The Blaschke conjecture and great circle fibrations of spheres

We construct an explicit diffeomorphism taking any fibration of a sphere by great circles into the Hopf fibration, using elementary geometry--indeed the diffeomorphism is a local (differential) invariant, algebraic in derivatives.Comment: 61 pages, 8 figures, corrected errors in the published versio

A soundtrack to the insurrection : street music, marching bands and popular protest

What happens in social movements when people actually move, how does the mobile moment of activism contribute to mobilisation? Are they marching or dancing? How is the space of action, the street itself, altered, re-sounded? The employment of street music in the very specific context of political protest remains a curiously under-researched aspect of cultural politics in social movements.... By looking at the marching bands of different socio- political and cultural contexts, primarily British, I aim to further current understanding of the idea and history of street music itself, as well as explore questions of the construction or repositioning of urban space via music'how the sound of music can alter spaces'; participation, pleasure and the political body; subculture and identity

The legend of St Catherine’s well

A short story written from the research of local history sources and produced as an audio work. The piece was commissioned by Nottinghamshire County Council for the development of the successful £1.3m Heritage Lottery bid to renovate historical features within Sconce & Devon Park, Newark, Nottinghamshire

A wolf enters the field of the arts in Wanganui after the 2004 local body elections : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Sociology at Massey University

This research uses a Bourdieuian framework to explore 'the collision' between the fields of local government and the arts at the symbolic site of the Sarjeant Art Gallery in Wanganui, New Zealand. The Sarjeant Gallery Extension Project, conceptualised to make the Gallery more accessible and inclusive, had 84% of the necessary funds committed when it became a key issue in the 2004 local body elections. Once elected the new Mayor, who opposed the Project, swiftly undertook an intensive media campaign to discredit it. Within weeks, the entire Sarjeant Gallery Trust Board had resigned, the Extension Project was abandoned and the artists of the town were profoundly shocked. In response to these acts of symbolic violence by the Mayor, the artists developed a number of strategies that were ultimately unsuccessful in reviving the Project. Pierre Bourdieu's conception of the social space as a site of struggle between fields for the many different kinds of capital he identified resonates with the aim of this research, which was to explore the possible causes and consequences of this monumental clash of fields. Undertaken in three phases, the first two stages of the research mapped the field of the arts in Wanganui and documented the events of 'the collision'. These set the scene for the fieldwork, which took the form of structured interviews with eight agents from the field of the arts who had been involved in devising strategies to respond to the attacks on their field. Bourdieu's analysis of the field of the arts as autonomous explains why its agents looked for support for the Sarjeant Gallery Extension Project from the national field of the arts instead of its own social space. This meant that the Project never gained the wide support and political leadership it needed to take it through to completion and that calling on funding from local government became fraught with difficulty even though the Project was predicated on social inclusion. His notion of habitus, an unspoken set of values and beliefs within fields, explains why the agents within the field of the arts responded the way they did to the attack on their symbolic capital, with some agents abandoning the site of struggle and others engaging in strategies that were ultimately ineffective in constructing an included and supportive public that could have persuaded the politicians of Wanganui to invest in art

Problems with the "Problems" with psychophysical causation

In this essay, I defend a mind-body dualism, according to which human minds are immaterial substances that exercise non-redundant causal powers over bodies, against the notorious problem of psychophysical causation. I explicate and reply to three formulations of the problem: (i) the claim that, on dualism, psychophysical causation is inconsistent with physical causal closure, (ii) the claim that psychophysical causation on the dualist view is intolerably mysterious, and (iii) Jaegwon Kim’s claim that dualism fails to account for causal pairings. Ultimately, I conclude that these objections fail and that dualist interactionism is no more problematic or mysterious than physical causation

Global fits of the scalar singlet model using GAMBIT

The extension of the standard model (SM) by a Higgs portal scalar field is one the simplest dark matter theories. We present here the first results for a global fit to this model using the global and beyond the SM inference tool (GAMBIT). This software enables the combination of dark matter constraints in a statistically consistent manner. In total 15 parameters are varied and the parameter space explored using four different scanning algorithms. The viable parameter space is reduced from previous studies of this model due to the inclusion of the latest direct detection constraints.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Contribution to proceedings of EPS-HEP 201

On topics today

This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two generations of topic theorists. The first is constructed around three influential texts: Leonard Ratners seminal book that established the discipline in its own right, Classic music: expression, form and style (1980); Wye Allanbrooks. Rhythmic gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (1983); and Kofi Agawus. Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classical music (1991). The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hattens Musical meaning in Beethoven: markedness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelles Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000). Topic Theory's role as the soft hermeneutic sub-field of music semiotics (relative to the harder, formalist practices of Nattiezs neutral level analysis) is portrayed here as navigating a number of treacherous polemical paths. These wend their way between referential style (expression) and structural syntax (form); historical reconstruction and hermeneutic construction; and heightened sensitivity to social meanings and imposed acts of creative interpretation. This existence of topic theory in a continuous dialogue between structural formalism and the semantics of expressive discourse is held responsible for its marginal position both to the dominant strains of contemporary postmodern musicology and to the dying embers of formalist analysis. The failure of topic theory to strike a fashionable text-context balance thus highlights why musicology continues to view semiotics with scepticism. Ratner presents his thesaurus of style labelssomewhat dubiouslyas the historically authentic ready-to-hand materials (types and styles) of eighteenth-century expressive musical rhetoric. But it is Agawus combination of this universe of topics with a Schenker-influenced beginning-middle-end paradigm that establishes the hallmark of first generation topic theory on which the first half of this paper focuses. Agawus delicate equation between extroversive and introversive semiosis is essayed as a pivotal turning point in topic theorys ability to transcend the mere passive ascription of rhetorical labels. Out of this equation, expressive meanings can ariseas much from the non-congruence, as the congruence, of signs and structure. Hatten's critique of Agawu for neglecting the full interpretative consequences of his signifieds is the springboard for his more hermeneutically replete brand of topic theory and the emergence of the second generation topic theorists. Hattens use of troping (a kind of musical metaphor), is one of many interpretative tools that are responsible for broadening the arena of topic theorysome of his others being: expressive genres, emergent meanings and markedness theory. These are deployed across a variety of musical parameters as Hattens attention increasingly turns to the prototypicality of topics in their euphoric and dysphoric states. Hattens interpretative work is shown to transcend historical reconstruction to comprise creative interpretation built on a much broader definition of expressive gestures, of which topics are only a constituent part. The article concludes with Monelles expos of the dubious historical underpinnings of Ratners topic theory foundations. This does not render this vibrant branch of semiotics redundant but, on the contrary, charts its future direction as one calling out for far deeper historical investigation and cultural criticism. Monelles enlightening forays into the more replete expressive meanings of such topics as the horse and pianto make this point abundantly clear. The future of topics today, if not musicology in general, is one of cultural criticism