A Near-Infrared Spectroscopic Study of Young Field Ultracool Dwarfs

We present a near-infrared (0.9-2.4 mu m) spectroscopic study of 73 field ultracool dwarfs having spectroscopic and/or kinematic evidence of youth (approximate to 10-300 Myr). Our sample is composed of 48 low-resolution (R approximate to 100) spectra and 41 moderate-resolution spectra (R greater than or similar to 750-2000). First, we establish a method for spectral typing M5-L7 dwarfs at near-IR wavelengths that is independent of gravity. We find that both visual and index-based classification in the near-IR provides consistent spectral types with optical spectral types, though with a small systematic offset in the case of visual classification at J and K band. Second, we examine features in the spectra of similar to 10 Myr ultracool dwarfs to define a set of gravity-sensitive indices based on FeH, VO, Ki, Nai, and H-band continuum shape. We then create an index-based method for classifying the gravities of M6-L5 dwarfs that provides consistent results with gravity classifications from optical spectroscopy. Our index-based classification can distinguish between young and dusty objects. Guided by the resulting classifications, we propose a set of low-gravity spectral standards for the near-IR. Finally, we estimate the ages corresponding to our gravity classifications.

On the composition of Frostman Blaschke products

We construct an infinite uniform Frostman Blaschke product B such that B composed with itself is also a uniform Frostman Blaschke product. We also show that the set of uniform Frostman Blaschke products is open in the set of inner functions with the uniform norm.

Prime and semiprime inner functions

Abstract This paper studies the structure of inner functions under the operation of composition, and in particular the notions or primeness and semiprimeness. Results proved include the density of prime finite Blaschke products in the set of finite Blaschke products, the semiprimeness of finite products of thin Blaschke products and their approximability by prime Blaschke products. An example of a nonsemiprime Blaschke product that is a Frostman Blaschke product is also provided.

Career Influences of Music Education Audition Candidates

In this descriptive study, we examined the influences and experiences motivating students to enter college-level music schools as reported by a population of precollegiate students auditioning (but not yet accepted) to music education degree programs. As a follow-up to a published pilot study, this research was designed to quantify the various experiences respondents had as part of their precollege school and community programs that related to teaching and music. Results indicate a strong connection between respondents’ primary musical background and future teaching interest. The top three influential experiences were related to high school ensemble membership (band, choir, orchestra), and the most influential group of individuals in the decision to become a music educator were high school ensemble directors. Respondents from all four primary background groups (band, choir, orchestra, and general or other) rated private lesson teaching as their second strongest future teaching interest, just behind teaching at the high school level in their primary background. Respondents rated parents as moderately influential on their desire to become a music teacher.

Auditory Imagery and the Poor-Pitch Singer

The vocal imitation of pitch by singing requires one to plan laryngeal movements on the basis of anticipated target pitch events. This process may rely on auditory imagery, which has been shown to activate motor planning areas. As such, we hypothesized that poor-pitch singing, although not typically associated with deficient pitch perception, may be associated with deficient auditory imagery. Participants vocally imitated simple pitch sequences by singing, discriminated pitch pairs on the basis of pitch height, and completed an auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale). The percentage of trials participants sung in tune correlated significantly with self-reports of vividness for auditory imagery, although not with the ability to control auditory imagery. Pitch discrimination was not predicted by auditory imagery scores. The results thus support a link between auditory imagery and vocal imitation.

Another Way of Saying Enough: Environmental Concern and Popular Mobilization in Kyrgyzstan

This article is a foray into the understudied issue of environmental protest politics in Central Asia. Specifically, it uses Kyrgyzstan as a case study to test the argument that environmental concerns mobilized people to engage in protest and in ways different from other kinds of protest. This essay presents the first systematic study of public opinion about the environment in Kyrgyzstan. It includes results from a 2009 nationwide survey, over 100 expert and elite interviews, and newspaper content analysis. Furthermore, it spatially analyzes these results to identify geographical variation in public perception and political event occurrence patterns. Protest engagement is a complex process determined by the interaction of several factors, and is not explained solely by affluence, rationality, or grievances. Eco-mobilization - collective political action about the environment - represents a class of protest events that offers a different view into mass discontent in the former Soviet Union and neo-patrimonial societies. The study finds that these political actions about the environment are not necessarily elite driven; there is a basic foundation of national concern and salience of these issues, and demonstrated environmental beliefs do help to explain protest behavior.

Montaigne, Lying and Early Modern Self-Fashioning: A Discursive Dialogue with Lope's El perro del hortelano on the Page and on Stage

A shared code of connection arguably exists between two plays by Lope de VegaEl mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi and El perro del hortelanoand the work of Michel de Montaigne. Nevertheless, one cannot but ask: how it can be that in two works produced so close in time, the same situation is resolved so differently? Montaigne can be said to provide an answer in his Essays, explaining that a similar situation can produce wholly different results: how in the first, one is saved', and in the second, one is destroyed. One might imagine, too, that Belflor's countess and her ennobled secretary, who together sustain a lie in a society that lived by the lie, would have been likewise consoled' by a set of interlocking tropes and similitudes' in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, which linked two contemporary and complementary fashioners of human nature, Lope and Montaigne, in a discursive dialogue on how otherwise honest women and men were subject to the vice of lying in their process of self-fashioning, as well as potentially enslaved' by it.

New Results Concerning Probability Distributions with Increasing Generalized Failure Rates

The generalized failure rate of a continuous random variable has demonstrable importance in operations management. If the valuation distribution of a product has an increasing generalized failure rate (that is, the distribution is IGFR), then the associated revenue function is unimodal, and when the generalized failure rate is strictly increasing, the global maximum is uniquely specified. The assumption that the distribution is IGFR is thus useful and frequently held in recent pricing, revenue, and supply chain management literature. This note contributes to the IGFR literature in several ways. First, it investigates the prevalence of the IGFR property for the left and right truncations of valuation distributions. Second, we extend the IGFR notion to discrete distributions and contrast it with the continuous distribution case. The note also addresses two errors in the previous IGFR literature. Finally, for future reference, we analyze all common (continuous and discrete) distributions for the prevalence of the IGFR property, and derive and tabulate their generalized failure rates.

Sensory-specific Appetition: Postingestive Detection of Glucose Rapidly Promotes Continued Consumption of a Recently Encountered Flavor

It is generally thought that macronutrients stimulate intake when sensed in the mouth (e.g., sweet taste) but as food enters the GI tract its effects become inhibitory, triggering satiation processes leading to meal termination. Here we report experiments extending recent work (see [1]) showing that under some circumstances nutrients sensed in the gut produce a positive feedback effect, immediately promoting continued intake. In one experiment, rats with intragastric (IG) catheters were accustomed to consuming novel flavors in saccharin daily while receiving water infused IG (5 ml/15 min). The very first time glucose (16% w/w) was infused IG instead of water, intake accelerated within 6 mins of infusion onset and total intake increased 29% over baseline. Experiment 2 replicated this stimulatory effect with glucose infusion but not fructose nor maltodextrin. Experiment 3 showed the immediate intake stimulation is specific to the flavor accompanying the glucose infusion. Rats were accustomed to flavored saccharin being removed and replaced with the same or a different flavor. When glucose infusion accompanied the first bottle, intake from the second bottle was stimulated only when it contained the same flavor, not when the flavor switched. Thus we confirm not only that glucose sensed postingestively can have a rapid, positive feedback effect ('appetition' as opposed to 'satiation') but that it is sensory-specific, promoting continued intake of a recently encountered flavor. This sensory specific motivation may represent an additional psychobiological influence on meal size, and further, has implications for the mechanisms of learned flavor-nutrient associations.

Rats Acquire Stronger Preference for Flavors Consumed Towards the End of a High-fat Meal

Rats learn to prefer flavors associated with postingestive effects of nutrients. The physiological signals underlying this postingestive reward are unknown. We have previously shown that rats readily learn to prefer a flavor that was consumed early in a multi-flavored meal when glucose is infused intragastrically (IG), suggesting rapid postingestive reward onset. The present experiments investigate the timing of postingestive fat reward, by providing distinctive flavors in the first and second halves of meals accompanied by IG fat infusion. Learning stronger preference for the earlier or later flavor would indicate when the rewarding postingestive effects are sensed. Rats consumed sweetened, calorically-dilute flavored solutions accompanied by IG high-fat infusion (+ sessions) or water (- sessions). Each session included an "Early" flavor for 8min followed by a "Late" flavor for 8min. Learned preferences were then assessed in two-bottle tests (no IG infusion) between Early(+) vs. Early(-), Late(+) vs. Late(-), Early(+) vs. Late(+), and Early(-) vs. Late(-). Rats only preferred Late(+), not Early(+), relative to their respective (-) flavors. In a second experiment rats trained with a higher fat concentration learned to prefer Early(+) but more strongly preferred Late(+). Learned preferences were evident when rats were tested deprived or recently satiated. Unlike with glucose, ingested fat appears to produce a slower-onset rewarding signal, detected later in a meal or after its termination, becoming more strongly associated with flavors towards the end of the meal. This potentially contributes to enhanced liking for dessert foods, which persists even when satiated.

Accounting for Fetal Death: Vital Statistics and the Medicalization of Pregnancy in the United States

Recent reports by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have decried the high rate of fetal mortality in the contemporary United States. Much of the data about fetal and infant deaths, as well as other poor pregnancy outcomes, are tabulated and tracked through vital statistics. In this article, I demonstrate how notions of fetal death became increasingly tied to the surveillance of maternal bodies through the tabulating and tracking of vital statistics in the middle part of the twentieth century. Using a historical analysis of the revisions to the United States Standard Certificate of Live Birth, and the United States Standard Report of Fetal Death, I examine how the categories of analysis utilized in these documents becomes integrally linked to contemporary ideas about fetal and perinatal death, gestational age, and prematurity. While it is evident that there are relationships between maternal behavior and birth outcomes, in this article I interrogate the ways in which the surveillance of maternal bodies through vital statistics has naturalized these relationships. Copyright 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Model Predictive Control for Vehicle Stabilization at the Limits of Handling

Recent developments in vehicle steering systems offer new opportunities to measure the steering torque and reliably estimate the vehicle sideslip and the tire-road friction coefficient. This paper presents an approach to vehicle stabilization that leverages these estimates to define state boundaries that exclude unstable vehicle dynamics and utilizes a model predictive envelope controller to bound the vehicle motion within this stable region of the state space. This approach provides a large operating region accessible by the driver and smooth interventions at the stability boundaries. Experimental results obtained with a steer-by-wire vehicle and a proof of envelope invariance demonstrate the efficacy of the envelope controller in controlling the vehicle at the limits of handling.

The Chinese Currency and Global Rebalancing: A Discussion

Perceived to be substantially undervalued, the Chinese currency, the yuan, has attracted much attention in recent years, especially since the recession of 2008-2009. To remedy the situation, a proposal put forward recently by C. Fred Bergsten is noteworthy, for its impressive boldness in calling for drastic US policy actions, and for the potentially far-reaching impacts on the global rebalancing and recovery it may bring about. The purpose of this article is twofold: to assess the underlying analytical validity of this proposal and to explore its implications for the US, China and the rebalancing and recovery of the world economy.