A Deconstruction of Elie Wiesel\u27s The Time of the Uprooted

This thesis explores the implications of bearing witness as testimony, and the recuperation of community and identity in the wake of exile. Through a close reading of Elie Wiesel’s The Time of the Uprooted, alongside the theories of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (among others), I argue that a True Testimony cannot exist, and yet despite this fact, there is a necessity to bear witness in the face of the Other. The realization suggests an imperative of a different order—one that steps back from the very notion of truth, to instead accept the impossibility of truth in any act of witnessing. By comparing Wiesel’s metaphysical framework to post-structural philosophies, I am able to blur the lines between an exile’s metaphysical feelings of isolation and strangeness from both others and themselves to the effects of recognizing and accepting that all language is différance

Three-boson relativistic bound states with zero-range interaction

For the zero-range interaction providing a given mass M_2 of the two-body bound state, the mass M_3 of the relativistic three-boson state is calculated. We have found that the three-body system exists only when M_2 is greater than a critical value M_c approximately 1.43 m (m is the constituent mass). For M_2=M_c the mass M_3 turns into zero and for M_2<M_c there is no solution with real value of M_3.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Developing Sous Vide/Freezing Systems for Ready-Meal omponents

End of project reportSous vide cooking involves sealing raw or par-cooked food in a vacuumised laminated plastic pouch or container, cooking by controlled heating, rapid chilling and then re-heating for consumption. The chilled storage period is up to 21 days at 0 to 3oC. The recommended thermal process for sous vide products is 90oC for 10min or its time-temperature equivalent. Concerns about the safety of sous vide products, mainly due to the potential for temperature abuse in the chill chain, has prevented the widespread use of this technology. The role of the current project, therefore, was to investigate sous vide cooking followed by freezing, as a safe alternative to sous vide/chilling for 10 ready-meal components i.e. carbohydrates (potatoes, pasta, rice), vegetables (carrots, broccoli) and muscle foods (salmon, cod, chicken, beef and lamb).National Development Plan (NDP

Long-term variation in the Sun's activity caused by magnetic Rossby waves in the tachocline

Long-term records of sunspot number and concentrations of cosmogenic radionuclides (10Be and 14C) on the Earth reveal the variation of the Sun's magnetic activity over hundreds and thousands of years. We identify several clear periods in sunspot, 10Be, and 14C data as 1000, 500, 350, 200 and 100 years. We found that the periods of the first five spherical harmonics of the slow magnetic Rossby mode in the presence of a steady toroidal magnetic field of 1200-1300 G in the lower tachocline are in perfect agreement with the time scales of observed variations. The steady toroidal magnetic field can be generated in the lower tachocline either due to the steady dynamo magnetic field for low magnetic diffusivity or due to the action of the latitudinal differential rotation on the weak poloidal primordial magnetic field, which penetrates from the radiative interior. The slow magnetic Rossby waves lead to variations of the steady toroidal magnetic field in the lower tachocline, which modulate the dynamo magnetic field and consequently the solar cycle strength. This result constitutes a key point for long-term prediction of the cycle strength. According to our model, the next deep minimum in solar activity is expected during the first half of this century.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ApJ

Speech Communication

Contains reports on two research projects.National Science FoundationUnited States Air Force, Cambridge Research Center, Air Research and Development Command (Contract AF19(604)-6102

Euclidean to Minkowski Bethe–Salpeter amplitude and observables

We propose a method to reconstruct the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude in Minkowski space given the Euclidean Bethe-Salpeter amplitude -- or alternatively the Light-Front wave function -- as input. The method is based on the numerical inversion of the Nakanishi integral representation and computing the corresponding weight function. This inversion procedure is, in general, rather unstable, and we propose several ways to considerably reduce the instabilities. In terms of the Nakanishi weight function, one can easily compute the BS amplitude, the LF wave function and the electromagnetic form factor. The latter ones are very stable in spite of residual instabilities in the weight function. This procedure allows both, to continue the Euclidean BS solution in the Minkowski space and to obtain a BS amplitude from a LF wave function.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

Opportunities at the Intersection of Synthetic Biology, Machine Learning, and Automation

Our inability to predict the behavior of biological systems severely hampers progress in bioengineering and biomedical applications. We cannot predict the effect of genotype changes on phenotype, nor extrapolate the large-scale behavior from small-scale experiments. Machine learning techniques recently reached a new level of maturity, and are capable of providing the needed predictive power without a detailed mechanistic understanding. However, they require large amounts of data to be trained. The amount and quality of data required can only be produced through a combination of synthetic biology and automation, so as to generate a large diversity of biological systems with high reproducibility. A sustained investment in the intersection of synthetic biology, machine learning, and automation will drive forward predictive biology, and produce improved machine learning algorithms

Manifestation of three-body forces in three-body Bethe-Salpeter and light-front equations

Bethe-Salpeter and light-front bound state equations for three scalar particles interacting by scalar exchange-bosons are solved in ladder truncation. In contrast to two-body systems, the three-body binding energies obtained in these two approaches differ significantly from each other: the ladder kernel in light-front dynamics underbinds by approximately a factor of two compared to the ladder Bethe-Salpeter equation. By taking into account three-body forces in the light-front approach, generated by two exchange-bosons in flight, we find that most of this difference disappears; for small exchange masses, the obtained binding energies coincide with each other.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, submitted in Few-Body System

Nucleon form factors and moments of parton distributions in twisted mass lattice QCD

We present results on the electroweak form factors and on the lower moments of parton distributions of the nucleon, within lattice QCD using two dynamical flavors of degenerate twisted mass fermions. Results are obtained on lattices with three different values of the lattice spacings, namely a=0.089 fm, a=0.070 fm and a=0.056 fm, allowing the investigation of cut-off effects. The volume dependence is examined by comparing results on two lattices of spatial length L=2.1 fm and L=2.8 fm. The simulations span pion masses in the range of 260-470 MeV. Our results are renormalized non-perturbatively and the values are given in the MS-scheme at a scale mu=2 GeV.Comment: Talk presented in the XXIst International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, 21-27 July 2011, Grenoble, Rhones Alpes Franc