A Technique of Direct Tension Measurement of a Strung Fine Wire

We present a new technique of direct measurement of wire tensions in wire chambers. A specially designed circuit plucks the wire using the Lorentz force and measures the frequency of damped transverse oscillations of the wire. The technique avoids the usual time-consuming necessity of tuning circuit parameter to a resonance. It allows a fast and convenient determination of tensions and is straightforward to implement.Comment: 15 pages with 9 figure

The Ex Ante Function of the Criminal Law

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the ex ante function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of majoritarian states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized. A legal code in a complex society is designed to have several functions. First, it is designed to announce beforehand the rules by which citizens must conduct themselves, on pain of criminal punishment. Second, if a person violates one of these rules of conduct, the criminal law must determine whether the violator is to be held criminally liable. Third, another part of its adjudicatory function, where liability is imposed the law must determine the general range, or grade, of punishment to be imposed. It is the first function that is of interest to us here, the so-called ex ante function of the criminal law. The code announces in advance what actions count as criminal; thus the citizenry can use the announcement to guide their actions to avoid criminal conduct. The law, in other words, draws bright lines between allowable and unallowable conduct, and those lines enable the citizens to regulate their conduct so they do not break the laws. To use a familiar metaphor, the criminal law specifies what sorts of actions are out of bounds, and the penalties for those actions, so the players will stay in bounds. The criminal justice system relies on people knowing the law and knowing where the boundaries for their conduct lie. Ignorance does not excuse unlawful conduct, a fact summarized in the phrase ignorance of the law is no excuse. Such a rule is defended as a useful means of creating an incentive for citizens to learn the law. Available for download at http://ssrn.com/abstract=66206

Locations for Children: school and orphanages in Bergamo and Bologna in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This essay briefly reviews the essential historiography of the history of childhood, especially that in the English language, before turning to examples of schools and orphanages in Bergamo and Bologna. The Caspi Academy of Bergamo, founded 1547 as a private elementary boarding school, and a pedagogical treatise published by schoolmaster Giovita Ravizza in Venice in 1551, represent two brief case studies that show the surprising range of education in sixteenth-century northern Italy. For orphanages, the Orphanage of S. Martino in Bergamo, founded 1532 by the Venetian patrician Girolamo Miani, provided destitute children with housing, education, and career training. A second example is the Collegio Panolini of Bologna, endowed in 1585 by a wealthy silk merchant, named Francesco Panolini, and realized in 1632. This small residential college was created specifically for orphans, and offered sixteen years of training, culminating in a university degree and/or an ecclesiastical position with the Catholic Church. Children faced a multitude of dangers and obstacles in early modern Italy; while schools and orphanages were far from perfect, they did offer a safe haven to keep children off the streets and out of danger

The paradoxical consequences of revenge

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances, revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender, whereas those who do not punish "move on" and think less about the offender, and (b) people fail to appreciate the different affective consequences of witnessing and instigating punishment

The paradoxical consequences of revenge

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances, revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender, whereas those who do not punish "move on" and think less about the offender, and (b) people fail to appreciate the different affective consequences of witnessing and instigating punishment

Aligning the CMS Muon Endcap Detector with a System of Optical Sensors

The positions and orientations of one sixth of 468 large cathode strip chambers in the endcaps of the CMS muon detector are directly monitored by several hundred sensors including 2-D optical sensors with linear CCDs illuminated by cross-hair lasers. Position measurements obtained by photogrammetry and survey under field-off conditions show that chambers in the +Z endcap have been placed on the yoke disks with an average accuracy of $\approx 1$ mm in all 3 dimensions. We reconstruct absolute Z$_{CMS}$ positions and orientations of chambers at B=0T and B=4T using data from the optical alignment system. The measured position resolution and sensitivity to relative motion is about 60 $\mu m$. The precision for measuring chamber positions taking into account mechanical tolerances is \mbox{$\approx 270 \mu m$}. Comparing reconstruction of optical alignment data and photogrammetry measurements at B=0T indicates an accuracy of $\approx$ 680 $\mu m$ currently achieved with the hardware alignment system. Optical position measurements at B=4T show significant chamber displacements of up to 13 mm due to yoke disk deformation

Simulations of events for the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment

The LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter search aims to achieve a sensitivity to the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross-section down to (1–2)×10−12 pb at a WIMP mass of 40 GeV/c2. This paper describes the simulations framework that, along with radioactivity measurements, was used to support this projection, and also to provide mock data for validating reconstruction and analysis software. Of particular note are the event generators, which allow us to model the background radiation, and the detector response physics used in the production of raw signals, which can be converted into digitized waveforms similar to data from the operational detector. Inclusion of the detector response allows us to process simulated data using the same analysis routines as developed to process the experimental data

Projected WIMP sensitivity of the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter experiment

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a next-generation dark matter direct detection experiment that will operate 4850 feet underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, USA. Using a two-phase xenon detector with an active mass of 7 tonnes, LZ will search primarily for low-energy interactions with weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are hypothesized to make up the dark matter in our galactic halo. In this paper, the projected WIMP sensitivity of LZ is presented based on the latest background estimates and simulations of the detector. For a 1000 live day run using a 5.6-tonne fiducial mass, LZ is projected to exclude at 90% confidence level spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross sections above 1.4×10-48 cm2 for a 40 GeV/c2 mass WIMP. Additionally, a 5σ discovery potential is projected, reaching cross sections below the exclusion limits of recent experiments. For spin-dependent WIMP-neutron(-proton) scattering, a sensitivity of 2.3×10-43 cm2 (7.1×10-42 cm2) for a 40 GeV/c2 mass WIMP is expected. With underground installation well underway, LZ is on track for commissioning at SURF in 2020