Industrial Terrorism and the Unmaking of New Deal Labor Law

The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of industrial terrorism. Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the literature has neither adequately described the extent and intensity of this phenomenon nor fully explored its effects. This Article remedies that shortcoming. Focusing on three industries where the practice of industrial terrorism was especially well developed and its influence especially pronounced, this Article shows how the practitioners of industrial terrorism and their allies in Congress were able to turn the legacy of violence and disorder, which they authored by their violent resistance to the Wagner Act, into the basis of an extraordinary counterattack on labor rights. It shows how this attack culminated in 1947 with the enactment of the profoundly reactionary Taft-Hartley Act and remade the landscape of American labor relations

Decision trees, monotone functions, and semimatroids

We define decision trees for monotone functions on a simplicial complex. We define homology decidability of monotone functions, and show that various monotone functions related to semimatroids are homology decidable. Homology decidability is a generalization of semi-nonevasiveness, a notion due to Jonsson. The motivating example is the complex of bipartite graphs, whose Betti numbers are unknown in general. We show that these monotone functions have optimum decision trees, from which we can compute relative Betti numbers of related pairs of simplicial complexes. Moreover, these relative Betti numbers are coefficients of evaluations of the Tutte polynomial, and every semimatroid collapses onto its broken circuit complex.Comment: 16 page

Magnetically centered liquid column float Patent

Magnetically centered liquid column floa

Resolving the virial discrepancy in clusters of galaxies with modified Newtonian dynamics

A sample of 197 X-ray emitting clusters of galaxies is considered in the context of Milgrom's modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). It is shown that the gas mass, extrapolated via an assumed $\beta$ model to a fixed radius of 3 Mpc, is correlated with the gas temperature as predicted by MOND ($M_g \propto T^2$). The observed temperatures are generally consistent with the inferred mass of hot gas; no substantial quantity of additional unseen matter is required in the context of MOND. However, modified dynamics cannot resolve the strong lensing discrepancy in those clusters where this phenomenon occurs. The prediction is that additional baryonic matter may be detected in the central regions of rich clusters.Comment: Submitted to A&A, 4 pages, 3 figures, A&A macro

Brave New World: Can We Engineer a Better Start for Freshers?

Abstract - The crucial importance of first experiences in shaping future success has been widely acknowledged. Creating the best foundations in large cohorts of students from diverse backgrounds presents special problems of its own. But a secure foundation can enhance student achievement and improve retention – and the students may even have fun too. Research has suggested that building learning communities can enhance student engagement and achievement. This paper examines how introducing non-technical activities can establish sound foundations for a university career by a) addressing objectives in the wider curriculum and b) promoting non-technical skills and experience of group working. A set of changes introduced to five degree cohorts in our academic school were designed to complement enhancements to our technical curriculum introduced during many years of debate and consideration. The changes have impacted upon generic and technical educational experiences. The paper presents an evaluation of the programme of changes through two iterations from the perspective of both faculty and student