Are Women Beach Volleyballers ‘Too Sexy for Their Shorts?’

This is a paper on the philosophy of sport or the ethics of sport more specifically. It provides a critical assessment of a particular feminist approach to a specific issue in the ethics of sport with regard to what some feminist scholars refer to as the ‘sexualizing’ of women in sport with particular attention paid to women beach volleyballers

Teachers as the Gravediggers of Neoliberalism: Promoting Dialectical Individualism from the Ruins of the Neoliberal State

Neoliberalism will not die naturally, it must be killed through relentless criticism. However, as criticism of neoliberalism expands, scholars must not reify the term. Scholars must begin to disentangle the historical antecedents that comprise neoliberalism in order to expose it for the sham that it is. Perhaps the biggest sham of neoliberalism is its call for individual freedom. Specifically, by paying attention to the more revolutionary conceptions of individualism contained in some strands of Eighteenth century liberalism, the contradictions of neoliberalism can be exposed. If education, and society in general, is to move past neoliberalism, neoliberalism cannot simply be discarded or wished away, rather, it must be dialectically negated by superseding its unjust elements and retaining and transforming any of its more revolutionary elements to lay a new foundation for education in a post-neoliberal world. Drawing off this dialectical negation of neoliberalism, this paper argues for a new conception of individualism called dialectical individualism. This is not a return to some idealized form of liberalism however, but a new phase in human history with a new conception of individualism. The dialectical movement should not be seen as the product of some otherworldly force, but rather, it should be viewed as centered in the individual and driven by volunteerism in the context of the historical situation. Students can be taught to be dialectical in their actual school work, by writing challenging papers, by writing vision statements, and by partaking in collaborative assignments, and through their understanding of history and the present.Educatio

Attempts to test an alternative electrodynamic theory of superconductors by low-temperature scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy

We perform an experiment to test between two theories of the electrodynamics of superconductors: the standard London theory and an alternative proposed by J. E. Hirsch [Phys. Rev. B 69, 214515 (2004)]. The two alternatives give different predictions with respect to the screening of an electric field by a superconductor, and we try to detect this effect using atomic force microscopy on a niobium sample. We also perform the reverse experiment, where we demonstrate a superconductive tip mounted on a qPlus force sensor. Due to limited accuracy, we are able neither to prove nor to disprove Hirsch's hypothesis. Within our accuracy of 0.17 N/m, the superconductive transition does not alter the atomic-scale interaction between tip and sample.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Minor amendment

Divide and conquer method for proving gaps of frustration free Hamiltonians

Providing system-size independent lower bounds on the spectral gap of local Hamiltonian is in general a hard problem. For the case of finite-range, frustration free Hamiltonians on a spin lattice of arbitrary dimension, we show that a property of the ground state space is sufficient to obtain such a bound. We furthermore show that such a condition is necessary and equivalent to a constant spectral gap. Thanks to this equivalence, we can prove that for gapless models in any dimension, the spectral gap on regions of diameter $n$ is at most $o\left(\frac{\log(n)^{2+\epsilon}}{n}\right)$ for any positive $\epsilon$.Comment: This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication/published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/aaa793, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, March 201

Cyclical Behavior of Prices and Quantities in the Automobile Market

This paper has a simple goal, that of understanding the joint behaviorof prices and quantities in a particular market. More precisely, it examines whether we can find decision problems for suppliers and buyers, together with a market equilibrium structure, which are consistent with the observed price and quantity time series. Because of the relative homogeneity of the product, of the size of the market, end of the quality of the data, the market chosen is the automobile market.The first conclusion we reach is that this goal is difficult to achieve.The behavior of prices appears inconsistent with simple -- competitive, monopolistically competitive or monopolistic -- market structures. Prices appear, in a well defined sense, to be too "sticky". We then consider potentiail explanations and extensions. None appears completely satisfactory. In particular, the introduction of costs of changing prices does not seem able to explain the joint behavior of prices and quantities.

The role of auxiliary states in state discrimination with linear optical evices

The role of auxiliary photons in the problem of identifying a state secretly chosen from a given set of L-photon states is analyzed. It is shown that auxiliary photons do not increase the ability to discriminate such states by means of a global measurement using only optical linear elements, conditional transformation and auxiliary photons.Comment: 5 pages. 1 figure. RevTex documen