Reconnection

One half of a conversation in images that took place over 3 months between Rosie Gunn and New York based artist, Renate Aller. The images were attached to email to update her old friend about her experience of being a woman, juggling children, family and lecturer life. The artists showed randomly changing grids of over 60 photographs on plasma screens positioned opposite each other in the gallery to create a juxtaposition of New York and Farnham. Narratives within the individual screens continuously shifted as new image combinations appeared

My school

‘My School’ is a digital photography project that took place within Key Stage 2 at a local Farnham school, Rowledge Primary . Gunn was assisted by Digital Film and Screen Arts students through the Widening Participation mentoring scheme. Children used digital cameras to capture photographic fragments of their environment - the bits and pieces of daily life that were relatively unnoticed until they ended up in a photo. The project involved approximately 90 children who contributed to an ‘image wall’ made of 96 photographs to represent their school. Gunn received a Teaching Fellowship Award from UCA that partially funded the project. After being shown to the school and parents on Sports Day, the ‘image wall’ was exhibited in the UCA Foyer Gallery in January 2010. It was also presented as the school’s contribution to an exhibition ‘Opening Doors To New Learning’ at the Petersfield School in Hampshire and disseminated at the British Library, Marylebone Road, London – L&T Conference where Gunn presented a paper - How can a school or community project enhance student learning

Fish

Through the 90s Gunn was keen to discuss her photography of the male body with students. 'Annette’s expertise in food styling with fish had led to her become interested in photography hence she was studying with me. We decided a fish and men series would be humorous on one level but also create some ironic and thought provoking images around the notion of masculinity. We had a lot of fun making the series. Annette’s husband was the model.’ The main image in the series, Fish, is the hand tinted, toned silver gelatin print and this was reproduced as a postcard for the Photographers Gallery. It was also printed as a poster on number 38 and 73 London buses and as a magazine cover for Dutch magazine, Homologie, to accompany the Exposures exhibition at the Melkweg (Milky Way) in Amsterdam. Another image from this series, a large blue crab strategically placed around a flaccid penis, was Rosie’s first photographic private sale. Gunn says, ‘I was told that a woman bought the image to hang in her first apartment after leaving the family home - a sort of ‘right of passage’ image for her. However a male journalist reviewing the same image in the Melkweg exhibition described the 'violence against men' that was signified by the threat of the sharp claws near the vulnerable body part. He claimed my photography was motivated by ‘revenge’. Maybe that was a small part of it – pay back for what male artists and photographers have done with the female form - but it was about many, many other things too – particularly the power to be gained as a woman being seen to use the camera to look back at men.

In Motion

In Motion: A series of 6 5x7in b/w sepia photographs exhibited in The Nude Male, a group show curated by Julie Cook and Nerys Mathias, and featuring work by Sarah Ainslie, Laure Albin Guillot, Julie Cook, Alexis Hunter, Rosie Gunn, Minna Kantonen, Nerys Mathias, Emma Mcguire, and Nicoletta Tortone. This exploratory exhibition takes a historical perspective and brings together female photographers using the male nude within their practice. A selection of my press cuttings from 1990s were also in the exhibition

Understanding the Astrophysics of Galaxy Evolution: the role of spectroscopic surveys in the next decade

Over the last decade optical spectroscopic surveys have characterized the low redshift galaxy population and uncovered populations of star-forming galaxies back to z ~ 7. This work has shown that the primary epoch of galaxy building and black hole growth occurs at redshifts of 2 to 3. The establishment of the concordance LCDM cosmology shifted the focus of galaxy population studies from constraining cosmological parameters to characterizing the processes which regulate the formation and evolution of galaxies.In the next decade, high redshift observers will attempt to formulate a coherent evolutionary picture connecting galaxies in the high redshift Universe to galaxies today. In order to link galaxy populations at different redshifts, we must not only characterize their evolution in a systematic way, we must establish which physical processes are responsible for it. Considerable progress has already been made in understanding how galaxies evolved from z ~ 1 to the present day. Large spectroscopic surveys in the near infrared are required to push these studies back towards the main epoch of galaxy building. Only then will we understand the full story of the formation of L* galaxies like our own Milky Way. A large near-IR spectroscopic survey will also provide the calibration needed to avoid systematics in the large photometric programs proposed to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy. We provide an outline design for a multi-object 0.4 to 1.8 micron spectrograph, which could be placed on an existing telescope, and which would allow a full characterization of the galaxy population out to z ~ 2. We strongly recommend a serious further study to design a real instrument, which will be required for galaxy formation studies to advance to the next frontier.Comment: White paper, primary author J.E. Gunn, submitted to Astro2010 Decadal Survey, see http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bpa/Astro2010_SWP_byTitle.htm

Male gays in the female gaze: women who watch m/m pornography

This paper draws on a piece of wide-scale mixed-methods research that examines the motivations behind women who watch gay male pornography. To date there has been very little interdisciplinary research investigating this phenomenon, despite a recent survey by PornHub (one of the largest online porn sites in the world) showing that gay male porn is the second most popular choice for women porn users out of 25+ possible genre choices. While both academic literature and popular culture have looked at the interest that (heterosexual) men have in lesbian pornography, considerably less attention has been paid to the consumption of gay male pornography by women. Research looking at women's consumption of pornography from within the Social Sciences is very focused around heterosexual (and, to a lesser extent, lesbian) pornography. Research looking more generally at gay pornography/erotica (and the subversion of the ‘male gaze’/concept of ‘male as erotic object’) often makes mention of female interest in this area, but only briefly, and often relies on anecdotal or observational evidence. Research looking at women's involvement in slashfic (primarily from within media studies), while very thorough and rich, tends to view slash writing as a somewhat isolated phenomenon (indeed, in her influential article on women's involvement in slash, Bacon-Smith talks about how ‘only a small number’ of female slash writers and readers have any interest in gay literature or pornography more generally, and this phenomenon is not often discussed in more recent analyses of slash); so while there has been a great deal of very interesting research done in this field, little attempt has been made to couch it more generally within women's consumption and use of pornography and erotica or to explore what women enjoy about watching gay male pornography. Through a series of focus groups, interviews, and an online questionnaire (n = 275), this exploratory piece of work looks at what women enjoy about gay male pornography, and how it sits within their consumption of erotica/pornography more generally. The article investigates what this has to say about the existence and nature of a ‘female gaze’

Progress with the Prime Focus Spectrograph for the Subaru Telescope: a massively multiplexed optical and near-infrared fiber spectrograph

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is an optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph with 2394 science fibers, which are distributed in 1.3 degree diameter field of view at Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. The simultaneous wide wavelength coverage from 0.38 um to 1.26 um, with the resolving power of 3000, strengthens its ability to target three main survey programs: cosmology, Galactic archaeology, and galaxy/AGN evolution. A medium resolution mode with resolving power of 5000 for 0.71 um to 0.89 um also will be available by simply exchanging dispersers. PFS takes the role for the spectroscopic part of the Subaru Measurement of Images and Redshifts project, while Hyper Suprime-Cam works on the imaging part. To transform the telescope plus WFC focal ratio, a 3-mm thick broad-band coated glass-molded microlens is glued to each fiber tip. A higher transmission fiber is selected for the longest part of cable system, while one with a better FRD performance is selected for the fiber-positioner and fiber-slit components, given the more frequent fiber movements and tightly curved structure. Each Fiber positioner consists of two stages of piezo-electric rotary motors. Its engineering model has been produced and tested. Fiber positioning will be performed iteratively by taking an image of artificially back-illuminated fibers with the Metrology camera located in the Cassegrain container. The camera is carefully designed so that fiber position measurements are unaffected by small amounts of high special-frequency inaccuracies in WFC lens surface shapes. Target light carried through the fiber system reaches one of four identical fast-Schmidt spectrograph modules, each with three arms. Prototype VPH gratings have been optically tested. CCD production is complete, with standard fully-depleted CCDs for red arms and more-challenging thinner fully-depleted CCDs with blue-optimized coating for blue arms.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, submitted to "Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, Suzanne K. Ramsay, Ian S. McLean, Hideki Takami, Editors, Proc. SPIE 9147 (2014)

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Scoping potential routes to UK civil unrest via the food system: Results of a structured expert elicitation

We report the results of a structured expert elicitation to identify the most likely typesof potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK, focusing on routes to civil unrest. Wetake a backcasting approach by defining as an end-point a societal event in which 1 in 2000 peoplehave been injured in the UK, which 40% of experts rated as “Possible (20–50%)”, “More likely thannot (50–80%)” or “Very likely (>80%)” over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, thisincreased to 80% of experts. The experts considered two food system scenarios and ranked theirplausibility of contributing to the given societal scenario. For a timescale of 10 years, the majorityidentified a food distribution problem as the most likely. Over a timescale of 50 years, the expertswere more evenly split between the two scenarios, but over half thought the most likely route tocivil unrest would be a lack of total food in the UK. However, the experts stressed that the variouscauses of food system disruption are interconnected and can create cascading risks, highlighting theimportance of a systems approach. We encourage food system stakeholders to use these results intheir risk planning and recommend future work to support prevention, preparedness, response andrecovery planning