The Art Of Resistance: An Arts Based Understanding Of Activism

In this project, the researcher explored the ways that millennial activists articulated the role of emotions in their activisms through artistic means. Specifically, through the production of zines, a format that eschews standardization but often reflect non-dominant positionalities, millennial activists explored their articulations, experiences, and engagement with activism. Informed by arts-based research (ABR) the researcher analyzed data from an emic perspective. Analyzing the experiences of the 14 millennial activists who reflected a heterogeneous group, the researcher represents eight themes: the demands of artistry; building community; distance in families of birth; resistance to oppression; emotion; mental health, self-care, and guilt; the South; and social media. This study makes scholarly contributions to the empirical, theoretical, and methodological spheres of education research, and student activism and is a resource for educational researchers, scholar-activists, and university administrators who work in community with young adult activists. Specifically, implications from the research include among others: changes in support and policy for historically underrepresented students, and campus response to hate-inciting speakers and events on and near college campuses, the incorporation of new technologies in student affairs outreach, new formations of university leadership, and a call for universities to be proactive to support historically underrepresented students

Studies of Hydrogen Defects and Free-Carrier Absorption in Transparent Conducting Oxides using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy

Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) are wide-band-gap, metal-oxide semiconductors that combine high electrical conductivity with transparency to visible light. These properties have made TCOs attractive candidates for many optoelectronics applications. Although the origin of the conductivity of TCOs has traditionally been attributed to native defects such as oxygen vacancies and cation interstitials, theoretical calculations show that these defects are deep-level defects and therefore cannot be responsible for the n-type conductivity. Recent reports have shown that hydrogen, often incorporated unintentionally into the sample during crystal growth, acts as a shallow donor and is likely a source of the unexpected conductivity. Understanding the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen-related defects in these materials is vital for controlling the conductivity, and for the continued development of transparent electronic devices.Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool for studying the vibrational properties of hydrogen-related defects in semiconductors, and can reveal information about the atomic composition, microscopic structure, and thermal stability of a defect. Measurement of the absorption in the IR spectral region due to free carriers provides a contact-free method for probing the electrical conductivity of a material. This dissertation presents three different studies of defects in TCOs.Experimental methods were developed to quantitatively measure the transmission spectra of materials in the near-infrared and mid-infrared spectral regions at different temperatures using an FTIR spectrometer. This technique was used to study the free carrier absorption and the carrier scattering mechanisms in n-type, hydrothermally grown, ZnO single crystals.Previous IR studies have assigned the 3306 cm-1 O-H vibrational line observed in as-grown and hydrogenated In2O3 single crystals to the interstitial hydrogen shallow donor (Hi+). Polarized IR absorption measurements of In2O3 single crystals under [001] and [110] uniaxial stresses reveal that the Hi+ defect has [110] monoclinic symmetry, which is consistent with that predicted by theory. A stress-induced alignment has been observed in samples under [001] stress. The reorientation process giving this alignment corresponds to a diffusion jump. The combination of diffusivities determined at low temperature from uniaxial stress experiments and high temperatures from bulk diffusion experiments (Ying Qin) reveal the diffusivity of Hi+ across 10 decades. Monoclinic gallium oxide (b-Ga2O3) is a TCO that has received renewed interest due to its large band gap of 4.9 eV, which makes it transparent at ultra-violet wavelengths. Hydrogenated b-Ga2O3 samples show a strong O-H vibrational line at 3437 cm-1 comprising two equivalent hydrogens. The line has a high thermal stability (~ 900 °C) and exhibits interesting polarization properties. The combination of experimental data and first principles calculations using CRYSTAL06 suggest that the 3437 cm-1 O-H line originates from a gallium vacancy complexed with two hydrogens

B spectroscopy using all-to-all propagators

We measure the ground and excited states for B mesons in the static limit using maximally variance reduced estimators for light quark propagators. Because of the large number of propagators we are able to measure accurately also orbitally excited P, D and F states. We also present some results for Lambda_b.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Talk presented at Lattice '97 by J. Peis

On the computational complexity of dynamic slicing problems for program schemas

This is the preprint version of the Article - Copyright @ 2011 Cambridge University PressGiven a program, a quotient can be obtained from it by deleting zero or more statements. The field of program slicing is concerned with computing a quotient of a program that preserves part of the behaviour of the original program. All program slicing algorithms take account of the structural properties of a program, such as control dependence and data dependence, rather than the semantics of its functions and predicates, and thus work, in effect, with program schemas. The dynamic slicing criterion of Korel and Laski requires only that program behaviour is preserved in cases where the original program follows a particular path, and that the slice/quotient follows this path. In this paper we formalise Korel and Laski's definition of a dynamic slice as applied to linear schemas, and also formulate a less restrictive definition in which the path through the original program need not be preserved by the slice. The less restrictive definition has the benefit of leading to smaller slices. For both definitions, we compute complexity bounds for the problems of establishing whether a given slice of a linear schema is a dynamic slice and whether a linear schema has a non-trivial dynamic slice, and prove that the latter problem is NP-hard in both cases. We also give an example to prove that minimal dynamic slices (whether or not they preserve the original path) need not be unique.This work was partly supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK, under grant EP/E002919/1

Testing the role of body size and litter depth on invertebrate diversity across six forests in North America

Ecologists search for rules by which traits dictate the abundance and distribution of species. Here we search for rules that apply across three common taxa of litter invertebrates in six North American forests from Panama to Oregon. We use image analysis to quantify the abundance and body size distributions of mites, springtails, and spiders in 21 1-m2 plots per forest. We contrast three hypotheses: two of which focus on trait–abundance relationships and a third linking abundance to species richness. Despite three orders of magnitude variation in size, the predicted negative relationship between mean body size and abundance per area occurred in only 18% of cases, never for large bodied taxa like spiders. We likewise found only 18% of tests supported our prediction that increasing litter depth allows for high abundance; two-thirds of which occurred at a single deciduous forest in Massachusetts. In contrast, invertebrate abundance constrained species richness 76% of the time. Our results suggest that body size and habitat volume in brown food webs are rarely good predictors of variation in abundance, but that variation in diversity is generally well predicted by abundance.publishedVersio