ArchiVISTA: A New Horizon in Providing Access to Visual Records of the National Archives of Canada

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Demise of the College of Communications and Fine Arts at SIUC

This article focuses on significant events leading to the demise of the College of Communications and Fine Arts (CCFA) at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) in 1993. The CCFA at SIUC was one of the largest units of its kind in the country. It had been in existence almost 25 years, formed when the fine arts school joined the School of Communications. In 1990, Jim Edgar was elected governor of Illinois, the first Republican in recent memory. The change in political fortunes brought a new head of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the coordinating body for all post-secondary public education in the state. The national economy soured in 1989, and by 1991 sales revenues were running so far behind projections that Illinois employee medical claim payments were running six months late

Isospin asymmetry and type-I superconductivity in neutron star matter

It has been argued by Buckley et. al.(Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 151102, 2004) that nuclear matter is a type-I rather than a type-II superconductor. The suggested mechanism is a strong interaction between neutron and proton Cooper pairs, which arises from an assumed U(2) symmetry of the effective potential, which is supposed to originate in isospin symmetry of the underlying nuclear interactions. To test this claim, we perform an explicit mean-field calculation of the effective potential of the Cooper pairs in a model with a simple four-point pairing interaction. In the neutron star context, matter is very neutron rich with less than 10% protons, so there is no neutron-proton pairing. We find that under these conditions our model shows no interaction between proton Cooper pairs and neutron Cooper pairs at the mean-field level. We estimate the leading contribution beyond mean field and find that it is is small and attractive at weak coupling.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Do Scaffolded Supports between Aspects of Problem Solving Enhance Assessment Usability?

While problem solving as an instructional technique is widely advocated, educators are often challenged in effectively assessing student skill in this area. Students failing to solve a problem might fail in any of several aspects of the effort. The purpose of this research was to validate a scaffolded technique for assessing problem solving in science and social studies at the middle school level. This technique attempts to isolate three aspects of problem solving (data collection, analysis and display, and interpretation) and to measure each aspect separately. Problem solving measures were developed in both science and social studies. These were administered both fall and spring to determine student skill in problem solving and to measure growth in problem solving skill over time and differential skill across grades (6 through 8). Segmented tasks were scaffolded between segments to circumvent the interdependency of elements of the problem solving process. It was determined the measures were successful in supporting students who had difficulty across segments within a single problem solving task and student problem solving skills could be evaluated effectively using the results of the measure

Conformal Symmetry and Universal Properties of Quantum Hall States

The low-lying excitations of a quantum Hall state on a disk geometry are edge excitations. Their dynamics is governed by a conformal field theory on the cylinder defined by the disk boundary and the time variable. We give a simple and detailed derivation of this conformal field theory for integer filling, starting from the microscopic dynamics of $(2+1)$-dimensional non-relativistic electrons in Landau levels. This construction can be generalized to describe Laughlin's fractional Hall states via chiral bosonization, thereby making contact with the effective Chern-Simons theory approach. The conformal field theory dictates the finite-size effects in the energy spectrum. An experimental or numerical verification of these universal effects would provide a further confirmation of Laughlin's theory of incompressible quantum fluids.Comment: 39 pages, 7 figures (not included, they are mailed on request), harvmac CERN-TH 6702/9