The United States of America’s interlocked information industry: An examination into seven U.S. media sectors’ boards of directors

This research explores the interfirm interlock networks that currently exist among publicly-traded media conglomerates operating in the United States of America. Directorship information was gathered from annual reports and definitive proxy reports filed with the U.S. SEC for 68 media conglomerates across seven media sectors for year ending 2018. This investigation applies social resource theory to assess the social networks formed by interfirm interlocks and how such network structures address environmental uncertainty. Results indicate that not all alliances are mutually beneficial and those that are more resource-dependent endure negative cooptation effects. This research discusses how these changes in interfirm interlocks have resulted in directorship wars. Practical implications are discussed

Adding insult to rivalry: Exploring the discord communicated between rivals

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to extend current knowledge regarding rivalry communication among sport consumers to better understand how rivals behave with one another when they communicate. Design/methodology/approach – This national survey of US sport consumers used a novel approach to explore whether and with whom rivals discuss National Football League (NFL) game outcomes. The survey captured both uniplex and multiplex data by asking respondents to name rival discussants with whom they had recently interacted, and the fan behaviors they exchanged with those named rival discussants. Findings – Through use of this novel data collection approach, new findings were uncovered related to blasting, glory out of reflective failure, schadenfreude and the influence of team identification on the exchange of rivalry fan behaviors. The results of the uniplex and multiplex data analyses uniquely showcase the ways in which social identity theory combines with team identification to enact rivalry behavior. Originality/value – This research is the first to precisely dichotomize the psychological antecedents from the communicated behavior between rival fans. Results reveal the precise ways in which team identification influences discordant communication between rival fans, which differs from past research in an interesting new way

Panel. Faulkner and the Literary Canon

Considering the Unthinkable: The Risks and Rewards of Decanonizing Faulkner / Deborah Clarke, Arizona State UniversityAre we doing Faulkner any favors by canonizing him? To what extent does our belief in his greatness foreclose different ways of reading his work? Do we default to “if Faulkner did it, it must be brilliant,” giving him the benefit of all doubts? I’ll be looking at how our reverence for his work may actually hinder our understanding of it, as well as alienating students and colleagues who don’t dare to admit their resistance and doubt. Rather than using Faulkner’s difficulty as a way to silence critics, let’s consider what happens if we admit that it may be a problem. It’s time to re-think why Faulkner should—or shouldn’t—retain his position atop the American literary canon. Popular Faulkner: Pulp Paperbacks, Oprah’s Book Club, and the Curse of the Hypercanonical / Jaime Harker, University of MississippiBecause of Faulkner’s hypercanonical status—that is, because his writing seems to exemplify the autonomous aesthetic object, placed in opposition to mass culture—decades of brilliant scholarship about Faulkner’s deep and complicated relationship to popular culture have had little effect on the larger direction of Faulkner studies. Building on David Earle’s book Re-Covering Modernism, I suggest that Cold War paperbacks created an egalitarian, diverse reading and writing community that Oprah’s Book Club continued. I conclude by speculating about how a pulp Faulkner canon might construct a new vocabulary for talking about style that articulates multiple interpretive communities and their contingencies of value (in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s provocative phrase). What happens when we no longer understand popular culture as base source material transformed by genius but as alternate interpretive communities? What if we consider a ‘fertile interchange’ without assuming that our own designations of quality are natural and innate? Benjy Compson\u27s Mind of the South / Mab Segrest, Connecticut CollegeBenjy Compson is more than likely the referent of Faulkner\u27s title for The Sound and the Fury. But a reading of the novel through the lens of southern psychiatric history and my own study of Georgia\u27s mammoth and iconic \u27lunatic asylum\u27\u27/sanitarium/state hospital at Milledgeville reveals the complex signification that results from the family\u27s decision to keep a cognitively disabled son and brother out of the state hospital. What do we learn about Faulkner and about the disciplining of mind in the Jim Crow South from Faulkner\u27s radical decision to write the novel\u27s opening from Benjy\u27s point of view? How do the Compsons’ choices and those of the African Americans who care for them and for Benjy reverberate through The Sound and the Fury and through other southern works, from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Violent Bear It Away to The Member of the Wedding to Streetcar Named Desire

Changes in ESCRT-III filament geometry drive membrane remodelling and fission in silico

BACKGROUND: ESCRT-III is a membrane remodelling filament with the unique ability to cut membranes from the inside of the membrane neck. It is essential for the final stage of cell division, the formation of vesicles, the release of viruses, and membrane repair. Distinct from other cytoskeletal filaments, ESCRT-III filaments do not consume energy themselves, but work in conjunction with another ATP-consuming complex. Despite rapid progress in describing the cell biology of ESCRT-III, we lack an understanding of the physical mechanisms behind its force production and membrane remodelling. // RESULTS: Here we present a minimal coarse-grained model that captures all the experimentally reported cases of ESCRT-III driven membrane sculpting, including the formation of downward and upward cones and tubules. This model suggests that a change in the geometry of membrane bound ESCRT-III filaments-from a flat spiral to a 3D helix-drives membrane deformation. We then show that such repetitive filament geometry transitions can induce the fission of cargo-containing vesicles. // CONCLUSIONS: Our model provides a general physical mechanism that explains the full range of ESCRT-III-dependent membrane remodelling and scission events observed in cells. This mechanism for filament force production is distinct from the mechanisms described for other cytoskeletal elements discovered so far. The mechanistic principles revealed here suggest new ways of manipulating ESCRT-III-driven processes in cells and could be used to guide the engineering of synthetic membrane-sculpting systems

Mid-Infrared Spectrophotometric Observations of Fragments B and C of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3

We present mid-infrared spectra and images from the GEMINI-N (+Michelle) observations of fragments SW3-[B] and SW3-[C] of the ecliptic (Jupiter Family) comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 pre-perihelion. We observed fragment B soon after an outburst event (between 2006 April 16 - 26 UT) and detected crystalline silicates. The mineralogy of both fragments was dominated by amorphous carbon and amorphous pyroxene. The grain size distribution (assuming a Hanner modified power-law) for fragment SW3-[B] has a peak grain radius of a_p ~ 0.5 micron, and for fragment SW3-[C], a_p ~ 0.3 micron; both values larger than the peak grain radius of the size distribution for the dust ejected from ecliptic comet 9P/Tempel 1 during the Deep Impact event (a_p = 0.2 micron. The silicate-to-carbon ratio and the silicate crystalline mass fraction for the submicron to micron-size portion of the grain size distribution on the nucleus of fragment SW3-[B] was 1.341 +0.250 -0.253 and 0.335 +0.089 -0.112, respectively, while on the nucleus of fragment SW3-[C] was 0.671 +0.076 -0.076 and 0.257 +0.039 -0.043, respectively. The similarity in mineralogy and grain properties between the two fragments implies that 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 is homogeneous in composition. The slight differences in grain size distribution and silicate-to-carbon ratio between the two fragments likely arises because SW3-[B] was actively fragmenting throughout its passage while the activity in SW3-[C] was primarily driven by jets. The lack of diverse mineralogy in the fragments SW3-[B] and SW3-[C] of 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 along with the relatively larger peak in the coma grain size distribution suggests the parent body of this comet may have formed in a region of the solar nebula with different environmental properties than the natal sites where comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) and 9P/Tempel 1 nuclei aggregated.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure, accepted for publication in A

Dust in Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin)

We report optical imaging, optical and near-infrared polarimetry, and Spitzer mid-infrared spectroscopy of comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin). Polarimetric observations were obtained in R (0.676 micron) at phase angles from 0.44 degrees to 21 degrees with simultaneous observations in H (1.65 micron) at 4.0 degrees, exploring the negative branch in polarization. Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) shows typical negative polarization in the optical as well as a similar negative branch near-infrared wavelengths. The 10 micron silicate feature is only weakly in emission and according to our thermal models, is consistent with emission from a mixture of silicate and carbon material. We argue that large, low-porosity (akin to Ballistic Particle Cluster Aggregates) rather absorbing aggregate dust particles best explain both the polarimetric and the mid-infrared spectral energy distribution.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures, 3 table

Particle transport in evolving protoplanetary disks: Implications for results from Stardust

Samples returned from comet 81P/Wild 2 by Stardust confirm that substantial quantities of crystalline silicates were incorporated into the comet at formation. We investigate the constraints that this observation places upon protoplanetary disk physics, assuming that outward transport of particles processed at high temperatures occurs via advection and turbulent diffusion in an evolving disk. We also look for constraints on particle formation locations. Our results are based upon 1D disk models that evolve with time under the action of viscosity and photoevaporation, and track solid transport using an ensemble of individual particle trajectories. We find that two classes of disk model are consistent with the Stardust findings. One class features a high particle diffusivity (a Schmidt number Sc < 1), which suffices to diffuse particles up to 20 microns in size outward against the mean gas flow. For Sc > 1, such models are unlikely to be viable, and significant outward transport requires that the particles of interest settle into a midplane layer that experiences an outward gas flow. In either class of models, the mass of inner disk material that reaches the outer disk is a strong function of the disk's initial compactness. Hence, models of grain transport within steady-state disks underestimate the efficiency of outward transport. Neither model results in sustained outward transport of very large particles exceeding a mm in size. We show that the transport efficiency generally falls off rapidly with time. Hence, high-temperature material must be rapidly incorporated into icy bodies to avoid fallback, and significant radial transport may only occur during the initial phase of rapid disk evolution. It may also vary substantially between disks depending upon their initial mass distributions. We discuss implications for Spitzer observations of crystalline silicates in T Tauri disks.Comment: ApJ, in pres

Application of Beamforming Methods to Full-Scale Military Jet Noise

Over the past decade, beamforming in aeroacoustics applications have undergone significant advances. Cross beamforming methods improve upon traditional beamforming in that they relax the assumption of multiple-source incoherence. This paper compares the abilities of three cross beamforming methods to reproduce source and field characteristics for an extended, partially correlated source that mimics supersonic jet noise radiation. Standard cross beamforming and two related methods that involve regularization—the hybrid method and improved generalized inverse beamforming—are applied to a numerically generated dataset along a near-field line. Estimated levels and coherence lengths are compared with benchmarks at the source as well as near and far-field locations. All three methods are successful in reproducing the field and source properties in high-amplitude regions. Although regularization generally helps to improve both source and field reconstructions, results are sensitive to regularization parameters, particularly for the generalized inverse method. The successful application of the three methods demonstrate the utility of cross-beamforming in formulating equivalent source models for accurate field prediction of complex sources, including jet noise

Bi2Te1.6S1.4 - a Topological Insulator in the Tetradymite Family

We describe the crystal growth, crystal structure, and basic electrical properties of Bi2Te1.6S1.4, which incorporates both S and Te in its Tetradymite quintuple layers in the motif -[Te0.8S0.2]-Bi-S-Bi-[Te0.8S0.2]-. This material differs from other Tetradymites studied as topological insulators due to the increased ionic character that arises from its significant S content. Bi2Te1.6S1.4 forms high quality crystals from the melt and is the S-rich limit of the ternary Bi-Te-S {\gamma}-Tetradymite phase at the melting point. The native material is n-type with a low resistivity; Sb substitution, with adjustment of the Te to S ratio, results in a crossover to p-type and resistive behavior at low temperatures. Angle resolved photoemission study shows that topological surface states are present, with the Dirac point more exposed than it is in Bi2Te3 and similar to that seen in Bi2Te2Se. Single crystal structure determination indicates that the S in the outer chalcogen layers is closer to the Bi than the Te, and therefore that the layers supporting the surface states are corrugated on the atomic scale.Comment: To be published in Physical Review B Rapid Communications 16 douuble spaced pages. 4 figures 1 tabl