Not all creatives are created equal

Revelations of sexual harassment, sexism and unequal pay in film and broadcasting have called ‘time’s up’ on the myths of egalitarianism that circulate about the creative sector, argues Rosalind Gill

Bell's inequality and the coincidence-time loophole

This paper analyzes effects of time-dependence in the Bell inequality. A generalized inequality is derived for the case when coincidence and non-coincidence [and hence whether or not a pair contributes to the actual data] is controlled by timing that depends on the detector settings. Needless to say, this inequality is violated by quantum mechanics and could be violated by experimental data provided that the loss of measurement pairs through failure of coincidence is small enough, but the quantitative bound is more restrictive in this case than in the previously analyzed "efficiency loophole."Comment: revtex4, 3 figures, v2: epl document class, reformatted w slight change

De-westernizing creative labour studies: The informality of creative work from an ex-centric perspective

Creative labour studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male. This article outlines the contours of a de-Westernizing project in creative labour studies while introducing a special journal issue that examines the lived dynamics of creative work outside the West. The article advocates an ‘ex-centric perspective’ on creative work. An ex-centric perspective does not merely aim at multiplying non-West empirical case studies. Rather, it aims at destabilizing, decentring and provincializing the taken-for-grantedness of some entrenched notions in creative labour studies such as informality and precarity. An ex-centric perspective, we contend, offers a potential challenge to many of the claims about creative work that have taken on the status of general truths and universal principles in spite of them being generated from limited empirical evidence gleaned from research sites situated almost exclusively in the creative hubs of Euro-America

Comment on "Exclusion of time in the theorem of Bell" by K. Hess and W. Philipp

A recent Letter by Hess and Philipp claims that Bell's theorem neglects the possibility of time-like dependence in local hidden variables, hence is not conclusive. Moreover the authors claim that they have constructed, in an earlier paper, a local realistic model of the EPR correlations. However, they themselves have neglected the experimenter's freedom to choose settings, while on the other hand, Bell's theorem can be formulated to cope with time-like dependence. This in itself proves that their toy model cannot satisfy local realism, but we also indicate where their proof of its local realistic nature fails.Comment: Latex needs epl.cl

A geometric proof of the Kochen-Specker no-go theorem

We give a short geometric proof of the Kochen-Specker no-go theorem for non-contextual hidden variables models. Note added to this version: I understand from Jan-Aake Larsson that the construction we give here actually contains the original Kochen-Specker construction as well as many others (Bell, Conway and Kochen, Schuette, perhaps also Peres).Comment: This paper appeared some years ago, before the author was aware of quant-ph. It is relevant to recent developments concerning Kochen-Specker theorem

Fisher information in quantum statistics

Braunstein and Caves (1994) proposed to use Helstrom's {\em quantum information} number to define, meaningfully, a metric on the set of all possible states of a given quantum system. They showed that the quantum information is nothing else than the maximal Fisher information in a measurement of the quantum system, maximized over all possible measurements. Combining this fact with classical statistical results, they argued that the quantum information determines the asymptotically optimal rate at which neighbouring states on some smooth curve can be distinguished, based on arbitrary measurements on $n$ identical copies of the given quantum system. We show that the measurement which maximizes the Fisher information typically depends on the true, unknown, state of the quantum system. We close the resulting loophole in the argument by showing that one can still achieve the same, optimal, rate of distinguishability, by a two stage adaptive measurement procedure. When we consider states lying not on a smooth curve, but on a manifold of higher dimension, the situation becomes much more complex. We show that the notion of ``distinguishability of close-by states'' depends strongly on the measurement resources one allows oneself, and on a further specification of the task at hand. The quantum information matrix no longer seems to play a central role.Comment: This version replaces the previous versions of February 1999 (titled 'An Example of Non-Attainability of Expected Quantum Information') and that of November 1999. Proofs and results are much improved. To appear in J. Phys.

Mediated intimacy: Sex advice in media culture

The bold argument of Mediated Intimacy (Barker et al., 2018)1 is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people’s knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships. While arguments rage about the nature and content of sex and relationship education in schools, it is becoming clear that more and more of us – young and old – look not to formal education, or even to our friends, for information about sex, but to the media (Albury, 2016; Attwood et al., 2015). This is not simply a matter of media ‘advice’ in the form of self-help books, magazine problem pages, or online ‘agony’ columns – though these are all proliferating and are discussed at length in the book. It is also about the wider cultural habitat of images, ideas and discourses about intimacy that circulate through and across media: the ‘happy endings’ of romantic comedies; the ‘money shots’ of pornography; the celebrity gossip about who is seeing whom, who is ‘cheating’, and who is looking ‘hot’; the lifestyle TV about ‘embarrassing bodies’ or being ‘undateable’; the newspaper features on how to have a ‘good’ divorce or ‘ten things never to say on a first date’; the new apps that incite us to quantify and rate our sex lives, and so forth. These constitute the ‘taken for granted’ of everyday understandings of intimacy, and they are at the heart of Mediated Intimacy