Tailoring Accelerating Beams in Phase Space

An appropriate design of wavefront will enable light fields propagating along arbitrary trajectories thus forming accelerating beams in free space. Previous ways of designing such accelerating beams mainly rely on caustic methods, which start from diffraction integrals and only deal with two-dimensional fields. Here we introduce a new perspective to construct accelerating beams in phase space by designing the corresponding Wigner distribution function (WDF). We find such a WDF-based method is capable of providing both the initial field distribution and the angular spectrum in need by projecting the WDF into the real space and the Fourier space respectively. Moreover, this approach applies to the construction of both two- and three-dimensional fields, greatly generalizing previous caustic methods. It may therefore open up a new route to construct highly-tailored accelerating beams and facilitate applications ranging from particle manipulation and trapping to optical routing as well as material processing.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Fully integrated microsystem for bacterial genotyping

Methods for bacterial detection and identification has garnered renewed interest in recent years due to the infections they may cause and the antimicrobial resistances they can develop, the potential for bioterrorism threats and possible contamination of food/water supplies. Therefore, the rapid, specific and accurate detection of pathogens is crucial for the prevention of pathogen-related disease outbreaks and facilitating disease management as well as the containment of suspected contaminated food and/or water supplies. In this dissertation an integrated modular-based microfluidic system composed of a fluidic cartridge and a control instrument has been developed for bacterial pathogen detection. The integrated system can directly carry out the entire molecular processing pipeline in a single disposable fluidic cartridge and can detect sequence variations in selected genes to allow for the identification of the bacterial species and even its strain. The unique aspect of this fluidic cartridge is its modular format with a task-specific module interconnected to a fluidic motherboard to permit the selection of a material appropriate for the given processing step(s). In addition, to minimize the amount of finishing steps for assembling the fluidic cartridge, many of the functional components were produced during the polymer molding step used to create the fluidic network. The operation of the fluidic cartridge was provided by electronic, mechanical, optical and hydraulic controls located off-chip and assembled into a small footprint instrument. The fluidic cartridge was capable of performing cell lysis, solidphase extraction of genomic DNA from the whole cell lysate, continuous flow PCR amplification of specific gene fragments, continuous flow ligase detection reaction to discriminate sequence variations and universal DNA array readout, which consisted of DNA probes patterned onto a planar polymer waveguide for evanescent excitation. The performance of the fluidic system was demonstrated through its successful application to the genetic detection of bacterial pathogens, such as Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and multi-drug resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which are major threats for global heath. The modular system, which could successfully identify several strains of bacteria in \u3c40 min with minimal human intervention and also perform strain identification, represents a significant contribution to pathogen detection

Does unemployment have asymmetric effects on suicide rates? Evidence from the United States: 1928–2013

This study applied the recently developed asymmetric causality test and asymmetric generalised impulse-response method to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between unemployment and suicide rates in the U.S. over the period of 1928–2013. The results suggest that there exist asymmetric effects of unemployment on suicide rates. An economic recession (in terms of an increase in unemployment rate) is more likely to increase the suicide rate among an old age group (55–64 years old) than among other age groups, while an economic expansion (in terms of a decrease in unemployment rate) is more likely to reduce the suicide rate of young (15–24 and 25–34 years old) and middle age groups (35–44 and 45– 54 years old) than their counterpart. Therefore, policy implications generated from our results include the following: that intervention to prevent suicidal behaviour should be directed more towards the older age group during economic recession and that we may expect that an economic expansion may not result in a great reduction of suicide rates for the old age (55–64 years) group

Foreign Is Not Unfamiliar. A Translation Impact Study Involving Taiwan Subjects

The research discussed in this paper is the last of a trilogy investigating the impact of foreignized and domesticated translations on sampled readers. The two precursors had been conducted in two Chinese Mainland cities (Beijing and Guangzhou) and this last one was conducted in the Taiwanese city of Douliou. Therefore, comparisons can be made with the two precursors in the discussion of the research procedure and findings of the Taiwan project. The paper begins with a brief introduction of the background in which the Taiwan project was conceived and a brief profile of the subjects sampled for the project. Then there is a description of the research design, including the hypotheses and field work methodology. Four hypotheses were tested: a) the subjects would have distinguishable ideas about the two renditions; b) they would have a more intense feeling of exoticism when reading the foreignized rendition; c) their degree of sensing the rendition to be exotic or not would be correlated with their other socio-linguistic perceptions of that text; d) the findings of the present investigation would corroborate those obtained from the two precursors. The description of the research design is followed by a presentation of the data analysis conducted for the project together with a statement of the conventions adopted for reading the statistics. Based on the data analysis, interpretations are made in relation to the hypotheses.Le présent article fait état des travaux issus du troisième volet d’une recherche portant sur les effets de traductions « étrangéisées » ou naturalisées, qui ont été observés chez un échantillon de lecteurs. Les deux premiers volets de cette recherche avaient été menés dans deux villes de Chine continentale (Beijing et Guangzhou), tandis que le troisième volet a été réalisé à Douliou, à Taiwan. Il est ainsi possible de comparer les résultats à ceux qui ont été obtenus antérieurement. L’article introduit brièvement le contexte du projet mené à Taiwan ainsi qu’un bref profil des sujets participants. Le plan de l’étude est ensuite présenté, y compris les hypothèses et la méthodologie de collecte des données. Quatre hypothèses ont été testées : a) les sujets distinguent clairement les deux modes de traduction ; b) ils éprouvent davantage un sentiment d’exotisme à la lecture de la version étrangéisée ; c) leur opinion quant au caractère exotique ou non de la traduction est corrélée aux autres caractéristiques sociolinguistiques perçues pour le texte ; d) les résultats de la présente étude corroborent ceux qui ont été obtenus dans le cadre des deux premiers volets. La description du plan de l’étude est suivie de la présentation de l’analyse des données, laquelle est accompagnée des conventions nécessaires à l’interprétation des calculs statistiques. L’interprétation des résultats au regard des hypothèses avancées se fonde sur cette analyse