INTER-AMERICAN NOTES: CONFERENCES

Between July 23 and July 25, 2014, the University of Montevideo hosted the Fourth Jornadas Internacionales de Historia del Paraguay, with sponsorship from the Universities of Georgia, Köln, and Rennes 2. Organized by Thomas Whigham and Juan Manuel Casal, the conference included 45 presenters and 70 attendees traveling to the Uruguayan capital from the United States, Germany, Spain, Italy, Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Students from both the National and Catholic Universities of Asunción also took part with one of their number, Claudio José Fuentes Armadans (Universidad Católica), providing an interesting presentation on the history of the Liberal Party. First-time contributors to the conference included Carlos Gómez Florentín (SUNY Stony Brook), who discussed the environmental history of the hydroelectric complex at Itaipú, and Justin Michael Heath (University of Texas, Austin), who traced the evolution of frontier security in the early Jesuit missions. The Jornadas also benefited from repeat contributors, including Ignacio Telesca (Universidad Nacional de Formosa/CONICET), who analyzed the historical content of Paraguayan textbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Bridget María Chesterton, who discussed how the “sweet herb” ka’a he’e (stevia) has affected markets and habits of consumption in more recent times.

COOL MULTITHREADING IN HTMT SPELL-1 PROCESSORS

A COOL-1 multiprocessor shared memory system based on superconductor Rapid Single-Flux Quantum (RSFQ) technology is being developed at SUNY (Stony Brook, USA) within the framework of the Hybrid Technology Multithreaded architecture (HTMT) petaflops project led by JPL. This paper describes a multithreading approach proposed in the COOL-I architecture and mechanisms to exploit the thread level parallelism in RSFQ processors called SPELL-1. Up to 128 fine-grain threads called (instruction) streams arranged in 16 groups of 8 streams each can run in parallel within a SPELL-1 processor. All eight streams comprising each COOL stream cluster can communicate and synchronize directly via shared registers. Fast creation and termination of streams including speculative stream execution are also supported.

HIGH Tc SUPERCONDUCTIVITY: SYMMETRIES AND REFLECTIONS

This is a talk given at the Symposium "Symmetries and Reflections", dedicated to Prof. C. N. Yang's retirement. In this talk, I shall reflect on my personal interaction with Prof. Yang since my graduate career at SUNY Stony Brook, and his profound impact on my understanding of theoretical physics. I shall also review the SO(5) theory of high T c superconductivity and show how my collaboration with Prof. Yang in 1990 lead to the foundation of this idea.

OPEN PROBLEMS IN SOAP BUBBLE GEOMETRY

The Burlington Mathfest in August 1995 included an AMS Special Session on Soap Bubble Geometry, organized by Frank Morgan. At the end of the session, participants were asked to pose open problems related to bubble geometry. We have collected those problems here, adding a few introductory comments. Participants in the special session included the following: Fred Almgren, Princeton U. Megan Barber, Williams C. Ken Brakke, Susquehanna U. John Cahn, NIST Joel Foisy, Duke U. Christopher French, U.Chicago Scott Greenleaf, SUNY Stony Brook Karsten Groeß-Brauckmann, Bonn Joel Hass, UC Davis Aladár Heppes, Budapest Michael Hutchings, Harvard U. Jenny Kelley, Rutgers U. Andy Kraynik, Sandia Rob Kusner, U.Massachusetts Rafael Lopez, Granada Joe Masters, U.Texas Helen Moore, Bowdoin C. Frank Morgan, Williams C. Ivars Peterson, Science News Robert Phelan, Dublin Joel Shore, McGill U. John Sullivan, U.Minnesota Italo Tamanini, Trento Jean Taylor, Rutgers U. Jennifer Tice, Williams C. Brian Wecht, Williams C. Henry Wente, U.Toledo Brian White, Stanford U.

On Neural Codes and Perception

Bill Newsome is a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his B.S. in physics from Stetson University in 1974 and his Ph.D. in biology from Caltech in 1980. Following postdoctoral work at MH, he served on the faculty at SUNY Stony Brook before joining the Stanford faculty in 1988. His research has focused on the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and visually guided behavior. Bill was a corecipient of the Rank Prize in optoelectronics in 1992, and received the Minerva Foundation's Golden Brain Award in the same year. This fall he received the Spencer Award, granted yearly by the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University for highly original contributions to research in neurobiology. In addition, he won the Kaiser Award for excellence in preclinical teaching granted annually by the Stanford School of Medicine.