Dogging Cornwall’s 'secret freaks': Béroul on the limits of European orthodoxy

This piece argues that Béroul's version of the Tristan tale can be read as offering a discreetly veiled view of the sexual, ritual and ontological chaos associated with visions of the Celtic West such as figure in Gerald of Wales' History and Topography of Ireland as well as with accounts of heretical orgies found in continental sources such as Caesarius of Heisterbach. Drawing parallels between the poem’s fictional Cornwall and Gerald’s often hyperbolically lurid accounts of the perversions and peculiarities of Ireland, both religious and sexual, this essay targets the cultural voyeurism in which the world of King Mark appears to veil its kinship with the deviance and hybridity Gerald presents as characteristic of religious life across the Irish Sea. This relation can perhaps helpfully be characterised as a form of cultural 'dogging', the sociology of which is one of the methodological focuses of this paper and which mirrors Béroul's recurring focus on voyeuristic scenarios. Evidently, however, the disavowed investments underlying orthodoxy's voyeuristic fascination with what Gerald describes as the'secret freaks' nature spawns in Ireland also reflect a desire to render unintelligible the logics of othered practices. What gives Béroul’s text an edginess discernible even today is the clear implication that such ‘flawed’ societies operated on their own cultural terms and according to the

Solar concentrator

An improved solar concentrator is characterized by a number of elongated supporting members arranged in substantial horizontal parallelism with the axis and intersecting a common curve. A tensioned sheet of flexible reflective material is disposed in engaging relation with the supporting members in order to impart to the tensioned sheet a catenary configuration

Accurate and efficient calculation of response times for groundwater flow

We study measures of the amount of time required for transient flow in heterogeneous porous media to effectively reach steady state, also known as the response time. Here, we develop a new approach that extends the concept of mean action time. Previous applications of the theory of mean action time to estimate the response time use the first two central moments of the probability density function associated with the transition from the initial condition, at $t=0$, to the steady state condition that arises in the long time limit, as $t \to \infty$. This previous approach leads to a computationally convenient estimation of the response time, but the accuracy can be poor. Here, we outline a powerful extension using the first $k$ raw moments, showing how to produce an extremely accurate estimate by making use of asymptotic properties of the cumulative distribution function. Results are validated using an existing laboratory-scale data set describing flow in a homogeneous porous medium. In addition, we demonstrate how the results also apply to flow in heterogeneous porous media. Overall, the new method is: (i) extremely accurate; and (ii) computationally inexpensive. In fact, the computational cost of the new method is orders of magnitude less than the computational effort required to study the response time by solving the transient flow equation. Furthermore, the approach provides a rigorous mathematical connection with the heuristic argument that the response time for flow in a homogeneous porous medium is proportional to $L^2/D$, where $L$ is a relevant length scale, and $D$ is the aquifer diffusivity. Here, we extend such heuristic arguments by providing a clear mathematical definition of the proportionality constant.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, accepted version of paper published in Journal of Hydrolog

New homogenization approaches for stochastic transport through heterogeneous media

The diffusion of molecules in complex intracellular environments can be strongly influenced by spatial heterogeneity and stochasticity. A key challenge when modelling such processes using stochastic random walk frameworks is that negative jump coefficients can arise when transport operators are discretized on heterogeneous domains. Often this is dealt with through homogenization approximations by replacing the heterogeneous medium with an $\textit{effective}$ homogeneous medium. In this work, we present a new class of homogenization approximations by considering a stochastic diffusive transport model on a one-dimensional domain containing an arbitrary number of layers with different jump rates. We derive closed form solutions for the $k$th moment of particle lifetime, carefully explaining how to deal with the internal interfaces between layers. These general tools allow us to derive simple formulae for the effective transport coefficients, leading to significant generalisations of previous homogenization approaches. Here, we find that different jump rates in the layers gives rise to a net bias, leading to a non-zero advection, for the entire homogenized system. Example calculations show that our generalized approach can lead to very different outcomes than traditional approaches, thereby having the potential to significantly affect simulation studies that use homogenization approximations.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, accepted version of paper published in The Journal of Chemical Physic

Is the real exchange rate stationary? - a similar sized test approach for the univariate panel cases

In this article we show that mean-adjusting Panel and Time Series unit root tests yields similar size when there is no drift. The conclusion of the empirics for Purchasing Power Parity is that it holds on average

The impact of the law on industrial disputes in the 1980s: report of a survey of public transport employers

This paper reports the results of one part of a research project which investigated the nature and extent of the impact of the labour legislation enacted between 1980 and 1990 on the conduct of the industrial relations and the processes by which this came about. Interviews were carried out with managers in three major public sector transport organisations. All three were subject to radical organisational change during the period under review and had quite extensive experience of dispute in this time. While they had made greater use of the law than employers in other sectors covered by the research project, there were mixed views on the results of this resort to the law. In general the law appeared to be a subsidiary part of, and influence on, the management of the process of change rather than an independent factor influencing management''s relations with trade unions and the workforce

A Panel Test of Purchasing Power Parity Under the Null of Stationarity

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is tested using a sample of real exchange rate data for twelve European countries. Acknowledging that Augmented Dickey Fuller tests have low power, we apply a Panel test that considers the null of stationarity and corrects for serial dependence using a non-parametric kernel based method