Quasars

I review recent results for quasars and discuss how they are related to activity in galaxies. Topics included are studies of quasar host galaxies with HST; searches for quasars in the Hubble Deep Field; evolution of the quasar luminosity function; news highlights from astro-ph; and current observational problems and their relation to theoretical work.Comment: 8 pages (LaTeX, paspconf.sty), invited review to appear in proceedings of IAU Sym. 194, "Activity in Galaxies and Related Phenomena" (1998 August 17-21, Byurakan, Armenia), ASP Conf. Series, ed. Y. Terzian, E. Khachikian, and D. Weedma

Wherefore Art Thou Guidelines? An Empirical Study of White-Collar Criminal Sentencing and How the Gall Decision Effectively Eliminated the Sentencing Guidelines

[Excerpt] “Until the passage of the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines in 1984, federal judges had relatively wide discretion in sentencing federal offenders up to the statutory maximum. This judicial discretion led to a disparity in the sentences of similarly situated offenders, particularly in white-collar cases. The Guidelines attempted to eliminate this disparity by establishing maximum and minimum sentences for certain offenses based on the characteristics of the crime. An important feature of the Guidelines system was its mandatory nature, which decreased and structured the judiciary‘s discretion within bounds set by Congress. The mandatory application of the Guidelines resulted in stiff sentences for white-collar criminals, effectively reducing the disparity in sentencing that had existed prior to implementation. However, in January of 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court held in United States v. Booker that the Guidelines‘ mandatory use of enhancing factors not found by a jury was unconstitutional, and the proper remedy for this constitutional error was to sever the provisions from the statute that made the Guidelines mandatory, rendering the Guidelines advisory. Then, in December of 2007, the Court effectively eliminated the mandatory guideline sentencing entirely in Gall v. United States. Although the Gall decision impacts all sentencing within the federal court system, a significant group of criminal defendants that one should expect to be impacted are high-ranking corporate officers convicted of financial crimes. Theoretically, those defendants should now expect to receive lighter sentences, in part because of the subjective factors available to district court judges during sentencing which were expressly rejected by appellate courts prior to Gall. Additionally, because judges often articulate the view that white-collar crime lacks violence and identifiable victims — a belief that tends to obscure the severity of the harm caused by white-collar crimes — their personal views often influence white-collar defendants‘ sentences. Although one of the motivating factors behind Congress‘s passage of the Guidelines was the relatively light sentences given to white-collar criminals, recent trends demonstrate that judges have increasingly imposed more lenient sentences upon white-collar defendants since the Booker decision, a trend which Gall could help accelerate. This note will theoretically analyze why one should expect lighter sentences for defendants convicted of financial crimes, and it will test that theory by examining sentences imposed on Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) from 1998 to 2007.

Derivation of the Lamb Shift using an Effective Field Theory

We rederive the $O(\alpha^5)$ shift of the hydrogen levels in the non-recoil ($m_e/m_P \to 0$) limit using Nonrelativistic QED (NRQED), an effective field theory developed by Caswell and Lepage (Phys. Lett. 167B, 437 (1986)). Our result contains the Lamb shift as a special case. Our calculation is far simpler than traditional approaches and has the advantage of being systematic. It also clearly illustrates the need to renormalize (or ``match'') the coefficients of the effective theory beyond tree level.Comment: 15 pages, 11 Postscript figures, uses Latex2e and epsf.te

Ion-by-Ion DEM Determination: I. Method

We describe a technique to derive constraints on the differential emission measure (DEM) distribution, a measure of the temperature distribution, of collisionally ionized hot plasmas from their X-ray emission line spectra. This technique involves fitting spectra using a number of components, each of which is the entire X-ray line emission spectrum for a single ion. It is applicable to high-resolution X-ray spectra of any collisionally ionized plasma and particularly useful for spectra in which the emission lines are broadened and blended such as those of the winds of hot stars. This method does not require that any explicit assumptions about the form of the DEM distribution be made and is easily automated.Comment: This paper was split in two. This version is part I. Part II may be found at astro-ph/050343