Charity schools in Northumberland and Durham, 1699-1810

Many charity schools providing free elementary education were founded in Northumberland and Durham especially in the early and later years of the eighteenth century. Motives of founders, mainly from the gentry, clergy and urban middling classes, varied. Many felt it a duty; some saw in the schools a defence of Protestantism; most had genuine humanitarian motives. School management was essentially local - by the trustees or subscribers. However up to mid-century the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge through its local correspondents acted as an advisory body. Main sources of schools' incomes included endowments, subscriptions and charity sermons. Misappropriation of funds and loss of endowments limited the movement's success. Urban schools usually flourished with the continuing interest and support of subscribers and often of corporations. The majority of rural parishes had schools but these were poorly attended, lacked adequate funds and, in the remoter areas, failed to attract suitable teachers. A few Nonconformist schools were founded and, despite legal disabilities, Catholic schools existed. Special schools were those of Trinity House Newcastle for mariners' apprentices, the Crowley schools for workers' children and the Bamburgh Castle schools which included the only boarding school. Religious education played a large part in the limited curriculum. Reading was taught to all, writing mainly to boys but arithmetic and other subjects were rare. Manual instruction was largely limited to girls. Schools often provided clothing and apprenticeship fees. Usually teachers were poorly qualified and their salaries varied greatly. To help retired masters or their dependants the Association of Protestant Schoolmasters was founded. Teachers' subscriptions were never rigidly demanded. After 1785 Sunday schools attempted to provide for increasing numbers of working children. Girls' schools of industry soon followed but had limited success . Monitorial schools appeared early in the nineteenth century and many existing charity schools adopted their method

The Aromatic Features in Very Faint Dwarf Galaxies

We present optical and mid-infrared photometry of a statistically complete sample of 29 very faint dwarf galaxies (M_r > -15 mag) selected from the SDSS spectroscopic sample and observed in the mid-infrared with Spitzer IRAC. This sample contains nearby (redshift z<0.005) galaxies three magnitudes fainter than previously studied samples. We compare our sample with other star-forming galaxies that have been observed with both IRAC and SDSS. We examine the relationship of the infrared color, sensitive to PAH abundance, with star-formation rates, gas-phase metallicities and radiation hardness, all estimated from optical emission lines. Consistent with studies of more luminous dwarfs, we find that the very faint dwarf galaxies show much weaker PAH emission than more luminous galaxies with similar specific star-formation rates. Unlike more luminous galaxies, we find that the very faint dwarf galaxies show no significant dependence at all of PAH emission on star-formation rate, metallicity, or radiation hardness, despite the fact that the sample spans a significant range in all of these quantities. When the very faint dwarfs in our sample are compared with more luminous (M_r ~ -18 mag) dwarfs, we find that PAH emission depends on metallicity and radiation hardness. These two parameters are correlated; we look at the PAH-metallicity relation at fixed radiation hardness and the PAH-hardness relation at fixed metallicity. This test shows that the PAH emission in dwarf galaxies depends most directly on metallicity.Comment: submitted to Ap

Deep Lenses of Circumpolar Water in the Argentine Basin

Three deep anticyclonic eddies of a species only reported once before [ Gordon and Greengrove, 1986 ] were intersected by hydrographic lines of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and South Atlantic Ventilation Experiment (SAVE) programs in the Argentine Basin. The vortices are centered near 3500 m depth at the interface between North Atlantic Deep Water and Bottom Water. They have ∼1500-m-thick cores containing Lower Circumpolar Deep Water and a dynamic influence that may span up to two thirds of the water column. As one eddy was observed just downstream of the western termination of the Falkland Escarpment, a destabilization of the deep boundary current by the sudden slope relaxation is suggested as a potential cause of eddy formation. Besides isopycnal interleaving at the eddy perimeters, strongly eroded core properties in the upper parts of the lenses, associated with low density ratios, hint at double diffusion at the top of the structures as another major decay mechanism. The presence of an eddy in the northern Argentine Basin shows the possibility for a northward drift of the vortices, in this basin at least. Deep events in recent current measurements from the Vema Channel are presented that raise the question of further equatorward motion to the Brazil Basin

Spatially Resolved PAH Emission Features in Nearby, Low Metallicity, Star-Forming Galaxies

Low-resolution, mid-infrared Spitzer/IRS spectral maps are presented for three nearby, low-metallicity dwarf galaxies (NGC 55, NGC 3109 and IC 5152) for the purpose of examining the spatial distribution and variation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission. The sample straddles a metallicity of 12+log(O/H)~8.0, a transition point below which PAH intensity empirically drops and the character of the interstellar medium changes. We derive quantitative radiances of PAH features and atomic lines on both global and spatially-resolved scales. The Spitzer spectra, combined with extensive ancillary data from the UV through the mid-infrared, allow us to examine changes in the physical environments and in PAH feature radiances down to a physical scale of 50 pc. We discuss correlations between various PAH emission feature and atomic line radiances. The (6.2 micron)/(11.3 micron), (7.7 micron)/(11.3 micron), (8.6 micron)/(11.3 micron), (7.7 micron)/(6.2 micron), and (8.6 micron)/(6.2 micron) PAH radiance ratios are found to be independent of position across all three galaxies, although the ratios do vary from galaxy to galaxy. As seen in other galaxies, we find no variation in the grain size distribution as a function of local radiation field strength. Absolute PAH feature intensities as measured by a ratio of PAH/(24 micron) radiances are seen to vary both positionally within a given galaxy, and from one galaxy to another when integrated over the full observed extent of each system. We examine direct comparisons of CC mode PAH ratios (7.7 micron)/(6.2 micron) and (8.6 micron)/(6.2 micron) to the mixed (CC/CH) mode PAH ratio (7.7 micron)/(11.3 micron). We find little variation in either mode, and no difference in trends between modes. While the local conditions change markedly over the observed regions of these galaxies, the properties of PAH emission show a remarkable degree of uniformity.Comment: Astrophysical Journal, in pres

A Survey of z~6 Quasars in the SDSS Deep Stripe. II. Discovery of Six Quasars at z_{AB}>21

We present the discovery of six new quasars at z~6 selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) southern survey, a deep imaging survey obtained by repeatedly scanning a stripe along the celestial equator. The six quasars are about two magnitudes fainter than the luminous z~6 quasars found in the SDSS main survey and one magnitude fainter than the quasars reported in Paper I (Jiang et al. 2008). Four of them comprise a complete flux-limited sample at 21<z_AB<21.8 over an effective area of 195 deg^2. The other two quasars are fainter than z_AB=22 and are not part of the complete sample. The quasar luminosity function at z~6 is well described as a single power law \Phi(L_{1450}) \propto L_{1450}^{\beta} over the luminosity range -28<M_{1450}<-25. The best-fitting slope \beta varies from -2.6 to -3.1, depending on the quasar samples used, with a statistical error of 0.3-0.4. About 40% of the quasars discovered in the SDSS southern survey have very narrow Lya emission lines, which may indicate small black hole masses and high Eddington luminosity ratios, and therefore short black hole growth time scales for these faint quasars at early epochs.Comment: Accepted for publication in A

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons as Star Formation Rate Indicators

As images and spectra from ISO and Spitzer have provided increasingly higher-fidelity representations of the mid-infrared (MIR) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) emission from galaxies and galactic and extra-galactic regions, more systematic efforts have been devoted to establishing whether the emission in this wavelength region can be used as a reliable star formation rate indicator. This has also been in response to the extensive surveys of distant galaxies that have accumulated during the cold phase of the Spitzer Space Telescope. Results so far have been somewhat contradictory, reflecting the complex nature of the PAHs and of the mid-infrared-emitting dust in general. The two main problems faced when attempting to define a star formation rate indicator based on the mid-infrared emission from galaxies and star-forming regions are: (1) the strong dependence of the PAH emission on metallicity; (2) the heating of the PAH dust by evolved stellar populations unrelated to the current star formation. I review the status of the field, with a specific focus on these two problems, and will try to quantify the impact of each on calibrations of the mid-infrared emission as a star formation rate indicator.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure; invited review at the conference `PAHs and the Universe' (Toulouse, France, June 1-4, 2010). Proceedings eds. C. Joblin and A.G.G.M. Tielens (EAS Publication Series