You only have to look at the US and Brazil to see if the genie of inequality is let out the bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in again – James Crabtree

Former Mumbai bureau chief for the Financial Times and LSE alumnus, James Crabtree sat down with the editor of SouthAsia@LSE, Christopher Finnigan to discuss his new book The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, and the state of income inequality, crony capitalism and corruption in India

Four units in mythology for use in English classes in grades eight and nine

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1948. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Illusory Rights: The Missouri Approach to Employment Contracts

In Main v. Skaggs Community Hospital, the Southern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals concluded that pursuant to the employment at will doctrine in Missouri, such agreements do not confer contractual rights.This Note explores the history of the Missouri employment at will doctrine and the ramifications of the Main v. Skaggs Community Hospital decision

Updates from the Global Dataverse Community Consortium (GDCC)

Academic presentation at Dataverse Community Meeting 2022, 14.06.22 - 16.06.22

Exoplanet telescope diffracted light minimized: the pinwheel-pupil solution

Terrestrial exoplanets shine in light reflected from a parent star. Optical spectra are required to provide evidence of a life-supporting environment. Exoplanets are very faint and their optical spectra are contaminated by the spectrum of the parent star. High angular resolution provided by large apertures is needed to distinguish between the spectrum of the exoplanet and its star. Today, large aperture telescopes use segmented primary mirrors that employ close-packed hexagonal segments. The telescope primary mirror is periodically discontinuous with straight lines. These discontinuities scatter unwanted radiation from the much brighter parent star across the field of view to obscure the light from the very faint terrestrial exoplanet. These discontinuities, which mimic a diffraction grating, result in a non-uniform distribution of background light across the image plane. This non-uniformity masks or hides exoplanets from view, to reduce the number of exoplanets that can be observed with a large aperture telescope or to reduce the quality of spectra and thus lead to misinterpretation of data. Here we introduce the concept of the pinwheel pupil whose unique diffraction pattern significantly reduces the non-uniform distribution of background radiation. Diffraction patterns from pinwheel pupils are compared to the monolithic filled aperture, the classical Cassegrain, the 60-degree symmetry of the hexagonal segments (JWST, E-ELT, etc.). Diffraction “spikes” are reduced by at least 105. We discuss the “pinwheel pupil” advantages to spectroscopy, image processing, and observatory operations. We show that, segment fabrication of curved-sided mirrors is not more difficult than fabrication of hexagonal mirror segments. . This is the report of quantitative study of Fraunhofer (far field) diffraction patterns produced by three different topologies or architectures of mirror segmentation, when illuminated by a plane wave of monochromatic white-light. A plot, in angular units of the intensity as a function of azimuth, Phi_f , within annular rings at different FOVs, centered on the system axis of the diffraction pattern will be presented. The advantages of the segmented pinwheel pupil is discussed

"This has to be the cats": personal data legibility in networked sensing systems

Notions like ‘Big Data’ and the ‘Internet of Things’ turn upon anticipated harvesting of personal data through ubiquitous computing and networked sensing systems. It is largely presumed that understandings of people’s everyday interactions will be relatively easy to ‘read off’ of such data and that this, in turn, poses a privacy threat. An ethnographic study of how people account for sensed data to third parties uncovers serious challenges to such ideas. The study reveals that the legibility of sensor data turns upon various orders of situated reasoning involved in articulating the data and making it accountable. Articulation work is indispensable to personal data sharing and raises real requirements for networked sensing systems premised on the harvesting of personal data