The Sanford Underground Research Facility at Homestake

The former Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota is being transformed into a dedicated laboratory to pursue underground research in rare-process physics, as well as offering research opportunities in other disciplines such as biology, geology and engineering. A key component of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) is the Davis Campus, which is in operation at the 4850-foot level (4300 m.w.e) and currently hosts three projects: the LUX dark matter experiment, the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment and the CUBED low-background counter. Plans for possible future experiments at SURF are well underway and include long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, future dark matter experiments as well as nuclear astrophysics accelerators. Facility upgrades to accommodate some of these future projects have already started. SURF is a dedicated facility with significant expansion capability.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, Proceedings of the VII International Conference on Interconnections between Particle Physics and Cosmology (PPC2013), Deadwood, SD, July 8-13, 201

Education Rights and Wrongs: Publicly Funded Vouchers, State Consitutions, and Education Death Spirals

A response to Julie F. Mead, The Right to an Education or the Right to Shop for Schooling: Examining Voucher Programs in Relation to State Constitutional Guarantees, 42 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 703 (2015)

The weight of the past: trauma and testimony in Que bom te ver viva

This article examines representations of trauma in Lúcia Murat’s Que bom te ver viva (How Nice to See You Alive, 1989), a semi-documentary focusing on the experiences of former political militants who, like the director herself, were arrested and tortured under Brazil’s military dictatorship. Despite having limited distribution at the time of release, the film has since gained status as one of the most significant representations of State-sanctioned violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It has received renewed attention more recently as Brazil enters a new period of reckoning with human rights crimes committed during the military regime. I first consider elements of trauma theory and their potential for better understanding the ways in which the film establishes connections between individual suffering and the wider socio-political realm. Essential to the film’s understanding of historical trauma are processes of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ which I explore along with the need, partially fulfilled in Que bom te ver viva, to create a witness to traumatic events. This is combined with an examination of stylistic strategies. I argue that the film’s flexible and unconventional aesthetics is a crucial means through which it can represent certain experiences associated with trauma and perform a radical re-envisioning of history

Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome

Legalization of marijuana use will increase the number of people who will become long-term users. A prior medical record review study in Australia, in 2004, identified 19 chronic marijuana users who entered the emergency department with recurrent vomiting associated with abdominal pain. Routine treatment of the nausea and vomiting, associated with the chronic marijuana abuse, with antiemetics is ineffective in patients with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Narcotics do not relieve the abdominal pain but may cause worsening rebound pain. The best treatment of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome was found to be abstinence from the recreational use of marijuana. It is important for advanced practice nurses to place cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome in their differentials of patients presenting to the emergency department with recurrent nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. They need to be knowledgeable about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome to provide the proper management of care for this specific medical condition

How to create a growth-oriented market constellation for South Africa

Post-apartheid South Africa is facing three major economic problems: (1) slack economic growth, (2) high and growing unemployment and (3) among the world's highest income inequality and poverty indices. South Africa is currently caught in a macro-economic straight-jacket of tight monetary, restrictive fiscal and a wage policy stance that raises NAIRU. The persistence of a sub-optimal 'market constellation' is created by an institutional setting of a non-accommodative Reserve Bank, a sectoral-regional and company level noncoordinated collective bargaining system, an austere 'sound finance regime' of public budgeting and the lack of any institution to co-ordinate macro-economic policy. To tailor a better fitting constellation, a social contract involving major reforms in macro-economic governance in South Africa is proposed. --Monetary Policy,fiscal policy,wage policy,macro-economic co-ordination

The political economy of meritocracy: a post-Kaleckian, post-Olsonian approach to unemployment and income inequality in modern varieties of capitalism

The 'big trade-off', described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again. Equality or efficiency, or to put it differently again: modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality or the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it looks like the continental European economies - foremost Germany and France - sided with more egalitarian ends accepting higher unemployment whilst the liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom choose higher inequality for lower unemployment. In this paper it is argued, that the trade-off is not a supply-side necessity to maintain work effort in a situation of incomplete contracts, but is a politico-economic issue of particular interest groups to seek rents. However, unlike in Mancur Olson's seminal approach, it is not the trade unions which are forming distributional coalitions on the labour market but rather the meritoracy which is happy to use Keynesian-type demand management in order to advance their material interests by pursuing a 'Meritocratically Optimal Rate of Unemployment' (MORU). --Unemployment,Income inequality,Political Economy

Market constellations and macroeconomic policy-making: institutional impacts on economic performance

Post Keynesian theory as opposed to Walrasian theory does not provide the foundations for a unique general equilibrium but claims the existence of multiple equilibrium positions. In this article, such a multiple of equilibrium positions is explained by different market constellations which are characterised by different sets of institutions. political and cultural factors and historical circumstance in general and can be formed by collective bargaining systems and Central Banking designs as well as implicit or explicit mechanisms of coordination between key macroeconomic policy areas in particular. A market participation theory of economic policy based on market constellations may help to bridge the gap between nomocratic policy denial and teleocratic policy euphoria. --Market constellations,Central Bank Independence,Collective Bargaining system

The economic policies of German 'third wayism' in the light of agenda theory

German Social Democracy is faced with tremendous challenges of societal and economic changes: party dealignment, a bourgeoisifying of society, the rise of media democracy and economic and cultural globalisation. The party's reaction - a third order change in its ideological objectives and a respective adjustment in its short term policy programme as the leading governing party in the red-green coalition (AGENDA 2010) - is being investigated under the conditions of bounded rationality of voters and against the backround of an unprecedented loss in acceptance by the electorate as well as the ordinary party member. --Economic Policy,Agenda theory,Social Democracy

EMU, coordinated macroeconomic policies and a boost to employment in the European Union

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