Beyond aspect: will be -ing and shall be -ing

This article discusses the synchronic status and diachronic development of will be -ing and shall be -ing (as in I’ll be leaving at noon).2 Although available since at least Middle English, the constructions did not establish a significant foothold in standard English until the twentieth century. Both types are also more prevalent in British English (BrE) than American English (AmE). We argue that in present-day usage will/shall be -ing are aspectually underspecified: instances that clearly construe a situation as future-in-progress are in the minority. Similarly, although volition-neutrality has been identified as a key feature of will/shall be -ing, it is important to take account of other, generally richer meanings and associations, notably ‘future-as-matter-of-course’ (Leech 2004), ‘already-decided future’ (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002) and non-agentivity. Like volition-neutrality, these characteristics appear to be relevant not only in contemporary use, but also in their historical expansion. We show that the construction has evolved from progressive aspect towards more subjectivised evidential meaning

Saul Bellow and the Role of the Intellectual in 20th Century Society

As contemporary readers constantly “lower the bar”, writers tend to follow the same trend, thus creating a vicious circle. Their novels become more and more “unintellectual” in order to appeal to the common man. And this happens not as much because the writers wish to remain loyal to their readers as it happens out of fear of rejection. The role of the modern writer is therefore to resist the temptation of writing for the masses and to assume the higher responsibility of forcing the masses out of their ignorance, of reorienting the self towards knowledge, exchange of ideas in order to create the ability to filter what an impure society might confront us with. The evolution from rights to liberty and from liberty to openness needs to be constantly adjusted and only the intellectuals can alert his fellow citizens of the danger behind the famous statement “the right to the pursuit of happiness”: that of transforming oneself into a simple consumer, getting satisfaction from a fake reality, a simulacra, complacent about himself/herself and always willing to choose the easiest way around. Most modern readers simply do not take the challenge, they just wish to be entertained. But entertainment without intellectual effort creates not a reality, but an illusion and Bellow is aware of the growing need for illusion of the contemporary society: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”; “You could see the suicidal impulses pushing strongly. You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination – whether only its science and technology or administrative practices would travel, be adopted by other societies”. (Bellow, Sammler…, p. 34).modern intellectual, contemporary society, Saul Bellow

Dynamic Scaling in Diluted Systems Phase Transitions: Deactivation trough Thermal Dilution

Activated scaling is confirmed to hold in transverse field induced phase transitions of randomly diluted Ising systems. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations have been made not just at the percolation threshold but well bellow and above it including the Griffiths-McCoy phase. A novel deactivation phenomena in the Griffiths-McCoy phase is observed using a thermal (in contrast to random) dilution of the system.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, RevTe

Geotechnical design with apparent seismic safety factors well-bellow 1

The paper demonstrates that whereas often in seismic geotechnical design it is not realistically feasible to design with ample factor of safety against failure as is done in static design, an "engineering" apparent seismic factor of safety less than 1 does not imply failure. Examples from slope stability and foundation rocking illustrate the concept. It is also shown that in many cases it may be beneficial to under-design the foundation by accepting substantial uplifting and/or full mobilization of bearing capacity failure mechanisms. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, [VOL 57, (February 2014)] DOI10.1016/j.soildyn.2013.10.002 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.</p

Supersymmetric origin of a low aJ/psia_{J/psi} CP asymmetry

We show that general Minimal Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (MSSM) allow for a CP asymmetry in B --> J/psi K(S) well bellow the SM expectations with dominant Supersymmetric contributions to epsilon_K and epsilon'/epsilon. Indeed, we provide an explicit example of an MSSM with non-universal soft breaking terms fully consistent with the low results of this asymmetry recently announced by Babar and Belle collaborations.Comment: 6 pages, no figures. Reference added, typos correcte

The "approach unifying spin and charges" predicts the fourth family and a stable family forming the dark matter clusters

The Approach unifying spin and charges, assuming that all the internal degrees of freedom---the spin, all the charges and the families---originate in $d > (1+3)$ in only two kinds of spins (the Dirac one and the only one existing beside the Dirac one and anticommuting with the Dirac one), is offering a new way in understanding the appearance of the families and the charges (in the case of charges the similarity with the Kaluza-Klein-like theories must be emphasized). A simple starting action in $d >(1+3)$ for gauge fields (the vielbeins and the two kinds of the spin connections) and a spinor (which carries only two kinds of spins and interacts with the corresponding gauge fields) manifests after particular breaks of the starting symmetry the massless four (rather than three) families with the properties as assumed by the Standard model for the three known families, and the additional four massive families. The lowest of these additional four families is stable. A part of the starting action contributes, together with the vielbeins, in the break of the electroweak symmetry manifesting in $d=(1+3)$ the Yukawa couplings (determining the mixing matrices and the masses of the lower four families of fermions and influencing the properties of the higher four families) and the scalar field, which determines the masses of the gauge fields. The fourth family might be seen at the LHC, while the stable fifth family might be what is observed as the dark matter.Comment: 11 pages, to appear in Proceedings to the 5th International Conference on Beyond the Standard Models of Particle Physics, Cosmology and Astrophysics, Cape Town, February 1- 6, 2010