Spin polarisabilities of the nucleon at NLO in the chiral expansion

We present a calculation of the fourth-order (NLO) contribution to spin-dependent Compton scattering in heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory, and we give results for the four spin polarisabilities. No low-energy constants, except for the anomalous magnetic moments of the nucleon, enter at this order. For forward scattering the fourth-order piece of the spin polarisability of the proton turns out to be almost twice the size of the leading piece, with the opposite sign. This leads to the conclusion that no prediction can currently be made for this quantity. For backward scattering the fourth-order contribution is much smaller than the third-order piece which is dominated by the anomalous scattering, and so cannot explain the discrepancy between the CPT result and the current best experimental determination.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, revtex. Minor typos corrected and reference adde

Workmen\u27s Compensation in Washington—Truly Liability Without Fault

The turn of the century witnessed the commencement of a great movement, in the United States, of social and economic legislative reform. In their obedience to the people\u27s will, state legislatures bent to the task of eliminating what were then, and still are, viewed as evils too long existent. It was in the field of labor-capital relations that our legislatures early found matter for profound consideration. European nations, following enactment of the first compensation law in Germany in 1884, had emphasized one social and economic evil—the unfortunate plight of the workingman, injured in the course of his employment, who had lost his capacity to earn. Following the lead of these European countries, Massachusetts first considered workmen\u27s compensation legislation; but the abortive New York law of 1910 was the first American state enactment of a workmen\u27s compensation law. Then, in 1911, ten states, including Washington, enacted workmen\u27s compensation laws

The Limits of Sociality

There is a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy of emphasizing the capacity for reflection in theories about humans’ characteristic nature. In Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, John Doris attempts to shift the focus to an emphasis on human sociality. Particularly, Doris argues that sociality, both implicitly and in the form of collaborative reasoning, is what makes humans best equipped for moral improvement. This collaborativism possesses a defining role in his account of agency and responsibility. This thesis attempts to gain an understanding of how sociality affects moral behavior and to argue that it is not conducive to agency in the way that Doris hypothesizes. The paper advances in three stages. First, I provide an exegesis of what I take to be the three foundational aspects of Doris’ account of agency and responsibility: value-expressive behavior, collaborativism and currentism. I surmise that if values, the agency-grounding inner state, are deeply historical and unshakeable, they fail to be expressive of self-direction. For Doris, sociality should be a means for revision by helping individuals to better determine what they should value and how to express those values in their behavior. In the second section, I introduce the norms literature to argue that (1) sociality inculcates individuals with highly consistent sets of values through mechanisms for norm acquisition. In the third section, I argue that (2) sociality does not have an easy route to revising those acquired sets of values due to confirmation bias, the strength of our moral convictions and the difficulties these factors raise for individuals recognizing and resolving moral dilemmas. I conclude that because (1) and (2) are the case, values are not self-directed in the way agency requires. Accordingly, Doris’ currentist, collaborativist, valuational account of agency and responsibility is in need of substantial revision, or amendment

Exact renormalization group and many-fermion systems

The exact renormalization group methods is applied to many fermion systems with short-range attractive force. The strength of the attractive fermion-fermion interaction is determined from the vacuum scattering length. A set of approximate flow equations is derived including fermionic and bosonic fluctuations. The numerical solutions show a phase transition to a gapped phase. The inclusion of bosonic fluctuations is found to be significant only in the small-gap regime.Comment: Talk, given by B. Krippa on the International Workshop "Meson2004", Cracow, Poland, 3 page