Social Media Users\u27 Guide

Mass Communication Professor Susan Currie Sivek shares ideas and suggestions for how to take control of social media and use it to your advantage

Reclaiming heritage: colourization, culture wars and the politics of nostalgia

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity,canonicity and tradition,has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the confguration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance,the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions

Existence and partial regularity for heat flows for a variational functional of degenerate type

Abstract Artificial spin ices (ASI) are arrays of single domain nano-magnetic islands, arranged in geometries that give rise to frustrated magnetostatic interactions. It is possible to reach their ground state via thermal annealing. We have made square ASI using different FePd alloys to vary the magnetization via co-sputtering. From a polarized state the samples were incrementally heated and we measured the vertex population as a function of temperature using magnetic force microscopy. For the higher magnetization FePd sample, we report an onset of dynamics at T = 493 K, with a rapid collapse into >90% ground state vertices. In contrast, the low magnetization sample started to fluctuate at lower temperatures, T = 393 K and over a wider temperature range but only reached a maximum of 25% of ground state vertices. These results indicate that the interaction strength, dynamic temperature range and pathways can be finely tuned using a simple co-sputtering process. In addition we have compared our experimental values of the blocking temperature to those predicted using the simple Néel-Brown two-state model and find a large discrepancy which we attribute to activation volumes much smaller than the island volume