Search for Kaluza-Klein Graviton Emission in ppˉp\bar{p} Collisions at s=1.8\sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV using the Missing Energy Signature

We report on a search for direct Kaluza-Klein graviton production in a data sample of 84 ${pb}^{-1}$ of \ppb collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 1.8 TeV, recorded by the Collider Detector at Fermilab. We investigate the final state of large missing transverse energy and one or two high energy jets. We compare the data with the predictions from a $3+1+n$-dimensional Kaluza-Klein scenario in which gravity becomes strong at the TeV scale. At 95% confidence level (C.L.) for $n$=2, 4, and 6 we exclude an effective Planck scale below 1.0, 0.77, and 0.71 TeV, respectively.Comment: Submitted to PRL, 7 pages 4 figures/Revision includes 5 figure

Measurement of the average time-integrated mixing probability of b-flavored hadrons produced at the Tevatron

We have measured the number of like-sign (LS) and opposite-sign (OS) lepton pairs arising from double semileptonic decays of $b$ and $\bar{b}$-hadrons, pair-produced at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The data samples were collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) during the 1992-1995 collider run by triggering on the existence of $\mu \mu$ and $e \mu$ candidates in an event. The observed ratio of LS to OS dileptons leads to a measurement of the average time-integrated mixing probability of all produced $b$-flavored hadrons which decay weakly, $\bar{\chi} = 0.152 \pm 0.007$ (stat.) $\pm 0.011$ (syst.), that is significantly larger than the world average $\bar{\chi} = 0.118 \pm 0.005$.Comment: 47 pages, 10 figures, 15 tables Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues

In this essay, I venture to describe my own trajectory, through linguistics and continental philosophy, to becoming a philologist specialized in the Old Nubian language, in tandem with a broader analysis of the destabilizing powers of philology that resonate in both deconstruction and psychoanalysis: the problem of the material carrier of writing as that which eventually determines the reading, the humbling idea that the most abstract thought of Plato can be traced to a crumbling fourth-century papyrus. In parallel, I also address the current state of Nubiology and how I have inserted myself into the field as an advocate of both accessible scholarship and a re-anchoring of the scientific field within the local political and social context of Egypt and the Sudan

The Chagossians’ struggle and the last bastions of imperial constitutionalism

The scale of the injustice inflicted upon the Chagossians by the United Kingdom is self-evident, but their legal route to redress has proven opaque and fraught with difficulty, as illustrated by the House of Lords’ majority decision in R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No 2) [2008] UKHL 61; [2009] 1 AC 453. This disconnect is, nonetheless, inherent in the UK’s constitutional order. Constitutions outline the operation of governance orders, with constitutionalism injecting substantive principles into this picture, developing the relationship between the holders of power and those subject to its exercise. But not all constitutionalising projects are devoted to the same ends. The legal saga of the Chagossians throws into sharp relief the disparity between the imperial constitutionalism which was constructed to organise the governance of the United Kingdom’s colonial possessions in the mid-nineteenth century and the principles which supposedly underpin its liberal democracy in the twenty-first. The denial of substantive protections for a colonised community against unchecked and oppressive exercises of executive power sits uneasily with the prevailing understandings of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements, even though the constitutional architecture of the British Empire was designed to achieve this very end. Drawing upon archival material which highlights how differently the Chagossians were treated from ‘settler’ communities such as the Falklanders, our paper reassesses the Chagossians’ legal struggle in light of the hurdles that this bifurcated constitutional order places in their path, and the significant impacts of their efforts to navigate these barriers to justice upon this constitutional structure