No Escape

The initial idea for the film came from an inspiring performance of Chaplin's Easy Street (1917) accompanied by Donald MacKenzie, resident organist at the Odeon Leicester Square, which led me into researches of early cinema (c1895-1907), a period described by Tom Gunning as the ‘cinema of attractions’. James Lastra points out that during this time competition between cinemas was based on the success of various sound strategies all emphasising the ‘liveness’ of the film experience and films were made to motivate particular types of sound accompaniment. Particularly intriguing was the use of live sound effects performed by a skilled troupe from behind the film screen to produce ‘realistic’ sound effects. This is translated in No Escape into the manipulation of on-screen diegetic sound, also inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète and his notions of the sound object and reduced listening. The interaction between the live piano and the onscreen sound is crucial to No Escape as is that of the piano and images, which exist alone together for long stretches. The visual content and structure of the film draws on the city symphonies of Walter Ruttman and especially Dziga Vertov whose formal experimentation, startling juxtaposition of images and very rapid editing is important to No Escape’s non-narrative and at times complex montage of British rural and urban vistas. Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is by and partially about the man with the camera as is No Escape, the title of which refers to the idea that though we may travel to get away from something, there is no escape from the inner life. This is represented by the piano music, which varies but within fairly restricted limits. It does respond or drive image choice and editing but the overall sense should be that one cannot escape and these responses are temporary and fleeting Extrapolating from Tom Gunning's cinema of attractions, James Beattie's concept of ‘documentary display’ - a poetic, sensual and subjective approach which encourages listening and looking rather than cognitive understanding - underpins the aesthetic of No Escape, as is a belief in the supremacy of sound and of film as a performative event

Making Fanaroff-Riley I radio sources. Numerical Hydrodynamic 3D Simulations of Low Power Jets

Extragalactic radio sources have been classified into two classes, Fanaroff-Riley I and II, which differ in morphology and radio power. Strongly emitting sources belong to the edge-brightened FR II class, and weakly emitting sources to the edge-darkened FR I class. The origin of this dichotomy is not yet fully understood. Numerical simulations are successful in generating FR II morphologies, but they fail to reproduce the diffuse structure of FR Is. By means of hydro-dynamical 3D simulations of supersonic jets, we investigate how the displayed morphologies depend on the jet parameters. Bow shocks and Mach disks at the jet head, which are probably responsible for the hot spots in the FR II sources, disappear for a jet kinetic power L_kin < 10^43 erg/s. This threshold compares favorably with the luminosity at which the FR I/FR II transition is observed. The problem is addressed by numerical means carrying out 3D HD simulations of supersonic jets that propagate in a non-homogeneous medium with the ambient temperature that increases with distance from the jet origin, which maintains constant pressure. The jet energy in the lower power sources, instead of being deposited at the terminal shock, is gradually dissipated by the turbulence. The jets spread out while propagating, and they smoothly decelerate while mixing with the ambient medium and produce the plumes characteristic of FR I objects. Three-dimensionality is an essential ingredient to explore the FR I evolution because the properties of turbulence in two and three dimensions are very different, since there is no energy cascade to small scales in two dimensions, and two-dimensional simulations with the same parameters lead to FRII-like behavior.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, to appear on A&

Building valoristaion strategies for biodiverse products - the approach

The market valorisation of ‘diverse food products’ is crucial to increase diversity in farming systems. It involves multiple actors, from the field to the table, and requires an integrated approach to take into account several dimensions involved

The 2016-2017 peak luminosity of the pre-main sequence variable V2492 Cyg

V2492 Cyg is a young pre-main sequence star presenting repetitive brightness variations of significant amplitude (Delta R > 5 mag) whose physical origin has been ascribed to both extinction (UXor-type) and accretion (EXor-type) variability, although their mutual proportion has not been clarified yet. Recently, V2492 Cyg has reached a level of brightness ever registered in the period of its documented activity. Optical and near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy have been obtained in October 2016 and between March and July 2017. The source has remained bright until the end of May 2017, then it started to rapidly fade since the beginning of June at a rate of about 0.08 mag/day. On mid-July 2017 the source has reached the same low-brightness level as two years before. Extinction and mass accretion rate were derived by means of the luminosity of the brightest lines, in particular Halpha and Hbeta. A couple of optical high-resolution spectra are also presented to derive information on the gas kinematics. Visual extinction variations do not exceed a few magnitudes, while the mass accretion rate is estimated to vary from less than 10^-8 up to a few 10^-7 M_sun/yr. This latter is comparable to that estimated on the previous high-state in 2010, likely occurred under more severe extinction conditions. The combined analysis of the optical and near-infrared (NIR) observations extends to the present event the original suggestion that the V2492 Cyg variability is a combination of changing extinction and accretion.Comment: Accepted by A&

Orbital and valley state spectra of a few-electron silicon quantum dot

Understanding interactions between orbital and valley quantum states in silicon nanodevices is crucial in assessing the prospects of spin-based qubits. We study the energy spectra of a few-electron silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor quantum dot using dynamic charge sensing and pulsed-voltage spectroscopy. The occupancy of the quantum dot is probed down to the single-electron level using a nearby single-electron transistor as a charge sensor. The energy of the first orbital excited state is found to decrease rapidly as the electron occupancy increases from N=1 to 4. By monitoring the sequential spin filling of the dot we extract a valley splitting of ~230 {\mu}eV, irrespective of electron number. This indicates that favorable conditions for qubit operation are in place in the few-electron regime.Comment: 4 figure