A paradigm shift: Anarchism has entered the chat

IntroductionResponding directly to Mayo’s (2022) article Covid-19 and Mutual Aid: prefigurative approaches to caring? published in Vol.13(3), this reflection seeks to further the conversation on the ways that ‘mutual aid’ has entered community development discourse in the aftermath of the global pandemic. It does so by drawing on the extensive legacy of the practice to suggest some of the limitations of sharing individual experiences, stressing the ways in which mutual aid rejects capitalistic self-importance (Roxburgh, 2021; Spade, 2020b)

Beyond Sectoral Values: Radical Organisational Responses to Human Need

In this time of successive crises of austerity, poverty, and the Covid-19 Coronavirus, this article offers a critical reflection on community-based practice, professionalisation of the community development sector, and the limitations imposed on radically-inclined organisations and activists who become entwined with funding criteria and imposed outcomes. Anarchist literature from Graeber (2011) and Kinna (2021) form a central theoretical lens from which to approach the topic, whilst Beck and Purcell (2020) support a critical assessment of the complicated cycles many community collectives or organisations go through as they become more intimately connected with the state. Three Edinburgh-based informal groups - Autonomous Centre Edinburgh (A.C.E.), Edinburgh Helping Hands (E.H.H.), and Mutual Aid Trans Edinburgh (M.A.T.E.) - serve as brief case studies of radical practices, whilst the author’s own employer, the Tollcross Community Action Network (T.C.A.N.) is assessed in terms of anarchistic influence on practice when viewed in relation to state-imposed practice outcomes. &nbsp

Reviews

Reviews of Employment Contracts: New Zealand Experiences, Workplace Industrial Relations: Australian Case Studies, Life and Death at Work: Industrial Accidents as a Case of Socially Produced Erro

A novel protection scheme for inverter-dominated microgrid

Protecting an inverter-dominated microgrid is challenging for the traditional overcurrent protection scheme owing to the suppressed fault current from the inverter interfaced DGs (IIDGs). In this paper, a protection scheme based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform is developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK to detect the faults in the microgrid. The input voltage of the proposed scheme is first transformed into dq0 frame using the Park Transform. A filtering system based on the wavelet denoising approach is then implemented to reduce the sampling frequency and reject the switching noise generated by the inverters in the microgrid. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in transient simulation by systematically applying different types of faults, including varied fault positions and impedances. Additionally, a high impedance arcing fault model is implemented to test the proposed protection scheme under nonlinear fault impedance conditions

Probabilistic abstract interpretation: From trace semantics to DTMC’s and linear regression

In order to perform probabilistic program analysis we need to consider probabilistic languages or languages with a probabilistic semantics, as well as a corresponding framework for the analysis which is able to accommodate probabilistic properties and properties of probabilistic computations. To this purpose we investigate the relationship between three different types of probabilistic semantics for a core imperative language, namely Kozen’s Fixpoint Semantics, our Linear Operator Semantics and probabilistic versions of Maximal Trace Semantics. We also discuss the relationship between Probabilistic Abstract Interpretation (PAI) and statistical or linear regression analysis. While classical Abstract Interpretation, based on Galois connection, allows only for worst-case analyses, the use of the Moore-Penrose pseudo inverse in PAI opens the possibility of exploiting statistical and noisy observations in order to analyse and identify various system properties

Thermal gluo-magnetic vacuum of SU(N) gauge theory

The magnetic sector of SU(N) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature is studied. At low temperatures, T<2T_c, the analytic expressions for the temperature dependence of the magnetic correlator, of the magnetic gluon condensate and of the spatial string tension are obtained. Fair agreement with lattice calculations for spatial string tension is obtained for SU(2) and SU(3) gauge theories. The relative contribution given by non-zero Matsubara modes to the spatial string tension is calculated. At T=2T_c this contribution is of the order of 5%. The behavior of magnetic correlator at high temperatures is investigated and it is shown that gluo-magnetic condensate increases with temperature as (T)= const g^8(T) T^4.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures; minor corrections, to appear in Phys.Lett.

Extending the Shakura-Sunyaev approach to a strongly magnetized accretion disc model

We develop a model of thin turbulent accretion discs supported by magnetic pressure of turbulent magnetic fields. This applies when the turbulent kinetic and magnetic energy densities are greater than the thermal energy density in the disc. Whether such discs survive in nature or not remains to be determined, but here we simply demonstrate that self-consistent solutions exist when the alpha-prescription for the viscous stress, similar to that of the original Shakura-Sunyaev model, is used. We show that \alpha \sim 1 for the strongly magnetized case and we calculate the radial structure and emission spectra from the disc in the regime when it is optically thick. Strongly magnetized optically thick discs can apply to the full range of disc radii for objects < 10^{-2} of the Eddington luminosity or for the outer parts of discs in higher luminosity sources. In the limit that the magnetic pressure is equal to the thermal or radiation pressure, our strongly magnetized disc model transforms into the Shakura-Sunyaev model with \alpha=1. Our model produces spectra quite similar to those of standard Shakura-Sunyaev models. In our comparative study, we also discovered a small discrepancy in the spectral calculations of Shakura and Sunyaev (1973).Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures, Astron. Astroph. in press; shortened version accepted by A&A, all calculations and conclusions are unchange

Test of the QCD vacuum with the sources in higher representations

Recent accurate measurement by G.Bali of static potentials between sources in various SU(3) representations provides a crucial test of the QCD vacuum and of different theoretical approaches to the confinement. In particular, the Casimir scaling of static potentials found for all measured distances implies a strong suppression of higher cumulants and a high accuracy of the Gaussian stochastic vacuum. Most popular models are in conflict with these measurements.Comment: LaTeX, 7 page

Well-being over time in Britain and the USA

This paper studies happiness in the United States and Great Britain. Reported levels of well-being have declined over the last quarter of a century in the US; life satisfaction has run approximately flat through time in Britain. These findings are consistent with the Easterlin hypothesis [Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honour of Moses Abramowitz (1974) Academic Press; J. Econ. Behav. Org., 27 (1995) 35]. The happiness of American blacks, however, has risen. White women in the US have been the biggest losers since the 1970s. Well-being equations have a stable structure. Money buys happiness. People care also about relative income. Well-being is U-shaped in age. The paper estimates the dollar values of events like unemployment and divorce. They are large. A lasting marriage (compared to widowhood as a ‘natural’ experiment), for example, is estimated to be worth $100,000 a year