Visible Veil Dressing & the Gender Geopolitics of ‘What Not To Wear’

This essay critically reflects on ‘Burkha Ban’ legislation in Europe and surrounding public controversies by drawing links between the visual aesthetics of makeover reality TV, the veil, and the cultural politics of ‘visibly Muslim’ dress in western societies. In all cases we see women’s bodies and comportment under increasing scrutiny at the intersection of post 9/11 geopolitics, the global fashion industry, national identity, and everyday life

Rock-Chic(k) Lit: Vanguard or Old Guard?

A string of memoirs published by women musicians has been revising androcentric accounts of popular music making: onstage, in the studio, and on tour. The memoirs of Patti Smith, Viv Albertine, Kim Gordon, Carrie Brownstein, Chrissie Hynde, and Britt Smith Start provide a rich vein of inquiry into the under-acknowledged role that women musicians have played in the alternative – punk – music that is integral to the soundscape of Anglo-American countercultural and feminist politics. This paper considers their work as one way of substantiating the link between inquiries into the popular culture and world politics nexus writ large and, on the other hand, the embodied, psychoemotional dimensions of lived lives in the communities of practice that constitute these interconnections. First-person accounts like these provide opportunities and challenges for the analyst interested in exploring the complexities of creative and political agency of the female, rather than androgynous male Other (e.g. girl in a band, girl band, woman-with-guitar) in a (hetero)sexist and corporatized cultural domain sustained by masculinist tropes in music-making and analysis. These autobiographies - of personal lives but primarily of committed musicianship, artistic and professional collaborations – are much more than stories of single-minded women achieving success in hostile domains. These narratives comprise a rich cultural archive of the individual and collective complexities of musical countercultures that have emerged from within, but also push back against the global music and entertainment industry that underpins Anglo-American political economic and cultural hegemony

Magnetic dipoles and electric currents

We discuss several similarities and differences between the concepts of electric and magnetic dipoles. We then consider the relation between the magnetic dipole and a current loop and show that in the limit of a pointlike circuit, their magnetic fields coincide. The presentation is accessible to undergraduate students with a knowledge of the basic ideas of classical electromagnetism.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Redesigning the 'choice architecture' of hospital prescription charts: a mixed methods study incorporating in situ simulation testing.

Objectives: To incorporate behavioural insights into the user-centred design of an inpatient prescription chart (Imperial Drug Chart Evaluation and Adoption Study, IDEAS chart) and to determine whether changes in the content and design of prescription charts could influence prescribing behaviour and reduce prescribing errors. Design: A mixed-methods approach was taken in the development phase of the project; in situ simulation was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the newly developed IDEAS prescription chart. Setting: A London teaching hospital. Interventions/methods: A multimodal approach comprising (1) an exploratory phase consisting of chart reviews, focus groups and user insight gathering (2) the iterative design of the IDEAS prescription chart and finally (3) testing of final chart with prescribers using in situ simulation. Results: Substantial variation was seen between existing inpatient prescription charts used across 15 different UK hospitals. Review of 40 completed prescription charts from one hospital demonstrated a number of frequent prescribing errors including illegibility, and difficulty in identifying prescribers. Insights from focus groups and direct observations were translated into the design of IDEAS chart. In situ simulation testing revealed significant improvements in prescribing on the IDEAS chart compared with the prescription chart currently in use in the study hospital. Medication orders on the IDEAS chart were significantly more likely to include correct dose entries (164/164 vs 166/174; p=0.0046) as well as prescriber's printed name (163/164 vs 0/174; p<0.0001) and contact number (137/164 vs 55/174; p<0.0001). Antiinfective indication (28/28 vs 17/29; p<0.0001) and duration (26/28 vs 15/29; p<0.0001) were more likely to be completed using the IDEAS chart. Conclusions: In a simulated context, the IDEAS prescription chart significantly reduced a number of common prescribing errors including dosing errors and illegibility. Positive behavioural change was seen without prior education or support, suggesting that some common prescription writing errors are potentially rectifiable simply through changes in the content and design of prescription charts

Deltaic Sedimentary Environments in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Chinotu Franklin George would like to thank his sponsor: Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) and SPDC Port Harcourt for providing the satellite images used. He expresses his gratitude to his mentors: Dr. K. O. Ladipo and late Professor L. C. Amajor, and to Ms. Okwuchi Omekara for the technical support, she offered for data assembly.Peer reviewedPostprin

“Human Rights Futures for the Internet”

In a digitally connected world, the question of how to respect, protect and implement human rights has become unavoidable. This contemporary Handbook offers new insights into well-established debates by framing them in terms of human rights. It examines the issues posed by the management of key Internet resources, the governance of its architecture, the role of different stakeholders, the legitimacy of rule making and rule-enforcement, and the exercise of international public authority over users. Highly interdisciplinary, its contributions draw on law, political science, international relations and even computer science and science and technology studies. This chapter considers the longer-term implications that revelations of state-sanctioned programs of online snooping at a global level have had on human rights agendas for internet media and communications. These revelations in 2013 lifted the lid on the indiscriminate data-retention practices of powerful internet service-providers that include governments as well as corporate actors. The implications for the enjoyment and protection of our human rights online, but also offline, have fuelled power struggles over ownership and control of future internet-policymaking. Meanwhile public-private partnerships are being consolidated to “connect the next billion”, now part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, in policy-making consultations that ostensibly include everyone under the auspices of “multistakeholder participation” and which recognize human rights online, in principle. How does what citizens may know, not yet know, or not want to know about the extent of both governmental and corporate exploitation of the data generated by everyday life online affect our work as scholars, activists, educators, technical and legal experts, or as public intellectuals engaging in human rights advocacy for the internet (however defined)

“(Global) Internet Governance and its Civil Discontents”

Cybersecurity and Human Rights in the Age of Cyberveillance is a collection of articles by distinguished authors from the US and Europe and presents a contemporary perspectives on the limits online of human rights. By considering the latest political events and case law, including the NSA PRISM surveillance program controversy, the planned EU data protection amendments, and the latest European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence, it provides an analysis of the ongoing legal discourse on global cyberveillance. Using examples from contemporary state practice, including content filtering and Internet shutdowns during the Arab Spring as well as the PRISM controversy, the authors identify limits of state and third party interference with individual human rights of Internet users. Analysis is based on existing human rights standards, as enshrined within international law including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, European Convention on Human Rights and recommendations from the Human Rights Council. The definition of human rights, perceived as freedoms and liberties guaranteed to every human being by international legal consensus will be presented based on the rich body on international law

Music Making Politics: Around the World in a Song

In 2016, Bob Dylan, was awarded the 113th Nobel Prize for Literature, the first musician to receive this internationally prestigious award. Amidst debates about whether or not this decision erased the longstanding divide between ‘high’ art – classical art music and popular, commercially successful ‘low’ art – folk/pop music , Dylan’s media silence signalled a seeming indifference to the iconic status of this Nobel Prize. This scenario encapsulates some of the complexities of any discussion about the interplay between arts and culture (music in this case) and (world) politics today. This essay explores these relationships through an example of how a song travels through different, even competing musical cultures and political sensibilities. This example helps shed light on the uneven cultural geographies of musical meaning-making, within the commercial capriciousness of a global music industry that, nonetheless, cannot completely control the ways in which music travels. Nor can these economic sovereigns (the so-called Music Majors) completely dictate to whom broader cultures of musical practices ‘belong’, or how people respond as these practices circulate through diverse locations of entitlement and experience