Salman Rushdie’s Picture of Coexistence: Faith and Doubt in “The Parting of the Arabian Sea”

Graduate Textual or Investigativ

Adult sex offenders in youth-oriented institutions: evidence on sexual victimisation experiences of offenders and their offending patterns

This study investigates child sexual abuse committed by adult males in youth-oriented institutions. Foreword There is significant interest in the issue of child sexual abuse committed in institutional settings. This study uses information collected from a sample of 23 convicted Canadian sex offenders to examine key elements of the offending. Issues explored include the nature of the offender’s involvement with institutions, their own prior sexual victimisation experiences, factors influencing the selection of victims and the locations where the sexual assaults occurred. Particularly telling was the length of time offenders spent at an institution prior to initiating the assaults and the potential to avert offending by reducing opportunities to offend, as well as the associated danger evident in allowing staff—without supervision—to transport children outside of an institutional setting, given the frequency of the assaults that occurred offsite

Dark state lasers

We propose a new type of laser resonator based on imaginary "energy-level splitting" (imaginary coupling, or quality factor Q splitting) in a pair of coupled microcavities. A particularly advantageous arrangement involves two microring cavities with different free-spectral ranges (FSRs) in a configuration wherein they are coupled by "far-field" interference in a shared radiation channel. A novel Vernier-like effect for laser resonators is designed where only one longitudinal resonant mode has a lower loss than the small signal gain and can achieve lasing while all other modes are suppressed. This configuration enables ultra-widely tunable single-frequency lasers based on either homogeneously or inhomogeneously broadened gain media. The concept is an alternative to the common external cavity configurations for achieving tunable single-mode operation in a laser. The proposed laser concept builds on a high-Q "dark state" that is established by radiative interference coupling and bears a direct analogy to parity-time (PT) symmetric Hamiltonians in optical systems. Variants of this concept should be extendable to parametric-gain based oscillators, enabling use of ultrabroadband parametric gain for widely tunable single-frequency light sources

Tunable coupled-mode dispersion compensation and its application to on-chip resonant four-wave mixing

We propose and demonstrate localized mode coupling as a viable dispersion engineering technique for phase-matched resonant four-wave mixing (FWM). We demonstrate a dual-cavity resonant structure that employs coupling-induced frequency splitting at one of three resonances to compensate for cavity dispersion, enabling phase-matching. Coupling strength is controlled by thermal tuning of one cavity enabling active control of the resonant frequency-matching. In a fabricated silicon microresonator, we show an 8 dB enhancement of seeded FWM efficiency over the non-compensated state. The measured four-wave mixing has a peak wavelength conversion efficiency of -37.9 dB across a free spectral range (FSR) of 3.334 THz ($\sim$27 nm). Enabled by strong counteraction of dispersion, this FSR is, to our knowledge, the largest in silicon to demonstrate FWM to date. This form of mode-coupling-based, active dispersion compensation can be beneficial for many FWM-based devices including wavelength converters, parametric amplifiers, and widely detuned correlated photon-pair sources. Apart from compensating intrinsic dispersion, the proposed mechanism can alternatively be utilized in an otherwise dispersionless resonator to counteract the detuning effect of self- and cross-phase modulation on the pump resonance during FWM, thereby addressing a fundamental issue in the performance of light sources such as broadband optical frequency combs

Essay – The Toxic Legacy of Coal Ash on Southeastern Rivers, Waterways, and Reservoirs

My talk focuses on what I have called the toxic legacy of coal ash pollution in the Southeastern United States, andmy goal today is to give you all an insight into how we in the environmental communityby which I mean the waterkeepers and riverkeepersare seeing this issue. I also hope to share with you the perspective of the impacted communities and families that live downstream of these coal ash lagoons

The effects of drug and fatty acid binding on human serum albumin fluorescence

In order to create a laboratory experiment focused on Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer for undergraduate biochemistry students at Ball State University, Human Serum Albumin, an abundant and sponge-like blood protein, was studied through the eyes of a spectrofluorometer. HSA binds very readily to many types of ligands, including drugs and fatty acids. When the lone tryptophan molecule within HSA gets excited, it fluoresces. Changing the shape of the HSA molecule by adding a fatty acid, like palmitic acid, changes the type and intensity of the fluorescence given off by the tryptophan. Adding a drug that can participate in Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer, like tetracycline, before adding a fatty acid allows one to quantitatively study the change in shape of the HSA molecule by calculating the exact distance between the tryptophan and the tetracycline. Overall, this research project showed promising results for this idea, but time constraints and difficulties in producing consistent data in the later stages of the project detracted from the ability to form a final unifying conclusive product.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?

Catalonia's Separatist Swell

Artur Mas, the regional leader of Catalonia, signed a decree on September 27 calling for a non-binding consultation on independence to be held on November 9 to determine the region's fate. Recent polls indicate that half of Catalans would vote to break away from Spain, while the other half would vote to stay on current or more autonomous terms. In the likely scenario that the Spanish Constitutional Court suspends the decree on the grounds that it is illegal, Mas is expected to call off the November 9 consultation. If he backs down on the consultation, however, pressure will rise in Catalonia for early regional elections. His party, Convergència i Unió, will likely lose votes in such elections to the more radically pro-independence party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). If ERC makes big gains, Spain's prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, may soon face a new partner in Barcelona - one who is less willing to negotiate. Madrid would be wise to offer Barcelona far more than just fiscal concessions

SHIFTING THE ULTIMATUM: POLITICAL ALIENATION AND PARTICIPATION

Common knowledge dictates that cynicism and mistrust of politics is rampant among US citizens, wreaking havoc on participation in the American political process. Social Capital theories are commonly used to effectively explain US political behavior, but fail to account for alienation from the political process or the influence of peers. I argue that models of political participation would be improved by the inclusion of political alienation variables, which have fallen into disuse in recent decades. Using data from the US Citizenship, Involvement, and Democracy Survey (2006), this paper relies upon negative binomial regression with nested models to compare the explanatory power of social capital variables with models including political alienation and peer influence variables to assess the value of such concepts. Results indicate that while the parent variables of political alienation (powerlessness, meaninglessness, and mistrust of political institutions) improve model accuracy and influence political participation, the latent variable remains ambiguously useful. Powerlessness and mistrust revealed significant effects, but mistrust failed to fit into the latent concept of political alienation, and meaninglessness did not produce significant results. Peer influence only significantly affected political participation when participants specifically discussed political matters with peers. Implications and concepts for future research follow

Alien Registration- Albert, Cale (Millinocket, Penobscot County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/7983/thumbnail.jp