Introduction (to Dossier on Walter Benjamin and Education)

Although it is well known that Walter Benjamin played a leading role in the antebellum German Youth Movement, withdrawing from the presidency of the Berlin Independent Students Association and from other reformist activities only with the onset of World War I, scholars often do not ask whether this multifaceted student activism had any effect on his later thought and writing. This dossier proposes to investigate the early writings on youth and educational reform and their discernible afterlife in the better known historical-materialist phase of Benjamin’s career, including his writings on radio, film, children’s literature, and children’s theater, as well as his studies of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. The introduction provides brief summaries of the ten articles comprising the dossier and their relation to one another, and it addresses the question of the relevance of Benjamin’s ideas on education to contemporary debates concerning pedagogy

Pre-images of quadratic dynamical systems

For a quadratic endomorphism of the affine line defined over the rationals we consider the problem of bounding the number of rational points that eventually land at a given constant after iteration, called pre-images of the constant. In the article "Uniform Bounds on Pre-Images Under Quadratic Dynamical Systems," it was shown that the number of rational pre-images is bounded as one varies the morphism in a certain one-dimensional family. Explicit values of the constant for pre-images of zero and -1 defined over the rational numbers were addressed in subsequent articles. This article addresses an explicit bound for any algebraic image constant and provides insight into the geometry of the "pre-image surfaces."Comment: to appear in Involve; 16page

An application of Khovanov homology to quantum codes

We use Khovanov homology to define families of LDPC quantum error-correcting codes: unknot codes with asymptotical parameters [[3^(2l+1)/sqrt(8{\pi}l);1;2^l]]; unlink codes with asymptotical parameters [[sqrt(2/2{\pi}l)6^l;2^l;2^l]] and (2,l)-torus link codes with asymptotical parameters [[n;1;d_n]] where d_n>\sqrt(n)/1.62.Comment: 20 page

Opportunities with top quarks at future circular colliders

We describe various studies relevant for top physics at future circular collider projects currently under discussion. We show how highly-massive top-antitop systems produced in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 100 TeV could be observed and employed for constraining top dipole moments, investigate the reach of future proton-proton and electron-positron machines to top flavor-changing neutral interactions, and discuss top parton densities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table; to appear in the proceedings of the "7th International Workshop on Top Quark Physics", 28 Sep - 3 Oct 2014, Cannes, Franc

An Approximate Version of the Jordan von Neumann Theorem for Finite Dimensional Real Normed Spaces

It is known that any normed vector space which satisfies the parallelogram law is actually an inner product space. For finite dimensional normed vector spaces over R, we formulate an approximate version of this theorem: if a space approximately satisfies the parallelogram law, then it has a near isometry with Euclidean space. In other words, a small von Neumann Jordan constant E + 1 for X yields a small Banach-Mazur distance with R^n, d(X, R^n) < 1 + B_n E + O(E^2). Finally, we examine how this estimate worsens as the dimension, n, of X increases, with the conclusion that B_n grows quadratically with n.Comment: Version 2 adds contact information for the author and actually states the correct Jordan-von Neumann theorem (oops!

(The Varieties of) Love in Contemporary Anglophone Philosophy

This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a particular individual, there are multiple ways of doing this, corresponding to multiple kinds of love

John Rawls' 'A Theory of Justice'

Some people are multi-billionaires; others die because they are too poor to afford food or medications. In many countries, people are denied rights to free speech, to participate in political life, or to pursue a career, because of their gender, religion, race or other factors, while their fellow citizens enjoy these rights. In many societies, what best predicts your future income, or whether you will attend college, is your parents’ income. To many, these facts seem unjust. Others disagree: even if these facts are regrettable, they aren’t issues of justice. A successful theory of justice must explain why clear injustices are unjust and help us resolve current disputes. John Rawls (1921-2002) was a Harvard philosopher best known for his A Theory of Justice (1971), which attempted to define a just society. Nearly every contemporary scholarly discussion of justice references A Theory of Justice. This essay reviews its main themes

Squaring the Epicurean Circle: Friendship and Happiness in the Garden

Epicurean ethics has been subject to withering ancient and contemporary criticism for the supposed irreconcilability of Epicurus’s emphatic endorsement of friendship and his equally clear and striking ethical egoism. Recently, Matthew Evans (2004) has suggested that the key to a plausible Epicurean response to these criticisms must begin by understanding why friendship is valuable for Epicurus. In the first section of this paper I develop Evans’ suggestion further. I argue that a shared conception of the human telos and of what is required to attain it structures the confidence that characterizes friendship. In the second part of the paper I return to two contemporary criticisms of Epicurean friendship. The first criticism focuses on the problem of free riders. The second criticism points to a seeming inconsistency in Epicurean doctrine. I suggest that both criticisms can be adequately addressed once we understand Epicurean friendship in greater depth