6,779 research outputs found
Rural People, Rural Places: The Hidden Costs of Hurricane Katrina
This brief shows how the characteristics of rural Gulf Coast families place them at higher risks during natural disasters and make them far less able to recover from such calamities. Although few realize it, nonmetro residents represented the majority (55%) of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. They also constituted 17% of the people living in Alabama's disaster-stricken area, and about 12% of the affected population in Louisiana. These are not inconsequential numbers; they represent thousands of inhabitants living in small communities dotting the tri-state region. This Rural Realities brief draws much needed attention to nonmetro areas affected by Hurricane Katrina and outlines the key features of the rural people and places that have been impacted by this major disaster. Most important, it offers a series of policy recommendations that can assist in rebuilding the region's nonmetro counties and parishes. The hope is that these policy ideas can offer a meaningful set of strategies for lessening the future vulnerability of rural areas within and outside this region of the country. This brief is from Rural Realities; Volume 1, Issue 2. Rural Realities is published by the Rural Sociological Society. It is a peer-reviewed, web-based series that is published four times a year. Each issue is devoted to a single topic
What price civil justice?
In the jurisdictions both of England and Wales and of Scotland, the civil justice system is currently the subject of intense critical appraisal. This paper considers the current status of civil justice, beginning by asking what we expect from our system of civil justice and going on to analyse the supply and demand of civil legal services in market terms. The authors conclude that there is scope in the system for substantial experimentation with procedural reform. They suggest that as much as possible should be done to encourage the development of a cafeteria-style of civil justice system with improved information flows for consumers, and provision for innovations such as cost capping and risk sharing between legal representatives and clients, so providing consumers with more freedom of choice.
Dark Matter, Modified Gravity and the Mass of the Neutrino
It has been suggested that Einstein's theory of General Relativity can be
modified to accomodate mismatches between the gravitational field and luminous
matter on a wide range of scales. Covariant theories of modified gravity
generically predict the existence of extra degrees of freedom which may be
interpreted as dark matter. We study a subclass of these theories where the
overall energy density in these extra degrees of freedom is subdominant
relative to the baryon density and show that they favour the presence of
massive neutrinos. For some specific cases (such as a flat Universes with a
cosmological constant) one finds a conservative lower bound on the neutrinos
mass of eV.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev.
An ideal mass assignment scheme for measuring the Power Spectrum with FFTs
In measuring the power spectrum of the distribution of large numbers of dark
matter particles in simulations, or galaxies in observations, one has to use
Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) for calculational efficiency. However, because of
the required mass assignment onto grid points in this method, the measured
power spectrum \la |\delta^f(k)|^2\ra obtained with an FFT is not the true
power spectrum but instead one that is convolved with a window function
in Fourier space. In a recent paper, Jing (2005) proposed an
elegant algorithm to deconvolve the sampling effects of the window function and
to extract the true power spectrum, and tests using N-body simulations show
that this algorithm works very well for the three most commonly used mass
assignment functions, i.e., the Nearest Grid Point (NGP), the Cloud In Cell
(CIC) and the Triangular Shaped Cloud (TSC) methods. In this paper, rather than
trying to deconvolve the sampling effects of the window function, we propose to
select a particular function in performing the mass assignment that can
minimize these effects. An ideal window function should fulfill the following
criteria: (i) compact top-hat like support in Fourier space to minimize the
sampling effects; (ii) compact support in real space to allow a fast and
computationally feasible mass assignment onto grids. We find that the scale
functions of Daubechies wavelet transformations are good candidates for such a
purpose. Our tests using data from the Millennium Simulation show that the true
power spectrum of dark matter can be accurately measured at a level better than
2% up to , without applying any deconvolution processes. The new
scheme is especially valuable for measurements of higher order statistics, e.g.
the bi-spectrum,........Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ,Matches the
accepte
Radio Galaxy Clustering at z~0.3
Radio galaxies are uniquely useful as probes of large-scale structure as
their uniform identification with giant elliptical galaxies out to high
redshift means that the evolution of their bias factor can be predicted. As the
initial stage in a project to study large-scale structure with radio galaxies
we have performed a small redshift survey, selecting 29 radio galaxies in the
range 0.19<z<0.45 from a contiguous 40 square degree area of sky. We detect
significant clustering within this sample. The amplitude of the two-point
correlation function we measure is consistent with no evolution from the local
(z<0.1) value. This is as expected in a model in which radio galaxy hosts form
at high redshift and thereafter obey a continuity equation, although the
signal:noise of the detection is too low to rule out other models. Larger
surveys out to z~1 should reveal the structures of superclusters at
intermediate redshifts and strongly constrain models for the evolution of
large-scale structure.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ApJ Letter
Modelling the energy gap in transition metal/aluminium bilayers"
We present an application of the generalised proximity effect theory.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, presented at workshop on low temperature
superconducting electronics at the University of Twente, The Netherland
Cluster Correlation in Mixed Models
We evaluate the dependence of the cluster correlation length r_c on the mean
intercluster separation D_c, for three models with critical matter density,
vanishing vacuum energy (Lambda = 0) and COBE normalized: a tilted CDM (tCDM)
model (n=0.8) and two blue mixed models with two light massive neutrinos
yielding Omega_h = 0.26 and 0.14 (MDM1 and MDM2, respectively). All models
approach the observational value of sigma_8 (and, henceforth, the observed
cluster abundance) and are consistent with the observed abundance of Damped
Lyman_alpha systems. Mixed models have a motivation in recent results of
neutrino physics; they also agree with the observed value of the ratio
sigma_8/sigma_25, yielding the spectral slope parameter Gamma, and nicely fit
LCRS reconstructed spectra. We use parallel AP3M simulations, performed in a
wide box (side 360/h Mpc) and with high mass and distance resolution, enabling
us to build artificial samples of clusters, whose total number and mass range
allow to cover the same D_c interval inspected through APM and Abell cluster
clustering data. We find that the tCDM model performs substantially better than
n=1 critical density CDM models. Our main finding, however, is that mixed
models provide a surprisingly good fit of cluster clustering data.Comment: 22 pages + 10 Postscript figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
The finite size effect of galaxies on the cosmic virial theorem and the pairwise peculiar velocity dispersions
We discuss the effect of the finite size of galaxies on estimating
small-scale relative pairwise peculiar velocity dispersions from the cosmic
virial theorem (CVT). Specifically we evaluate the effect by incorporating the
finite core radius in the two-point correlation function of mass, i.e.
and the effective gravitational force
softening on small scales. We analytically obtain the lowest-order
correction term for which is in quantitative agreement with the
full numerical evaluation. With a nonzero and/or the cosmic virial
theorem is no longer limited to the case of . We present accurate
fitting formulae for the CVT predicted pairwise velocity dispersion for the
case of . Compared with the idealistic point-mass approximation
(), the finite size effect can significantly reduce the small-scale
velocity dispersions of galaxies at scales much larger than and .
Even without considering the finite size of galaxies, nonzero values for
are generally expected, for instance, for cold dark matter (CDM) models with a
scale-invariant primordial spectrum. For these CDM models, a reasonable force
softening r_s\le 100 \hikpc would have rather tiny effect. We present the CVT
predictions for the small-scale pairwise velocity dispersion in the CDM models
normalized by the COBE observation. The implication of our results for
confrontation of observations of galaxy pair-wise velocity dispersions and
theoretical predictions of the CVT is also discussed.Comment: 18 pages. LaTeX text and 8 postcript figures. submitted to Ap
The Omega Dependence of the Evolution of xi(r)
The evolution of the two-point correlation function, xi(r,z), and the
pairwise velocity dispersion, sigma(r,z), for both the matter and halo
population, in three different cosmological models:
(Omega_M,Omega_Lambda)=(1,0), (0.2,0) and (0.2,0.8) are described. If the
evolution of xi is parameterized by xi(r,z)=(1+z)^{-(3+eps)}xi(r,0), where
xi(r,0)=(r/r_0)^{-gamma}, then eps(mass) ranges from 1.04 +/- 0.09 for (1,0) to
0.18 +/- 0.12 for (0.2,0), as measured by the evolution of at 1 Mpc (from z ~ 5
to the present epoch). For halos, eps depends on their mean overdensity. Halos
with a mean overdensity of about 2000 were used to compute the halo two-point
correlation function tested with two different group finding algorithms: the
friends of friends and the spherical overdensity algorithm. It is certainly
believed that the rate of growth of this xihh will give a good estimate of the
evolution of the galaxy two-point correlation function, at least from z ~ 1 to
the present epoch. The values we get for eps(halos) range from 1.54 for (1,0)
to -0.36 for (0.2,0), as measured by the evolution of xi(halos) from z ~ 1.0 to
the present epoch. These values could be used to constrain the cosmological
scenario. The evolution of the pairwise velocity dispersion for the mass and
halo distribution is measured and compared with the evolution predicted by the
Cosmic Virial Theorem (CVT). According to the CVT, sigma(r,z)^2 ~ G Q rho(z)
r^2 xi(r,z) or sigma proportional to (1+z)^{-eps/2}. The values of eps measured
from our simulated velocities differ from those given by the evolution of xi
and the CVT, keeping gamma and Q constant: eps(CVT) = 1.78 +/- 0.13 for (1,0)
or 1.40 +/- 0.28 for (0.2,0).Comment: Accepted for publication in the ApJ. Also available at
http://manaslu.astro.utoronto.ca/~carlberg/cnoc/xiev/xi_evo.ps.g
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