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A paper evaluating the effects of lessons intended to encourage high school students to continue physics studies made some important errors. One was to underestimate the width of confidence intervals by failing to use standard cluster randomization analysis. Another was to use a missing-data imputation program that inappropriately assumes that data are missing at random, leading to potential bias in estimating the effect. The last was to omit discussion of how the treatment used was likely to produce substantial social desirability survey response bias, eroding external validity., Comment: less than 2000 words

Finding good educational policies requires sound estimates of their potential effects. Methods for making such estimates, i.e. finding causal estimands, have made great progress in the last few decades. Nevertheless, serious errors in causal reasoning have been found previously in papers n a leading physics education journal, Physical Review Physics Education Research. Here we examine three more recent papers from that journal that present explicit methods of causal inference. The methods given include major errors, including in identifying causal mediation, choosing variables to control for, and imputing missing data., Comment: ~8k words, 4 figs. A follow-up to 1902.09442, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax3787, and https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.17.020118 v2 has minor tweaks

Barkhausen current noise is used to probe the slow field-driven conversion of the glassy relaxor ferroelectric state to an ordered ferroelectric (FE) state. The frequent presence of distinct micron-scale Barkhausen events well before the polarization current starts to speed up shows that the process is not a conventional nucleation-limited one. The prevalence of reverse switching events near the onset of the rapid part of the transition strongly indicates that electric dipole interactions play a key role. The combination of Barkhausen noise changes and changes in the complex dielectric response indicate that the process consists of an initial mixed-alignment domain formation stage followed by growth of the domains aligned with the applied field.

An unusual noise component is found near and below about 250 K in the normal state of underdoped YBCO and Ca-YBCO films. This noise regime, unlike the more typical noise above 250 K, has features expected for a symmetry-breaking collective electronic state. These include large individual fluctuators, a magnetic sensitivity, and aging effects. A possible interpretation in terms of fluctuating charge nematic order is presented., 4 pages, 4 figures

The relaxor ferroelectric (PbMn$_{1/3}$Nb$_{2/3}$O$_3$)$_{1-x}$(PbTiO$_3$)$_{x}$, $x=0.1$, (PMN/PT(90/10)) is found to exhibit several regimes of complicated aging behavior. Just below the susceptibility peak there is a regime exhibiting rejuvenation but little memory. At lower temperature, there is a regime with mainly cumulative aging, expected for simple domain-growth. At still lower temperature, there is a regime with both rejuvenation and memory, reminiscent of spin glasses. PMN/PT (88/12) is also found to exhibit some of these aging regimes. This qualitative aging behavior is reminiscent of that seen in reentrant ferromagnets, which exhibit a crossover from a domain-growth ferromagnetic regime into a reentrant spin glass regime at lower temperatures. These striking parallels suggest a picture of competition in PMN/PT (90/10) between ferroelectric correlations formed in the domain-growth regime with glassy correlations formed in the spin glass regime. PMN/PT (90/10) is also found to exhibit frequency-aging time scaling of the time-dependent part of the out-of-phase susceptibility for temperatures 260 K and below. The stability of aging effects to thermal cycles and field perturbations is also reported., Comment: 8 pages RevTeX4, 11 figures; submitted to Phys. Rev. B

Proposals to solve the problems of quantum measurement via non-linear CPT-violating modifications of quantum dynamics are argued to provide a possible fundamental explanation for the irreversibility of statistical mechanics as well. The argument is expressed in terms of collapse-free accounts. The reverse picture, in which statistical irreversibility generates quantum irreversibility, is argued to be less satisfactory because it leaves the Born probability rule unexplained., Comment: 13 pages

We present a novel analytic calculation of the Haar power spectra, and various higher order spectra, of mean field avalanche models. We also compute these spectra from a simulation of the zero-temperature mean field RFIM and infinite range RFIM model for $d = 3$. We compare the results and obtain novel exponents., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures