Between Wind and Water: Experiences of Mothers of Adolescents with Autism During the Post-High School Transition

Research Question: How do mothers of adolescents with autism experience and prepare for their child\u27s post- high school transition

Feminine Purity and Masculine Revenge-Seeking In \u3ci\u3eTaken\u3c/i\u3e (2008)

The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women\u27s “purity” against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legitimates both male conquest abroad and overbearing protection of young women at home. I contend that popular films such as Taken are a part of the broader cultural system of representing social reality that elicit popular adherence to common-sense myths of white masculinity, feminine purity, and Orientalism

Neocolonialism and the Global Prison in National Geographic\u27s \u3ci\u3eLocked Up Abroad\u3c/i\u3e

This essay examines the reformulation of colonial ideologies in National Geographic Channel\u27s Locked Up Abroad, a documentary program that chronicles the narratives of Westerner travelers incarcerated in foreign nations. An analysis of Locked Up Abroad evinces neocolonialism in contemporary media culture, including: the historic association between dark-skin and savagery, the backwardness of the non-Western world, and the Western imperative to civilize it. The program\u27s documentary techniques and framing devises sustain an Otherizing gaze toward non-Western societies, and its portrayals elide a critical analysis of colonialism in its present forms. I advocate for neocolonial criticism to trace how NatGeo remains haunted by its own history in support of America\u27s civilizing mission

A photon loss tolerant Zeno CSIGN gate

We model an optical implementation of a CSIGN gate that makes use of the Quantum Zeno effect [1,2] in the presence of photon loss. The raw operation of the gate is severely affected by this type of loss. However, we show that by using the same photon loss codes that have been proposed for linear optical quantum computation (LOQC), the performance is greatly enhanced and such gates can outperform LOQC equivalents. The technique can be applied to other types of nonlinearities, making the implementation of nonlinear optical gates much more attractive

Chemistry of the Most Metal-poor Stars in the Bulge and the z > 10 Universe

Metal-poor stars in the Milky Way are local relics of the epoch of the first stars and the first galaxies. However, a low metallicity does not prove that a star formed in this ancient era, as metal-poor stars form over a range of redshift in different environments. Theoretical models of Milky Way formation have shown that at constant metallicity, the oldest stars are those closest to the center of the Galaxy on the most tightly-bound orbits. For that reason, the most metal-poor stars in the bulge of the Milky Way provide excellent tracers of the chemistry of the high-redshift universe. We report the dynamics and detailed chemical abundances of three stars in the bulge with [Fe/H] $\lesssim-2.7$, two of which are the most metal-poor stars in the bulge in the literature. We find that with the exception of scandium, all three stars follow the abundance trends identified previously for metal-poor halo stars. These three stars have the lowest [Sc II/Fe] abundances yet seen in $\alpha$-enhanced giant stars in the Galaxy. Moreover, all three stars are outliers in the otherwise tight [Sc II/Fe]-[Ti II/Fe] relation observed among metal-poor halo stars. Theoretical models predict that there is a 30% chance that at least one of these stars formed at $z\gtrsim15$, while there is a 70% chance that at least one formed at $10 \lesssim z \lesssim 15$. These observations imply that by $z\sim10$, the progenitor galaxies of the Milky Way had both reached [Fe/H] $\sim-3.0$ and established the abundance pattern observed in extremely metal-poor stars.Comment: Submitted to ApJ on 2014 December 23, accepted 2015 May 4th after minor revisions. ArXiv tarball includes referee report and respons

The Best and Brightest Metal-Poor Stars

The chemical abundances of large samples of extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars can be used to investigate metal-free stellar populations, supernovae, and nucleosynthesis as well as the formation and galactic chemical evolution of the Milky Way and its progenitor halos. However, current progress on the study of EMP stars is being limited by their faint apparent magnitudes. The acquisition of high signal-to-noise spectra for faint EMP stars requires a major telescope time commitment, making the construction of large samples of EMP star abundances prohibitively expensive. We have developed a new, efficient selection that uses only public, all-sky APASS optical, 2MASS near-infrared, and WISE mid-infrared photometry to identify bright metal-poor star candidates through their lack of molecular absorption near 4.6 microns. We have used our selection to identify 11,916 metal-poor star candidates with V < 14, increasing the number of publicly-available candidates by more than a factor of five in this magnitude range. Their bright apparent magnitudes have greatly eased high-resolution follow-up observations that have identified seven previously unknown stars with [Fe/H] <~ -3.0. Our follow-up campaign has revealed that 3.8^{+1.3}_{-1.1}% of our candidates have [Fe/H] <~ -3.0 and 32.5^{+3.0}_{-2.9}% have -3.0 <~ [Fe/H] <~ -2.0. The bulge is the most likely location of any existing Galactic Population III stars, and an infrared-only variant of our selection is well suited to the identification of metal-poor stars in the bulge. Indeed, two of our confirmed metal-poor stars with [Fe/H] <~ -2.7 are within about 2 kpc of the Galactic Center. They are among the most metal-poor stars known in the bulge.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures, and 4 tables in emulateapj format; accepted for publication in Ap

“I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in \u3ci\u3eStorage Wars\u3c/i\u3e

This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriates omnivorous consumption, thrift, and collaboration to fit within the masculine repertoire of self-reliance, individualism, and competition. Thus, the program adapts hegemonic masculinity by showcasing male auction bidders adeptly performing feminine consumer practices. Whether the feminine is assimilated into the male body or represented as its Other, we contend that the expressions of masculinity in Storage Wars render women obsolete and subjugated in the marketplaces of the 21st-century economy and contribute to the mediation of the contemporary crisis in masculinity