The Risks and Weaknesses of the International Criminal Court from America’s Perspective

Bolton argues the US should raise its objections to the International Criminal Court (ICC) on every appropriate occasion, as part of its larger campaign to assert American interests against stifling, illegitimate, and unacceptable international agreements. The US has many alternative foreign policy instruments to utilize that are fully consistent with US interests, leaving the ICC to the obscurity it richly deserves

A study of methods to predict and measure the transmission of sound through the walls of light aircraft

The objectives are: measurement of dynamic properties of acoustical foams and incorporation of these properties in models governing three-dimensional wave propagation in foams; tests to measure sound transmission paths in the HP137 Jetstream 3; and formulation of a finite element energy model. In addition, the effort to develop a numerical/empirical noise source identification technique was completed. The investigation of a design optimization technique for active noise control was also completed. Monthly progress reports which detail the progress made toward each of the objectives are summarized

Photo-heating and the fate of hard photons during the reionisation of HeII by quasars

We use a combination of analytic and numerical arguments to consider the impact of quasar photo-heating during HeII reionisation on the thermal evolution of the intergalactic medium (IGM). We demonstrate that rapid (\Delta z 10^4 K) photo-heating is difficult to achieve across the entire IGM unless quasar spectra are significantly harder than implied by current observational constraints. Although filtering of intrinsic quasar radiation through dense regions in the IGM does increase the mean excess energy per HeII photo-ionisation, it also weakens the radiation intensity and lowers the photo-ionisation rate, preventing rapid heating over time intervals shorter than the local photo-ionisation timescale. Moreover, the hard photons responsible for the strongest heating are more likely to deposit their energy inside dense clumps. The abundance of such clumps is, however, uncertain and model-dependent, leading to a fairly large uncertainty in the photo-heating rates. Nevertheless, although some of the IGM may be exposed to a hardened and weakened ionising background for long periods, most of the IGM must instead be reionised by the more abundant, softer photons and with accordingly modest heating rates (\Delta T < 10^4 K). The repeated ionisation of fossil quasar HeIII regions does not increase the net heating because the recombination times in these regions typically exceed the IGM cooling times and the average time lag between successive rounds of quasar activity. Detailed line-of-sight radiative transfer simulations confirm these expectations and predict a rich thermal structure in the IGM during HeII reionisation. [Abridged]Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, accepted by MNRA

Fire extinguishing apparatus having a slidable mass for a penetrator nozzle

A fire extinguishing apparatus for delivering an extinguishing agent through a tarrier surrounding a structure into its interior includes an elongated tubular nozzle body which has a pointed penetrating head carried on one end of the tubular body. A source of extinguishing agent coupled to the opposite end of the tubular body is fed through and passes through passages adjacent the head for delivering the extinguishing agent to the interior of the structure. A slidable mass is carried on the tubular body on a remote end of the tubular body from the penetrating head. By manipulating the slidable mass and bringing such in contact with an abutment the force imparted to the tubular body causes the head to penetrate the structure

Quantifying the Biases of Spectroscopically Selected Gravitational Lenses

Spectroscopic selection has been the most productive technique for the selection of galaxy-scale strong gravitational lens systems with known redshifts. Statistically significant samples of strong lenses provide a powerful method for measuring the mass-density parameters of the lensing population, but results can only be generalized to the parent population if the lensing selection biases are sufficiently understood. We perform controlled Monte Carlo simulations of spectroscopic lens surveys in order to quantify the bias of lenses relative to parent galaxies in velocity dispersion, mass axis ratio, and mass density profile. For parameters typical of the SLACS and BELLS surveys, we find: (1) no significant mass axis ratio detection bias of lenses relative to parent galaxies; (2) a very small detection bias toward shallow mass density profiles, which is likely negligible compared to other sources of uncertainty in this parameter; (3) a detection bias towards smaller Einstein radius for systems drawn from parent populations with group- and cluster-scale lensing masses; and (4) a lens-modeling bias towards larger velocity dispersions for systems drawn from parent samples with sub-arcsecond mean Einstein radii. This last finding indicates that the incorporation of velocity-dispersion upper limits of \textit{non-lenses} is an important ingredient for unbiased analyses of spectroscopically selected lens samples. In general we find that the completeness of spectroscopic lens surveys in the plane of Einstein radius and mass-density profile power-law index is quite uniform, up to a sharp drop in the region of large Einstein radius and steep mass density profile, and hence that such surveys are ideally suited to the study of massive field galaxies.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophys. J., June 7, 2012. In press. 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl