The world-wide spread of journalism convergence

Convergence is a likely destination for news media in many parts of the world, though the duration of the journey will vary from country to country. This paper defines convergence as well as it is possible to do so, traces its spread around the world, and describes some of the most common business models. It looks at the forces driving convergence, and factors common to the most successful converged operations. The paper also describes the uncertain scenario in Australia now the Howard government has announced plans to change media ownership laws. It ends with discussion about changes in curricula at journalism programs in the United States in the light of the spread of convergence.<br /

On Liberty and Art

One-day conference organised by Dr Malcolm Quinn This conference, organised by Quinn in collaboration with Tate Britain, was the latest in a series of engagements by Quinn with the legacy of JS Mill and the idea of an aesthetics of liberty, beginning with an address to Mill’s ‘On Liberty’in a co-authored book, then developed through a paper at the JS Mill Bicentennial conference at University College London (6th April 2006) and another at the conference ‘Liberty, Human Values and Utilitarianism,’ Yokohama National University, Japan (9th -11th September 2006). This latter paper, initially delivered at a conference that included many of the most important researchers in the field, made a decisive shift from discussion of the epistemology of Millian liberty to an address to questions of art, sensibility and aesthetics. It formed part of Quinn’s development of ideas for the ‘On Liberty and Art’ conference at Tate Britain, which has initiated a WCA research project investigating frameworks and reference points for a discourse on liberty conducted through art practice, with presentations from the artists John Russell, Dave Beech, Bob and Roberta Smith, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Amanda Beech and Roman Vasseur. Quinn’s opening address isolated the question of aesthetic liberty as a ‘sensibility of freedom’ and discussed how artists are included within a current media conversation on the crisis of liberty and free speech. Quinn also discussed the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay as exemplifying a discourse on liberty developed through art practice that directly challenged the utilitarian model of liberty as non-coercion and equal distribution developed by Mill and Bentham. Quinn also included reference to the ‘rights to art’ cited in the UN Declaration of human rights of 1948, which produce a conflation of collective/moral and personal rights that have influenced current understanding of the relationship of liberty and art

Composite Fermions and the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: Essential Role of the Pseudopotential

The mean field (MF) composite Fermion (CF) picture successfully predicts the band of low lying angular momentum multiplets of fractional quantum Hall systems for any value of the magnetic field. This success cannot be attributed to a cancellation between Coulomb and Chern--Simons interactions between fluctuations beyond the mean field. It results instead from the short range behavior of the Coulomb pseudopotential in the lowest Landau level (LL). The class of pseudopotentials for which the MFCF picture is successful can be defined, and used to explain the success or failure of the picture in different cases (e.g. excited LL's, charged magneto-excitons, and Laughlin quasiparticles in a CF hierarchy picture).Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures (RevTeX+epsf); talk at EP2DS-XII