633 research outputs found
Network properties of written human language
We investigate the nature of written human language within the framework of complex network theory. In particular, we analyse the topology of Orwell's \textit{1984} focusing on the local properties of the network, such as the properties of the nearest neighbors and the clustering coefficient. We find a composite power law behavior for both the average nearest neighbor's degree and average clustering coefficient as a function of the vertex degree. This implies the existence of different functional classes of vertices. Furthermore we find that the second order vertex correlations are an essential component of the network architecture. To model our empirical results we extend a previously introduced model for language due to Dorogovtsev and Mendes. We propose an accelerated growing network model that contains three growth mechanisms: linear preferential attachment, local preferential attachment and the random growth of a pre-determined small finite subset of initial vertices. We find that with these elementary stochastic rules we are able to produce a network showing syntactic-like structures
Women, know your limits: Cultural sexism in academia
Despite the considerable advances of the feminist movement across Western societies, in Universities women are less likely to be promoted, or paid as much as their male colleagues, or even get jobs in the first place. One way in which we can start to reflect on why this might be the case is through hearing the experiences of women academics themselves. Using feminist methodology, this article attempts to unpack and explore just some examples of
‘cultural sexism’ which characterise the working lives of many women in British academia.This article uses qualitative methods to describe and make sense of just some of those experiences. In so doing, the argument is also made that the activity of academia is profoundly gendered and this explicit acknowledgement may contribute to our
understanding of the under-representation of women in senior positions
Sparrows can't sing : East End kith and kinship in the 1960s
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by
the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in
the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves
more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career
spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl
in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage
and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East,
often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences
(Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre
Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances
on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material
for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television
commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre
Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice
which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32).
The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer,
in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t
Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in
Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the
urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration,
I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular
community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and
for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques
(recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic
delivery in performance
Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment
While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time
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'Crawling in the Flanders mud': Samuel Beckett, war writing and scatological pacifism
This article explores the depiction of wounded soldiers in Samuel Beckett’s novel Mercier and Camier (written in French in 1946, published in 1970, and translated and published in English in 1974). This aspect of the novel is discussed from two perspectives: the Irish military history which Beckett repeatedly invokes in the novel, notably the Boer War and World War I; and the relation between the novel and the ‘war books’ which followed World War I, many of which express pacifist ideals by laying bare the suffering which combatant bodies experience. Drawing attention to the hitherto neglected context of war writing for the image of the wounded soldier in Beckett’s work, this article uses Mercier and Camier to consider the political implications of the author’s allusions to military history following World War II
The ultimate return:Dissent, apostolic succession, and the renewed ministry of Roman Catholic women priests
Articles of Faith: Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture
This article examines the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression within contemporary multicultural liberal democracies. These two fundamental human rights have increasingly been seen, in public and political discourse, in terms of tension if not outright opposition, a view reinforced by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015. And yet in every human rights charter they are proximate to one another. This essay argues that this adjacency is not coincidental, that it has a history and that, in illuminating this history, it is possible to explore how the contemporary framing of these two rights as being in opposition has come about. Looking back to the framing of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the essay offers an historical perspective that, in turn, facilitates a reappraisal and re-evaluation of these two liberties that is the necessary, albeit insufficient, predicate to the task of addressing the problematic of multicultural ‘crisis' in the contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, in which the presence of certain religious communities (Muslims, in particular) and the role of religion in public and political life more generally (and, conversely, of secularism) has assumed a central importance
Transparent Nuclei and Deuteron-Gold Collisions at RHIC
The current normalization of the cross section of inclusive high-pT particle
production in deuteron-gold collisions measured RHIC relies on Glauber
calculations for the inelastic d-Au cross section. These calculations should be
corrected for diffraction. Moreover, they miss the Gribov's inelastic shadowing
which makes nuclei more transparent (color transparency). The magnitude of this
effect rises with energy and it may dramatically affect the normalization of
the RHIC data. We evaluate these corrections employing the light-cone dipole
formalism and found a rather modest corrections for the current normalization
of the d-Au data. The results of experiments insensitive to diffraction
(PHENIX, PHOBOS) should be renormalized by about 20% down, while those which
include diffraction (STAR), by only 10%. Such a correction completely
eliminates the Cronin enhancement in the PHENIX data for pions. The largest
theoretical uncertainty comes from the part of the inelastic shadowing which is
related to diffractive gluon radiation, or gluon shadowing. Our estimate is
adjusted to data for the triple-Pomeron coupling, however, other models do not
have such a restrictions and predict much stronger gluon shadowing. Therefore,
the current data for high-pT hadron production in d-Au collisions at RHIC
cannot exclude in a model independent way the possibility if initial state
suppression proposed by Kharzeev-Levin-McLerran. Probably the only way to
settle this uncertainty is a direct measurement of the inelastic d-Au cross
sections at RHIC. Also d-Au collisions with a tagged spectator nucleon may
serve as a sensitive probe for nuclear transparency and inelastic shadowing. We
found an illuminating quantum-mechanical effect: the nucleus acts like a lens
focusing spectators into a very narrow cone.Comment: Latex 50 pages. Based on lectures given by the author at Workshop on
High-pT Correlations at RHIC, Columbia University, May-June, 2003. The
version to appear in PR
A symbol of carnival or menace? Sojourner perceptions of the St George Cross flag during the FIFA 2010 World Cup
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