Direct Imaging At 12 Microns Of The Star-Forming Region W51 IRS-2

Astronom

Designing behaviourally informed policies for land stewardship: A new paradigm

This paper argues the case for a new approach to the stewardship of land resources that uses behavioural science theory to support the design and application of policies that facilitate changes in behaviour by those who develop policy and the farmers who implement it. Current approaches have: focused on legally-based expert system; and have been devised by national and international bureaucracies with little or no knowledge of how land owners and managers are motivated, and how they think, behave and operate as stewards of their natural resources. A review of current approaches from the social scientific literature is provided, with a particular focus on principles from social psychology. This is followed by an examination of how these principles can be applied to influence behaviour related to land restoration and soil conservation. Examples of the problems with traditional approaches and the evolution of new approaches with full engagement of farmers as the delivery agents are provided from within the European Union, Iceland and Scotland. In the light of these examples and emerging thinking in other parts of the world, the paper sets out the basis for a new approach based on behavioural science theory and application, reinforcing the arguments already made in the literature for a social license for farming

Extracting Radial Velocities of A- and B-type Stars from Echelle Spectrograph Calibration Spectra

We present a technique to extract radial velocity measurements from echelle spectrograph observations of rapidly rotating stars ($V\sin{i} \gtrsim 50$ km s$^{-1}$). This type of measurement is difficult because the line widths of such stars are often comparable to the width of a single echelle order. To compensate for the scarcity of lines and Doppler information content, we have developed a process that forward-models the observations, fitting the radial velocity shift of the star for all echelle orders simultaneously with the echelle blaze function. We use our technique to extract radial velocity measurements from a sample of rapidly rotating A- and B-type stars used as calibrator stars observed by the California Planet Survey observations. We measure absolute radial velocities with a precision ranging from 0.5-2.0 km s$^{-1}$ per epoch for more than 100 A- and B-type stars. In our sample of 10 well-sampled stars with radial velocity scatter in excess of their measurement uncertainties, three of these are single-lined binaries with long observational baselines. From this subsample, we present detections of two previously unknown spectroscopic binaries and one known astrometric system. Our technique will be useful in measuring or placing upper limits on the masses of sub-stellar companions discovered by wide-field transit surveys, and conducting future spectroscopic binarity surveys and Galactic space-motion studies of massive and/or young, rapidly-rotating stars.Comment: Accepted to ApJ

Employees, Firm Size and Profitability of U.S. Manufacturing Industries

We examine the relation between firm size and profitability within 109 SIC four-digit manufacturing industries. Depending on our measure of profitability, we find that profitability increases at a decreasing rate and eventually declines in up to 47 of our industries. No relation between profitability and size is found in up to 52 of our industries. These two categories account for 97 of our 109 industries. Profitability continues to increase as firms become larger in up to 11 industries. Hence, the relation between size and profitability is industry specific. But, regardless of the shape of the size profitability function, we find that profitability is negatively correlated with the number of employees for firms of a given size measured in terms of total assets and sales. These results are puzzling in the context of work by others who report that common stock returns are negatively correlated with size when size is measured by the market value of a company or with the work of those who argue that size is a proxy for risk. Interpreted against these works, our findings may mean that large firms earn excess returns, that small firms fail to earn their cost of capital, or that accounting returns simply behave differently than market returns with respect to firm size