Politicking the personal: examining academic literature and British National Party beliefs and wishes about intimate interracial relationships and mixed heritage

Drawing heavily on our earlier work in this area (Perry and Sutton 2006; forthcoming), this article discusses the issue of intimate interracial relationships (IIRs) within the context of the UK Government's current concerns with social cohesion and provides an overview of the literature on hate and prejudice against those in IIRs in the UK and USA. Following an examination of the official statistics and the numbers of mixed race people in England and Wales, we move on to provide a brief but disturbing glimpse of what it would mean if the BNP's long-term dream of winning a national election were actually to happen in light of their official website published proposed policies against IRRs and mixed heritage people

Virtually connected, practically mobile

This is the post-print version of the Chapter. The official published version can be accessed from the links below - Copyright @ 2006 SpringerThis chapter addresses a central issue in studies of mobile work and mobile technology – what is the work of mobile workers, and how do they use the resources that they have to undertake this work (i.e. the work they have to do in order to do their work)? In contrast to many of the other papers in this collection, the objective of this chapter is to examine individual mobile work, and not teamwork and co-operation other than where it impacts on the work of individuals. We present data from a study of mobile workers, examining a range of mobile workers to produce a rich picture of their work. Our analysis reveals insights into how mobile workers mix their mobility with their work, home and social lives, their use of mobile technology, the problems – technological and otherwise – inherent in being mobile, and the strategies that they use to manage their work, time, other resources and availability. Our findings demonstrate important issues in understanding mobile work, including the maintenance of communities of practice, the role and management of interpersonal awareness and co-ordination, how environmental resources affect activity, the impact of mobility on family/social relationships and the crossover between the mobile workers’ private and working lives, how preplanning is employed prior to travel, and how mobile workers perform activity multitasking, for example through making use of ‘dead time’. Finally, we turn to the implications of this data for the design and deployment of mobile virtual work (MVW) technologies for individuals and a broader organisational context

Building an alternative social currency: Dematerialising and rematerialising digital money across media

This paper reports on the user experience and design of physical and digital forms of a mixed-media local currency. We reconceive digitally mediated transactions as social interactions and report on the development of conceptual designs informed by user research and interactive workshops. Our findings show that use is strongly tied to conceptions of locality and community, markers of identity, information exchange and the digital and physical forms as tools for shaping interactions. The form of the currency can make the invisible visible, exposing our identities and values, business models, and the details of the transactions themselves. Our analysis stresses the need to provide opportunities for extending social interaction, making more local connections and deriving the best value from those connections, without insulating individuals from each other, or from the wider geographical context. Themes that emerged from the user research were visualized as conceptual designs for digitally augmented media, allowing us to explore the monetary transaction at three levels: the material, as interaction between two parties, and the context of the transaction.The RCUK Digital Economy theme (EP/K012304/1)

Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

The Agricultural Economics Profession at 100 Years: A Profile and Projections for the Future

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Quarkonia in Hamiltonian Light-Front QCD

A constituent parton picture of hadrons with logarithmic confinement naturally arises in weak coupling light-front QCD. Confinement provides a mass gap that allows the constituent picture to emerge. The effective renormalized Hamiltonian is computed to ${\cal O}(g^2)$, and used to study charmonium and bottomonium. Radial and angular excitations can be used to fix the coupling $\alpha$, the quark mass $M$, and the cutoff $\Lambda$. The resultant hyperfine structure is very close to experiment.Comment: 9 pages, 1 latex figure included in the text. Published version (much more reader-friendly); corrected error in self-energ

Temporal hybridity: Mixing live video footage with instant replay in real time

Copyright @ 2010 ACMIn this paper we explore the production of streaming media that involves live and recorded content. To examine this, we report on how the production practices and process are conducted through an empirical study of the production of live television, involving the use of live and non-live media under highly time critical conditions. In explaining how this process is managed both as an individual and collective activity, we develop the concept of temporal hybridity to explain the properties of these kinds of production system and show how temporally separated media are used, understood and coordinated. Our analysis is examined in the light of recent developments in computing technology and we present some design implications to support amateur video production.The research was partly made possible by a grant from the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems to the Mobile Life VinnExcellence Center, in partnership with SonyEricsson, Ericsson, Microsoft Research, Nokia Research, TeliaSonera and the City of Stockholm