Licence to Offend?

Parekh and Touraine have stressed the importance of intercultural dialogue in the construction of multicultural societies. When, in 2004, the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham, UK, produced Behzti (‘Dishonour’ in Punjabi), by a British-born Sikh playwright, local Sikhs entered into a dialogue with the theatre management and tried unsuccessfully to change aspects of the play they believed offensive to their faith. A demonstration outside the theatre turned violent and the production was halted, with an international outcry against this affront to artistic licence. Although frequently represented as a Manichaean conflict between proponents of free speech and those who sought to protect religious sensibilities, the affair may not have been about, or not mainly about, the clash between religious and secular values at all. It was much more complex, with a diversity of voices and arguments that slithered between principles of liberal and religious faith, culture, gender, and ‘race’

Propagation of UHECRs in cosmological backgrounds: some results from SimProp

Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Ray (UHECR) nuclei propagating in cosmological radiation backgrounds produce secondary particles detectable at Earth. SimProp is a one dimensional code for extragalactic propagation of UHECR nuclei, inspired by the kinetic approach of Aloisio et al. As in this approach, only a subset of nuclei and nuclear channels are used as representative. We discuss the validation of the code and present applications to UHECR experimental results. In particular we present the expected fluxes of neutrinos produced in some astrophysical scenario.Comment: Poster presented by A. Di Matteo at the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Rio De Janeiro (Brasil) July 2-9 201

Cosmogenic neutrinos and ultra-high energy cosmic ray models

We use an updated version of {\it SimProp}, a Monte Carlo simulation scheme for the propagation of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, to compute cosmogenic neutrino fluxes expected on Earth in various scenarios. These fluxes are compared with the newly detected IceCube events at PeV energies and with recent experimental limits at EeV energies of the Pierre Auger Observatory. This comparison allows us to draw some interesting conclusions about the source models for ultra-high energy cosmic rays. We will show how the available experimental observations are almost at the level of constraining such models, mainly in terms of the injected chemical composition and cosmological evolution of sources. The results presented here will also be important in the evaluation of the discovery capabilities of the future planned ultra-high energy cosmic ray and neutrino observatories.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, some reference added, version accepted for publication in JCA

FLIGHT CONTROL RESEARCH LABORATORY UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEM WIND SHEAR ON-LINE IDENTIFICATION

An algorithm to perform the on line identification of the wind shear components suitable for the UAS characteristics has been implemented. The mathematical model of aircraft and wind shear in the augmented state space has been built without any restrictive assumption on the dynamic of wind shear. Because of the strong velocity variations typical of wind shear induce severe accelerations on the aircraft the wind shear effects have been modeled as external forces and moments applied on the aircraft. The identification problem addressed in this work has been solved by using the Filter error method approach. An Extended Kalman Filter has been developed to propagate state. It has been tuned by using a database of measurements through off-line identification of the process noise covariance matrix. Afterwards the implemented EKF has been employed to estimate onboard either aircraft state or turbulence, with significant savings in terms of time and computing resources. Robustness of implemented algorithm has been verified by means of several tests. The obtained results show the feasibility of the tuned up algorithm. In fact it is possible, by using a few numbers of low cost sensors, to estimate with a noticeable accuracy the augmented state vector. Besides a very short computation time is required to performthe augmented state estimation even by using low computation power