Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare

This essay considers the use of Shakespeare as marker of authenticity and as a therapeutic space for performers and audiences across a number of genres, from professional actors in training literature to prison inmates in radio and film documentaries. It argues that in the wake of recent academic trends—the critique of Shakespeare as an author figure; the privileging of the text as a source of multiple, potentially conflicting readings—Shakespeare\u27s function as cultural capital has shifted sites, from Shakespeare to the playtexts themselves

Studies of Mixing Processes in Gases and Effects on Combustion and Stability

Three physical models of laminar mixing of initially separated gases are studied. Two models study the effects of the mixing dynamics on the chemical reactions between the gases. The third model studies the structure and stability of a laminar mixing layer in a binary gas. The three models are: 1. Two ideal and incompressible gases representing fuel and oxidizer are initially at rest and separated across an infinite linear interface in a two dimensional system. Combustion, expected as the gases mix, will lead to a rapid rise in temperature in a localized area, i.e. ignition. The mixing of the gases is enhanced by two counter-rotating vortices with centers located on the initial interface. The ignition process is studied by an asymptotic analysis. Ignition times for the double vortex lay between the no vortex and the single vortex times. As the distance between the two counter-rotating vortices gets smaller, ignition times approach the no vortex case, for increasing distance the ignition times approach the single vortex case. 2. Laminar mixing of compressible gases representing two reduced chemical systems is studied. The gases are initially separated into two semi-infinite planes and have different freestream flow velocities. Combustion is followed through ignition to the post-ignition steady flame. The ignition distance is an inverse logarithmic function of the initially required loading of a non-fuel, non-oxidizer radical. The post-ignition flame temperature is not effected by the initial radical concentration. 3. Laminar compressible non-reacting mixing of two real gases of different free-stream temperatures and flow velocities is studied. Realistic values of transport properties are obtained from various tables or calculated from theory. The transport properties are dynamically calculated as functions of the changing temperature and gas concentrations across the mixing layer. A steady state mixed solution is found. Items of interest are the stability characteristics, the profiles of temperature and gas concentrations and the variations of the Prandtl and Lewis numbers. The Lewis number and Prandtl numbers may vary significantly through the mixing layer. Neutral phase speeds and growth rates for spatial stability are also shown to be effected by the molecular weights and physical properties

Habitat Evaluation Procedures (HEP) Report; Precious Lands Wildlife Management Area, Technical Report 2000-2003.

The Nez Perce Tribe (NPT) currently manages a 15,325 acre parcel of land known as the Precious Lands Wildlife Management Area that was purchased as mitigation for losses incurred by construction of the four lower Snake River dams. The Management Area is located in northern Wallowa County, Oregon and southern Asotin County, Washington (Figure 1). It is divided into three management parcels--the Buford parcel is located on Buford Creek and straddles the WA-OR state line, and the Tamarack and Basin parcels are contiguous to each other and located between the Joseph Creek and Cottonwood Creek drainages in Wallowa County, OR. The project was developed under the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act of 1980 (P.L. 96-501), with funding from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The acreage protected under this contract will be credited to BPA as habitat permanently dedicated to wildlife and wildlife mitigation. A modeling strategy known as Habitat Evaluation Procedure (HEP) was developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and adopted by BPA as a habitat equivalency accounting system. Nine wildlife species models were used to evaluate distinct cover type features and provide a measure of habitat quality. Models measure a wide range of life requisite variables for each species and monitor overall trends in vegetation community health and diversity. One product of HEP is an evaluation of habitat quality expressed in Habitat Units (HUs). This HU accounting system is used to determine the amount of credit BPA receives for mitigation lands. After construction of the four lower Snake River dams, a HEP loss assessment was conducted to determine how many Habitat Units were inundated behind the dams. Twelve target species were used in that evaluation: Canada goose, mallard, river otter, downy woodpecker, song sparrow, yellow warbler, marsh wren, western meadowlark, chukar, ring-necked pheasant, California quail, and mule deer. The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers and the Washington Department of fish and Wildlife subsequently purchased numerous properties to mitigate for the identified Snake River losses. These projects, however, were not sufficient to mitigate for all the HU's lost. The Northwest Power Planning Council amended the remaining 26,774 HU's into their 1994-1995 Fish and Wildlife Program as being unmitigated (NPPC 2000), which allowed the Nez Perce Tribe to contract with BPA to provide HU's through the Precious Lands Project. The Precious Lands project contains a different composition of cover types than those assessed during the lower Snake loss assessment. For example, no mallard or Canada goose habitat exists on Precious Lands but the area does contain conifer forest, which was not present on the area inundated by dam construction. These cover type differences have resulted in a slightly different suite of species for the current HEP assessment. Target species for Precious Lands are downy woodpecker, yellow warbler, song sparrow, California Quail, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse (brood rearing), west em meadowlark, beaver, and black-capped chickadee. This list is a reflection of the available cover types and the management objectives of the Nez Perce Tribe. For example, chukar was not used in the present assessment because it is an introduced Eurasian game bird that does not provide an accurate representation of the ecological health of the native grasslands it was supposed to represent. Initial model runs using the chukar confirmed this suspicion so the brood-rearing section of the sharp-tailed grouse model was used instead. Additionally, the beaver model was used in place of the river otter model because the otter model used in the loss assessment was not a published model, was overly simplistic, and did not provide an accurate assessment of riparian condition. The beaver model, however, provides a detailed evaluation of overstory class structure that the NPT felt was a good compliment to the yellow warbler and song sparrow models that evaluated understory shrub layers. Overall, such substitutions should result in a more accurate evaluation of the ecological conditions on Precious Lands, and provide better information for decision making. A baseline HEP analysis was initiated on the Precious Lands in 2000, and data collection continued throughout the 2001 and 2002 field seasons. In the future, HEP analysis will be used to evaluate habitat changes resulting from management activities. Repeat surveys will be useful in assessing long-term trends in plant community health, weed encroachment, wildlife limiting factors, habitat degradation, and establishing desired future condition guidelines for the management program

Respect for Form as Substance in U.S. Taxation of International Trusts

...we might decide that the attribution rule should not be applied so broadly, or so automatically. But how would such a system be devised by regulation? The attribution rule could be applied to trusts in which the discretion of the trustee is very limited and the beneficial interests so clearly ascertainable that the trust is, for all practicable purposes, transparent. That is, however, only a small universe of cases. This leads to the further conclusion that the attribution rule has to be applied based on a facts and circumstances determination of the beneficial interest in each case. Yet that seems the antithesis of an attribution rule, and the factual inquiry would necessarily require a thorough examination of governing trust law and corporate law in almost every case. That process would be difficult enough if it were Delaware law at issue. Applying non-U.S. trust law and non-U.S. corporate law would be much more cumbersome. Assessing the element of tax avoidance motivation in the structure in order to test the bona fide nature of the trustee\u27s role would further add to the burden of the inquiry. The search for a satisfactory system seems fruitless

The Stability of Compressible Mixing Layers in Binary Gases

We present the results of a study of the inviscid two-dimensional spatial stability of a parallel compressible mixing layer in a binary gas. The parameters of this study are the Mach number of the fast stream, the ratio of the velocity of the slow stream to that of the fast stream, the ratio of the temperatures, the composition of the gas in the slow stream and in the fast stream, and the frequency of the disturbance wave. The ratio of the molecular weight of the slow stream to that of the fast stream is found to be an important quantity and is used as an independent variable in presenting the stability characteristics of the flow. It is shown that differing molecular weights have a significant effect on the neutral-mode phase speeds, the phase speeds of the unstable modes, the maximum growth rates, and the unstable frequency range of the disturbances. The molecular weight ratio is a reasonable predictor of the stability trends. We have further demonstrated that the normalized growth rate as a function of the convective Mach number is relatively insensitive (≈25%) to changes in the composition of the mixing layer. Thus, the normalized growth rate is a key element when considering the stability of compressible mixing layers, since once the basic stability characteristics for a particular combination of gases is known at zero Mach number, the decrease in growth rates due to compressibility effects at the larger convective Mach numbers is somewhat predictable. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics

The stability of compressible mixing layers in binary gases

We present the results of a study of the inviscid two-dimensional spatial stability of a parallel compressible mixing layer in a binary gas. The parameters of this study are the Mach number of the fast stream, the ratio of the velocity of the slow stream to that of the fast stream, the ratio of the temperatures, the composition of the gas in the slow stream and in the fast stream, and the frequency of the disturbance wave. The ratio of the molecular weight of the slow stream to that of the fast stream is found to be an important quantity and is used as an independent variable in presenting the stability characteristics of the flow. It is shown that differing molecular weights have a significant effect on the neutral-mode phase speeds, the phase speeds of the unstable modes, the maximum growth rates and the unstable frequency range of the disturbances. The molecular weight ratio is a reasonable predictor of the stability trends. We have further demonstrated that the normalized growth rate as a function of the convective Mach number is relatively insensitive (Approx. 25%) to changes in the composition of the mixing layer. Thus, the normalized growth rate is a key element when considering the stability of compressible mixing layers, since once the basic stability characteristics for a particular combination of gases is known at zero Mach number, the decrease in growth rates due to compressibility effects at the larger convective Mach numbers is somewhat predictable

The structure of variable property, compressible mixing layers in binary gas mixtures

We present the results of a study of the structure of a parallel compressible mixing layer in a binary mixture of gases. The gases included in this study are hydrogen (H2), helium (He), nitrogen (N2), oxygen (02), neon (Ne) and argon (Ar). Profiles of the variation of the Lewis and Prandtl numbers across the mixing layer for all thirty combinations of gases are given. It is shown that the Lewis number can vary by as much as a factor of eight and the Prandtl number by a factor of two across the mixing layer. Thus assuming constant values for the Lewis and Prandtl numbers of a binary gas mixture in the shear layer, as is done in many theoretical studies, is a poor approximation. We also present profiles of the velocity, mass fraction, temperature and density for representative binary gas mixtures at zero and supersonic Mach numbers. We show that the shape of these profiles is strongly dependent on which gases are in the mixture as well as on whether the denser gas is in the fast stream or the slow stream

Modelling of Tirapazamine effects on solid tumour morphology

Bioreductive drugs are in clinical practice to exploit the resistance from tumour microenvironments especially in the hypoxic region of tumour. We pre-sented a tumour treatment model to capture the pharmacology of one of the most prominent bioreductive drugs, Tirapazamine (TPZ) which is in clinical trials I and II. We calculated solid tumour mass in our previous work and then integrated that model with TPZ infusion. We calculated TPZ cytotoxicity, concentration, penetra-tion with increasing distance from blood vessel and offered resistance from micro-environments for drug penetration inside the tumour while considering each cell as an individual entity. The impact of these factors on tumour morphology is also showed to see the drug behaviour inside animals/humans tumours. We maintained the heterogeneity factors in presented model as observed in real tumour mass es-pecially in terms of cells proliferation, cell movement, extracellular matrix (ECM) interaction, and the gradients of partial oxygen pressure (pO2) inside tumour cells during the whole growth and treatment activity. The results suggest that TPZ high concentration in combination with chemotherapy should be given to get maximum abnormal cell killing. This model can be a good choice for oncologists and re-searchers to explore more about TPZ action inside solid tumour

Density-Dependence as a Size-Independent Regulatory Mechanism

The growth function of populations is central in biomathematics. The main dogma is the existence of density dependence mechanisms, which can be modelled with distinct functional forms that depend on the size of the population. One important class of regulatory functions is the $\theta$-logistic, which generalises the logistic equation. Using this model as a motivation, this paper introduces a simple dynamical reformulation that generalises many growth functions. The reformulation consists of two equations, one for population size, and one for the growth rate. Furthermore, the model shows that although population is density-dependent, the dynamics of the growth rate does not depend either on population size, nor on the carrying capacity. Actually, the growth equation is uncoupled from the population size equation, and the model has only two parameters, a Malthusian parameter $\rho$ and a competition coefficient $\theta$. Distinct sign combinations of these parameters reproduce not only the family of $\theta$-logistics, but also the van Bertalanffy, Gompertz and Potential Growth equations, among other possibilities. It is also shown that, except for two critical points, there is a general size-scaling relation that includes those appearing in the most important allometric theories, including the recently proposed Metabolic Theory of Ecology. With this model, several issues of general interest are discussed such as the growth of animal population, extinctions, cell growth and allometry, and the effect of environment over a population.Comment: 41 Pages, 5 figures Submitted to JT

Clinical and molecular characterization of a novel PLIN1 frameshift mutation identified in patients with familial partial lipodystrophy.

Perilipin 1 is a lipid droplet coat protein predominantly expressed in adipocytes, where it inhibits basal and facilitates stimulated lipolysis. Loss-of-function mutations in the PLIN1 gene were recently reported in patients with a novel subtype of familial partial lipodystrophy, designated as FPLD4. We now report the identification and characterization of a novel heterozygous frameshift mutation affecting the carboxy-terminus (439fs) of perilipin 1 in two unrelated families. The mutation cosegregated with a similar phenotype including partial lipodystrophy, severe insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, extreme hypertriglyceridemia, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in both families. Poor metabolic control despite maximal medical therapy prompted two patients to undergo bariatric surgery, with remarkably beneficial consequences. Functional studies indicated that expression levels of the mutant protein were lower than wild-type protein, and in stably transfected preadipocytes the mutant protein was associated with smaller lipid droplets. Interestingly, unlike the previously reported 398 and 404 frameshift mutants, this variant binds and stabilizes ABHD5 expression but still fails to inhibit basal lipolysis as effectively as wild-type perilipin 1. Collectively, these findings highlight the physiological need for exquisite regulation of neutral lipid storage within adipocyte lipid droplets, as well as the possible metabolic benefits of bariatric surgery in this serious disease.Wellcome TrustThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Diabetes Association via http://dx.doi.org/10.2337/db14-010