Ba Win and Pete Baumann

Selected excerpts from an event at which Ba Win and Pete Baumann were the guest speakers. The full transcript may be restricted. To request access contact the Simon’s Rock College Archives. Ba Win: Mrs. Hall told me that she thought that a variant on even a good American high schools might be possible based on her conversations with her alumnae, her Concord graduates who had come back to visit her, and she asked them how are things going, and these young women at the best schools in America, they would say “Fine, it’s OK.” without much enthusiasm but she knew they were doing well, and when she dug further she found that what had happened was that she had a bunch of bright students at Concord, and she had great teachers working for her, and in a private school you don’t have to conform to state standards, you can do whatever you want within reason, and what had happened was that... the teachers would raise the bar and the students would respond to the teachers raising the bar and on and on it went. So much so that it wasn’t until their sophomore or even their junior years that her Concord Academy students really encountered real work, that without meaning to, they had anticipated the first two years of college, and they had gone into it, and so it really brought to Mrs. Hall the question about the convention that 18 year olds are only supposed to be doing this much, in fact her 18 year old students were doing a whole lot more than that. Ba Win: For years and years and years, after the original campus was built, and it was a very nice new campus, we did not have sophisticated facilities. Science was taught with a piece of chalk, photo labs were as basic as they could be, but basic as they were, 3 weeks ago in the New York Times, they had a series of winter scenes in the city, 10 pictures, utterly beautiful, all [by] Simon’s Rock [alumni Jan Staller ‘70] At a time when we had very primitive performance facilities we nevertheless produced the Coen Brothers, Ethan and Joel Coen, so we’ve had extraordinary people come out of this place. We have more than a piece of chalk now to do the sciences, and that’s how it should be, when you recruit the most talented people that you can find you owe them the appropriate facilities but the tradition of really teaching, not just using bells and whistles, has persisted. Pete Baumann: I thought of an idea, wouldn’t it be nice to put a little water in [the Library Atrium] or something or something like that so I dug a ditch and got some stones and river rocks, and put in some black plastic and some water. [...] Ace who was there by himself, and one of the guys decided, you know, throw in a couple extra frogs and he ate them, except for one, and that one survived and we called him Deuce. Deuce had a little bit of a problem, he couldn’t swim well, he couldn’t swallow well and I had to kind of hand feed him, and everyone would come in and take pictures of the frogs, little kids would come in with their parents, maybe brothers and sisters, maybe prospective students. I used to bring them out and show them the frogs, well some of these little kids grew up and became students at Simon’s Rock, graduated, and brought their kids in, that’s how long. The two bullfrogs were in there for 15 years, Ace and Deuce were, and they were very tame, the bullfrogs were, the students used to pick them up and pet them, and if the students were sitting there the frogs would come out and sit right there between them like they were part of the conversation, it was really something. Ba Win: Betty Hall was very successful at Concord Academy at a time when the women\u27s voice was very nascent, she was one of the people who by being a strong leader was showing that generation who were at school with her that all the usual rules and limitations should not apply, they were ridiculous, they should fall away. But she was also of an older style, she would begin a meeting by saying “Ladies” and when she started Simon’s Rock she had one foot in her mother\u27s generation and one foot in the next generation. It’s important to remember that she started the school in the second half of the 60s when questioning authority was very much en vogue. She took care to hire younger teachers, she did not want to hire very experienced people because she was sure once they came they would revert to what they were familiar with, she wanted something new and as a result she went out and hired a whole lot of recently minted MA and PhDs, but they were also stepping out of the 60s having just come out of college where protests and demands were commonplace, so, basically Betty collided with the 60s and she found it really, really hard. In many ways the form of education that she proposed was transformative, it was very different, it wasn’t you sit there obediently and silently and I’ll tell you and you record it, and of course if you have questions I’m happy to answer. It was going from that to challenging everything.https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/sr-oral_hist/1002/thumbnail.jp

D3-brane Potentials from Fluxes in AdS/CFT

We give a comprehensive treatment of the scalar potential for a D3-brane in a warped conifold region of a compactification with stabilized moduli. By studying general ultraviolet perturbations in supergravity, we systematically incorporate `compactification effects' sourced by supersymmetry breaking in the compact space. Significant contributions to the D3-brane potential, including the leading term in the infrared, arise from imaginary anti-self-dual (IASD) fluxes. For an arbitrary Calabi-Yau cone, we determine the most general IASD fluxes in terms of scalar harmonics, then compute the resulting D3-brane potential. Specializing to the conifold, we identify the operator dual to each mode of flux, and for chiral operators we confirm that the potential computed in the gauge theory matches the gravity result. The effects of four-dimensional curvature, including the leading D3-brane mass term, arise directly from the ten-dimensional equations of motion. Furthermore, we show that gaugino condensation on D7-branes provides a local source for IASD flux. This flux precisely encodes the nonperturbative contributions to the D3-brane potential, yielding a promising ten-dimensional representation of four-dimensional nonperturbative effects. Our result encompasses all significant contributions to the D3-brane potential discussed in the literature, and does so in the single coherent framework of ten-dimensional supergravity. Moreover, we identify new terms with irrational scaling dimensions that were inaccessible in prior works. By decoupling gravity in a noncompact configuration, then systematically reincorporating compactification effects as ultraviolet perturbations, we have provided an approach in which Planck-suppressed contributions to the D3-brane effective action can be computed.Comment: 70 page

A Terminal Velocity on the Landscape: Particle Production near Extra Species Loci in Higher Dimensions

We investigate particle production near extra species loci (ESL) in a higher dimensional field space and derive a speed limit in moduli space at weak coupling. This terminal velocity is set by the characteristic ESL-separation and the coupling of the extra degrees of freedom to the moduli, but it is independent of the moduli's potential if the dimensionality of the field space is considerably larger than the dimensionality of the loci, D >> d. Once the terminal velocity is approached, particles are produced at a plethora of nearby ESLs, preventing a further increase in speed via their backreaction. It is possible to drive inflation at the terminal velocity, providing a generalization of trapped inflation with attractive features: we find that more than sixty e-folds of inflation for sub-Planckian excursions in field space are possible if ESLs are ubiquitous, without fine tuning of initial conditions and less tuned potentials. We construct a simple, observationally viable model with a slightly red scalar power-spectrum and suppressed gravitational waves; we comment on the presence of additional observational signatures originating from IR-cascading and individual massive particles. We also show that moduli-trapping at an ESL is suppressed for D >> d, hindering dynamical selection of high-symmetry vacua on the landscape based on this mechanism.Comment: 46 pages, 6 figures. V3: typos corrected compared to JHEP version, conclusions unchange

Analysis of chromosome positions in the interphase nucleus of Chinese hamster cells by laser-UV-microirradiation experiments

Unsynchronized cells of an essentially diploid strain of female Chinese hamster cells derived from lung tissue (CHL) were laser-UV-microirradiated (=257 nm) in the nucleus either at its central part or at its periphery. After 7–9 h postincubation with 0.5 mM caffeine, chromosome preparations were made in situ. Twenty-one and 29 metaphase spreads, respectively, with partial chromosome shattering (PCS) obtained after micro-irradiation at these two nuclear sites, were Q-banded and analyzed in detail. A positive correlation was observed between the frequency of damage of chromosomes and both their DNA content and length at metaphase. No significant difference was observed between the frequencies of damage obtained for individual chromosomes at either site of microirradiation. The frequency of joint damage of homologous chromosomes was low as compared to nonhomologous ones. Considerable variation was noted in different cells in the combinations of jointly shattered chromosomes. Evidence which justifies an interpretation of these data in terms of an interphase arrangement of chromosome territories is discussed. Our data strongly argue against somatic pairing as a regular event, and suggest a considerable variability of chromosome positions in different nuclei. However, present data do not exclude the possibility of certain non-random chromosomal arrangements in CHL-nuclei. The interphase chromosome distribution revealed by these experiments is compared with centromere-centromere, centromere-center and angle analyses of metaphase spreads and the relationship between interphase and metaphase arrangements of chromosomes is discussed

A New Class of Four-Dimensional N=1 Supergravity with Non-minimal Derivative Couplings

In the N=1 four-dimensional new-minimal supergravity framework, we supersymmetrise the coupling of the scalar kinetic term to the Einstein tensor. This coupling, although introduces a non-minimal derivative interaction of curvature to matter, it does not introduce harmful higher-derivatives. For this construction, we employ off-shell chiral and real linear multiplets. Physical scalars are accommodated in the chiral multiplet whereas curvature resides in a linear one.Comment: 18 pages, version published at JHE

Delay in diagnosis of muscle disorders depends on the subspecialty of the initially consulted physician

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>New therapeutic strategies in muscular dystrophies will make a difference in prognosis only if they are begun early in the course of the disease. Therefore, we investigated factors that influence the time to diagnosis in muscle dystrophy patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A sample of 101 patients (mean age 49 years; range 19-80; 44% women) with diagnosed muscle dystrophies from neurological practices and the neuromuscular specialty clinic in Berlin, Germany, was invited to participate. Time from first consultation to diagnosis, subspecialty of physician, and sociodemographic data were assessed with self-report questionnaires. The association between time to diagnosis and potential predictors (subspecialty of initially consulted physician, diagnoses, gender, and age at onset) was modeled with linear regression analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean time span between first health-care contact and diagnosis was 4.3 years (median 1). The diagnostic delay was significantly longer if patients were initially seen by a non-neurological specialist compared to a general practitioner (5.2 vs. 3.5 years, p = 0.047). Other factors that were independently associated with diagnostic delay were female gender and inherited muscle disease.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Action to improve clinical awareness of muscle diseases in non-neurological specialists is needed.</p

Beam Energy and Centrality Dependence of Direct-Photon Emission from Ultrarelativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions.

The PHENIX collaboration presents first measurements of low-momentum (0.41  GeV/c) direct-photon yield dN_{γ}^{dir}/dη is a smooth function of dN_{ch}/dη and can be well described as proportional to (dN_{ch}/dη)^{α} with α≈1.25. This scaling behavior holds for a wide range of beam energies at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Large Hadron Collider, for centrality selected samples, as well as for different A+A collision systems. At a given beam energy, the scaling also holds for high p_{T} (&gt;5  GeV/c), but when results from different collision energies are compared, an additional sqrt[s_{NN}]-dependent multiplicative factor is needed to describe the integrated-direct-photon yield

Production of π0 and η mesons in Cu+Au collisions at sNN =200 GeV

Production of π0 and η mesons has been measured at midrapidity in Cu+Au collisions at sNN=200GeV. Measurements were performed in π0(η)→γγ decay channel in the 1(2)-20GeV/c transverse momentum range. A strong suppression is observed for π0 and η meson production at high transverse momentum in central Cu+Au collisions relative to the p+p results scaled by the number of nucleon-nucleon collisions. In central collisions the suppression is similar to Au+Au with comparable nuclear overlap. The η/π0 ratio measured as a function of transverse momentum is consistent with mT-scaling parametrization down to pT=2GeV/c, its asymptotic value is constant and consistent with Au+Au and p+p and does not show any significant dependence on collision centrality. Similar results were obtained in hadron-hadron, hadron-nucleus, and nucleus-nucleus collisions as well as in e+e- collisions in a range of collision energies sNN=3-1800 GeV. This suggests that the quark-gluon-plasma medium produced in Cu+Cu collisions either does not affect the jet fragmentation into light mesons or it affects the π0 and η the same way