Comedy in Unfunny Times: News Parody and Carnival after 9/11

Comedy has a special role in helping societies manage crisis moments, and the U.S. media paid considerable attention to the proper role of comedy in public culture after the 9/11 tragedies. As has been well documented, many popular U.S. comic voices were paralyzed in trying to respond to 9/11 or disciplined by audiences when they did. Starting with these obstacles in mind, this essay analyzes early comic responses to 9/11, and particularly those of the print and online news parody The Onion, as an example of how “fake” news discourse could surmount the rhetorical chill that fell over public culture after the tragedies. By exposing the news as “mere” production and by setting an agenda for learning about Islamic culture and Middle East politics, The Onion avoided violating decorum and invited citizen participation. This kind of meta-discourse was crucial after 9/11, when shifting rules for decorum created controversy and as official voices in government and media honed frames and narratives for talking about the attacks

2P-4D AND 2P-4S TRANSITION ARRAYS IN FLUORINE-LIKE COPPER-XXI TO ARSENIC-XXV SPECTRA

The present paper is devoted to the concept of reciprocity and to reciprocal expressions, which are divided into two main classes. Those belonging to the first of them signify reciprocity on their own, i.e. without any additional reciprocal markers. The other class contains expressions that acquire ability to refer to reciprocal states of affairs only as a result of appropriate transformations. Different reciprocal markers – grammatical, lexical and quantifying – are singled out and thoroughly characterized. Their use results in converting non-reciprocal signs into reciprocal ones. They are applied according to the part of speech of a modified term. The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis revolves around the discrepancy between morphological and syntactic means of reciprocal transformation. While the former ones are rather scanty, the latter are largely used in contemporary French.The present paper is devoted to the concept of reciprocity and to reciprocal expressions, which are divided into two main classes. Those belonging to the first of them signify reciprocity on their own, i.e. without any additional reciprocal markers. The other class contains expressions that acquire ability to refer to reciprocal states of affairs only as a result of appropriate transformations. Different reciprocal markers – grammatical, lexical and quantifying – are singled out and thoroughly characterized. Their use results in converting non-reciprocal signs into reciprocal ones. They are applied according to the part of speech of a modified term. The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis revolves around the discrepancy between morphological and syntactic means of reciprocal transformation. While the former ones are rather scanty, the latter are largely used in contemporary French

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering study of the dynamics of a multipolar plasma generator

A Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy (CARS) study of the hydrogen plasma generated by a discharge with magnetic multipolar confinement has been conducted at pressures in the range 0.5-5 Pa. The steady-state radial distribution of the rovibrational populations has been measured. The vibrational temperature is always uniformly distributed and so is the rotational temperature at the lower pressures, while a strong gradient is seen at 5 Pa for the rotation. Time-resolved measurements with the discharge operated in a square-pulse mode give additional insight into the dynamics of the discharge. Some results are compared with the predictions of two computer models of the plasma kinetics. We observe H$_{2}$ vibrational excitation by the Joule-heated filament alone (in the absence of the discharge) and show it to be caused primarily by the confined discharge between the filament and its cold positive copper connector. Another interpretation of the presence of vibrationally excited H$_{2}$ by recombinative desorption (Hall R.I. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 60 (1988) 337) is not comforted by our results, within instrumental sensitivity. The densities of the first rotational levels that the ortho and para forms of H$_{2}$ have different electron collisional cross-sections. Under pulsed excitation, the vibrational temperature rises on a time scale of 1-2 ms in agreement with numerical predictions. At switch-off, we show by matching the experimental and theoretical decays that vibrational state $v=1$ survives $16\pm 5$ wall collisions; meanwhile, the rotation cools very rapidly, probably because of superelastic electronic collisions