Admiral Jerauld Wright: Warrior among Diplomats

For more than two-thirds of a century, a host of diplomats, military officers, and statesmen have been entertained in their wardrooms, clubs, and drawing rooms from London to Manila by Jerry Wright’s stories and vignettes drawn from his re- markable career. After every session, the inevitable reaction would be, “Jerry, you’ve got to write a book.

The Lore of Low Methane Livestock:Co-Producing Technology and Animals for Reduced Climate Change Impact

Methane emissions from sheep and cattle production have gained increasing profile in the context of climate change. Policy and scientific research communities have suggested a number of technological approaches to mitigate these emissions. This paper uses the concept of co-production as an analytical framework to understand farmers’ evaluation of a 'good animal’. It examines how technology and sheep and beef cattle are co-produced in the context of concerns about the climate change impact of methane. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews, this paper demonstrates that methane emissions are viewed as a natural and integral part of sheep and beef cattle by farmers, rather than as a pollutant. Sheep and beef cattle farmers in the UK are found to be an extremely heterogeneous group that need to be understood in their specific social, environmental and consumer contexts. Some are more amenable to appropriating methane reducing measures than others, but largely because animals are already co-constructed from the natural and the technical for reasons of increased production efficiency

'Open Marxism' against and beyond the 'Great Enclosure'? Reflections on How (Not) to Crack Capitalism

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth discussion of John Holloway’s recent book, Crack Capitalism. To this end, the paper offers a detailed account of the key strengths and weaknesses of Holloway’s version of ‘open Marxism’. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on six significant strengths of Crack Capitalism: (1) its insistence upon the importance of autonomous forms of agenda-setting for both individual and collective emancipation; (2) its emphasis on the ordinary constitution of social struggles; (3) its fine-grained interpretation of the socio-ontological conditions underlying human agency; (4) its processual conception of radical social transformation; (5) its recognition of the elastic, adaptable, and integrative power of capitalism; and (6) its proposal for an alternative critical theory, commonly known as ‘open Marxism’ or ‘autonomous Marxism’. The second part of the study examines the principal weaknesses of Crack Capitalism: (1) the counterproductive implications of the preponderance of negativity, owing to a one-sided concern with critique, cracks, and crises; (2) conceptual vagueness; (3) an overuse of poetic and metaphorical language; (4) the absence of a serious engagement with the question of normativity; (5) a lack of substantive evidence; (6) a residual economic reductionism; (7) a simplistic notion of gender; (8) the continuing presence of various problematic ‘isms’; (9) the misleading distinction between ‘doing’ and ‘labour’; (10) a reductive understanding of capitalism; (11) an unrealistic view of society; and (12) socio-ontological idealis

Magnetic characterization of perpendicular recording media

In this paper, we describe techniques for the magnetic characterization of perpendicular recording media. Such measurements made using traditional techniques, such as the vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) and alternating gradient force magnetometer (AGFM), have to be corrected for the sample shape demagnetizing factor, which is often found not to be equal to -4p. For measurements other than the simple hysteresis loop, such as remanence curves, this correction must be carried out in real time and we describe the method by which this can be achieved and the process for achieving the correct demagnetization of perpendicular films prior to measurements of the isothermal remanent magnetization curve. A further complication is that real perpendicular media have a soft underlayer beneath the recording layer, which swamps and confuses signals from instruments such as VSM or AGFM. Hence, we describe the construction and use of a magnetooptical Kerr effect magnetometer, which does not penetrate significantly into the soft layer and enables the perpendicular layer to be measured independently. We describe the properties of a traditional alloy perpendicular medium and a Co-Pd multilayer system, which in the latter case exhibits multiple switching behavior. We also address the issue of the effect of the soft underlayer on the coupling in similar longitudinal films and find that the presence of the underlayer induces significant additional coupling effects that may well give rise to an increase in noise in recorded signal

Robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on UK dairy farms

Robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) are novel technologies that take over the labor of dairy farming and reduce the need for human-animal interactions. Because robotic milking involves the replacement of 'conventional' twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, some claim robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. This paper examines how established ethical relations on dairy farms are unsettled by the intervention of a radically different technology such as AMS. The renegotiation of ethical relationships is thus an important dimension of how the actors involved are re-assembled around a new technology. The paper draws on in-depth research on UK dairy farms comparing those using conventional milking technologies with those using AMS. We explore the situated ethical relations that are negotiated in practice, focusing on the contingent and complex nature of human-animal-technology interactions. We show that ethical relations are situated and emergent, and that as the identities, roles, and subjectivities of humans and animals are unsettled through the intervention of a new technology, the ethical relations also shift. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

The Origin of X-shaped Radio Galaxies: Clues from the Z-symmetric Secondary Lobes

Existing radio images of a few X-shaped radio galaxies reveal Z-symmetric morphologies in their weaker secondary lobes which cannot be naturally explained by either the galactic merger or radio-lobe backflow scenarios, the two dominant models for these X-shaped radio sources. We show that the merger picture can explain these morphologies provided one takes into account that, prior to the coalescence of their supermassive black holes, the smaller galaxy releases significant amounts of gas into the ISM of the dominant active galaxy. This rotating gas, whose angular momentum axis will typically not be aligned with the original jets, is likely to provide sufficient ram pressure at a distance ~10 kpc from the nucleus to bend the extant jets emerging from the central engine, thus producing a Z-symmetry in the pair of radio lobes. Once the two black holes have coalesced some 10^7 yr later, a rapid reorientation of the jets along a direction close to that of the orbital angular momentum of the swallowed galaxy relative to the primary galaxy would create the younger primary lobes of the X-shaped radio galaxy. This picture naturally explains why such sources typically have powers close to the FR I/II break. We suggest that purely Z-symmetric radio sources are often en route to coalescence and the concomitant emission of substantial gravitational radiation, while X-shaped ones have already merged and radiated.Comment: 12 pages, 1 compressed figure; accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Linking mesoscale landscape heterogeneity and biodiversity: gardens and tree cover significantly modify flower-visiting beetle communities

Context Maintaining biodiversity in multifunction landscapes is a significant challenge. Planning for the impacts of change requires knowledge of how species respond to landscape heterogeneity. Some insect groups are known to respond to heterogeneity at the mesoscale, defined here as hundreds of metres. However, for many taxa these effects are poorly known. Objectives To identify key elements of mesoscale landscape heterogeneity influencing community composition in flower-visiting beetles, and whether landscape explains any variation in beetle communities beyond that driven by immediate habitat cover. Methods Flower-visiting beetles were sampled from 36 transects, laid out using a 6 km2 grid located in southern Britain. Landscape heterogeneity was measured for 30 and 200 m buffers around the transects and the relative response of beetle communities to each assessed using ordination analyses followed by variation partitioning. Results The composition of immediately adjacent habitat (30 m) and mesoscale landscape heterogeneity (200 m) explained unique portions of the variation in flower-visiting beetle communities. A number of species, including those affiliated with deadwood habitats, were positively linked to tree cover in the surrounding mesoscale landscape. Gardens covered a smaller area than trees but modified beetle communities to the same extent. Conclusions The local abundance of some flower-visiting beetles is modified by the composition of the surrounding landscape. Results highlight the importance of tree cover for maintaining insect biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, while suggesting that gardens associated with small urban areas may have a disproportionate influence on biodiversity

Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) scanner instrument anomaly investigation

The results of an ad-hoc committee investigation of in-Earth orbit operational anomalies noted on two identical Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) Scanner instruments on two different spacecraft busses is presented. The anomalies are attributed to the bearings and the lubrication scheme for the bearings. A detailed discussion of the pertinent instrument operations, the approach of the investigation team and the current status of the instruments now in Earth orbit is included. The team considered operational changes for these instruments, rework possibilities for the one instrument which is waiting to be launched, and preferable lubrication considerations for specific space operational requirements similar to those for the ERBE scanner bearings