41,500 research outputs found
Wikipedia and the politics of mass collaboration
Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms
of economic production, is of great importance in the task of political transformation and the
creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration” has become a veritable buzzword
used to describe the human associations that create such new media objects. In the language
of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”, “peer production” and
the “produser”, first and foremost we are all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent
literature that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in particular, works that
address the nascent processes of peer production. I contend that this material positions such
projects as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a fictitious space far
divorced from the clamour of the everyday. I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the
distance between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the realities it describes,
and finish by arguing for a more politicised notion of collaboration
Non-monotonicity of the frictional bimaterial effect
Sliding along frictional interfaces separating dissimilar elastic materials
is qualitatively different from sliding along interfaces separating identical
materials due to the existence of an elastodynamic coupling between interfacial
slip and normal stress perturbations in the former case. This bimaterial
coupling has important implications for the dynamics of frictional interfaces,
including their stability and rupture propagation along them. We show that
while this bimaterial coupling is a monotonically increasing function of the
bimaterial contrast, when it is coupled to interfacial shear stress
perturbations through a friction law, various physical quantities exhibit a
non-monotonic dependence on the bimaterial contrast. In particular, we show
that for a regularized Coulomb friction, the maximal growth rate of unstable
interfacial perturbations of homogeneous sliding is a non-monotonic function of
the bimaterial contrast, and provide analytic insight into the origin of this
non-monotonicity. We further show that for velocity-strengthening
rate-and-state friction, the maximal growth rate of unstable interfacial
perturbations of homogeneous sliding is also a non-monotonic function of the
bimaterial contrast. Results from simulations of dynamic rupture along a
bimaterial interface with slip-weakening friction provide evidence that the
theoretically predicted non-monotonicity persists in non-steady, transient
frictional dynamics.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
Analytic evaluation of diffuse fluence error in multi-layer scattering media with discontinuous refractive index
A simple analytic method of estimating the error involved in using an
approximate boundary condition for diffuse radiation in two adjoining
scattering media with differing refractive index is presented. The method is
based on asymptotic planar fluences and enables the relative error to be
readily evaluated without recourse to Monte Carlo simulation. Three examples of
its application are considered: (1) evaluating the error in calculating the
diffuse fluences at a boundary between two media with differing refractive
index and dissimilar scattering properties (2) the dependence of the relative
error in a multilayer medium with discontinuous refractive index on the ratio
of the reduced scattering coefficient to the absorption coefficient ms'/ma (3)
the parametric dependence of the error in the radiant flux Js at the surface of
a three-layer medium. The error is significant for strongly forward biased
scattering media with non-negligible absorption and is cumulative in
multi-layered media with refractive index increments between layers.Comment: 21 pages 7 Figures Text further revise
Stable cell-centered finite volume discretization for Biot equations
In this paper we discuss a new discretization for the Biot equations. The
discretization treats the coupled system of deformation and flow directly, as
opposed to combining discretizations for the two separate sub-problems. The
coupled discretization has the following key properties, the combination of
which is novel: 1) The variables for the pressure and displacement are
co-located, and are as sparse as possible (e.g. one displacement vector and one
scalar pressure per cell center). 2) With locally computable restrictions on
grid types, the discretization is stable with respect to the limits of
incompressible fluid and small time-steps. 3) No artificial stabilization term
has been introduced. Furthermore, due to the finite volume structure embedded
in the discretization, explicit local expressions for both momentum-balancing
forces as well as mass-conservative fluid fluxes are available.
We prove stability of the proposed method with respect to all relevant
limits. Together with consistency, this proves convergence of the method.
Finally, we give numerical examples verifying both the analysis and convergence
of the method
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