The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Socialist Transformation: The Case of Greece

With its 2015 electoral victory in Greece, Syriza became the first left political party to lead a European government since the founding of the European Union. As such, its eventual capitulation to the demands of the Troika was a bitter development, and not only for the people of Greece. Because the need for change remains as great as ever, and efforts at electoral-based transformations continue, especially in Europe, this paper seeks to assess the Greek experience, and in particular Syriza’s political options and choices, in order to help activists more effectively respond to the challenges faced when confronting capitalist power. Section 1 examines how Greece’s membership in the euro area promoted an increasingly fragile and unsustainable economic expansion over the period 2001 to 2007. Section 2 discusses the role of the Troika in Greece’s 2008 to 2014 downward spiral into depression. Section 3 discusses the ways in which popular Greek resistance to their country’s crisis helped to shape and nourish Syriza as a new type of left political organization, “a mass connective party.” Section 4 critically analyzes the Syriza-led government’s political choices, highlighting alternative policies not chosen that might have helped the government break the Troika’s strangle hold over the Greek economy and further radicalize the Greek population. Section 5 concludes with a presentation of five lessons from the Greek experience of relevance for future struggles

Investigating the medium range order in amorphous Ta₂O₅ coatings

Ion-beam sputtered amorphous heavy metal oxides, such as Ta2O5, are widely used as the high refractive index layer of highly reflective dielectric coatings. Such coatings are used in the ground based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in which mechanical loss, directly related to Brownian thermal noise, from the coatings forms an important limit to the sensitivity of the LIGO detector. It has previously been shown that heat-treatment and TiO2 doping of amorphous Ta2O5 coatings causes significant changes to the levels of mechanical loss measured and is thought to result from changes in the atomic structure. This work aims to find ways to reduce the levels of mechanical loss in the coatings by understanding the atomic structure properties that are responsible for it, and thus helping to increase the LIGO detector sensitivity. Using a combination of Reduced Density Functions (RDFs) from electron diffraction and Fluctuation Electron Microscopy (FEM), we probe the medium range order (in the 2-3 nm range) of these amorphous coatings

On-sky wide field adaptive optics correction using multiple laser guide stars at the MMT

We describe results from the first astronomical adaptive optics system to use multiple laser guide stars, located at the 6.5-m MMT telescope in Arizona. Its initial operational mode, ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO), provides uniform stellar wavefront correction within the 2 arc minute diameter laser beacon constellation, reducing the stellar image widths by as much as 53%, from 0.70 to 0.33 arc seconds at lambda = 2.14 microns. GLAO is achieved by applying a correction to the telescope's adaptive secondary mirror that is an average of wavefront measurements from five laser beacons supplemented with image motion from a faint stellar source. Optimization of the adaptive optics system in subsequent commissioning runs will further improve correction performance where it is predicted to deliver 0.1 to 0.2 arc second resolution in the near-infrared during a majority of seeing conditions.Comment: 13 pages, 1 table, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal. Expected March 200

Continuous Blooming of Convex Polyhedra

We construct the first two continuous bloomings of all convex polyhedra. First, the source unfolding can be continuously bloomed. Second, any unfolding of a convex polyhedron can be refined (further cut, by a linear number of cuts) to have a continuous blooming.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

The infrared imaging spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: design of image slicer

The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is one of three first light science instruments for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). It will provide dedicated function of imaging and integral field spectroscopic observations in parallel with the assistance of a Narrow Field InfraRed Adaptive Optics System (NFIRAOS). The IRIS imager delivers celestial light to a dual-channel Integral Field Spectrograph (IFS) through a pair of pick-off mirrors in the central field. The IFS creates multi-functional ability to explore the universe in IR (0.84 – 2.4um) with moderate spectral resolution of R=4,000/8,000 and four spaxel scales of 4, 9, 25, 50 milli-arc-seconds (mas). An image slicer serves one of the two spectral channels as its Integral Field Unit (IFU) in two coarse spaxel scales of 25 and 50mas over the continuous science fields of 2.2x1.125 arc-seconds (arcsec) and 4.4x2.25 arcsec respectively. It splits the field to 88 unit systems, and then re-images at two parallel slits in order to take full advantage of the detector (4Kx4K @ 15um). This paper describes a novel all-reflective design of image slicer, which uses a new ‘brick stage’ layout to stagger the adjacent mirrors and deliver image quality close to diffraction limit. The quasi-telecentric optical design gives more friendly interfaces with pre-optics and spectrograph than the conceptual design. Here, more technical issues are discussed to guide the further study on optical performance and fabrication feasibility