Embassy cinema: What Wikileaks reveals about US state support for Hollywood

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several detractors sought to distinguish, in the words of former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, ‘real Americans’ from ‘celluloid Americans’ (Gingrich and Schweizer, 2003), arguing that the attacks on the World Trade Center were emblematic of a reaction to the pervasive Hollywood construct of America. Yet despite these reservations, Hollywood’s relationship with Washington has, in recent decades, strengthened to such a degree that the epithet ‘Washwood’ is now frequently used to describe the industry (Lewis et al, 2002: 130), which, it is argued, regularly functions as a tub-thumper for the American military industrial complex. While there have been a number of significant recent studies that place this relationship in a fuller socioeconomic context (Robb, 2004; Miller et al, 2007; Kellner 2010; Jenkins 2012; Jenkins & Alford, 2012), the importance of the global network of US embassies in this system, and their role in Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, is often overlooked. Until recently, this involvement has been examined only in a handful of articles, which focus on the years immediately following the Second World War (Jarvie, 1990; Swann, 1991; Trumpbour, 2007; Lee, 2008; Colman, 2009). Yet the release by Wikileaks in 2011 of a tranche of over 250,000 US embassy cables has provided an opportunity to explore how this process operates in the 21st-century

Extending Continuum Models for Atom Probe Simulation

This work describes extensions to existing level-set algorithms developed for application within the field of Atom Probe Tomography (APT). We present a new simulation tool for the simulation of 3D tomographic volumes, using advanced level set methods. By combining narrow-band, B-Tree and particle-tracing approaches from level-set methods, we demonstrate a practical tool for simulating shape changes to APT samples under applied electrostatic fields, in three dimensions. This work builds upon our previous studies by allowing for non-axially symmetric solutions, with minimal loss in computational speed, whilst retaining numerical accuracy

A novel synthetic chemistry approach to linkage-specific ubiquitin conjugation.

Ubiquitination is of great importance as the post-translational modification of proteins with ubiquitin, or ubiquitin chains, facilitates a number of vital cellular processes. Herein we present a facile method of preparing various ubiquitin conjugates under mild conditions using michael acceptors based on dibromo-maleimides and dibromo-pyridazinediones

Bioconjugation of Green Fluorescent Protein via an Unexpectedly Stable Cyclic Sulfonium Intermediate

Bioconjugation of superfolder GFP involving the formation of an unusually stable, and unprecedented, cyclic sulfonium species is described. This sulfonium can undergo smooth reaction with a range of nucleophiles to give sulfur-, selenium- and azide-modified GFP derivatives in high conversions

The Effect of Motivational Highlight DVDs on State Self-Confidence in Elite Female Hockey Players

Formal coach education programmes, driven by the national governing bodies of individual sports, have for many years been regarded as essential in the development of competent, qualified coaches. However, more recent opinion suggests that such coach education is actually ‘‘low impact’’ in comparison to the hours individual aspirant coach’s spend coaching, being coached or participating (Rossi & Cassidy, 1999: Learning and teaching in physical education. London: Falmer). It appears the literature is, in part, implying that experiential learning has greater significance over formal education programmes. The aim of this study was to investigate the educational journey of a sample of paddlesport coaches by addressing why coaches chose to enter formal coach education programmes

An Introduction to Community Detection in Multi-layered Social Network

Social communities extraction and their dynamics are one of the most important problems in today's social network analysis. During last few years, many researchers have proposed their own methods for group discovery in social networks. However, almost none of them have noticed that modern social networks are much more complex than few years ago. Due to vast amount of different data about various user activities available in IT systems, it is possible to distinguish the new class of social networks called multi-layered social network. For that reason, the new approach to community detection in the multi-layered social network, which utilizes multi-layered edge clustering coefficient is proposed in the paper.Comment: M.D. Lytras et al. (Eds.): WSKS 2011, CCIS 278, pp. 185-190, 201

Performance of alumina-supported Pt catalysts in an electron-beam-sustained CO2 laser amplifier

The performance of an alumina-supported Pt catalyst system used to maintain the gas purity in an electron-beam-sustained (636) isotope CO2 laser amplifier has been tested. The system characteristics using the two-zone, parallel flow reactor were determined for both continuous- and end-of-day reactor operation using on-line mass spectrometric sampling. The laser amplifier was run with an energy loading of typically 110 J-l/atm and an electron-beam current of 4 mA/sq cm. With these conditions and a pulse repetition frequency of 10 Hz for up to 10,000 shots, increases on the order of 100 ppm O2 were observed with the purifier on and 150 ppm with it off. The 1/e time recovery time was found to be approximately 75 minutes