Black Male Teens: Moving to Success in the High School Years

This issue of the Educational Testing Service Policy Information Center provides highlights from the symposium, "Black Male Teens: Moving to Success in the High School Years," held on June 24, 2013 in Washington, DC. The third in a series of four symposia co-sponsored by ETS and the Children's Defense Fund, the seminar examined the education and status of African-American teenage boys

Non-perturbative dynamics of hot non-Abelian gauge fields

The dynamics of high temperature gauge fields, on scales relevant for non-perturbative phenomena such as electroweak baryogenesis, may be described by a remarkably simple effective theory. This theory, which takes the form of a local, stochastic, classical Yang-Mills theory, depends on a single parameter, the non-Abelian (or ``color'') conductivity. This effective theory has recently been shown to be valid to next-to-leading-log order (NLLO), provided one uses an improved NLLO value for the non-Abelian conductivity. Comparisons of numerical simulations using this NLLO effective theory and a more microscopic effective theory agree surprisingly well.Comment: 6 pages, based on talks at Quarks-2000 and SEWM-200

Reid on Favors, Injuries, and the Natural Virtue of Justice

Reid argues that Hume’s claim that justice is an artificial virtue is inconsistent with the fact that gratitude is a natural sentiment. This chapter shows that Reid’s argument succeeds only given a philosophy of mind and action that Hume rejects. Among other things, Reid assumes that one can conceive of one of a pair of contradictories only if one can conceive of the other—a claim that Hume denies. So, in the case of justice, the disagreement between Hume and Reid is, at bottom, a disagreement over their respective conceptions of how the human mind works at its most fundamental level

Z(3)-symmetric effective theory for SU(3) Yang-Mills theory at high temperature

A three-dimensional effective theory for high temperature SU(3) gauge theory, which maintains the Z(3) center symmetry of the full theory, is constructed. Such a Z(3) invariant effective theory should be applicable to a wider temperature range than the usual effective theory, known as EQCD, which fails to respect the center symmetry. This center-symmetric effective theory can reproduce domain wall and phase transition properties that are not accessible in EQCD. After identifying a convenient class of Z(3) invariant effective theories, we constrain the coefficients of the various terms in the Lagrangian using leading-order matching to EQCD at high temperature, plus matching of domain wall properties in the full theory. We sketch the expected structure of the phase diagram of the effective theory and briefly discuss the prospects of numerical simulations and the addition of quarks.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, v2 with minor correction