Re-Storying the Colonial Landscape: Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse

The narratives of Anishinaubae author Richard Wagamese, whether autobiographical or fictional, are representations of his own journey, vehicles of personal and cultural reconstruction. Indian Horse is another such narrative. It is possible to read the novel as being exclusively about residential schools or hockey or both. These topics require attention in order to understand the depiction of Saul Indian Horse's wounded spirit and of what Eduardo and Bonnie Duran call the "soul wound" of his people. Yet close textual analysis shows how the text uses oral storytelling techniques to render Saul's journey of personal re-creation: his reclamation of a healthy form of Indigenous masculinity, of his visionary power, of a spiritual connection with the land, of relationships with his extended kinship family, and of a sense of gender complementarity and reverence for the feminine

Re-Reading David Adams Richards: Ironies of Allegory in Mercy among the Children

David Adams Richards’s literary reputation as a single-minded essentialist, or sometimes his personal reputation as the Miramichi scrapper, distracts critics from a diligent and responsible consideration of his texts. A reading of Mercy among the Children attentive to the novel’s complexities and indeterminacies shows it to be suffused or saturated with irony, as seen in the multi-levelled insights of its astringent humour. The upshot of these multiple ironies is that the tone becomes multi-faceted, character is destabilized, and traditional allegory’s assignation of one-to-one equivalencies is dislodged and becomes no longer adequate to describe the text at hand. Richards is practicing a kind of allegory that conducts an ongoing and finally unresolved debate about the narrative’s meanings while in the process of constructing them

Shrinkage Cracking in Concrete Tilt-Up Construction

The purpose of this project is to investigate a particular, undesirable cracking pattern in concrete tilt-up panels that, until now, did not have a known definite cause. The cause of this cracking pattern is hypothesized to be due to shrinkage restraint of the concrete panels. The cracking under investigation occurs at the bottom corners of the Tilt-Up panels, suggesting that the base of the panel is restrained from shrinkage. This project models various components of Tilt-Up Construction that have potential for restraining the panels from shrinking. This project consists of the following main components. The first aspect of this project was to investigate and become familiar with the means and methods of Tilt-Up Construction. To determine the potential shrinkage restraints on the panels, the connections and details associated with Tilt-Up must be thoroughly understood. This involved reviewing typical details of connections as well as contacting engineers and contractors in the field to determine the typical means and methods of Tilt-Up construction and construction sequencing. Once typical construction practices were understood, the first shrinkage restraint investigated was the friction developed by the panel setting pads. Once the panel is ready to lift, it is set on grout pads or plastic shims, typically located at the ends of the panel. To determine the amount of restraint caused by friction, an experiment was conducted to determine the coefficient of static friction. Tests were run to find the coefficient of friction for concrete against grout, and concrete against plastic shims. The third aspect of this project was to develop an effective computer model of stresses in Tilt-Up panels induced by shrinkage restraint. The goal of this model was to be able to run various scenarios, to determine the effects of panel concrete mix design, panel geometry, and construction sequencing. The last aspect of this project was to collect enough data from the computer model to determine whether or not shrinkage restraint induces enough stress in the panel to initiate cracking, determine when the cracking would occur given construction sequencing, as well as determine if the cracking pattern matches the pattern seen out in the field. Conclusions will have to be made on a case by case basis, but the panel specifications in this analysis were chosen from a Home Depot building in San Luis Obispo, CA, an as-built Tilt-Up project. After running about 70 different cases, it was discovered that the grout pads by themselves did not provide enough shrinkage restraint to initiate cracking in the panel. This led to further investigation of panel connections, specifically the panel to slab connection at the pour strip. This paper concludes that when combining the shrinkage restraint from grout pad friction and pour strip reinforcement tension, there is potential for cracking in the panel. Even further, the cracking pattern determined from the computer model provides nearly an exact match to the actual cracks under investigation and measured in the field. Although this report provides evidence for potential cracking in Tilt-Up panels due to shrinkage restraint, recommendations for limiting the potential of cracking in panels will need to be made on a case by case basis

Hiding in the Shadows: Searching for Planets in Pre--transitional and Transitional Disks

Transitional and pre--transitional disks can be explained by a number of mechanisms. This work aims to find a single observationally detectable marker that would imply a planetary origin for the gap and, therefore, indirectly indicate the presence of a young planet. N-body simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of an embedded planet of one Jupiter mass on the production of instantaneous collisional dust derived from a background planetesimal disk. Our new model allows us to predict the dust distribution and resulting observable markers with greater accuracy than previous work. Dynamical influences from a planet on a circular orbit are shown to enhance dust production in the disk interior and exterior to the planet orbit while removing planetesimals from the the orbit itself creating a clearly defined gap. In the case of an eccentric planet the gap opened by the planet is not as clear as the circular case but there is a detectable asymmetry in the dust disk.Comment: Accepted to ApJL 25th September 2013. 4 figures, 1 tabl

Sex ratio: Adaptive response to population fluctuation in Pandalid shrimp

Pandalus jordani is a protandrus (sequential) hermaphrodite. Populations show large year-to-year variation in age composition. In response to this variation, individuals alter the age at which they change sex. This response is predicted by a genetic model that assumes an individual shrimp maximizes its genetic contribution to the next generation

Hiding in the Shadows II: Collisional Dust as Exoplanet Markers

Observations of the youngest planets ($\sim$1-10 Myr for a transitional disk) will increase the accuracy of our planet formation models. Unfortunately, observations of such planets are challenging and time-consuming to undertake even in ideal circumstances. Therefore, we propose the determination of a set of markers that can pre-select promising exoplanet-hosting candidate disks. To this end, N-body simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of an embedded Jupiter mass planet on the dynamics of the surrounding planetesimal disk and the resulting creation of second generation collisional dust. We use a new collision model that allows fragmentation and erosion of planetesimals, and dust-sized fragments are simulated in a post process step including non-gravitational forces due to stellar radiation and a gaseous protoplanetary disk. Synthetic images from our numerical simulations show a bright double ring at 850 $\mu$m for a low eccentricity planet, whereas a high eccentricity planet would produce a characteristic inner ring with asymmetries in the disk. In the presence of first generation primordial dust these markers would be difficult to detect far from the orbit of the embedded planet, but would be detectable inside a gap of planetary origin in a transitional disk.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

Regulation of B cell fate by chronic activity of the IgE B cell receptor.

IgE can trigger potent allergic responses, yet the mechanisms regulating IgE production are poorly understood. Here we reveal that IgE+ B cells are constrained by chronic activity of the IgE B cell receptor (BCR). In the absence of cognate antigen, the IgE BCR promoted terminal differentiation of B cells into plasma cells (PCs) under cell culture conditions mimicking T cell help. This antigen-independent PC differentiation involved multiple IgE domains and Syk, CD19, BLNK, Btk, and IRF4. Disruption of BCR signaling in mice led to consistently exaggerated IgE+ germinal center (GC) B cell but variably increased PC responses. We were unable to confirm reports that the IgE BCR directly promoted intrinsic apoptosis. Instead, IgE+ GC B cells exhibited poor antigen presentation and prolonged cell cycles, suggesting reduced competition for T cell help. We propose that chronic BCR activity and access to T cell help play critical roles in regulating IgE responses

Energy conservation for the Euler equations on T2 x R+ for weak solutions defined without reference to the pressure

We study weak solutions of the incompressible Euler equations on T2×R+; we use test functions that are divergence free and have zero normal component, thereby obtaining a definition that does not involve the pressure. We prove energy conservation under the assumptions that u∈L3(0,T;L3(T2×R+)), lim|y|→01|y|∫0T∫T2∫x3>|y|∞|u(x+y)−u(x)|3dxdt=0, and an additional continuity condition near the boundary: for some δ>0 we require u∈L3(0,T;C0(T2×[0,δ])). We note that all our conditions are satisfied whenever u(x,t)∈Cα, for some α>1/3, with Hölder constant C(x,t)∈L3(T2×R+×(0,T))