The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research: A New Paradigm for Battery Research and Development

The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) seeks transformational change in transportation and the electricity grid driven by next generation high performance, low cost electricity storage. To pursue this transformative vision JCESR introduces a new paradigm for battery research: integrating discovery science, battery design, research prototyping and manufacturing collaboration in a single highly interactive organization. This new paradigm will accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation and reduce the time from conceptualization to commercialization. JCESR applies its new paradigm exclusively to beyond-lithium-ion batteries, a vast, rich and largely unexplored frontier. This review presents JCESR's motivation, vision, mission, intended outcomes or legacies and first year accomplishments.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figures, 96 reference

Within, without: dialogical perspectives on feminism and Islam.

This paper offers an ontological and literary review of Muslim women’s religious practices across the Muslim ummah, in considering the development of an epistemology of faith and feminism within the Islamic schema. Global examples of faith-based practice are reviewed, where issues of dominant and minority cultures and values refer to how Muslim faith practices are enacted within the local context. The authors use a dyadic, auto-ethnographic methodology to explore their own personal, political and spiritual positioning as feminists from a Muslim, immigrant and secular British background. The significance of women’s spiritual and feminist dimensions in the context of faith, nationhood and embodiment of ideological positions are analysed. Additionally, religious, cultural and the geo-political implications of feminism and Islam are considered regarding identity, culture and tradition, and religious resurgence, together with forms of feminist resistance to religious doctrine. Finally, the search by women for spiritual authority and authenticity is discussed. Keywords: Islam, Muslim, feminist, faith, auto-ethnographi

Driven vortices in confined geometry: the Corbino disk

The fabrication of artificial pinning structures allows a new generation of experiments which can probe the properties of vortex arrays by forcing them to flow in confined geometries. We discuss the theoretical analysis of such experiments in both flux liquids and flux solids, focusing on the Corbino disk geometry. In the liquid, these experiments can probe the critical behavior near a continuous liquid-glass transition. In the solid, they probe directly the onset of plasticity.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Invited talk presented at M2S-HTSC-VI, Houston, February 200