AIGO: a southern hemisphere detector for the worldwide array of ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors

This paper describes the proposed AIGO detector for the worldwide array of interferometric gravitational wave detectors. The first part of the paper summarizes the benefits that AIGO provides to the worldwide array of detectors. The second part gives a technical description of the detector, which will follow closely the Advanced LIGO design. Possible technical variations in the design are discussed

Abortion. One issue?

En los últimos años, el tema del aborto ha sido abordado repetidas veces, de forma aislada, como si se tratara de uno sólo de los muchos problemas sociales a los que tiene que enfrentarse la sociedad moderna. En este artículo, el autor subraya sin regatear palabras, que un planteamiento así carece de validez: el aborto no es «un problema más», un problema aparte, sino de hecho, un eslabón de importancia vital en la cadena anti-natalista, que tiene como última manifestación la eutanasia. En realidad, se ofrece en este artículo una documentación abundante que demuestra claramente que no se puede arrancar el tema del aborto del contexto que le es propio, es decir, el ataque y desprecio a ultranza de la vida como realidad sagrada. En muchos países del llamado -mundo desarrollado», los efectos de las leyes liberales con referencia al aborto, así como de la visión permisiva que es, al mismo tiempo, resultado y manifestación de las ideas que inspiraron dichas leyes, han sido -para enumerar sólo unos pocos males que hallan su origen en el utilitarismo al margen de Dios- los siguientes: el alarmante declive de la natalidad y las consecuencias adversas que dicho declive supone; el aumento de la irresponsabilidad en materia sexual, especialmente en los jóvenes; el aumento de abortos ilegales e incluso de nacimientos ilegítimos, así como de enfermedades venéreas; la destrucción de la familia; el consenso cada vez mayor en torno a la aceptación de la eutanasia. Se ve, pues, que el autor puede con razón afirmar que el aborto no es «un tema aparte», sino un conjunto explosivo de temas, una especie de pulpo maligno cuyos tentáculos tocan a una infinidad de aspectos de la sociedad. los efectos del aborto son múltiples; su apetito, incontrolado. El autor basa sus afirmaciones en los resultados de investigaciones llevadas a cabo en muchas partes del mundo, y en las opiniones de numerosos expertos que han colaborado con él sobre este tema. Una y otra vez, se ve que carece de sentido tratar el aborto como -un solo tema», ya que abunda la documentación -tanto histórica como actual- en contra de este planteamiento que, en el mejor de los casos, parte Simplemente de la ingenuidad. Frecuentemente, no obstante, dicho planteamiento se halla defendido precisamente por aquellos que cosechan las mayores ganancias de la práctica del aborto

Abortion/euthanasia

It is impossible to be too much concerned about the alternatives and positive responses to the modern, worldwide regressive death movement. I suggest the foJlowing for your consideration: 1) For the terminaJly iJl we need to establish more hospices like Sto Christopher's in London, where staff members practice the best of geriatric medicine in making dying patients as comfortable as possible, handling them with dignity and love and working out individualized methods of treatment in the management of pain. Death comes but once let it be easy, said Carl Sandburg. 2) We need homes where the elderly, the most alienated members of our society, can engage in activities appropriate to their age. We have learned how to increase their years; we have not yet learned how to help them enjoy their days. 3) At all costs the Hippocratic Oath and tradition must be retained, or restored whre it has been given up: Ending life is not the business of medicine. Alevare - Sedare - Sanare: «To cure sometimes, to comfort often, and to care always» - that is the vocation of medicine. 4) Instances of overtreatment must be eliminated, because these medical abuses precisely give euthanasians an excuse to push for the legalization of mercy killing. Just as allowing «selective» abortion ends inevitably in virtual abortion-on-demand, so no law can be written for «voluntary» euthanasia which would not occasion massive abuses. 5) We must engage in intensive and comprehensive educational prolife programs at every level. Hard evidence shows that the advocates of killing lose when the public is educated; for example, the jury in the Edelin case had not realized that babies are aborted. 6) We must engage in organized, large-scale political action and lobbying, from the lowest precincts to the highest echelons of government. No one must vote for any office-seeker without knowing where that candidate stands on pro-life issues. We must also develop a much needed prdlife rhetoric. 7) As Dostoyevski said, «If Godis not, nothing is morally wrong», Thus, there must be a revival of religion, with renewed emphasis on the Christian philosophy and theology of redemptive suffering and dying. Albert Schweitzer said that if you wish to avoid suffering, embrace it. In the past, three moral forces were bulwarks of public morality - religion, medicine and law. But today in many countries the religious forces stand alone, often divided and weakened in their influence. Propagandists for death have successfully employed the Hitler-Goebbels tactic of privatizing Christian institutions and Christian bel ievers, making it seem that the disposition of human life is a matter of religious belief and personal morality to be governed by the individual conscience without recourse to universal norms. As Ramsey has clarified, «Unless we think of man's life in terms of his worth to God, we have already in principie justified his possible murder for the sake of the 'greatert happiness of the greatest number' or sorne other quite reasonable earthly goal ". 8) Five years ago Bioethics was not even a word. Biomedical technology has catapulted society into a revolution of ethical dilemmas. For all medical and health care students we must urgently develop special educational programs in medical and biomedical ethics responding to the new questions and problems generated by fast-moving medical advances. In every large hospital there should be a highly competent committee for medical ethics from several disciplines. I see no reason to regard physicians as experts about values and their priorities. 9) Legalized killing of the innocent is a unique threat to modern society. Nevertheless, we must strive for consistency in our pro-life stance. What about capital punishment? What about an adequate theology of war? And what about discrimination and poverty, anti-life social injustices which destroy enormous numbers of lives throughout the world? 10) Watch the death-definers who would inflict on us a Procrustean definition of death or a definition with a vested interest. What is their motivation? Particularly in matters as supremely important as life and death, our technological society must assume that what is not explicitly forbidden will eventually be done - and soon. Fragile are the membranes of society. The line between freedom and compulsion is a perilously thin one. 11) Because the twin evils of abortion and euthanasia are really inseparable, stemming from the same disregard for human life and the same refusal to love all of God's children unconditionally, the best way to fight euthanasia is to continue fighting the legalization of free-andeasy abortion and even to continue fighting the promotion of contraception, that subtle origin of the killing mentality as a solution to human problems. Let me conclude with the words of Sto Augustine at the end of his The City of God: «Let those who think I have said too little, or those who think I have said too much, forgive me; and let those who think I have said just enough join me in giving thanks to God. Amen»

Quantum Fluctuations Driven Orientational Disordering: A Finite-Size Scaling Study

The orientational ordering transition is investigated in the quantum generalization of the anisotropic-planar-rotor model in the low temperature regime. The phase diagram of the model is first analyzed within the mean-field approximation. This predicts at $T=0$ a phase transition from the ordered to the disordered state when the strength of quantum fluctuations, characterized by the rotational constant $\Theta$, exceeds a critical value $\Theta_{\rm c}^{MF}$. As a function of temperature, mean-field theory predicts a range of values of $\Theta$ where the system develops long-range order upon cooling, but enters again into a disordered state at sufficiently low temperatures (reentrance). The model is further studied by means of path integral Monte Carlo simulations in combination with finite-size scaling techniques, concentrating on the region of parameter space where reentrance is predicted to occur. The phase diagram determined from the simulations does not seem to exhibit reentrant behavior; at intermediate temperatures a pronounced increase of short-range order is observed rather than a genuine long-range order.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, RevTe

Buy High Sell Low: Redefining Bean Counting in the Coffee Industry for a Sustainable Future

Charles Manz returns to the JVBL providing ‒ together with several fellow researchers/writers ‒ a case study of a socially responsible business within the coffee industry. Familiar CSR concepts are examined such as Fair Trade and sustainability which foster parity in dealing with buyers while maintaining product quality and reasonable income. The practices of Dean’s Beans, a progressive coffee organization, are examined as a notable demonstration of how a business can fiscally succeed while maintaining a commitment to the triple-bottom-line considerations of people, planet, and profits

An exact characterization of tractable demand patterns for maximum disjoint path problems

We study the following general disjoint paths problem: given a supply graph G, a set T ⊆ V(G) of terminals, a demand graph H on the vertices T, and an integer k, the task is to find a set of k pairwise vertex-disjoint valid paths, where we say that a path of the supply graph G is valid if its endpoints are in T and adjacent in the demand graph H. For a class H of graphs, we denote by Maximum Disjoint ℋ-Paths the restriction of this problem when the demand graph H is assumed to be a member of ℋ. We study the fixed-parameter tractability of this family of problems, parameterized by k. Our main result is a complete characterization of the fixed-parameter tractable cases of Maximum Disjoint ℋ-Paths for every hereditary class ℋ of graphs: it turns out that complexity depends on the existence of large induced matchings and large induced skew bicliques in the demand graph H (a skew biclique is a bipartite graph on vertices a1, …, an, b1, …, bn with ai and bj being adjacent if and only if i ≤ j). Specifically, we prove the following classification for every hereditary class ℋ. If ℋ does not contain every matching and does not contain every skew biclique, then MAXIMUM Disjoint ℋ-Paths is FPT. If ℋ does not contain every matching, but contains every skew biclique, then MAXIMUM DISJOINT ℋ-Paths is W[1]-hard, admits an FPT approximation, and the valid paths satisfy an analog of the Erdös-Pósa property. If ℋ contains every matching, then MAXIMUM DISJOINT ℋ-Paths is W[1]-hard and the valid paths do not satisfy the analog of the Erdös-Pósa property