The impact of libraries on learning, teaching and research. Report of the LIRG seminar held in October 2001.

What makes a good academic library? Those of us who work in academic libraries know that we need to be able to demonstrate value for money. The Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) has recently organised two seminars on the effective academic library. These have been concerned with how we measure the performance of an academic library

The differential impact of mortality of American troops in the Iraq War: The non-metropolitan dimension

This study investigates the disproportionate impact of mortality among United States troops in Iraq on rural communities. We advance scholarly research and popular accounts that suggest a non-metropolitan disadvantage by disaggregating the risk of mortality according to the metropolitan status of their home county and by examining potential sources of variation, including enlistment, rank and race or ethnicity. Results show that troops from non-metropolitan areas have higher mortality after accounting for the disproportionate enlistment of non-metropolitan youth, and the non-metropolitan disadvantage generally persists across military branch and rank. Moreover, most of the differential is due to higher risks of mortality for non-metropolitan African American and Hispanic military personnel, compared to metropolitan enlistees of the same race or ethnicity.ethnicity, Iraq War, military, military mortality, mortality, non-metropolitan impact, race/ethnicity

First order resonance overlap and the stability of close two planet systems

Motivated by the population of multi-planet systems with orbital period ratios 1<P2/P1<2, we study the long-term stability of packed two planet systems. The Hamiltonian for two massive planets on nearly circular and nearly coplanar orbits near a first order mean motion resonance can be reduced to a one degree of freedom problem (Sessin & Ferraz Mello (1984), Wisdom (1986), Henrard et al. (1986)). Using this analytically tractable Hamiltonian, we apply the resonance overlap criterion to predict the onset of large scale chaotic motion in close two planet systems. The reduced Hamiltonian has only a weak dependence on the planetary mass ratio, and hence the overlap criterion is independent of the planetary mass ratio at lowest order. Numerical integrations confirm that the planetary mass ratio has little effect on the structure of the chaotic phase space for close orbits in the low eccentricity (e <~0.1) regime. We show numerically that orbits in the chaotic web produced primarily by first order resonance overlap eventually experience large scale erratic variation in semimajor axes and are Lagrange unstable. This is also true of the orbits in this overlap region which are Hill stable. As a result, we can use the first order resonance overlap criterion as an effective stability criterion for pairs of observed planets. We show that for low mass (<~10 M_Earth) planetary systems with initially circular orbits the period ratio at which complete overlap occurs and widespread chaos results lies in a region of parameter space which is Hill stable. Our work indicates that a resonance overlap criterion which would apply for initially eccentric orbits needs to take into account second order resonances. Finally, we address the connection found in previous work between the Hill stability criterion and numerically determined Lagrange instability boundaries in the context of resonance overlap.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Acknowledgement

When I was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest (JOLPI) this spring, I was both thrilled and terrified. The Journal has been increasingly successful in recent years: recruiting large classes of staff members, organizing well-attended symposia, and publishing a record number of issues. The goals the new Editorial Board inherited were lofty ones, including maintaining our recent successes, while adding a new issue in a new medium. The issue that you are reading- the inaugural edition of The General Assembly in Review-is the happy result of those two goals. With this issue, JOLPI takes its place as one of the few Journals at the University of Richmond Law School to publish in print. The costs and efforts associated with this achievement are great and are a testament to both the school\u27s faith in the Journal and the Journal\u27s faith in itself

Acknowledgment

The Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest has had a very successful-if very busy-year. At the end of the summer, we published The General Assembly in Review, which was the Journal\u27s first issue published in print. In the fall, we published an issue dedicated to campaign finance reform to correspond with the presidential election. We also hosted a public symposium on this topic, with two experts debating the merits of recent campaign finance reform measures. In the winter, we published an issue dealing with health care reform. And in the spring, we published an issue focused on family law, dedicated to one of the University\u27s most respected professors, Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. Now, we end this volume with our annual publication of The General Assembly in Review, which details the 2009 session of the Virginia General Assembly

Acknowledgement

When I was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest (JOLPI) this spring, I was both thrilled and terrified. The Journal has been increasingly successful in recent years: recruiting large classes of staff members, organizing well-attended symposia, and publishing a record number of issues. The goals the new Editorial Board inherited were lofty ones, including maintaining our recent successes, while adding a new issue in a new medium. The issue that you are reading- the inaugural edition of The General Assembly in Review-is the happy result of those two goals. With this issue, JOLPI takes its place as one of the few Journals at the University of Richmond Law School to publish in print. The costs and efforts associated with this achievement are great and are a testament to both the school\u27s faith in the Journal and the Journal\u27s faith in itself

Acknowledgment

The Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest has had a very successful-if very busy-year. At the end of the summer, we published The General Assembly in Review, which was the Journal\u27s first issue published in print. In the fall, we published an issue dedicated to campaign finance reform to correspond with the presidential election. We also hosted a public symposium on this topic, with two experts debating the merits of recent campaign finance reform measures. In the winter, we published an issue dealing with health care reform. And in the spring, we published an issue focused on family law, dedicated to one of the University\u27s most respected professors, Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. Now, we end this volume with our annual publication of The General Assembly in Review, which details the 2009 session of the Virginia General Assembly

People's perceptions and classifications of sounds heard in urban parks : semantics, affect and restoration

Sounds have been broadly categorized by researchers into ‘human’, ‘nature’ and ‘mechanical’. It is less clear if the general public define and classify sounds in the same way and which factors influence their classification process. Establishing people’s classification and impression of urban park sounds helps identify their perception and experience of urban parks. This in turn aides the process of defining parks with reference to soundscapes, to produce an appreciated and potentially restorative place. This study involved urban park sounds, identified by park users, being presented in card sorts and survey items. Participants sorted the sounds into similar groups, in reference to a visited park. The terminology, factors involved and classification of the sounds was assessed using multidimensional scaling. Triangulation of the results suggests affect is a key factor in people’s classification process. Participants’ grouped sounds were labelled by affective terms more often than their perceived physical properties. Affective evaluations of each sound produced a similar classification structure as the card sort results. People’s classification structure also varied depending on how restorative they found their urban park. Furthermore schematic recollections played a part with many sounds being ‘expected’. Overall similarities and differences with ‘human’, ‘nature’ and ‘mechanical’ classifications were observed

The impact of libraries on learning, teaching and research. Report of the LIRG seminar held in October 2001.

What makes a good academic library? Those of us who work in academic libraries know that we need to be able to demonstrate value for money. The Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) has recently organised two seminars on the effective academic library. These have been concerned with how we measure the performance of an academic library

Stability of Satellites in Closely Packed Planetary Systems

We perform numerical integrations of four-body (star, planet, planet, satellite) systems to investigate the stability of satellites in planetary Systems with Tightly-packed Inner Planets (STIPs). We find that the majority of closely-spaced stable two-planet systems can stably support satellites across a range of parameter-space which is only slightly decreased compared to that seen for the single-planet case. In particular, circular prograde satellites remain stable out to $\sim 0.4 R_H$ (where $R_H$ is the Hill Radius) as opposed to $\sim 0.5 R_H$ in the single-planet case. A similarly small restriction in the stable parameter-space for retrograde satellites is observed, where planetary close approaches in the range 2.5 to 4.5 mutual Hill radii destabilize most satellites orbits only if $a\sim 0.65 R_H$. In very close planetary pairs (e.g. the 12:11 resonance) the addition of a satellite frequently destabilizes the entire system, causing extreme close-approaches and the loss of satellites over a range of circumplanetary semi-major axes. The majority of systems investigated stably harbored satellites over a wide parameter-space, suggesting that STIPs can generally offer a dynamically stable home for satellites, albeit with a slightly smaller stable parameter-space than the single-planet case. As we demonstrate that multi-planet systems are not a priori poor candidates for hosting satellites, future measurements of satellite occurrence rates in multi-planet systems versus single-planet systems could be used to constrain either satellite formation or past periods of strong dynamical interaction between planets.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication, ApJ