The Charles Lamb Bulletin 174 (Winter) 2021

Winter edition of the Charles and Mary Lamb Journal, The Charles Lamb Bulletin

Demonstration of surface electron rejection with interleaved germanium detectors for dark matter searches

The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 103.16 (2013): 164105 and may be found at http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/100/26/10.1063/1.4729825The SuperCDMS experiment in the Soudan Underground Laboratory searches for dark matter with a 9-kg array of cryogenic germanium detectors. Symmetric sensors on opposite sides measure both charge and phonons from each particle interaction, providing excellent discrimination between electron and nuclear recoils, and between surface and interior events. Surface event rejection capabilities were tested with two 210 Pb sources producing ∼130 beta decays/hr. In ∼800 live hours, no events leaked into the 8–115 keV signal region, giving upper limit leakage fraction 1.7 × 10−5 at 90% C.L., corresponding to < 0.6 surface event background in the future 200-kg SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment.This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. AST-9978911, NSF-0847342, PHY-1102795,NSF-1151869, PHY-0542066, PHY-0503729, PHY-0503629, PHY-0503641, PHY-0504224, PHY-0705052,PHY-0801708, PHY-0801712, PHY-0802575, PHY-0847342, PHY-0855299, PHY-0855525, and PHY-1205898), by the Department of Energy (Contract Nos. DE-AC03-76SF00098, DE-FG02-92ER40701, DE-FG02-94ER40823,DE-FG03-90ER40569, DE-FG03-91ER40618, and DESC0004022),by NSERC Canada (Grant Nos. SAPIN 341314 and SAPPJ 386399), and by MULTIDARK CSD2009-00064 and FPA2012-34694. Fermilab is operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. De-AC02-07CH11359, while SLAC is operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the United States Department of Energy

Fc Effector Function Contributes to the Activity of Human Anti-CTLA-4 Antibodies.

With the use of a mouse model expressing human Fc-gamma receptors (FcγRs), we demonstrated that antibodies with isotypes equivalent to ipilimumab and tremelimumab mediate intra-tumoral regulatory T (Treg) cell depletion in vivo, increasing the CD8+ to Treg cell ratio and promoting tumor rejection. Antibodies with improved FcγR binding profiles drove superior anti-tumor responses and survival. In patients with advanced melanoma, response to ipilimumab was associated with the CD16a-V158F high affinity polymorphism. Such activity only appeared relevant in the context of inflamed tumors, explaining the modest response rates observed in the clinical setting. Our data suggest that the activity of anti-CTLA-4 in inflamed tumors may be improved through enhancement of FcγR binding, whereas poorly infiltrated tumors will likely require combination approaches

'That Ill Opinion': Robert Burns and the British Romantic Tradition

My thesis examines the influence of Robert Burns’s poetry on the poetry of several major British Romantic poets, specifically William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Burns’s debut volume of poetry, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published in 1786, became an immediate success in Scotland and England. My thesis offers the first sustained analysis of the self-conscious echoes of Burns by Wordsworth, Keats and Byron, where close readings of Burns’s poems alongside their works unearth moments of allusion and intertextuality, as well as shared poetic techniques and aesthetic approaches. My first chapter looks at Burns’s influence on Wordsworth. Wordsworth was profoundly moved by Burns’s sensitivity to nature and to his sincere attention to low and rustic subjects. Here, I examine Burns’s influence on poems such as Peter Bell, The Ruined Cottage, and ‘Michael’, as well as some of Wordsworth’s poems inspired by his 1803 tour of Scotland, which included visiting Burns’s grave. My second chapter begins by charting the complicated network of tributes paid to Thomas Chatterton and Robert Burns, where these seemingly disparate poets were often paired together by writers such as Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and John Keats. This chapter also focuses on Keats’s poems and letters produced during his 1818 tour of Northern England and Scotland, where he, like Wordsworth, made a pilgrimage to Burns’s grave, as well as to his birth-place cottage in Ayrshire. My final chapter looks at the many shared qualities between the poetry of Burns and Byron. Both poets were adept at manipulating their perceived biographical personae within their poems and so this chapter looks at poems such as ‘Tam O’Shanter’ and Burns’s verse epistles alongside some of Byron’s major works, including The Giaour, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgment, as well as Byron’s shorter lyrics

Humour and Satire

Originally presented at a conference on ‘Humour and Satire in British Romanticism’, held at Durham University in September 2019, the essays in this issue each explore in various ways the open-endedness of these modes of writing. For Burns, Byron, Lamb, and Campbell, humour is shown to take on a function almost as a tool of self-analysis. Its ability to subvert assumptions and mores becomes a means of voicing transgressive impulses or shaping personal and authorial identities despite social and rational restraints. The essays on the work of children’s literature 'The Feast of the Fishes', the Tory magazine 'The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor', and Benjamin Disraeli’s novel 'Vivian Gray' present satire playing a similarly ambivalent and exploratory role. Asking questions both of their society and of themselves, the writers discussed here do use satire as a means of attack, but one with a greater degree of self-awareness and often ambiguity than simple denunciation or polemic. Each takes a pleasure in the probing and identity-forming capabilities of satire that goes beyond a simple assertion of moral values

Introduction: Humour and Satire

Introductory essay to 'Humour and Satire' special issu