4,185 research outputs found
The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century
When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world\u27s two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?
In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists
Middle East: An Update on Changing Events
Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, Thomas L. Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist for The New York Times. [Following title] The Bank of America Lecture in Judaic Studies. [Followed by] Now celebrating its successful first decade, the Center for Judaic Studies at Fairfield University was created through a generous gift made by Carl and Dorothy Bennett. The Department of Judaic Studies offers an interdisciplinary minor that incorporates theological, historical, and cultural perspectives on Judaism and its changing role over the past 4,000 years. The Center for Judaic Studies also boasts an impressive array of scholars from a variety of disciplines, which makes the minor in Judaic Studies an encompassing program of study. Contact the Center at (203) 254-4000, ext. 2066 for more information.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1230/thumbnail.jp
Quasi-Chemical and Structural Analysis of Polarizable Anion Hydration
Quasi-chemical theory is utilized to analyze the roles of solute polarization
and size in determining the structure and thermodynamics of bulk anion
hydration for the Hofmeister series Cl, Br, and I. Excellent
agreement with experiment is obtained for whole salt hydration free energies
using the polarizable AMOEBA force field. The quasi-chemical approach exactly
partitions the solvation free energy into inner-shell, outer-shell packing, and
outer-shell long-ranged contributions by means of a hard-sphere condition.
Small conditioning radii, even well inside the first maximum of the
ion-water(oxygen) radial distribution function, result in Gaussian behavior for
the long-ranged contribution that dominates the ion hydration free energy. The
spatial partitioning allows for a mean-field treatment of the long-ranged
contribution, leading to a natural division into first-order electrostatic,
induction, and van der Waals terms. The induction piece exhibits the strongest
ion polarizability dependence, while the larger-magnitude first-order
electrostatic piece yields an opposing but weaker polarizability dependence. In
addition, a structural analysis is performed to examine the solvation
anisotropy around the anions. As opposed to the hydration free energies, the
solvation anisotropy depends more on ion polarizability than on ion size:
increased polarizability leads to increased anisotropy. The water dipole
moments near the ion are similar in magnitude to bulk water, while the ion
dipole moments are found to be significantly larger than those observed in
quantum mechanical studies. Possible impacts of the observed over-polarization
of the ions on simulated anion surface segregation are discussed.Comment: slight revision, in press at J. Chem. Phy
Radiation of Angular Momentum by Neutrinos from Merged Binary Neutron Stars
We study neutrino emission from the remnant of an inspiraling binary neutron
star following coalescence. The mass of the merged remnant is likely to exceed
the stability limit of a cold, rotating neutron star. However, the angular
momentum of the remnant may also approach or even exceed the Kerr limit, J/M^2
= 1, so that total collapse may not be possible unless some angular momentum is
dissipated. We find that neutrino emission is very inefficient in decreasing
the angular momentum of these merged objects and may even lead to a small
increase in J/M^2. We illustrate these findings with a post-Newtonian,
ellipsoidal model calculation. Simple arguments suggest that the remnant may
form a bar mode instability on a timescale similar to or shorter than the
neutrino emission timescale, in which case the evolution of the remnant will be
dominated by the emission of gravitational waves.Comment: 12 pages AASTeX, 2 figures, to appear in Ap
Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve
The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to
recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a
holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that
they were trained to solve: next-word prediction over Internet text. By
recognizing the pressures that this task exerts we can make predictions about
the strategies that LLMs will adopt, allowing us to reason about when they will
succeed or fail. This approach - which we call the teleological approach -
leads us to identify three factors that we hypothesize will influence LLM
accuracy: the probability of the task to be performed, the probability of the
target output, and the probability of the provided input. We predict that LLMs
will achieve higher accuracy when these probabilities are high than when they
are low - even in deterministic settings where probability should not matter.
To test our predictions, we evaluate two LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on eleven
tasks, and we find robust evidence that LLMs are influenced by probability in
the ways that we have hypothesized. In many cases, the experiments reveal
surprising failure modes. For instance, GPT-4's accuracy at decoding a simple
cipher is 51% when the output is a high-probability word sequence but only 13%
when it is low-probability. These results show that AI practitioners should be
careful about using LLMs in low-probability situations. More broadly, we
conclude that we should not evaluate LLMs as if they are humans but should
instead treat them as a distinct type of system - one that has been shaped by
its own particular set of pressures.Comment: 50 pages plus 11 page of references and 23 pages of appendice
On wormholes with arbitrarily small quantities of exotic matter
Recently several models of traversable wormholes have been proposed which
require only arbitrarily small amounts of negative energy to hold them open
against self-collapse. If the exotic matter is assumed to be provided by
quantum fields, then quantum inequalities can be used to place constraints on
the negative energy densities required. In this paper, we introduce an
alternative method for obtaining constraints on wormhole geometries, using a
recently derived quantum inequality bound on the null-contracted stress-energy
averaged over a timelike worldline. The bound allows us to perform a simplified
analysis of general wormhole models, not just those with small quantities of
exotic matter. We then use it to study, in particular, the models of Visser,
Kar, and Dadhich (VKD) and the models of Kuhfittig. The VKD models are
constrained to be either submicroscopic or to have a large discrepancy between
throat size and curvature radius. A recent model of Kuhfittig is shown to be
non-traversable. This is due to the fact that the throat of his wormhole flares
outward so slowly that light rays and particles, starting from outside the
throat, require an infinite lapse of affine parameter to reach the throat.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figure
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