George Snell Oral History

Susan Mehrtens\u27 Note: George Snell\u27s quiet voice and calm demeanor contrasted sharply with the background atmosphere of our taping session: constant interruptions from visitors, the telephone and a very solicitous spouse, and, on top of all this, a lengthy thunderstorm. George remained unperturbed, but he may have been distracted, and this may account for the anecdotal thinness of this tape. Despite his c. 40 years at Jax, Snell provides little here of the colorful vignette. He does recall his early days, living in a tent on the Lab grounds, and the locals\u27 referring to the Lab as the mouse house; he also offers pictures of C.C. Little and the enjoyment they had. in Lab parties, their games with the mice, and the family atmosphere that provided moral support through the lean Depression years. Never is the issue of administrative transition raised, nor does Snell get deeply into the technical areas of his histocompability work, for which he won the Nobel Prize. There is no incisive or objective look at the Lab, its merits or failings. Snell\u27s description of the phases of his retirement and the Lab\u27s retirement policy is poignant. For him, as for so many Lab employees, the Jax has been a central focus of his life. It was obviously painful to be forced to layoff his assistants when his grants were cut solely on the basis of his age, and retirement status. Snell\u27s veracity is reliable, but the distractions may have affected his concentration. Supplement this tape with others, e.g. the Clark~Robbins-Salisbury tape, of a more anecdotal nature for a good picture of the Lab in its early years

Popular Agitation and British Parliamentary Reform, 1866-1867

This paper demonstrated that the force of public opinion as expressed by pro-reform agitations played a critical role in the attainment of working-class voting rights with the Reform Act of 1867. This Reform Act, which passed after more than a year of political disputes and public demands, gave most of the urban English working class the right to vote. In 1866 a modest reform bill sponsored by William Gladstone’s Liberal government had been defeated by a combination of Conservative and conservative Liberal opposition. After months of popular demonstrations, Benjamin Disraeli’s new Conservative government introduced another reform bill that initially was very restrictive. But after further public demonstrations and political conflict in parliament, the bill emerged as a radical measure that more than doubled the size of the electorate. The paper followed the course of the reform controversy and public agitations, and established that the working-class agitations in favor of parliamentary reform were a critical force in compelling parliament to enact comprehensive working class enfranchisement. The project used original source material, including the parliamentary debates, The Times and the Manchester Guardian, working class and radical newspapers such as the Beehive, Commonwealth and the e National Reformer, magazines such as Blackwood’s, Contemporary Review, and Quarterly Review, trade union minutes, memoirs, speeches, and private letters

Microstructure Effects on Daily Return Volatility in Financial Markets

We simulate a series of daily returns from intraday price movements initiated by microstructure elements. Significant evidence is found that daily returns and daily return volatility exhibit first order autocorrelation, but trading volume and daily return volatility are not correlated, while intraday volatility is. We also consider GARCH effects in daily return series and show that estimates using daily returns are biased from the influence of the level of prices. Using daily price changes instead, we find evidence of a significant GARCH component. These results suggest that microstructure elements have a considerable influence on the return generating process.Comment: 15 pages, as presented at the Complexity Workshop in Aix-en-Provenc

Sixty original plays for primary grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Validation of magnetophonon spectroscopy as a tool for analyzing hot-electron effects in devices

It is shown that very high precision hot-electron magnetophonon experiments made on n+n−n+-GaAs sandwich device structures which are customized for magnetoresistance measurements can be very accurately modeled by a new Monte Carlo technique. The latter takes account of the Landau quantization and device architecture as well as material parameters. It is proposed that this combination of experiment and modeling yields a quantitative tool for the direct analysis of spatially localized very nonequilibrium electron distributions in small devices and low dimensional structures