The Company They Didn\u27t Keep: Collaborative Women in the Letters of C.S. Lewis

Building on the work of Diana Pavlac Glyer to establish a framework and set of terms for understanding the collaborative nature of the Inklings, McBride takes us outside their exclusively masculine circle to look at women who influenced Lewis’s writing. His study introduces us to women who served Lewis as, in Glyer’s terms, Resonators, Opponents, Conductors, and so on, from anonymous fans to well-known names like Pitter and Sayers

Gender and Inklings Friendship

This paper discusses C.S. Lewis’s views on women and friendship between the sexes

Battling the Woman Warrior: Females and Combat in Tolkien and Lewis

Examines women in combat in a number of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works, finding that their portrayals have one thing in common: battles are ugly when women fight

Doo bee doo bee doo

We explore the design and implementation of Frank, a strict functional programming language with a bidirectional effect type system designed from the ground up around a novel variant of Plotkin and Pretnar's effect handler abstraction. Effect handlers provide an abstraction for modular effectful programming: a handler acts as an interpreter for a collection of commands whose interfaces are statically tracked by the type system. However, Frank eliminates the need for an additional effect handling construct by generalising the basic mechanism of functional abstraction itself. A function is but the special case of a Frank operator that interprets no commands. Moreover, Frank's operators can be multihandlers which simultaneously interpret commands from several sources at once, without disturbing the direct style of functional programming with values. Effect typing in Frank employs a novel form of effect polymorphism which avoids mentioning effect variables in source code. This is achieved by propagating an ambient ability inwards, rather than accumulating unions of potential effects outwards. With the ambient ability describing the effects that are available at a certain point in the code, it can become necessary to reconfigure access to the ambient ability. A primary goal is to be able to encapsulate internal effects, eliminating a phenomenon we call effect pollution. Moreover, it is sometimes desirable to rewire the effect flow between effectful library components. We propose adaptors as a means for supporting both effect encapsulation and more general rewiring. Programming with effects and handlers is in its infancy. We contribute an exploration of future possibilities, particularly in combination with other forms of rich type systems

Law, Liquor, and Love

This article discusses attempts at alcohol law reform in New Zealand between 2008 and 2017. First, it describes a major review of alcohol by the New Zealand Law Commission, headed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who had overseen liberalisation of alcohol regulation 25 years earlier. The main recommendations of the commission’s final report featured progressive reform of the alcohol laws regulating marketing, price, accessibility and age of purchase. Second, it outlines the response to the commission’s report by the Nationalled government, including an Alcohol Reform Bill that ignored the key recommendations of the commission. This ‘non-reform’ bill was the outcome of a political process of obfuscation, delay and inaction led by then prime minister, John Key. Third, the article describes the factors that have contributed to the lack of effective alcohol law reform, despite the review and high public support for change over the past decade. We conclude that ‘the love of money’ is at the heart of the barriers to change. Finally, we propose three main policies that would make a significant difference to reducing alcohol-related harm in New Zealand and suggest how these could be advanced

Mechanical characterisation of nanocrystalline graphite using micromechanical structures

Conductive nanocrystalline graphite has been deposited using plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition at 750 °C, directly onto silicon substrates without any catalyst and fabricated into micromechanical membrane and beam structures. Using the buckling profile of the membrane and beam structures, we measure a built-in strain of - 0.0142 and through wafer-bow measurement, a compressive stress of 436 MPa. From this we have calculated the Young's modulus of nanographite as 23.0 ± 2.7 GPa. This represents a scalable method for fabricating nanographite MEMS and NEMS devices via a microfabrication-compatible process and provides useful mechanical properties to enable design of future devices

Sensing performance of Nanocrystalline Graphite Based Humidity Sensors

Environmental sensors play a crucial role in a wide range of applications. Amongst them, humidity sensors that are stable and operational in harsh environments are incredibly important for process control and monitoring. Nanocrystalline graphite (NCG) is a type of carbon-based thin film material. Previous work has shown that NCG has excellent mechanical properties and is able to withstand high radiation doses. The granular structure of the NCG film makes it a good candidate for humidity sensing as the film consists of conductive graphitic grains with a high density of sp2 bonds and amorphous grain boundaries with high resistivity, adsorption of water molecule onto the film forms conductive pathways between grains through the Grotthuss mechanism which lowers the resistance of the film by a measurable amount. Here we report for the first time, a working humidity sensor with linear response, fabricated using NCG as the sensing material for harsh, real-world environments, which include exposure to weak acids via rainfall, UV radiation, mechanical wear, and high humidity environments. The calculated sensitivity of the best-fabricated sensor is S = 0.0334%, with a maximum resistance change of -4.4 kOhms, over the range of 15% RH to 85% RH. The response time of the sensor is 20ms with the current measurement setup. The baseline resistance value of the sensor at 15% RH is 210 kOhms. The sensor has the potential to be used as a humidity sensor for harsh environments due to the chemical, thermal and mechanical stability of the NCG film

Micromachined nanocrystalline graphite membranes for gas separation

Carbon nanoporous membranes show promising performance for the passive separation and sieving of different gases, for example for helium and hydrogen separation. In this paper, nanocrystalline graphite (or nanographite) has been evaluated as a membrane material for molecular sieving of helium and hydrogen from larger gas constituents. Nanographite of 350 nm thickness was prepared using plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition onto fused silica substrates, from which membranes were microfabricated using deep wet etching. Permeability of hydrogen and helium were 1.79 ×10-16 and 1.40×10-16 mol·m·m-2·s-1·Pa-1 at 150 °C respectively, and measured separation was 48 for He/Ne, >135 for H2/CO2 and >1000 for H2/O2. The gas separation properties of the nanographite membranes were tested in the temperature range of 25 to 150 °C, and the permeation measurements show nanographite to be highly selective of helium and hydrogen over all larger gas molecules, including neon