Writing the Island

The historians may call this a failed expedition. For the first time, we didn’t complete a circumnavigation of Isla Espiritu Santo, an accomplishment that usually entails 50 miles of epic paddling in sea kayaks so loaded with food, water, and gear that it takes eight students to lift one. But in March 2010 it was not to be; El Norte, the bully of the Sea of Cortez, had nearly blown us off the beach, and we’d had to remain on the lee side of the island, roaming the canyons and diving the reefs because we couldn’t safely kayak the windward swells. And yet, these students not only managed to learn a thing or two about Baja’s natural history, they managed to go about the business of learning in such a way that they became the tightest community of any class with which I’ve worked. The reflections below, taken from my field notes, are an attempt to figure out what went right, so very right, during an experience that had all the underpinnings of a pedagogical disaster

The Buzz about Sustainability

I wear sweater vests, I never split infinitives, I trim my beard close, and I read a poem at the beginning of every class. More to the point, as a member of the English faculty at a distinguished university, I distrust any word that had not been coined by the time my father—himself formerly a professor at a Jesuit university—completed his undergraduate studies. So what am I doing as the faculty director of a Residential Learning Community (RLC) organized around the theme of “sustainability”? In the past 18 months, the university that employs me hired its first sustainability coordinator, held its first Campus Sustainability Day, inaugurated a sustainability- across-the-curriculum program, has looked at ways in which sustainability might serve as a key theme for upper-division courses in the new Core Curriculum, and approved a Sustainable Living Research Project at the undergraduate level. Even this fine magazine has decided to dedicate this issue to the theme of sustainability

Accountable Care Organizations and Transaction Cost Economics

Using a Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) approach, this paper explores which organizational forms Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may take. A critical question about form is the amount of vertical integration that an ACO may have, a topic central to TCE. We posit that contextual factors outside and inside an ACO will produce variable transaction costs (the non-production costs of care) such that the decision to integrate vertically will derive from a comparison of these external versus internal costs, assuming reasonably rational management abilities. External costs include those arising from environmental uncertainty and complexity, small numbers bargaining, asset specificity, frequency of exchanges, and information impactedness. Internal costs include those arising from human resource activities including hiring and staffing, training, evaluating (i.e., disciplining, appraising, or promoting), and otherwise administering programs. At the extreme, these different costs may produce either total vertical integration or little to no vertical integration with most ACOs falling in between. This essay demonstrates how TCE can be applied to the ACO organization form issue, explains TCE, considers ACO activity from the TCE perspective, and reflects on research directions that may inform TCE and facilitate ACO development

The geometry of physical observables

Jordan algebras were first introduced in an effort to restructure quantum mechanics purely in terms of physical observables. In this paper we explain why, if one attempts to reformulate the internal structure of the standard model of particle physics geometrically, one arrives naturally at a discrete internal geometry that is coordinatized by a Jordan algebra

Change the Game

Not only was it a wild idea, it was someone else’s wild idea. Having spent the three previous summers working feverishly on a book, I’d decided that I was due for a more restful interlude between spring and fall quarters. My summer was to be heavy on contemplation as I scratched together a prospectus for a new book. There was to be ample time for grant writing. In my spare time I would work on a sabbatical proposal. There was the pile of books I was eager to get to, heavy on obscure nature writers. Then came an email from Santa Clara President Michael Engh, S.J., in early June announcing that a papal encyclical on the environment was on its way. He was inviting me to serve on a committee to host an academic conference in early November about this encyclical. Fr. Engh wanted to invite the cardinal who’d consulted closely with the pope during the encyclical’s composition. One of my colleagues, David DeCosse, came up with the wild idea that three of us from the new committee should awaken early in the morning on Thursday, June 18—the date scheduled for the encyclical’s release—download it from the Vatican website, read it carefully but quickly, and then collaborate on an op-ed that we’d publish that afternoon

What Does the Desert Say?: A Rhetorical Analysis of Desert Solitaire

While Edward Abbey\u27s Desert Solitaire has suffered no dearth of critical at tention since its publication in 1968, most of the discourse concerning this work has taken the form of literary criticism, with an increasingly ecocritical focus having been attended to over the course of the past decade. Little, if anything, however, has been published critiquing Abbey\u27s masterwork from the perspec tive of rhetorical analysis. Such analysis, I will contend in what follows, casts new light on the work, and is instrumental in appreciating the more polemic elements of the text. I begin, therefore, with the observation that the author him self must have considered the book, at least partially, a polemic, having gone so far as grant the fifth chapter the less-than-romantic title: Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks. Richard Shelton, in his essay Creeping up on Desert Solitaire\u27\u27 argues that the book was written by an arch-romantic trying desperately not to be a roman tic (102). The tension between Abbey\u27s romanticism and his cynical realism becomes an integral part of the persuasion driving the chapters narrated in the voice identified as Abbey\u27s. The rhetor\u27s voice mirrors the tensions plaguing the landscape he describes, and this tension serves to propagate Abbey\u27s polemic persuasively. Shelton opines, No character in any of his novels has the depth, the believability, the absolute feel of a real person that Ed Abbey in Desert Soli taire has (1 04

Incompatible coordinate algebra representations as the origin of particle generations

The success of the Higgs mechanism in the standard model has led to the speculation that the standard model gauge group might arise through an analogous breaking of a yet more unified group. Such `grand unified theories' have the advantage of unifying both the gauge structure and fermion representations of the standard model. Unfortunately, the theories that most elegantly unify the fermions, without predicting extra unobserved fermion states, do not explain the existence of the three fermion generations. They also typically predict a proliferation of bosonic states, which lead to so-far unobserved processes like proton decay. In this paper we introduce an alternative explanation for why one might only observe a subgroup of a larger `unified' group in nature. The approach we introduce gives rise naturally to a generation structure without the appearance of unwanted fermion states, and is cleaner in the sense that it avoids the usual proliferation of unobserved bosonic states and resulting unobserved processes

Particle models from special Jordan backgrounds and spectral triples

We put forward a definition for spectral triples and algebraic backgrounds based on Jordan coordinate algebras. We also propose natural and gauge-invariant bosonic configuration spaces of fluctuated Dirac operators and compute them for general, almost-associative, Jordan, coordinate algebras. We emphasize that the theory so obtained is not equivalent with usual associative noncommutative geometry, even when the coordinate algebra is the self-adjoint part of a $C^*$-algebra. In particular, in the Jordan case, the gauge fields are always unimodular, thus curing a long-standing problem in noncommutative geometry

The journal’s the thing: teaching natural history and nature writing in Baja California Sur

The skills of making informed observations, synthesizing those observations, and communicating them effectively are central to the naturalist. Developing university courses that optimize instruction in these skills simultaneously can, however, be a challenge. Here we describe a program at Santa Clara University comprised of two integrated co-requisite courses, Writing Natural History (ENVS 142) and The Natural History of Baja (BIOL/ENVS 144). Lectures through the 10-week winter quarter expand students’ knowledge of the ecosystems and biodiversity of the Baja Peninsula and help them to develop descriptive writing skills. The courses culminate in a ten-day expedition to the Baja Peninsula and Isla Espiritu Santo in the Sea of Cortez, where students explore local ecosystems and journal about their experiences. The result is a program in which students expand their skills in natural history and develop their own voices as writers and natural historians. We describe the structure and philosophy of this program and provide details on associated lecture topics, logistics, exercises, and readings