Trauma and the fantastic in twentieth century war fiction

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on June 14, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Thesis advisor: Dr. Samuel Cohen.M.A. University of Missouri--Columbia 2010.This thesis examines the relationship between trauma and the literary mode of the fantastic. While the fantastic has historically been understood as an escapist mode or a literature of wish fulfillment, it may also play an important role in how victims of trauma construct their narratives. The fantastic does not simply leave trauma behind or provide pleasant alternatives to actual experiences; rather, it can constitute the acting out of trauma, facilitate working through, and even enable victims to bear witness to the traumatic past. After a brief overview of both trauma theory and the effects of combat trauma, this study offers readings of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, John A. Williams' Captain Blackman, and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato to show that fantastic elements in trauma narratives can be read as responses to and manifestations of trauma. The second chapter returns to O'Brien's novel to examine the fantastic mode as a means of healing. The study concludes with an analysis of the fantastic as bearing witness to real historical events in addition to those that make up the experience of trauma itself.Includes bibliographical references

Coupling light into optical fibres near the diffraction limit

The burgeoning field of astrophotonics explores the interface between astronomy and photonics. Important applications include photonic OH suppression at near-infrared wavelengths, and integrated photonic spectroscopy. These new photonic mechanisms are not well matched to conventional multi-mode fibres and are best fed with single or few-mode fibres. We envisage the largest gains in astrophotonics will come from instruments that operate with single or few-mode fibres in the diffraction limited or near diffraction limited regimes. While astronomical instruments have largely solved the problem of coupling light into multi-mode fibres this is largely unexplored territory for few-mode and single-mode fibres. Here we describe a project to explore this topic in detail, and present initial results on coupling light into single and few-mode fibres at the diffraction limit. We find that fibres with as few as ~5 guided modes have qualitatively different behaviour to single-mode fibres and share a number of the beneficial characteristics of multi-mode fibres.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Proc. SPIE 6269 Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronom

DAzLE: The Dark Ages z (redshift) Lyman-alpha Explorer

DAzLE is an near infrared narrowband differential imager being built by the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, in collaboration with the Anglo-Australian observatory. It is a special purpose instrument designed with a sole aim; the detection of redshifted Lyman-alpha emission from star forming galaxies at z>7. DAzLE will use pairs of high resolution (R=1000) narrowband filters to exploit low background `windows' in the near infrared sky emission spectrum. This will enable it to reach sensitivities of ~2E-21 W/m^2, thereby allowing the detection of z>7 galaxies with star formation rates as low as a few solar masses per year. The design of the instrument, and in particular the crucial narrowband filters, are presented. The predicted performance of DAzLE, including the sensitivity, volume coverage and expected number counts, is discussed. The current status of the DAzLE project, and its projected timeline, are also presented.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 5492, Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronom

The diversity of well-being indicators: a latent profile analysis

IntroductionResearch on the dimensional structure of subjective well-being (SWB) suggests a five-dimensional solution, consisting of the three established dimensions of life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect, and two additional empirically supported dimensions: domain satisfaction and happiness. While these dimensions can be aggregated into a superordinate SWB construct, little research has explored how these dimensions differ in their variation across subpopulations of individuals.MethodsThe present study addresses this gap via secondary analysis of a sample of 1,487 partnered individuals, using the five dimensions of SWB as indicators for latent profile analysis.ResultsAnalyses returned five profiles, which we labeled Satisfied, Ambivalent, Indifferent, Dissatisfied, and Very Dissatisfied. In the Ambivalent and Indifferent profiles, the dimensions of negative affect and happiness exhibit discrepant behavior, resulting in shape differences. The five profiles are organized with reference to the external criterion of couple satisfaction. At the theoretical level, the results of the present study have the potential to inform current debates about the structure of well-being.DiscussionThese findings suggest that, while SWB can usually be measured as a unidimensional construct, there is still merit to using multidimensional approaches and alternative forms of measurement-such as LPA-that capture complexities normally absent from unidimensional treatments. At the practical level, the results of the current study have the potential to inform well-being interventions (both clinical and otherwise), suggesting that those dealing with well-being in real life situations should pause before concluding that the absence of negativity implies the presence of positivity, or vice versa

The Australian Space Eye: studying the history of galaxy formation with a CubeSat

The Australian Space Eye is a proposed astronomical telescope based on a 6U CubeSat platform. The Space Eye will exploit the low level of systematic errors achievable with a small space based telescope to enable high accuracy measurements of the optical extragalactic background light and low surface brightness emission around nearby galaxies. This project is also a demonstrator for several technologies with general applicability to astronomical observations from nanosatellites. Space Eye is based around a 90 mm aperture clear aperture all refractive telescope for broadband wide field imaging in the i and z bands.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, submitted for publication as Proc. SPIE 9904, 9904-56 (SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation 2016

PyCPL: The ESO Common Pipeline Library in Python v1.0

PyCPL provides full access to ESO's Common Pipeline Library ( CPL) for astronomical data reduction within a Python environment. Not only does it offer a Python interface to the robust CPL library, but it also lets users and developers fully utilise the rest of the scientific Python ecosystem. We have written a C++ layer to CPL and with pybind11 (a third-party library) created a Pythonic API to CPL. Since CPL has been around for so long, it has been thoroughly tested and understood. In 2003 it was developed in C due to its efficiency and speed of execution. With the community however moving away from C/C++ programming and embracing Python for data processing tasks, there is a need to provide access to the CPL utilities within a Python environment. With the latest version being released users can now install PyCPL to run existing CPL recipes (written in C) and access the results from Python. It also provides the ability to create new recipes in Python using the functionality provided by CPL.Comment: This paper was for a poster presented in ADASS XXXIII. poster number P92

Dwarfism on Dwarf Millets

Our research team studied the effect of Dwarf mutations on Millet plant growth. To study these effects a plant hormone named Gibberellin was periodically added to the plants. Gibberellin is a hormone used in plants to grow, elongate, and flower the plant stems. With the addition of Gibberellin to millet plants, we compared the elongation of Millet stem length (cm) to the Millet wild-type generations. We hypothesized the implementation of Gibberellin would boost the growth rate and size of dwarf mutated millet