The Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Same Femme, Different Fate

Siblings Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti both lived during the Victorian era and wrote poetry which epitomizes the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Although they were related, these two poets were drastically different, and their differences are evident in their poetry. Dante Gabriel was infatuated with beautiful women and many of his poems express sexual desire, while Christina was intensely devoted to God and many of her poems provide moral instruction. However, these poets both make femme fatales the subjects of their poems “Body’s Beauty,” “The Card-Dealer,” “The World,” and “Babylon the Great.” This paper analyzes the different ways in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses the image of a dangerous, eroticized woman to symbolize the threat that the power of female beauty poses to a man\u27s life, while Christina Rossetti uses this image to symbolize the threat that worldly desires pose to a person\u27s eternal life

Nickel-cadium batteries for Apollo telescope mount

The operational testing and evaluation program is presented which was conducted on 20-ampere-hour nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) batteries for use on the Apollo telescope mount (ATM). The test program was initiated in 1967 to determine if the batteries could meet ATM mission requirements and to determine operating characteristics and methods. The ATM system power and charging power for the Ni-Cd secondary batteries is provided by a solar array during the 58-minute daylight portion of the orbit; during the 36-minute night portion of the orbit, the Ni-Cd secondary batteries will supply ATM system power. The test results reflect battery operating characteristics and parameters relative to simulated ATM orbital test conditions. Maximum voltage, charge requirements, capacity, temperature, and cyclic characteristics are presented

Worldsheet four-point functions in AdS(3)/CFT(2)

We calculate some extremal and non-extremal four-point functions on the sphere of certain chiral primary operators for strings on AdS_3 x S^3 x T^4. The computation is done for small values of the spacetime cross-ratio where global SL(2) and SU(2) descendants may be neglected in the intermediate channel. Ignoring also current algebra descendants, we find that in the non-extremal case the integrated worldsheet correlators factorize into spacetime three-point functions, which is non-trivial due to the integration over the moduli space. We then restrict to the extremal case and compare our results with the four-point correlators recently computed in the dual boundary theory. We also discuss a particular non-extremal correlator involving two chiral and two anti-chiral operators.Comment: 34 pages, subsection on crossing symmetry adde

The financial impact of ISO 9000 certification in the United States: an empirical analysis.

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000–3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market benefits, and improved financial performance. We employ event-study methods, matching each certified firm to a control group of one or more noncertified firms in the same industry with similar precertification size and/or return on assets. We find that firms’ decision to seek their first ISO 9000 certification was indeed followed by significant abnormal improvements in financial performance, though the exact timing and magnitude of this effect depend on the specification of the control group. Three years after certification, the certified firms do display strongly significant abnormal performance under all control-group specifications. The degree to which the precise results vary across control-group specifications indicates that event studies should always include extensive sensitivity analysis, for instance matching by size and performance separately and jointly, using both single firms and portfolios as controls.ISO 9000; Quality management; Standards; Financial; Empirical; Event study; Compustat;

Positivity of Lyapunov exponents for a continuous matrix-valued Anderson model

We study a continuous matrix-valued Anderson-type model. Both leading Lyapunov exponents of this model are proved to be positive and distinct for all ernergies in $(2,+\infty)$ except those in a discrete set, which leads to absence of absolutely continuous spectrum in $(2,+\infty)$. This result is an improvement of a previous result with Stolz. The methods, based upon a result by Breuillard and Gelander on dense subgroups in semisimple Lie groups, and a criterion by Goldsheid and Margulis, allow for singular Bernoulli distributions

RAINIER: A Simulation Tool for Distributions of Excited Nuclear States and Cascade Fluctuations

A new code has been developed named RAINIER that simulates the $\gamma$-ray decay of discrete and quasi-continuum nuclear levels for a user-specified range of energy, angular momentum, and parity including a realistic treatment of level spacing and transition width fluctuations. A similar program, DICEBOX, uses the Monte Carlo method to simulate level and width fluctuations but is restricted to $\gamma$-ray decay from no more than two initial states such as de-excitation following thermal neutron capture. On the other hand, modern reaction codes such as TALYS and EMPIRE populate a wide range of states in the residual nucleus prior to $\gamma$-ray decay, but do not go beyond the use of deterministic functions and therefore neglect cascade fluctuations. This combination of capabilities allows RAINIER to be used to determine quasi-continuum properties through comparison with experimental data. Several examples are given that demonstrate how cascade fluctuations influence experimental high-resolution $\gamma$-ray spectra from reactions that populate a wide range of initial states.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figures, Nuclear Instrumentation and Methods A, 201