BOOK REVIEWS Farry, Eithne; Caplan, Nina; Chadwick, Alan ...
Evening Standard,
09/2006
Book Review
Marisha Pessl'S debut is an accomplished campus novel-cum-mystery thriller that has attracted comparisons with Donna Tartt's The Secret History. It's certainly not as compelling as that: the thriller ...element is too slow in an overlong book. That said, protagonist Blue Van Meer is smart and funny, invited into the inner sanctum of an elite group of students and the teacher they worship, Hannah Schneider. But as Blue looks back on events surrounding Schneider's suicide, the book's Nabokovian stylistic tics and its overload of references to pop culture and the Western canon become wearisome. It's a highly stylised book keen to wear its smarts on its sleeve and which fails to recognise that literature should engage the heart as well as the brain. Edna O'Brien'S new novel draws deeply on autobiographical material. It opens with Dilly Macready in hospital awaiting the arrival of her daughter Eleanora, a famously outspoken novelist. As she waits, Dilly recalls her own youth and her voyage from Ireland to the glamour of New York. After getting her heart broken, Dilly returned home and married a local farmer. Her Catholic attitude to Eleanora's romantic vicissitudes is censorious and funny, a mixture of curiosity and disapproval.
The authors present detailed results concerning the dynamic range of an amplitude-shift keyed (ASK) heterodyne optical communication system where the transmitted signal is impaired by significant ...amounts of laser phase noise. Theoretical results are evaluated for a system with up to ten in-line optical amplifiers and a significant influence of the laser phase noise is found for the maximum allowable transmission span and the dynamic range. With ten amplifiers, a linewidth of 11% of the bit rate causes the span to be reduced by 12.2 dB and the dynamic range to be reduced by 5.7 dB. The results have been confirmed using two amplifiers in a field trial experiment at a bit rate of 636 Mb/s with an IF linewidth of 70 MHz.< >
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