Effective potential for nonrelativistic non-Abelian Chern-Simons matter system in constant background fields

We present the effective potential for nonrelativistic matter coupled to non-Abelian Chern-Simons gauge fields. We perform the calculation using a functional method in constant background fields to satisfy Gauss's law and to simplify the computation. Both the quantum gauge and matter fields are integrated over. The gauge fixing is achieved with an $R_\xi$-gauge in the $\xi\to 0$ limit. Divergences appearing in the matter sector are regulated via operator regularization. We find no corrections to the Chern-Simons coupling constant and the system experiences conformal symmetry breaking to one-loop order except at the known value of self-duality. These results agree with previous analysis of the non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm scattering.Comment: 17 pages in Tex (phyzzx), UdeM-LPN-TH-94-200, CRM-219

Levin Visits Anna: The Iconology of Harlotry

Reader response to Anna Karenina has ranged widely over the years, with some inclined to condemn Tolstoy\u27s heroine categorically as a manipulating female and an immoral adulteress. while others have preferred to see her as a pathetic victim of her society\u27s hypocritical moral code and a noble sacrifice to her own passionate capacity for love.\u27 Whatever our final judgment of her may turn out to be, there can be little argument that Anna Karenina has indeed fallen to a pitifully low moral, spiritual and emotional state by the time she decides to commit suicide near the end of Tolstoy\u27s novel. Addicted to narcotics. psychologically unstable. and pathologically jealous, she has by now become insanely suspicious of her lover Vronsky\u27s every movement. And as her last carriage ride through Moscow makes abundantly clear, Anna is now bitterly cynical, if noc downright nihilistic, about the human condition in general. By smoking cigarettes, taking drugs. practicing birth control and refusing co breastfeed her child, she hardly qualifies. in any event, as the Tolstoyan epitome of feminine virtue or moral goodness

The Karamazov Murder Trial: Dostoevsky\u27s Rejoinder to Compassionate Acquittals

Gary Rosenshield has argued that the miscarriage of justice Dostoevsky depicts in the final book of The Brothers Karamazov, where an innocent man is wrongly convicted in a court of law for a crime he did not commit, may be read as the novelists attempt to dramatize in a work of fiction the strong misgivings about the legal reforms of 1864 that he had expressed in his Diary of a Writer during the mid-1870s. More specifically, Rosenshield argues that the Karamazov trial constitutes Dostoevsky’s novelistic reworking of his own journalistic commentary on two particular jury trials, those of Stanislav Kronenberg and Ekaterina Kornilova, both of which illustrated how Western law was, to Dostoevsky’s mind, standing in the way of Russian justice. My article extends this hypothesis by arguing that the Karamazov trial may also be read as a novelistic reworking of yet another legal case on which Dostoevsky had earlier provided journalistic commentary: the case of Nastasya Kairova, a jealous young actress who was acquitted of premeditated attempted murder in the violent stabbing attack upon her lover’s wife. At her trial, Kairova’s attorney claimed that the defendant was not morally responsible for her actions. He blamed the crime instead on her environment and on the fit of passion [аффект] she suffered at the time, which rendered her temporarily insane. My article argues that the guilty verdict in the Karamazov trial may be read as Dostoevsky’s attempt in a work of fiction to reverse the egregious miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated in the Kairova case and to send a very different message to his contemporaries about crimes of passion, moral culpability, and compassionate acquittals

Learning by Seeing by Doing: Arithmetic Word Problems

Learning by doing in pursuit of real-world goals has received much attention from education researchers but has been unevenly supported by mathematics education software at the elementary level, particularly as it involves arithmetic word problems. In this article, we give examples of doing-oriented tools that might promote children\u27s ability to see significant abstract structures in mathematical situations. The reflection necessary for such seeing is motivated by activities and contexts that emphasize affective and social aspects. Natural language, as a representation already familiar to children, is key in these activities, both as a means of mathematical expression and as a link between situations and various abstract representations. These tools support children\u27s ownership of a mathematical problem and its expression; remote sharing of problems and data; software interpretation of children\u27s own word problems; play with dynamically linked representations with attention to children\u27s prior connections; and systematic problem variation based on empirically determined level of difficulty