"After Tocqueville – the Curious Adventures of Bernard-Henri Lévy and Don Watson"

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"One Day in the Life of David Hicks"

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Mr Galt Goes To Washington

Two recently published oral histories highlight the long-term trend concerning the mainstreaming of Objectivism, the political and economic ideas of the libertarian conservative writer and ideologue, Ayn Rand. Scott McConnell’s sympathetic interview collection focuses on supporters and acquaintances from Rand’s active period in the 1960s and 1970s. These supporters and acquaintances include former Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, who provides McConnell with his considered views concerning Rand. Gary Weiss’s critical interview collection focusses on her more recent supporters, with one displeased and insightful interviewee to be found in both collections. Weiss’s collection reveals the role played by Objectivists in galvanizing the focus of the populist Tea Party movement. Both oral histories reveal the role played by the media and popular culture in mainstreaming Rand’s views. The review ends by comparing Randolph Stow’s socially responsive individualism as described in his novel 'Tourmaline' with Rand’s transactional individualism as described in 'Atlas Shrugged.

" Tocqueville in a Conservative World"

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Mesoscale atmosphere ocean coupling enhances the transfer of wind energy into the ocean

Although it is well established that the large-scale wind drives much of the world’s ocean circulation, the contribution of the wind energy input at mesoscales (10–200 km) remains poorly known. Here we use regional simulations with a coupled high-resolution atmosphere–ocean model of the South Atlantic, to show that mesoscale ocean features and, in particular, eddies can be energized by their thermodynamic interactions with the atmosphere. Owing to their sea-surface temperature anomalies affecting the wind field above them, the oceanic eddies in the presence of a large-scale wind gradient provide a mesoscale conduit for the transfer of energy into the ocean. Our simulations show that this pathway is responsible for up to 10% of the kinetic energy of the oceanic mesoscale eddy field in the South Atlantic. The conditions for this pathway to inject energy directly into the mesoscale prevail over much of the Southern Ocean north of the Polar Front

The effect of personality on collaborative task performance and interaction

Collocated, multi-user technologies, which support group-work are becoming increasingly popular. Examples include MERL's Diamondtouch and Microsoft's Surface, both of which have evolved from research prototypes to commercial products. Many applications have been developed for such technologies which support the work and entertainment needs of small groups of people. None of these applications however, have been studied in terms of the interactions and performances of their users with regards to their personality. In this paper, we address this research gap by conducting a series of user studies involving dyads working on a number of multi-user applications on the DiamondTouch tabletop device

How To Build an Undervoting Machine: Lessons from an Alternative Ballot Design

Despite the importance of usability in ensuring election integrity, it remains an under-studied aspect of voting systems. Voting computers (a.k.a. DREs) offer the opportunity to present ballots to voters in novel ways, yet this space has not been systematically explored. We constructed a DRE that, unlike most commercial DREs, does not require voters to view every race, but instead starts at the “review screen” and lets voters directly navigate to races. This was compared with a more traditional, sequentially-navigated, DRE. The direct access navigation model had two effects, both of which were quite large. First, voters made omission (undervote) errors markedly more often. Second, voters who were free to choose who to vote for chose to vote in substantially fewer races. We also examined the relationship between the true error rate—which is not observable in real elections—and the residual vote rate, a measure of effectiveness commonly used for real elections. Replicating the findings of [Campbell and Byrne 2009a], the mean residual vote rate was close to the mean true error rate, but the correlation between these measures was low, suggesting a loose coupling between these two measures

Multilingualism in London: LUCIDE City Report

This report is produced for LUCIDE (Languages in Urban Contexts: Integration and Diversity in Europe) project and network, funded by the EU Lifelong learning programme 2010- 2014, based on the collected primary and secondary data. It includes a brief historic overview of London’s demolinguistic features and a range of evidence relevant to current manifestations of multilingualism and plurilingualism in this global city. Considering the size, population and complexity of London our specific focus is on one local authority (out of an existing 33): the City of Westminster, geographically the heart of this metropolis. Westminster is in many ways representative of London language trends. It shows some of the most prominent features of multilingualism in London: an extraordinary linguistic variety with a wide distribution of languages, where no one language is dominant. Nevertheless, we also make reference to examples of multilingualism from outside Westminster, when we have considered it to be pertinent

The Chromospheric Activity and Ages of M Dwarf Stars in Wide Binary Systems

We investigate the relationship between age and chromospheric activity for 139 M dwarf stars in wide binary systems with white dwarf companions. The age of each system is determined from the cooling age of its white dwarf component. The current limit for activity-age relations found for M dwarfs in open clusters is 4 Gyr. Our unique approach to finding ages for M stars allows for the exploration of this relationship at ages older than 4 Gyr. The general trend of stars remaining active for a longer time at later spectral type is confirmed. However, our larger sample and greater age range reveals additional complexity in assigning age based on activity alone. We find that M dwarfs in wide binaries older than 4 Gyr depart from the log-linear relation for clusters and are found to have activity at magnitudes, colors and masses which are brighter, bluer and more massive than predicted by the cluster relation. In addition to our activity-age results, we present the measured radial velocities and complete space motions for 161 white dwarf stars in wide binaries.Comment: 22 pages including 9 figures and 5 tables. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa