She is Clothed with Strength and Dignity; She can Laugh at the Days to Come!

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda. See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they\u27re going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person? Well, they\u27re a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you. You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you\u27ll find that they\u27re a person just like you. With thoughts and dreams and all of that. That\u27s why I know her better now. You know. And when you see that your dream is deferred or it\u27s just not going to come to fruition, how… that must feel? How stripped you must feel? How disappointing and depressing that must be. You know… But my mother went from being on social service to being a dietary aide up at Teresian House and learning how to read. People may think, you know, that\u27s nothing, but that was everything to her, for her to be able to confess that to me– that she didn’t know how to read. Even though I\u27ve known about it for years. Who am I without my mother? Who is my mother absent from me

A Biomythography of Mommy

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Resonant control of spin dynamics in ultracold quantum gases by microwave dressing

We study experimentally interaction-driven spin oscillations in optical lattices in the presence of an off-resonant microwave field. We show that the energy shift induced by this microwave field can be used to control the spin oscillations by tuning the system either into resonance to achieve near-unity contrast or far away from resonance to suppress the oscillations. Finally, we propose a scheme based on this technique to create a flat sample with either singly- or doubly-occupied sites, starting from an inhomogeneous Mott insulator, where singly- and doubly-occupied sites coexist.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

A rare case of urethral triplication in association with tethered cord and vertebral anomalies

In this manuscript, we describe the case of a 5-year-old boy with Y triplication of the urethra in association with fatty filum terminale, tethered cord and vertebral anomalies. Unlike a Y duplication in which the penile meatus is hypoplastic, a Y triplication can have a penile meatus of adequate calibre, which can be used as a functional conduit. Most patients with urethral triplication have been found to have associated malformations. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of urethral triplication seen in association with fatty filum terminale, tethered cord and vertebral anomalies.Keywords: rectus flap, tethered cord, urethral triplication, vertebral anomal

Identification of a group of nontuberculous mycobacteria isolated from the South Indian BCG trial area by HPLC

Twenty-five isolates of nontuberculous mycobacteria isolated from the South Indian BCG trial area were analysed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for mycolic acid pattern. The chromatograms differentiated the isolates into four species, namely M. terrae complex, M. intracellulare, M. parafortuitum and M. fortuitum. Three strains were unidentified, one of which did not show any mycolic acid peaks. All isolates had been identified as M. diernhoferi by biochemical methods in a previous study. Nineteen of the isolates were analysed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for the presence of tuberculostearic acid, 2-eicosanol and mycolic acid cleavage products, and were classified as nonchromogens or rapidly growing mycobacteria. The results show that HPLC can discriminate the described mycobacterial species better than biochemical methods and GC-MS

Audio Compression using a Modified Vector Quantization algorithm for Mastering Applications

Audio data compression is used to reduce the transmission bandwidth and storage requirements of audio data. It is the second stage in the audio mastering process with audio equalization being the first stage. Compression algorithms such as BSAC, MP3 and AAC are used as standards in this paper. The challenge faced in audio compression is compressing the signal at low bit rates. The previous algorithms which work well at low bit rates cannot be dominant at higher bit rates and vice-versa. This paper proposes an altered form of vector quantization algorithm which produces a scalable bit stream which has a number of fine layers of audio fidelity. This modified form of the vector quantization algorithm is used to generate a perceptually audio coder which is scalable and uses the quantization and encoding stages which are responsible for the psychoacoustic and arithmetical terminations that are actually detached as practically all the data detached during the prediction phases at the encoder side is supplemented towards the audio signal at decoder stage. Therefore, clearly the quantization phase which is modified to produce a bit stream which is scalable. This modified algorithm works well at both lower and higher bit rates. Subjective evaluations were done by audio professionals using the MUSHRA test and the mean normalized scores at various bit rates was noted and compared with the previous algorithms

A Comprehensive Analysis of the X-15 Flight 3-65 Accident

The November 15, 1967, loss of X-15 Flight 3-65-97 (hereafter referred to as Flight 3-65) was a unique incident in that it was the first and only aerospace flight accident involving loss of crew on a vehicle with an adaptive flight control system (AFCS). In addition, Flight 3-65 remains the only incidence of a single-pilot departure from controlled flight of a manned entry vehicle in a hypersonic flight regime. To mitigate risk to emerging aerospace systems, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) proposed a comprehensive review of this accident. The goal of the assessment was to resolve lingering questions regarding the failure modes of the aircraft systems (including the AFCS) and thoroughly analyze the interactions among the human agents and autonomous systems that contributed to the loss of the pilot and aircraft. This document contains the outcome of the accident review