Quasi-local black hole horizons

This article introduces the subject of quasi-local horizons at a level suitable for physics graduate students who have taken a first course on general relativity. It reviews properties of trapped surfaces and trapped regions in some simple examples, general properties of trapped surfaces including their stability properties, the definitions and some applications of dynamical-, trapping-, and isolated-horizons.Comment: 41 pages, 12 Figures. To appear in the Springer Handbook of Spacetime, Springer Verlag (2013

Reading Globalization from the Margin: The Case of Abdullah Munshi

In this essay I argue that the global perspective, established in the era of modernEuropean imperialism, is given institutional expression as a way of seeing that is engaged—both by ruler and ruled— as the frame of adequate representation. Briefly outlining how this frame operates in historical and cultural studies today, I examine its deployment in mid-nineteenth-century Melaka and Singapore through a reading of the Hikayat Abdullah, a seminal Malay-language text composed by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir. Although Abdullah self-consciously sets about reproducing the global perspective, I show how this mode of thematization is interrupted and displaced as it brings about an encounter between the diverse and uneven contexts of the native and European worlds

A Model for Large theta13 Constructed using the Eigenvectors of the S4 Rotation Matrices

A procedure for using the eigenvectors of the elements of the representations of a discrete group in model building is introduced and is used to construct a model that produces a large reactor mixing angle, sin^2(theta13)=2/3 sin^2(pi/16), in agreement with recent neutrino oscillation observations. The model fully constrains the neutrino mass ratios and predicts normal hierarchy with the light neutrino mass, m1~25 meV. Motivated by the model, a new mixing ansatz is postulated which predicts all the mixing angles within 1sigma errors.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, contribution to the proceedings of DISCRETE 2012 to appear in the open access Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS), preprint typeset in two-column revtex4 styl