Southern Backwardness: Metronormativity and Regional Visual Culture

Since the early 1980s, visual artist Michael Meads has photographed numerous white working-class males who reside in his rural hometown of Eastaboga, Alabama, and he has often displayed these images under the installation title Eastaboga. In 2002, Meads gathered many of these photos together and reprinted them on his personal website, Alabama Souvenirs. These images have sparked commentary from major urban-oriented gay newspapers, websites, and magazines that normalized Meads’ images by situating them into the ready-made sexual identity-categories of metropolitan middle-class gay males, and by placing them into an elitist canon of Western white “gay” male art. This essay looks at how Meads disrupts this standardizing project by focusing on how his anachronistic incarnations undermine the thrust of what one critic has termed urban “sexual assimilation” in the late twentieth-century United States. To do so, I first examine some of Meads’ invocations of the gay male art canon in the opening windows of his website. Second, I read Alabama Souvenirs as an appropriative dialogue with earlier gay male art icons such as Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s turn-of-the-century pictorials of southern Mediterranean boys. Third, I address how his appropriations distort a canon of (white) visual art that affirms the presumed artistic “heritage” of many metro-identified gay male cultures in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in the early twenty-first century

The Fate of Bad Things

A review of Kevin M. Moist and David Banash (eds), Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices and the Fate of Things (Scarecrow Press, 2013)

Efficient Algorithm for Two-Center Coulomb and Exchange Integrals of Electronic Prolate Spheroidal Orbitals

We present a fast algorithm to calculate Coulomb/exchange integrals of prolate spheroidal electronic orbitals, which are the exact solutions of the single-electron, two-center Schr\"odinger equation for diatomic molecules. Our approach employs Neumann's expansion of the Coulomb repulsion 1/|x-y|, solves the resulting integrals symbolically in closed form and subsequently performs a numeric Taylor expansion for efficiency. Thanks to the general form of the integrals, the obtained coefficients are independent of the particular wavefunctions and can thus be reused later. Key features of our algorithm include complete avoidance of numeric integration, drafting of the individual steps as fast matrix operations and high accuracy due to the exponential convergence of the expansions. Application to the diatomic molecules O2 and CO exemplifies the developed methods, which can be relevant for a quantitative understanding of chemical bonds in general.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Systematic reviews and tech mining: A methodological comparison with case study

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147169/1/jrsm1318_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147169/2/jrsm1318.pd

Line graphs as social networks

The line graphs are clustered and assortative. They share these topological features with some social networks. We argue that this similarity reveals the cliquey character of the social networks. In the model proposed here, a social network is the line graph of an initial network of families, communities, interest groups, school classes and small companies. These groups play the role of nodes, and individuals are represented by links between these nodes. The picture is supported by the data on the LiveJournal network of about 8 x 10^6 people. In particular, sharp maxima of the observed data of the degree dependence of the clustering coefficient C(k) are associated with cliques in the social network.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Azimuthal Modulational Instability of Vortices in the Nonlinear Schr\"odinger Equation

We study the azimuthal modulational instability of vortices with different topological charges, in the focusing two-dimensional nonlinear Schr{\"o}dinger (NLS) equation. The method of studying the stability relies on freezing the radial direction in the Lagrangian functional of the NLS in order to form a quasi-one-dimensional azimuthal equation of motion, and then applying a stability analysis in Fourier space of the azimuthal modes. We formulate predictions of growth rates of individual modes and find that vortices are unstable below a critical azimuthal wave number. Steady state vortex solutions are found by first using a variational approach to obtain an asymptotic analytical ansatz, and then using it as an initial condition to a numerical optimization routine. The stability analysis predictions are corroborated by direct numerical simulations of the NLS. We briefly show how to extend the method to encompass nonlocal nonlinearities that tend to stabilize solutions.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, in press for Optics Communication