Keep an "eye" on the text: The Use of Self-mention in the Academic Writing of Experts

One of the most controversial inquiries in academic writing is whether it is admissible to use first person pronouns in a scientific paper or not. Many professors discourage their students from using them, rather favoring a more passive tone, and thus causing novices to avoid inserting themselves into their texts in an expert-like manner. Abundant research, however, has recently attested that negotiation of identity is plausible in academic prose, and there is no need for a paper to be void of an authorial identity. Because in the course of the English Studies Degree we have received opposing prompts in the use of I, the aim of this dissertation is to throw some light upon this vexed issue. To this end, I compiled a corpus of 16 Research Articles (RAs) that comprises two sub-corpora, one featuring Linguistics RAs and the other one Literature RAs, and each, in turn, consists of articles written by American and British authors. I then searched for real occurrences of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our and ours, and studied their frequency, rhetorical functions and distribution along each paper. The results obtained certainly show that academic writing is no longer the faceless prose that it used to be, for I is highly used in both disciplines and varieties of English. Concerning functions, the most typically used roles were the use of I to take credit for the writer’s research process, and also those involving plural forms. With respect to the spatial disposition, all sections welcomed first person pronouns, but the Method and the Results/Discussion sections seem to stimulate their appearance. On the basis of these findings, I suggest that an L2 writing pedagogy that is mindful not only of the language proficiency, but also of the students’ own identity may have a beneficial effect on the composition of their texts.

Magnetic field modulated direct overwrite with pulsed laser irradiation for TbFeCo magneto-optical disks

WE have designed a dual-beam magneto-optical (MO) storage system to test the dynamic storage properties of MO disks. The characteristics of this dual-beam system are demonstrated. Magnetic field modulated direct overwrite, which is a promising technique for highspeed MO storage, is realized on TbFeCo MO disks with this dual-beam MO system. The effect of light intensity, magnetic field intensity, and linear velocity of the disk and the modulating frequency variation on carrier-to-noise ratio is investigated. (C) 1997 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

氧化铋薄膜用于蓝光可录存储的研究

利用直流磁控溅射法在不同氧氩分压比条件下制备了BiOx薄膜。通过对薄膜在蓝光作用前后的反射率对比度变化的研究发现，氧氩分压比为50％时制备的薄膜具有最佳的光学对比度。利用X射线衍射仪(XRD)、X光电子能谱(XPS)和光谱仪研究了薄膜热处理前后的结构和光谱性质的变化。研究结果表明薄膜光学性质变化主要由薄膜中氧化铋的相变引起。蓝光静态测试结果显示氧氩分压比为50％条件下制备的BiOx薄膜具有很好好的记录敏感度，在11mW的记录功率和800ns的记录脉宽条件下，得到了52％的反射率对比度。此外，BiOx薄膜表现出了非常好的读出稳定性。