From Little Words, Big Words Grow: Annotations on the Yo, Sí Puedo Experience in Brewarrina, Australia

This article is a reflection on the application of the Cuban literacy methodology Yo, Sí Puedo to the Australian setting. The Yo, Sí Puedo / Yes, I Can! model developed in Cuba by the Instituto Pedagógico Latinoamericano y Caribeño, IPLAC (Institute of Pedagogy for Latin America and the Caribbean) has been successfully implemented across the Global South as a strategy of adult literacy. It is a legacy of our Latin American revolutionary roots, with its origin in the Freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. Expanding across continents this model continues to teach reading and writing to disenfranchised adults in marginal and Indigenous communities, from the Argentinean Chaco to Brewarrina in northern NSW, Australia. Its aim is to contribute to the hope of improving the health and educational outcomes of the country’s First Peoples. This article is indebted to conversations with the Cuban advisor of Yes, I Can!, José Manuel Chala Leblanch. Observing him working in the classroom setting of Brewarrina touched me at different levels: personally because it reminded me of my own family experiences with the education system in my country, Argentina; and professionally as an educator negotiating different languages and cultures. It also reinforced my belief in the importance of incorporating Indigenous ways of learning and teaching to Western styles of teaching and learning. I built this reflection moving from personal and poetic—visual and textual—narratives and observations to academic interventions informed by researched literature on adult and Indigenous education

Ab-initio analysis of superstructures revealed by STM on bilayer graphene

In this work we performed density functional theory calculations for a twisted bilayer graphene (BLG). Several conmensurable rotation angles were analyzed and for each one a constant height mode STM image was obtained. These STM images, calculated under the Tersoff-Hamman theory, reproduce the main features experimentally observed, paticularly superstructures and giant corrugations. In this way we confirm that STM characterization of twisted BLG can produce superstructures whose tunneling current intensity maxima occur over regions with $AA$ stacking. Additionally we give new evidence in favour of an electronic origin for the superstructures instead another physical grounds

Noncommutative fermions and Morita equivalence

We study the Morita equivalence for fermion theories on noncommutative two-tori. For rational values of the $\theta$ parameter (in appropriate units) we show the equivalence between an abelian noncommutative fermion theory and a nonabelian theory of twisted fermions on ordinary space. We study the chiral anomaly and compute the determinant of the Dirac operator in the dual theories showing that the Morita equivalence also holds at this level.Comment: 12 pages, LaTex file, no figures. Minor corrections, version to appear in Phys. Lett.

Quantizing Open Spin Chains with Variable Length: an example from Giant Gravitons

We study an XXX open spin chain with variable number of sites, where the variability is introduced only at the boundaries. This model arises naturally in the study of Giant Gravitons in the AdS/CFT correspondence. We show how to quantize the spin chain by mapping its states to a bosonic lattice of finite length with sources and sinks of particles at the boundaries. Using coherent states, we show how the Hamiltonian for the bosonic lattice gives the correct description of semiclassical open strings ending on Giant Gravitons.Comment: 4 pages. v2: updated reference

Ladders for Wilson Loops Beyond Leading Order

We set up a general scheme to resum ladder diagrams for the quark-anti-quark potential in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, and do explicit calculations at the next-to-leading order. The results perfectly agree with string theory in AdS(5)xS(5) when continued to strong coupling, in spite of a potential order-of-limits problem.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Particle-vortex dynamics in noncommutative space

We study the problem of a charged particle in the presence of a uniform magnetic field plus a vortex in noncommutative planar space considering the two possible non-commutative extensions of the corresponding Hamiltonian, namely the ``fundamental'' and the ``antifundamental'' representations. Using a Fock space formalism we construct eigenfunctions and eigenvalues finding in each case half of the states existing in the ordinary space case. In the limit of $\theta \to 0$ we recover the two classes of states found in ordinary space, relevant for the study of anyon physics.Comment: 13 pages, no figures, plain LaTeX. References adde