Claim in the Matter of the Estate of Hamilton K. Woodruff

Claim (6 typed pages) by Julia C. Woodruff and Margaret W. Band in the matter of the estate of Hamilton K. Woodruff regarding bills paid by Mrs. Woodruff prior to her husband's death.

Metal music as critical dystopia : humans, technology and the future in 1990s science fiction metal

Metal Music as Critical Dystopia: Humans, Technology and the Future in 1990s Science Fiction Metal seeks to demonstrate that the dystopian elements in metal music are not merely or necessarily a sonic celebration of disaster. Rather, metal music's fascination with dystopian imagery is often critical in intent, borrowing themes and imagery from other literary and cinematic traditions in an effort to express a form of social commentary. The artists and musical works examined in this thesis maintain strong ties with the science fiction genre, in particular, and tum to science fiction conventions in order to examine the long-term implications of humanity's complex relationship with advanced technology. Situating metal's engagements with science fiction in relation to a broader practice of blending science fiction and popular music and to the technophobic tradition in writing and film, this thesis analyzes the works of two science fiction metal bands, VOlvod and Fear Factory, and provides close readings of four futuristic albums from the mid to late 1990s that address humanity's relationship with advanced technology in musical and visual imagery as well as lyrics. These recorded texts, described here as cyber metal for their preoccupation with technology in subject matter and in sound, represent prime examples of the critical dystopia in metal music. While these albums identify contemporary problems as the root bf devastation yet to come, their musical narratives leave room for the possibility of hope , allowing for the chance that dystopia is not our inevitable future.

Planar Topological Defects in Unconventional Superconductors

In this work, we consider the properties of planar topological defects in unconventional superconductors. Specifically, we calculate microscopically the interaction energy of domain walls separating degenerate ground states in a chiral p-wave fermionic superfluid. The interaction is mediated by the quasiparticles experiencing Andreev scattering at the domain walls. As a by-product, we derive a useful general expression for the free energy of an arbitrary nonuniform texture of the order parameter in terms of the quasiparticle scattering matrix. The thesis is structured as follows. We begin with a historical review of the theories of superconductivity (Sec. 1.1), which led the way to the celebrated Bardeen-Cooper- Schrieffer (BCS) theory (Sec. 1.3). Then we proceed to the treatment of superconductors with so-called "unconventional pairing" in Sec. 1.4, and in Sec. 1.5 we introduce the specific case of chiral p-wave superconductivity. After introducing in Sec. 2 the domain wall (DW) model that will be considered throughout the work, we derive the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equations in Sec. 3.1, which determine the quasiparticle excitation spectrum for a nonuniform superconductor. In this work, we use the semiclassical (Andreev) approximation, and solve the Andreev equations (which are a particular case of the BdG equations) in Sec. 4 to determine the quasiparticle spectrum for both the single- and two-DW textures. The Andreev equations are derived in Sec. 3.2, and the formal properties of the Andreev scattering coefficients are discussed in the following subsection. In Sec. 5, we use the transfer matrix method to relate the interaction energy of the DWs to the scattering matrix of the Bogoliubov quasiparticles. This facilitates the derivation of an analytical expression for the interaction energy between the two DWs in Sec. 5.3. Finally, to illustrate the general applicability our method, we apply it in Sec. 6 to the interaction between phase solitons in a two-band s-wave superconductor.