Do the gravitational corrections to the beta functions of the quartic and Yukawa couplings have an intrinsic physical meaning?

We study the beta functions of the quartic and Yukawa couplings of General Relativity and Unimodular Gravity coupled to the $\lambda\phi^4$ and Yukawa theories with masses. We show that the General Relativity corrections to those beta functions as obtained from the 1PI functional by using the standard MS multiplicative renormalization scheme of Dimensional Regularization are gauge dependent and, further, that they can be removed by a non-multiplicative, though local, field redefinition. An analogous analysis is carried out when General Relativity is replaced with Unimodular Gravity. Thus we show that any claim made about the change in the asymptotic behaviour of the quartic and Yukawa couplings made by General Relativity and Unimodular Gravity lack intrinsic physical meaning.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

A Wikipedia Literature Review

This paper was originally designed as a literature review for a doctoral dissertation focusing on Wikipedia. This exposition gives the structure of Wikipedia and the latest trends in Wikipedia research

Introduction to Library Trends 42 (3) Winter 1994: Library Finance: New Needs, New Models

published or submitted for publicatio

Reconstructing RFRA: The Contested Legacy of Religious Freedom Restoration

Almost every member of Congress voted to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), a bill endorsed by an unprecedented coalition of dozens of religious and civil rights organizations spanning the political and ideological spectrum. President Clinton quipped at the signing ceremony that perhaps only divine intervention could explain such an unusual meeting of the minds: the establishment of “new trust” across otherwise irreconcilable “ideological and religious lines,” he remarked, “shows . . . that the power of God is such that, even in the legislative process, miracles can happen.” The RFRA consensus was especially “miraculous” because the legislation addressed a deeply divisive question: whether and under what circumstances religious objectors should be exempt from generally applicable laws. RFRA’s supporters, both within and outside Congress, would surely have had sharp disagreements about many specific claims for religious exemptions to particular laws. Yet they coalesced around RFRA, which circumvented such disagreements at the retail level by codifying a “cross-cutting” statutory standard that judges would be required to apply to an undifferentiated and unknown array of future claims for exemptions to every generally applicable law in the land