To Be Everything: Sylvia Plath and the Problem That Has No Name

This thesis explores, in depth, how the poetry of Sylvia Plath operates as an expression of female discontent in the decade directly preceding the sexual revolution. This analysis incorporates both sociohistorical context and theory introduced in Betty Friedan’s 1963 work The Feminine Mystique. In particular, Plath’s work is put in conversation with Friedan’s notion of the “problem that has no name,” an all-consuming sense of malaise and dissatisfaction that plagued American women in the postwar era. This notion is furthered by close-readings of poems written throughout various stages of Plath’s career (namely “Spinster,” “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Elm,” “Ariel,” “Daddy,” and “The Applicant”), works that speak to binaries enforced by cultural convention, the dangers of the domestic model, and the inescapability of mid-century femininity. In advancing this argument, biographical readings of Plath’s work will be rejected, bolstering the notion that her work stands alone as culture criticism. Though this thesis certainly incorporates contemporary and modern cultural criticism as well as historical context for the concept of feminine containment and restriction, it is most focused on analyzing Plath’s work as a poet, including assessing her praxis, aesthetic, and narrative choices. This argument concludes in asserting that the six poems considered, as well as the rest of Plath’s oeuvre, directly anticipate second-wave feminism and the women’s rights movements of the sixties

Approximate Inference for Constructing Astronomical Catalogs from Images

We present a new, fully generative model for constructing astronomical catalogs from optical telescope image sets. Each pixel intensity is treated as a random variable with parameters that depend on the latent properties of stars and galaxies. These latent properties are themselves modeled as random. We compare two procedures for posterior inference. One procedure is based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) while the other is based on variational inference (VI). The MCMC procedure excels at quantifying uncertainty, while the VI procedure is 1000 times faster. On a supercomputer, the VI procedure efficiently uses 665,000 CPU cores to construct an astronomical catalog from 50 terabytes of images in 14.6 minutes, demonstrating the scaling characteristics necessary to construct catalogs for upcoming astronomical surveys.Comment: accepted to the Annals of Applied Statistic

Typical tropospheric aerosol backscatter profiles for Southern Ireland: The Cork Raman lidar

A Raman lidar instrument (UCLID) was established at the University College Cork as part of the European lidar network EARLINET. Raman backscatter coefficients, extinction coefficients and lidar ratios were measured within the period 28/08/2010 and 24/04/2011. Typical atmospheric scenarios over Southern Ireland in terms of the aerosol load in the planetary boundary layer are outlined. The lidar ratios found are typical for marine atmospheric condition (lidar ratio ca. 20–25 sr). The height of the planetary boundary layer is below 1000 m and therefore low in comparison to heights found at other lidar sites in Europe. On the 21st of April a large aerosol load was detected, which was assigned to a Saharan dust event based on HYSPLIT trajectories and DREAM forecasts along with the lidar ratio (70 sr) for the period concerned. The dust was found at two heights, pure dust at 2.5 km and dust mixing with pollution from 0.7 to 1.8 km with a lidar ratio of 40–50 sr

Rhetoric and Realpolitik: Interrogating the Relationship between Transitional Justice and Socio-Economic Justice

In the last decade, theorists and scholars of transitional justice have not only explored avenues for the field to address the socio-economic roots of conflict, but have increasingly argued that success in this regard is the metric by which it should ultimately be judged. However, the record of the field in identifying or remedying violations of economic, social and cultural rights is underwhelming at best. While one might agree that the roots of conflict and authoritarianism are structural and that such deprivations do lend themselves to judicial or quasijudicial action, neither the mechanisms of transitional justice nor the context in which they apply are apt to significantly catalyse beneficial change. As regards the former, the temporary, exceptionalist and extra-governmental nature of the mechanisms leave them unsuited to tackle structural abuses. In terms of the context in which transitional justice applies, advocates of a greater role in addressing root causes of conflict need to acknowledge that political transition from less to more democratic regimes is a relatively superficial phenomenon. The very real sense of civil-political possibility that transitions from war or authoritarianism to peace and democracy present is rarely accompanied by a transition in the shape of economic power. Transitional justice can take advantage of the period of flux to redress or temper political power imbalances symbolically, historically and jurisprudentially. These achievements are now dismissed by some as merely cosmetic outcomes of an overly liberal-legalist approach, but simultaneous opportunities to redress socio-economic imbalances simply may not exist. A more realistic appraisal of transitional justice’s merits is possible only if we accept the relative superficiality of its mechanisms and context of application. Addressing structural injustice is the task of the transitional government and development agencies—schemes for transitional justice can at best form just one of many valid sources of advice, but assuming they can catalyse, dominate or contribute substantially to re-ordering horizontal inequalities is to set expectations too high

Punishment is strongly motivated by revenge and weakly motivated by inequity aversion

There are two broad functional explanations for second-party punishment: fitness-leveling and deterrence. The former suggests that people punish to reduce fitness differences, while the latter suggests that people punish in order to reciprocate losses and deter others from inflicting losses on them in the future. We explore the relative roles of these motivations using a pre-registered, two-player experiment with 2426 US participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants played as the “responder” and were assigned to either a Take or Augment condition. In the Take condition, the “partner” could steal money from the responder's bonus or do nothing. In the Augment condition, the partner could augment the responder's bonus by giving them money at no cost to themselves or do nothing. We also manipulated the responders' starting endowments, such that after the partner's decision, responders experienced different payoff outcomes: advantageous inequity, equality, or varying degrees of disadvantageous inequity. Responders then decided whether to pay a cost to punish the partner. Punishment was clearly influenced by theft and was most frequent when theft resulted in disadvantageous inequity. However, people also punished in the absence of theft, particularly when confronted with disadvantageous inequity. While the effect of inequity on punishment was small, our results suggest that punishment is motivated by more than just the desire to reciprocate losses. These findings highlight the multiple motivations undergirding punishment and bear directly on functional explanations for the existence of punishment in human societies

Mid-infrared optical sensing using sub-wavelength gratings

Optical sensing has shown great potential for both quantitative and qualitative analysis of compounds. In particular sensors which are capable of detecting changes in refractive index at a surface as well as in bulk material have received much attention. Much of the recent research has focused on developing technologies that enable such sensors to be deployed in an integrated photonic device. In this work we demonstrate experimentally, using a sub-wavelength grating the detection of ethanol in aqueous solution by interrogating its large absorption band at 9.54 μm. Theoretical investigation of the operating principle of our grating sensor shows that in general, as the total field interacting with the analyte is increased, the corresponding absorption is also increased. We also theoretically demonstrate how sub-wavelength gratings can detect changes in the real part of the refractive index, similar to conventional refractive index (RI) sensors

Low-Stakes, Reflective Writing: Moving Students into Their Professional Fields

This study examines low-stakes, written commentaries from a graduate counseling course to better understand the role writing plays in the transition from being a student to becoming a professional practitioner. The cross disciplinary research team used methods from Grounded Theory to analyze 60 commentaries and found that: (1) low-stakes, reflective writing revealed changes in self-awareness from Situational Self-Knowledge to Pattern Self-Knowledge (Weinstein & Alschuler, 1985); (2) low-stakes writing provided evidence of students connecting personally to learning and then connecting learning to professional practice; and (3) low-stakes writing encouraged the instructor to make mid-course adjustments to his teaching methods. This study provides empirical evidence that low-stakes writing-to-learn both supports and records the transition students make from hoping to know how to knowing how to imagine themselves in their professional field