Mismanagement: Labor\u27s Rightful Cause

[Excerpt] Mismanagement is so widespread and its effects upon job security, wages and standards are so damaging to labor that unions must expand the traditional boundaries of their authority and begin to experiment with ways to challenge management prerogatives. While some people may argue that such a direction will lead to enterprise unionism, those arguments have many of the same weaknesses as those against worker ownership and power-sharing. The alternative in our current situation is to passively allow managers to continue to destroy jobs and communities. Those who hope to rebuild our economy based upon more humane principles will need a constituency which includes union members who have, at the local level, really dug in and challenged mismanagement, posing alternatives to save jobs. The discussion below covers the most common and damaging forms of mismanagement; the rest of this issue of Labor Research Review shows what unions can and have done to challenge bad management. It does nor cover subjects which many of us consider mismanagement of the overall economy, such as socially destructive deregulation, laissez-faire trade policies, or the massive diversion of precious financial and technical resources to the military. While not ignoring such national economic issues, the training for empowerment for more grass-roots control of the economy has to begin with local campaigns where local unions and their allies have immediate organizing handles

Mechanized semantics

The goal of this lecture is to show how modern theorem provers---in this case, the Coq proof assistant---can be used to mechanize the specification of programming languages and their semantics, and to reason over individual programs and over generic program transformations, as typically found in compilers. The topics covered include: operational semantics (small-step, big-step, definitional interpreters); a simple form of denotational semantics; axiomatic semantics and Hoare logic; generation of verification conditions, with application to program proof; compilation to virtual machine code and its proof of correctness; an example of an optimizing program transformation (dead code elimination) and its proof of correctness

Vegetation cycles in a disturbed sequence around the Cobb-Mountain subchron in Catalonia

A 52 m-long lacustrine sequence has been recovered from the basin of Bòbila-Ordis, near Banyoles (N-E Spain). The presence of Early Biharian rodent teeth (Early Pleistocene) and of a c. 9 ka-long palaeomagnetic reversal (Cobb-Mountain subchron) suggests an age centred on 1.2 Ma, making this sequence one of the very few well-dated terrestrial sequences of that age in Europe. The first 22.5 m (with an interglacial character) are very homogenous owing to sedimentation affected by underwater springs. In the middle part of the sequence, palynological analyses, supported by sediment visual description, ostracod and mollusc assemblages, allow the reconstruction of one glacial-interglacial cycle, with vegetation succession. A second incomplete climatic cycle is recorded in the top part, within a shallower lake. These brief interruptions in the two climatic cycles are possibly linked to lake bank collapse caused by Hippopotamus amphibius or faulting linked to karst. The succession is likely to correlate to MIS 36-33. The Bòbila-Ordis lacustrine series (including two other nested lakes) covers altogether some sections of four glacial and four interglacial periods, not all contiguous

Measurement of ϕs\phi_s at LHCb

The study of CP violation in $B_s^0$ oscillations is one of the key goals of the LHCb experiment. Effects are predicted to be very small in the Standard Model but can be significantly enhanced in many models of new physics. We present the world's best measurement of the CP-violating phase $\phi_s$ using $B_s^0\to J/\psi KK$ and $B_s^0\to J/\psi\pi\pi$ decays.Comment: Presentation at the DPF 2013 Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields, Santa Cruz, California, August 13-17, 201

The MCLR Reporter

Contains Salute to Jack Metzgar, Conference Puts Forth New Vision, MCLR Research Dept. News

Pollen analysis of core DS7-1SC (Dead Sea) showing intertwined effects of climatic change and human activities in the Late Holocene

The Dead Sea sediment holds the archives of a complex relationship between ever-changing nature and ancient civilisations. Here the detailed pollen analyses of core DS7-1SC (off-Ein-Gedi) are presented for the first time. The record covers the last 2500 years. The facies changes from halite (when no freshwater flows in the Dead Sea) to laminites (when rainfall provides sufficient inflow for the Jordan and subsidiary rivers) a couple of times through the record. The pollen diagram (supported by the facies change) shows a wetter Roman-Byzantine period, which allowed intensive arboriculture and a wetter period at the end of the XIXth and beginning of the XXth centuries, the latter in good relation with historical and instrumental data. Based on radiocarbon chronologies on several pollen diagrams along the western Dead Sea shore, the transition to drier climates and the transition to pastoralism are suggested to take place between a few decades before the Islamic period and close to this transition. A high-resolution palynological study of the individual laminae forming the laminites (aragonite and gypsum in the summer versus detritics in winter) confirms the seasonal character of the laminae, but throws a note of caution as for their regular annual character

First steps towards the certification of an ARM simulator using Compcert

The simulation of Systems-on-Chip (SoC) is nowadays a hot topic because, beyond providing many debugging facilities, it allows the development of dedicated software before the hardware is available. Low-consumption CPUs such as ARM play a central role in SoC. However, the effectiveness of simulation depends on the faithfulness of the simulator. To this effect, we propose here to prove significant parts of such a simulator, SimSoC. Basically, on one hand, we develop a Coq formal model of the ARM architecture while on the other hand, we consider a version of the simulator including components written in Compcert-C. Then we prove that the simulation of ARM operations, according to Compcert-C formal semantics, conforms to the expected formal model of ARM. Size issues are partly dealt with using automatic generation of significant parts of the Coq model and of SimSoC from the official textual definition of ARM. However, this is still a long-term project. We report here the current stage of our efforts and discuss in particular the use of Compcert-C in this framework.Comment: First International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs 7086 (2011

Optical absorption and electrical conductivity of electron acceptor doped poly-3-octylthiophene films

Optical absorption and electrical conductivity measurements of solution-doped poly-3-octylthiophene (P3OT) films were studied. Chloroform solutions of P3OT were doped with the organic electron-acceptors, 2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-l,4-benzoquinone (DDQ) and 7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ); and with the inorganic electron acceptor, ferric chloride (FeCl{dollar}\sb3{dollar}). Charge transfer was observed in P3OT solutions doped with FeCl{dollar}\sb3{dollar} and DDQ. TCNQ-doped solutions showed no optical evidence of charge transfer. Thin films of the doped P3OT were examined at various doping levels. Spectroscopic and electrical conductivity measurements of P3OT films, doped with DDQ, TCNQ, and FeCl{dollar}\sb3{dollar}, at different doping levels, are presented. Optical absorption measurements provided information on the degree of charge transfer occurring for the various dopants. Electrical conductivity measurements showed that the conductivity of P3OT increased with the various dopants in the order of TCNQ {dollar}\u3c{dollar} DDQ {dollar}\u3c{dollar} FeCl{dollar}\sb3{dollar}, for the same dopant concentration level. Results are discussed in relation to the electrochemical properties of the prepared films and the structural properties of P3OT