Moral Values and Family in Middle School Students of the Concepción Province

Se presenta un aspecto de la moralidad juvenil, medido por la aceptación de conductas morales cuestionables (Escala de Harding y Phillips, 1986), y sus relaciones con variables familiares, en una muestra aleatoria de 296 estudiantes de enseñanza media, de la provincia de Concepción, Chile.El funcionamiento psicométrico de la escala de Harding y Phillips fue adecuado.En general, la permisividad moral fue baja, con una más alta permisividad sexual yuna más baja legal y personal.Hubo correlación entre las variables funcionamiento familiar y los niveles de permisividad. A mayor familismo e interacción familiar, menor permisividad moral y a mayorinsatisfacción con el funcionamiento familiar, mayor permisividad moral.This study presents an aspect of youth morality, especifically acceptance ofquestionable moral behaviors and its relation to familiy structure and functioning instudents of secundary education at the Province of Concepción, Chile. For this purpose a random sample of 296 students was surveyed.The Harding and Phillips Scale (1986) showed adequate psicometrical functioning.In general, the moral permissiveness detected may be considered low, but higherlevels of permissivenes were observed in sexuality dimention and lower levels weremeasured on personal and legal permissiveness.A correlation was found between family and permissiveness. The greater familismand family interaction in secondary educational-level students, the lesser moralpermissiviness; and the greater dissatisfaction with familiy functioning, the greatermoral permissiveness

The thermodynamics and roughening of solid-solid interfaces

The dynamics of sharp interfaces separating two non-hydrostatically stressed solids is analyzed using the idea that the rate of mass transport across the interface is proportional to the thermodynamic potential difference across the interface. The solids are allowed to exchange mass by transforming one solid into the other, thermodynamic relations for the transformation of a mass element are derived and a linear stability analysis of the interface is carried out. The stability is shown to depend on the order of the phase transition occurring at the interface. Numerical simulations are performed in the non-linear regime to investigate the evolution and roughening of the interface. It is shown that even small contrasts in the referential densities of the solids may lead to the formation of finger like structures aligned with the principal direction of the far field stress.Comment: (24 pages, 8 figures; V2: added figures, text revisions

Roughening of Fracture Surfaces: the Role of Plastic Deformations

Post mortem analysis of fracture surfaces of ductile and brittle materials on the $\mu$m-mm and the nm scales respectively, reveal self affine graphs with an anomalous scaling exponent $\zeta\approx 0.8$. Attempts to use elasticity theory to explain this result failed, yielding exponent $\zeta\approx 0.5$ up to logarithms. We show that when the cracks propagate via plastic void formations in front of the tip, followed by void coalescence, the voids positions are positively correlated to yield exponents higher than 0.5.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

Testing hydrostatic equilibrium in galaxy cluster MS 2137

We test the assumption of strict hydrostatic equilibrium in galaxy cluster MS2137.3-2353 (MS 2137) using the latest CHANDRA X-ray observations and results from a combined strong and weak lensing analysis based on optical observations. We deproject the two-dimensional X-ray surface brightness and mass surface density maps assuming spherical and spheroidal dark matter distributions. We find a significant, 40%-50%, contribution from non-thermal pressure in the core assuming a spherical model. This non-thermal pressure support is similar to what was found by Molnar et al. (2010) using a sample of massive relaxed clusters drawn from high resolution cosmological simulations. We have studied hydrostatic equilibrium in MS 2137 under the assumption of elliptical cluster geometry adopting prolate models for the dark matter density distribution with different axis ratios. Our results suggest that the main effect of ellipticity (compared to spherical models) is to decrease the non-thermal pressure support required for equilibrium at all radii without changing the distribution qualitatively. We find that a prolate model with an axis ratio of 1.25 (axis in the line of sight over perpendicular to it) provides a physically acceptable model implying that MS 2137 is close to hydrostatic equilibrium at about 0.04-0.15 Rvir and have an about 25% contribution from non-thermal pressure at the center. Our results provide further evidence that there is a significant contribution from non-thermal pressure in the core region of even relaxed clusters, i.e., the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium is not valid in this region, independently of the assumed shape of the cluster.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Impacts of a Changing Climate and Land Use on Reindeer Pastoralism: Indigenous Knowledge and Remote Sensing

The Arctic is home to many indigenous peoples, including those who depend on reindeer herding for their livelihood, in one of the harshest environments in the world. For the largely nomadic peoples, reindeer not only form a substantial part of the Arctic food base and economy, but they are also culturally important, shaping their way of life, mythologies, festivals and ceremonies. Reindeer pastoralism or husbandry has been practiced by numerous peoples all across Eurasia for thousands of years and involves moving herds of reindeer, which are very docile animals, from pasture to pasture depending on the season. Thus, herders must adapt on a daily basis to find optimal conditions for their herds according to the constantly changing conditions. Climate change and variability plus rapid development are increasingly creating major changes in the physical environment, ecology, and cultures of these indigenous reindeer herder communities in the North, and climate changes are occurring significantly faster in the Arctic than the rest of the globe, with correspondingly dramatic impacts (Oskal, 2008). In response to these changes, Eurasian reindeer herders have created the EALAT project, a comprehensive new initiative to study these impacts and to develop local adaptation strategies based upon their traditional knowledge of the land and its uses - in targeted partnership with the science and remote sensing community - involving extensive collaborations and coproduction of knowledge to minimize the impacts of the various changes. This chapter provides background on climate and development challenges to reindeer husbandry across the Arctic and an overview of the EALAT initiative, with an emphasis on indigenous knowledge, remote sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and other scientific data to 'co-produce' datasets for use by herders for improved decision-making and herd management. It also provides a description of the EALAT monitoring data integration and sharing system and portal being developed for reindeer pastoralism. In addition, the chapter provides some preliminary results from the EALAT Project, including some early remote sensing research results

Eurasian Reindeer Pastoralism in a Changing Climate: Indigenous Knowledge and NASA Remote Sensing

It is intended that Reindeer Mapper/EALAT will be able to provide reindeer herders with an efficient tool for managing the real-time movements and migrations of their herds through enabling improved efficiency in linking different members of the herder settlements or communities and providing real-time local, satellite or other data (e.g., ice melt in lakes and rivers, weather events), thus enabling real time adjustments to herd movements to avoid problems such as changing weather/climate conditions, freeze-thaw "lock-out" problems, or take advantage of availability of better pasturelands along migration routes. The system is being designed to incorporate local data to allow users to bring their own data into the system for analysis in addition to the data provided by the system itself. With the local information of the population, up to date environmental data and habitat characteristics, the system could generate maps depicting important features of interest for reindeer managers. One of the products derived from the planned Reindeer Mapper system will be a web-based graphic display that allows analysts to quickly pinpoint areas of interest such as those with large concentrations of reindeer and provide surrounding environmental information. The system could be automatically updated with near-real-time information such as hourly precipitation and snowfall rate and accumulation, daily surface and air temperatures, and vegetation cover conditions. The system could bring attention to the proximity of human and animal populations as part of the need for control response. A local GIS will bring these many layers together with several supporting models, showing only a straightforward graphic of the real-time situation in the field. Because the system proposed will be operating in the Internet environment, it should be virtually accessible from any network computers and wireless remote access from the field. The International Center for Reindeer Husbandry in Kautokeino, Norway, is providing regional and international coordination of and access to data sets and expertise, and will act as overall clearinghouse for EALAT information

The cluster gas mass fraction as a cosmological probe: a revised study

(Abriged) We present the analysis of the baryonic content of 52 X-ray luminous galaxy clusters observed with Chandra in the redshift range 0.3-1.273. We use the deprojected X-ray surface brightness profiles and the measured values of the gas temperature to recover the gas and total mass profiles. By assuming that galaxy clusters are representative of the cosmic baryon budget, the distribution of the cluster baryon fraction in the hottest (T> 4 keV) systems as a function of redshift is used to constrain the cosmological parameters. We discuss how our constraints are affected by several systematics, namely the isothermality, the assumed baryon fraction in stars, the depletion parameter and the sample selection. By using only the cluster baryon fraction as a proxy for the cosmological parameters, we obtain that Omega is very well constrained at the value of 0.35 with a relative statistical uncertainty of 11% (1 sigma level; w=-1) and a further systematic error of about (-6,+7)%. On the other hand, constraints on Lambda (without the prior of flat geometry) and w (using the prior of flat geometry) are definitely weaker due to the presence of larger statistical and systematic uncertainties (of the order of 40 per cent on Lambda and larger than 50 per cent on w). If the WMAP 5-year best-fit results are assumed to fix the cosmological parameters, we limit the contributions expected from non-thermal pressure support and ICM clumpiness to be lower than about 10 per cent, leaving also room to accommodate baryons not accounted for either in the X-ray emitting plasma or in stars of the order of 18 per cent of the total cluster baryon budget.Comment: A&A in press. Accepted on March 28, 2009. Revised to match version in prin

Fracturing ranked surfaces

Discretized landscapes can be mapped onto ranked surfaces, where every element (site or bond) has a unique rank associated with its corresponding relative height. By sequentially allocating these elements according to their ranks and systematically preventing the occupation of bridges, namely elements that, if occupied, would provide global connectivity, we disclose that bridges hide a new tricritical point at an occupation fraction $p=p_{c}$, where $p_{c}$ is the percolation threshold of random percolation. For any value of $p$ in the interval $p_{c}< p \leq 1$, our results show that the set of bridges has a fractal dimension $d_{BB} \approx 1.22$ in two dimensions. In the limit $p \rightarrow 1$, a self-similar fracture is revealed as a singly connected line that divides the system in two domains. We then unveil how several seemingly unrelated physical models tumble into the same universality class and also present results for higher dimensions

Twitter-based analysis of the dynamics of collective attention to political parties

Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by the collective attention to the action of political parties. Not surprisingly, researchers and stakeholders tried to correlate parties' presence on social media with their performances in elections. Despite the many efforts, results are still inconclusive since this kind of data is often very noisy and significant signals could be covered by (largely unknown) statistical fluctuations. In this paper we consider the number of tweets (tweet volume) of a party as a proxy of collective attention to the party, identify the dynamics of the volume, and show that this quantity has some information on the elections outcome. We find that the distribution of the tweet volume for each party follows a log-normal distribution with a positive autocorrelation of the volume over short terms, which indicates the volume has large fluctuations of the log-normal distribution yet with a short-term tendency. Furthermore, by measuring the ratio of two consecutive daily tweet volumes, we find that the evolution of the daily volume of a party can be described by means of a geometric Brownian motion (i.e., the logarithm of the volume moves randomly with a trend). Finally, we determine the optimal period of averaging tweet volume for reducing fluctuations and extracting short-term tendencies. We conclude that the tweet volume is a good indicator of parties' success in the elections when considered over an optimal time window. Our study identifies the statistical nature of collective attention to political issues and sheds light on how to model the dynamics of collective attention in social media.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Published in PLoS ON