Nobel Gas Mass Spectometry

From the Washington University Office of Undergraduate Research Digest (WUURD), Vol. 12, 05-01-2017. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentor: Alex Meshi

'A Huge Blunder from Beginning to End': Colonial Archives and the Hong Kong Commission of Baron Raimund von Stillfried

Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011.This paper examines an album of photographs of the visit of the Royal Princes Albert Victor and George of Wales to the British colony of Hong Kong in 1881-1882. As an official commission of the Governor-General Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the Austrian photographer, Baron Raimund von Stillfried, endeavoured to satisfy his patron's demand for a deluxe souvenir of the royal visit. This case study emphasizes the potential of official commissions to embarrass their colonial masters and render the mechanisms of colonial bureaucracy open to public scrutiny. As the full financial cost of the commission became known, the subsequent public scandal threatened to compromise the photographs' intention as testaments of colonial order and authority. The controversial history of this commission effectively ensured the photographic album's burial in colonial archives as a compromised document of state maladministration. To borrow Christopher Pinney's recent term, it provides a salient reminder of the potential 'poison' of photography for the operations of colonial governance. This paper highlights the hazards of photography for the purposes of colonial officials and the potential of colonial archives to reveal alternative histories of photography's unruly relations with colonial and institutional power.Conference supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the NYU Humanities Initiative, the IFA Visual Resources Collections, and Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Visual Resources Collection

Novel excitations in driven vortex channels in a superconductor, and solitary waves of light and atoms in photonic crystal fibres

This is a thesis in two parts. In Part I, we will study the shear response of confined vortices. In Part 2, we will study light and matter interactions in photonic crystal fibres. Whilst the approaches of each are completely different, they both have the same central theme: solitons. In the first part of this thesis we study the static and dynamic properties of vortices within a Type-II superconductor, confined within a channel. The channel comprises a collection of pinned vortices, which form the perfect triangular lattice in the boundary, and rows of “free” particles which are driven via an external force. We provide two main results within this system. First we calculate the potential stemming from the boundary, and derive (under certain approximations) the phenomenologically accepted result for the critical shear dependence on the system width. We then study a novel system in which a defect is placed in a deformable potential; specifically a system comprised of two channels where one or both channels have a defect. This system provides a mechanism for the proliferation of kink/kink and anti-kink/anti-kink pairs as the defect binds to a local excitation in the form of a “breather”. We observe and explain what appears to be an action at a distance style interaction between excitations. In Part II, we will utilise the nonlinear effects of a Bose condensate and the unique optical properties of a photonic crystal fibre to demonstrate there are nonlinearly stable configurations which exist in the vicinity of an optical mode with a cut-off. These are solitary waves, whose relative composition of atoms and photons may be changed via altering the detuning of light from an atomic transition and Feshbach resonances

April-Fool

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3498/thumbnail.jp

The Lilac Tree : Perspicacity

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/1985/thumbnail.jp

'Enough is enough': Austin, knowledge and context

This thesis is concerned with J.L. Austin’s work on the topic of empirical knowledge. Austin encourages us to attend to our everyday epistemic and discursive practices, and specifically to the particular circumstances in which we might ordinarily say that a person knows something. I begin by considering what kind of illumination on the topic of empirical knowledge we might expect to get by following Austin’s approach, and defend Austin’s approach against one influential critique. The focus then shifts to one of Austin’s key observations regarding knowledge, namely that knowing is a matter of having done ‘enough’ for present intents and purposes to establish the truth. I argue that this and other Austinian considerations speak in favour of a contextualist account of knowledge. Finally, I present a novel Austin-inspired response to one particular sceptical puzzle occasioned by what have been referred to as ‘arguments from ignorance’

Molly Mine

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/3665/thumbnail.jp

'A Huge Blunder from Beginning to End': Colonial Archives and the Hong Kong Commission of Baron Raimund von Stillfried

Conference paper presented March 25-26, 2011.This paper examines an album of photographs of the visit of the Royal Princes Albert Victor and George of Wales to the British colony of Hong Kong in 1881-1882. As an official commission of the Governor-General Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the Austrian photographer, Baron Raimund von Stillfried, endeavoured to satisfy his patron's demand for a deluxe souvenir of the royal visit. This case study emphasizes the potential of official commissions to embarrass their colonial masters and render the mechanisms of colonial bureaucracy open to public scrutiny. As the full financial cost of the commission became known, the subsequent public scandal threatened to compromise the photographs' intention as testaments of colonial order and authority. The controversial history of this commission effectively ensured the photographic album's burial in colonial archives as a compromised document of state maladministration. To borrow Christopher Pinney's recent term, it provides a salient reminder of the potential 'poison' of photography for the operations of colonial governance. This paper highlights the hazards of photography for the purposes of colonial officials and the potential of colonial archives to reveal alternative histories of photography's unruly relations with colonial and institutional power.Conference supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the NYU Humanities Initiative, the IFA Visual Resources Collections, and Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Visual Resources Collection