DOPE 2014 - Friday Keynote 

Featuring: Simón Sedillo (organizer and filmmaker); Geoff Boyce (Doctoral Candidate, School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona); Aviva Chomsky (Department of History, Salem State University); Vanessa Hall (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth); and Ann Kingsolver, (Department of Anthropology and Appalachian Studies Center, University of Kentucky)

Featuring: Dianne Rocheleau (Clark University); Laura Ogden (Florida International University);Carolyn Finney (University of California Berkeley); Melanie DuPuis (University of California Santa Cruz); Sharlene Mollett (University of Toronto at Scarsborough); and Rebecca Lave (Indiana University)

This will be the second of Dr. Hochschild's lectures, and is more appropriate for an academic audience. There will be a reception afterward, with refreshments, in the same room.

Arlie Hocschild is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of such notable books as The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, and So How's the Family and Other Essays?. Through her work, Dr. Hochschild has contributed to our understanding of emotional relationships in relation to changing social contexts and cultural definitions. Her work is significant in and of particular interest to those working the fields of sociology, psychology, gender and women's studies, social work, and family studies.

This lecture is based upon her book of the same title in which she interviews "love coaches, wedding planners, surrogate mothers, nannies, household consultants and elder-care managers and their clients. These consumers buy hyperpersonal services because they lack the family support or social capital or sheer time to meet potential mates, put on weddings, whip up children’s birthday parties, build children’s school projects, or care for deteriorating parents. Or these folks think they just couldn’t perform such tasks as well as the pros. The providers sell their services because the service economy is where the money is, or because they take pleasure in helping others. Everybody worries about preserving the human element in the commercial encounter. Very few succeed." Judith Shulevitz, May 25, 2012, NY Times, Sunday Book Review. This lecture is open to public including campus and the community, and there will be a book signing following the event.

Arlie Hocschild is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of such notable books as The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, and So How's the Family and Other Essays?. Through her work, Dr. Hochschild has contributed to our understanding of emotional relationships in relation to changing social contexts and cultural definitions. Her work is significant in and of particular interest to those working the fields of sociology, psychology, gender and women's studies, social work, and family studies.

More info...

Thursday of the month, they are always free and open to the public.

I will first talk about the discovery of a pair of gigantic bubbles in our Galaxy
using data from Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the multi-wavelength
observations on this so called "Fermi bubble" structure. Our numerical simulation
demonstrates that the bubble structure could be evidence for past accretion events
of the central supermassive black hole. I will then summarize the current state of dark
matter search with Fermi data, with the focus on gamma-ray line searching from the
Galactic center, galaxy clusters, and dwarf galaxies. I will explain why we got extremely
excited in 2012 with a tentative gamma-ray line signal from the Galactic center. We have
recently proposed to change the survey strategy of Fermi to increase the exposure at
the Galactic center by more than a factor of 2. This new survey strategy has been
initiated since December 2013 and will last for at least one year. I will end up with a
discussion of future gamma-ray space missions.

A revision of our system of units, the SI, is currently discussed and may be implemented as early as 2018. The new SI is a logical extension of an argument made in 1983 when the meter was redefined to be based on the exact value of the speed of light. In the new SI all units will be derived from seven fundamental reference constants, thus replacing the seven base units of the current system. For example, the unit of mass, the kilogram, is currently defined by an artifact called the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK). In the future we will be able to realize the unit of mass, not just at the kilogram level, from a fixed value of the Planck constant, which has units of kg m^2/s. One condition for redefinition is agreement between different measurements of the Planck constant. Currently two measurement strategies lead to values with relative uncertainties less than 100 parts per billion (ppb): (1) Avogadro’s number can be determined by estimating the number of atoms in a well characterized crystal. From Avogadro’s number h can be calculated using the Rydberg constant, which is known with much smaller uncertainty (2) A watt balance can be used to measure mechanical power in units of electrical power. Electrical power can be measured as the product of the Planck constant and two frequencies by utilizing the Josephson effect and the Quantum Hall effect. NIST has carried out measurements of h with watt balances for over 20 years. In the past 18 months a new team has performed a largely independent determination of h. I will describe this measurement and measurements from other laboratories.

 

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