Feasibility of transit photometry of nearby debris discs

Dust in debris discs is constantly replenished by collisions between larger objects. In this paper, we investigate a method to detect these collisions. We generate models based on recent results on the Fomalhaut debris disc, where we simulate a background star transiting behind the disc, due to the proper motion of Fomalhaut. By simulating the expanding dust clouds caused by the collisions in the debris disc, we investigate whether it is possible to observe changes in the brightness of the background star. We conclude that in the case of the Fomalhaut debris disc, changes in the optical depth can be observed, with values of the optical depth ranging from $10^{-0.5}$ for the densest dust clouds to $10^{-8}$ for the most diffuse clouds with respect to the background optical depth of $\sim1.2\times10^{-3}$.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

In European public health we trust?

It is now 3 months since the British people voted narrowly to leave the European Union (EU). The absence of any agreement on what the alternative is, or a coherent plan to achieve it means that this may not actually happen. However, the resulting uncertainty creates major challenges, not only for the UK, which has suffered immediate economic damage, but also for the rest of Europe.peer-reviewe

Cultural Explorations of Time and Space: Indigenous Australian Artists-in Residence, Conventional Narratives and Children’s Text Creation

This paper details a project, funded by the University of Ballarat in Victoria, which addresses a local problem of schools' lack of acknowledgement of their being positioned on traditional owners' land. In addressing this issue, I am using two texts, 'My Place' (Wheatley and Rawlins 1987) and 'Who am I? The Diary of Mary Talence' (Heiss 2004) to engage the participants in discussions to make visible what has been invisible; that is, the issue of traditional Indigenous Australian ownership of the land on which the school is placed. Taking up notions of deconstruction from poststructuralist theory, I have looked to these texts as ways of disrupting the taken-for-granted occupation of public space, that is, I examine the language used to position the readers and 'yield up the ideologies that inform them' (Bradford 2001, p.9). I will then ask participants to use these understandings to look at their own situation in relation to the space their school occupies. What is examined in this project is the current state of affairs, where the land occupied by schools is owned by the state, and, notionally at least, by the school community of various stakeholders with no sense even of an Indigenous Australian perspective on ways in which relationships with the land may go well beyond concepts of ownership. The project referred to in this paper has not concluded, so I do not report here on any changes that may have occurred. Rather, I report on how I envisage the texts are to be used to make visible issues of land ownership and how and why these particular texts can contribute to this

Civil Society Organizations' Participation in the EU and Its Challenges for Democratic Representation

"Online consultations and the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) are tools that have been put into place by the European Union (EU) in order to increase the participation of citizens and Civil Society Organizations (CSO) in its politics and policy making. The current CSO representation at the system level of the EU is claimed to be biased in favor of the interests of economic producers and CSOs coming from old member states. The central question of this article is whether these tools help make participation more representative of the diversity of societal groups within the EU. The concept of 'actor representativeness' as well as 'discourse representativeness' will be applied in order to answer this question." (author's abstract

What drives the politicization of ART in Western and Northern European countries?

Engeli et al. (2012) developed the “two worlds of morality politics theory” (TWMP) in order to explain why morality issues in some Western European countries are addressed in the arena of parliamentary politics and lead to passionate debates between political parties, whereas in other countries, these are left to expert committees to decide on in relative silence. As ART also counts as a morality issue, first, this chapter will address the question of whether this theory also fits with some of the cases of ART policy making as addressed in our compilation. The TWMP’s hypothesis that a religious-secular cleavage in the party system drives the politicization of morality issues is confirmed – more or less – by comparing the Dutch and the Austrian country cases – both belonging to the religious world – with the Swedish. However, the Austrian case offers a puzzle, as in comparison to the Dutch case, it shows a much lower degree of politicization of ART issues. Second, this chapter tries to solve this puzzle by addressing insights about wedge issue politics.<br/

Intermittency generated by attracting and weakly repelling fixed points

Recently for a class of critically intermittent random systems a phase transition was found for the finiteness of the absolutely continuous invariant measure. The systems for which this result holds are characterized by the interplay between a superexponentially attracting fixed point and an exponentially repelling fixed point. In this article we consider a closely related family of random systems with instead exponentially fast attraction to and polynomially fast repulsion from two fixed points, and show that such a phase transition still exists. The method of the proof however is different and relies on the construction of a suitable invariant set for the transfer operator.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure