Georgette Heyer: what Austen left out

It has often been observed that there are certain things Jane Austen excludes from her books, most notably conversations between men at which no women are present, and the Napoleonic wars. Georgette Heyer comprehensively and systematically includes what Austen omits. Regency Buck, the first of Heyer’s regency romances, pointedly highlights a number of things that Austen keeps silent on: the Prince Regent and the Pavilion, duels, snuff, men’s clothes and pastimes, men’s conversation, Beau Brummell, curricle racing, cockfighting, boxing, and the manners of men to non-ladies. The heroine’s brother, Peregrine, takes sparring lessons at Jackson’s Saloon, shoots at Manton’s Galleries, fences at Angelo’s, and drinks Blue Ruin in Cribb’s Parlour, and we even overhear an all-male conversation. Above all, Heyer focuses on the Napoleonic Wars, which for her men are the preservative from foppishness and folly; essentially, they have a choice between fighting for Wellington or growing to be like Prinny or Byron. This chapter will examine her representation of the wars, with particular attention to the ways in which the language and imagery of warfare spills over into domestic situations

Reliability Analysis of River Levees Using Logistic Regression Models – Abilities and Limitations

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Resistivity and Hall effect of LiFeAs: Evidence for electron-electron scattering

LiFeAs is unique among the broad family of FeAs-based superconductors, because it is superconducting with a rather large $T_c\simeq 18$ K under ambient conditions although it is a stoichiometric compound. We studied the electrical transport on a high-quality single crystal. The resistivity shows quadratic temperature dependence at low temperature giving evidence for strong electron-electron scattering and a tendency towards saturation around room temperature. The Hall constant is negative and changes with temperature, what most probably arises from a van Hove singularity close to the Fermi energy in one of the hole-like bands. Using band structure calculations based on angular resolved photoemission spectra we are able to reproduce all the basic features of both the resistivity as well as the Hall effect data.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures included; V2 has been considerably revised and contain a more detailed analysis of the Hall effect dat

Thermal expansion of the magnetically ordering intermetallics RTMg (R = Eu, Gd and T = Ag, Au)

We report measurements of the thermal expansion for two Eu$^{+2}$- and two Gd$^{+3}$-based intermetallics which exhibit ferro- or antiferromagnetic phase transitions. These materials show sharp positive (EuAgMg and GdAuMg) and negative (EuAuMg and GdAgMg) peaks in the temperature dependence of the thermal expansion coefficient $\alpha$ which become smeared and/or displaced in an external magnetic field. Together with specific heat data we determine the initial pressure dependences of the transition temperatures at ambient pressure using the Ehrenfest or Clausius-Clapeyron relation. We find large pressure dependences indicating strong spin-phonon coupling, in particular for GdAgMg and EuAuMg where a quantum phase transition might be reached at moderate pressures of a few GPa.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Matrilineal Fertility Inheritance Detected in Hunter–Gatherer Populations Using the Imbalance of Gene Genealogies

Fertility inheritance, a phenomenon in which an individual's number of offspring is positively correlated with his or her number of siblings, is a cultural process that can have a strong impact on genetic diversity. Until now, fertility inheritance has been detected primarily using genealogical databases. In this study, we develop a new method to infer fertility inheritance from genetic data in human populations. The method is based on the reconstruction of the gene genealogy of a sample of sequences from a given population and on the computation of the degree of imbalance in this genealogy. We show indeed that this level of imbalance increases with the level of fertility inheritance, and that other phenomena such as hidden population structure are unlikely to generate a signal of imbalance in the genealogy that would be confounded with fertility inheritance. By applying our method to mtDNA samples from 37 human populations, we show that matrilineal fertility inheritance is more frequent in hunter–gatherer populations than in food-producer populations. One possible explanation for this result is that in hunter–gatherer populations, individuals belonging to large kin networks may benefit from stronger social support and may be more likely to have a large number of offspring

Long-lived Magnetic-Tension-Driven Modes in a Molecular Cloud

We calculate and analyze the longevity of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) wave modes that occur in the plane of a magnetic thin sheet. Initial turbulent conditions applied to a magnetically subcritical cloud are shown to lead to relatively rapid energy decay if ambipolar diffusion is introduced at a level corresponding to partial ionization primarily by cosmic rays. However, in the flux-freezing limit, as may be applicable to photoionized molecular cloud envelopes, the turbulence persists at "nonlinear" levels in comparison with the isothermal sound speed \cs, with one-dimensional rms material motions in the range of \approx 2\,\cs -5\,\cs for cloud sizes in the range of \approx 2\,\pc - 16\,\pc. These fluctuations persist indefinitely, maintaining a significant portion of the initial turbulent kinetic energy. We find the analytic explanation for these persistent fluctuations. They are magnetic-tension-driven modes associated with the interaction of the sheet with the external magnetic field. The phase speed of such modes is quite large, allowing residual motions to persist without dissipation in the flux-freezing limit, even as they are nonlinear with respect to the sound speed. We speculate that long-lived large-scale MHD modes such as these may provide the key to understanding observed supersonic motions in molecular clouds.Comment: Accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, 6 pages, 5 figures. Animations and a 3D pdf file are available at http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~basu/pb.ht

Sow body condition at weaning and reproduction performance in organic piglet production

The objective was to investigate the variation in backfat at weaning and its relations to reproduction results in organic sow herds in Denmark. The study included eight herds and 573 sows. The average backfat at weaning mean�13 mm; SD�4.2 mm) ranging from 10.5 to 17.3 mm among herds shows that it is possible to avoid poor body condition at weaning even with a lactation length of seven weeks or more. No main effect of backfat at weaning on reproduction performance was found, but the probability of a successful reproduction after weaning tended to decrease with decreasing backfat for first parity sows, whereas the opposite was the case for multiparous sows

Does External Pressure Explain Recent Results for Molecular Clouds?

The recent paper by Heyer et al (2009) indicates that observations of size, linewidth and column density of interstellar clouds do not agree with simple virial equilibrium (VE) as a balance between gravitational and kinetic energies in the sense that the clouds either have too much kinetic energy or too little mass to be bound. This may be explained by violation of VE as suggested by Dobbs et al 2011, by observational underestimation of the masses as suggested by Heyer et al 2009, or by an external pressure acting as an additional confining force as suggested earlier by Heyer et al 2004. The data of Heyer et al. 2009 cannot be explained with a single value for the external pressure, but if different clouds in the sample have different external pressures in the range of Pe/k = E4 to E7 cm-3 K, then most of the clouds could be in pressure virial equilibrium (PVE). In this paper we discuss two consequences of the external pressure. First, we show that the observational data are consistent with the hypothesis (Chie\'ze 1987) that most clouds are at a critical mass for dynamical stability determined solely by the pressure. Above this mass a cloud is unstable to gravitational collapse or fragmentation. Second, we show that the external pressure modifies the well-known size-linewidth relationship first proposed by Larson (1981) so that the proportionality is no longer constant but depends on the external pressure.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

iSTAR first light: Characterizing astronomy education research dissertations in the iSTAR database

There is widespread interest among discipline-based science education researchers to situate their research in the existing scholarly literature base. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to conducting a thorough literature review are unduly hindered in astronomy education research as the venues in which scholarship is reported are fragmented and widely dispersed across journals of varying disciplines. The international STudies of Astronomy education Research (iSTAR) online repository is the result of a concerted international community effort to collect and categorize existing research from peer-reviewed journal articles, dissertations/theses, and grey literature. In a “first light” survey of over 300 U.S. dissertations, we find: (i) work in AER dates back to 1923; (ii) the number of extant dissertations is far greater than anticipated; (iii) research methods definitions have evolved; and (iv) most work has studied participants’ broad knowledge rather than specific learning targets. The surprisingly wide breadth of rarely cited research motivates us to collect more AER from across international and cross-disciplinary sources