Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Chad Weidner reviews Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Ocean by Sue Goyette and Timely Irreverence by Jay MillAr

Review of Ocean by Sue Goyette and Timely Irreverence by Jay MillAr

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture by Karen Raber

Chad Weidner reviews Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture by Karen Raber

The cat inside

An encyclopedia entry for "The Cat Inside" by William Burroughs

America after nature: democracy, culture, environment

Reseña del libro: Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun, eds., "America after Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment" (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016), 485 pp

Becoming the demon: animal activism and the problem of violence

Animal rights activists use a variety of approaches to achieving ideological aims. This presentation examines the problems of violence both in terms of ethics and praxis. This presentation explores how violent animal activists actually turn themselves into targets of the police, the legal system, and the public. Ultimately, this presentation suggests that countering violence against animals through the act of violence offers no lasting solutions and actually perpetuates poor treatment of nonhuman creatures

Non-trivial scaling of self-phase modulation and three-photon absorption in III-V photonic crystal waveguides

We investigate the nonlinear response of photonic crystal waveguides with suppressed two-photon absorption. A moderate decrease of the group velocity (~ c/6 to c/15, a factor of 2.5) results in a dramatic (30x) enhancement of three-photon absorption well beyond the expected scaling, proportional to 1/(vg)^3. This non-trivial scaling of the effective nonlinear coefficients results from pulse compression, which further enhances the optical field beyond that of purely slow-group velocity interactions. These observations are enabled in mm-long slow-light photonic crystal waveguides owing to the strong anomalous group-velocity dispersion and positive chirp. Our numerical physical model matches measurements remarkably.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Searching for a Stochastic Background of Gravitational Waves with LIGO

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has performed the fourth science run, S4, with significantly improved interferometer sensitivities with respect to previous runs. Using data acquired during this science run, we place a limit on the amplitude of a stochastic background of gravitational waves. For a frequency independent spectrum, the new limit is $\Omega_{\rm GW} < 6.5 \times 10^{-5}$. This is currently the most sensitive result in the frequency range 51-150 Hz, with a factor of 13 improvement over the previous LIGO result. We discuss complementarity of the new result with other constraints on a stochastic background of gravitational waves, and we investigate implications of the new result for different models of this background.Comment: 37 pages, 16 figure