The Rapid Sequence of Events Forcing the Senate\u27s Hand: A Reappraisal of the Seventeenth Amendment, 1890-1913

For over 125 years, from the ratification of the Constitution to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, the voting public did not elect U.S. senators. Instead, as a result of careful planning by the Founding Fathers, state legislatures alone possessed the authority to elect two senators to represent their respective interests in Washington. It did not take long for second and third generation Americans to question the legitimacy of this process. To many observers, the system was in dire need of reform, but the stimulus for a popular elections amendment was controversial and not inevitable. This essay examines why reform came in 1911 with the Senate’s unexpected passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, which was ratified twenty-four months later in the first year of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency

Mahatma Gandhi\u27s Vision for the Future of India: The Role of Enlightened Anarchy

Few would dispute the notion that Mahatma K. Gandhi was one of the twentieth century’s transformative political and spiritual leaders. Among his many notable contributions, Gandhi is rightly credited with pioneering Satyagraha, resistance to tyranny though mass civil disobedience, and vocalizing a transcendent message that helped the Indian National Congress acquire independence from the British in August 1947. Often forgotten or omitted by standard histories, however, are Gandhi’s idealistic leanings that in fact compromised the universality of his appeal and confounded the ideological underpinnings of the Indian nation. His vision for India’s future was highly unorthodox

Circuit-Level Evaluation of the Generation of Truly Random Bits with Superparamagnetic Tunnel Junctions

Many emerging alternative models of computation require massive numbers of random bits, but their generation at low energy is currently a challenge. The superparamagnetic tunnel junction, a spintronic device based on the same technology as spin torque magnetoresistive random access memory has recently been proposed as a solution, as this device naturally switches between two easy to measure resistance states, due only to thermal noise. Reading the state of the junction naturally provides random bits, without the need of write operations. In this work, we evaluate a circuit solution for reading the state of superparamagnetic tunnel junction. We see that the circuit may induce a small read disturb effect for scaled superparamagnetic tunnel junctions, but this effect is naturally corrected in the whitening process needed to ensure the quality of the generated random bits. These results suggest that superparamagnetic tunnel junctions could generate truly random bits at 20 fJ/bit, including overheads, orders of magnitudes below CMOS-based solutions

Skyrmion Logic System for Large-Scale Reversible Computation

Computational reversibility is necessary for quantum computation and inspires the development of computing systems in which information carriers are conserved as they flow through a circuit. While conservative logic provides an exciting vision for reversible computing with no energy dissipation, the large dimensions of information carriers in previous realizations detract from the system efficiency, and nanoscale conservative logic remains elusive. We therefore propose a non-volatile reversible computing system in which the information carriers are magnetic skyrmions, topologically-stable magnetic whirls. These nanoscale quasiparticles interact with one another via the spin-Hall and skyrmion-Hall effects as they propagate through ferromagnetic nanowires structured to form cascaded conservative logic gates. These logic gates can be directly cascaded in large-scale systems that perform complex logic functions, with signal integrity provided by clocked synchronization structures. The feasibility of the proposed system is demonstrated through micromagnetic simulations of Boolean logic gates, a Fredkin gate, and a cascaded full adder. As skyrmions can be transported in a pipelined and non-volatile manner at room temperature without the motion of any physical particles, this skyrmion logic system has the potential to deliver scalable high-speed low-power reversible Boolean and quantum computing.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 3 table