Pioneering Women\u27s Committee Struggles with Hard Times

[Excerpt] The Women\u27s Committee of IUE Local 201, established informally in 1976 and officially in 1978, is one of the oldest and longest-lived union women\u27s committees in the country. It took root and thrived within a large and overwhelmingly male General Electric manufacturing complex in the Greater Boston area and within one of the oldest, most democratic and most progressive union locals in the labor movement. For the past 11 years, the Committee has battled an extremely insensitive and recalcitrant GE management over a wide range of issues — winning substantial victories for training and entry of women into skilled jobs, for comparable worth wage adjustments in traditional jobs, and for pregnancy disability benefits and parental leave. Committee members have counseled hundreds of women and spearheaded fights for individual grievances on pregnancy disability, sexual harassment and discrimination. Within the local, the Committee\u27s activities have created a more positive climate for women to become stewards and committee members and to run for offices on the Policy Board. Most of the Committee leaders and many of the active members are a key part of the progressive wing within Local 201. But the local now faces massive layoffs triggered by GE\u27s transfer of work to other plants in the U.S. and abroad. The cuts began in June 1987 and are expected to reach 3,000 or 4,000 members by the middle of 1989. With its ranks being cut in half, Local 201 membership is understandably uneasy about its future, and many of the Women\u27s Committee\u27s past accomplishments are now in jeopardy. As preparations begin for the national GE contract, which expires in June, GE is pushing for major concessions as the price to pay for job security. The progressive movement is faced with the dual tasks of opposing concessions and pushing to save jobs. In this context, the Women\u27s Committee\u27s challenge is to push ahead with its agenda in a very difficult political climate. As 1988 begins, both Local 201 and its Women\u27s Committee are in rapid transition

On 'Nothing'

Nothing---the absence of spacetime---can be either an endpoint of tunneling, as in the bubble of nothing, or a starting point for tunneling, as in the quantum creation of a universe. We argue that these two tunnelings can be treated within a unified framework, and that, in both cases, nothing should be thought of as the limit of anti-de Sitter space in which the curvature length approaches zero. To study nothing, we study decays in models with perturbatively stabilized extra dimensions, which admit not just bubbles of nothing---topology-changing transitions in which the extra dimensions pinch off and a hole forms in spacetime---but also a whole family of topology-preserving transitions that nonetheless smoothly hollow out and approach the bubble of nothing in one limit. The bubble solutions that are close to this limit, bubbles of next-to- nothing, give us a controlled setting in which to understand nothing. Armed with this understanding, we are able to embed proposed mechanisms for the reverse process, tunneling from nothing to something, within the relatively secure foundation of the Coleman-De Luccia formalism and show that the Hawking-Turok instanton does not mediate the quantum creation of a universe.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, v2: minor updates, published as "On 'Nothing' as an infinitely negatively curved spacetime

Effects of isospin mixing in the A=32 quintet

For the A=32 T=2 quintet we provide a unified theoretical description for three related aspects of isospin mixing: the necessity of more than three terms in the isobaric mass multiplet equation, isospin-forbidden proton decay, and a correction to the allowed Fermi beta decay. We demonstrate for the first time that all three effects observed in experiment can be traced to a common origin related to isospin mixing of the T=2 states with T=1 states

Optimal neuronal tuning for finite stimulus spaces

The efficiency of neuronal encoding in sensory and motor systems has been proposed as a first principle governing response properties within the central nervous system. We present a continuation of a theoretical study presented by Zhang and Sejnowski, where the influence of neuronal tuning properties on encoding accuracy is analyzed using information theory. When a finite stimulus space is considered, we show that the encoding accuracy improves with narrow tuning for one- and two-dimensional stimuli. For three dimensions and higher, there is an optimal tuning width

Bubbles of Nothing and the Fastest Decay in the Landscape

The rate and manner of vacuum decay are calculated in an explicit flux compactification, including all thick-wall and gravitational effects. For landscapes built of many units of a single flux, the fastest decay is usually to discharge just one unit. By contrast, for landscapes built of a single unit each of many different fluxes, the fastest decay is usually to discharge all the flux at once, which destabilizes the radion and begets a bubble of nothing. By constructing the bubble of nothing as the limit in which ever more flux is removed, we gain new insight into the bubble's appearance. Finally, we describe a new instanton that mediates simultaneous flux tunneling and decompactification. Our model is the thin-brane approximation to six-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures; v2: minor change