Body Language: Reading the Corpse in Forensic Crime Fiction .

Our purpose in this article is to explore the fascination, over the last decade, with crime narratives that centre on the figure of the forensic pathologist. Principally this involves a reading of Cornwell�s Scarpetta series, but we also discuss a growing number of other novels that confront readers with the �reality� of the dead body. In some cases (for example, Kathy Reichs and Priscilla Masters) writers use, as Cornwell does, the figure of the forensic pathologist; in other instances, such as Nicci French�s The Red Room (2001) and Jan Burke�s Bones (1999), the female protagonist�s reading of the crime is determined by alternative forms of first-hand access to the �underworld� of the grave or autopsy room, such as that of the crime journalist or criminal psychologist. In contrast to the kind of police procedural novel that gives centre-stage to the psyche of the serial killer, the forensic pathology novel aims instead to evoke the �appalling human messiness� of actual crime through a perspective nearer to that of the victim. By providing readers with not only a body of experts but an expert on the body the novelist allows them to listen to the voices of the dead

Unidirectional wave propagation in media with complex principal axes

In an anisotropic medium, the refractive index depends on the direction of propagation. Zero index in a fixed direction implies a stretching of the wave to uniformity along that axis, reducing the effective number of dimensions by one. Here we investigate two dimensional gyrotropic media where the refractive index is zero in a complex valued direction, finding that the wave becomes an analytic function of a single complex variable z. For simply connected media this analyticity implies unidirectional propagation of electromagnetic waves, similar to the edge states that occur in photonic 'topological insulators'. For a medium containing holes the propagation is no longer unidirectional. We illustrate the sensitivity of the field to the topology of the space using an exactly solvable example. To conclude we provide a generalization of transformation optics where a complex coordinate transformations can be used to relate ordinary anisotropic media to the recently highlighted gyrotropic ones supporting one-way edge states.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Transport Coefficients of Quark Gluon Plasma for Pure Gauge Models

The transport coefficients of quark gluon plasma are calculated on a lattice 16**3X8, with the pure gauge models. Matsubara Green's functions of energy momentum tensors have very large fluctuations and about a few million MC sweeps are needed to reduce the errors reasonably small in the case of the standard action. They are much suppressed if Iwasaki's improved action is employed. Preliminary results show that the transport coefficients roughly depend on the coupling constant as a**(-3)(g) in the case of SU(2).Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE96(finite temperature), 3 pages in latex, 4 Postscript figure

Efficiency rents of pumped-storage plants and their uses for operation and investment decisions

We apply duality methods of linear and convex programming to the problems of operation and rental valuation of facilities for conversion and storage of cyclically priced goods, e.g. , energy. Both problems are approached by shadow-pricing the stock (which is a purely intermediate commodity); and if the given market price p for the final good is a continuous function of time, then the stock's shadow price function ? is shown to be unique (and continuous). Therefore, despite being perfect Allen-Hicks complements, the plant's capacities have definite and separate marginal values, which are expressed in terms of ? (and p). In particular, the unit reservoir rent equals the total positive variation of ? over the cycle. The optimal storage policy is also given in terms of ? and p). The marginal capacity values are used to determine the optimum investment. The framework can accommodate related storage problems (such as hydroelectric generation)

On balanced incomplete block designs with specified weak chromatic number

A weak $c$-colouring of a balanced incomplete block design (BIBD) is a colouring of the points of the design with $c$ colours in such a way that no block of the design has all of its vertices receive the same colour. A BIBD is said to be weakly $c$-chromatic if $c$ is the smallest number of colours with which the design can be weakly coloured. In this paper we show that for all $c \geq 2$ and $k \geq 3$ with $(c,k) \neq (2,3)$, the obvious necessary conditions for the existence of a $(v,k,\lambda)$-BIBD are asymptotically sufficient for the existence of a weakly $c$-chromatic $(v,k,\lambda)$-BIBD.Comment: 26 pages, 0 figure

Embedding partial Steiner triple systems with few triples

It was proved in 2009 that any partial Steiner triple system of order $u$ has an embedding of order $v$ for each admissible integer $v\geq 2u+1$. This result is best-possible in the sense that, for each $u\geq 9$, there exists a partial Steiner triple system of order $u$ that does not have an embedding of order $v$ for any $v<2u+1$. Many partial Steiner triple systems do have embeddings of orders smaller than $2u+1$, but little has been proved about when these embeddings exist. In this paper we construct embeddings of orders less than $2u+1$ for partial Steiner triple systems with few triples. In particular, we show that a partial Steiner triple system of order $u \geq 62$ with at most $\frac{u^2}{50}-\frac{11u}{100}-\frac{116}{75}$ triples has an embedding of order $v$ for each admissible integer $v \geq \frac{8u+17}{5}$.Comment: 20 pages, 0 figure

Zero reflection and transmission in graded index media

Graded index media whose electric susceptibility satisfies the spatial Kramers-Kronig relations are known to be one-way reflectionless to electromagnetic radiation, for all angles of incidence. We demonstrate how a family of these media, in addition to being reflectionless, also have negligible transmission. To this end, we discuss how the transmission coefficient for the propagation of waves through a medium whose permittivity is built from poles in the complex position plane, with residues that sum to infinity, can be controlled by tuning the positions and residues of the poles. In particular, we have shown how to make the transmission arbitrarily small, and hence maximise the absorption of the wave's energy. This behaviour is confirmed by numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure