Coherent Perfect Rotation

Two classes of conservative, linear, optical rotary effects (optical activity and Faraday rotation) are distinguished by their behavior under time reversal. In analogy with coherent perfect absorption, where counterpropagating light fields are controllably converted into other degrees of freedom, we show that only time-odd (Faraday) rotation is capable of coherent perfect rotation in a linear and conservative medium, by which we mean the complete transfer of counterpropagating coherent light fields into their orthogonal polarization. This highlights the necessity of time reversal odd processes (not just absorption) and coherence in perfect mode conversion and may inform device design.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Retroactivity Analysis After Brand X

Under Brand X, federal courts must reverse their own prior precedent in deference to an intervening agency decision if that agency decision is based on a reasonable interpretation of the statute. Thus, if the first-in-time court sets the law at A, and if a second-in-time agency later finds that B is a superior interpretation of the statute, then the third-in-time court must defer to the agency and move the law from A to B. But can law B be retroactively applied to a litigant who reasonably relied on the first-in-time court\u27s opinion that the law was A? The answer to that question depends on which retroactivity standard applies to the Brand X problem, which in turn depends on the answers to two threshold legal questions. First, does the decision to move the law from A to B change the law, or does it merely clarify what the law has always been? Second, if the law has been changed, should that change be attributed to the second-in-time agency, which offered the authoritative interpretation of the statute, or to the third-in-time court, which decided whether to ratify that interpretation? Recent decisions have created circuit splits on both questions, and the Supreme Court has offered little guidance. This Note argues that a move from A to B does change the law, and that the third-in-time court, rather than the agency, is legally responsible for the change. In hopes of protecting reasonable litigants from the specter of retroactivity, this Note then proposes and defends a default rule for federal courts faced with the Brand X problem. In effect, this proposal would establish a rebuttable presumption that a small subset of administrative rules-all those which overrule first-in-time court precedents-should not become operational unless and until they are ratified by third-in-time federal courts

Concentration and Content of Secondary Metabolites

The University of Saskatchewan (UofS) has been conducting crosses of Lonicera caerulea and releasing genotypes for fruit production under the name “Haskap”. The primary objectives of the UofS Haskap Breeding Program are to improve fruit flavor, increase fruit size and facilitate mechanical harvest. A more recent additional objective is to increase the concentration and content of compounds with the potential to enhance human health in the fruit and leaves of new haskap genotypes.As a first step to meet this additional objective, this project surveyed the secondary metabolites present within fruit and leaves of haskap. Genotypes tested included genotypes released by the UofS Haskap Breeding Program, unnamed genotypes with potential for use in breeding programs, genotypes acquired from germplasm repositories as well as genotypes of Lonicera caerulea subsp. villosa. Secondary metabolites were selected for further study if they were both linked to human health and were found at sufficient concentrations in haskap to allow for quantification. Chlorogenic acid, quercetin (three glycosides), loganin and secologanin matched these selection criteria. HPLC and mass spectrometry methodologies were developed to allow for quantification and identification of the target secondary metabolites in methanolic extracts of haskap fruit and leaves. Concentrations of the selected secondary metabolites decreased with fruit development, but the overall content (concentration x fruit weight) increased. In fruit tested at harvest maturity, the highest concentrations of many compounds of interest occurred in the widely grown cultivar Tundra. The concentrations of secondary metabolites in haskap leaves also decreased over the growing season, however at the end of the season, substantial amounts of secondary metabolites were still present in the leaves. The fruit and leaves of Lonicera caerulea subsp. villosa germplasm had a different quercetin profile than the other Lonicera caerulea genotypes surveyed. The concentrations of secondary metabolites in the fruit of the various genotypes were negatively correlated with the individual fruit weight produced by each genotype. The concentrations of some of the metabolites in fruit and leaves of Lonicera caerulea subsp. villosa also varied with the geographic site of origin of the genotypes. Post-harvest treatment of haskap fruit with UVC did not enhance the secondary metabolite profile

The Devil in Cartagena: Slavery, religion and resistance in seventeenth-century Caribbean Colombia

This thesis examines the role of religion in African communities in seventeenth-century Caribbean Colombia, and the tensions between the system of racial and religious hierarchy imposed by the Catholic Church and Spanish authorities and the everyday religious life of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants. It will examine interactions between African religion and Christianity and African resistance to Spanish Catholic authority. It will examine Spanish-Catholic thought on African spirituality, and investigate the relationship between African subjects and Catholic authorities in the Spanish Atlantic. It explores the goals of Catholic authorities in relation to African subjects, and the various methods they employed in order to Christianize Africans living under Spanish rule. Drawing on trial transcripts from the Cartagena Office of the Inquisition, it will examine everyday African religious life and the relationship between Africans and Christianity in Colombia and the Spanish Caribbean. It will use the Inquisition trials of African religious practitioners to demonstrate how African ritual knowledge spread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, and the role that the Inquisition played in inadvertently promoting this spread. It will also examine the ways in which African defendants drew on both their own religious traditions and Christian ideas to subvert authority and work within Spanish society. Furthermore, it will examine Spanish anxieties about African religious practices, and the connection between such practices and a general fear of African insurrection connected to the Spanish wars against palenques, cities of free Africans who had escaped slavery. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to examine the relationship between everyday African religious life and Spanish-Catholic authority and hierarchy in early colonial Caribbean Colombia. As a result, it seeks to provide a thorough understanding of power dynamics between Spanish and African communities in the Americas, and the role that African communities in Caribbean Colombia played in the social and cultural development of the Atlantic World

Alien Registration- Dawson, James E. (Bridgewater, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/26135/thumbnail.jp

Some Congruence Modulo 2 Statements of Primitive Conway Vassiliev Invariants.

Polynomial knot invariants can often be used to define Vassiliev invariants on singu- lar knots. Here Vassiliev invariants form the Conway, Jones, HOMFLY, and Kauffman polynomials are explored. Also, some explanation is given about how symbols of the Jones and Conway polynomial can evaluated on suitable chord diagrams. These in- variants are further used to find expressions that are congruent modulo 2 to some low degree invariants derived from the Primitive Conway polynomial

Generic Techniques in General Purpose GPU Programming with Applications to Ant Colony and Image Processing Algorithms

In 2006 NVIDIA introduced a new unified GPU architecture facilitating general-purpose computation on the GPU. The following year NVIDIA introduced CUDA, a parallel programming architecture for developing general purpose applications for direct execution on the new unified GPU. CUDA exposes the GPU's massively parallel architecture of the GPU so that parallel code can be written to execute much faster than its sequential counterpart. Although CUDA abstracts the underlying architecture, fully utilising and scheduling the GPU is non-trivial and has given rise to a new active area of research. Due to the inherent complexities pertaining to GPU development, in this thesis we explore and find efficient parallel mappings of existing and new parallel algorithms on the GPU using NVIDIA CUDA. We place particular emphasis on metaheuristics, image processing and designing reusable techniques and mappings that can be applied to other problems and domains. We begin by focusing on Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), a nature inspired heuristic approach for solving optimisation problems. We present a versatile improved data-parallel approach for solving the Travelling Salesman Problem using ACO resulting in significant speedups. By extending our initial work, we show how existing mappings of ACO on the GPU are unable to compete against their sequential counterpart when common CPU optimisation strategies are employed and detail three distinct candidate set parallelisation strategies for execution on the GPU. By further extending our data-parallel approach we present the first implementation of an ACO-based edge detection algorithm on the GPU to reduce the execution time and improve the viability of ACO-based edge detection. We finish by presenting a new color edge detection technique using the volume of a pixel in the HSI color space along with a parallel GPU implementation that is able to withstand greater levels of noise than existing algorithms