Henrietta Kent and the Feminised North

Some time around 1876, S. H. Kent, Susanna Sarah Henrietta Kent or Henrietta Kent as she probably called herself, travelled through the northern parts of Norway and Sweden with her elderly mother. Her impressions from the northern trip were published in two volumes entitled Within the Arctic Circle: Experiences of Travel through Norway, to the North Cape, Sweden and Lapland, advertised in The Times 6 February 1877. There was a great deal of public interest in the Arctic at the time due to the scientific and cultural activity leading up to the firstInternational Polar Year 1882-83. Kent, however, does not foreground the adventure and excitement associated with the Polar expeditions in her narrative. Instead, she concentrates on the kind people and pleasant aspects of northern Scandinavia, asserting that the difficultiesof northern travel have been exaggerated and that nothing should "deter even lady travellers" from going North. At least as she presents the exercise in her preface, travelling in Norway and Sweden requires no particular strength or stamina. The dangers of the wild as well as the romance of the Arctic are absent from her book, makingnorthern Scandinavia seem quite woman-friendly. Kent's travelogue demonstrates in many ways the interaction between the construction of a gendered narrative self and the gendering of place

Preliminary results of 3D-DDTC pixel detectors for the ATLAS upgrade

Presented at: 9th International Conference on Large Scale Applications and Radiation Hardness of Semiconductor Detectors - RD09. Florence, Italy, 30 September - 2 October 20093D Silicon sensors fabricated at FBK-irst with the Double-side Double Type Column (DDTC) approach and columnar electrodes only partially etched through p-type substrates were tested in laboratory and in a 1.35 Tesla magnetic field with a 180GeV pion beam at CERN SPS. The substrate thickness of the sensors is about 200μm, and different column depths are available, with overlaps between junction columns (etched from the front side) and ohmic columns (etched from the back side) in the range from 110μm to 150μm. The devices under test were bump bonded to the ATLAS Pixel readout chip (FEI3) at SELEX SI (Rome, Italy). We report leakage current and noise measurements, results of functional tests with Am241 γ-ray sources, charge collection tests with Sr90 β-source and an overview of preliminary results from the CERN beam test.publishedVersio

A physical map of Brassica oleracea shows complexity of chromosomal changes following recursive paleopolyploidizations

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Evolution of the Brassica species has been recursively affected by polyploidy events, and comparison to their relative, <it>Arabidopsis thaliana</it>, provides means to explore their genomic complexity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A genome-wide physical map of a rapid-cycling strain of <it>B. oleracea </it>was constructed by integrating high-information-content fingerprinting (HICF) of Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clones with hybridization to sequence-tagged probes. Using 2907 contigs of two or more BACs, we performed several lines of comparative genomic analysis. Interspecific DNA synteny is much better preserved in euchromatin than heterochromatin, showing the qualitative difference in evolution of these respective genomic domains. About 67% of contigs can be aligned to the Arabidopsis genome, with 96.5% corresponding to euchromatic regions, and 3.5% (shown to contain repetitive sequences) to pericentromeric regions. Overgo probe hybridization data showed that contigs aligned to Arabidopsis euchromatin contain ~80% of low-copy-number genes, while genes with high copy number are much more frequently associated with pericentromeric regions. We identified 39 interchromosomal breakpoints during the diversification of <it>B. oleracea </it>and <it>Arabidopsis thaliana</it>, a relatively high level of genomic change since their divergence. Comparison of the <it>B. oleracea </it>physical map with Arabidopsis and other available eudicot genomes showed appreciable 'shadowing' produced by more ancient polyploidies, resulting in a web of relatedness among contigs which increased genomic complexity.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>A high-resolution genetically-anchored physical map sheds light on Brassica genome organization and advances positional cloning of specific genes, and may help to validate genome sequence assembly and alignment to chromosomes.</p> <p>All the physical mapping data is freely shared at a WebFPC site (<url>http://lulu.pgml.uga.edu/fpc/WebAGCoL/brassica/WebFPC/</url>; Temporarily password-protected: account: pgml; password: 123qwe123.</p

The gentleman's north : Lord Dufferin and the beginnings of Arctic tourism

In his 1857 travelogue Letters from High Latitudes, Lord Dufferin positions himself as the first real tourist in the region of Iceland and Spitsbergen. The representation of these sites as tourist destinations involves a female gendering of place in comparison with the masculine image of the Arctic conveyed in, for instance, exploration narratives. The narrative is more an instance of self-writing than a report of observations, a privatising, subjective mode which again signals a move away from the pseudo-objective, masculine genres of scientific writing. Dufferin’s aristocratic outlook is an important aspect of the self-presentation, emphasising the writer’s refinement and good breeding. Nevertheless, one of Dufferin’s central concerns is to convey the romance of the Arctic which builds on the image of man pitted against the forces of harsh and dangerous nature. The text can consequently be viewed as a site where conflicting gendered narrative traditions fuse or collide

Bayard Taylor and the Genders of the North

In nineteenth-century travelogues, representations of nature as feminine commonly serve to underscore constructions of masculinity as dominant, controlled and rational. Feminine language is more readily utilised to describe southern than northern spaces, however. Thus, southern landscapes are quite often seen as picturesque and coded as feminine, whereas northern landscapes are frequently described as awe-inspiring and sublime and given masculine properties. To some extent, the American travel writer Bayard Taylor’s Northern Travel: Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Lapland and Norway (1858) conforms to a model which genders the land feminine and the traveller masculine. But a factor that seems to influence how a region is discursively gendered is to what degree the writer is presented as separated from or integrated with the environment. To some extent, Taylor’s representation of the North as a physically demanding region where the traveller is vulnerable works to undermine the conventionally masculine position of much nineteenth-century travel writing. As a result, the narrative vacillates between reinforcing and undermining essentialist gender polarities, highlighting the problem of gendering physical space

Feminine Poles : Josephine Diebitsch-Peary's and Jennie Darlington's polar narratives

From the Eurocentric or Anglo-American point of view, the Arctic and the Antarctic have often been perceived and presented as the last masculine preserves on earth. Outside constructions of the masculine Arctic obviously also disregard the circumstance that people have lived in the region for very long, but there are also non-indigenous women who have spent time or lived in both areas, to begin with usually as companions to their husbands, but in later years as researchers in their own right. Two early narratives about life in the far North and the far South, respectively, are Josephine Diebitsch-Peary’s My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos (1893) and Jennie Darlington’s My Antarctic Honeymoon: A Year at the Bottom of the World (1956). Both women describe life in the polar areas in ways compatible with the gender ideologies of their time. In many respects, however, Diebitsch-Peary’s account presents more radical suggestions for how women might live in the masculine polar environment than Darlington whose conclusion is that the Antarctic should remain a men-only continent