Revisiting Jane Austen as a Romantic Author in Literary Biopics

This essay seeks to establish whether portrayals of Jane Austen on screen reaffirm a sense of the author's neoconservative heritage, or whether an alternative and more challenging model of female authorship is visible. Does this particular, and arguably defining, moment in Austen’s legacy offer new and diverse perspectives on the author and her Romantic and post-Romantic contexts? Both films raise troubling questions about adapting (and appropriating) Austen in the twenty-first century, with wider implications for the study of female authors and artists on screen. However, as I hope to demonstrate, the Austens of these biopics are neither reactionary heritage reproductions nor “authentic” Austens. Miss Austen Regrets (2008) and Becoming Jane (2007) are in a generative cinematic conversation with Austen’s past “lives” and the author’s present popularity as well as with the narrative style, mood, and tone of her fiction. In other words, “Austen”, as the name has come to signify her literary works and the cultural stories she has become the adoptive author of, reads the biopics even as they read her. Austen’s “authorship” in the twenty-first century rests on and is transfigured by a rapidly evolving and mutually informed nexus of co-readings between text and screen

Exceptional automorphisms of (generalized) super elliptic surfaces

A super-elliptic surface is a compact, smooth Riemann surface S with a conformal automorphism w of prime order p such that S/ has genus zero, extending the hyper-elliptic case p=2. More generally, a cyclic n-gonal surface S has an automorphism w of order n such that S/ has genus zero. All cyclic n-gonal surfaces have tractable defining equations. Let A = Aut(S) and N be the normalizer of C = in A. The structure of N, in principal, can be easily determined from the defining equation. If the genus of S is sufficiently large in comparison to n, and C satisfies a generalized super-elliptic condition, then A = N. For small genus A - N may be non-empty and, in this case, any automorphism h ∈ A - N is called exceptional. The exceptional automorphisms of all general cyclic n-gonal surfaces seems to be hard. We focus on generalized super-elliptic surfaces in which n is composite and the projection of S onto S/C is fully ramified. Generalized super-elliptic surfaces are easily identified by their defining equations. In this paper we discuss an approach to the determination of generalized super-elliptic surfaces with exceptional automorphisms

In Vivo Dosimetry using Plastic Scintillation Detectors for External Beam Radiation Therapy

In vivo dosimetry, the direct measurement of dose delivered to patients during radiation therapy, has significant potential in ensuring safe and effective treatment in radiation therapy. It can serve as point-of-delivery, patient specific quality assurance and direct verification of treatment. Despite evidence that in vivo dosimetry can detect errors in patient treatment that would otherwise go undetected, it is not commonly practiced. This is due in part to a lack of available detectors ideally suited to perform in vivo dosimetry. Plastic scintillation detectors (PSDs) possess a number of dosimetric characteristics advantageous for in vivo dosimetry including water equivalence, real-time capability, small size, and energy independence. However, PSDs have not been used for in vivo dosimetry of external beam radiation therapy to date. The overall purpose of this work is to apply PSDs to in vivo dosimetry of external beam radiation therapy, and demonstrate the utility and practicality of performing in vivo dosimetry with PSDs. Three avenues of research were pursued in accordance with this purpose. First, the temperature dependence of PSDs was characterized. Prior to this work, PSDs were understood to be temperature independent detectors. However responses of PSDs constructed with BCF-60 and BCF-12, two common scintillating fibers, were demonstrated to decrease by 0.5% and 0.1% per °C increase relative to 22 °C, respectively. The spectral distribution of light was observed to change with temperature as well. This resulted in a non-negligible error in measured dose at human body temperature, requiring a temperature-specific correction factor. Next, PSDs were used for in vivo dosimetry of the rectal wall in five patients undergoing intensity modulated radiation therapy for prostate cancer. This was done as part of an Institutional Review Board approved protocol. PSDs were attached to endorectal balloons used routinely during prostate radiotherapy, positioning the detectors in close proximity with the rectal wall. Two PSDs were used for two treatment fractions each week for the duration of each patient’s treatment. The difference between the measured dose and expected dose was used to evaluate the accuracy and precision of the system. The mean difference between the measured and expected dose for the five patient population was -0.4%, with a standard deviation of 2.8%. The mean differences for individual patients fell between -3.3% and 3.3%. Finally, a thorough characterization of the response of PSDs used for absolute entrance dosimetry in proton beams was performed. Entrance dose measurements for a passively scattered proton beam performed with a PSD were compared to measurements made with an ion chamber and radiochromic film. Ionization quenching, an under-response due to densely ionizing radiation, was found to be responsible for a 7% loss of signal at the highest energy studied (250 MeV) and a 10% loss at the lowest (140 MeV). The under-response was found to be insensitive to other beam parameters, such as the width of the spread out Bragg peak

Poking Holes and Cutting Corners to Achieve Clifford Gates with the Surface Code

The surface code is currently the leading proposal to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computation. Among its strengths are the plethora of known ways in which fault-tolerant Clifford operations can be performed, namely, by deforming the topology of the surface, by the fusion and splitting of codes, and even by braiding engineered Majorana modes using twist defects. Here, we present a unified framework to describe these methods, which can be used to better compare different schemes and to facilitate the design of hybrid schemes. Our unification includes the identification of twist defects with the corners of the planar code. This identification enables us to perform single-qubit Clifford gates by exchanging the corners of the planar code via code deformation. We analyze ways in which different schemes can be combined and propose a new logical encoding. We also show how all of the Clifford gates can be implemented with the planar code, without loss of distance, using code deformations, thus offering an attractive alternative to ancilla-mediated schemes to complete the Clifford group with lattice surgery

‘Bicentennial Essays on Jane Austen’s Afterlives’

This special issue of Women’s Writing is concerned with the changing approaches to Jane Austen and her texts over the past 200 years. The issue will reflect on the cultural reach and reimaginings of Austen in view of the bicentennial celebrations of her published novels. The editors invite articles on all aspects of Austen’s national and international reputation, on her critical reception, on creative appropriations of her texts, on aspects of Austen’s afterlives in popular culture, in visual media, in ephemeral publications, in abridgements, stage and film versions. Together, these essays will shed new light on some of the complex reception processes and legacies of this enduringly popular author