Afterword: Narratives that Determine Writers and Social Justice Writing Center Work

Recently, I took over as my campus’ writing center director. I’ll be honest. I haven’t worked in a writing center since I was a graduate student at Oregon State (that was in the early 90s). I have a lot to learn. While I’ve helped assess and review the writing center at Fresno State and the one I’m currently directing, I haven’t read carefully in the literature for two decades. This summer has been one of rereading the literature on writing centers, and reading newer scholarship (to me). When I left writing centers and its scholarship in the early 90s, the discussions were about encouraging writers to take control of the consultation, to find ways to have them read and write on their drafts. It was about collaboration, agency-building, and student control. I remember working hard to find ways to be collaborators, not teachers, to have the writer read and mark on her draft. But we never talked about race or racism in writing center practices, never discussed the ways whiteness and whiteliness saturated writing centers and their practices. While in 2007 Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, and Boquet identify the limited ways that writing center training texts address race and racism, the discussions I find in the literature today are ones that at least approach such concerns. These more recent discussions are ones about multilingual writers, diversity in writing centers, and the complexities around working alongside the growing numbers of international writers in U.S. colleges and universities. Many of these questions were initiated by Nancy Grimm in 1999, with other voices contributing important ideas, such as Victor Villanueva’s on the new racism, Paul Kei Matsuda’s on “the myth of linguistic homogeneity,” Vershawn Ashanti Young’s on “codemeshing,” Ben Rafoth’s on engaging with multilingual writers in writing centers, and of course, Greenfield and Rowan’s important 2011 collection, Writing Centers and the New Racism. But as Geller et al. discuss, there still is much work to be done around identifying white privilege and, I’ll add, white language privilege, in writing center practices.University Writing Cente

Star Formation Rate from Dust Infrared Emission

We examine what types of galaxies the conversion formula from dust infrared (IR) luminosity into the star formation rate (SFR) derived by Kennicutt (1998) is applicable to. The ratio of the observed IR luminosity, $L_{\rm IR}$, to the intrinsic bolometric luminosity of the newly (\la 10 Myr) formed stars, $L_{\rm SF}$, of a galaxy can be determined by a mean dust opacity in the interstellar medium and the activity of the current star formation. We find that these parameters area being $0.5 \le L_{\rm IR}/L_{\rm SF} \le 2.0$ is very large, and many nearby normal and active star-forming galaxies really fall in this area. It results from offsetting two effects of a small dust opacity and a large cirrus contribution of normal galaxies relative to starburst galaxies on the conversion of the stellar emission into the dust IR emission. In conclusion, the SFR determined from the IR luminosity under the assumption of $L_{\rm IR}=L_{\rm SF}$ like Kennicutt (1998) is reliable within a factor of 2 for all galaxies except for dust rich but quiescent galaxies and extremely dust poor galaxies.Comment: Accepted by ApJL: 6 pages (emulateapj5), 2 figures (one is an extra figure not appeared in ApJL

One-way electromagnetic Tamm states in magnetophotonic structures

We study surface Tamm states in magnetophotonic structures magnetized in the Cotton–Mouton (Voigt) geometry. We demonstrate that the periodicity violation due to the structure truncation together with the violation of the time reversal symmetry due to the presence of magneto-optical materials gives rise to nonreciprocality of the surface modes. Dispersion of forward and backward modes splits and becomes magnetization dependent. This results in the magnetization-induced transitions between bulk and surface modes and unidirectional propagation of surface waves.We thank the Australian Research Council for a financial support and S. Fan for useful discussions. This work was supported in part by the Super Optical Information Memory Project from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan MEXT, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research S Grant No. 17106004 from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science JSPS

Charmless B→PV,VVB \to PV, VV decays and new physics effects in the mSUGRA model

By employing the QCD factorization approach, we calculate the new physics contributions to the branching radios of the two-body charmless $B \to PV$ and $B \to VV$ decays in the framework of the minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) model. we choose three typical sets of the mSUGRA input parameters in which the Wilson coefficient $C_{7\gamma}(m_b)$ can be either SM-like (the case A and C) or has a flipped-sign (the case B). We found numerically that (a) the SUSY contributions are always very small for both case A and C; (b) for those tree-dominated decays, the SUSY contributions in case B are also very small; (c) for those QCD penguin-dominated decay modes, the SUSY contributions in case B can be significant, and can provide an enhancement about $30$ to the branching ratios of $B \to K^*(\pi,\phi,\rho)$ and $K \phi$ decays, but a reduction about $30$ to $B\to K(\rho, \omega)$ decays; and (d) the large SUSY contributions in the case B may be masked by the large theoretical errors dominated by the uncertainty from our ignorance of calculating the annihilation contributions in the QCD factorization approach.Comment: 34 pages, 8 PS figures, this is the correct version

Mobilizing agro-biodiversity and social networks to cope with adverse effects of climate and social changes: experiences from Kitui, Kenya

Poster presented at 13th Congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology. Montpellier (France), 20-25 May 201

Two-Fluid MHD Simulations of Converging HI Flows in the Interstellar Medium. I: Methodology and Basic Results

We develop an unconditionally stable numerical method for solving the coupling between two fluids (frictional forces/heatings, ionization, and recombination), and investigate the dynamical condensation process of thermally unstable gas that is provided by the shock waves in a weakly ionized and magnetized interstellar medium by using two-dimensional two-fluid magnetohydrodynamical simulations. If we neglect the effect of magnetic field, it is known that condensation driven by thermal instability can generate high density clouds whose physical condition corresponds to molecular clouds (precursor of molecular clouds). In this paper, we study the effect of magnetic field on the evolution of supersonic converging HI flows and focus on the case in which the orientation of magnetic field to converging flows is orthogonal. We show that the magnetic pressure gradient parallel to the flows prevents the formation of high density and high column density clouds, but instead generates fragmented, filamentary HI clouds. With this restricted geometry, magnetic field drastically diminishes the opportunity of fast molecular cloud formation directly from the warm neutral medium, in contrast to the case without magnetic field.Comment: ApJ accepte

The escape fraction of ionizing photons from high redshift galaxies

The fraction of ionizing photons which escape their host galaxy and so are able to ionize hydrogen in the inter-galactic medium (IGM) is a critical parameter in studies of the reionization era and early galaxy formation. In this paper we combine observations of Lyman-alpha absorption towards high redshift quasars with the measured UV luminosity function of high redshift galaxies to constrain the escape fraction (f_esc) of ionizing photons from galaxies at z ~ 5.5-6. The observed Lyman-alpha transmission constrains the escape fraction to lie in the range f_esc ~ 10-25 % (at z ~ 5.5-6). Excluding halos with M< 10^10 M_sun (as might be expected if galaxy formation is suppressed due to the reionization of the IGM) implies a larger escape fraction of f_esc ~ 20-45 %. Using the numerical results to calibrate an analytic relation between the escape fraction and minimum galaxy halo mass we also extrapolate our results to a mass (M~10^8 M_sun) corresponding to the hydrogen cooling threshold. In this case we find f_esc ~ 5-10 %, consistent with observed estimates at lower redshift. We find that the escape fraction of high redshift galaxies must be greater than 5 % irrespepctive of galaxy mass. Based on these results we use a semi-analytic description to model the reionization history of the IGM, assuming ionizing sources with escape fractions suggested by our numerical simulations. We find that the IBG observed at z ~ 5.5-6 implies a sufficient number of ionizing photons to have reionized the Universe by z ~ 6. However, if the minimum mass for star-formation were greater than 10^9 M_sun, the IBG would be over-produced at redshifts less than z ~ 5. In summary, our results support a scenario in which the IGM was reionized by low mass galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Use of graphics in decision aids for telerobotic control: (Parts 5-8 of an 8-part MIT progress report)

Four separate projects recently completed or in progress at the MIT Man-Machine Systems Laboratory are summarized. They are: a decision aid for retrieving a tumbling satellite in space; kinematic control and graphic display of redundant teleoperators; real time terrain/object generation: a quad-tree approach; and two dimensional control for three dimensional obstacle avoidance

AR and MA representation of partial autocorrelation functions, with applications

We prove a representation of the partial autocorrelation function (PACF), or the Verblunsky coefficients, of a stationary process in terms of the AR and MA coefficients. We apply it to show the asymptotic behaviour of the PACF. We also propose a new definition of short and long memory in terms of the PACF.Comment: Published in Probability Theory and Related Field

Enhanced and continuous electrostatic carrier doping on the SrTiO3_{3} surface

Paraelectrical tuning of a charge carrier density as high as 10$^{13}$\,cm$^{-2}$ in the presence of a high electronic carrier mobility on the delicate surfaces of correlated oxides, is a key to the technological breakthrough of a field effect transistor (FET) utilising the metal-nonmetal transition. Here we introduce the Parylene-C/Ta$_{2}$O$_{5}$ hybrid gate insulator and fabricate FET devices on single-crystalline SrTiO$_{3}$, which has been regarded as a bedrock material for oxide electronics. The gate insulator accumulates up to $\sim10^{13}$cm$^{-2}$ carriers, while the field-effect mobility is kept at 10\,cm$^2$/Vs even at room temperature. Further to the exceptional performance of our devices, the enhanced compatibility of high carrier density and high mobility revealed the mechanism for the long standing puzzle of the distribution of electrostatically doped carriers on the surface of SrTiO$_{3}$. Namely, the formation and continuous evolution of field domains and current filaments.Comment: Supplementary Information: <http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130424/srep01721/extref/srep01721-s1.pdf