NOSTALGIA AS AN EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE GREAT WAR

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War. What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. Some argue that a ‘cultural chasm’ developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the ‘disillusionment story’ of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among men of the ‘war generation’ particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.</jats:p

Top-down and bottom-up research in biodemography

The most efficient way to make scientific progress in biodemography is to encourage bi-directional exchange between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ research. This will entail exchange along the continuum of research from microscopic intracellular processes to population-level consequences. In addition, our understanding of the biology of aging and its demographic consequences will be enriched by mutual influence between studies of mechanistic or ‘proximate’ causal processes and investigations of the evolutionary processes underlying the same phenomena. Researchers working at these different levels of explanation could be more productive if they were informed by research at other levels and interacted with scientists with complementary expertise. Such collaborations could be encouraged both through interdisciplinary workshops, research projects, program projects and training programs.aging, biodemography, evolution, life history

Physics of An Ultrahigh-Statistics Charm Experiment

We review the physics goals of an ultrahigh-statistics charm experiment and place them in the broader context of the community's efforts to study the Standard Model and to search for physics beyond the Standard Model, and we point out some of the experimental difficulties which must be overcome if these goals are to be met.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

Infinitely Robust Order and Local Order-Parameter Tulips in Apollonian Networks with Quenched Disorder

For a variety of quenched random spin systems on an Apollonian network, including ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic bond percolation and the Ising spin glass, we find the persistence of ordered phases up to infinite temperature over the entire range of disorder. We develop a renormalization-group technique that yields highly detailed information, including the exact distributions of local magnetizations and local spin-glass order parameters, which turn out to exhibit, as function of temperature, complex and distinctive tulip patterns.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; updated to reflect minor changes in published versio

Observation and numerical simulation of a convective initiation during COHMEX

Under a synoptically undisturbed condition, a dual-peak convective lifecycle was observed with the COoperative Huntsville Meteorological EXperiment (COHMEX) observational network over a 24-hour period. The lifecycle included a multicell storm, which lasted about 6 hours, produced a peak rainrate exceeding 100 mm/hr, and initiated a downstream mesoscale convective system. The 24-hour accumulated rainfall of this event was the largest during the entire COHMEX. The downstream mesoscale convective system, unfortunately, was difficult to investigate quantitatively due to the lack of mesoscale observations. The dataset collected near the time of the multicell storm evolution, including its initiation, was one of the best datasets of COHMEX. In this study, the initiation of this multicell storm is chosen as the target of the numerical simulations

Frustrated Further-Neighbor Antiferromagnetic and Electron-Hopping Interactions in the d=3 tJ Model: Finite-Temperature Global Phase Diagrams from Renormalization-Group Theory

The renormalization-group theory of the d=3 tJ model is extended to further-neighbor antiferromagnetic or electron-hopping interactions, including the ranges of frustration. The global phase diagram of each model is calculated for the entire ranges of temperatures, electron densities, and further/first-neighbor interaction strength ratios. In addition to the \tau_{tJ} phase seen in earlier studies of the nearest-neighbor d=3 tJ model, the \tau_{Hb} phase seen before in the d=3 Hubbard model appears both near and away from half-filling. These distinct \tau phases potentially correspond to different (BEC-like and BCS-like) superconducting phases.Comment: Improved figures, added discussions, added references. Published version. 12 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

"Spying for the People": surveillance, democracy and the impasse of cynical reason

This essay examines the Snowden affair as a sort of Rorschach test that traces the contours of what I am calling the impasse of cynical reason. In particular, I contend that the emerging form of algorithmic dataveillance both elicits and actively thwarts theoretical and critical approaches predicated on an a normative, symbolic model of epistemology that this form aspires to supplant. As a result, what such approaches tend to discern in the emerging culture of surveillance are its own epistemological commitments—the very ones comprising the impasse of cynical reason. Breaking out of this impasse will thus require disrupting the deep, hidden complicity of such critique with its ostensible object. I contend that this will require taking seriously the often disingenuous or fallacious arguments on behalf of dataveillance in order to overcome the critical resistance to the quite genuine eventuality they connote—that of the decline of cynical reason as the prevailing form of social coordination

Infinitely Robust Order and Local Order-Parameter Tulips in Apollonian Networks with Quenched Disorder

For a variety of quenched random spin systems on an Apollonian network, including ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic bond percolation and the Ising spin glass, we find the persistence of ordered phases up to infinite temperature over the entire range of disorder. We develop a renormalization-group technique that yields highly detailed information, including the exact distributions of local magnetizations and local spin-glass order parameters, which turn out to exhibit, as function of temperature, complex and distinctive tulip patterns