There is a recognised requirement for solid-phase, non-linear absorbing devices. We present data for a range of non-linear absorbing dyes in polymer hosts. We identify polycarbonate as a useful host material. We recognise that progress will be required to increase the laser-induced damage threshold of the dyed polymers if practical devices are to be realised.

Bilingual children face a variety of challenges that their monolingual peers do not. For instance, switching between languages requires the phonological translation of proper names, a skill that requires mapping the phonemic units of one language onto the phonemic units of the other. Proficiency of phonological awareness has been linked to reading success, but little information is available about phonological awareness across multiple phonologies. Furthermore, the relationship between this kind of phonological awareness and reading has never been addressed. The current study investigated phonological translation using a task designed to measure children's ability to map one phonological system onto another. A total of 425 kindergarten and second grade monolingual and bilingual students were evaluated. The results suggest that monolinguals generally performed poorly. Bilinguals translated real names more accurately than fictitious names, in both directions. Correlations between phonological translation and measures of reading ability were moderate, but reliable. Phonological translation is proposed as a tool with which to evaluate phonological awareness through the perspective of children who live with two languages and two attendant phonemic systems.

The study of bilingualism has often focused on two contradictory possibilities: that the learning of two languages may produce deficits of performance in each language by comparison with performance of monolingual individuals, or on the contrary, that the learning of two languages may produce linguistic or cognitive advantages with regard to the monolingual learning experience. The work reported here addressed the possibility that the very early bilingual experience of infancy may affect the unfolding of vocal precursors to speech. The results of longitudinal research with 73 infants aged 0;4 to 1;6 in monolingual and bilingual environments provided no support for either a bilingual deficit hypothesis nor for its opposite, a bilingual advantage hypothesis. Infants reared in bilingual and monolingual environments manifested similar ages of onset for canonical babbling (production of well-formed syllables), an event known to be fundamentally related to speech development. Further, quantitative measures of vocal performance (proportion of usage of well-formed syllables and vowel-like sounds) showed additional similarities between monolingual and bilingual infants. The similarities applied to infants of middle and low socio-economic status and to infants that were born at term or prematurely. The results suggest that vocal development in the first year of life is robust with respect to conditions of rearing. The biological foundations of speech appear to be such as to resist modifications in the natural schedule of vocal development.

Jon Sobrino has suggested that those who stand in the intellectual tradition of the Enlightenment tend to interpret suffering and disaster as ‘crises of meaning’, by which we seek to explain and accommodate alienating experiences within preconceived models of reality. Our question is how evil may be understood. But that search for meaning is a luxury denied those who can barely hold to existence itself. Theirs is a ‘crisis of reality’; and their question is less how to understand evil than how to withstand it, to overcome suffering or at least survive it. ‘The interpretative models become relevant [only] to the extent that they arise out of the experienced reality and aim at eliminating the wretched state of the real world’.