Albion College

About: Albion College is a education organization based out in Albion, Michigan, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Higher education. The organization has 485 authors who have published 754 publications receiving 20907 citations.

Form discrimination as a function of sex, procedure and tactual mode

Abstract: Forty males and 40 females were randomly assigned to two tactual form discrimination tasks, easy and difficult under conditions of active and passive touch. Females were found to be better form discriminators than males and increased task difficulty resulted in highlighting female superiority.

A novel switched interferometric quantum key distribution system

Abstract: A novel system for ultra-long-distance quantum key distribution in optical fiber, incorporating ultra-low-noise transition-edge sensor (TES) photodetectors, is described. Integration of the TES detectors into the system was facilitated with a unique optically switched interferometer design. The performance of the system over 101 km of dark, single-mode fiber at 1550 nm and a clock rate of 1 MHz is described. Secret-key bits were produced after error correction and privacy amplification when using mean photon numbers of 0.01, 0.0148, 0.02, 0.0304, and 0.2 photons/pulse at the output of the transmitter. At a mean photon number of 0.1 photons per pulse at the transmitter, a transmission line loss of 29.92 dB, roughly equivalent to 150 km of optical fiber, could be tolerated and secret bits extracted from the transmitted key.

Classical Education and Britain’s Imperial Elite

Abstract: A.P. Thornton once described Kennedy’s Latin Primer, a standard public school text for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as ‘one of the winding sheets of empire’. This was hyperbole, meant to underscore his assertion that Britain’s elite educational institutions had lost their vitality by the 1920s and 1930s, and were no longer instilling the proper imperial spirit in graduates. By implication these same institutions — and the classical curriculum symbolized by Kennedy’s Primer — had been very successful at instilling that spirit during the empire’s 19th-century heyday. Elsewhere Thornton was even more explicit. He referred to elite education in Britain’s public schools and universities as an ‘elixir of empire’: a powerful cultural force inculcating particular imperial ideas and values in Britain’s elites, albeit in a sometimes mysterious, often uneven, and entirely unscientific manner.62

Julio Cortázar's Axolotl: Literary Archaeology of the Unreal

Abstract: Axolotl (Final del juego, "end of the game"), one of Julio Cortazar's masterpieces, chronicles one man's discovery of the axolotls, rather unusuallooking amphibians, his growing obsession with them and, ultimately, his supposed transformation into an axolotl One of the better known and most frequently analyzed of all Cortazar's stories, Axolotl quickly establishes and perpetuates an aura of ambiguity surrounding the narrator and the axolotls which causes the reader to question the nature of reality 1 Consequently, the text's openness has fueled interpretive speculation with regard to a wide variety of topics, ranging from religion and Aztec mythology to philosophy and psychology Some readers view Axolotl as a commentary on the creative process itself, among them Alfred MacAdam, who writes that: "The philosophical problem of interpretation seems reduced in importance, displaced by the purely aesthetic problem of the representation of the unreal " Mac Adam's comment prompts the important question: How does Cortazar evoke a "representation of the unreal" that allows for such interpretive breadth? This study will consider how narrative strategies suggest that Cortazar's depiction of the "unreal" is inspired by a variety of literary sources, both classical and modern Cortazar draws from these other texts to infuse his own story with subtle, yet highly significant nuances A close reading will explore these fictional interrelationships and explain why Cortazar's vision of reality seems so multifaceted The examination of how Cortazar manipulates these allusions will lead to an even deeper appreciation for this magnificent tale