Contextualizing Native Resistance: Precedents for the Movement Against the Dakota Access Pipeline

In 2016, news of the Standing Rock resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline swept through the social media sphere. Although many young people had never seen anything like it, this article shows that the “water protectors” are part of a long tradition of Indigenous resistance on the North American plains

Chance Estimations for Detecting Gravitational Waves with LIGO/Virgo Associated with Gamma Ray Bursts

Short Gamma Ray Bursts (SGRB) are believed to originate from the merger of two compact objects. If this scenario is correct, SGRB will be accompanied by the emission of strong gravitational waves, detectable by current or planned GW detectors, such as LIGO and Virgo. No detection of a gravitational wave has been made up to date. In this paper I will use a set of SGRB with observed redshifts to fit a model describing the cumulative number of SGRB as a function of redshift, to determine the rate of such merger events in the nearby universe. These estimations will be used to make probability statements about detecting a gravitational wave associated with a short gamma ray burst during the latest science run of LIGO/Virgo. Chance estimations for the enhanced and advanced detectors will also be made, and a comparison between the rates deduced from this work will be compared to the existing literature.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Big Cohen-Macaulay Algebras and Seeds

We delve into the properties possessed by algebras, which we have termed seeds, that map to big Cohen-Macaulay algebras. We will show that over a complete local domain of positive characteristic any two big Cohen-Macaulay algebras map to a common big Cohen-Macaulay algebra. We will also strengthen Hochster and Huneke's "weakly functorial" existence result for big Cohen-Macaulay algebras by showing that the seed property is stable under base change between complete local domains of positive characteristic. We also show that every seed over a positive characteristic local ring (R,m) maps to a big Cohen-Macaulay R-algebra that is an absolutely integrally closed, m-adically separated, quasilocal domain.Comment: 31 pages, typos corrected, Journal-ref adde

Migration policy challenges at the new Eastern borders of the enlarged European Union : The Ukrainian case

With the enlargement of the European Union, new bordering countries emerged in the East which are characterized by comparatively low incomes and living standards, incomplete democratization and a number of latent political conflicts. Against this background it can be expected that migrations from these countries into the European Union will be growing, although a considerable part of the expected movements might be temporary or circular. Focussing on the Ukraine which shares borders with four European Union countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania) and which entertains migration relations with a number of European Union member states, this study identifies the new migration challenges at the Eastern borders of the enlarged European Union. The study reveals, that some European Union states are particularly addressed by Ukrainian labour migrations. Whereas high income differences and a lack of job opportunities in the home country trigger these movements in general, they are additionally based on traditional migration patterns and network relations in states such as Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech and the Slovak Republic. In other EU member states, such as Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, the demand for low-skilled labour in segmented markets, particularly in the nontraded goods sectors of the economy seems to have primarily supported the movement of Ukrainian labour migrants. Although the European Union has recently undertaken some efforts to develop common migration regulations, many of the proposed policy measurements are still indeterminate, particularly in the case of lowskilled labour movements.

Van Hove Singularities and Excited-State Quantum Phase Transitions in Graphene-like Microwave Billiards

We discuss solutions of an algebraic model of the hexagonal lattice vibrations, which point out interesting localization properties of the eigenstates at van Hove singularities (vHs), whose energies correspond to Excited-State Quantum Phase Transitions (ESQPT). We show that these states form stripes oriented parallel to the zig-zag direction of the lattice, similar to the well-known edge states found at the Dirac point, however the vHs-stripes appear in the bulk. We interpret the states as lines of cell-tilting vibrations, and inspect their stability in the large lattice-size limit. The model can be experimentally realized by superconducting 2D microwave resonators containing triangular lattices of metallic cylinders, which simulate finite-sized graphene flakes. Thus we can assume that the effects discussed here could be experimentally observed.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, to appear in AIP Conference Proceedings, SYMMETRIES AND ORDER: ALGEBRAIC METHODS IN MANY BODY SYSTEMS, In honor of Professor Francesco Iachello on the occasion of his retirement, October 5-6, 2018 at Yale Universit