A Shplit Ticket, Half Irish, Half Chinay : Representations of Mixed-Race and Hybridity in the Turn-of-the-Century Theater

Charles Townsend\u27s 1889 adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin features white actors playing light- and dark-skinned African-American characters, changing degrees of make-up as the script, stage business, or number of available players demands. Thomas Denison\u27s stage directions to his 1895 play, Patsy O\u27Wang, an Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-Up, stipulates that the alternation of the half -Chinese, half-Irish cook between his two ethnic personas is key to this capital farce, and that a comedie use of the Chinese dialect is central to this. The Geezer (c. 1896), Joseph Herbert\u27s spoof of the popular musical, The Geisha, features white actors playing Chinese dignitaries, but also donning German and Irish accents. The white actors in these plays enact different paradigms of hybridity. The actors in Townsend\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin, a Melodrama in Five Acts embody conceptions of both mixed and unmixed African Americans, freely alternating between each. In Patsy O\u27Wang, the main character\u27s background is central to the story, and the lead actor moves between the two ethnicities by his accent, mannerisms, and politics. Racial mixing is central to the plot of The Geezer through Anglo actors who make themselves hybrid by appearing Chinese and appropriating a third accent, rather than the creation of racially mixed offspring

Intermittent turbulence and turbulent structures in a linear magnetized plasma

Strongly intermittent turbulence is observed in the shadow of a limiter in the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at UCLA [W. Gekelman, H. Pfister, Z. Lucky, J. Bamber, D. Leneman, and J. Maggs, Rev. Sci. Inst. {\bfseries 62}, 2875 (1991)]. The amplitude probability distribution function (PDF) of the turbulence is strongly skewed, with density depletion events (or ``holes'') dominant in the high density region and density enhancement events (or ``blobs'') dominant in the low density region. Two-dimensional cross-conditional averaging shows that the blobs are detached, outward-propagating filamentary structures with a clear dipolar potential while the holes appear to be part of a more extended turbulent structure. A statistical study of the blobs reveals a typical size of ten times the ion sound gyroradius and a typical velocity of one tenth the sound speed.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Physics of Plasma

Fuel optimal maneuvers of spacecraft about a circular orbit

Fuel optimal maneuvers of spacecraft relative to a body in circular orbit are investigated using a point mass model in which the magnitude of the thrust vector is bounded. All nonsingular optimal maneuvers consist of intervals of full thrust and coast and are found to contain at most seven such intervals in one period. Only four boundary conditions where singular solutions occur are possible. Computer simulation of optimal flight path shapes and switching functions are found for various boundary conditions. Emphasis is placed on the problem of soft rendezvous with a body in circular orbit

Social Network Analysis with sna

Modern social network analysis---the analysis of relational data arising from social systems---is a computationally intensive area of research. Here, we provide an overview of a software package which provides support for a range of network analytic functionality within the R statistical computing environment. General categories of currently supported functionality are described, and brief examples of package syntax and usage are shown.

network: A Package for Managing Relational Data in R

Effective memory structures for relational data within R must be capable of representing a wide range of data while keeping overhead to a minimum. The network package provides an class which may be used for encoding complex relational structures composed a vertex set together with any combination of undirected/directed, valued/unvalued, dyadic/hyper, and single/multiple edges; storage requirements are on the order of the number of edges involved. Some simple constructor, interface, and visualization functions are provided, as well as a set of operators to facilitate employment by end users. The package also supports a C-language API, which allows developers to work directly with network objects within backend code.

Graphene valley filter using a line defect

With its two degenerate valleys at the Fermi level, the band structure of graphene provides the opportunity to develop unconventional electronic applications. Herein, we show that electron and hole quasiparticles in graphene can be filtered according to which valley they occupy without the need to introduce confinement. The proposed valley filter is based on scattering off a recently observed line defect in graphene. Quantum transport calculations show that the line defect is semitransparent and that quasiparticles arriving at the line defect with a high angle of incidence are transmitted with a valley polarization near 100%.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Valley and spin polarization from graphene line defect scattering

Quantum transport calculations describing electron scattering off an extended line defect in graphene are presented. The calculations include potentials from local magnetic moments recently predicted to exist on sites adjacent to the line defect. The transmission probability is derived and expressed as a function of valley, spin, and angle of incidence of an electron at the Fermi level being scattered. It is shown that the previously predicted valley polarization in a beam of transmitted electrons is not significantly influenced by the presence of the magnetic moments. These moments, however, do introduce some spin polarization, in addition to the valley polarization, albeit no more than about 20%.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure