Civic Virtue, the American Founding, and Federalism

The question of what kind of civic virtues citizens of the United States need in order to maintain the republic and to enable it to flourish, is one that was on the minds of the Framers themselves. They recognized that good government would depend upon the moral character and intellectual abilities of the citizens, on their having certain qualities of heart and mind. While institutional arrangements were employed to minimize reliance upon such character and abilities as much as possible, the Framers did not understand themselves to be eliminating those qualities, as an examination of The Federalist shows. Further, the institutional arrangements themselves were expected to contribute to the fostering of certain civic virtues. Yet it is not the case that such formal, structural provisions were expected to be sufficient on their own to engender good citizens. Rather, the Framers left the bulk of the responsibility of forming character to the states instead of the national government, where it was already being undertaken. Public education, in particular, is one means by which the states at the time of the Founding were seeking to cultivate good citizens for republican government in the United States.

Unstable manifolds and Schroedinger dynamics of Ginzburg-Landau vortices

The time evolution of several interacting Ginzburg-Landau vortices according to an equation of Schroedinger type is approximated by motion on a finite-dimensional manifold. That manifold is defined as an unstable manifold of an auxiliary dynamical system, namely the gradient flow of the Ginzburg-Landau energy functional. For two vortices the relevant unstable manifold is constructed numerically and the induced dynamics is computed. The resulting model provides a complete picture of the vortex motion for arbitrary vortex separation, including well-separated and nearly coincident vortices.Comment: 23 pages amslatex, 5 eps figures, minor typos correcte

Book Review: Water delivery: Public or private?

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

History of vertical displacement of Kerepehi Fault at Kopouatai bog, Hauraki Lowlands, New Zealand, since c. 10 700 years ago

Thirteen tephra layers interbedded with peat, and a basal peathorizon, in four pairs of cores provide radiocarbon-dated reference horizons that indicate vertical displacement on the Kerepehi Fault at Kopouatai bog, Hauraki Lowlands. Progressive offset of the horizons with time shows that vertical fault movement, downthrown to the west, has been occurring for the past c. 10 700 radiocarbon years at an approximately uniform rate of c. 0.13 mm/yr. Step functions indicate faulting events earthquakes at c. 1400, c. 5600, c. 6800, and C. 9000 years ago, a mean recurrence interval of c. 2500 years. These findings support geophysical and geological evidence that the Hauraki Depression is an active rift, and show that active faulting occurs along the northern as well as southern extensions of the Kerepehi Fault. If such earthquakes occur randomly in time, and based on the return period of 2500 years, there are 2%, 18%, and 33% probabilities of a major earthquake affecting the Kerepehi Fault at Kopouatai bog in the next 50, 500, and 1000 years, respectively

Influence of intensity distribution on the meltpool and clad shape for laser cladding

The influence of the optical system on the laser cladding process is studied, in particular with respect to the burn-in shape: the penetration of the meltpool into the substrate. The beam caustic and intensity profiles for the commonly used out-of-focus laser clad operation are presented and discussed. To avoid the disadvantages of the out-of-focus operation, a novel telezoom optical system is developed, which allows in-focus operation with a sufficiently large focus with a uniform intensity distribution and a spot diameter ranging from 3 up to over 6 mm. Different typical burn-in shapes are indicated, as they can be found in cross sections of experimental clads. The influence of the intensity distribution on the occurring burn-in shapes is discussed, as well as other phenomena that can play a role, such as flow recirculation cells in the meltpool