Multilingual gendered identities: female undergraduate students in London talk about heritage languages

In this paper I explore how a group of female university students, mostly British Asian and in their late teens and early twenties, perform femininities in talk about heritage languages. I argue that analysis of this talk reveals ways in which the participants enact ‘culturally intelligible’ gendered subject positions. This frequently involves negotiating the norms of ‘heteronormativity’, constituting femininity in terms of marriage, motherhood and maintenance of heritage culture and language, and ‘girl power’, constituting femininity in terms of youth, sassiness, glamour and individualism. For these young women, I ask whether higher education can become a site in which they have the opportunities to explore these identifications and examine other ways of imagining the self and what their stories suggest about ‘doing being’ a young British Asian woman in London

Increasing trap stiffness with position clamping in holographic optical tweezers

We present a holographic optical tweezers system capable of position clamping multiple particles. Moving an optical trap in response to the trapped object's motion is a powerful technique for optical control and force measurement. We have now realised this experimentally using a Boulder Nonlinear Systems Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) with a refresh rate of 203Hz. We obtain a reduction of 44% in the variance of the bead's position, corresponding to an increase in effective trap stiffness of 77%. This reduction relies on the generation of holograms at high speed. We present software capable of calculating holograms in under 1ms using a graphics processor unit. © 2009 Optical Society of America

The Statistics of the BATSE Spectral Features

The absence of a BATSE line detection in a gamma-ray burst spectrum during the mission's first six years has led to a statistical analysis of the occurrence of lines in the BATSE burst database; this statistical analysis will still be relevant if lines are detected. We review our methodology, and present new simulations of line detectability as a function of the line parameters. We also discuss the calculation of the number of ``trials'' in the BATSE database, which is necessary for our line detection criteria.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, AIPPROC LaTeX, to appear in "Gamma-Ray Bursts, 4th Huntsville Symposium," eds. C. Meegan, R. Preece and T. Koshu

Efficiency of donning and doffing medical examination gloves

Quickly donning and doffing medical gloves is of vital importance for high-pressure environments. The efficiency of glove donning, however, is sometimes hindered because of moisture on the hand. A variety of commercial glove coatings exist that are said to enable a smoother donning process, however, no previous studies have examined the differences in time taken to don or doff gloves manufactured using different materials and coatings. The aim of this new study was to compare the efficiency of donning and doffing different glove types. 14 participants were timed on their efficiency to don and doff chlorinated latex and nitrile gloves, as well as polymer coated latex and nitrile gloves. All glove types were studied in both dry and wet hand conditions, leading to a total of 8 different glove condition combinations. The results indicate that polymer coated latex gloves are desirable when a quick glove change is required as there was no statistically significant difference between the average time taken to don these gloves in dry and wet hand conditions. Higher incidences of sticking were found among the wet hands, particularly in the polymer coated nitrile, which took the longest to don. However, little differences were found between all glove types, suggesting that neither the material itself, nor the internal coating, have an effect on the overall donning process when hands are dry. Discrepancies in best fit size were also noticed between the recommended sizes based on anthropometric measurements and the participants preferred glove size

The theory of spectral evolution of the GRB prompt emission

We develop the theory of jitter radiation from GRB shocks containing small-scale magnetic fields and propagating at an angle with respect to the line of sight. We demonstrate that the spectra vary considerably: the low-energy photon index, $\alpha$, ranges from 0 to -1 as the apparent viewing angle goes from 0 to $\pi/2$. Thus, we interpret the hard-to-soft evolution and the correlation of $\alpha$ with the photon flux observed in GRBs as a combined effect of temporal variation of the viewing angle and relativistic aberration of an individual thin, instantaneously illuminated shell. The model predicts that about a quarter of time-resolved spectra should have hard spectra, violating the synchrotron $\alpha=-2/3$ line of death. The model also naturally explains why the peak of the distribution of $\alpha$ is at $\alpha\approx-1$. The presence of a low-energy break in the jitter spectrum at oblique angles also explains the appearance of a soft X-ray component in some GRBs and a relatively small number of them. We emphasize that our theory is based solely on the first principles and contains no {\it ad hoc} (phenomenological) assumptions.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted to Ap