A discriminating probe of gravity at cosmological scales

The standard cosmological model is based on general relativity and includes dark matter and dark energy. An important prediction of this model is a fixed relationship between the gravitational potentials responsible for gravitational lensing and the matter overdensity. Alternative theories of gravity often make different predictions for this relationship. We propose a set of measurements which can test the lensing/matter relationship, thereby distinguishing between dark energy/matter models and models in which gravity differs from general relativity. Planned optical, infrared and radio galaxy and lensing surveys will be able to measure $E_G$, an observational quantity whose expectation value is equal to the ratio of the Laplacian of the Newtonian potentials to the peculiar velocity divergence, to percent accuracy. We show that this will easily separate alternatives such as $\Lambda$CDM, DGP, TeVeS and $f(R)$ gravity.Comment: v2: minor revisions in the main text, fig, table and references. Slightly longer than the PRL version in press. V3: update the figure (minor change due to a coding bug. No other change

Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2014

A joint effort by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in schools and colleges. This report presents data on crime at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population from an array of sources--the National Crime Victimization Survey, the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the School Survey on Crime and Safety, the Schools and Staffing Survey, EDFacts, and the Campus Safety and Security Survey. The report covers topics such as victimization, bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, the presence of security staff at school, availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, student perceptions of personal safety at school, and criminal incidents at postsecondary institutions

The Constant Paradox: Constancy, Genre, and Literary Tradition in the English Civil Wars

This dissertation interrogates writers’ references to “constancy” during the English civil wars, reading the debate surrounding this vexed and multifarious term as indicative of a broader examination of constancy as a concept. Through generic case studies of the emblem book, prose romance, epic, and country house poem, I show how writers used constancy’s semantic and contextual slippage to participate in key debates of the civil wars; Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert, John Milton, Thomas Carew, Mildmay Fane, and Andrew Marvell deploy constancy as they intervene in civil war polemic surrounding kingship, property ownership, liturgy, and England’s relationship with the wider world. These cases, I argue, show the interaction between writers’ reevaluation of constancy and their reevaluation of inherited literary traditions. In interrogating constancy, writers articulate and even inspire innovation in literary genre, thereby demonstrating not the destruction of literary form during the civil wars, but writers’ ability to accommodate established literary tradition to dynamic religiopolitical circumstances

On Interactive Coding Schemes with Adaptive Termination

In interactive coding, Alice and Bob wish to compute some function $f$ of their individual private inputs $x$ and $y$. They do this by engaging in an interactive protocol to jointly compute $f(x,y)$. The goal is to do this in an error-resilient way, such that even given some fraction of adversarial corruptions to the protocol, both parties still learn $f(x,y)$. Typically, the error resilient protocols constructed by interactive coding schemes are \emph{non-adaptive}, that is, the length of the protocol as well as the speaker in each round is fixed beforehand. The maximal error resilience obtainable by non-adaptive schemes is now well understood. In order to circumvent known barriers and achieve higher error resilience, the work of Agrawal, Gelles, and Sahai (ISIT 2016) introduced to interactive coding the notion of \emph{adaptive} schemes, where the length of the protocol or the speaker order are no longer necessarily fixed. In this paper, we study the power of \emph{adaptive termination} in the context of the error resilience of interactive coding schemes. In other words, what is the power of schemes where Alice and Bob are allowed to disengage from the protocol early? We study this question in two contexts, both for the task of \emph{message exchange}, where the goal is to learn the other party's input