A Technological Skills Gap: What Can We Do About It?

In the last thirty years, education has transformed faster than ever before. As a society we have developed new classroom technologies that allow for better communication and access to more information than ever before. However, at the same time, education seems rockier than ever before. Several major companies, including Tesla, Apple, Google and Netflix, no longer require a college degree for employment, and many companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have begun programs to train their own employees in skills and create their own certification programs to help employees learn necessary skills (Akhtar, O’Donnell). Why do these major corporations not rely on the tried-and-true models of education? What makes the classroom of the 21st century so different than the centuries past? What can colleges do to improve our education system to meet the needs of these employers

Synthesis v. Purity and Large-N Studies: How Might We Assess the Gap between Promise and Performance?

A review of: Protecting Human Rights: A Comparative Study by Todd Landman. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005, 231 pp

Wid De Moon, Moon, Moon

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3438/thumbnail.jp

Faded Love Letters : Of Mine

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3097/thumbnail.jp

New Villagers

It was a gorgeous day in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brooke Barker, senior in management and international business, kayaked to the Island of Lokrum, the wind blew through her hair as she paddled to keep up with the group. Upon reaching the island, she began the trek to the top, where she ran into some local daredevils preparing to jump into the deep blue water of the Adriatic Sea 35 feet below. Intrigued, Brooke decided to join them

Spontaneous Lorentz Violation and the Long-Range Gravitational Preferred-Frame Effect

Lorentz-violating operators involving Standard Model fields are tightly constrained by experimental data. However, bounds are more model-independent for Lorentz violation appearing in purely gravitational couplings. The spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance by the vacuum expectation value of a vector field selects a universal rest frame. This affects the propagation of the graviton, leading to a modification of Newton's law of gravity. We compute the size of the long-range preferred-frame effect in terms of the coefficients of the two-derivative operators in the low-energy effective theory that involves only the graviton and the Goldstone bosons.Comment: 11 pages, no figures, revtex4. v4: Replaced to match version to appear in Phys. Lett. B (minor corrections of form

Matter-gravity couplings and Lorentz violation

The gravitational couplings of matter are studied in the presence of Lorentz and CPT violation. At leading order in the coefficients for Lorentz violation, the relativistic quantum hamiltonian is derived from the gravitationally coupled minimal Standard-Model Extension. For spin-independent effects, the nonrelativistic quantum hamiltonian and the classical dynamics for test and source bodies are obtained. A systematic perturbative method is developed to treat small metric and coefficient fluctuations about a Lorentz-violating and Minkowski background. The post-newtonian metric and the trajectory of a test body freely falling under gravity in the presence of Lorentz violation are established. An illustrative example is presented for a bumblebee model. The general methodology is used to identify observable signals of Lorentz and CPT violation in a variety of gravitational experiments and observations, including gravimeter measurements, laboratory and satellite tests of the weak equivalence principle, antimatter studies, solar-system observations, and investigations of the gravitational properties of light. Numerous sensitivities to coefficients for Lorentz violation can be achieved in existing or near-future experiments at the level of parts in 10^3 down to parts in 10^{15}. Certain coefficients are uniquely detectable in gravitational searches and remain unmeasured to date.Comment: 59 pages two-column REVTe

Loop-Generated Bounds on Changes to the Graviton Dispersion Relation

We identify the effective theory appropriate to the propagation of massless bulk fields in brane-world scenarios, to show that the dominant low-energy effect of asymmetric warping in the bulk is to modify the dispersion relation of the effective 4-dimensional modes. We show how such changes to the graviton dispersion relation may be bounded through the effects they imply, through loops, for the propagation of standard model particles. We compute these bounds and show that they provide, in some cases, the strongest constraints on nonstandard gravitational dispersions. The bounds obtained in this way are the strongest for the fewest extra dimensions and when the extra-dimensional Planck mass is the smallest. Although the best bounds come for warped 5-D scenarios, for which the 5D Planck Mass is O(TeV), even in 4 dimensions the graviton loop can lead to a bound on the graviton speed which is comparable with other constraints.Comment: 18 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, uses revte

Taking Back the Work: A Cooperative Inquiry into Leaders of Color in Movement-Building Organizations

Through the Leadership for a Changing World Research and Documentation program, a group of leaders of color committed to social justice came together to reflect on the specific obstacles leaders of color face as they engage in movement building and to find ways to overcome these barriers. Together they asked: How do we build, strengthen and sustain movement-building organizations led by people of color? In the report, the group has identified four strategies to help community-based leaders of color engage in "taking back the work," with examples of each based on their successful work in communities

Design Studies Suggested by an Abstract Model for Medical Information System

We have developed a formal model of a database system that is unusual in that it has the ability to represent information about its own structure and to insure semantic consistency. The model distinguishes general laws from instances of events and objects, but many of its mechanisms serve both categories of information. The model form a substrate upon which an information structure appropriate to neonatology is being developed. Some example queries are shown and a design study for an associative memory suggested by the model is described briefly