Future world: Anticipatory archaeology, materially affective capacities and the late human legacy

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Equinox Publishing via the DOI in this recordUsing the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern

Mid-rapidity π±\pi^\pm, K±K^\pm, and pˉ\bar{p} spectra and particle ratios from STAR

Results are presented on $\pi^\pm$, $K^\pm$, and $\bar{p}$ transverse mass spectra and particle multiplicity ratios at mid-rapidity in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{\rm NN}}}$=130 and 200 GeV and in p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s}$=200 GeV. Comparisons are made to results from lower energies. The bulk properties of the collision inferred from these results are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Talk presented at Quark Matter 2002, Nantes, France, July 200

The effects of verbal information on children's fear beliefs about social situations

Two experiments explored the role of verbal information in changing children’s fearrelated beliefs about social situations. In Experiment 1, 118 6- to 8- and 12- to 13-year-olds heard positive, negative, or no information about individuals’ experiences of three social situations. Fear beliefs regarding each situation were assessed before and after this manipulation. Verbal information had no significant influence on children’s fear beliefs. In Experiment 2, the same paradigm was used with 80 12- to 13-year-olds, but the information took the form of multiple attitude statements about the situations expressed by groups of peers, older children, or adults. An affective priming task of implicit attitudes was used to complement the explicit questions about fear beliefs. Negative information influenced both explicit and implicit fear beliefs. The source of information and the child’s own social anxiety did not moderate these effects. Implications for our understanding of the socialisation of childhood fears are discussed

Exploring the Local Grammar of Evaluation: The Case of Adjectival Patterns in American and Italian Judicial Discourse

Based on a 2-million word bilingual comparable corpus of American and Italian judgments, this paper tests the applicability of a local grammar to study evaluative phraseology in judicial discourse in English and Italian. In particular, the study compares the use of two patterns: v-link + ADJ + that pattern / copula + ADJ + che and v-link + ADJ + to-infinitive pattern / copula + ADJ + verbo all’infinito in the disciplinary genre of criminal judgments delivered by the US Supreme Court and the Italian Corte Suprema di Cassazione. It is argued that these two patterns represent a viable and efficient diagnostic tool for retrieving instances of evaluative language and they represent an ideal starting point and a relevant unit of analysis for a cross-language analysis of evaluation in domainrestricted specialised discourse. Further, the findings provided shed light on important interactions occurring among major interactants involved in the judicial discourse

Dynamical properties of the Landau-Ginzburg model with long-range correlated quenched impurities

We investigate the critical dynamics of the time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg model with non conserved n-component order parameter (Model A) in the presence of long-range correlated quenched impurities. We use a special kind of long-range correlations, previously introduced by Weinrib and Halperin. Using a double expansion in \epsilon and \delta we calculate the critical exponent z up to second order on the small parameters. We show that the quenched impurities of this kind affect the critical dynamics already in first order of \epsilon and \delta, leading to a relevant correction for the mean field value of the exponent zComment: 7 pages, REVTEX, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Nonequilibrium Josephson-like effects in wide mesoscopic S-N-S junctions

Mesoscopic superconducting-normal-metal-superconducting (S-N-S) junctions with a large separation between the superconducting electrodes (i.e. wide junctions) exhibit nonequilibrium supercurrents, even at temperatures for which the equilibrium Josephson effect is exponentially small. The second harmonic of the Josephson frequency dominates these currents, as observed in recent experiments. A simple description of these effects, in the spirit of the Resistively-Shunted-Junction model, is suggested here. It is used to calculate dc I-V characteristics, and to examine the effects of various types of noise and of external microwave radiation (Shapiro steps). It is found that the nonequilibrium supercurrents are excited when the junction is driven by a dc bias or an ac bias, or even by external noise. In the case of junctions which are also long in the direction perpendicular to the current flow, thermodynamic phase fluctuations (thermal noise) alone can drive the quasiparticles out of local equilibrium. Magnetic flux is then predicted to be trapped in units of Phi_0 /2 = hc/4e.Comment: 10 pages, to appear in a special issue of Superlattices & Microstructure

Cigarette smoking and gastric cancer in the stomach cancer pooling (StoP) project

Tobacco smoking is a known cause of gastric cancer, but several aspects of the association remain imprecisely quantified. We examined the relation between cigarette smoking and the risk of gastric cancer using a uniquely large dataset of 23 epidemiological studies within the ‘Stomach cancer Pooling (StoP) Project’, including 10 290 cases and 26 145 controls. We estimated summary odds ratios (ORs) and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) by pooling study-specific ORs using random-effects models. Compared with never smokers, the ORs were 1.20 (95% CI: 1.09–1.32) for ever, 1.12 (95% CI: 0.99–1.27) for former, and 1.25 (95% CI: 1.11–1.40) for current cigarette smokers. Among current smokers, the risk increased with number of cigarettes per day to reach an OR of 1.32 (95% CI: 1.10–1.58) for smokers of more than 20 cigarettes per day. The risk increased with duration of smoking, to reach an OR of 1.33 (95% CI: 1.14–1.54) for more than 40 years of smoking and decreased with increasing time since stopping cigarette smoking (P for trend<0.01) and became similar to that of never smokers 10 years after stopping. Risks were somewhat higher for cardia than noncardia gastric cancer. Risks were similar when considering only studies with information on Helicobacter pylori infection and comparing all cases to H. pylori+ controls only. This study provides the most precise estimate of the detrimental effect of cigarette smoking on the risk of gastric cancer on the basis of individual data, including the relationship with dose and duration, and the decrease in risk following stopping smoking

Exponential inequalities for martingales and asymptotic properties of the free energy of directed polymers in random environment

The objective of the present paper is to establish exponential large deviation inequalities, and to use them to show exponential concentration inequalities for the free energy of a polymer in general random environment, its rate of convergence, and an expression of its limit value in terms of those of some multiplicative cascades.Comment: 25 page

On the Instanton Contributions to the Masses and Couplings of E6E_6 Singlets

We consider the gauge neutral matter in the low--energy effective action for string theory compactification on a \cym\ with $(2,2)$ world--sheet supersymmetry. At the classical level these states (the \sing's of $E_6$) correspond to the cohomology group H^1(\M,{\rm End}\>T). We examine the first order contribution of instantons to the mass matrix of these particles. In principle, these corrections depend on the \K\ parameters $t_i$ through factors of the form e^{2\p i t_i} and also depend on the complex structure parameters. For simplicity we consider in greatest detail the quintic threefold \cp4[5]. It follows on general grounds that the total mass is often, and perhaps always, zero. The contribution of individual instantons is however nonzero and the contribution of a given instanton may develop poles associated with instantons coalescing for certain values of the complex structure. This can happen when the underlying \cym\ is smooth. Hence these poles must cancel between the coalescing instantons in order that the superpotential be finite. We examine also the \Y\ couplings involving neutral matter \ysing\ and neutral and charged fields \ymix, which have been little investigated even though they are of phenomenological interest. We study the general conditions under which these couplings vanish classically. We also calculate the first--order world--sheet instanton correction to these couplings and argue that these also vanish.Comment: 40 pages, plain TeX with epsf, one uuencoded figur