Common Sense and the Rhetoric of Technology

This article investigates rhetorical methods for establishing notions of common sense, especially the common sense that makes technological choices take on an aura of inevitability. I rely on a rhetorical framework drawn from Aristotle and Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, as well as the philosophers Charles Taylor and Andrew Feenberg

Microvesicles as biomarkers in diabetes, obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: current knowledge and future directions

NAFLD is the most common chronic liver disease, frequently associated with diabetes. Both of these insulin resistant states have increased cardiovascular risk factors associated, and a prevalent cause of mortality in these diseases. Microvesicles are heterogonously sized, phospholipid rich spheres released by cells upon activation and apoptosis. Evidence is continuing to accumulate of microvesicles being not only markers of disease severity but as also having a functional role in the pathophysiology of disease progression.<br/

Prospects for the Characterization and Confirmation of Transiting Exoplanets via the Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect

The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary orbits with the spin axes of their parent stars, and to confirm exoplanetary transits. We compute the achievable accuracy for the parameters of interest, in general and for the 5 known cases of transiting exoplanets with bright host stars. We determine the requirements for detecting the effects of differential rotation. For transiting planets with small masses or long periods (as will be detected by forthcoming satellite missions), the velocity anomaly produced by the RM effect can be much larger than the orbital velocity of the star. For a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star found by the Kepler mission, it will be difficult to use the RM effect to confirm transits with current instruments, but it still may be easier than measuring the spectroscopic orbit.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, one table. Minor changes. Accepted to ApJ, to appear in the Jan 20, 2007 issue (v655

The Prograde Orbit of Exoplanet TrES-2b

We monitored the Doppler shift of the G0V star TrES-2 throughout a transit of its giant planet. The anomalous Doppler shift due to stellar rotation (the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect) is discernible in the data, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 2.9, even though the star is a slow rotator. By modeling this effect we find that the planet's trajectory across the face of the star is tilted by -9 +/- 12 degrees relative to the projected stellar equator. With 98% confidence, the orbit is prograde.Comment: ApJ, in press [15 pages

Transit Timing Observations from Kepler. VIII Catalog of Transit Timing Measurements of the First Twelve Quarters

Following Ford et al. (2011, 2012) and Steffen et al. (2012) we derived the transit timing of 1960 Kepler KOIs using the pre-search data conditioning (PDC) light curves of the first twelve quarters of the Kepler data. For 721 KOIs with large enough SNRs, we obtained also the duration and depth of each transit. The results are presented as a catalog for the community to use. We derived a few statistics of our results that could be used to indicate significant variations. Including systems found by previous works, we have found 130 KOIs that showed highly significant TTVs, and 13 that had short-period TTV modulations with small amplitudes. We consider two effects that could cause apparent periodic TTV - the finite sampling of the observations and the interference with the stellar activity, stellar spots in particular. We briefly discuss some statistical aspects of our detected TTVs. We show that the TTV period is correlated with the orbital period of the planet and with the TTV amplitude.Comment: Accepted for publication to ApJ. 57 pages, 23 Figures. Machine readable catalogs are available at ftp://wise-ftp.tau.ac.il/pub/tauttv/TT

Police use traffic stops as a form of ‘catch and release’ to disproportionately target Black Americans

It is well known that Black Americans are targeted more often by police in traffic stops. But what happens after they are stopped? In new research, Joshua Chanin, Megan Welsh, and Dana Nurge reviewed nearly 260,000 traffic stop records from the San Diego Police Department, finding that Blacks were more likely than Whites to be subject to field interrogation interviews, but were no more likely to be arrested, and were less likely to receive a citation. This suggests that police traffic stops can be a form of racially biased ‘catch and release’, which are likely to do little to improve trust between Black communities and the police

Kepler eclipsing binary stars. VII. the catalogue of eclipsing binaries found in the entire Kepler data set

The primary Kepler Mission provided nearly continuous monitoring of ~200,000 objects with unprecedented photometric precision. We present the final catalog of eclipsing binary systems within the 105 deg2 Kepler field of view. This release incorporates the full extent of the data from the primary mission (Q0-Q17 Data Release). As a result, new systems have been added, additional false positives have been removed, ephemerides and principal parameters have been recomputed, classifications have been revised to rely on analytical models, and eclipse timing variations have been computed for each system. We identify several classes of systems including those that exhibit tertiary eclipse events, systems that show clear evidence of additional bodies, heartbeat systems, systems with changing eclipse depths, and systems exhibiting only one eclipse event over the duration of the mission. We have updated the period and galactic latitude distribution diagrams and included a catalog completeness evaluation. The total number of identified eclipsing and ellipsoidal binary systems in the Kepler field of view has increased to 2878, 1.3% of all observed Kepler targets