War Gender and Dancing: Gettysburg College and the USO During World War II

Made up of women and the men who could not join the military, the home front was more than just victory gardens and factory jobs. Although factory work was seen as a way for women both to help the war effort and at the same time gain some independence outside the home, not every woman was ready to hang up her dress and start donning pants full time. There was a middle ground where women were able to break traditional feminine roles yet still keep their dresses and serve the servicemen fighting the war between victory gardens and factory jobs; a balance was found in volunteer organizations designed to serve the military. The largest and most well-known organization on the home front was the United Services Organization, more commonly referred to as the USO. After the outbreak of World War II, USO canteens start to appear everywhere across the United States in towns and cities alike. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was one of many towns with their own USO branch. The Gettysburg branch was supported by the female students at Gettysburg College and the Army Air Corps detachment stationed on campus which provided an opportunity for local young women to explore new social roles while supporting the war effort. [excerpt

Optically induced free carrier light modulator

Signal carrier laser beam is optically modulated by a second laser beam of different frequency acting on a free carrier source to which the signal carrier laser is directed. The second laser beam affects the transmission characteristics of the free carrier source to light from the signal carrier laser, thus modulating it

The Nature of Radio Emission from Distant Galaxies

I describe an observational program aimed at understanding the radio emission from distant, rapidly evolving galaxy populations. These observations were carried out at 1.4 and 8.5 GHz with the VLA centered on the Hubble Deep Field. Further MERLIN observations of the HDF region at 1.4 GHz provided an angular resolution of 0.2" and when combined with the VLA data produced an image with an unprecedented rms noise of 4 $\mu$Jy. All radio sources detected in the VLA complete sample are resolved with a median angular size of 1-2". The differential count of the radio sources is marginally sub-Euclidean ($\gamma$ = -2.4 $\pm$ 0.1) and fluctuation analysis suggests nearly 60 sources per arcmin$^2$ are present at the 1 $\mu$Jy level. A correlation analysis indicates spatial clustering among the 371 radio sources on angular scales of 1- 40 arcmin. Optical identifications are made primarily with bright (I = 22) disk systems composed of irregulars, peculiars, interacting/merging galaxies, and a few isolated field spirals. Available redshifts span the range 0.2 - 3. These clues coupled with the steep spectral index of the 1.4 GHz selected sample are indicative of diffuse synchrotron radiation in distant galactic disks. Thus the evolution in the microjansky radio population is driven principally by star-formation. I have isolated a number of optically faint radio sources (about 25% of the overall sample) which remain unidentified to I = 26-28 in the HDF and flanking optical fields. Several of these objects have extremely red counterparts and constitute a new class of radio sources which are candidate high-z dusty protogalaxies.Comment: dissertation summary to be published in PASP, sucessfully defended on May 19, 1999 at the University of Virginia, committee composed of R. W. O'Connell (UVa), K. I. Kellermann (NRAO), E. B Fomalont (NRAO), T. X. Thuan (UVa), P. Humphreys (UVa), and J. Wall (Oxford

Method and apparatus for optical modulating a light signal Patent

Method and apparatus for optically modulating light or microwave bea

Prototype selection for parameter estimation in complex models

Parameter estimation in astrophysics often requires the use of complex physical models. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the parameters that describe star formation history (SFH) in galaxies. Here, high-dimensional spectral data from galaxies are appropriately modeled as linear combinations of physical components, called simple stellar populations (SSPs), plus some nonlinear distortions. Theoretical data for each SSP is produced for a fixed parameter vector via computer modeling. Though the parameters that define each SSP are continuous, optimizing the signal model over a large set of SSPs on a fine parameter grid is computationally infeasible and inefficient. The goal of this study is to estimate the set of parameters that describes the SFH of each galaxy. These target parameters, such as the average ages and chemical compositions of the galaxy's stellar populations, are derived from the SSP parameters and the component weights in the signal model. Here, we introduce a principled approach of choosing a small basis of SSP prototypes for SFH parameter estimation. The basic idea is to quantize the vector space and effective support of the model components. In addition to greater computational efficiency, we achieve better estimates of the SFH target parameters. In simulations, our proposed quantization method obtains a substantial improvement in estimating the target parameters over the common method of employing a parameter grid. Sparse coding techniques are not appropriate for this problem without proper constraints, while constrained sparse coding methods perform poorly for parameter estimation because their objective is signal reconstruction, not estimation of the target parameters.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS500 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org