Once a month, the Rackham Student Government and Society for Women in Physics presents Seminar Slam. Seminar Slam brings two speakers from different departments together to each give a 20 to 25-minute presentation on their research in the form of a public lecture. These talks are designed to be given by graduate students for graduate students.

This month, the features speakers are Kelly E. Wright from Linguistics and Ryan Farber from Astronomy. Seminar Slam will take place on Thursday, October 12, from 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm in Undergraduate Science Building, Room 4151.

Kelly E. Wright

Covert Segregation - Investigating Dialect Discrimination in the Housing Market

Since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, under ten cases have been tried on dialect discrimination. Purnell et al. (1999), used a matched-guise study to illuminate the varying responses apartment rental agents gave to differently-raced callers, showing that auditory discrimination is real and disproportionately effects racial minorities. That was near 20 years ago, and there has not been sufficient movement towards bringing this reality to the awareness of consumers and courts. This work revisits Purnell et al. (1999), bringing in information about listeners and new technology, to reveal the underlying language ideologies that motivate the commonplace racial disparity that continues to limit the social mobility and personal agency of victims of dialect discrimination.

Ryan Farber

Two New Stitches in the Great Galactic Quilt - The Impact of Cosmic Ray Transport​ ​on​ ​Galactic​ ​Winds

The role of cosmic rays generated by supernovae and young stars has very recently begun to receive significant attention in studies of galaxy formation and evolution due to the realization that cosmic rays can efficiently accelerate galactic winds. Microscopic cosmic ray transport processes are fundamental for determining the efficiency of cosmic ray wind driving. Previous studies focused on modeling of cosmic ray transport either via constant diffusion coefficient or via streaming proportional to the Alfven speed. However, in predominantly cold, neutral gas, cosmic rays can propagate faster than in the ionized medium and the effective transport can be substantially larger; i.e., cosmic rays can decouple from the gas. We perform three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical simulations of patches of galactic disks including the effects of cosmic rays. Our simulations include the decoupling of cosmic rays in the cold, neutral interstellar medium. We find that, compared to the ordinary diffusive cosmic ray transport case, accounting for the decoupling leads to significantly different wind properties such as the gas density and temperature, significantly broader spatial distribution of cosmic rays, and larger wind speed. These results have implications for X-ray, γ-ray and radio emission, and for the magnetization and pollution of the circumgalactic medium by cosmic rays.