Juncos, Sparrows, and Crows in the Transnational Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

This essay explores Lim’s efforts to express and encourage inclusivity through the agency of her poetic imagination. As Lim renavigates the Pacific and other terrain and writes, she strives for a “utopian goal,” or to “voice authenticity as a signified.” Her poems advocate self-empowerment so that her nestlings can find their way in a world full of individuals of every race, creed, and gender. Lim shapes her poems to recognize the exhausting, long-term efforts a traveler or migrant must make as he or she wanders; a journey is not always finite, circular, or linear. To propel her inclusivity efforts, Lim often draws on imagery, not just of birds, but also of political movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere, natural disasters such as wildfires, or even a sunshine-filled Californian moment. She crafts her form to share her advocacy via haiku, alphabet, and prose poems. The intersections of her form, poetic imagination, and transnational crisscrossings reveal the painstaking ways in which a crosshatched identity develops and emerges over a lifetime. This article offers a bird’s eye view of some of Lim’s recent poems, mostly published after 2014, including her “Cassandra Days: Poems,” as well as works from Ars Poetica for the Day, Do You Live In?, and The Irreversible Sun, not to mention an unearthed and unpublished interview from 1985

Alfv\'enic instabilities driven by runaways in fusion plasmas

Runaway particles can be produced in plasmas with large electric fields. Here we address the possibility that such runaway ions and electrons excite Alfv\'enic instabilities. The magnetic perturbation induced by these modes can enhance the loss of runaways. This may have important implications for the runaway electron beam formation in tokamak disruptions.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Dissecting the Discourse of Social Licence to Operate

The term “social licence to operate”, or SLO, has increasingly featured in public discussion about commercial operations in the marine environment. As part of the Sustainable Seas National Challenge, we are studying how this term is being used in New Zealand and its implications for industry-community relations

Semiparametric inference in mixture models with predictive recursion marginal likelihood

Predictive recursion is an accurate and computationally efficient algorithm for nonparametric estimation of mixing densities in mixture models. In semiparametric mixture models, however, the algorithm fails to account for any uncertainty in the additional unknown structural parameter. As an alternative to existing profile likelihood methods, we treat predictive recursion as a filter approximation to fitting a fully Bayes model, whereby an approximate marginal likelihood of the structural parameter emerges and can be used for inference. We call this the predictive recursion marginal likelihood. Convergence properties of predictive recursion under model mis-specification also lead to an attractive construction of this new procedure. We show pointwise convergence of a normalized version of this marginal likelihood function. Simulations compare the performance of this new marginal likelihood approach that of existing profile likelihood methods as well as Dirichlet process mixtures in density estimation. Mixed-effects models and an empirical Bayes multiple testing application in time series analysis are also considered

Cost effective power amplifiers for pulsed NMR sensors

Sensors that measure magnetic resonance relaxation times are increasingly finding applications in areas such as food and drink authenticity and waste water treatment control. Modern permanent magnets are used to provide the static magnetic field in many commercial instruments and advances in electronics, such as field programmable gate arrays, have provided lower cost console electronics for generating and detecting the pulse sequence. One area that still remains prohibitively expensive for many sensor applications of pulsed NMR is the requirement for a high frequency power amplifier. With many permanent magnet sensors providing a magnetic field in the 0.25T to 0.5T range, a power amplifier that operates in the 10MHz to 20MHz rage is required. In this work we demonstrate that some low cost commercial amplifiers can be used, with minor modification, to operate as pulsed NMR power amplifiers. We demonstrate two amplifier systems, one medium power that can be constructed for less than Euro 100 and a second much high power system that produces comparable results to commercial pulse amplifiers that are an order of magnitude more expensive. Data is presented using both the commercial NMR MOUSE and a permanent magnet system used for monitoring the clog state of constructed wetlands

Regression-based variance reduction approach for strong approximation schemes

In this paper we present a novel approach towards variance reduction for discretised diffusion processes. The proposed approach involves specially constructed control variates and allows for a significant reduction in the variance for the terminal functionals. In this way the complexity order of the standard Monte Carlo algorithm ($\varepsilon^{-3}$) can be reduced down to $\varepsilon^{-2}\sqrt{\left|\log(\varepsilon)\right|}$ in case of the Euler scheme with $\varepsilon$ being the precision to be achieved. These theoretical results are illustrated by several numerical examples.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.0314

Canceling Quadratic Divergences in a Class of Two-Higgs-Doublet Models

The Newton-Wu conditions for the cancellation of quadratic divergences in a class of two-Higgs-doublet models are analyzed as to how they may be satisfied with a typical extension of the Standard Model of particle interactions.Comment: 5 pages, no figur