World wide web and scientific publishing

The relationship of scientific publishing and the world wide web steadily evolves as the internet technology advances in its sophistication and ability to reach an increasing number of people. Many well established medical publication currently publish their journal electronically as well as in print format. Forced by high volume of manuscript submissions as well as financial restraints, some journals publish a number of their articles on the internet alone, while others-such as this journal-are starting an entirely new publication in an electronic version only. The presentation of articles in the field of pediatric cardiology electronically has numerous advantages, particularly the ability to include movie clips, sound and animations in the published articles. This format of publication continues to have limitation. It is still not as widely available as a print journal could be and it is awkward to curl up in bed with a lap top, no matter how small or light it ispeer-reviewe

“Dead cities, crows, the rain and their ripper, the Yorkshire ripper”: The red riding novels (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983) of David Peace as Lieux d’horreur

This article explores the role and importance of place in the Red Riding novels of David Peace. Drawing on Nora’s (1989) concept of Lieux de mémoire and Rejinders’ (2010) development of this work in relation to the imaginary world of the TV detective and engaging with a body of literature on the city, it examines the way in which the bleak Yorkshire countryside and the city of Leeds in the North of England, in particular, is central to the narrative of Peace’s work and the locations described are reflective of the violence, corruption and immorality at work in the storylines. While Nora (1984) and Rejinders (2010) describe places as sites of memory negotiated through the remorse of horrific events, the authors agree that Peace’s work can be read as describing L’ieux d’horreur; a recalling of past events with the violence and horror left in

A brief historical perspective of the Wiener-Hopf technique

It is a little over 75 years since two of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century collaborated on finding the exact solution of a particular equation with semi-infinite convolution type integral operator. The elegance and analytical sophistication of the method, now called the Wiener–Hopf technique, impress all who use it. Its applicability to almost all branches of engineering, mathematical physics and applied mathematics is borne out by the many thousands of papers published on the subject since its conception. The Wiener–Hopf technique remains an extremely important tool for modern scientists, and the areas of application continue to broaden. This special issue of the Journal of Engineering Mathematics is dedicated to the work of Wiener and Hopf, and includes a number of articles which demonstrate the relevance of the technique to a representative range of model problems

The ambivalent shadow of the pre-Wilsonian rise of international law

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a “moralistic legalistic approach to international relations” remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the U.S. from the mid-19th century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the U.S. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed.by the realist founders of the field of “international relations” to the “moralistic legalistic approach to international relation

Our side of the mirror : the (re)-construction of 1970s’ masculinity in David Peace’s Red Riding

David Peace and the late Gordon Burn are two British novelists who have used a mixture of fact and fiction in their works to explore the nature of fame, celebrity and the media representations of individuals caught up in events, including investigations into notorious murders. Both Peace and Burn have analysed the case of Peter Sutcliffe, who was found guilty in 1981 of the brutal murders of thirteen women in the North of England. Peace’s novels filmed as the Red Riding Trilogy are an excoriating portrayal of the failings of misogynist and corrupt police officers, which allowed Sutcliffe to escape arrest. Burn’s somebody’s Husband Somebody’ Son is a detailed factual portrait of the community where Sutcliffe spent his life. Peace’s technique combines reportage, stream of consciousness and changing points of views including the police and the victims to produce an episodic non linear narrative. The result has been termed Yorkshire noir. The overall effect is to render the paranoia and fear these crimes created against a backdrop of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Peace has termed his novels as “fictions of the facts”. This paper will examine the way that Peace uses his account of Sutcliffe’s crimes and the huge police manhunt to catch the killer to explore the society that produced the perpetrator, victims and the police. The police officers represent a form of “hegemonic masculinity” but one that is challenged by the extreme misogyny, brutality, misery and degradation that surround them. This deconstruction of the 1970s male police officer is contrasted with the enormously popular figure of Gene Hunt from the BBC TV series Life on Mars

Scattering of flexural waves by a semi-infinite crack in an elastic plate carrying an electric current

Copyright @ 2011 Sage Publications LtdSmart structures are components used in engineering applications that are capable of sensing or reacting to their environment in a predictable and desired manner. In addition to carrying mechanical loads, smart structures may alleviate vibration, reduce acoustic noise, change their mechanical properties as required or monitor their own condition. With the last point in mind, this article examines the scattering of flexural waves by a semi-infinite crack in a non-ferrous thin plate that is subjected to a constant current aligned in the direction of the crack edge. The aim is to investigate whether the current can be used to detect or inhibit the onset of crack growth. The model problem is amenable to an exact solution via the Wiener–Hopf technique, which enables an explicit analysis of the bending (and twisting) moment intensity factors at the crack tip, and also the diffracted field. The latter contains an edge wave component, and its amplitude is determined explicitly in terms of the current and angle of incidence of the forcing flexural wave. It is further observed that the edge wave phase speed exhibits a dual dependence on frequency and current, resulting in two distinct asymptotic behaviours

An orthogonality condition for a class of problems with high order boundary conditions: Applications in sound/structure interaction

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in The Quarterly Journal of Mechanics and Applied Mathematics following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version: Lawrie, J.B. & Abrahams, I.D. (1999) “An orthogonality condition for a class of problems with high order boundary conditions; applications in sound/structure interaction.” Q. Jl. Mech. Appl. Math., 52(2), 161-181. is available online at: http://qjmam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/2/161There are numerous interesting physical problems, in the fields of elasticity, acoustics and electromagnetism etc., involving the propagation of waves in ducts or pipes. Often the problems consist of pipes or ducts with abrupt changes of material properties or geometry. For example, in car silencer design, where there is a sudden change in cross-sectional area, or when the bounding wall is lagged. As the wavenumber spectrum in such problems is usually discrete, the wave-field is representable by a superposition of travelling or evanescent wave modes in each region of constant duct properties. The solution to the reflection or transmission of waves in ducts is therefore most frequently obtained by mode-matching across the interface at the discontinuities in duct properties. This is easy to do if the eigenfunctions in each region form a complete orthogonal set of basis functions; therefore, orthogonality relations allow the eigenfunction coefficients to be determined by solving a simple system of linear algebraic equations. The objective of this paper is to examine a class of problems in which the boundary conditions at the duct walls are not of Dirichlet, Neumann or of impedance type, but involve second or higher derivatives of the dependent variable. Such wall conditions are found in models of fluid/structural interaction, for example membrane or plate boundaries, and in electromagnetic wave propagation. In these models the eigenfunctions are not orthogonal, and also extra edge conditions, imposed at the points of discontinuity, must be included when mode matching. This article presents a new orthogonality relation, involving eigenfunctions and their derivatives, for the general class of problems involving a scalar wave equation and high-order boundary conditions. It also discusses the procedure for incorporating the necessary edge conditions. Via two specific examples from structural acoustics, both of which have exact solutions obtainable by other techniques, it is shown that the orthogonality relation allows mode matching to follow through in the same manner as for simpler boundary conditions. That is, it yields coupled algebraic systems for the eigenfunction expansions which are easily solvable, and by which means more complicated cases, such as that illustrated in figure 1, are tractable