Towards Reconciliation: Immigration in Marty Chan’s The Forbidden Phoenix and David Yee’s lady in the red dress

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public announcement of redress to acknowledge the early mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, he turned a new chapter in Canada’s legislative history. Postcolonial theatre offers a window into the lives of late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries immigrants, many of whom were subjected to exclusionary policies while attempting to become Canadian citizens. This article offers a comparative analysis of two plays: The Forbidden Phoenix by Marty Chan and lady in the red dress by David Yee. Such plays actively encourage readers and audiences to move towards reconciliation, a term used to describe the process of featuring immigrant characters onstage in order to challenge the roots of stereotypes and race-based policies. These plays, though contrasting in style and tone, gesture towards the importance of immigrants to Canadian history, and, more specifically, how theatre artists are attempting to understand the legacy of race-based policies and prejudices on the cultural relations of the twenty-first century.Quand le Premier ministre Stephen Harper a officiellement offert des excuses pour les mauvais traitements infligés aux premiers immigrés d’origine chinoise, un nouveau chapitre de l’histoire législative s’est ouvert au Canada. Le théâtre postcolonial jette un regard sur la vie des immigrants de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle, dont plusieurs ont été assujettis à des politiques d’exclusion au moment de demander la citoyenneté canadienne. Dans cet article, Chang propose une analyse comparée de The Forbidden Phoenix de Marty Chan et de lady in the red dress de David Yee. Ces pièces participent à une mise en scène de la réconciliation, processus par lequel des personnages immigrants sont représentés sur scène dans le but de combattre les sources des stéréotypes et des politiques fondées sur la race. Bien que les deux pièces à l’étude contrastent autant par leur ton que par leur style, elles montrent l’importance des immigrants pour l’histoire du Canada et, plus spécifiquement, la façon dont les artistes de théâtre tentent de comprendre le legs des politiques et des préjugés raciaux et leurs effets sur les relations culturelles au XXIe siècle

On Melonic Supertensor Models

We investigate a class of supersymmetric quantum mechanical theories (with two supercharges) having tensor-valued degrees of freedom which are dominated by melon diagrams in the large $N$ limit. One motivation was to examine the interplay between supersymmetry and melonic dominance and potential implications for building toy models of holography. We find a definite tension between supersymmetry (with dynamical bosons) and melonic dominance in this class of systems. More specifically, our theories attain a low energy non-supersymmetric conformal fixed point. The origin of supersymmetry breaking lies in the need to regularize bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom independently. We investigate various aspects of the low energy spectrum and also comment on related examples with different numbers of supercharges. Along the way we also derive some technical results for $SL(2,{\mathbb R})$ wavefunctions for fermionic excitations.Comment: 37+19 pages; v2: references added. v3: typos fixed. published versio

The Distribution of Pairwise Genetic Distances: A Tool for Investigating Disease Transmission

Whole-genome sequencing of pathogens has recently been used to investigate disease outbreaks and is likely to play a growing role in real-time epidemiological studies. Methods to analyze high-resolution genomic data in this context are still lacking, and inferring transmission dynamics from such data typically requires many assumptions. While recent studies have proposed methods to infer who infected whom based on genetic distance between isolates from different individuals, the link between epidemiological relationship and genetic distance is still not well understood. In this study, we investigated the distribution of pairwise genetic distances between samples taken from infected hosts during an outbreak. We proposed an analytically tractable approximation to this distribution, which provides a framework to evaluate the likelihood of particular transmission routes. Our method accounts for the transmission of a genetically diverse inoculum, a possibility overlooked in most analyses. We demonstrated that our approximation can provide a robust estimation of the posterior probability of transmission routes in an outbreak and may be used to rule out transmission events at a particular probability threshold. We applied our method to data collected during an outbreak of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, ruling out several potential transmission links. Our study sheds light on the accumulation of mutations in a pathogen during an epidemic and provides tools to investigate transmission dynamics, avoiding the intensive computation necessary in many existing methods

Composable architecture for rack scale big data computing

The rapid growth of cloud computing, both in terms of the spectrum and volume of cloud workloads, necessitate re-visiting the traditional rack-mountable servers based datacenter design. Next generation datacenters need to offer enhanced support for: (i) fast changing system configuration requirements due to workload constraints, (ii) timely adoption of emerging hardware technologies, and (iii) maximal sharing of systems and subsystems in order to lower costs. Disaggregated datacenters, constructed as a collection of individual resources such as CPU, memory, disks etc., and composed into workload execution units on demand, are an interesting new trend that can address the above challenges. In this paper, we demonstrated the feasibility of composable systems through building a rack scale composable system prototype using PCIe switch. Through empirical approaches, we develop assessment of the opportunities and challenges for leveraging the composable architecture for rack scale cloud datacenters with a focus on big data and NoSQL workloads. In particular, we compare and contrast the programming models that can be used to access the composable resources, and developed the implications for the network and resource provisioning and management for rack scale architecture

Lipids driving protein structure? Evolutionary adaptations in Kir channels

Many eukaryotic channels, transporters and receptors are activated by phosphatidyl inositol bisphosphate (PIP(2)) in the membrane, and every member of the eukaryotic inward rectifier potassium (Kir) channel family requires membrane PIP(2) for activity. In contrast, a bacterial homolog (KirBac1.1) is specifically inhibited by PIP(2). We speculate that a key evolutionary adaptation in eukaryotic channels is the insertion of additional linkers between trans-membrane and cytoplasmic domains, revealed by new crystal structures, that convert PIP(2) inhibition to activation. Such an adaptation may reflect a novel evolutionary drive to protein structure,; one that was necessary to permit channel function within the highly negatively charged membranes that evolved in the eukaryotic lineage

Coherence Times of Bose-Einstein Condensates beyond the Shot-Noise Limit via Superfluid Shielding

We demonstrate a new way to extend the coherence time of separated Bose-Einstein condensates that involves immersion into a superfluid bath. When both the system and the bath have similar scattering lengths, immersion in a superfluid bath cancels out inhomogeneous potentials either imposed by external fields or inherent in density fluctuations due to atomic shot noise. This effect, which we call superfluid shielding, allows for coherence lifetimes beyond the projection noise limit. We probe the coherence between separated condensates in different sites of an optical lattice by monitoring the contrast and decay of Bloch oscillations. Our technique demonstrates a new way that interactions can improve the performance of quantum devices.Samsung Scholarship FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. Grant 1506369)United States. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grants FA9550-14-1-0035 and W911NF-14-1-0003

Unique structure and positive selection promote the rapid divergence of Drosophila Y chromosomes

Y chromosomes across diverse species convergently evolve a gene-poor, heterochromatic organization enriched for duplicated genes, LTR retrotransposons, and satellite DNA. Sexual antagonism and a loss of recombination play major roles in the degeneration of young Y chromosomes. However, the processes shaping the evolution of mature, already degenerated Y chromosomes are less well-understood. Because Y chromosomes evolve rapidly, comparisons between closely related species are particularly useful. We generated de novo long-read assemblies complemented with cytological validation to reveal Y chromosome organization in three closely related species of the Drosophila simulans complex, which diverged only 250,000 years ago and share \u3e98% sequence identity. We find these Y chromosomes are divergent in their organization and repetitive DNA composition and discover new Y-linked gene families whose evolution is driven by both positive selection and gene conversion. These Y chromosomes are also enriched for large deletions, suggesting that the repair of double-strand breaks on Y chromosomes may be biased toward microhomology-mediated end joining over canonical non-homologous end-joining. We propose that this repair mechanism contributes to the convergent evolution of Y chromosome organization across organisms