Creative and productive workplaces: a review

The built environment affects our well-being and this in turn influences our effectiveness in the workplace. Poor environments contribute to absenteeism and to people not working as well as they might. This is an enormous cost to the nation. High-quality environmental design is an investment, as occupants are healthier, staff-retention rates are higher, productivity is higher and sustainability ideals are more likely to be met. Workplaces reflect the culture of companies and are places that are not just functional and convenient but give the occupant a wholesome experience in terms of body and spirit

Home as a Site of State-Corporate Violence: Grenfell Tower, Aetiologies and Aftermaths

Focusing on the aftermaths and consequences of the Grenfell Tower fire, this article reveals the factors which combined to produce a fire that could have such devastating effects. Further, it delineates the discrete ways in which distinct types of harms – physical, emotional and psychological, cultural and relational, and financial and economic – continue to be produced by a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions. Some of these harms are readily apparent, others are opaque and obscured. It concludes by showing how failures to mitigate these factors constitute one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of ‘social murder’

Curvature-based crease surfaces for wave visualization

The visualization and analysis of complex fields often requires identifying and extracting domain specific features. Through a collaboration with geophysicists we extend previous work on crease surfaces with a new and complimentary definition: extremas in principal surface curvature rather than scalar value. Using this definition, we visualize the resulting surfaces which correspond to individual wave fronts. As these wave fronts propagate through a control structure (medium), they undergo changes in intensity, shape and topology due to reflection, refraction and interference. We demonstrate our ability to effectively visualize these phenomena in complex data sets including a large-scale simulation of a hypothetical earthquake along the San Andreas fault in Southern California

Curvature-based crease surfaces for wave visualization

The visualization and analysis of complex fields often requires identifying and extracting domain specific features. Through a collaboration with geophysicists we extend previous work on crease surfaces with a new and complimentary definition: extremas in principal surface curvature rather than scalar value. Using this definition, we visualize the resulting surfaces which correspond to individual wave fronts. As these wave fronts propagate through a control structure (medium), they undergo changes in intensity, shape and topology due to reflection, refraction and interference. We demonstrate our ability to effectively visualize these phenomena in complex data sets including a large-scale simulation of a hypothetical earthquake along the San Andreas fault in Southern California

Oreos, Topdeck and Eminem: Hybrid identities and global media flows

The slang terms Oreo (someone who looks black but acts white) and Topdeck (someone who looks white but acts black) draw on the language of popular culture to signify racial hybridity, superseding slurs such as 'black honkie' and 'wigger'. Using the terms Oreo and Topdeck to frame the analysis, this article investigates how identity politics finds expression in language, youth media and popular culture. It questions how global media flows affect conceptions of black masculinity by contrasting cinematic representations of African-Americans and black Africans in Shaft and the South African film Hijack Stories, and by examining class, ethnicity and rap culture in 8 Mile. I argue that, as South African media culture reflexively reworks messages about black identities, it produces terminology and texts that neither simply reinforce nor resist racial stereotypes, but legitimate the diversification of blackness by making cultural transition and difference visible