The year of ecology

The keynote speaker comments on the advent of the “Year of Ecology,” with concerns that some of the current environmental rhetoric fails to understand the science behind pest control and the current practices of food production and food processing. In regard to pests, 4tThroughout history man has always made value judgements about other organisms that share our world, and always decides in favor of himself. It is a concern that we will almost certainly lose some of the more useful chemical tools used in pest control, as a result of the emotional concern about pollution, and it is already becoming increasingly difficult to get registration and residue tolerance for new pesticides. All pest control measures are going to continue to be under attack. The solution is to continue to depend up on the scientific method: do basic research, get the facts, and leave emotions out of our decisions, and lastly, speak out

Calibrated embeddings in the special Lagrangian and coassociative cases

Every closed, oriented, real analytic Riemannian 3-manifold can be isometrically embedded as a special Lagrangian submanifold of a Calabi-Yau 3-fold, even as the real locus of an antiholomorphic, isometric involution. Every closed, oriented, real analytic Riemannian 4-manifold whose bundle of self-dual 2-forms is trivial can be isometrically embedded as a coassociative submanifold in a G_2-manifold, even as the fixed locus of an anti-G_2 involution. These results, when coupled with McLean's analysis of the moduli spaces of such calibrated submanifolds, yield a plentiful supply of examples of compact calibrated submanifolds with nontrivial deformation spaces.Comment: AMS-TeX v. 2.1, 26 pages, uses amsppt.sty (2.1h), minor typos correcte

Comment on "On an identity for the volume integral of the square of a vector field"

Stewart has provided a position-space derivation of an identity for the volume integral of the square of a vector field that was quoted by Gubarev, Stodolsky and Zakharov. In this comment, I provide a momentum-space derivation of this result, generalized to the scalar product of two complex vector fields. This approach demonstrates the effective use of the Fourier transform technique in the context of vector analysis at a level suitable for undergraduate instruction.Comment: 5 page

Para-Legal Authority and Its Perils

Four cases of System Identification courses are discussed and described: A short introduction to participants without any prior knowledge, a course for industry, an undergraduate course and a graduate course.The discussion is carried out in terms of how to convey six basic messages to the course participants