Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War (Book Review) by Bruce Dancis

Review of Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War by Bruce Danci

The Urgent Need for an Academic Revolution: From Knowledge to Wisdom,

At present the basic intellectual aim of academic inquiry is to improve knowledge. Much of the structure, the whole character, of academic inquiry, in universities all over the world, is shaped by the adoption of this as the basic intellectual aim. But, judged from the standpoint of making a contribution to human welfare, academic inquiry of this type is damagingly irrational. Three of four of the most elementary rules of rational problem-solving are violated. A revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry is needed so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom, conceived of as the capacity to realize what is of value, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. This urgently needed revolution would affect every branch and aspect of the academic enterprise

Investigation of New Hampshire hydropower potential

The popularity of green and renewable energy has risen sharply in recent years, and hydropower has consistently been the most common form of renewable energy in both the US and the state of New Hampshire. As a result of this strong green movement, government organizations have seen increased pressure to produce figures to the public detailing the amount of hydropower potentially available in the country. Often these figures will depict very attractive numbers for the untapped hydropower potential in the country, yet the data do not seem realistic to anyone familiar with hydropower generation. This paper will attempt to de-rate these general estimates made for hydropower potential by government organizations, specifically in New Hampshire. It will be determined if these parties are ignoring basic hydropower design challenges in their estimations, such as system efficiency, generator capacity factors, and the economic feasibility of the projects themselves. These results should reveal the inaccuracies (if any) of the estimates by the government groups. To analyze the general feasibility of hydropower projects in New Hampshire, three case studies in hydropower system design will be examined

Conformal Parameterizations of Slices of Flat Kasner Spacetimes

The Kasner metrics are among the simplest solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations, and we use them here to examine the conformal method of finding solutions of the Einstein constraint equations. After describing the conformal method's construction of constant mean curvature (CMC) slices of Kasner spacetimes, we turn our attention to non-CMC slices of the smaller family of flat Kasner spacetimes. In this restricted setting we obtain a full description of the construction of certain $U^{n-1}$ symmetric slices, even in the far-from-CMC regime. Among the conformal data sets generating these slices we find that most data sets construct a single flat Kasner spacetime, but that there are also far-from-CMC data sets that construct one-parameter families of slices. Although these non-CMC families are analogues of well-known CMC one-parameter families, they differ in important ways. Most significantly, unlike the CMC case, the condition signaling the appearance of these non-CMC families is not naturally detected from the conformal data set itself. In light of this difficulty, we propose modifications of the conformal method that involve a conformally transforming mean curvature.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figure

Are philosophers responsible for global warming?

Global warming has come about as a result of rapid population increase plus our whole modern way of life, all made possible by modern science. In order to tackle global warming successfully, we need a new kind of inquiry that gives intellectual priority to tackling problems of living over problems of knowledge. If we had had this new kind of inquiry fifty years ago, we might have begun to do something about global warming long ago, in the early 1960s, when Keeling first discovered that carbon dioxide was increasing in the atmosphere. Our long-standing failure to respond to global warming is in part due to our failure to develop a genuinely rigorous kind of inquiry devoted to helping us tackle our global problems, which is, in turn, a philosophical failure. Philosophers are responsible for global warming to the extent that they have failed to highlight this philosophical blunder inherent in academia in part responsible for our tardy response to global warming