Las Vegas and Houston: Global Command Centers in the Sun Belt

Apart from their notoriously hot summers, Las Vegas, Nevada and Houston, Texas appear to have little in common. Upon further scrutiny, however, the two cities have followed strikingly parallel trajectories. As a hub of commercial gaming today, Las Vegas faces challenges comparable to the obstacles Houston encountered in the 1970s and 1980s as a hub of oil and energy. The story of Houston since this downtime reflects a stunning transformation into a modern-day international city, and one that both parallels and portends a new Las Vegas. In this article, we argue that Houston provides a viable model for Las Vegas as a “global command center” of a major international industry – and that in many ways Las Vegas is already following this path

A study of methods to predict and measure the transmission of sound through the walls of light aircraft

The objectives are: measurement of dynamic properties of acoustical foams and incorporation of these properties in models governing three-dimensional wave propagation in foams; tests to measure sound transmission paths in the HP137 Jetstream 3; and formulation of a finite element energy model. In addition, the effort to develop a numerical/empirical noise source identification technique was completed. The investigation of a design optimization technique for active noise control was also completed. Monthly progress reports which detail the progress made toward each of the objectives are summarized

The image of the heat kernel transform on Riemannian symmetric spaces of the noncompact type

The heat kernel or Bargmann-Segal transform on a noncompact Riemannian symmetric space X=G/K maps a square integrable function on X to a holomorphic function on the complex crown. In this article we determine the range of this transform.Comment: Expanded version. Two new sections added in order to clarify two remarks in the previous verson. 15

Comment on "Material Evidence of a 38 MeV Boson"

In the recent preprint 1202.1739 it was claimed that preliminary data presented by COMPASS at recent conferences confirm the existence of a resonant state of mass 38 MeV decaying to two photons. This claim was made based on structures observed in two-photon mass distributions which however were shown only to demonstrate the purity and mass resolution of the {\pi}0 and {\eta} signals. The additional structures are understood as remnants of secondary interactions inside the COMPASS spectrometer. Therefore, the COMPASS data do not confirm the existence of this state.Comment: 2 pages, 7 figure