Modeling the interaction of light between diffuse surfaces

Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley are arguably the most important female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, while Wollstonecraft is one of the most significant contributors to the women’s rights movement, with some of her ideas expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman being referenced in the modern-day laws about the rights of women. This paper will analyze the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, focusing mostly on their most famous and most significant works, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, respectively. Furthermore, it will analyze the position of women through the biographies of both writers and the autobiographical elements in their works, as well as through the analysis of the female characters in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus as a representation of more or less typical women of the time. Finally, it will search for and analyze the influence of Mary Shelley’s mother’s works and ideas on her writing in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and her work in general. The aim of this BA paper is to analyze the position of women in society and literature through the above mentioned aspects of the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley and to prove the importance of both of these authors, but especially Wollstonecraft, in the female struggle for obtaining the most basic human rights and the still persisting fight for gender equality

Chemoenzymatic elaboration of monosaccharides using engineered cytochrome P450_(BM3) demethylases

Polysaccharides comprise an extremely important class of biopolymers that play critical roles in a wide range of biological processes, but the synthesis of these compounds is challenging because of their complex structures. We have developed a chemoenzymatic method for regioselective deprotection of monosaccharide substrates using engineered Bacillus megaterium cytochrome P450 (P450_(BM3)) demethylases that provides a highly efficient means to access valuable intermediates, which can be converted to a wide range of substituted monosaccharides and polysaccharides. Demethylases displaying high levels of regioselectivity toward a number of protected monosaccharides were identified using a combination of protein and substrate engineering, suggesting that this approach ultimately could be used in the synthesis of a wide range of substituted mono- and polysaccharides for studies in chemistry, biology, and medicine

Holographic Foam, Dark Energy and Infinite Statistics

Quantum fluctuations of spacetime give rise to quantum foam, and black hole physics dictates that the foam is of holographic type. Applied to cosmology, the holographic model requires the existence of dark energy which, we argue, is composed of an enormous number of inert ``particles'' of extremely long wavelength. These "particles" necessarily obey infinite statistics in which all representations of the particle permutation group can occur. For every boson or fermion in the present observable universe there could be $\sim 10^{31}$ such "particles". We also discuss the compatibility between the holographic principle and infinite statistics.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX; added references and footnotes; version to appear in Physics Letters

A survey to investigate the association of pain, foot disability and quality of life with corns

Background Corns are a common foot problem affecting a large proportion of the population. This study describes the characteristics of corns experienced by 201 participants taking part in a randomised controlled trial to investigate associations between demographic and corn parameters on pain, foot related disability and quality of life (QoL). Methods Pain from the main (index) corn was measured using a visual analogue scale (VAS); foot related disability was assessed with the Foot Disability Questionnaire (now known as the Manchester Foot Pain and Disability Index) and quality of life was recorded with the EQ-5D questionnaire. The effect of demographic and corn parameters on the pain and quality of life outcomes was assessed with analysis of variance (ANOVA) methods. The effect of the same factors on a linear combination of the foot-related disability outcome measures was assessed using multivariate ANOVA methods. Pain was also tested for its mediating properties on the causal pathway between the independent variables and quality of life. Results The mean pain score was 5.29 points on a 10 cm VAS, with females reporting substantively higher pain levels than males. Age affected foot-related disability, with lower levels on all domains of the MFPDI reported in older participants; each year of advancing age was associated with falls of: 0.009 points on the Concern about Appearance (CA) domain; 0.047 points on the Functional Limitation (FL) domain and 0.048 points on the Pain Intensity (PI) domain. Sex and corn type also affected disability, with higher scores reported by females and participants with plantar corns. Conclusions The effect of pain was shown to mediate the relationship between sex and foot-related disability. The presence of plantar corns has a more detrimental effect on QoL than dorsal/inter-digital corns

Taken by strum: ukuleles and participatory music-making in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Ethnographic study of ukulele playing in Hamilton, N

Charge Conjugation Invariance of the Vacuum and the Cosmological Constant Problem

We propose a method of field quantization which uses an indefinite metric in a Hilbert space of state vectors. The action for gravity and the standard model includes, as well as the positive energy fermion and boson fields, negative energy fields. The Hamiltonian for the action leads through charge conjugation invariance symmetry of the vacuum to a cancellation of the zero-point vacuum energy and a vanishing cosmological constant in the presence of a gravitational field. To guarantee the stability of the vacuum, we introduce a Dirac sea `hole' theory of quantization for gravity as well as the standard model. The vacuum is defined to be fully occupied by negative energy particles with a hole in the Dirac sea, corresponding to an anti-particle. We postulate that the negative energy bosons in the vacuum satisfy a para-statistics that leads to a para-Pauli exclusion principle for the negative energy bosons in the vacuum, while the positive energy bosons in the Hilbert space obey the usual Bose-Einstein statistics. This assures that the vacuum is stable for both fermions and bosons. Restrictions on the para-operator Hamiltonian density lead to selection rules that prohibit positive energy para-bosons from being observable. The problem of deriving a positive energy spectrum and a consistent unitary field theory from a pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonian is investigated.Comment: 15 pages, Latex file, no figures. Typos corrected. To be published in Physics Letters

High-Frequency InAIAs/InGaAs Metal-Insulator-Doped Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors (MIDFET's) for Telecommunications

Contains report on one research project.Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAL03-86-K-0002)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAALO3-89-C-0001

Solving the Mystery of Myelodysplasia

The author reviews key research on the biology underlying treatment response in myelodysplasia, including a new study inPLoS Medicine