750 research outputs found

    Dynamic pupillary exchange engages brain regions encoding social salience

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    Covert exchange of autonomic responses may shape social affective behavior, as observed in mirroring of pupillary responses during sadness processing. We examined how, independent of facial emotional expression, dynamic coherence between one's own and another's pupil size modulates regional brain activity. Fourteen subjects viewed pairs of eye stimuli while undergoing fMRI. Using continuous pupillometry biofeedback, the size of the observed pupils was varied, correlating positively or negatively with changes in participants’ own pupils. Viewing both static and dynamic stimuli activated right fusiform gyrus. Observing dynamically changing pupils activated STS and amygdala, regions engaged by non-static and salient facial features. Discordance between observed and observer's pupillary changes enhanced activity within bilateral anterior insula, left amygdala and anterior cingulate. In contrast, processing positively correlated pupils enhanced activity within left frontal operculum. Our findings suggest pupillary signals are monitored continuously during social interactions and that incongruent changes activate brain regions involved in tracking motivational salience and attentionally meaningful information. Naturalistically, dynamic coherence in pupillary change follows fluctuations in ambient light. Correspondingly, in social contexts discordant pupil response is likely to reflect divergence of dispositional state. Our data provide empirical evidence for an autonomically mediated extension of forward models of motor control into social interaction

    Aesthetics of self-scaling: parallaxed transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman's art practice

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    This article examines relations of ethnography, contemporary art-practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to Kutluğ Ataman’s artworks. Having been shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate and awarded the prestigious international Carnegie Prize in 2004 with his forty-screen video installation KĂŒba (2004), Ataman became an extremely well-known, globally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Self-conscious of their global travel and critically attentive to the contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman’s video-works perform a conscientious failure of representing cultural alterity as indigeneity. Concentrating on the artist’s engagement with ethnography, this article contains three main parts. Analyses of the selection of videos in each part will give an account of different scalar aspects of Ataman’s artworks. It will first revisit a previous study (Çakirlar 2011) on the artist’s earlier work of video-portraits including Never My Soul! (2002) and Women Who Wear Wigs (1999). A detailed discussion of KĂŒba follows, which may be taken as the ‘hinge - work’ in Ataman’s oeuvre that marks a scalar transition in his critical focus - from body and identity to community and geopolitics. The discussion will then move to a brief analysis of the series Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, including the screen-based sculptures Dome (2009), Column (2009), Frame (2009), English as a Second Language (2009), and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2009). Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this article aims to demonstrate the ways in which Ataman’s art-practice produces self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitates a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s regionalisms and internationalisms

    The Rise of the Resilient Local Authority?

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    The term resilience is increasingly being utilised within the study of public policy to depict how individuals, communities and organisations can adapt, cope, and ‘bounce back’ when faced with external shocks such as climate change, economic recession and cuts in public expenditure. In focussing on the local dimensions of the resilience debate, this article argues that the term can provide useful insights into how the challenges facing local authorities in the UK can be reformulated and reinterpreted. The article also distinguishes between resilience as ‘recovery’ and resilience as ‘transformation’, with the latter's focus on ‘bouncing forward’ from external shocks seen as offering a more radical framework within which the opportunities for local innovation and creativity can be assessed and explained. While also acknowledging some of the weaknesses of the resilience debate, the dangers of conceptual ‘stretching’, and the extent of local vulnerabilities, the article highlights a range of examples where local authorities – and crucially, local communities – have enhanced their adaptive capacity, within existing powers and responsibilities. From this viewpoint, some of the barriers to the development of resilient local government are not insurmountable, and can be overcome by ‘digging deep’ to draw upon existing resources and capabilities, promoting a strategic approach to risk, exhibiting greater ambition and imagination, and creating space for local communities to develop their own resilience

    Going Solo: findings from a survey of women ageing without a partner and who do not have children

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    Greater longevity in the UK population has led to the increasing diversity of women experiencing ageing in a multitude of ways. Internationally gender inequalities within ageing are still relatively invisible within both government policy and everyday life for particular groups of women. This paper explores the concept of women growing older ‘solo’ by which we mean women who find themselves non partnered and ageing without children as they move into later life. We report on the findings from a mixed-methods survey of 76 solo women in the UK aged 50 years and over, used to provide a broader overview of the issues and challenges they face as they move into later life. Qualitative data from the survey captured respondents’ perspectives about the links between their relationships status and wellbeing in later life and highlighted specific cumulative disadvantages emerging for some women as a result of their solo lifestyles. We discuss two key themes were identified; ‘solo-loneliness’ and ‘meaningful futures’ in conjunction with the relevant literature and make suggestions for future research within gender and ageing studies that could enhance more positive approaches to solo lifestyles

    First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

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    Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far

    Gravitational Waves and Gamma-Rays from a Binary Neutron Star Merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A

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    On 2017 August 17, the gravitational-wave event GW170817 was observed by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors, and the gamma-ray burst (GRB) GRB 170817A was observed independently by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, and the Anti-Coincidence Shield for the Spectrometer for the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory. The probability of the near-simultaneous temporal and spatial observation of GRB 170817A and GW170817 occurring by chance is 5.0 × 10 -8 . We therefore confirm binary neutron star mergers as a progenitor of short GRBs. The association of GW170817 and GRB 170817A provides new insight into fundamental physics and the origin of short GRBs. We use the observed time delay of (+1.74±0.05)between GRB 170817A and GW170817 to: (i) constrain the difference between the speed of gravity and the speed of light to be between -3 × 10 -15 and +7 × 10 -16 times the speed of light, (ii) place new bounds on the violation of Lorentz invariance, (iii) present a new test of the equivalence principle by constraining the Shapiro delay between gravitational and electromagnetic radiation. We also use the time delay to constrain the size and bulk Lorentz factor of the region emitting the gamma-rays. GRB 170817A is the closest short GRB with a known distance, but is between 2 and 6 orders of magnitude less energetic than other bursts with measured redshift. A new generation of gamma-ray detectors, and subthreshold searches in existing detectors, will be essential to detect similar short bursts at greater distances. Finally, we predict a joint detection rate for the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor and the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors of 0.1-1.4 per year during the 2018-2019 observing run and 0.3-1.7 per year at design sensitivity

    Search for High-energy Neutrinos from Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817 with ANTARES, IceCube, and the Pierre Auger Observatory

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    The Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo observatories recently discovered gravitational waves from a binary neutron star inspiral. A short gamma-ray burst (GRB) that followed the merger of this binary was also recorded by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (Fermi-GBM), and the Anti-Coincidence Shield for the Spectrometer for the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL), indicating particle acceleration by the source. The precise location of the event was determined by optical detections of emission following the merger. We searched for high-energy neutrinos from the merger in the GeV-EeV energy range using the Antares, IceCube, and Pierre Auger Observatories. No neutrinos directionally coincident with the source were detected within ± 500 s around the merger time. Additionally, no MeV neutrino burst signal was detected coincident with the merger. We further carried out an extended search in the direction of the source for high-energy neutrinos within the 14 day period following the merger, but found no evidence of emission. We used these results to probe dissipation mechanisms in relativistic outflows driven by the binary neutron star merger. The non-detection is consistent with model predictions of short GRBs observed at a large off-axis angle
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