Knight\u27s Challenge Answered

Only one solution was received for the Five-Jog Knight puzzle contest posed in the November Word Ways. Submitted in mid-December, editor Jeremiah Farrell\u27s solution managed to achieve a 20/20 Collegiate score, which is to say that every word in its 20-word word set is an entry in Webster\u27s New Collegiate Dictionary. Such perfection had not been expected

The closure of Michael Colliery in 1967 and the politics of deindustrialization in Scotland

Michael Colliery in east Fife was the largest National Coal Board (NCB) unit in Scotland when it closed in 1967, following a disastrous fire which killed nine miners. The NCB, operating within the constraints of the Labour government’s policy framework, decided not to invest in Michael’s recovery, although this would have secured profitable production within five years and access to thirty-plus years of coal reserves. This outcome, which had major local economic implications, demonstrates that deindustrialization is a willed and highly politicized process. The Labour government ignored workforce entreaties to override the NCB’s decision and invest to bring the pit back into production, but made significant localized adjustments to regional policy that within a year attracted a major employer to the area, the Distillers Company Limited. The article relates the closure to moral economy arguments about deindustrialization. It shows that coal closures in the 1960s, while actually more extensive than those of the 1980s, were managed very differently, with attention to the interests of the workers and communities affected, and an emphasis on cultivating alternative industrial employment

Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka's Solution to Illegal Immigration

In last summer's debate over immigration reform, Congress treated a national electronic employment eligibility verification (EEV) system as a matter of near consensus. Intended to strengthen internal enforcement of the immigration laws, electronic EEV is an Internet-based employee vetting system that the federal government would require every employer to use. Broad immigration reform failed before Congress thoroughly considered national EEV, but the lines of debate have been drawn. Advocates in Congress will try to attach a nationwide worker registration system to any immigration bill Congress considers, and the Bush administration recently announced steps to promote such a system.A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work. By increasing the value of committing identity fraud, EEV would cause that crime's rates to rise. Creating an accurate EEV system would require a national identification (ID) system, costing about $20 billion to create and hundreds of millions more per year to operate. Even if it were free, the country should reject a national ID system. It would cause law-abiding American citizens to lose more of their privacy as government records about them grew and were converted to untold new purposes. "Mission creep" all but guarantees that the federal government would use an EEV system to extend federal regulatory control over Americans' lives even further

Detecting projectivity in sheaves associated to representations of infinitesimal groups

Let G be an infinitesimal group scheme of finite height r and V(G) the scheme which represents 1-parameter subgroups of G. We consider sheaves over the projectivization P(G) of V(G) constructed from a G-module M. We show that if P(G) is regular then the sheaf H^[1](M) is zero if and only if M is projective. In general, H^[1] defines a functor from the stable module category and we prove that its kernel is a thick triangulated subcategory. Finally, we give examples of G such that P(G) is regular and indicate, in characteristic 2, the connection to the BGG correspondence. Along the way we will provide new proofs of some known results and correct some errors in the literature.Comment: 26 pages, grant acknowledgement, journal reference, and DOI added to previous versio

Missing Records: Holes in Background Check System Allow Illegal Buyers to Get Guns

This report takes a look at the state of the background check system in the wake of the most lethal gun crime in American history -- one with direct relevance to the troubles with the background check system. An illegal buyer, Seung-Hui Cho, was able to pass a background check because his data was missing from the system. He purchased two firearms which he used to kill 32 people and wound 29 others at Virginia Tech University. In this report, we conclude that the background check system is better and more accurate than five years ago, but still deeply flawed, particularly in certain areas like mental health disqualifications. Dangerous holes in the system remain because states have not adequately completed the important tasks of collecting and automating all of the records necessary to disqualify illegal gun buyers from passing a check to obtain a firearm. On the positive side, the records of those who have committed felony crimes or have directed violence toward women have shown significant improvement. On the negative side, it is still virtually impossible to stop a person who has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution from passing a background check and buying a gun