Finally, results from Gravity Probe-B

Nearly fifty years after its inception, the Gravity Probe B satellite mission delivers the first measurements of how a spinning gyroscope precesses in the gravitational warping of spacetime.Comment: A Viewpoint article, published in Physics 4, 43 (2011), available at http://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/43 Submitted to the arXiv by permission of the American Physical Societ

Beantown Baptism in the free speech\u27 zone

Democratic practice depends on civil discourse. In the long run an intelligent word will always be more effective than a whole book of insults, or a whole bottle of water

On finite derived quotients of 3-manifold groups

This paper studies the set of finite groups appearing as $\pi_1(M)/\pi_1(M)^{(n)}$, where $M$ is a closed, orientable 3-manifold and $\pi_1(M)^{(n)}$ denotes the $n$-th term of the derived series of $\pi_1(M)$. Our main result is that if $M$ is a closed, orientable 3-manifold, $n\ge 2$, and $G\cong \pi_1(M)/\pi_1(M)^{(n)}$ is finite, then the cup product pairing $H^2(G)\otimes H^2(G)\to H^4(G)$ has cyclic image $C$, and the pairing $H^2(G)\otimes H^2(G)\stackrel{\smile}{\longrightarrow} C$ is isomorphic to the linking pairing $H_1(M)_{\textrm{Tors}}\otimes H_1(M)_{\textrm{Tors}}\to \mathbb{Q}/\mathbb{Z}$

If the government wants to introduce a real revolution in law and order, it should devolve powers and budgets for all criminal justice and emergency services to PCCs

Will Tanner argues that if the Prime Minister is serious about his ‘tough but intelligent’ approach to crime and justice then resources should be directed to what is proven to work. The astonishing success of the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) in Glasgow is just such a project. Only through such localism could initiatives like the VRU become the norm

Integration and the Achievement Gap: Innovation in Dallas, Texas

Educatio

Scaled-free objects II

This work creates two categories of "array-weighted sets" for the purposes of constructing universal matrix-normed spaces and algebras. These universal objects have the analogous universal property to the free vector space, lifting maps completely bounded on a generation set to a completely bounded linear map of the matrix-normed space. Moreover, the universal matrix-normed algebra is used to prove the existence of a free product for matrix-normed algebras using algebraic methods.Comment: 46 pages. Version 4 fixed a few minor typos. Version 3 added matricial completion; fixed an arithmetic error in Example 3.5.10. Version 2 added a preliminaries section on weighted sets and matricial Banach spaces, incorporating much of "Matricial Banach spaces" in summary; fixed a domain issue in Lemma 3.3.2; simplified Examples 3.5.10 and 4.11; added more proofs to Sections 4 and