Marketing Transnational Childhoods: The Bio Blurbs of Third Culture Novelists

Many contemporary novelists experienced high levels of transnational mobility during their childhood and were thus raised ‘among’ different countries and cultures. Predominantly the offspring of diplomats, business executives, missionaries, military personnel and academics, these writers have compelling backgrounds of transnational and transient childhoods. Third Culture Kid (TCK), coined by the sociologist Ruth Useem, is the term given to this childhood experience. Until 2010, the term TCK was only used by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and cultural educators, but never before by scholars of literary studies. In 2011, Antje Rauwerda adapted this concept and coined the term ‘Third Culture Literature’ to describe the fictional writings by authors who share a ‘cultural background of expatriatism’. For Rauwerda, these novelists do not fit ‘a postcolonial, diasporic or cosmopolitan paradigm’ so that an up-to-date classification is needed for this new ‘subset of international writing’. The purpose of this article is to verify to what extent cultural identities are deployed in the marketing of Third Culture Literature. The article focuses on five contemporary well-known authors (such as Ian Martel and Ian McEwan) who have ‘grown up across worlds’ and analyses over 25 biographical details that are offered to readers by publishers in selected editions of their novels. The biographical details I examine are not only distributed in English but also, for example, in Arabic, Danish, German and Spanish. Not all publishers choose to portray their transnational authors in a ‘global’ light. However, due to the primarily international settings of Third Culture novels, many publishers either adopt the expatriate culture of their authors or adapt their biographies in order to kindle their target audiences

Constraining A4A_4 Leptonic Flavour Model Parameters at Colliders and Beyond

The observed pattern of mixing in the neutrino sector may be explained by the presence of a non-Abelian, discrete flavour symmetry broken into residual subgroups at low energies. Many flavour models require the presence of Standard Model singlet scalars which can promptly decay to charged leptons in a flavour-violating manner. We constrain the model parameters of a generic $A_4$ leptonic flavour model using a synergy of experimental data including limits from charged lepton flavour conversion, an 8 TeV collider analysis and constraints from the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The most powerful constraints derive from the MEG collaborations' limit on Br$\left(\mu\to e\gamma\right)$ and the reinterpretation of an 8 TeV ATLAS search for anomalous productions of multi-leptonic final states. We quantify the exclusionary power of each of these experiments and identify regions where the constraints from collider and MEG experimental data are complementary.Comment: v1: 28 + 9 pages, 8 figures. v2: 30 + 10 pages, 10 figures. v2 consistent with JHEP accepted version where further discussion of results and several more references were adde

Big Small Steps: Childhoods on the Move

In May, shortly before boarding the Milano Malpensa airport Express train at the station of Cadorna, a stone set into the floor caught my eye. Passengers of the Malpensa Express who have the time to take a closer look at the stone can read an engraved inscription in Italian and English: “Every step I have taken in my life has led me here, now” (Garutti). After a 50-minute train ride, the inscription can be found inside the Milano Malpensa airport too, emphasizing both the significance of transport and the places of transit for travellers. These works of public art by the Italian artist Albert Garutti inspire travellers to think about the deeper meaning and consequences of each of their infinite steps, journeys, actions and decisions. Why we are physically in this certain place, right now, is often connected to moves we deliberately chose to make in adulthood, for example, family or job related. Yet, for many individuals, moves which can determine the course of one’s life are made in childhood due to their parents’ choices. Thus some of the “steps” which have led them to certain locations were not taken of one’s own free will but involuntarily. For work reasons, at the end of the 1960s, my British mother and Italian father moved to Liberia in West Africa, where I would eventually see the light of day. After eight years, due to the deteriorating political situation, my parents decided to move to Italy, where my siblings and I attended a British school. For love, years later, I moved to Germany. Due to my family’s background, relocating was not an unknown experience and my first German steps were taken in Stuttgart. Subsequently in 2004, two weeks before delivering our baby, my husband and I moved to Münster, where I began my Bachelor studies in 2008. By virtue of my cross-cultural upbringing, I then decided to enrol in the Master of Arts programme “National and Transnational Studies”. During the very first weeks of this programme, whilst discussing the term natio, we were asked by a lecturer to explain what home meant to us. Many peers replied that home was where they were born or where they grew up. Somewhat perplexed, that same evening I immediately searched the whole Internet for the definition of home when one has multiple passports (in my case three), attachments and languages. Seconds later, Google informed me that having grown up “among worlds”, I am a Third Culture Kid

HAIKU OF MALADISMS

Creative writin

Dead Ends

Dead Ends by Jessica Sanfilippo-Schul

A comprehensive analysis of the importance of translation initiation factors for Haloferax volcanii applying deletion and conditional depletion mutants

Translation is an important step in gene expression. The initiation of translation is phylogenetically diverse, since currently five different initiation mechanisms are known. For bacteria the three initiation factors IF1 – IF3 are described in contrast to archaea and eukaryotes, which contain a considerably higher number of initiation factor genes. As eukaryotes and archaea use a non-overlapping set of initiation mechanisms, orthologous proteins of both domains do not necessarily fulfill the same function. The genome of Haloferax volcanii contains 14 annotated genes that encode (subunits of) initiation factors. To gain a comprehensive overview of the importance of these genes, it was attempted to construct single gene deletion mutants of all genes. In 9 cases single deletion mutants were successfully constructed, showing that the respective genes are not essential. In contrast, the genes encoding initiation factors aIF1, aIF2γ, aIF5A, aIF5B, and aIF6 were found to be essential. Factors aIF1A and aIF2β are encoded by two orthologous genes in H. volcanii. Attempts to generate double mutants failed in both cases, indicating that also these factors are essential. A translatome analysis of one of the single aIF2β deletion mutants revealed that the translational efficiency of the second ortholog was enhanced tenfold and thus the two proteins can replace one another. The phenotypes of the single deletion mutants also revealed that the two aIF1As and aIF2βs have redundant but not identical functions. Remarkably, the gene encoding aIF2α, a subunit of aIF2 involved in initiator tRNA binding, could be deleted. However, the mutant had a severe growth defect under all tested conditions. Conditional depletion mutants were generated for the five essential genes. The phenotypes of deletion mutants and conditional depletion mutants were compared to that of the wild-type under various conditions, and growth characteristics are discussed

Experimente mit interkultureller Literatur im Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache

Was bedeutet Fremdheit? Wie äußert sie sich? Was bedeutet Fremdheit im Hinblick auf Literatur und Kultur? Diese Fragen werden in dieser Arbeit mittels einer verflechtenden Analyse von Theorie und Literatur untersucht. Das deutschsprachige Werk der Autorin Tawada Yoko bildet dabei Ort und Ausgangspunkt der theoretischen Analyse, sowie auch der praktischen Umsetzung. Es wird das fachliche Anliegen verfolgt, in der didaktischen Aufarbeitung von Literatur im Unterricht Deutsch als Fremdsprache nicht die inhaltliche und ästhetische Analyse, sondern die Erfahrung an sich in den Mittelpunkt zu stellen. Es soll dabei gezeigt werden, wie auch beim Lesen in der Fremdsprache die Ästhetik sinnlich wahrgenommen wird, selbst wenn Leerstellen im Textverständnis entstehen. In diesem Zuge wird ein eigenes Experiment anhand einer Adaption der Methode der globalen Simulation entwickelt

Kleintierbildgebung am 1,5 T MR-Tomographen : Techniken für 0,01-mm3-Auflösung, T1-Bestimmung und flusskompensiertes Selfgating

An klinischen Ganzkörper-Magnetresonanz (MR)-Tomographen ist die hochaufgelöste anatomische Bildge-bung, die Bestimmung der longitudinalen Relaxationszeit T1 und die Kompensation von physiologischen Bewegungen bei Kleintieren schwierig. Darum wurde in der vorliegenden Arbeit eine klinische Spinecho-Sequenz so modifiziert, dass post mortem Aufnahmen einer neugeborenen Maus mit einer Voxelgröße von nur 240×210×210 µm3 realisiert werden konnten. Zur Bestimmung von T1 wurden zwei Verfahren entwickelt: Das erste Verfahren, die Segmented Saturation Re¬covery turboFLASH-Pulssequenz mit aperiodischer Sättigung (APS-SSRTFL), bietet eine schnelle und von Anregungs¬feld¬in¬homo¬genitäten weitgehend unabhängige Alternative zu konventionellen Inversion Reco-very-Sequenzen. Die zweite Methode, eine Kombination des driven-equilibrium single-pulse observation of T1 (DESPOT)-Verfahrens mit einem Gleitfenster (sliding window, sw), ermöglicht im Gegensatz zur APS-SSRTFL eine dynamische Messung in 3D. Während einer Kontrastmittelstudie konnte mit sw-DESPOT T1 mit einer Zeitauflösung von 10 s gemessen werden. Die Kompensation von physiologischen Bewegungen wurde mit dem Selfgating-Verfahren realisiert, bei dem aus dem MR-Signal ein Trigger zur Bewegungskorrektur abgeleitet wird. Hierfür wurde eine optimierte Flusskompensation mit bipolaren Gradienten umgesetzt. Die in dieser Arbeit entwickelten Methoden werden bereits für die vorklinische Forschung an Kleintieren an Ganzkörper-MR-Systemen eingesetzt

ULYSSES: Universal LeptogeneSiS Equation Solver

ULYSSES is a python package that calculates the baryon asymmetry produced from leptogenesis in the context of a type-I seesaw mechanism. The code solves the semi-classical Boltzmann equations for points in the model parameter space as specified by the user. We provide a selection of predefined Boltzmann equations as well as a plugin mechanism for externally provided models of leptogenesis. Furthermore, the ULYSSES code provides tools for multi-dimensional parameter space exploration. The emphasis of the code is on user flexibility and rapid evaluation. It is publicly available at https://github.com/earlyuniverse/ulyssesComment: 20 pages, 2 figures, 4 table