Personal identity (de)formation among lifestyle travellers: A double-edged sword?

This article explores the personal identity work of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are interpreted in light of theories on identity formation in late modernity that position identity as problematic. It is suggested that extended leisure travel can provide exposure to varied cultural praxes that may contribute to a sense of social saturation. Whilst a minority of the respondents embraced a saturation of personal identity in the subjective formation of a cosmopolitan cultural identity, several of the respondents were paradoxically left with more identity questions than answers as the result of their travels

Exposure to the antimicrobial peptide LL-37 produces dendritic cells optimized for immunotherapy

Immunization of patients with autologous, ex vivo matured dendritic cell (DC) preparations, in order to prime antitumor T-cell responses, is the focus of intense research. Despite progress and approval of clinical approaches, significant enhancement of these personalized immunotherapies is urgently needed to improve efficacy. We show that immunotherapeutic murine and human DC, generated in the presence of the antimicrobial host defense peptide LL-37, have dramatically enhanced expansion and differentiation of cells with key features of the critical CD103 + /CD141 + DC subsets, including enhanced cross-presentation and co-stimulatory capacity, and upregulation of CCR7 with improved migratory capacity. These LL-37-DC enhanced proliferation, activation and cytokine production by CD8 + (but not CD4 + ) T cells in vitro and in vivo. Critically, tumor antigen-presenting LL-37-DC increased migration of primed, activated CD8 + T cells into established squamous cell carcinomas in mice, and resulted in tumor regression. This advance therefore has the potential to dramatically enhance DC immunotherapy protocols

Active Galaxies in the UV

In this article we present different aspects of AGN studies demonstrating the importance of the UV spectral range. Most important diagnostic lines for studying the general physical conditions as well as the metalicities in the central broad line region in AGN are emitted in the UV. The UV/FUV continuum in AGN excites not only the emission lines in the immediate surrounding but it is responsible for the ionization of the intergalactic medium in the early stages of the universe. Variability studies of the emission line profiles of AGN in the UV give us information on the structure and kinematics of the immediate surrounding of the central supermassive black hole as well as on its mass itself.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, Ap&SS in pres

Symptomatic Sinus Node Disease: Natural History After Permanent Ventricular Pacing *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75403/1/j.1540-8159.1979.tb03650.x.pd

Electron Cooling Experiments in CSR

The six species heavy ion beam was accumulated with the help of electron cooling in the main ring of Cooler Storage Ring of Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou(HIRFL-CSR), the ion beam accumulation dependence on the parameters of cooler was investigated experimentally. The 400MeV/u 12C6+ and 200MeV/u 129Xe54+ was stored and cooled in the experimental ring CSRe, the cooling force was measured in different condition.Comment: 5 pages 11 figure

From Coherent Modes to Turbulence and Granulation of Trapped Gases

The process of exciting the gas of trapped bosons from an equilibrium initial state to strongly nonequilibrium states is described as a procedure of symmetry restoration caused by external perturbations. Initially, the trapped gas is cooled down to such low temperatures, when practically all atoms are in Bose-Einstein condensed state, which implies the broken global gauge symmetry. Excitations are realized either by imposing external alternating fields, modulating the trapping potential and shaking the cloud of trapped atoms, or it can be done by varying atomic interactions by means of Feshbach resonance techniques. Gradually increasing the amount of energy pumped into the system, which is realized either by strengthening the modulation amplitude or by increasing the excitation time, produces a series of nonequilibrium states, with the growing fraction of atoms for which the gauge symmetry is restored. In this way, the initial equilibrium system, with the broken gauge symmetry and all atoms condensed, can be excited to the state, where all atoms are in the normal state, with completely restored gauge symmetry. In this process, the system, starting from the regular superfluid state, passes through the states of vortex superfluid, turbulent superfluid, heterophase granular fluid, to the state of normal chaotic fluid in turbulent regime. Both theoretical and experimental studies are presented.Comment: Latex file, 25 pages, 4 figure

Scotogenic dark matter and Dirac neutrinos from unbroken gauged B−LB-L symmetry

We propose a simple extension of the standard model where neutrinos get naturally small "scotogenic" Dirac masses from an unbroken gauged $B-L$ symmetry, ensuring dark matter stability. The associated gauge boson gets mass through the Stueckelberg mechanism. Two scenarios are identified, and the resulting phenomenology briefly sketched.Comment: 9 pages, 3 tables, 1 figur

Two-Body Decays of the Lightest Stop in Supergravity with and without R-Parity

We study the decays of the lightest top squark in supergravity models with and without R-parity. Using the simplest model with an effective explicit bilinear breaking of R-parity and radiative electroweak symmetry breaking we show that, below the threshold for decays into charginos $\tilde t_1\to c\chi^+_1$, the lightest stop decays mainly into third generation fermions, $\tilde t_1\to b\tau$ instead of the R-parity conserving mode $\tilde t_1\to c\chi^0_1$, even for tiny tau--neutrino mass values. Moreover we show that, even above the threshold for decays into charginos, the decay $\tilde t_1\to b\tau$ may be dominant. We study the role played by the universality of the boundary conditions on the soft supersymmetry breaking terms. This new decay mode $\tilde t_1\to b\tau$ as well as the cascades originated by the conventional $\tilde t_1\to c\chi^0_1$ decay followed by the R-parity violating neutralino decays can provide new signatures for stop production at LEP and the Tevatron.Comment: Latex, 27 pages, including 11 figures. Version to be published in Nucl. Phys.

Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy, policy and institutions in Gramsci. Part one: Gramsci and cultural policy studies: some methodological reflections

Gramsci’s writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci has been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist-technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the ‘Gramscian tradition’ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost twenty years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci’s contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and to provide an analysis of Gramsci’s writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of his work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part One, I question the use of the notion of ‘Gramscian tradition’ made by its critics and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In parts Two and Three, I consider Gramsci’s specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part Two, I consider Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsci’s early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates. Finally, in Part Three, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsci’s insights amount to a theory of cultural policy

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio