Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

This is a monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life. This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain

The Developing Role of the Defense Lawyer in Mental Health Litigation

Hogg Foundation for Mental Healt

The influence of peer group response: Building a teacher and student expertise in the writing classroom

New Zealand students in the middle and upper school achieve better results in reading than they do in writing. This claim is evident in national assessment data reporting on students’ literacy achievement. Research findings also state that teachers report a lack of confidence when teaching writing. Drawing on the National Writing Project developed in the USA, a team of researchers from the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and teachers from primary and secondary schools in the region collaborated to “talk” and “do” writing by building a community of practice. The effects of writing workshop experiences and the transformation this has on teachers’ professional identities, self-efficacy, and their students’ learning provided the research focus. This paper draws mostly on data collected during the first cycle of the two-year project. It discusses the influence of peer group response – a case study teacher’s workshop experiences that transformed her professional identity, building her confidence and deepening her understandings of self as writer and ultimately transforming this expertise into her writing classroom practice

Becoming curious about cats: A collaborative writing project

Students’ interests and achievement in writing are often debated and located in theoretical and pedagogical arguments. These issues can polarise understandings of effective teaching practice. This article describes one teacher’s classroom practice in a New Zealand primary school. It outlines a collaborative project between a local teacher and a university lecturer. The two educators were concerned about political and educational changes and the influence this had on teachers’ writing pedagogy. They were concerned about the differences between the children’s reading and writing achievement evident in this year three classroom. As researchers they were keen to explore the ‘power of literature’ as a way of enriching children’s oral and written language experiences. The writers argue that by using quality literature in the classroom, with an explicit focus on authors’ literary techniques, students develop an awareness of how authors craft and construct texts. The young writers were apprenticed to experts and developed a metalanguage, which enhanced their own writing skills

Statistical Analysis of Lineaments and their Relation to Fracturing, Faulting, and Halokinesis in the East Texas Basin

UT Librarie

"A L C L A D" A New Corrosion Resistant Aluminum Product

Described here is a new corrosion resistant aluminum product which is markedly superior to the present strong alloys. Its use should result in greatly increased life of a structural part. Alclad is a heat-treated aluminum, copper, manganese, magnesium alloy that has the corrosion resistance of pure metal at the surface and the strength of the strong alloy underneath. Of particular importance is the thorough character of the union between the alloy and the pure aluminum. Preliminary results of salt spray tests (24 weeks of exposure) show changes in tensile strength and elongation of Alclad 17ST, when any occurred, to be so small as to be well within the limits of experimental error. Some surface corrosion of the pure metal had taken place, but not enough to cause the specimens to break through those areas

Anion transport inhibitor binding to band 3 in red blood cell membranes.

The inhibitor of anion exchange 4,4'-dibenzoamido-2,2'-disulfonic stilbene (DBDS) binds to band 3, the anion transport protein in human red cell ghost membranes, and undergoes a large increase in fluorescence intensity when bound to band 3. Equilibrium binding studies performed in the absence of transportable anions show that DBDS binds to both a class of high-affinity (65 nM) and low-affinity (820 nM) sites with stoichiometry equivalent to 1.6 nmol/mg ghost protein for each site, which is consistent with one DBDS site on each band 3 monomer. The kinetics of DBDS binding were studied both by stopped-flow and temperature-jump experiments. The stopped-flow data indicate that DBDS binding to the apparent high-affinity site involves association with a low-affinity site (3 microM) followed by a slow (4 s-1) conformational change that locks the DBDS molecule in place. A detailed, quantitative fit of the temperature-jump data to several binding mechanisms supports a sequential-binding model, in which a first DBDS molecule binds to one monomer and induces a conformational change. A second DBDS molecule then binds to the second monomer. If the two monomers are assumed to be initially identical, thermodynamic characterization of the binding sites shows that the conformational change induces an interaction between the two monomers that modifies the characteristics of the second DBDS binding site

Generation of Generalized-Gauss Laser Beams via a Spatial Light Modulator

Generalized-Gauss laser beams can be described as a continuous transition between the well-known Hermite-Gauss (HG) and Laguerre-Gauss (LG) laser beams. A spatial light modulator (SLM) was made by removing the liquid crystal display (LCD) from an overhead projector. The homemade SLM, encoded with a computer-generated hologram, was then used to convert a fundamental Gaussian beam from a small frame Helium-Neon (HeNe) laser into several different orders of Generalized-Gauss (GG) beams. The experimentally generated GG beam profiles matched the theoretically expected profiles