1,137 research outputs found
Tracking changes in everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the 2012 London Paralympics
The 2012 Paralympics was the biggest ever, the most accessible and best attended in its 64-year history. The Paralympics and ideas of disability associated with the Games provide significant opportunity for reflection on how far societal opinions, attitudes and behaviour have changed regarding disability. In 2012 â the first ever âlegacy gamesâ â an explicit aim of the Paralympics was to âtransform the perception of disabled people in societyâ, (Channel 4), and use sport to contribute to âa better world for all people with a disabilityâ (IPC 2011). The 2012 Games therefore came with a social agenda: to challenge the current perceptions many people have about disability and disability sport. Within this report â commissioned by the UKâs Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 â we consider everyday experiences of disability and disability sport within the context of the London 2012 Paralympics and televised coverage of the Games. The analysis is based 140 in-depth interviews that took place in the UK over a period of eighteen months, during the lead up to, and immediately after, the Games: between January 2011 and September 2012. Embedded in the lifeworld of our participants, we ask whether the 2012 Paralympics was successful in changing perceptions of disability
Electrodynamics of a Magnet Moving through a Conducting Pipe
The popular demonstration involving a permanent magnet falling through a
conducting pipe is treated as an axially symmetric boundary value problem.
Specifically, Maxwell's equations are solved for an axially symmetric magnet
moving coaxially inside an infinitely long, conducting cylindrical shell of
arbitrary thickness at nonrelativistic speeds. Analytic solutions for the
fields are developed and used to derive the resulting drag force acting on the
magnet in integral form. This treatment represents a significant improvement
over existing models which idealize the problem as a point dipole moving slowly
inside a pipe of negligible thickness. It also provides a rigorous study of
eddy currents under a broad range of conditions, and can be used for precision
magnetic braking applications. The case of a uniformly magnetized cylindrical
magnet is considered in detail, and a comprehensive analytical and numerical
study of the properties of the drag force is presented for this geometry.
Various limiting cases of interest involving the shape and speed of the magnet
and the full range of conductivity and magnetic behavior of the pipe material
are investigated and corresponding asymptotic formulas are developed.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figures; computer program posted to
http://www.csus.edu/indiv/p/partovimh/magpipedrag.nb Submitted to the
Canadian Journal of Physic
From awww to awe factor: UK audience meaning-making of the 2012 Paralympics as mediated spectacle.
This article considers UK audiencesâ meaning-making of television coverage of the London 2012 Paralympic Games. As an elite sporting event, the Paralympics has been categorized alongside other high-profile media spectacles. Yet, an analysis of the âspectacleâ has further significance here in relation to what Mitchell and Snyder conceptualize as âfascination with spectacles of differenceâ, which encourages audiences to view the disabled person through their impairment, rather than as a human being. Inspirational âsupercripâ stories that glorify âspecial achievementâ fuel perceptions that disabled athletes have extraordinary, heroic qualities, and coverage of the 2012 Paralympics was no different. The spectacle is created through everyday talk. Therefore, we utilize in-depth interviews supported by netnography-inspired methods to consider to what extent media representations appropriated disability into âspectacleâ, consequently perpetuating ablest discourses, whilst also addressing the intended social agenda by facilitating greater understanding. Our findings suggest an unexpected emotional engagement with the (mostly) sporting spectacle, with audience narratives moving from âawwwâ to âaweâ as sporting achievement was celebrated. The disabled sporting âheroâ as âsuperheroâ is, we argue, further evidence of the influence of discourses that attempt to transform a stigmatized identity, i.e. disability, into a revered one â athleticism, thus reinforcing existing hierarchies of ability/disability
The Asia Minor Greek adpositional cycle: a tale of multiple causation
This paper examines the interplay of language-internal continuity and external influence in the cyclical development of the Asia Minor Greek adpositional system. The Modern Greek dialects of Asia Minor inherited an adpositional system of the Late Medieval Greek type whereby secondary adpositions regularly combined with primary adpositions to encode spatial region. Secondary adpositions could originally precede simple adpositions ([PREPOSITION + PREPOSITION + NPACC]) or follow the adpositional complement ([PREPOSITION + NPACC + POSTPOSITION]). Asia Minor Greek replicated the structure of Ottoman Turkish postpositional phrases to resolve this variability, fixing the position of secondary adpositions after the complement and thus developing circumpositions of the type [PREPOSITION + NPACC + POSTPOSITION]. Later, some varieties dropped the primary preposition SE from circumpositional phrases, leaving (secondary) postpositions as the only overt relator ([NPACC + POSTPOSITION]) in some environments. In addition, a number of Turkish postpositions were borrowed wholesale, thus enriching the Greek adpositional inventory
Coastal sea level rise with warming above 2°C
Two degrees of global warming above the preindustrial level is widely suggested as an appropriate threshold beyond which climate change risks become unacceptably high. This â2 °Câ threshold is likely to be reached between 2040 and 2050 for both Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and 4.5. Resulting sea level rises will not be globally uniform, due to ocean dynamical processes and changes in gravity associated with water mass redistribution. Here we provide probabilistic sea level rise projections for the global coastline with warming above the 2 °C goal. By 2040, with a 2 °C warming under the RCP8.5 scenario, more than 90% of coastal areas will experience sea level rise exceeding the global estimate of 0.2 m, with up to 0.4 m expected along the Atlantic coast of North America and Norway. With a 5 °C rise by 2100, sea level will rise rapidly, reaching 0.9 m (median), and 80% of the coastline will exceed the global sea level rise at the 95th percentile upper limit of 1.8 m. Under RCP8.5, by 2100, New York may expect rises of 1.09 m, Guangzhou may expect rises of 0.91 m, and Lagos may expect rises of 0.90 m, with the 95th percentile upper limit of 2.24 m, 1.93 m, and 1.92 m, respectively. The coastal communities of rapidly expanding cities in the developing world, and vulnerable tropical coastal ecosystems, will have a very limited time after midcentury to adapt to sea level rises unprecedented since the dawn of the Bronze Age
Special section on advances in reachability analysis and decision procedures: contributions to abstraction-based system verification
Reachability analysis asks whether a system can evolve from legitimate initial states to unsafe states. It is thus a fundamental tool in the validation of computational systems - be they software, hardware, or a combination thereof. We recall a standard approach for reachability analysis, which captures the system in a transition system, forms another transition system as an over-approximation, and performs an incremental fixed-point computation on that over-approximation to determine whether unsafe states can be reached. We show this method to be sound for proving the absence of errors, and discuss its limitations for proving the presence of errors, as well as some means of addressing this limitation. We then sketch how program annotations for data integrity constraints and interface specifications - as in Bertrand Meyers paradigm of Design by Contract - can facilitate the validation of modular programs, e.g., by obtaining more precise verification conditions for software verification supported by automated theorem proving. Then we recap how the decision problem of satisfiability for formulae of logics with theories - e.g., bit-vector arithmetic - can be used to construct an over-approximating transition system for a program. Programs with data types comprised of bit-vectors of finite width require bespoke decision procedures for satisfiability. Finite-width data types challenge the reduction of that decision problem to one that off-the-shelf tools can solve effectively, e.g., SAT solvers for propositional logic. In that context, we recall the Tseitin encoding which converts formulae from that logic into conjunctive normal form - the standard format for most SAT solvers - with only linear blow-up in the size of the formula, but linear increase in the number of variables. Finally, we discuss the contributions that the three papers in this special section make in the areas that we sketched above. © Springer-Verlag 2009
Charge and Current Sum Rules in Quantum Media Coupled to Radiation
This paper concerns the equilibrium bulk charge and current density
correlation functions in quantum media, conductors and dielectrics, fully
coupled to the radiation (the retarded regime). A sequence of static and
time-dependent sum rules, which fix the values of certain moments of the charge
and current density correlation functions, is obtained by using Rytov's
fluctuational electrodynamics. A technique is developed to extract the
classical and purely quantum-mechanical parts of these sum rules. The sum rules
are critically tested in the classical limit and on the jellium model. A
comparison is made with microscopic approaches to systems of particles
interacting through Coulomb forces only (the non-retarded regime). In contrast
with microscopic results, the current-current correlation function is found to
be integrable in space, in both classical and quantum regimes.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur
Integration of epitaxial colossal magnetoresistive films onto Si(100) using SrTiO\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3e as a template layer
We report on the integration of epitaxial colossal magnetoresistive La0.67Ba0.33MnO films on Si(100) semiconductor using SrTiO3 template layer by pulsed-laser deposition. X-ray diffraction reveals the superior quality of the manganite film that grows epitaxially on heteroepitaxially grown SrTiO3 template layer on Si substrate. The epitaxial films demonstrate remarkable surface morphology, magnetic transition and hysteresis, magnetoresistance, and ferromagnetic resonance, illustrating the ferromagnetic nature of the film and possible device applications at room temperature
Re-presenting para-sport bodies: Disability and the cultural legacy of the Paralympic Games
This report provides data and recommendations drawn from the rst funded academic project to examine the implications of the rapid commercialisation of the Paralympic Games and the increasing visibility of disa- bility in the media; in uenced by the success of Channel 4âs entry as the United Kingdomâs o cial Paralympic broadcaster in 2012. Through an integrated methodological approach, we provide a joined-up evidence base that captures the intentions and practices of Channel 4âs (C4) broadcasting of the Rio 2016 Paralympics; the in uence of this on the content of Paralympic coverage and mediated forms of disability representation; and the wider impact on public attitudes toward disability. This approach allowed us to examine the important and in uential relationship between Paralympic production practices, progressive social change and cultural legacies
Scattering of light and atoms in a Fermi-Dirac gas with BCS pairing
We theoretically study the optical properties of a Fermi-Dirac gas in the
presence of a superfluid state. We calculate the leading quantum-statistical
corrections to the standard column density result of the electric
susceptibility. We also consider the Bragg diffraction of atoms by means of
light-stimulated transitions of photons between two intersecting laser beams.
Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer pairing between atoms in different internal levels
magnifies incoherent scattering processes. The absorption linewidth of a
Fermi-Dirac gas is broadened and shifted. Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer pairing
introduces a collisional local-field shift that may dramatically dominate the
Lorentz-Lorenz shift. For the case of the Bragg spectroscopy the static
structure function may be significantly increased due to superfluidity in the
nearforward scattering.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures; to appear in PR
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