Study of the kinetics of catalytic decomposition of hydrazine vapors on palladium

The decomposition rates of N2H4 on a palladium surface are studied. Experiments were conducted in a circulating unit at atmosphere pressure. The experimental method is described. The laws found for the reaction kinetics are explained by equations

A correction framework for improving the robustness of motor vehicle registration data

An important key to reducing the environmental impact of motor vehicles is to identify those in-services vehicles which are likely to excessively contribute to air pollution. Such an assessment is dependent on quantifying vehicle scrappage which, in turn, relies upon the provision of temporally consistent motor vehicle registration data. There exist a number of issues that adversely impact on the temporal accuracy of motor vehicle registration data. This paper identifies these issues and proposes a cost effective correction framework for motor vehicle registration time series data. An application to Australian data demonstrated the efficacy of the framework, identifying the need to introduce an additional vehicle category into the data, adjusting annual vehicle counts and removing the erroneous incidence of the number of vehicles of a particular vintage increasing substantially beyond two years after the year of manufacture

How We Broke Impeachment and Why We Need to Fix It: Presidential and Cabinet Level Impeachments, 1974–2024

From 1974 to 2024, the House of Representatives initiated a total of 6 presidential and cabinet level impeachments—4 more than were brought in the Nation’s first 185 years. In the aftermath of the “gold standard” set during the Nixon impeachment inquiry, the process has experienced a steady decline in fairness and effectiveness and increase in partisanship, with the result being the weakening of our constitutional system of checks and balances. During this period, impeachment proceedings have become more frequent and less meaningful, rarely led to disclosures of significant non-public information, and not resulted in conviction by the Senate The procedural rights provided to the Minority and the President are now a shadow of the rights provided in the 1974 Nixon impeachment inquiry; DOJ legal precedents make it too easy for Presidents to deny Congress documents and testimony; and the courts are hesitant to intervene to resolve the inevitable interbranch disputes. This state of affairs is not solely attributable to one party or one branch of government, rather both parties and all three branches bear responsibility. Ironically, following the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision in Trump v. United States—limiting a former president’s culpability for criminal behavior while in office, the need for a fairer and less partisan impeachment process is greater than ever. Beginning with the Nixon impeachment inquiry in 1974 and continuing through the Mayorkas and Biden impeachment investigations in 2024, this Article compares the process governing impeachments in terms of House investigatory and Senate trial procedures, Executive Branch responses, and the role of federal courts. For the first time, this Article identifies and analyzes the legal and political factors which have led to the deterioration of the impeachment process over the last five decades. Based on this analysis, this Article proposes a comprehensive set of reforms for all three branches, including proposals to ensure Congress has the necessary information to consider impeachment when presidential misconduct is otherwise immune from prosecution

There\u27s No Such Thing as a Free Bet: How to Stop Misleading the Public in Gambling Advertisments

For many years, gambling was limited to lottery tickets and casinos in select states and Nevada was the only state where sports gambling was legal. In 2018, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era of gambling when it struck down the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Ass’n. States are now free to regulate sports gambling, including mobile gambling on cell phones. Thirty-six states have legalized sports gambling, and twenty-nine of those states allow for mobile betting. Online casino games such as slots and blackjack have been legalized in six states. If you have watched a sporting event on TV in the time since the Murphy decision, there is a good chance you have seen an ad for sports gambling as numerous companies work to grab market share in the new industry. These ads promote the possibility of big wins and offer attractive sign-up inducements such as “risk-free” and “no-sweat” bets. Some online promotions even tout the opportunity to win “guaranteed” money. These ads mislead individuals on their likelihood of winning by playing on cognitive biases. Research shows that people are overly confident in predicting events, which can cause them to misunderstand the risks of gambling. It is estimated that less than 5% of gamblers win money in the long-term. For the rare person that does make money in the long term, many gambling websites will restrict winning users’ ability to bet. Unsurprisingly, the increased prevalence of gambling has led to increases in addiction that comes with financial and social costs. Some states have begun to prohibit misleading promotions for “risk-free” and “free bets” to protect the public, but the volume of ads continues. In Part I, this article will describe the current state of gambling advertisements and the negative effects of legalized mobile gambling on the public. Part II will examine and propose reforms to the regulation of online gambling, drawing lessons from solutions developed in response to the public health crisis created by the tobacco industry. This article proposes closer regulation of misleading advertisements and requirements that gambling companies inform consumers of the risk of addiction and the likelihood of loss, rather than falsely glamorizing their product

Swarm accelerometer data processing from raw accelerations to thermospheric neutral densities

The Swarm satellites were launched on November 22, 2013, and carry accelerometers and GPS receivers as part of their scientific payload. The GPS receivers do not only provide the position and time for the magnetic field measurements, but are also used for determining non-gravitational forces like drag and radiation pressure acting on the spacecraft. The accelerometers measure these forces directly, at much finer resolution than the GPS receivers, from which thermospheric neutral densities can be derived. Unfortunately, the acceleration measurements suffer from a variety of disturbances, the most prominent being slow temperature-induced bias variations and sudden bias changes. In this paper, we describe the new, improved four-stage processing that is applied for transforming the disturbed acceleration measurements into scientifically valuable thermospheric neutral densities. In the first stage, the sudden bias changes in the acceleration measurements are manually removed using a dedicated software tool. The second stage is the calibration of the accelerometer measurements against the non-gravitational accelerations derived from the GPS receiver, which includes the correction for the slow temperature-induced bias variations. The identification of validity periods for calibration and correction parameters is part of the second stage. In the third stage, the calibrated and corrected accelerations are merged with the non-gravitational accelerations derived from the observations of the GPS receiver by a weighted average in the spectral domain, where the weights depend on the frequency. The fourth stage consists of transforming the corrected and calibrated accelerations into thermospheric neutral densities. We present the first results of the processing of Swarm C acceleration measurements from June 2014 to May 2015. We started with Swarm C because its acceleration measurements contain much less disturbances than those of Swarm A and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than those of Swarm B. The latter is caused by the higher altitude of Swarm B as well as larger noise in the acceleration measurements of Swarm B. We show the results of each processing stage, highlight the difficulties encountered, and comment on the quality of the thermospheric neutral density data set.Astrodynamics & Space Mission

Hay un duende en la voz: Técnica vocal y canto popular revisitados

Grosso modo existe um costume referente ao canto popular, ao menos na Argentina, de não prestar importancia à técnica vocal e pensar que o canto popular quando mais distante do treinamento, mais autêntico é. No entanto, cedo ou tarde os cantores de música popular precisam recorrer ao treinamento vocal. Na maioria dos casos, ao menos naqueles cantores cujas vozes chamam a atenção, o treinamente vem do canto lírico. Propomos aquí uma série de práticas para o treinamento vocal que em si mesmas nos conectem com a nossa verdade, e nos permitam alcançar uma voz natural, rica, expressiva e, além de mais, saudável

Five degrees of freedom test mass readout via optical levers

High precision measurement of all six degrees of freedom of freely floating test masses is necessary for future gravitational space missions as the sensing noise is frequently a limiting factor in the overall performance of the instrument. Femto-meter sensitivity has been demonstrated with LISA Pathfinder which used a complex laser interferometric setup. However, these measurements where restricted to the length changes in one degree of freedom only. When aiming for sensing multiple degrees of freedom, typically capacitive sensing is used, which facilitates a compact setup but does not provide competitive precision. An alternative approach to improve the sensitivity beyond capacitance readout systems and to reduce the complexity of the setup, is to use optical levers. Here, we report on the realization of a test mass sensing system by means of a modulation/demodulation technique in combination with four optical levers detected by quadrant photodiodes. The results of our table-top experiment show that this configuration allows us to extract information on five degrees of freedom of a cubic test mass. With basic off-the-shelf laser diodes we demonstrate an angular resolution of below 600 nrad Hz-1/2 at frequencies between 10 mHz and 1 Hz (which is better than a conventional autocollimator) while simultaneously measuring the linear motion of the test mass with a precision of better than 300 nm Hz-1/2 in the same frequency band. Extension of the geometry will enable optical sensing of all six degrees of freedom of the test mass. © 2019 IOP Publishing Ltd