Sex: Sexual Orientation, Sex Stereotyping, and Title VII

The United States Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Altitude Express v. Zarda, a case that addresses whether Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination “on the basis of sex” prohibits sexual orientation discrimination.  Relying on three related lines of reasoning, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had held that it did.  First, sexual orientation discrimination would not have occurred “but for” the employee’s sex; second, sexual orientation discrimination relies on the sex-stereotype that individuals should be attracted to individuals of the opposite sex; and third, sexual orientation discrimination is a form of prohibited associational discrimination.  This Article opines that the strongest and most compelling of these three arguments is sex stereotyping since gays and lesbians fail to conform to the ultimate stereotype that real men are sexually attracted to women and real women are sexually attracted to men.  This stereotype is a means of maintaining anachronistic and outdated gender roles for men and women

Radially Self-Accelerating Beams

We report on optical non-paraxial beams that exhibit a self-accelerating behavior in radial direction. Our theory shows that those beams are solutions to the full scalar Helmholtz equation and that they continuously evolve on spiraling trajectories. We provide a detailed insight into the theoretical origin of the beams and verify our findings on an experimental basis

Framing Colomina

Sometime in the 1990s architecture historians shifted their attention from buildings to publications, exhibitions, films and photographs produced by architects. This shift is related to the more general transformation in which ‘society’ has been substituted by ‘culture’. More than any other work it is Beatriz Colomina’s Privacy and Publicity that has come to represent this growing interest of architecture historians. The following review article closely studies the arguments and methodologies at the centre of Privacy and Publicity as a means of delineating the idealism that is the subtext of this shift

The hidden geometry of electromagnetism

Nearly all field theories suffer from singularities when particles are introduced. This is true in both classical and quantum physics. Classical field singularities result in the notorious self-force problem, where it is unknown how the dynamics of a particle change when the particle interacts with its own (self) field. Self-force is a pressing issue and an active research topic in gravitational phenomena, as well as a source of controversies in classical electromagnetism. In this work, we study a hidden geometrical structure manifested by the electromagnetic field-lines that has the potential of eliminating all singularities from classical electrodynamics. We explore preliminary results towards a consistent way of treating both self- and external fields.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. This is a preprint for the proceedings of DICE2014 in Tuscany, Ital

The 4D-TECS integration for NASA TSRV airplane

The integration of the Total Energy Control System (TECS) concept with 4D navigation is described. This integration was made to increase the operational capacity of modern aircraft and encourage incorporation of this increased capability with the evolving National Airspace System (NAS). Described herein is: 4D smoothing, the basic concepts of TECS, the spoiler integration concept, an algorithm for nulling out time error, speed and altitude profile modes, manual spoiler implementation, 4D logic, and the results of linear and nonlinear analysis