Identifying the Third Agers: An Analysis of British Retirees' Leisure Pursuits

Despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle, there is a dearth of quantitative studies on how older people spend their time. Few studies of later life capitalise on time-use surveys, which constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting data on everyday life. This article analyses data from the 2000 UK Time Use Survey in order to operationalise the concept of the Third Age and test theoretical propositions regarding the irrelevance of social divisions in the formation of an active leisure lifestyle after retirement. The analysis focuses on a subsample of 1615 people over the age of 64. An index of active leisure activities is constructed in order to estimate the proportion of third agers amongst British retirees. Logistic regression models are specified to examine the relative influence of socio-demographic characteristics on the probability of a person being a third ager. Strong effects of structural factors and health are found, which do not support arguments suggesting a minor influence of social context in lifestyle choices after retirement. 'Active' ageing appears to be the province of those who are culturally and materially advantaged, and it is the healthy, educated, upper-class and middle-class men that are more likely to engage in a Third Age leisure lifestyle.Active Leisure; Retirement; Time-Use Research; Third Age; Successful Ageing; UK

A developed stage of Alfven wave phase mixing

Alfven wave phase mixing is an extensively studied mechanism for dissipating wave energy in an inhomogeneous medium. It is common in the vast majority of phase mixing papers to assume that even though short scale lengths and steep gradients develop as a result of phase mixing, nonlinear wave coupling does not occur. However, weakly nonlinear studies have shown that phase mixing generates magnetoacoustic modes. Numerical results are presented which show the nonlinear generation of magnetosonic waves by Alfven wave phase mixing. The efficiency of the effect is determined by the wave amplitude, the frequency of the Alfven waves and the gradient in the background Alfven speed. Weakly nonlinear theory has shown that the amplitude of the fast magnetosonic wave grows linearly in time. The simulations presented in this paper extend this result to later times and show saturation of the fast magnetosonic component at amplitudes much lower than that of the Alfven wave. For the case where Alfven waves are driven at the boundary, simulating photospheric footpoint motion, a clear modulation of the saturated amplitude is observed. All the results in this paper are for a low amplitude (<=0.1), single frequency Alfven wave and a uniform background magnetic field in a two dimensional domain. For this simplified geometry, and with a monochromatic driver, we concluded that the nonlinear generation of fast modes has little effect on classical phase mixing

Observational properties of a kink unstable coronal loop

Aims. Previous work on the dynamics of the kink instability has concentrated on the evolution of the magnetic field and associated current sheets. Here we aim to determine the observational consequences of the kink instability in short coronal loops, particularly what images TRACE would record of such an instability. This paper concentrates on the internal m = 1 mode where the kink structure of the instability may not be apparent from the global field shape. This is most relevant to the observation of active region brightenings and coronal bright points. Methods. An existing fluid code was modified to include the TRACE temperature response function in order to calculate temporally and spatially averaged, line of sight images in the 171, 195 and 284 Å band passes for straight, kink unstable flux tubes. Results. Two new fluid effects of the kink instability are discovered: the circular enhancement of the density at the foot points and the appearance of a low density band running across the flux tube. The second of these effects is shown to be imagable by TRACE and hence would be a good candidate observational signature for an internal m = 1 kink unstable loop

Un roman « linguistique »? Le Nouveau Roman à la lumière de ses traductions allemandes

National audienceDieser Artikel untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen Nouveau Roman und Sprachwissenschaft anhand der Bemerkungen und Übersetzungsnotizen von Elmar TOPHOVEN. Die Probleme der Referenz, der Temporalität und der Deixis in den Romanen von Alain ROBBE-GRILLET, Nathalie SARRAUTE und Claude SIMON hängen mit den Fragen zusammen, die in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren von der Linguistik aufgeworfen worden sind. Die Arbeit des Übersetzers hebt die damaligen Berührungspunkte zwischen Linguistik und Literatur hervor.This paper studies the relationship between linguistics and Nouveau Roman based on the remarks and translation notes of Elmar TOPHOVEN. Problems of reference, temporality and deixis in the novels of Alain ROBBE-GRILLET, Nathalie SARRAUTE and Claude SIMON, are closely linked to the questions brought forth by linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s. The translator’s work highlights the connexions between linguistics and literature at the time.Cet article explore les relations entre le Nouveau Roman et la linguistique à partir des réflexions et des notes de traduction d’Elmar TOPHOVEN. Les problèmes de référence, de temporalité et de deixis dans les romans d’Alain ROBBE-GRILLET, de Nathalie SARRAUTE et de Claude SIMON, font écho aux questions soulevées par la linguistique dans les années 1950-1960. Le travail du traducteur met en évidence les points de contact entre linguistique et littérature à cette période

Accumulation of muscle ankyrin repeat protein transcript reveals local activation of primary myotube endcompartments during muscle morphogenesis

The characteristic shapes and positions of each individual body muscle are established during the process of muscle morphogenesis in response to patterning information from the surrounding mesenchyme. Throughout muscle morphogenesis, primary myotubes are arranged in small parallel bundles, each myotube spanning the forming muscles from end to end. This unique arrangement potentially assigns a crucial role to primary myotube end regions for muscle morphogenesis. We have cloned muscle ankyrin repeat protein (MARP) as a gene induced in adult rat skeletal muscle by denervation. MARP is the rodent homologue of human C-193 (Chu, W., D.K. Burns, R.A. Swerick, and D.H. Presky. 1995. J. Biol. Chem. 270:10236-10245) and is identical to rat cardiac ankyrin repeat protein. (Zou, Y., S. Evans, J. Chen, H.-C. Kuo, R.P. Harvey, and K.R. Chien. 1997. Development. 124:793-804). In denervated muscle fibers, MARP transcript accumulated in a unique perisynaptic pattern. MARP was also expressed in large blood vessels and in cardiac muscle, where it was further induced by cardiac hypertrophy. During embryonic development, MARP was expressed in forming skeletal muscle. In situ hybridization analysis in mouse embryos revealed that MARP transcript exclusively accumulates at the end regions of primary myotubes during muscle morphogenesis. This closely coincided with the expression of thrombospondin-4 in adjacent prospective tendon mesenchyme, suggesting that these two compartments may constitute a functional unit involved in muscle morphogenesis. Transfection experiments established that MARP protein accumulates in the nucleus and that the levels of both MARP mRNA and protein are controlled by rapid degradation mechanisms characteristic of regulatory early response genes. The results establish the existence of novel regulatory muscle fiber subcompartments associated with muscle morphogenesis and denervation and suggest that MARP may be a crucial nuclear cofactor in local signaling pathways from prospective tendon mesenchyme to forming muscle and from activated muscle interstitial cells to denervated muscle fibers

Damping of vertical coronal loop kink oscillations through wave tunneling

The decay rate of vertical kink waves in a curved flux tube is modeled numerically. The full MHD equations are solved for a curved equilibrium flux tube in an arcade geometry and the decay of ψ, the integral over the flux tube of the modulus of the velocity perpendicular to the local magnetic field, is measured. These simulations are 2D and are thus restricted to kink oscillations in the loop plane. The decay rate is found to increase with increasing wavelength, increasing β and decreasing density contrast ratio. The wave tunneling effect is shown to be a possible mechanism for the high decay rate of the recent observed kink oscillation reported by Wang & Solanki (2004)