Experiment at Nebraska The First Two Years of a Cluster College

In November 1968 the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska was asked to react to a document coming from a faculty-student committee charged with examining the feasibility of establishing an innovating college on the Lincoln campus. It attempted to spell out the need for such innovation, and it offered a plan for fulfilling the need that it delineated. This is that document: 1 Within the past generation a new kind of student, a new kind of faculty, and a new kind of university have developed. To meet the challenges which these changes present and to provide for an educational and national future whose nature is unforseeable, many persons have concluded that there is a need for experiments in university curriculum and organization. The purpose of such endeavors should be a graduate who is sharply aware of himself, his society, and his world, able and desirous of continuing his liberal and professional education beyond the classroom. The New Students Students who come to the University are different from those who came twenty years ago.! A larger number of high school graduates choose to enroll than before and, of those who come, a larger number graduate. Though the numbers are greater, their quality is not inferior often. Television and other instruments of mass communication have provided them with astonishing funds of miscellaneous information, some of it inaccurate, much of it irrelevant, and part of it useful. In addition, many have traveled widely. The new students come to us with new formal preparation. High school science programs have been set up by distinguished scientists, the new math has become widespread-and public school English has undergone elaborate revision. In the future, advanced placement programs promise to change drastically the relation of entering students to the University. Perhaps more important, the temper of the undergraduates seems to be changing. The students have learned to react quickly to situations far from home ground, and echoes of Vietnam and Berkeley can be heard in Lincoln. In some universities the students have not hesitated to bite the hand that presumes to feed them, and generally students are becoming increasingly critical of their courses, professors, and colleges. They complain that universities have made them numbers on IBM cards, anonymous to teachers and advisers, and a gray mass to their administrators. They resent a lack of individual attention. For the past two years-at least responsible students through their official channels (e.g. ASUN [Associated Students of University of Nebraska]) have undertaken to scrutinize university programs. It is significant that the disgruntled students are not the weakest. The most critical are often the brightest, the most committed socially, and the most responsible morally. The best seem to be the most critical

Quantum state engineering using conditional measurement on a beam splitter

State preparation via conditional output measurement on a beam splitter is studied, assuming the signal mode is mixed with a mode prepared in a Fock state and photon numbers are measured in one of the output channels. It is shown that the mode in the other output channel is prepared in either a photon-subtracted or a photon-added Jacobi polynomial state, depending upon the difference between the number of photons in the input Fock state and the number of photons in the output Fock state onto which it is projected. The properties of the conditional output states are studied for coherent and squeezed input states, and the probabilities of generating the states are calculated. Relations to other states, such as near-photon-number states and squeezed-state-excitations, are given and proposals are made for generating them by combining the scheme with others. Finally, effects of realistic photocounting and Fock-state preparation are discussed.Comment: 8 figures using a4.st

Vehicle infrastructure cooperative localization using Factor Graphs

Highly assisted and Autonomous Driving is dependent on the accurate localization of both the vehicle and other targets within the environment. With increasing traffic on roads and wider proliferation of low cost sensors, a vehicle-infrastructure cooperative localization scenario can provide improved performance over traditional mono-platform localization. The paper highlights the various challenges in the process and proposes a solution based on Factor Graphs which utilizes the concept of topology of vehicles. A Factor Graph represents probabilistic graphical model as a bipartite graph. It is used to add the inter-vehicle distance as constraints while localizing the vehicle. The proposed solution is easily scalable for many vehicles without increasing the execution complexity. Finally simulation indicates that incorporating the topology information as a state estimate can improve performance over the traditional Kalman Filter approac

Quantum local-field corrections and spontaneous decay

A recently developed scheme [S. Scheel, L. Knoll, and D.-G. Welsch, Phys. Rev. A 58, 700 (1998)] for quantizing the macroscopic electromagnetic field in linear dispersive and absorbing dielectrics satisfying the Kramers-Kronig relations is used to derive the quantum local-field correction for the standard virtual-sphere-cavity model. The electric and magnetic local-field operators are shown to be consistent with QED only if the polarization noise is fully taken into account. It is shown that the polarization fluctuations in the local field can dramatically change the spontaneous decay rate, compared with the familiar result obtained from the classical local-field correction. In particular, the spontaneous emission rate strongly depends on the radius of the local-field virtual cavity.Comment: 7 pages, using RevTeX, 4 figure