Receipt from Peter J. Burke & Co. to Ogden Goelet

https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/goelet-new-york/1035/thumbnail.jp

The XO Planetary Survey Project - Astrophysical False Positives

Searches for planetary transits find many astrophysical false positives as a by-product. There are four main types analyzed in the literature: a grazing-incidence eclipsing binary star, an eclipsing binary star with a small radius companion star, a blend of one or more stars with an unrelated eclipsing binary star, and a physical triple star system. We present a list of 69 astrophysical false positives that had been identified as candidates of transiting planets of the on-going XO survey. This list may be useful in order to avoid redundant observation and characterization of these particular candidates independently identified by other wide-field searches for transiting planets. The list may be useful for those modeling the yield of the XO survey and surveys similar to it. Subsequent observations of some of the listed stars may improve mass-radius relations, especially for low-mass stars. From the candidates exhibiting eclipses, we report three new spectroscopic double-line binaries and give mass function estimations for 15 single lined spectroscopic binaries.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, accepted to ApJ

The Interacting Branching Process as a Simple Model of Innovation

We describe innovation in terms of a generalized branching process. Each new invention pairs with any existing one to produce a number of offspring, which is Poisson distributed with mean p. Existing inventions die with probability p/\tau at each generation. In contrast to mean field results, no phase transition occurs; the chance for survival is finite for all p > 0. For \tau = \infty, surviving processes exhibit a bottleneck before exploding super-exponentially - a growth consistent with a law of accelerating returns. This behavior persists for finite \tau. We analyze, in detail, the asymptotic behavior as p \to 0.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The land ‘flow[ing] … with milk and honey’: Cultural landscape

This paper examines the cultural landscape of Peel town, a transient camp occupied for a short time in 1829–1830 during the Swan River settlement’s initial colonisation phase. The camp comprised indentured free colonists from Britain under the leadership of Thomas Peel. The research described shows that the camp’s layout altered over time as disease, low morale and the addition of further colonists from Britain into the camp area eroded the predetermined ideas of class segregation and the control of resources, seriously affecting the leadership group’s ability to maintain authority

Testing facial composite construction under witness stress

Facial composite systems may be used by police to help a witness to a crime create a likeness of the perpetrator. Evaluation of new facial composite systems in the laboratory allows a measure of experimental control, but lacks the emotional impact of a real crime. As a step towards a more realistic level of stress for our participant witnesses, we presented target face images while they were engaged in playing an action thriller computer game. The quality of the composites they subsequently produced was compared with that of a second ‘onlooker' participant, who merely observed the game and had the same view of the target face. Heart rate monitoring confirmed that the players were more stressed than the onlookers while the recognition rate of the onlooker composites was twice as good. We conclude that the method holds some promise as a method for composite system evaluation