Conditions of the Martian atmosphere and surface in the remote past and their relevance to the question of life on Mars

Although the Viking Landers failed to find any evidence of life on the surface of Mars, much remains unknown. Study of returned samples can answer some of these questions. The search for organic compounds, the building blocks of life forms based on carbon chemistry, should continue. The question of life on Mars is still an open one, and deserves to be addressed by the study of returned samples. Whether life developed and evolved on Mars or not depends critically on the history of the Martian atmosphere and hydrosphere. The exobiology of Mars is thus inextrically intertwined with the nature of its paleoatmosphere and the ancient state of the planet's regolith, which may still be preserved in the polar caps and underground. Core samples from such sites could answer some of the questions

Introduction to the Plasma Issue

The study of the physics of ionized gases has had a long and complicated history. The word "plasma" was first coined by Langmuir and Tonks in 1929 to denote a gas in which an important fraction of the molecules are dissociated into ions and electrons, the gas as a whole remaining electrically neutral. The laboratory study of plasmas, of course, had been pursued long before that, many important discoveries in the realm of gas discharge phenomena having been made in the 1800's. These studies, continuing into the Twentieth Century as exemplified by the work of Langmuir, served as the foundation for many practical electronic devices used for the generation, rectification, and control of electrical energy. The plasmas used in these devices usually have a low-charge density, and the fractional ionization is ordinarily less than one per cent. This small percentage of ionization is sufficient to provide good electrical conductivity which can be controlled externally, but it is difficult to study theoretically because of the numerous competing processes involving neutral atoms, metastable atoms, ions, electrons, and collective oscillations of ions and electrons

Coexisting Holes and Electrons in High-Tc Materials: Implications from Normal State Transport

Normal state resistivity and Hall effect are shown to be successfully modeled by a two-band model of holes and electrons that is applied self-consistently to (i) DC transport data reported for eight bulk-crystal and six oriented-film specimens of YBa2Cu3O7-{\delta}, and (ii) far-infrared Hall angle data reported for YBa2Cu3O7-{\delta} and Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+{\delta}. The electron band exhibits extremely strong scattering; the extrapolated DC residual resistivity of the electronic component is shown to be consistent with the previously observed excess thermal conductivity and excess electrodynamic conductivity at low temperature. Two-band hole-electron analysis of Hall angle data suggest that the electrons possess the greater effective mass.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables and 78 reference

On the domain wall partition functions of level-1 affine so(n) vertex models

We derive determinant expressions for domain wall partition functions of level-1 affine so(n) vertex models, n >= 4, at discrete values of the crossing parameter lambda = m pi / 2(n-3), m in Z, in the critical regime.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures included in latex fil

Cascades: A view from Audience

Cascades on online networks have been a popular subject of study in the past decade, and there is a considerable literature on phenomena such as diffusion mechanisms, virality, cascade prediction, and peer network effects. However, a basic question has received comparatively little attention: how desirable are cascades on a social media platform from the point of view of users? While versions of this question have been considered from the perspective of the producers of cascades, any answer to this question must also take into account the effect of cascades on their audience. In this work, we seek to fill this gap by providing a consumer perspective of cascade. Users on online networks play the dual role of producers and consumers. First, we perform an empirical study of the interaction of Twitter users with retweet cascades. We measure how often users observe retweets in their home timeline, and observe a phenomenon that we term the "Impressions Paradox": the share of impressions for cascades of size k decays much slower than frequency of cascades of size k. Thus, the audience for cascades can be quite large even for rare large cascades. We also measure audience engagement with retweet cascades in comparison to non-retweeted content. Our results show that cascades often rival or exceed organic content in engagement received per impression. This result is perhaps surprising in that consumers didn't opt in to see tweets from these authors. Furthermore, although cascading content is widely popular, one would expect it to eventually reach parts of the audience that may not be interested in the content. Motivated by our findings, we posit a theoretical model that focuses on the effect of cascades on the audience. Our results on this model highlight the balance between retweeting as a high-quality content selection mechanism and the role of network users in filtering irrelevant content

The Configuration of Performance Appraisal: Investigating the Impact of Leadership and Personality Using a Within- and Between-Supervisory Group Analysis

The key to improvfrig performance appraisals in organizations may be the leadership exchange processes that occur between managers and subordinates. We suggest two ways in which this might unfold: (a) the direct relationships among leadership attention, tenure with supervisor, and actual performance appraisal rating and (b) the cqnfiguration of these three variables around the organization\u27s structure in which differences between supervisory groups are highlighted. Our findings suggest that all three variables are significantly related. For leadership attention and performance appraisal, an individual-level model best applies. A group model is implied for leaders~ip attention and tenure with supervisor, whereby entire supervisory groups that have longer tenure with their supervisor also receive, on average, higher amounts of leadership attention