Jane Eyre and Education

As the first female Bildungsroman in the English language, Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre focuses heavily on the theme of education. Throughout the course of the story, the character of Jane Eyre acquires a vast array of classical knowledge and ladylike accomplishments, facilitating her transition from a lowly student to a highly-respected teacher in true Bildungsroman fashion. Jane’s impressive scholarly abilities, however, contrast sharply with the deep struggles she undergoes as she pursues a much more difficult “education” in her personal beliefs. In the end, though, Jane masters both her mind and heart. Emboldened and liberated by her formal education, Jane finally balances her conflicting moral and spiritual desires to become a content and thoroughly self-confident young woman

Antibunching of distorted optical wave packets at a beam splitter

Interference of single-photon wave packets at a beam splitter usually leads to an anticorrelation of the light intensity in the two output ports of the beam splitter. The effect may be regarded as ``bunching'' of the photons at the beam splitter and has widely been interpreted as a result of quantum mechanical interference between the probability amplitudes of indistinguishable bosonic particles. Here we show that when the wave packets are sufficiently distorted, then the opposite behaviour is observed, i.e., simultaneous clicks of the photodetectors in the two output ports are favoured, which may be regarded as ``antibunching'' of the photons at the beam splitter.Comment: 16 pages, LaTex, 6 figure

Photon tunneling through absorbing dielectric barriers

Using a recently developed formalism of quantization of radiation in the presence of absorbing dielectric bodies, the problem of photon tunneling through absorbing barriers is studied. The multilayer barriers are described in terms of multistep complex permittivities in the frequency domain which satisfy the Kramers--Kronig relations. From the resulting input--output relations it is shown that losses in the layers may considerably change the photon tunneling times observed in two-photon interference experiments. It is further shown that for sufficiently large numbers of layers interference fringes are observed that cannot be related to a single traversal time.Comment: 17 pages LaTeX, 9 figures (PS) include

New Combinatorial Construction Techniques for Low-Density Parity-Check Codes and Systematic Repeat-Accumulate Codes

This paper presents several new construction techniques for low-density parity-check (LDPC) and systematic repeat-accumulate (RA) codes. Based on specific classes of combinatorial designs, the improved code design focuses on high-rate structured codes with constant column weights 3 and higher. The proposed codes are efficiently encodable and exhibit good structural properties. Experimental results on decoding performance with the sum-product algorithm show that the novel codes offer substantial practical application potential, for instance, in high-speed applications in magnetic recording and optical communications channels.Comment: 10 pages; to appear in "IEEE Transactions on Communications

The effects of cold rolling on the notched and unnotched tensile properties of type 310 stainless steel at plus 75 deg F, minus 320 deg F and minus 423 deg F

Effects of cold rolling on notched and unnotched tensile properties of type 310 stainless stee