Another Person\u27s World: Ed Reform Through True Understanding

Anthropologist and humanist Ashley Montagu stated: Love is profound involvement in the well-being of others. Several weeks ago, I experienced this kind of love in West Humboldt Park, an impoverished, gang-and-violence-infested inner city Chicago neighborhood

The Backside of Habit: Notes on Embodied Agency and the Functional Opacity of the Medium

In this chapter what I call the “backside” of habit is explored. I am interested in the philosophical implications of the physical and physiological processes that mediate, and which allow for what comes to appear as almost magic; namely the various sensorimotor associations and integrations that allows us to replay our past experiences, and to in a certain sense perceive potential futures, and to act and bring about anticipated outcomes – without quite knowing how. Thus, the term “backside” is meant to refer both the actual mediation and the epistemic opacity of these backstage intermediaries that allow for the front stage magic. The question is if the epistemic complexities around sensorimotor mediation gives us valuable insights into the nature of human agency and further how it might begin to show us new ways to think of the mind as truly embodied yet not reducible to any finite body-as-object

Honor in the face of death: Hemingway’s moral code in \u3cem\u3eDeath in the Afternoon\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eFor Whom the Bell Tolls\u3c/em\u3e

This paper analyzes the code of honor in bullfighting as it is explained in Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway. It then describes the cathartic emotion given to the audience after an honorable performance and discusses the implications of this emotion. Finally, this paper applies the previous analyses of Death in the Afternoon to an analysis of For Whom the Bell Tolls in order to explain how the novel suggests Hemingway\u27s understanding of the Spanish way of life

Vanishing in Plain Sight

Playfully negotiating the historical constructs of theatrical vanishing and its disturbingly female trappings this paper centers on the creation of Bautier de Kolta’s l’Escamotage D’une Dame, an illusion used to screen the anxieties of the male British populous, irked by a buoyant surplus in unmarried, white, middle class women, in the late 1880s. Introducing texts such as W. R Greg’s Why are women Redundant? This paper makes ever more apparent the political, violent and sexual connotations of the female body in magical feats of performative disappearance. From the photographic curios of hidden mothers to the dark room of the séance, the conversation unfurls around the many forms of female vanishing, culminating in a discussion of the contemporary artwork Escamotage (Grace A Williams, 2015) that takes the Persian rug as both a motif of magical vanishing and a tool for the exposure of form. This paper was originally delivered as a performance from within a ‘Zig-Zag’ illusion box, in collaboration with artist David Cheeseman. The first critical analysis of women’s role within magical illusions, delivered by a female artist from within a magical prop that continues to dismember female bodies for entertainment in the contemporary magic market

Systematics of collective correlation energies from self-consistent mean-field calculations

The collective ground-state correlations stemming from low-lying quadrupole excitations are computed microscopically. To that end, the self-consistent mean-field model is employed on the basis of the Skyrme-Hartre-Fock (SHF) functional augmented by BCS pairing. The microscopic-macroscopic mapping is achieved by quadrupole-constrained mean-field calculations which are processed further in the generator-coordinate method (GCM) at the level of the Gaussian overlap approximation (GOA). We study the correlation effects on energy, charge radii, and surface thickness for a great variety of semi-magic nuclei. A key issue is to work out the influence of variations of the SHF functional. We find that collective ground-state correlations (GSC) are robust under change of nuclear bulk properties (e.g., effective mass, symmetry energy) or of spin-orbit coupling. Some dependence on the pairing strength is observed. This, however, does not change the general conclusion that collective GSC obey a general pattern and that their magnitudes are rather independent of the actual SHF parameters.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

Strongly Localized State of a Photon at the Intersection of the Phase Slips in 2D Photonic Crystal with Low Contrast of Dielectric Constant

Two-dimensional photonic crystal with a rectangular symmetry and low contrast (< 1) of the dielectric constant is considered. We demonstrate that, despite the {\em absence} of a bandgap, strong localization of a photon can be achieved for certain ``magic'' geometries of a unit cell by introducing two $\pi/2$ phase slips along the major axes. Long-living photon mode is bound to the intersection of the phase slips. We calculate analytically the lifetime of this mode for the simplest geometry -- a square lattice of cylinders of a radius, $r$. We find the magic radius, $r_c$, of a cylinder to be 43.10 percent of the lattice constant. For this value of $r$, the quality factor of the bound mode exceeds $10^6$. Small ($\sim 1$) deviation of $r$ from $r_c$ results in a drastic damping of the bound mode.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure