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  1. We present a method for solving the linearized Vlasov-Poisson equation, based on analyticity properties of the equilibrium and initial condition through Cauchy-type integrals, that produces algebraic expressions for the distribution and field, i.e., the solution is expressed without integrals. Standard extant approaches involve deformations of the Bromwich contour that give erroneous results for certain physically reasonable configurations or eigenfunction expansions that are misleading as to the temporal structure of the solution. Our method is more transparent, lacks these defects, and predicts previously unrecognized behavior. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 1, 2024
  2. We present the results of a survey fielded in June of 2022 as a lens to examine recent data reliability issues on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We contrast bad data from this survey with bad data from the same survey fielded among US workers in October 2013, April 2018, and February 2019. Application of an established data cleaning scheme reveals that unusable data has risen from a little over 2% in 2013 to almost 90% in 2022. Through symptomatic diagnosis, we attribute the data reliability drop not to an increase in bad faith work, but rather to a continuum of English proficiency levels. A qualitative analysis of workers’ responses to open-ended questions allows us to distinguish between low fluency workers, ultra-low fluency workers, satisficers, and bad faith workers. We go on to show the effects of the new low fluency work on Likert scale data and on the study’s qualitative results. Attention checks are shown to be much less effective than they once were at identifying survey responses that should be discarded. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 30, 2024
  3. Benoit Lavraud (Ed.)
    The amateur radio community is a global, highly engaged, and technical community with an intense interest in space weather, its underlying physics, and how it impacts radio communications. The large-scale observational capabilities of distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and radio science enthusiasts offers a tremendous opportunity to advance the fields of heliophysics, radio science, and space weather. Well-established amateur radio networks like the RBN, WSPRNet, and PSKReporter already provide rich, ever-growing, long-term data of bottomside ionospheric observations. Up-and-coming purpose-built citizen science networks, and their associated novel instruments, offer opportunities for citizen scientists, professional researchers, and industry to field networks for specific science questions and operational needs. Here, we discuss the scientific and technical capabilities of the global amateur radio community, review methods of collaboration between the amateur radio and professional scientific community, and review recent peer-reviewed studies that have made use of amateur radio data and methods. Finally, we present recommendations submitted to the U.S. National Academy of Science Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024–2033 for using amateur radio to further advance heliophysics and for fostering deeper collaborations between the professional science and amateur radio communities. Technical recommendations include increasing support for distributed instrumentation fielded by amateur radio operators and citizen scientists, developing novel transmissions of RF signals that can be used in citizen science experiments, developing new amateur radio modes that simultaneously allow for communications and ionospheric sounding, and formally incorporating the amateur radio community and its observational assets into the Space Weather R2O2R framework. Collaborative recommendations include allocating resources for amateur radio citizen science research projects and activities, developing amateur radio research and educational activities in collaboration with leading organizations within the amateur radio community, facilitating communication and collegiality between professional researchers and amateurs, ensuring that proposed projects are of a mutual benefit to both the professional research and amateur radio communities, and working towards diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 16, 2024
  4. Has widespread news of abuse changed the public's perceptions of how user-contributed content from social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn can be used? We collected two datasets that reflect participants' attitudes about content ownership, privacy, and control, one in April 2018, while Cambridge Analytica was still in the news, and another in February 2019, after the event had faded from the headlines, and aggregated the data according to participants' awareness of the story, contrasting the attitudes of those who reported the greatest awareness with those who reported the least. Participants with the greatest awareness of the news story's details have more polarized attitudes about reuse, especially the reuse of content as data. They express a heightened desire for data mobility, greater concern about networked privacy rights, increased skepticism of algorithmically targeted advertising and news, and more willingness for social media platforms to demand corrections of inaccurate or deceptive content. 
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  5. Educational prediction games use the popularity and engagement of fantasy sports as a success model to promote learning in other domains. Fantasy sports motivate players to stay up-to-date with relevant news and explore large statistical data sets, thereby deepening their domain understanding while potentially honing their data analysis skills. We conducted a study of fantasy sports players, and discovered that while some participants performed sophisticated data analysis to support their gameplay, far more relied on news and published commentary. We used results from this study to design a prototype prediction game, Fantasy Climate, which helps players move from intuitions and advice to consuming news and analyzing data by supporting a variety of activities essential to gameplay. Because news is a key component of Fantasy Climate, we evaluated two link-based interfaces to domain-related news, one geospatial and the other organized as a list. The evaluation revealed that news presentation has a strong effect on players' engagement and performance: players using the geospatial interface not only were more engaged in the game; they also made better predictions than players who used the list-based presentation. 
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  6. How do children’s visual concepts change across childhood, and how might these changes be reflected in their drawings? Here we investigate developmental changes in children’s ability to emphasize the relevant visual distinctions between object categories in their drawings. We collected over 13K drawings from children aged 2-10 years via a free-standing drawing station in a children’s museum. We hypothesized that older children would produce more recognizable drawings, and that this gain in recognizability would not be entirely explained by concurrent development in visuomotor control. To measure recognizability, we applied a pretrained deep convolutional neural network model to extract a high-level feature representation of all drawings, and then trained a multi-way linear classifier on these features. To measure visuomotor control, we developed an automated procedure to measure their ability to accurately trace complex shapes. We found consistent gains in the recognizability of drawings across ages that were not fully explained by children’s ability to accurately trace complex shapes. Furthermore, these gains were accompanied by an increase in how distinct different object categories were in feature space. Overall, these results demonstrate that children’s drawings include more distinctive visual features as they grow older. 
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  7. null (Ed.)
  8. Abstract A search for highly electrically charged objects (HECOs) and magnetic monopoles is presented using 2.2 $$\hbox {fb}{^{-1}}$$ fb - 1 of $$p-p$$ p - p collision data taken at a centre of mass energy (E $$_{CM}$$ CM ) of 8 TeV by the MoEDAL detector during LHC’s Run-1. The data were collected using MoEDAL’s prototype Nuclear Track Detectord array and the Trapping Detector array. The results are interpreted in terms of Drell–Yan pair production of stable HECO and monopole pairs with three spin hypotheses (0, 1/2 and 1). The search provides constraints on the direct production of magnetic monopoles carrying one to four Dirac magnetic charges and with mass limits ranging from 590 GeV/c $$^{2}$$ 2 to 1 TeV/c $$^{2}$$ 2 . Additionally, mass limits are placed on HECOs with charge in the range 10 e to 180 e , where e is the charge of an electron, for masses between 30 GeV/c $$^{2}$$ 2 and 1 TeV/c $$^{2}$$ 2 . 
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