Let S Be Reasonable

A conservative college professor's compelling defense of liberal education Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let's Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable—and revealing why the health of our democracy is at stake. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education. He recognizes that professors and administrators frequently adopt the language and priorities of the left, but he explains why conservative nightmare visions of liberal persecution and indoctrination bear little resemblance to what actually goes on in college classrooms. Marks examines why advocates for liberal education struggle to offer a coherent defense of themselves against their conservative critics, and demonstrates why such a defense must rest on the cultivation of reason and of pride in being reasonable. More than just a campus battlefield guide, Let's Be Reasonable recovers what is truly liberal about liberal education—the ability to reason for oneself and with others—and shows why the liberally educated person considers reason to be more than just a tool for scoring political points.

The authors give a combinatorial expansion of a Schubert homology class in the affine Grassmannian $\mathrm{Gr}_{\mathrm{SL}_k}$ into Schubert homology classes in $\mathrm{Gr}_{\mathrm{SL}_{k+1}}$. This is achieved by studying the combinatorics of a new class of partitions called $k$-shapes, which interpolates between $k$-cores and $k+1$-cores. The authors define a symmetric function for each $k$-shape, and show that they expand positively in terms of dual $k$-Schur functions. They obtain an explicit combinatorial description of the expansion of an ungraded $k$-Schur function into $k+1$-Schur functions. As a corollary, they give a formula for the Schur expansion of an ungraded $k$-Schur function.

This volume contains contributions by the participants of the conference "Groups and Computation", which took place at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, in June 1999. This conference was the successor of two workshops on "Groups and Computation" held at DIMACS in 1991 and 1995. There are papers on permutation group algorithms, finitely presented groups, polycyclic groups, and parallel computation, providing a representative sample of the breadth of Computational Group Theory. On the other hand, more than one third of the papers deal with computations in matrix groups, giving an in-depth treatment of the currently most active area of the field. The points of view of the papers range from explicit computations to group-theoretic algorithms to group-theoretic theorems needed for algorithm development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2006. The book presents 22 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks. Coverage includes work on foundations and semantics of timed systems including timed automata, timed Petri nets, timed MSCs, hybrid automata, timed process algebra, timed temporal logics, timed abstract state machines, as well as probabilistic models.

Provability, Computability and Reflection

This Handbook is an introduction to set-theoretic topology for students in the field and for researchers in other areas for whom results in set-theoretic topology may be relevant. The aim of the editors has been to make it as self-contained as possible without repeating material which can easily be found in standard texts. The Handbook contains detailed proofs of core results, and references to the literature for peripheral results where space was insufficient. Included are many open problems of current interest. In general, the articles may be read in any order. In a few cases they occur in pairs, with the first one giving an elementary treatment of a subject and the second one more advanced results. These pairs are: Hodel and Juhász on cardinal functions; Roitman and Abraham-Todorčević on S- and L-spaces; Weiss and Baumgartner on versions of Martin's axiom; and Vaughan and Stephenson on compactness properties.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Software Testing, FATES 2005, held in Edinburgh, UK, in July 2005 in conjunction with CAV 2005. The book presents 13 revised full papers together with 1 work-in-progress paper. These address formal approaches to testing and use techniques from areas like theorem proving, model checking, constraint resolution, program analysis, abstract interpretation, Markov chains, and various others.