Pinups and Pinball: The Sexualized Female Image in Pinball Artwork

Since the commercialization of pinball in the 1930s, the pinball industry has used art and imagery to promote the pinball machine as a product and to generate and cultivate its audience. Much of that imagery has relied on sexualizing and stereotyping women to appeal to a presumed male player. In this thesis, I explore how the depiction of women on pinball machines has evolved from the 1930s to 1970s, with a specific focus on artwork from 1970 to 1979. This is followed by an examination of how second wave feminism, popular culture, and the introduction of film licensing may (or may not) have influenced artwork design and production. I will then present the findings of a quantitative analysis of stereotypes in pinball artwork from 1970-1979 and consider areas of further research. I examined sources from The Strong National Museum of Play (Rochester, NY), in particular the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) Collection and the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. Combined, my analysis documents how the depiction of women has or has not changed in pinball artwork over time, and what it might mean today for a niche industry to depend on the visual sexualization of women for its commercial success

Relativistic Effects on the Appearance of a Clothed Black Hole

For an accretion disk around a black hole, the strong relativistic effects affect every aspect of the radiation from the disk, including its spectrum, light-curve, and image. This work investigates in detail how the images of a thin disk around a black hole will be distorted, and what the observer will see from different viewing angles and in different energy bands.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Based on the poster presented at the Sixth Pacific Rim Conference on Stellar Astrophysics (Xi'an, China, July 11-17, 2002). Color versions of figures are given separatel

The relativistic Iron K-alpha line from an accretion disc onto a static non-baryonic compact object

This paper continues the study of the properties of an accretion disc rotating around a non-baryonic (assumed super-massive) compact object. This kind of objects, generically known as boson stars, were earlier proposed as a possible alternative scenario to the existence of super-masive black holes in the center of every galaxy. A dilute boson star has also been proposed as a large part of the non-baryonic dark matter, flattening galactic rotational velocities curves. In this contribution, we compute the profile of the emission lines of Iron; its shape has been for long known as a useful diagnosis of the space-time geometry. We compare with the case of a Schwarzschild black hole, concluding that the differences are observationally distinguishable.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Accretion Disk Illumination in Schwarzschild and Kerr Geometries: Fitting Formulae

We describe the methodology and compute the illumination of geometrically thin accretion disks around black holes of arbitrary spin parameter $a$ exposed to the radiation of a point-like, isotropic source at arbitrary height above the disk on its symmetry axis. We then provide analytic fitting formulae for the illumination as a function of the source height $h$ and the black hole angular momentum $a$. We find that for a source on the disk symmetry axis and $h/M > 3$, the main effect of the parameter $a$ is allowing the disk to extend to smaller radii (approaching $r/M \to 1$ as $a/M \to 1$) and thus allow the illumination of regions of much higher rotational velocity and redshift. We also compute the illumination profiles for anisotropic emission associated with the motion of the source relative to the accretion disk and present the fractions of photons absorbed by the black hole, intercepted by the disk or escaping to infinity for both isotropic and anisotropic emission for $a/M=0$ and $a/M=0.99$. As the anisotropy (of a source approaching the disk) increases the illumination profile reduces (approximately) to a single power-law, whose index, $q$, because of absorption of the beamed photons by the black hole, saturates to a value no higher than $q \gtrsim 3$. Finally, we compute the fluorescence Fe line profiles associated with the specific illumination and compare them among various cases.Comment: 26 pages, 21 b/w figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal as of 4/16/200

Low-Temperature Photothermal Measurements of High-TCSuperconductors

Thermal conductivity provides important information on the scattering mechanisms in a material. In anisotropic materials, such as the high-temperature superconductors, the thermal conductivity depends on the anisotropy of both the charge carriers and the lattice contribution. The conductivity also depends intimately on the nature of the electron-phonon interactions which are a major source of the scattering. Since the electron-phonon interaction also plays a critical role in the Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity, measurements of the thermal conductivity can provide insight into the superconducting mechanism

Iron K-alpha Fluorescent Line Profiles from Spiral Accretion Flows in AGNs

We present 6.4 keV iron K-alpha fluorescent line profiles predicted for a relativistic black hole accretion disk in the presence of a spiral motion in Kerr geometry, the work extended from an earlier literature motivated by recent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. The velocity field of the spiral motion, superposed on the background Keplerian flow, results in a complicated redshift distribution in the accretion disk. An X-ray source attributed to a localized flaring region on the black hole symmetry axis illuminates the iron in the disk. The emissivity form becomes very steep because of the light bending effect from the primary X-ray source to the disk. The predicted line profile is calculated for various spiral waves, and we found, regardless of the source height, that: (i) a multiple-peak along with a classical double-peak structure generally appears, (ii) such a multiple-peak can be categorized into two types, sharp sub-peaks and periodic spiky peaks, (iii) a tightly-packed spiral wave tends to produce more spiky multiple peaks, whereas (iv) a spiral wave with a larger amplitude seems to generate more sharp sub-peaks, (v) the effect seems to be less significant when the spiral wave is centrally concentrated, (vi) the line shape may show a drastic change (forming a double-peak, triple-peak or multiple-peak feature) as the spiral wave rotates with the disk. Our results emphasize that around a rapidly-rotating black hole an extremely redshifted iron line profile with a noticeable spike-like feature can be realized in the presence of the spiral wave. Future X-ray observations, from {\it Astro-E2} for example, will have sufficient spectral resolution for testing our spiral wave model which exhibits unique spike-like features.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ApJ, will be presented at 204th Meeting of AAS in Denve

Substratos orgânicos e adubo de liberação lenta na produção de mudas de cajueiro-anão-precoce.

bitstream/item/79869/1/Substratos-Organicos.pd