Rolling the tachyon in super BSFT

We investigate the rolling of the tachyon on the unstable D9 brane in Type IIA string theory by studying the BSFT action. The action is known for linear profiles of the tachyon, which is the expected asymptotic behavior of the tachyon as it approaches the closed string vacuum, as recently described by Sen. We find that the action does indeed seem consistent with the general Sen description, in that it implies a constant energy density with diminishing pressure. However, the details are somewhat different from an effective field theory of Born-Infeld type. For instance, the BSFT action implies there are poles for certain rolling velocities, while a Born-Infeld action would have a cut. We also find that solutions with pressure diminishing from either the positive or negative side are possible.Comment: 8 pages LaTeX; v2, references adde

A Midrash On Water

(Excerpt) Jews and Christians share a common foundation of Scripture. It is within this common, sacred text that we shall find the source of Grace upon Grace: Living Water. It requires little religious imagination to link the use of water as a purification rite in the Biblical world to the use of the mikveh in the early rabbinic period, and ultimately to the transformative ritual of Baptism as an essential sacramental rite in Christianity. My task this evening is not to trace that course of ritual development, but rather to consider the many and varied texts of Scripture from within which we find water, Mayim, as a central metaphor for God\u27s presence and human struggle. I offer a midrash-an open interpretation of Biblical texts on water, a Jewish understanding of the religious significance of water, for our ongoing interfaith conversation on ritual and liturgy. Midrash is a form of rabbinic literature in which the text is used liked a prism and understanding, like light from many different sources, allowed to shine through the angles of glass, and if we are both lucky and skillful we shall see the bright colors of the spectrum suspended like a rainbow in front of our eyes. Midrash is a discipline of reading and rereading classic sacred texts, always allowing for our reality as readers and the overflowing surplus meaning of scripture to find their own new horizons of understanding

Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects: Definition and Determination of Damages After the Cosmos 954 Incident

This Note examines the conflicting provisions of the Liability Convention in the context of the Cosmos 954 incident to determine whether the damages that Canada claimed would be recoverable under the Convention. The analysis will illustrate the need for change in the Liability Convention\u27s definition of the measure of damages. Finally, this Note presents a proposal that would render the provisions more consistent with the spirit and the purpose of the Liability Convention

Knowing How: A Computational Approach

With advances in Artificial Intelligences being achieved through the use of Artificial Neural Networks, we are now at the point where computers are able to do tasks that were previously only able to be accomplished by humans. These advancements must cause us to reconsider our previous understanding of how people come to know how to do a particular task. In order to unpack this question, I will first look to an account of knowing how presented by Jason Stanley in his book Know How. I will then look towards criticisms of this view before using evidence presented by the existence of Artificial Neural Networks to present a new view that addresses the problems present in Stanley’s work. Finally, I will argue that knowing how to do something is a matter of heuristics, or knowing certain shortcuts which approximate a solution to the task one is trying to accomplish

Principal Series Representations of Direct Limit Groups

We combine the geometric realization of principal series representations of the author, with the Bott--Borel--Weil Theorem for direct limits of compact groups of Natarajan, Rodriguez-Carrington and the author, obtaining limits of principal series representations for direct limits of real reductive Lie groups. We introduce the notion of weakly parabolic direct limits and relate it to the conditions that the limit representations are norm--preserving representations on a Banach space or unitary representations on a Hilbert space. We specialize the results to diagonal embedding direct limit groups. Finally we discuss the possibilities of extending the results to limits of tempered series other than the principal series.Comment: 28 page

Human rights and the law: the unbreachable gap between the ethics of justice and the efficacy of law

This paper explores the structure of justice as the condition of ethical, inter-subjective responsibility. Taking a Levinasian perspective, this is a responsibility borne by the individual subject in a pre-foundational, proto-social proximity with the other human subject, which takes precedence over the interests of the self. From this specific post-humanist perspective, human rights are not the restrictive rights of individual self-will, as expressed in our contemporary legal human rights discourse. Rights do not amount to the prioritisation of the so-called politico-legal equality of the individual citizen-subject animated by the universality of the dignity of autonomous, reasoned intentionality. Rather, rights enlivened by proximity invert this discourse and signify, first and foremost, rights for the other, with the ethical burden of responsibility towards the other

CAP reform and world trade negotiations

In March 1999 the European Council in Berlin agreed on reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Dr Joseph McMahon of the Queen’s University of Belfast examines these reforms in relation to the European Community’s Agenda 2000 proposals and the next round of WTO negotiations and argues that they may not go far enough. Article by Dr Joseph A. McMahon published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London