'There is No Doubt that I'm Old': Everyday Narratives of Ageing

The 3-year Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), led by a research team in the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), and conducted as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme, began on 1st May 2009 and finished at the end of August 2012. This paper briefly outlines the research and some of its findings in order to illustrate some of the advantages of its particular narrative approach to ageing and issues that concern social gerontologists among others including policymakers, stakeholders and older subjects themselves. First, it discusses the responses of members of the University of the Third Age (U3A) to reading novels with depictions of older subjects such as David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence and Jim Crace’s Arcadia. Second, it discusses responses to the Mass Observation (MO) directive of 2009, ‘Books and You’, which was commissioned by the FCMAP team and situates these responses within the wider context of replies to other MO directives on ageing. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the changing nature of third and fourth age subjectivity and the importance of narrative understanding to the experience of ageing

Will Self and Zadie Smith’s depictions of post-Thatcherite London: Imagining traumatic and traumatological Space

This essay considers theories of trauma and fiction, in particular by analysing two novels set in London, Will Self’s The Book of Dave and Zadie Smith’s NW, and argues that trauma’s apparent belatedness (rendering its origins as elusive and unattainable) is less important particularly post-9/11 than the ‘traumatological,’ or a sense of immediate, attributable potential threats permeating the social and cultural conditions. The essay explores how Self’s future dystopia with its dogmatic belief systems runs parallel with the present and how Dave ‘Tufty’ Rudman, insane after his divorce, creates a ranting text retrieved in the future by those founding a new monotheistic religion, Dävinanity. The Book of Dave’s pathological influence allows a satire of the blind faith which animates the extremism that permeates elements of extreme Islam and future fundamentalists in a largely flooded Ingerland (England). Smith’s novel largely concerns two friends living in London’s north-west suburbs, Leah Hanwell and Natalie (previously Keisha) Blake, bonded by a traumatic childhood event. This essay explores a literal and visceral cartography of these women’s different betrayals of their partners, their multiple acts of deceit, and their troubled inner lives grounded in nostalgia for a less privileged upbringing. Both Self’s and Smith’s London fictions incorporate insistently cartographies of suffering, charting the traumatic and traumatological realities of urban selfhood

Coming of age

Copyright at Demos 2011. This work is made available under the terms of the Demos licence.Britain’s ageing population is often described as a demographic time-bomb. As a society we often view ageing as a ‘problem’ which must be ‘managed’ – how to cope with the pressure on national health services of growing numbers of older people, the cost of sustaining them with pensions and social care, and the effect on families and housing needs. But ageing is not a policy problem to be solved. Instead it is a normal part of life, which varies according to personal characteristics, experience and outlook, and for many people growing older can be a very positive experience. Drawing on the Mass Observation project, one of the longest-running longitudinal life-writing projects anywhere in the world, Coming of Age grounds public policy in people’s real, lived experiences of ageing. It finds that the experience of ageing is changing, so that most people who are now reaching retirement do not identify themselves as old. One-size-fits-all policy approaches that treat older people as if they are all alike are alienating and inappropriate. Instead, older people need inclusive policy approaches that enable them to live their lives on their own terms. To ensure that older people are actively engaged, policy makers should stop emphasising the costs posed by an ageing population and start building on the many positive contributions that older people already make to our society.The Research Support and Development Office (RSDO) at Brunel University and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Explicitly correlated plane waves: Accelerating convergence in periodic wavefunction expansions

We present an investigation into the use of an explicitly correlated plane wave basis for periodic wavefunction expansions at the level of second-order M{\o}ller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2). The convergence of the electronic correlation energy with respect to the one-electron basis set is investigated and compared to conventional MP2 theory in a finite homogeneous electron gas model. In addition to the widely used Slater-type geminal correlation factor, we also derive and investigate a novel correlation factor that we term Yukawa-Coulomb. The Yukawa-Coulomb correlation factor is motivated by analytic results for two electrons in a box and allows for a further improved convergence of the correlation energies with respect to the employed basis set. We find the combination of the infinitely delocalized plane waves and local short-ranged geminals provides a complementary, and rapidly convergent basis for the description of periodic wavefunctions. We hope that this approach will expand the scope of discrete wavefunction expansions in periodic systems.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure

Uniform approximation of barrier penetration in phase space

A method to approximate transmission probabilities for a nonseparable multidimensional barrier is applied to a waveguide model. The method uses complex barrier-crossing orbits to represent reaction probabilities in phase space and is uniform in the sense that it applies at and above a threshold energy at which classical reaction switches on. Above this threshold the geometry of the classically reacting region of phase space is clearly reflected in the quantum representation. Two versions of the approximation are applied. A harmonic version which uses dynamics linearised around an instanton orbit is valid only near threshold but is easy to use. A more accurate and more widely applicable version using nonlinear dynamics is also described

Quay voices in Glasgow museums : an oral history of Glasgow dock workers

Notes on oral history project commissioned by Glasgow museums about Glasgow dock workers

A regularized second-order correlation method from Green's function theory

We present a scalable single-particle framework to treat electronic correlation in molecules and materials motivated by Green's function theory. We derive a size-extensive Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory from the single-particle Green's function by introducing the Goldstone self-energy. This new ground state correlation energy, referred to as Quasi-Particle MP2 theory (QPMP2), avoids the characteristic divergences present in both second-order M{\o}ller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP2) and Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles (CCSD) within the strongly correlated regime. We show that the exact ground state energy and properties of the Hubbard dimer are reproduced by QPMP2 and demonstrate the advantages of the approach for the six-, eight- and ten-site Hubbard models where the metal-to-insulator transition is qualitatively reproduced, contrasting with the complete failure of traditional methods. We apply this formalism to characteristic strongly correlated molecular systems and show that QPMP2 provides an efficient, size-consistent regularization of MP2

The coupled-cluster self-energy

An improved description of electronic correlation in molecules and materials can only be achieved by uncovering connections between different areas of electronic structure theory. A general unifying relationship between the many-body self-energy and coupled-cluster theory has remained hitherto unknown. Here, we present a formalism for constructing the coupled-cluster self-energy from the coupled-cluster ground state energy. Our approach illuminates the fundamental connections between the many-body self-energy and the coupled-cluster equations. As a consequence, we naturally arrive at the coupled-cluster quasiparticle and Bethe-Salpeter equations describing correlated electrons and excitons. This deep underlying structure explains the origin of the connections between RPA, $GW$-BSE and coupled-cluster theory, whilst also elucidating the relationship between vertex corrections and the amplitude equations