X-ray Variability and Emission Process of the Radio Jet in M87

We monitored the M87 jet with the ACIS-S detector on Chandra with 5 observations between 2002 Jan and 2002 Jul. Our goal was to determine the presence and degree of variability in morphology, intensity, and spectral parameters. We find strong variability of the core and HST-1, the knot lying 0.8" from the core. These observations were designed to constrain the X-ray emission process: whereas synchrotron emission would necessitate the presence of extremely high energy electrons with a halflife of a few years or less, inverse Compton emission from a relativistic jet would arise from low energy electrons with very long halflives. Currently, all indications point to a synchrotron process for the X-ray emission from the M87 jet. We give key parameters for a ``modest beaming'' synchrotron model.Comment: 4 pages with 2 embedded figures (1 in color). To be published in the proceedings of the Bologna Jet Workshop "The Physics of Relativistic Jets in the CHANDRA and XMM Era", 23-27 September 2002, Brunetti, Harris, Sambruna, and Setti, editors. 2003, New Ast. Re

We All Have Them

Prose by Shakkira Harris. Finalist in the 2018 Manuscripts Prose Contest

The Role and Work of Bomber Command: A Note by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 28 June 1942

Editor’s Note: Few senior Allied Commanders have been criticized as strongly as Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. And even those critics who recognize the vital contribution Harris and the Bomber Command made to the defeat of Nazi Germany are disturbed by the tone of Harris’ letters to Churchill and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Harris never wavered in his conviction that Germany could be defeated by strategic bombing with ground roops assigned to a secondary role. This view underlay his arguments for assigning priority to strategic bombing. In pursuing the case Harris mixed careful argument and clear logic with emotional attacks on those who doubted his doctrines. The following note, written shortly after Harris assumed command, displays Harris at his best, arguing the case for Bomber Command “as the only means of bringing assitance to Russian in time” and the only means “which will make subsequent invasion a possible proposition.

Tempered Representations and Nilpotent Orbits

Given a nilpotent orbit O of a real, reductive algebraic group, a necessary condition is given for the existence of a tempered representation pi such that O occurs in the wave front cycle of pi. The coefficients of the wave front cycle of a tempered representation are expressed in terms of volumes of precompact submanifolds of an affine space.Comment: The class of nilpotent orbits studied in this paper is different from the class of noticed nilpotent orbits studied by Noel. A previous version of this paper erroneously stated that these two classes are the same. Representation Theory, Volume 16, 201

Religion and Hip Hop

Book review of Religion and Hip Hop, by Monica Miller (2013)

For Jeannie

For Jeannie is a short work of fiction that explores one mother\u27s struggle with—and reaction to—undiagnosed depression

Monomial principalization in the singular setting

We generalize an algorithm by Goward for principalization of monomial ideals in nonsingular varieties to work on any scheme of finite type over a field. The normal crossings condition considered by Goward is weakened to the condition that components of the generating divisors meet as complete intersections. This leads to a substantial generalization of the notion of monomial scheme; we call the resulting schemes `c.i. monomial'. We prove that c.i. monomial schemes in arbitrarily singular varieties can be principalized by a sequence of blow-ups at codimension 2 c.i. monomial centers.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Reconnecting Our Youth, a Scan of Policy Opportunities to Improve Economic Success for Vulnerable Youth

In March 2012, Grad Nation campaign released its report on the progress of the nation's public schools in improving graduation rates and movement toward achieving the goal of a 4-year cohort graduation rate of 90 percent by 2020. It revealed that from 2001 to 2009, the graduation rate increased from 72 percent to 75 percent, an average of less than .5 percentage points a year. During that same period of time, nearly a half million young people dropped out of school annually. High school reform and graduation accountability efforts are critical to stemming the disconnection of youth from our public education system. However, until these innovations and reforms are imbedded at scale in our districts, we must pay commensurate attention to the needs of the millions of youth who are dropping out and falling outside of the education and labor market mainstreams