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"With the digital age in full swing, colleges must reconceptualize what it means to act in loco parentis, and how, to the extent they can do anything, they can best serve their students. The answer is not to read into OCR investigations a new era of control and responsibility. Disaggregated problems require disaggregated solutions. Colleges cannot wrap their students in bubble wrap whenever they venture outside of their comfortable residence halls, and even bubble wrap does not protect against digital slander. Rather than reasserting rights and responsibilities under in loco parentis and seeking to envelope students in a protective aura, colleges should return to their core mission and educate students on how to interact within, and protect themselves from, the dangers posed by the digital world. "
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"In the mood I'm in right now, I don't think I'd do more than raise an eyebrow if Bernanke suggested we just shoot every tenth banker on Wall Street as an object lesson to the rest of them. But even so, I'm really lukewarm to this idea -- and not just on the practical grounds that it's almost impossible to really make it work properly."
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We propose and analyze a scheme to interface individual neutral atoms with nanoscale solid-state systems. The interface is enabled by optically trapping the atom via the strong near-field generated by a sharp metallic nanotip. We show that under realistic conditions, a neutral atom can be trapped with position uncertainties of just a few nanometers, and within tens of nanometers of other surfaces. Simultaneously, the guided surface plasmon modes of the nanotip allow the atom to be optically manipulated, or for fluorescence photons to be collected, with very high efficiency. Finally, we analyze the surface forces, heating and decoherence rates acting on the trapped atom.
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"Yes, this can be very complicated. But what should a middle-school student understand about light? You see stuff in textbooks that is either wrong or just a bunch of disconnected factoids (I like the word factoid). So, what do I think is important about light (not at the Maxwell's equations level)"
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