVL) has not sparked many innovations in the field of electoral studies. This paper aims to demonstrate that scholars miss out on a powerful theory of political behaviour by leaving Hirschman’s ideas to other disciplines. To change this, I resolve several theoretical complications that have hampered the application of EVL to democratic elections. On this basis, I construct a model of voting behaviour through the electoral cycle to explain typical “second-order” effects in elections to the European Parliament (EP). Building on the parameters of EVL allows to unite such diverse phenomena as anti-government swings, declining turnout, protest voting, conversion and alienation in one theoretical framework. Testing the model with survey data from the European Election Studies of 1999 and 2004 reveals novel insights into the dynamics at work in EP elections. The role of strategic voting in the form of voice appears to be limited. Instead, processes of de- and realignment in the form of exit dominate a picture of EP elections that undermines the widespread conception of second-order irrelevance