An Open Letter to Netflix

If there is one thing that I will be absolutely ashamed in admitting to you, it’s that I love television. Love it. Not in a turn-it-on-watch-whatever-all-TV-rocks kind of way, but in an I’m-overly-obsessed-with-15-shows-at-a-time kind of way, to the point where I could say that being able to watch the latest episode of Suits or Community could easily be the highlight of my day (week, year…). [excerpt

Death by Masculinity

On Friday, May 23rd, a 22-year-old man killed four men and two women and injured 13 more people at the University of California Santa Barbara, citing women who were not “attracted” to him or “looked down on [him] as an inferior man” as the primary cause for his violent outbreak

What Accounts for the Decline in Crime?

In this paper we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the United States. We propose a dynamic equilibrium model which guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime. Our main findings can be summarized as follows. First, the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996. Second, the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability, the stronger economy, and the aging of the population. Third, the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible. Fourth, the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime. Overall, our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century.PROPERTY CRIME; INEQUALITY; DYNAMICS

What My Muffin Top Has To Say To You

My name is Hannah, and I have a confession to make. I hate working out—none of that sweat, panting, exhaustion, and sore muscles for me, no thank you. I’m embarrassed to go to a gym because I assume that everyone judges my speed, pacing, and weight lifting. I try to encourage myself by shopping for brightly colored running shorts and funky sports bras, but, honestly, it’s a fruitless endeavor. Because at the end of the day, I just don’t like to exercise. So why do I do it? Because I want to be skinny. [excerpt

Who Do You Think You Are?

Now, I understand that labels are a natural part of our society. We’ve even posted recently about our editor’s tendency to label other people based off of their clothes or attitudes. But which labels do we get to choose for ourselves? Ideally, I’d like to say that I can label myself any way that I want to. Don’t you think that in a society like ours we should be at liberty to choose our own identity? [excerpt

Lyman-alpha forest-CMB cross-correlation and the search for the ionized baryons at high redshift

The intergalactic neutral hydrogen which is responsible for the Lyman alpha forest of quasar absorption is a tracer of much larger amounts of ionised hydrogen. The ionised component has yet to be detected directly, but is expected to scatter CMB photons via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. We use hydrodynamic simulations of a LambdaCDM universe to create mock quasar spectra and CMB sky maps. We find that the high-z Lya forest gas causes temperature fluctuations of the order of 1 muK rms in the CMB on arcmin scales. The kinetic and thermal SZ effects have a similar magnitude at z=3, with the thermal effect becoming relatively weaker as expected at higher z. The CMB signal associated with lines of sight having HI column densities > 10^18 cm^-2 is only marginally stronger than that for lower column densities. The strong dependence of rms temperature fluctuation on mean Lya absorbed flux, however, suggests that the CMB signal effectively arises in lower density material. We investigate the use of the cross-correlation of the Lya forest and the microwave background to detect the SZ effect at redshifts 2-4. In so doing we are able to set direct limits on the density of diffuse ionised intergalactic baryons. We carry out a preliminary comparison at a mean redshift z=3 of 3488 quasar spectra from SDSS Data Release 3 and the WMAP first year data. Assuming that the baryons are clustered as in a LambdaCDM cosmology, and have the same mean temperature, the cross-correlation yields a weak limit on the cosmic density of ionised baryons Omega_(b,I), which is Omega_(b,I) < 0.8 at 95% confidence. With data from upcoming CMB telescopes, we anticipate that a direct detection of the high redshift ionised IGM will soon be possible, providing an important consistency check on cosmological models.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, submitted to MNRA

Preliminary frameworks and models for telework maturity within organisations

This paper is a preliminary step to assess the feasibility of telework for any given organisation. We posit two qualitative frames of telework to define the additional, digital referential platforms that exist with regard to work today: abstraction and conceptualisation. To communicate research within this field we utilise a language taxonomy derived out of a review of the relevant literature. Furthermore, we propose a transformer model to serve as a means to i) interpret quantitative aspects of telework such as metrics and KPIs and ii) inform stakeholder decisions with regard to appropriate telework configurations for their respective company