Bromide: A potential risk to livestock production in South Africa

No Abstract Keywords: animals, groundwater, halides, toxicity, water qualit

Mapping individual electromagnetic field components inside a photonic crystal

We present a method to map the absolute electromagnetic field strength inside photonic crystals. We apply the method to map the electric field component Ez of a two-dimensional photonic crystal slab at microwave frequencies. The slab is placed between two mirrors to select Bloch standing waves and a subwavelength spherical scatterer is scanned inside the resulting resonator. The resonant Bloch frequencies shift depending on the electric field at the position of the scatterer. To map the electric field component Ez we measure the frequency shift in the reflection and transmission spectrum of the slab versus the scatterer position. Very good agreement is found between measurements and calculations without any adjustable parameters.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

‘These cameras are here for a reason’- media coming out, symbolic power and the value of ‘participation'

This article addresses the increasing popularity of coming out as mediatized practice, by focusing on the example of the internationally successful Dutch television programme Uit de Kast (‘Out of the Closet’). While the choice of coming out in front of the cameras is often received controversially both by the public and the protagonists’ immediate environment, youngsters keep applying to participate in the programme. To understand the continuous appeal of this form of self-disclosure, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 participants from different seasons about their motivations, experiences and evaluations of ta

Dating the Media: Participation, Voice, and Ritual Logic in the Disability Dating Show The Undateables

Interventional television formats centering around the ritual transformation of “ordinary people” are not only followed by sizable audiences worldwide but also attract large numbers of aspiring candidates. Although the benefits and consequences of participating in such shows have long been debated within academia and beyond, research into actual experiences of participating in such television productions remains scarce. Based on in-depth interviews with participants of the disability dating show The Undateables, this article focuses on how contributors deal with their position in the production and how their experiences reflect the emancipatory claims of the program. By presenting the production process through the story and from the perspective of three participants, different modes of participation will be discussed, revealing how instances of submission, appropriation, and contestation of the production logic are linked to ideals of representation, notions about empowerment and voice, and to strategies of negotiating normalcy and difference

Ultracold Electron Source

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Free expansion of lowest Landau level states of trapped atoms: a wavefunction microscope

We show that for any lowest-Landau-level state of a trapped, rotating, interacting Bose gas, the particle distribution in coordinate space in a free expansion (time of flight) experiment is related to that in the trap at the time it is turned off by a simple rescaling and rotation. When the lowest-Landau-level approximation is valid, interactions can be neglected during the expansion, even when they play an essential role in the ground state when the trap is present. The correlations in the density in a single snapshot can be used to obtain information about the fluid, such as whether a transition to a quantum Hall state has occurred.Comment: 5 pages, no figures. v2: discussion of neglect of interactions during expansion improved, refs adde

Ultracold Electron Source

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Coming out with the media: the ritualization of self-disclosure in the Dutch television program Uit de Kast

Using the media to disclose one’s sexual identity has become an increasingly salient practice in recent years. Yet little is known about the reasons for the emergence of this form of self-disclosure. Based on an analysis of the Dutch television programme Uit de Kast (‘Out of the Closet’), this article relates the rise of mediated coming out practices to the ritualizing power of the media: we argue that media plays a quintessential role in transforming the socially unscripted act of coming out into a patterned, culturally meaningful performance. Our analysis reveals that the ritual work of the programme is embedded in the ways 1) the generic format of the show structures the self-disclosures, 2) the authority of the media is deployed to channel the coming out process, and 3) the programme, while controlling diversity, reinforces dominant societal values and ideologies. The case not only highlights how unprecedented ritual forms come to flourish in the current era of ‘participatory’ media culture, but also demonstrates how ritualization supports and naturalizes the claim that media is an effective agent to create order in everyday, ordinary lives