Probing gravitation with pulsars

Radio pulsars are fascinating and extremely useful objects. Despite our on-going difficulties in understanding the details of their emission physics, they can be used as precise cosmic clocks in a wide-range of experiments -- in particular for probing gravitational physics. While the reader should consult the contributions to these proceedings to learn more about this exciting field of discovering, exploiting and understanding pulsars, we will concentrate here on on the usage of pulsars as gravity labs.Comment: Proceedings of IAUS 291 "Neutron Stars and Pulsars: Challenges and Opportunities after 80 years", J. van Leeuwen (ed.); 8 page

Dear Honors Freshmen

A junior Honors student offers the Honors Program class of 2017 some pieces of informal advice covering school, time management, relationships, and priorities

Logic of Non-Monotonic Interactive Proofs (Formal Theory of Temporary Knowledge Transfer)

We propose a monotonic logic of internalised non-monotonic or instant interactive proofs (LiiP) and reconstruct an existing monotonic logic of internalised monotonic or persistent interactive proofs (LiP) as a minimal conservative extension of LiiP. Instant interactive proofs effect a fragile epistemic impact in their intended communities of peer reviewers that consists in the impermanent induction of the knowledge of their proof goal by means of the knowledge of the proof with the interpreting reviewer: If my peer reviewer knew my proof then she would at least then (in that instant) know that its proof goal is true. Their impact is fragile and their induction of knowledge impermanent in the sense of being the case possibly only at the instant of learning the proof. This accounts for the important possibility of internalising proofs of statements whose truth value can vary, which, as opposed to invariant statements, cannot have persistent proofs. So instant interactive proofs effect a temporary transfer of certain propositional knowledge (knowable ephemeral facts) via the transmission of certain individual knowledge (knowable non-monotonic proofs) in distributed systems of multiple interacting agents.Comment: continuation of arXiv:1201.3667 ; published extended abstract: DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-36039-8_16 ; related to arXiv:1208.591

Emasculated Men: The Perception and Treatment of Shell-Shocked Soldiers During World War I

World War I differed from wars of the past in a variety of ways. Thus, it created a host of modern medical and psychological problems for soldiers, military leaders, and physicians to overcome such as shell shock. Since shell shock was a relatively new phenomenon in warfare, the medical and military communities were uncertain about how to interpret its appearance and decrease its occurrence in their armed forces. As a result, shell shock fell victim to several social constructs of the time. One of the main societal factors that fueled the negative stigmatization of shell-shocked soldiers during the war was militarized masculinity. Using a variety of primary sources including military recruitment posters, medical journals, and other military and medical records, this paper aims to contribute to the current historiographical literature on the period by focusing exclusively on how societal perceptions of masculinity ultimately influenced the American and British military’s attitudes towards shell-shocked soldiers and determined the types of treatments used by medical practitioners to relieve soldiers of their debilitating and “effeminate” symptoms

Foreword

This project measures the upper bound of exposure time for laser reflection detection in the software DotDetector. Via measurement of the exposure time for which distortion happens in a room lit with everyday light we conclude that the upper bound for exposure times are 100 milliseconds. This value does not change as long as the lighting in the room is the same. As future work this project proposes variable upper bounds depending on secondary lighting in the room. Also we propose automating the colour masking of the detection algorithm.Den här rapporten mäter den övre gränsen för slutartider i den laserljusreflektionsdetekterande mjukvaran DotDetector. Genom att ställa upp och mata slutartider vid vilka distortioner uppstår i bilden i ett normalt upplyst rum konstaterar vi i rapporten att den övra gränsen for slutartdider bör ligga vid 100 millisekunder. Detta värde är detsamma sa länge den övriga belysningen i rummet ar densamma. Projektet föreslår som framtida utveckling att ge ett variabelt gränsvärde baserat pa belysningen i rummet. Projektet föreslår även automatisering av färgaskningen i programmets detektionsalgoritm