Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant: A Technological Utopia in Retrospect

The Maine Yankee nuclear power plant, built in 1968 and closed in 1996, provides a revealing case study of the rise and fall of the nuclear power industry in the United States. At its inception, the plant generated a great outpouring of optimistic superlatives promising electricity “too cheap to meter” and a solution to Maine’s longstanding energy problems. Its promoters envisioned a technological utopia for Maine communities based on cheap and efficient energy, and based on these promising prospects, the town of Wiscasset welcomed the plant. This article traces the changes in public thinking that led to statewide referenda on the question of nuclear power in 1980, 1982, and 1987, and it highlights the anti-utopian fears that fueled these campaigns. Howard Segal is a professor of history specializing in history of technology at the University of Maine, having joined the faculty there in 1986. His publications include Technological Utopianism in American Culture (1985); Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (1994); Technology in America: A Brief History (1989); and Recasting the Machine Age: Henry Ford’s Village Industries (2001).His current research involves a history of high-tech technological utopias in America

The Marginalization of Faculty and the Quantification of Educational Policy: Lessons from My Many Years on Faculty Senates

Howard Segal shares conclusions about higher education and policy that apply to public colleges and universities across the country

Economic and Technological Innovation in Maine before the Twentieth Century: Complex, Uneven, but Pervasive and Important

Maine had a long history of economic and technological innovation which began long before it became a state in 1820. Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, woolen mills, shoe factories, paper mills, hydroelectric power and utilities, and other components of mainstream America’s industrial and commercial revolutions became key parts of most Mainers’ daily lives. This article argues that the blue highway signs one passes on entering Maine—Maine: The Way Life Should Be—conceal much of Maine’s actual past and present, especially its rich and complex history of innovation

Back to the Future: Envisioning The University Of Maine’s Next Decades from the Perspective of the 1965 Centennial Celebration

The University of Maine’s Centennial Celebration in 1965 generated a number of speeches, editorials, planning and fundraising documents, and visions about the institution’s past, present, and future. All assumed that the University would remain autonomous as it expanded both internally and externally in the face of projected growing enrollments at Orono, at the Portland campus, and at new satellite campuses elsewhere in Maine. There was no discussion of what, three years later, became the University of Maine System. Howard P. Segal is Professor of History at the University of Maine, where he has taught since 1986. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton. This special issue of Maine History previews a larger volume he is editing on the history of the University of Maine since roughly 1965. The book is to be published by the University of Maine Press in 2017. All of the articles here will be included in that book

Painful Admission

All across the U.S., colleges and universities are sending out their letters of acceptance and rejection. There will be tears

From Where I Sit: A Cocktail for Violence

Campus lifestyles and easy access to guns can create the perfect storm

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone

In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear operator behaves very much like a "cobordism". Similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic, where they represent proofs, and computation, where they represent programs. With the rise of interest in quantum cryptography and quantum computation, it became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between physics, topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of these analogies precise using the concept of "closed symmetric monoidal category". We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or computer science.Comment: 73 pages, 8 encapsulated postscript figure

Wide-Scale Analysis of Human Functional Transcription Factor Binding Reveals a Strong Bias towards the Transcription Start Site

We introduce a novel method to screen the promoters of a set of genes with shared biological function, against a precompiled library of motifs, and find those motifs which are statistically over-represented in the gene set. The gene sets were obtained from the functional Gene Ontology (GO) classification; for each set and motif we optimized the sequence similarity score threshold, independently for every location window (measured with respect to the TSS), taking into account the location dependent nucleotide heterogeneity along the promoters of the target genes. We performed a high throughput analysis, searching the promoters (from 200bp downstream to 1000bp upstream the TSS), of more than 8000 human and 23,000 mouse genes, for 134 functional Gene Ontology classes and for 412 known DNA motifs. When combined with binding site and location conservation between human and mouse, the method identifies with high probability functional binding sites that regulate groups of biologically related genes. We found many location-sensitive functional binding events and showed that they clustered close to the TSS. Our method and findings were put to several experimental tests. By allowing a "flexible" threshold and combining our functional class and location specific search method with conservation between human and mouse, we are able to identify reliably functional TF binding sites. This is an essential step towards constructing regulatory networks and elucidating the design principles that govern transcriptional regulation of expression. The promoter region proximal to the TSS appears to be of central importance for regulation of transcription in human and mouse, just as it is in bacteria and yeast.Comment: 31 pages, including Supplementary Information and figure

The Microbiome and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation: Past, Present, and Future

N/