High distance knots in closed 3-manifolds

Let M be a closed 3-manifold with a given Heegaard splitting. We show that after a single stabilization, some core of the stabilized splitting has arbitrarily high distance with respect to the splitting surface. This generalizes a result of Minsky, Moriah, and Schleimer for knots in S^3. We also show that in the complex of curves, handlebody sets are either coarsely distinct or identical. We define the coarse mapping class group of a Heeegaard splitting, and show that if (S, V, W) is a Heegaard splitting of genus greater than or equal to 2, then the coarse mapping class group of (S,V,W) is isomorphic to the mapping class group of (S, V,W).Comment: Certain misstatements about the pair of pants decompositions constructed for reducible Heegaard splittings have been corrected. The paper has also been restructured some to aid the exposition of the proof. Details have been provided for the end of the proof of the main theorem. And the first author's name has been change

The visual boundary of Z^2

We introduce ideas from geometric group theory related to boundaries of groups. This is a mostly expository paper. We consider the visual boundary of a free abelian group, and show that it is an uncountable set with the trivial topology

Monodromy action on unknotting tunnels in fiber surfaces

The second author showed that a tunnel of tunnel number one, fibered link in S³ can be isotoped to lie as a properly embedded arc in the fiber surface of the link. In this paper, we observe that this is true for fibered links in any 3-manifold, we analyze how the arc behaves under the monodromy action, and we show that the tunnel arc is nearly clean, with the possible exception of twisting around the boundary of the fiber

Javier Sicilia: Advocate of deliberative democracy in the Americas

When Javier Sicilia’s son was killed by cartel assassins in 2011, he transformed into a civic activist, with a mass following sufficiently large for Time Magazine to recognize him in 2011 as one of its “Protestors of the Year.” His very success mobilizing public opinion against cartel violence overshadows his more fundamental role as an advocate for deliberative democracy in the Americas. Sicilia’s historical importance lies in his recognition that only civic dialogue within the transnational public sphere that includes Mexico and the United States can heal the social pathologies unleashed by globalization and by the war on drugs. His ultimate achievement has been to dramatize what would be required of citizens to realize the democratic ideals that both countries profess as the foundations of their national identities