Origins of the Quark Model

An intellectual history of the quark model prior to February 1964 is presented. Aspects of this history are best summarized by a parable: Man asked God for a riddle, and God obliged: "What is green, hangs from a tree, and sings?" This, of course, was a very difficult question. So man asked God for the answer, and God replied: "A herring!" "A herring? But why is it green?" "Because I painted it green." "But why does it hang from a tree?" "Because I put it there. " "And why does it sing?" "If it didn't sing you would have guessed it was a herring.

Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean "John does not own more than one dog", but rather "John does not own a dog". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy)

A visual M170 effect of morphological complexity

Recent masked priming studies on visual word recognition have suggested that morphological decomposition is performed prelexically, purely on the basis of the orthographic properties of the word form. Given this, one might expect morphological complexity to modulate early visual evoked activity in electromagnetic measures. We investigated the neural bases of morphological decomposition with magnetoencephalography (MEG). In two experiments, we manipulated morphological complexity in single word lexical decision without priming, once using suffixed words and once using prefixed words. We found that morphologically complex forms display larger amplitudes in the M170, the same component that has been implicated for letterstring and face effects in previous MEG studies. Although letterstring effects have been reported to be left-lateral, we found a right-lateral effect of morphological complexity, suggesting that both hemispheres may be involved in early analysis of word forms

Memories of Murray and the Quark Model

Life at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann in the early 1960's is remembered. Our different paths to quarks, leading to different views of their reality, are described.Comment: Talk presented at the "Conference in Honor of Murray Gell-Mann's 80th Birthday," Nanyang Technical University, Singapore, February 24,2010. 18 pages, 4 figure

The complex relation between production and scattering amplitudes

The unitarity relation, Im(A)=T* A, is derived for a three-body production amplitude, A, that consists of a complex linear combination of elements of the two-body scattering amplitude, T. We conclude that the unitarity relation does not impose a realness condition on the coefficients in the expansion of, A, in terms of, T.Comment: 4 pages plain LaTe

Educational Alternatives for Vulnerable Youth: Student Needs, Program Types, and Research Directions

Chapter 1 of this document examines the need for alternative education among vulnerable youth by reviewing the numbers and characteristics of youth who disconnect from mainstream developmental pathways in various ways. The second chapter examines the question of "what is an alternative education school or program" and draws on a variety of elements from the literature to suggest the beginnings of a typology that might be used to define and organize the varieties of educational alternatives that currently exist and might be promoted in the future. Finally, Chapter 3 summarizes the findings of a roundtable on directions for future research on alternative education and describes the types of information and studies that are needed to advance the field of alternative education and foster more support for the development of high quality educational alternatives that all children can choose and benefit from