Death of the Emissary: Language, Metonymy, and European Complicity in Juan Diego Botto’s “La carta”

Juan Diego Botto’s 2005 monologue “La carta” explores the real-life death of Yaguine Koita and Fodé Tounkara, two Guinean boys who in 1999 died attempting to reach Europe with a letter addressed to European officials. A close reading of Botto’s monologue illustrates how the letter by Yaguine and Fodé functions as an archive that explores and redefines the liminal spaces, and therefore the relationship, between Europe and Africa. The monologue and the letter elucidate the boys’ position as emissaries who seek to reconcile the European continent with its complicity in the state of Africa

Pittsburgh's Failed Industry Targeting Strategy of the 1960s

In the 1960's and early 1970's, public and private leaders made a substantial effort to promote Pittsburgh's existing transportation industry as a center for the emerging urban transportation market. The selection of the rapid transit industry for targeting in the 1960's purportedly addressed two issues. Despite national acclaim for its Renaissance redevelopment since World War II, the metropolitan region still needed an effective mass transportation system. Moreover, industrial development efforts had not substantially diversified the region's manufacturing base that still specialized in primary metals. Operating in the region's Renaissance tradition of a public and private partnership, corporate executives and public officials pursued a three-pronged strategy: build an innovative rapid transportation system for Allegheny County, use it as a showcase for testing and marketing rapid transit hardware of regional corporations, and promote the city as a center of the rapid transportation industry. They settled on Westinghouse's automated, rubber-tired vehicle running on a separate cement guideway, known locally as "Skybus," for the demonstration project and the region's mass transit solution. The mass transit plan and industry targeting strategy foundered by the early 1970's because leadership weakened in both poles of the partnership. The Westinghouse technology divided the corporate community, while populist political sentiment diminished the ability of the Democratic party's political machine to deliver key public decisions. The Pittsburgh case suggests that a successful industry targeting strategy may depend more on effective leadership and local politics than on the quality of the selection process and vigorous pursuit of traditional economic development programs in support of the targeted industry

A question of scale

If you search for 'collective behaviour' with your web browser most of the texts popping up will be about group activities of humans, including riots, fashion and mass panic. Nevertheless, collective behaviour is also considered to be an important aspect of observed phenomena in atoms and molecules, for example, during spontaneous magnetization. In your web search, you might also find articles on collectively migrating bacteria, insects or birds; or phenomena where groups of organisms or non- living objects synchronize their signals or motion (think of fireflies flashing in unison or people clapping in phase during rhythmic applause).Comment: Concepts essay, published in Nature http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6836/full/411421a0.htm

Qualitative study of pilot payment aimed at increasing general practitioners' antismoking advice to smokers

OBJECTIVES: To elicit general practitioners' and practice nurses' accounts of changes in their clinical practice or practice organisation made to claim a pilot health promotion payment. To describe attitudes towards the piloted and previous health promotion payments. DESIGN: Qualitative, semistructured interview study. SETTING: 13 general practices in Leicester. PARTICIPANTS: 18 general practitioners and 13 practice nurses. RESULTS: Health professionals did not report substantially changing their clinical practice to claim the new payments and made only minimal changes in practice organisation. The new health promotion payment did not overcome general practitioners' resistance towards raising the issue of smoking when they felt that doing so could cause confrontation with patients. General practitioners who made the largest number of claims altered the way in which they recorded patients' smoking status rather than raising the topic of smoking more frequently with patients. Participants had strong negative views on die new payment, feeling it would also be viewed negatively by patients. They were, however, more positive about health promotion payments that rewarded "extra" effort-for example, setting up practice based smoking cessation clinics. CONCLUSIONS: General practitioners and practice nurses were negative about a new health promotion payment, despite agreeing to pilot it. Health promotion payments do not automatically generate effective health promotion activity, and policymakers should consider careful piloting and evaluation of future changes in health promotion payments

Coleman-Weinberg Mechanism and Interaction of D3-Branes in Type 0 String Theory

The low-energy theory on the world volume of parallel static D3-branes of type 0 strings is the Yang-Mills theory with six scalar fields in the adjoint representation. One-loop corrections in this theory induce Coleman-Weinberg effective potential, which can be interpreted as an interaction energy of D3-branes. The potential is repulsive at short distances and attractive at large ones. In the equilibrium, a large number of D3-branes forms a spherical shell with the radius proportional to the characteristic energy scale of the world-volume theory.Comment: 5 pages, LaTex, 1 figure; v2: Discussion of the interaction potential between D3-branes at short distances is modified, version to be published in Phys. Lett.

Two-fluid behavior of the Kondo lattice in the 1/N slave boson approach

It has been recently shown by Nakatsuji, Pines, and Fisk [S. Nakatsuji, D. Pines, and Z. Fisk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 016401 (2004)] from the phenomenological analysis of experiments in Ce1-xLaxCoIn5 and CeIrIn5 that thermodynamic and transport properties of Kondo lattices below coherence temperature can be very successfully described in terms of a two-fluid model, with Kondo impurity and heavy electron Fermi liquid contributions. We analyze thermodynamic properties of Kondo lattices using 1/N slave boson treatment of the periodic Anderson model and show that these two contributions indeed arise below the coherence temperature. We find that the Kondo impurity contribution to thermodynamics corresponds to thermal excitations into the flat portion of the energy spectrum.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Bounds on the Compactness of Neutron Stars from Brightness Oscillations

The discovery of high-amplitude brightness oscillations at the spin frequency or its first overtone in six neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries during type~1 X-ray bursts provides a powerful new way to constrain the compactness of these stars, and hence to constrain the equation of state of the dense matter in all neutron stars. Here we present the results of general relativistic calculations of the maximum fractional rms amplitudes that can be observed during bursts. In particular, we determine the dependence of the amplitude on the compactness of the star, the angular dependence of the emission from the surface, the rotational velocity at the stellar surface, and whether there are one or two emitting poles. We show that if two poles are emitting, as is strongly indicated by independent evidence in 4U 1636-536 and KS 1731-26, the resulting limits on the compactness of the star can be extremely restrictive. We also discuss the expected amplitudes of X-ray color oscillations and the observational signatures necessary to derive convincing constraints on neutron star compactness from the amplitudes of burst oscillations.Comment: 8 pages plus one figure, AASTeX v. 4.0, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letter