Patch by Patch: North Carolina\u27s Crazy Quilt of Campaign Finance Regulations

After more than a decade of judicial intervention and legislative reforms, North Carolina\u27s campaign finance laws resemble a crazy quilt - a patchwork of provisions pieced together from remnants and scraps. The law is a dizzying array of proscriptions, requirements, and exceptions, sometimes based on speaker identity and sometimes based on the content or context of the political message. This quilt is what remained after the Fourth Circuit\u27s strained and confusing decision in North Carolina Right to Life, Inc. v. Leake, decided in 2008, immediately following the Supreme Court\u27s landmark decision in McConnell v. FEC. This Comment evaluates and summarizes North Carolina\u27s existing campaign finance regulations, provides a critical analysis of both the state of the law and of the Fourth Circuit\u27s decision in North Carolina Right to Life, Inc. v. Leake, and offers a suggested analytical framework for future judicial review of campaign finance regulations

Spatial Patterns in Mass Balance of the Siple Coast and Amundsen Sea Sectors, West Antarctica

Local rates of change in ice-sheet thickness were calculated at IS sites in West Antarctica using the submergence velocity technique. This method entails a comparison of the vertical velocity of the ice sheet, measured using repeat global positioning system surveys of markers, and local long-term rates of snow accumulation obtained using firn-core stratigraphy. Any significant difference between these two quantities represents a thickness change with time. Measurements were conducted at sites located similar to 100-200 km apart along US ITASE traverse routes, and at several isolated locations. All but one of the sites are distributed in the Siple Coast and the Amundsen Sea basin along contours of constant elevation, along flowlines, across ice divides and close to regions of enhanced flow. Calculated rates of thickness change are different from site to site. Most of the large rates of change in ice thickness (similar to 10 cm a(-1) or larger) are observed in or close to regions of rapid flow, and are probably related to ice-dynamics effects. Near-steady-state conditions are calculated mostly at sites in the slow-moving ice-sheet interior and near the main West Antarctic ice divide. These results are consistent with regional estimates of ice-sheet change derived from remote-sensing measurements at similar locations in West Antarctica

Electronic structure and effects of dynamical electron correlation in ferromagnetic bcc-Fe, fcc-Ni and antiferromagnetic NiO

LDA+DMFT method in the framework of the iterative perturbation theory (IPT) with full LDA Hamiltonian without mapping onto the effective Wannier orbitals. We then apply this LDA+DMFT method to ferromagnetic bcc-Fe and fcc-Ni as a test of transition metal, and to antiferromagnetic NiO as an example of transition metal oxide. In Fe and Ni, the width of occupied 3d bands is narrower than those in LDA and Ni 6eV satellite appears. In NiO, the resultant electronic structure is of charge-transfer insulator type and the band gap is 4.3eV. These results are in good agreement with the experimental XPS. The configuration mixing and dynamical correlation effects play a crucial role in these results

Experimental application of sum rules for electron energy loss magnetic chiral dichroism

We present a derivation of the orbital and spin sum rules for magnetic circular dichroic spectra measured by electron energy loss spectroscopy in a transmission electron microscope. These sum rules are obtained from the differential cross section calculated for symmetric positions in the diffraction pattern. Orbital and spin magnetic moments are expressed explicitly in terms of experimental spectra and dynamical diffraction coefficients. We estimate the ratio of spin to orbital magnetic moments and discuss first experimental results for the Fe L_{2,3} edge.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

An asymptotic form of the reciprocity theorem with applications in x-ray scattering

The emission of electromagnetic waves from a source within or near a non-trivial medium (with or without boundaries, crystalline or amorphous, with inhomogeneities, absorption and so on) is sometimes studied using the reciprocity principle. This is a variation of the method of Green's functions. If one is only interested in the asymptotic radiation fields the generality of these methods may actually be a shortcoming: obtaining expressions valid for the uninteresting near fields is not just a wasted effort but may be prohibitively difficult. In this work we obtain a modified form the reciprocity principle which gives the asymptotic radiation field directly. The method may be used to obtain the radiation from a prescribed source, and also to study scattering problems. To illustrate the power of the method we study a few pedagogical examples and then, as a more challenging application we tackle two related problems. We calculate the specular reflection of x rays by a rough surface and by a smoothly graded surface taking polarization effects into account. In conventional treatments of reflection x rays are treated as scalar waves, polarization effects are neglected. This is a good approximation at grazing incidence but becomes increasingly questionable for soft x rays and UV at higher incidence angles. PACs: 61.10.Dp, 61.10.Kw, 03.50.DeComment: 19 pages, 4 figure