Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact Modeling: I. High-Resolution 3D Bolides

We have run high-resolution, three-dimensional, hydrodynamic simulations of the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into the atmosphere of Jupiter. We find that the energy deposition profile is largely similar to the previous two-dimensional calculations of Mac Low and Zahnle (1994), though perhaps somewhat broader in the range of height over which the energy is deposited. As with similar calculations for impacts into the Venusian atmosphere, there is considerable sensitivity in the results to small changes in the initial conditions, indicating dynamical chaos. We calculated the median depth of energy deposition (the height z at which 50% of the bolide's energy has been released) per run. The mean value among runs is approx 70 km below the 1-bar level, for a 1-km diameter impactor of porous ice of density rho=0.6 g cm^{-3}. The standard deviation among these runs is 14 km. We find little evidence of a trend in these results with the resolution of the calculations (up to 57 cells across the impactor radius, or 8.8-m resolution), suggesting that resolutions as low as 16 grid cells across the radius of the bolide may yield good results for this particular quantity

Mediatization of Emotion on Social Media: Forms and Norms in Digital Mourning Practices

This article provides the theoretical background for this Special Issue which explores the mediatization of emotion on social media as attested in different digital mourning practices. The overview discusses the affective and emotional turn alongside the mediatic turn in relation to key trends and foci in the study of affect/emotion. Our discussion points to a shift in conceptualizations of affect/emotion from mediated to mediatized practice, embedded in other social practices and subject to media and social media logics, affordances, and frames, which are worthy of empirical investigation. The article also presents key insights offered in the four articles of this Special Issue and foregrounds current and future directions in the study of mediatization, emotional sharing, and digital mourning practices

The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

© 2020 The Authors. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Literacy Association The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution-focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures

Cigarette Taxes and Illicit Trade in Europe Online Appendix

Cigarettes are highly taxed in Europe to discourage tobacco use and to fund public-health measures to mitigate the harms from tobacco consumption. At higher prices some consumers substitute more toward illicit cigarettes. We find that raising prices in any one country would lead to substantial increases in the expected illicit market share and volume in that country. This appendix contains more complete information about the data and additional regressions to which the article published in Economic Inquiry (and also available in earlier form as School of Public Policy Working Paper 60) refers

Violence in Illicit Markets: Unintended Consequences and the Search for Paradoxical Effects of Enforcement

The textbook competitive model of drug markets predicts that greater law enforcement leads to higher black market prices, but also to the unintended consequences of greater revenue and violence. These predictions are not in accord with the paradoxical outcomes evinced by recent history in some drug markets, where enforcement rose even as prices fell. We show that predictions of the textbook model are not unequivocal, and that when bandwagon effects among scofflaws are introduced, the simple predictions are more likely to be reversed. We next show that even simple models of noncompetitive black markets can elicit paradoxical outcomes. Therefore, we argue that instead of searching for assumptions that lead to paradoxical outcomes, which is the direction the literature has taken, it is better for policy analysis to choose appropriate assumptions for the textbook model. We finish with performing such an analysis for the case of banning menthol cigarettes. Under the most plausible assumptions enforcement will indeed spur violence, although the legal availability of electronic cigarettes may mitigate or reverse this conclusion

Cigarette Taxes and Illicit Trade in Europe

Cigarettes are highly taxed in Europe to discourage tobacco use and to fund public-health measures to mitigate the harms from tobacco consumption. At higher prices (more precisely, at higher differentials between licit and black-market prices) consumers substitute more toward illicit cigarettes. Illicit retail trade in cigarettes (IRTC) includes counterfeiting and smuggling—either of legally purchased products, from lower-tax to higher-tax jurisdictions, or of entirely non-tax-paid cigarettes. The existing literature includes claims that taxes are not an important factor determining the scale of IRTC. We investigate these claims with data from 1999–2013 in the European Union. We find that while the simple correlation between licit cigarette prices and the market share of illicit cigarettes in consumption is negative, raising prices in any one country would, on average, lead to substantial increases in the expected illicit market share and volume in that country. A one euro increase in tax per pack in a country is expected to increase illicit market share by 5 to 12 percentage points and increase illicit cigarette sales by 25% to 120% of the average consumption. We also find that the role of prices in stimulating IRTC is, empirically, far more important than the role of corruption. The results are robust to a host of alternative specifications and sources of data

Anomalous asymmetry of magnetoresistance in NbSe3_3 single crystals

A pronounced asymmetry of magnetoresistance with respect to the magnetic field direction is observed for NbSe$_3$ crystals placed in a magnetic field perpendicular to their conducting planes. It is shown that the effect persists in a wide temperature range and manifests itself starting from a certain magnetic induction value $B_0$, which at $T=4.2$ K corresponds to the transition to the quantum limit, i.to the state where the Landay level splitting exceeds the temperature.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, to be appeared in JETP Let

Unintended Consequences of Enforcement in Illicit Markets

Legal enforcement of bans on goods can reduce the size of the black market but lead to greater violence by increasing revenue in the illicit market. However, the link between enforcement and violence is not as simple as is suggested by the textbook model, even for a competitive market. Nevertheless, under plausible assumptions more enforcement on trafficking in the illicit good leads to more violence

Unintended Consequences of Cigarette Taxation and Regulation

Tobacco smoking harms health. Taxes and regulations can reduce that harm. But evasion reduces the efficacy of taxes and regulations and creates harms of its own in the form of illicit markets. Enforcement can reduce evasion but creates additional harms, including incarceration and violence. Peter Reu-ter has pointed out that a flat ban on cigarettes would be likely to generate illicit-market harms similar to the harms of existing illicit drug markets. Taxes and regulations can be thought of as “lesser prohibitions,” subject to the same sorts of risks. Minimizing total harm means minimizing the sum of abuse harms and control harms. Tighter regulations and higher taxes on cigarettes risk increasing the size of the existing illicit tobacco markets, which are already substantial. That risk can be somewhat blunted by increasing enforcement effort, but doing so can be costly on several dimensions and might, under plausible assumptions, lead to an increase in violence. Tobacco policymaking should therefore consider illicit markets and the need for enforcement; some of the health benefits of regula-tion and taxation may be offset by increased illicit-market side effects and enforcement costs. The presence of licit substitutes, such as e-cigarettes, can greatly reduce the size of the problem; the regulation of e-cigarettes should take this effect into account. If enforcement is to be increased to counterbal-ance tightened controls, positive-feedback dynamics suggest that the enforcement increase should precede, rather than follow, the tightening

Nebuliser therapy in the intensive care unit

The relationship between identity, lived experience, sexual practices and the language through which these are conveyed has been widely debated in sexuality literature. For example, ‘coming out’ has famously been conceptualised as a ‘speech act’ (Sedgwick 1990) and as a collective narrative (Plummer 1995), while a growing concern for individuals’ diverse identifications in relations to their sexual and gender practices has produced interesting research focusing on linguistic practices among LGBT-identified individuals (Leap 1995; Kulick 2000; Cameron and Kulick 2006; Farqhar 2000). While an explicit focus on language remains marginal to literature on sexualities (Kulick 2000), issue of language use and translation are seldom explicitly addressed in the growing literature on intersectionality. Yet intersectional perspectives ‘reject the separability of analytical and identity categories’ (McCall 2005:1771), and therefore have an implicit stake in the ‘vernacular’ language of the researched, in the ‘scientific’ language of the researcher and in the relationship of continuity between the two. Drawing on literature within gay and lesbian/queer studies and cross-cultural studies, this chapter revisits debates on sexuality, language and intersectionality. I argue for the importance of giving careful consideration to the language we choose to use as researchers to collectively define the people whose experiences we try to capture. I also propose that language itself can be investigated as a productive way to foreground how individual and collective identifications are discursively constructed, and to unpack the diversity of lived experience. I address intersectional complexity as a methodological issue, where methodology is understood not only as the methods and practicalities of doing research, but more broadly as ‘a coherent set of ideas about the philosophy, methods and data that underlie the research process and the production of knowledge’ (McCall 2005:1774). My points are illustrated with examples drawn from my ethnographic study on ‘lesbian’ identity in urban Russia, interspersed with insights from existing literature. In particular, I aim to show that an explicit focus on language can be a productive way to explore the intersections between the global, the national and the local in cross-cultural research on sexuality, while also addressing issues of positionality and accountability to the communities researched