Scots Whay Hae! Robert Louis Stevenson Special

Podcast celebrating the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, featuring novelist Louise Welsh in conversation with Alistair Braidwood and Ronnie Young

Understanding our Galaxy - key contributions from the Parkes telescope

Young massive stars, with their spectacular masers and HII regions, dominate our Galaxy, and are a cornerstone for understanding Galactic structure. I will highlight the role of Parkes in contributing to these studies - past, present and future.Comment: Published electronically in Proceedings "Science with Parkes @ 50 Years Young", 2012, Ed. Robert Braun. Conference link is, http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/conferences/Parkes50th/ProcPapers/caswell.pd

Averaged Dehn Functions for Nilpotent Groups

Gromov proposed an averaged version of the Dehn function and claimed that in many cases it should be subasymptotic to the Dehn function. Using results on random walks in nilpotent groups, we confirm this claim for most nilpotent groups. In particular, if a nilpotent group satisfies the isoperimetric inequality $\delta(l)2$ then it satisfies the averaged isoperimetric inequality $\delta^{\text{avg}}(l)<C'l^{\alpha/2}$. In the case of non-abelian free nilpotent groups, the bounds we give are asymptotically sharp.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure; many corrections/clarifications, expanded proof of main theorem, added Proposition 4. To appear in Topolog