Finite disturbance effect on the stability of a laminar incompressible wake behind a flat plate

An integral method is used to investigate the interaction between a two-dimensional, single frequency finite amplitude disturbance in a laminar, incompressible wake behind a flat plate at zero incidence. The mean flow is assumed to be a non-parallel flow characterized by a few shape parameters. Distribution of the fluctuation across the wake is obtained as functions of those mean flow parameters by solving the inviscid Rayleigh equation using the local mean flow. The variations of the fluctuation amplitude and of the shape parameters for the mean flow are then obtained by solving a set of ordinary differential equations derived from the momentum and energy integral equations. The interaction between the mean flow and the fluctuation through Reynolds stresses plays an important role in the present formulation, and the theoretical results show good agreement with the measurements of Sato & Kuriki (1961)

Research in graphic design

An invited and reviewed opinion piece about the current state of research in graphic/communication design

A new age of believing women? Judging rape narratives online

Book synopsis: This book critically examines the last few decades of discussion around sex and violence in the media, on social media, in the courtroom and through legislation. The discursive struggles over what constitutes "sexual violence", "victims" and "offenders" is normally determined through narratives: a selective ordering of events and participants. Centrally, the book investigates the social processes involved in the telling of stories of rape and its political implications. From a multidisciplinary feminist perspective, this volume explores what narratives about sexual violence are deemed legitimate at this historical juncture. This volume brings together feminist scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines including law, legal studies, history, gender studies, ethnology, media, criminology and social work from across the globe. Through situated empirical work, these scholars seek to understand currents movements between the criminal justice system and the cultural imagination

Political Branding: The Tea Party and Its Use of Participation Branding

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in 2009 witnessed the surfacing of a populist, anti-Obama libertarian mobilization within the United States. The Tea Party, a movement that brought together a number of disparate groups—some new, some established—utilized participation branding where the consumer attributed the movement its own identity and brand. Its consumer-facing approach, lack of one single leader, and lack of a detailed party platform, in combination with its impact on the 2010 election races in America, earmarks it as a contemporary and unconventional brand phenomenon worthy of investigation. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

‘A victim, and that’s all’: the construction of Meredith Kercher in the British national newspapers

What journalistic techniques are employed to construct a newsworthy female murder victim in the age of social media? Focusing on Meredith Kercher’s murder, this article examines how Kercher’s victim persona was fashioned by the British national press before the arrests of Amanda Knox and two others. Contrary to prevailing perspectives, we argue that the newsworthy murder victim is not necessarily an ideal victim. Murder victim status in a news story is a multi-facetted construction, contingent on whatever will magnify newsworthiness. The Kercher case is the first example of British journalists using the murder victim’s Facebook content as the primary news resource, adding “authenticity” to the text and images used, since it originated from the victim herself. The research findings illustrate how Kercher was sexualized through the application of misogynist victim-blaming templates used in the reporting of sex crimes. It was the degradation of her ideal victim status that drove the initial newsworthiness of the murder story

"Not 'radical', but not 'kailyard' either:The Paisley Community Development Project reconsidered."

Accounts of the Community Development Projects (CDPs) that ran as experimental interventions in twelve deprived UK localities in the 1970s concentrate on those projects identified as 'radical'. Focusing on the often-neglected history of Paisley's CDP, this article extends recent critical re-evaluations of how CDPs have been characterised. Ferguslie Park in Paisley was the most disadvantaged of the CDP areas on several criteria, and the only CDP to be based in an outer-urban area, as well as being distinct in further ways. This influenced how the CDP team devised its community development strategy, which is misunderstood when treated as embodying a parochial 'kailyard' mentality. Paisley’s CDP has continuing relevance to debates about area-based policy and public involvement in research as they are rehearsed in new contexts

Garotas de loja, história social e teoria social [Shop Girls, Social History and Social Theory]

Shop workers, most of them women, have made up a significant proportion of Britain’s labour force since the 1850s but we still know relatively little about their history. This article argues that there has been a systematic neglect of one of the largest sectors of female employment by historians and investigates why this might be. It suggests that this neglect is connected to framings of work that have overlooked the service sector as a whole as well as to a continuing unease with the consumer society’s transformation of social life. One element of that transformation was the rise of new forms of aesthetic, emotional and sexualised labour. Certain kinds of ‘shop girls’ embodied these in spectacular fashion. As a result, they became enduring icons of mass consumption, simultaneously dismissed as passive cultural dupes or punished as powerful agents of cultural destruction. This article interweaves the social history of everyday shop workers with shifting representations of the ‘shop girl’, from Victorian music hall parodies, through modernist social theory, to the bizarre bombing of the Biba boutique in London by the Angry Brigade on May Day 1971. It concludes that progressive historians have much to gain by reclaiming these workers and the service economy that they helped create

The SUN Protein Mps3 Is Required for Spindle Pole Body Insertion into the Nuclear Membrane and Nuclear Envelope Homeostasis

The budding yeast spindle pole body (SPB) is anchored in the nuclear envelope so that it can simultaneously nucleate both nuclear and cytoplasmic microtubules. During SPB duplication, the newly formed SPB is inserted into the nuclear membrane. The mechanism of SPB insertion is poorly understood but likely involves the action of integral membrane proteins to mediate changes in the nuclear envelope itself, such as fusion of the inner and outer nuclear membranes. Analysis of the functional domains of the budding yeast SUN protein and SPB component Mps3 revealed that most regions are not essential for growth or SPB duplication under wild-type conditions. However, a novel dominant allele in the P-loop region, MPS3-G186K, displays defects in multiple steps in SPB duplication, including SPB insertion, indicating a previously unknown role for Mps3 in this step of SPB assembly. Characterization of the MPS3-G186K mutant by electron microscopy revealed severe over-proliferation of the inner nuclear membrane, which could be rescued by altering the characteristics of the nuclear envelope using both chemical and genetic methods. Lipid profiling revealed that cells lacking MPS3 contain abnormal amounts of certain types of polar and neutral lipids, and deletion or mutation of MPS3 can suppress growth defects associated with inhibition of sterol biosynthesis, suggesting that Mps3 directly affects lipid homeostasis. Therefore, we propose that Mps3 facilitates insertion of SPBs in the nuclear membrane by modulating nuclear envelope composition

Prevalence and architecture of de novo mutations in developmental disorders.

The genomes of individuals with severe, undiagnosed developmental disorders are enriched in damaging de novo mutations (DNMs) in developmentally important genes. Here we have sequenced the exomes of 4,293 families containing individuals with developmental disorders, and meta-analysed these data with data from another 3,287 individuals with similar disorders. We show that the most important factors influencing the diagnostic yield of DNMs are the sex of the affected individual, the relatedness of their parents, whether close relatives are affected and the parental ages. We identified 94 genes enriched in damaging DNMs, including 14 that previously lacked compelling evidence of involvement in developmental disorders. We have also characterized the phenotypic diversity among these disorders. We estimate that 42% of our cohort carry pathogenic DNMs in coding sequences; approximately half of these DNMs disrupt gene function and the remainder result in altered protein function. We estimate that developmental disorders caused by DNMs have an average prevalence of 1 in 213 to 1 in 448 births, depending on parental age. Given current global demographics, this equates to almost 400,000 children born per year