Please join the UK Appalachian Center at an Appalachian Forum with Dr. Fran Ansley, Professor Emeritus of law at the University of Tennessee Knoxville on Wednesday, November 5, 2014.  Dr. Ansley will give a talk entitled Telescoping Movements, Telescoping Time:  Five Decades of Looking for the Labor Movement  through an Appalachian Lens in the Niles Gallery from 3:30 to 5 p.m.  This is a part of the Appalachian Forum Speaker Series on Civil Rights, Labor and Environmental Movements in Appalachia.  The event is free and open to the public.

We introduce a new 2+1 dimensional topological current that is identically conserved and whose charge is equal to the Euler character of the two dimensional spacelike foliations. The existence of this current allows us to introduce new Chern-Simons-type terms in the effective field theories describing relativistic quantum Hall states and (2+1) dimensional superfluids. In the quantum Hall case, this current provides the natural relativistic generalization of the Wen-Zee term, required to characterize the shift and Hall viscosity in quantum Hall systems. For the superfluid case this term is required to have nonzero Hall viscosity and to describe superfluids with non s-wave pairing.

Ching Kwan Lee graduated from the University of California-Berkeley Sociology Department, and is the author of the award winning Against the Law.  Her talk analyzes the peculiarity of outbound Chinese state capital by comparing it with global private capital in copper and construction in Zambia.  Refuting the dominant narratives of "Chinese colonialism" and "south-south cooperation," comparative ethnographic data collected over a 5-year period chronicle the multi-faceted struggles that confront and differentiate these two varieties of capital entailing uneven potentials for post-colonial African development.

There will also be a small workshop on doing ethnography in China at 10AM on the same day. (Please contact Thomas Janoski at tjanos@uky.edu for details)

David Moldoff

Professor Joel Gordon will explore the depiction of ‘normative’ religious practices and personal expressions of religious identity in recent Egyptian movies with a particular focus is on Egyptian youth.  Whereas in the past signs of piety had been restricted to either ‘traditional’ Egyptians – often in comic fashion – or political extremists, a few recent films have dared to depict ‘normal’ veiled women and bearded men and even a social environment in which questions of piety, morality and proper behavior dominate the discussions, concerns and conflicts between young Egyptians.  These films may point to a growing willingness by film artists to honestly explore social trends that have been taboo, especially as Egypt enters a new political era.

Prof. Joel Gordon: Professor of History and Director of Middle East Studies, University of Arkansas; Specialist in modern Egyptian history and Arab popular culture; Author of Nasser' Blessed Movement, Revolutionary Melodrama, and Nasser: Hero of the Arab Nation

Monday, September 15 at 7 PM is the first installment in the Honors/Gaines Center/History Department Sponsored War and Society film series.

Please join the UK Appalachian Center for an evening with Mimi Pickering as part of our Appalachain Forum Series on Appalachian Labor, Civil Rights, and Environmental Movements.  This is a free and public screening of "Anne Braden: Southern Patriot" followed by a discussion of the film with the Director and Producer of the film, Mimi Pickering.  The event will be held in Memorial Hall from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 2, 2014.

The nature of cooling in galaxy cluster has been puzzling since cool
core clusters were first discovered. Even though early X-ray observations
suggested copious amount of cooling, optical observations failed to detect star
formation at the levels suggested by X-rays. More recently, dispersed
spectroscopy with Chandra and XMM-Newton has revealed a dearth of gas below
1/3 of the mean cluster temperature. Heating mechanisms have been invoked
to account for the temperature floor and residual star formation, but the
details remain unclear.
Probes for the hot X-ray (~10 MK), cool optical (~10,000 K), and
intermediate temperature (~100,000 -- 1 million K) phases are necessary to
unravel the balance between heating and cooling in clusters. Recently, coronal
line emission from gas of ~1 million K has been reported near NGC 4696, the
Brightest Cluster Galaxy in the Centaurus galaxy cluster. By contast, gas at 2
million K was not detected.
In this talk I build upon a new facility in Cloudy that allows for
time-dependent, non-advective simulations. I use this capability to follow
a parcel of gas as it cools from ~80 MK to ~10,000 K. I show that the lack
of 2 million K gas is not due to extinction. I use the observed upper limit
to place an upper limit to the temperature of the coronal gas, and find that, if
the gas is cooling, it is cooling isochorically. I discuss scenarios for the
origin of the coronal gas, and propose observational probes for gas at
temperatures between a million and 10,000 K, that could shed some light into
cooling processes in galaxy clusters.

The statistical properties of the largest eigenvalue of a random matrix are of interest in diverse fields such as in the stability of large ecosystems, in disordered systems, in statistical data analysis and even in string theory. In this talk I'll discuss some recent developments in the theory of extremely rare fluctuations (large deviations) of the largest eigenvalue using a Coulomb gas method. Such rare fluctuations have also been measured in recent experiments in coupled laser systems. I'll also discuss recent applications of this Coulomb gas method in three different problems: entanglement in a bipartite system, conductance fluctuation through a mesoscopic cavity and the vicious random walkers problem.

Refreshments will be served in CP 179 at 3:15 PM