Adaption of space station technology for lunar operations

Space Station Freedom technology will have the potential for numerous applications in an early lunar base program. The benefits of utilizing station technology in such a fashion include reduced development and facility costs for lunar base systems, shorter schedules, and verification of such technology through space station experience. This paper presents an assessment of opportunities for using station technology in a lunar base program, particularly in the lander/ascent vehicles and surface modules

Whipped oil stabilised by surfactant crystals

We describe a protocol for preparing very stable air-in-oil foams starting with a one-phase oil solution of a fatty acid (myristic acid) in high oleic sunflower oil at high temperature. Upon cooling below the solubility limit, a two-phase mixture consisting of fatty acid crystals (length around 50 μm) dispersed in an oil solution at its solubility is formed which, after whipping, coat air bubbles in the foam. Foams which do not drain, coalesce or coarsen may be produced either by increasing the fatty acid concentration at fixed temperature or aerating the mixtures at different temperatures at constant concentration. We prove that molecular fatty acid is not surface-active as no foam is possible in the one-phase region. Once the two-phase region is reached, fatty acid crystals are shown to be surface-active enabling foam formation, and excess crystals serve to gel the continuous oil phase enhancing foam stability. A combination of rheology, X-ray diffraction and pulsed nuclear magnetic resonance is used to characterise the crystals and oil gels formed before aeration. The crystal-stabilised foams are temperature-sensitive, being rendered completely unstable on heating around the melting temperature of the crystals. The findings are extended to a range of vegetable oil foams stabilised by a combination of adsorbed crystals and gelling of the oil phase, which destabilise at different temperatures depending on the composition and type of fatty acid chains in the triglyceride molecules

On the Thom Isomorphism for Groupoid-Equivariant Representable K-Theory

This thesis proves a general Thom Isomorphism in groupoid-equivariant KK-theory. Through formalizing a certain pushforward functor, we contextualize the Thom isomorphism to groupoid-equivariant representable K-theory with various support conditions. Additionally, we explicitly verify that a Thom class, determined by pullback of the Bott element via a generalized groupoid homomorphism, coincides with a Thom class defined via equivariant spinor bundles and Clifford multiplication. The tools developed in this thesis are then used to generalize a particularly interesting equivalence of two Thom isomorphisms on TX, for a Riemannian G-manifold X

The Byline of Europe: An Examination of Foreign Correspondents\u27 Reporting from 1930 to 1941

This thesis focuses on two of the largest foreign correspondents’ networks the one of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times- in prewar Europe and especially in Germany, thus providing a wider perspective on the foreign correspondents’ role in news reporting and, more importantly, how their reporting appeared in the published newspaper. It provides a new, broader perspective on how foreign news reporting portrayed European events to the American public. It describes the correspondents’ role in publishing articles over three time periods- 1930 to 1933, 1933-1939, and 1939 to 1941. Reporting and consequently the published paper depended on the correspondents’ ingenuity in the relationship with the foreign government(s); their cultural knowledge; and their gender. All of this depended on the correspondents’ gender, cultural knowledge, and ingenuity. The reporters who combined them all under the right condition became legends in mass media and set a standard for international reporting. This standard influenced how mass media portrayed foreign conflicts and American’s perceptions of them years after the war

Warfare and Welcome: Practicality and Qur’ānic Hierarchy in Ibāḍī Muslims’ Jurisprudential Rulings on Music

While much ink has been spilled by musicologists on the legal standing of music in Islamic jurisprudential scholarship, few scholars have offered as comprehensive a view as Lois Ibsen Al-Faruqi. Thirty-five years after her major works on this issue, this article seeks to reassess her model of musical legitimacy within Muslim scholarship. Al-Faruqi places Qur’ānic recitation at the apex of a unidirectional continuum of sound art, with genres less similar to the recitation of the Qur’ān located progressively further away from it. Based on fieldwork in the Sultanate of Oman in 2015-17 and engaging with recent reinvigorations on the anthropological study of value, I present three connected claims. First, rather than criticizing or overturning Al-Faruqi’s thesis, I build on it by teasing out a latent Dumontian premise: while similarity to Qur’ānic recitation is the “cardinal value” of the Qur’ānic hierarchy, on other, conceptually “lower” levels, other contradictory logics of valuation may operate. Second, I argue that the latent value dimension of practicality, which is commonly articulated by Muslim scholars but little commented upon by musicologists, helps to explain why practices as diverse as occupational, life-cycle, and military music are Islamically licit while bearing no formal similarity to recitation. Finally, I closely examine a recent work of Ibāḍī legal scholarship that deals precisely with music in order to showcase how practicality and the necessities of warfare—particularly in the Omani case—have intersected with concerns over the legality of useful music. By breaking apart Al-Faruqi’s model and proposing my own relational-hierarchical model, I highlight divergent lower value dimensions that are ultimately encompassed by the value of the recited Qur’ān

Poems to Open Palms: Praise Performance and the State in the Sultanate of Oman

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered within two song and dance complexes: al-razḥa, a collective war dance with drumming and antiphonal choral singing, and al-‘āzī, a choral ode with a solo singer, tight poetic structure, and a chorus of responders. Through a close analysis of the content and context of praise poems sung by Arab men’s performance troupes experienced over a year of participant observation fieldwork, I argue that praise poetry is an overlooked site for the construction and negotiation of state political legitimacy. Drawing on heterodox and Gramscian political economy, I show how musical performance operates within broader circuits of exchange by functioning as a site wherein non-market economic logics are fused with moral, performative, and political norms. Instead of simply tracing a circuit of utilitarian exchange (praise for gifts for praise), I focus on the how gifts and their responses reciprocally negotiate social relations between state elites and non-elites. By focusing on the words and actions of non elites as they integrate the various proffered benefits of a distributive state into their own communities, I attempt to complicate standard explanations of Arabian Gulf politics and statecraft. I posit two social mechanisms—one which relates generosity and political legitimacy and one that relates performance with the construction of a moral political community—and then follow them through their operation in social space. By singing praise poetry at celebrations of state distribution, praisers rhetorically render such state gifting as “generosity,” which is deeply tied to good leadership in the Omani context. In addition, praisers simultaneously mythopoetically generate a political community of generous givers and grateful receivers who are linked by relations of history, homeland, religion, and kinship. In this way, praise “opens palms” and induces continued elite distributions. However, unequal gifting is fraught with social hazard and threatens to trap communities in dependency relations with the state. By attending to the pragmatics of performance, however, I argue that razḥa and ‘āzī tacitly address this threat of dependency by performing strength and dignity while simultaneously seeking to redraw the relations of unequal gifting from ones of dependency to ones of mutual obligation—a “moral economy.” This ethnomusicological study is an attempt to show how musical and linguistic performers draw on a wide variety of tacit and explicit economic, moral, political, and communal factors in order to take social action in a context of authoritarian state hegemony