Joint analysis of TeV blazar light curves with FACT and HAWC

Probing the high energy emission processes of blazars through their variability relies crucially on long-term monitoring. We present unprecedented light curves from unbiased observations of very high energy fluxes from the blazars Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 based on a joint analysis of data from the First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope (FACT) and the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory. Thanks to an offset of 5.3 hours of the geographic locations, a complementary coverage of up to 12 hours of observation per day allows us to track variability on time scales of hours to days in more detail than with single-instrument analyses. Complementary features, such as better sensitivity thanks to a lower energy threshold with FACT and more regular coverage throughout the year with HAWC, provide valuable cross checks and extensions to the individual analyses. Daily flux comparisons for both Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 show largely correlated variations with a few significant exceptions. These deviations between measurements can be explained through fast variability within a few hours and will be discussed in detail.Comment: Presented at the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017), Bexco, Busan, Korea. See arXiv:1708.02572 for all HAWC contribution

Extended search for point sources of neutrinos below and above the horizon: Covering energies from TeV to EeV with IceCube

Point source searches with neutrino telescopes like IceCube are normally restricted to one hemisphere, due to the selection of up-going events as a way of rejecting the atmospheric muon background. In this work we show that the down-going region above the horizon can be included in the search by suppressing the background through energy-sensitive selection procedures. This approach increases the reach to the EeV regime of the signal spectrum, which was previously not accessible due to the absorption of neutrinos with energies above a PeV inside the Earth. We present preliminary results of this analysis, which for the first time includes up-going as well as down-going muon events in a combined approach. We used data collected with IceCube in a configuration of 22 strings. No significant excess above the atmospheric background is observed. While other analyses provided results for the Northern hemisphere, this new approach extends the field of view to a large part of the Southern sky, which was previously not covered with IceCube.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. To be published in the proceedings of the 2nd Heidelberg workshop "High-Energy Gamma-rays and Neutrinos from Extra-Galactic Sources", 2009 (Journal of Modern Physics D

Will a Private War on Poverty Succeed? The Case of the St. Louis Provident Association

In view of the current emphasis on private approaches to social problem resolution, it is instructive to look at private efforts of the past. The St. Louis Provident Association was a private effort to deal with poverty. It was organized in 1860 to provide relief for the needy and distressed. Data on the volunteer leaders of the association and on the people who were actually helped show a number of things about the 19th-century effort to deal with poverty. First, the volunteers were upwardly- mobile business and professional men who were concerned about the stability of their society. Second, the policies and practices of the Association reflected the social status and ideology of the volunteer directors. Third, the consequences for the poor were a limited amount of help and disproportionate help to particular groups of the impoverished

Public Health Workforce Shortages Imperil Nation's Health

Examines from a community-based perspective the scope of the shortages in the public health workforce; contributing factors such as inadequate funding, salaries, and benefits; and strategies for training, recruiting, and retaining public health workers

Investigating Dispersal Ability to Infer Diversification in the Birds of Madagascar

The objective of this study was to investigate whether dispersal ability, as measured by a proxy of hand-wing index 2, influenced diversification of the birds of Madagascar at two scales. Madagascar is home to several avian lineages that have diversified greatly while other lineages are only represented by a single species. a key question in evolutionary biology is why some of these lineages diversified while others did not. One way to address this is to examine what features of these lineages promotes their diversification. Recent studies have focused on the relative importance of dispersal ability to diversification at the continental and island scales. to further test this relationship, I investigated whether dispersal ability, as measured by hand-wing index 2, influenced diversification in the birds of Madagascar at a large regional scale and smaller local scale within Madagascar. to assess whether dispersal ability influenced diversification of the birds of Madagascar I compared hand-wing index 2 of Malagasy and source (closest non-Malagasy relatives) clades of five radiating and three non-radiating lineages. I treated each lineage as an independent case study in the hopes of identifying a pattern reflecting a shift in dispersal ability upon colonization of Madagascar in radiating lineages. at a smaller local scale of macrohabitats within Madagascar, I examined whether variation in dispersal ability (HWI2) within widespread Malagasy species differed between subspecies restricted to macrohabitats reflecting local adaptation and divergence across macrohabitats. My study found that Malagasy species did not shift in their dispersal ability after colonizing Madagascar and thus, dispersal ability is not critical to the diversification of Malagasy endemics from their source clade in radiating or non-radiating lineages. However, at a smaller local scale of macrohabitats, I found variation in dispersal ability was likely due to local adaptations to macrohabitats. This study adds to our knowledge of dispersal ability and diversification patterns in Malagasy avifauna. This is a leading step towards additional studies to investigate the impact of potential geographic barriers to dispersal ability in the birds of Madagascar and could provide further insights into diversification patterns

The Reliability of Certain Scales for Measuring Attitudes

A list of 100 words were checked for five degrees of preference by 118 adult male subjects of post-college age. The attitude categories were arbitrarily called; liberal, socialistic, sports, risk and annoyance, law enforcement, racial and religious, and cultural. The reliability coefficients ranged from +.77 down to +.29. The highest reliabilities were found for the attitudes of law enforcement, liberalism, and risk and annoyance. The lowest reliabilities were for the attitudes toward race and religion, socialism and the sports

Iron mineralogy of a Hawaiian palagonitic soil with Mars-like spectral and magnetic properties

Visible and near-IR spectral data for some palagonitic soils from Mauna Kea, Hawaii, are similar to corresponding spectral data for Mars. It is important to understand the composition, distribution, and mineralogy of the ferric-bearing phases for the best spectral analogues because the correspondence in spectral properties implies that the nature of their ferric-bearing phases may be similar to those on Mars. In order to constrain interpretations of the Martian data, a variety of palagonitic soils should be studied in order to establish to what extent differences in their spectral data correspond to differences in the mineralogy of their ferric-bearing phases. Spectral (350-2100 nm), Mossbauer, magnetic, and some compositional data for one of a suite of Hawaiian palagonitic soils are presented. The soil (HWMK1) was collected below the biologically active zone from the sides of a gully cut at 9000 ft elevation on Mauna Kea. The soil was wet sieved with freon into seven size fractions less than 1 mm