The Feasibility of Remodeling

Each year buildings are remodeled which should have been razed and buildings are razed which could have been remodeled economically. It all adds up to wasted tax dollars

Ho-hum self-help book not so ho-hum

A book review of Therapy American Style: Person Power Through Self Help by Kenneth B. Mutheny and Richard J. Riordan

The human dimension in management

A book review of Causing Others to Want Your Leadership, by Robert L. DeBruyn

Commentary: Managers Must Lead

Simply stated, the superintendent is a manager and managers must lead

Developing two-way communication

To produce and disseminate information is only half the responsibility

Strengthening the School-Community Relationship

Four important areas of the community/school relationship should be analyzed to determine the potential acceptance of community education programs by the local community

Violence Prevention In High Schools: Choices for Effectiveness

Every two days, guns kill the equivalent of a classroom of youngsters and injure 60 more

Long-Range Capital Improvement Planning

Capital improvement planning provides a regular program for budgeting and fiscal planning. A 6-year plan provides the luxury of reflection rather than stamping out fires in the heat of disaster

Does the universe in fact contain almost no information?

At first sight, an accurate description of the state of the universe appears to require a mind-bogglingly large and perhaps even infinite amount of information, even if we restrict our attention to a small subsystem such as a rabbit. In this paper, it is suggested that most of this information is merely apparent, as seen from our subjective viewpoints, and that the algorithmic information content of the universe as a whole is close to zero. It is argued that if the Schr\"odinger equation is universally valid, then decoherence together with the standard chaotic behavior of certain non-linear systems will make the universe appear extremely complex to any self-aware subsets that happen to inhabit it now, even if it was in a quite simple state shortly after the big bang. For instance, gravitational instability would amplify the microscopic primordial density fluctuations that are required by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle into quite macroscopic inhomogeneities, forcing the current wavefunction of the universe to contain such Byzantine superpositions as our planet being in many macroscopically different places at once. Since decoherence bars us from experiencing more than one macroscopic reality, we would see seemingly complex constellations of stars etc, even if the initial wavefunction of the universe was perfectly homogeneous and isotropic.Comment: 17 pages, LATeX, no figures. Online with refs at http://astro.berkeley.edu/~max/nihilo.html (faster from the US), from http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~max/nihilo.html (faster from Europe) or from [email protected]