Temporary Protection: Towards a New Regional and Domestic Framework

During the past thirty-five years, the United States has seen the direct influx of thousands of individuals leaving politically unstable countries. While some seeking entry have proved themselves to be refugees and obtained permanent protection in the United States, far more, including a large number of people fleeing civil war, natural disasters, or comparable forms of upheaval in their home countries, have failed to demonstrate that they would be targets of persecution. Yet, their return to their home countries has been complicated by the very circumstances that led to their flight: conflict, violence, and repression. Over time, the United States developed a series of ad hoc responses that protected such individuals, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1990 (“IMMACT”), which provided legislative authority for Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”). Nevertheless, after eight years, many problems remain in the application of the law. Solving these problems will contribute both to better immigration control and more humane responses to future crises. Current policies fail on two accounts. First, the temporary protection provision in the law generally has failed to protect the vast majority of those in danger as a crisis develops and unfolds. If the United States government protects significant numbers at all, protection is provided outside the confines of the United States. Even so, the mechanisms for responding extraterritorially are not well developed. Second, current policies regarding protection in the United States do not provide the control mechanisms to ensure that protection is not abused and that return, when appropriate, is effected. The choice to admit people for temporary protection has been a difficult one for the United States for two main reasons: the lack of control over entry; and the inability to implement a fair but firm end game. These constraints together with the fear of litigation challenging domestic protection regimes have led policymakers to keep protection seekers offshore, such as on Guantanamo, or to return them directly to countries they fled without providing an opportunity for them to present requests for protection. But not having a fully developed regional or domestic capability for addressing these complex movements comes at a considerable cost. Estimates for the agency costs of handling the 1994 Cuban exodus through the use of offshore safe havens were more than $500 million. Further, an immigration system that cannot fairly and efficiently process protection seekers lacks credibility for which it pays a significant public cost

Context dependencies for younger and older adults in learning a 4-key motor sequence

The role environmental context has on performance level may change based on the skill being learned and the performer of that skill. The present study was designed to examine the role of environmental context in the learning of a 4-key motor sequence task. The present study had two primary purposes: first, replicating findings of a limited context effect in younger adults, and second, extending the findings to older adults to look at changes related to aging and environmental context. ANOVA results revealed no significant context effect in the present study for younger adults, and therefore comparisons between younger and older adults could not be made. Analysis of the data suggests the possibility of low performance levels in the current study being at least one factor related to context dependencies not developing in the learning of the 4-key motor sequence task

First search for a stochastic gravitational-wave background from ultralight bosons

Ultralight bosons with masses in the range 10^(−13)  eV ≤ m_b ≤ 10^(−12)  eV can induce a superradiant instability around spinning black holes (BHs) with masses of order 10−100  M⊙. This instability leads to the formation of a rotating “bosonic cloud” around the BH, which can emit gravitational waves (GWs) in the frequency band probed by ground-based detectors. The superposition of GWs from all such systems can generate a stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB). In this work, we develop a Bayesian data analysis framework to study the SGWB from bosonic clouds using data from Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, building on previous work by Brito et al. [Phys. Rev. D 96, 064050 (2017)]. We further improve this model by adding a BH population of binary merger remnants. To assess the performance of our pipeline, we quantify the range of boson masses that can be constrained by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo measurements at design sensitivity. Furthermore, we explore our capability to distinguish an ultralight boson SGWB from a stochastic signal due to distant compact binary coalescences (CBC). Finally, we present results of a search for the SGWB from bosonic clouds using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. We find no evidence of such a signal. Due to degeneracies between the boson mass and unknown astrophysical quantities such as the distribution of isolated BH spins, our analysis cannot robustly exclude the presence of a bosonic field at any mass. Nevertheless, we show that under optimistic assumptions about the BH formation rate and spin distribution, boson masses in the range 2.0×10^(−13)  eV ≤ m_b ≤ 3.8×10^(−13)  eV are excluded at 95% credibility, although with less optimistic spin distributions, no masses can be excluded. The framework established here can be used to learn about the nature of fundamental bosonic fields with future gravitational wave observations

How Do Mode and Timing of Follow-Up Surveys Affect Evaluation Success?

This article presents the analysis of evaluation methods used in a well-designed and comprehensive evaluation effort of a significant Extension program. The evaluation data collection methods were analyzed by questionnaire mode and timing of follow-up surveys. Response rates from the short- and long-term follow-ups and different questionnaire modes by occupational categories also were examined. Overall, the electronic questionnaire mode and 2-month follow-ups yielded significantly higher response rates. The findings have implications for meaningfully evaluating Extension programs operating with limited resources. The recommendations are useful to Extension educators who need to decide how to capture program outcomes but have limited resources

Nanomechanical testing of freestanding polymer thin films

A new approach for tensile testing of freestanding polymer thin films has been developed to investigate nanomechanical phenomena with precise control of strain rate, environmental and in situ TEM imaging capabilities. Several techniques for mechanical testing of polymer thin films have been reported previously, but there is a lack of consensus regarding size-dependent mechanical properties1–3. The technique described here is derived from a nanomechanical tensile testing platform known as at Push-to-Pull (PTP) device (Figure 1) using a novel sample preparation approach. A free-standing specimen is placed across the tensile actuation gap of the PTP device such that it can be mounted at the end of a specialized TEM holder for quantitative in situ tensile testing or to a specialized mount was designed to enable PTP experiments to be performed using a stand-alone nanoindenter. With this adaptation, all of the capabilities of ex situ nanoindentation are accessible to PTP tensile testing; which includes environmental control (temperature and humidity), DMA, and a wide range of strain rates. Polystyrene was chosen as a model system for direct comparison with alternative testing techniques. While polystyrene is traditionally thought of as a brittle polymer at room temperature, our initial testing of thin sections has revealed extreme ductility (Figure 1). Ductility in polystyrene thin films has been previously reported in literature1–3, but only to elongations of less than 7% before fracture. Initial results using the PTP device have shown extreme ductility in polystyrene, with strains exceeding 100% without fracture. Our results appear to be independent of strain rate in the range tested; unlike the yield stress, which shows a strong strain-rate dependence. The origin of this nanomechanical pheno Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Comparing crop growth and carbon budgets simulated across AmeriFlux agricultural sites using the Community Land Model (CLM)

Improvement of process-based crop models is needed to achieve high fidelity forecasts of regional energy, water, and carbon exchanges. However, most state-of-the-art Land Surface Models (LSMs) assessed in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison project (CMIP5) simulated crops as unmanaged C3 or C4 grasses. This study evaluated the crop-enabled version of one of the most widely used LSMs, the Community Land Model (CLM4- Crop), for simulating corn and soybean agro-ecosystems at relatively long-time scales (up to 11 years) using 54 site-years of data. We found that CLM4-Crop had a biased phenology during the early growing season and that carbon emissions from corn and soybean were underestimated. The model adopts universal physiological parameters for all crop types neglecting the fact that different crops have different specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen content and vcmax25, etc. As a result, model performance varied considerably according to crop type. Overall, the energy and carbon exchange of corn systems were better simulated than soybean systems. Long-term simulations at multiple sites showed that gross primary production (GPP) was consistently over-estimated at soybean sites leading to very large short and long-term biases. A modified model, CLM4-CropM’, with optimized phenology and calibrated crop physiological parameters yielded significantly better simulations of gross primary production (GPP), ecosystem respiration (ER) and leaf area index (LAI) at both short (hourly) and long-term (annual to decadal) timescales for both soybean and corn