The Uncertainty of National and Cultural Identity in Salman Rushdie’s East, West and Midnight’s Children

This project involves the examination of two works by Salman Rushdie: a short story collection, East, West and a novel, Midnight’s Children. Looking at these texts through a postcolonial lens, I analyze Rushdie’s writing in terms of its relationship to the academic debates of the period and the historical context that grounds the works. Throughout the paper, I analyze Rushdie’s portrayal of the relationship between culture, nationhood, and identity, while also focusing on different aspects of the works in the project’s two chapters. In the first, I examine the relationship between postcolonialism and magical realism in East, West, and argue that Rushdie uses a unique hybrid of magical realism, satire, and intertextuality to complicate the portrayal of culture in his stories, as he brings into question the use of the East/West binary that dominated scholarly discourse at the time of these texts’ publication. In the project’s second chapter I discuss the relationship between Midnight’s Children and East, West, examining on the portrayal of post-independence India and Rushdie’s critiques of the Indian government at the time. While in the project’s first chapter, stylistic decisions serve as the primary focus of my analysis, in this second part, the relationship between technology and national identity becomes the driving question. Using textual and historical evidence, I demonstrate the extent to which these two texts serve as a statement on the nature of cultural and national identity in the postcolonial era, providing no certain answers but instead raising more questions and illuminating the complexities of global interactions

Lost Laws: What We Can\u27t Find in the U.S. Code

This article looks at the development of the U.S. Code as the primary expression of federal statutory law and at those features which detract from its usefulness in that role. To provide background, some defmitions of terms pertaining to codes are provided, followed by a history of the U.S. Code, a description of appropriations riders as a source of uncodified law, and a look at some of the agencies that create and maintain the Code. The Analysis section discusses particular problems with the current Code. Special attention is paid to enacted law relegated to footnotes and appendices of the Code, and to serially enacted appropriations riders that are never codified at all

Periodicity makes galactic shocks unstable - I. Linear analysis

We study the dynamical stability of stationary galactic spiral shocks. The steady-state equilibrium flow contains a shock of the type derived by Roberts in the tightly wound approximation. We find that boundary conditions are critical in determining whether the solutions are stable or not. Shocks are unstable if periodic boundary conditions are imposed. For intermediate strengths of the spiral potential, the instability disappears if boundary conditions are imposed such that the upstream flow is left unperturbed as in the classic analysis of D'yakov and Kontorovich. This reconciles apparently contradictory findings of previous authors regarding the stability of spiral shocks. This also shows that the instability is distinct from the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, confirming the findings of Kim et al. We suggest that instability is a general characteristics of periodic shocks, regardless of the presence of shear, and provide a physical picture as to why this is the case. For strong spiral potentials, high post-shock shear makes the system unstable also to parasitic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability regardless of the boundary conditions. Our analysis is performed in the context of a simplified problem that, while preserving all the important characteristics of the original problem, strips it from unnecessary complications, and assumes that the gas is isothermal, non self-gravitating, non-magnetised.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

FireDB—a database of functionally important residues from proteins of known structure

The FireDB database is a databank for functional information relating to proteins with known structures. It contains the most comprehensive and detailed repository of known functionally important residues, bringing together both ligand binding and catalytic residues in one site. The platform integrates biologically relevant data filtered from the close atomic contacts in Protein Data Bank crystal structures and reliably annotated catalytic residues from the Catalytic Site Atlas. The interface allows users to make queries by protein, ligand or keyword. Relevant biologically important residues are displayed in a simple and easy to read manner that allows users to assess binding site similarity across homologous proteins. Binding site residue variations can also be viewed with molecular visualization tools. The database is available a