You’re trouble you are, just like your mother! An intergenerational autobiographical narrative on activism in Higher Education

This paper draws on autobiographical interviews of a mother and daughter concerning their experiences of working in higher education to explore the changes in university teaching and research in the UK and also the possibilities of challenging prevalent normative assumptions about aims and purpose. It uses the qualitative methodology of narrative enquiry, particularly in its focus on temporality, sociality and place, to create a co-constructed account which is able to expose critical events, possibilities and limitations for higher education ‘activists’ in the recent past and present. It will be shown that the quality of the relationship between the two researcher-participants had a significant impact on the quality of the data generated, and that together the relationship and methodology promoted interpretation and analysis in ‘uncommonly accelerated ways’ (Carillo & Baguley, 2011). At the same time, it created moments of discomfort and misunderstandings about ideological perceptions. It was found that while there were some similarities at least initially between the experiences of the two interviewees in their capacities both to perform to work expectations and to take an activist position, substantial differences were identified due, in particular, to generational intellectual schisms as well as shifts in higher education from elitist institutions promoting public good to mass, neo-liberal institutions with performative and institutional goals and practices. The European dream of becoming ‘the most competitive and knowledge-based economy of the world’ (European Council, 2000) has marked the transformation and modernisation of social welfare and education systems…. When policies and institutional practices based on competence, efficiency and competition are stressed, ideals such as equity and social community tend to become secondary (Arnesan, 2011

Interactive cutting path analysis programs

The operation of numerically controlled machine tools is interactively simulated. Four programs were developed to graphically display the cutting paths for a Monarch lathe, Cintimatic mill, Strippit sheet metal punch, and the wiring path for a Standard wire wrap machine. These programs are run on a IMLAC PDS-ID graphic display system under the DOS-3 disk operating system. The cutting path analysis programs accept input via both paper tape and disk file

Goldstone Gauginos

Models of supersymmetry with Dirac gauginos provide an attractive scenario for physics beyond the standard model. The "supersoft" radiative corrections and suppressed SUSY production at colliders provide for more natural theories and an understanding of why no new states have been seen. Unfortunately, these models are handicapped by a tachyon which is naturally present in existing models of Dirac gauginos. We argue that this tachyon is absent, with the phenomenological successes of the model preserved, if the right handed gaugino is a (pseudo-)Goldstone field of a spontaneously broken anomalous flavor symmetry.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. v2: minor changes to text, references added and update

Models of Goldstone Gauginos

Models with Dirac gauginos provide appealing scenarios for physics beyond the standard model. They have smaller radiative corrections to the Higgs mass, a suppression of certain SUSY production processes, and ameliorated flavor constraints. Unfortunately, they also generally have tachyons, the solutions to which typically spoil these positive features. The recently proposed "Goldstone Gaugino" mechanism provides a simple solution that eliminates these tachyonic states. We provide details on this mechanism and explore models for its origin. In particular, we find SUSY QCD models that realize this idea simply, and discuss scenarios for unification.Comment: 33 pages, 4 figure

Long-term material compatibility testing system

System includes procedure for hermetically sealing solid materials and fluids in glass ampoule and use of temperature-controlled facility containing sample holder, which permits sample containers to be retrieved safely and conveniently. Solid material and fluid are sealed within chemically-clean glass ampoule according to highly detailed procedure

Low energy universality and scaling of Van der Waals forces

At long distances interactions between neutral ground state atoms can be described by the Van der Waals potential V(r) =-C6/r^6-C8/r^8 - ... . In the ultra-cold regime atom-atom scattering is dominated by s-waves phase shifts given by an effective range expansion p cot d0 (p) = -1/a0 + r0 p^2/2 + ... in terms of the scattering length a0 and the effective range r0. We show that while for these potentials the scattering length cannot be predicted, the effective range is given by the universal low energy theorem r0 = A + B/a0+ C/a0^2 where A,B and C depend on the dispersion coefficients Cn and the reduced di-atom mass. We confront this formula to about a hundred determinations of r0 and a0 and show why the result is dominated by the leading dispersion coefficient C6. Universality and scaling extends much beyond naive dimensional analysis estimates.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure