Talks

I will report on some work in progress with Dan Freed and Greg Moore. In an orientifold background, D-brane charge takes values in a certain twisted version of KR Theory. Moreover, there is a nontrivial background charge (\'tadpole\'). Up \'til now, this background charge has only been calculated rationally -- i.e., ignoring torsion. We derive a formula for it, over the integers. Only after \'inverting 2\', does the charge localize to the fixed point sets of the orientifold action, and we can give a compact formula for it. This reproduces the previously known rational results, but contains new information.

This talk will review the public impact of developments in open access to research on education, professional practice, and public policy, with consideration given to legal, economic, and academic freedom issues, as well as to the very design of scholarly communication systems. The Public Knowledge Project has been conducting research on public interests in the new openness of research for a nearly a decade, and as a result, continues to explore how the creation of new reading environments for the online publication of journals and books can provide a wider range of readers with what might otherwise be the missing context for the work they are now able to discover online.

In the 1990s, the eprint arXivs fundamentally reshaped scientific communication in Math and Physics. In this decade, blogs, wikis and other, similar, tools are mediating an equally profound reshaping of scientific communication. I will talk about my own experience, as a blogger, software designer, and physicist, pointing to some of the successes and some of the challenges ahead.

At a time when the great challenges facing our civilization are scientific in nature (climate change, sustainable energy, pandemic disease), improving the voting public\'s understanding and appreciation of science is more important than ever. I will argue that the Internet in general and weblogs specifically provide an opportunity to address this problem, both through bringing science outreach directly to the public, but also by humanizing scientists to the public. I will illustrate with examples from my own experience blogging about physics for a popular audience, including explaining quantum mechanics to my dog.

This course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and is inspired by a book by the same title, written by Padmanabhan. Each session consists of solving one or two pre-determined problems, which is done by a randomly picked student. While the problems introduce various subjects in Astrophysics and Cosmology, they do not serve as replacement for standard courses in these subjects, and are rather aimed at educating students with hands-on analytic/numerical skills to attack new problems.

This course is aimed at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, and is inspired by a book by the same title, written by Padmanabhan. Each session consists of solving one or two pre-determined problems, which is done by a randomly picked student. While the problems introduce various subjects in Astrophysics and Cosmology, they do not serve as replacement for standard courses in these subjects, and are rather aimed at educating students with hands-on analytic/numerical skills to attack new problems.