The body in the library: adventures in realism

This essay looks at two aspects of the virtual ‘material world’ of realist fiction: objects encountered by the protagonist and the latter’s body. Taking from Sartre two angles on the realist pact by which readers agree to lend their bodies, feelings, and experiences to the otherwise ‘languishing signs’ of the text, it goes on to examine two sets of first-person fictions published between 1902 and 1956 — first, four modernist texts in which banal objects defy and then gratify the protagonist, who ends up ready and almost able to write; and, second, three novels in which the body of the protagonist is indeterminate in its sex, gender, or sexuality. In each of these cases, how do we as readers make texts work for us as ‘an adventure of the body’

Quantum heat transfer in harmonic chains with self consistent reservoirs: Exact numerical simulations

We describe a numerical scheme for exactly simulating the heat current behavior in a quantum harmonic chain with self-consistent reservoirs. Numerically-exact results are compared to classical simulations and to the quantum behavior under the linear response approximation. In the classical limit or for small temperature biases our results coincide with previous calculations. At large bias and for low temperatures the quantum dynamics of the system fundamentally differs from the close-to-equilibrium behavior, revealing in particular the effect of thermal rectification for asymmetric chains. Since this effect is absent in the classical analog of our model, we conclude that in the quantum model studied here thermal rectification is a purely quantum phenomenon, rooted in the quantum statistics

Global Cyber Intermediary Liability: A Legal & Cultural Strategy

This Article fills the gap in the debate on fighting cybercrime. It considers the role of intermediaries and the legal and cultural strategies that countries may adopt. Part II.A of this Article examines the critical role of intermediaries in cybercrime. It shows that the intermediaries’ active participation by facilitating the transmission of cybercrime traffic removes a significant barrier for individual perpetrators. Part II.B offers a brief overview of legal efforts to combat cybercrime, and examines the legal liability of intermediaries in both the civil and criminal context and in varying legal regimes with an emphasis on ISPs. Aside from some level of injunctive relief, intermediaries operate in a largely unregulated environment. Part III looks at what we can learn from other countries. The cleanest intermediary country, Finland, and the worst country, Lithuania, were selected in order to explore the causes for the differences between country performances. The section examines the remarkable distinctions between national cultures to explain differences in national cybercrime rates. Part III.A of this Article argues that the criminal code laws do not account for the difference in host and ISP performances between Finland and Lithuania. There are few differences in the codified laws pertaining to cybercrime between these countries. Instead, it is Finland’s cultural and business environments that appear to drive its cybercrime ranking. Part IV suggests reforms to shift a country’s culture to make it less prone to corruption. However, changing a culture takes time so Part IV also proposes a private law scheme in which intermediaries are unable to wave the “flag of immunity,” as they do now. The guiding philosophy for this proposal is that harmed parties should be permitted to recover damages directly from “bad” intermediaries

Quantum effects in thermal conduction: Nonequilibrium quantum discord and entanglement

We study the process of heat transfer through an entangled pair of two-level system, demonstrating the role of quantum correlations in this nonequilibrium process. While quantum correlations generally degrade with increasing the temperature bias, introducing spatial asymmetry leads to an intricate behavior: Connecting the qubits unequally to the reservoirs one finds that quantum correlations persist and increase with the temperature bias when the system is more weakly linked to the hot reservoir. In the reversed case, linking the system more strongly to the hot bath, the opposite, more natural behavior is observed, with quantum correlations being strongly suppressed upon increasing the temperature bias

Reading the Defense: Conceptualizations of Literacy By College Football Student-Athletes

This study investigated how college football student-athletes conceptualize the academic and athletic literacies they experience inside and outside the classroom. Participants included sophomore, junior, and senior football student-athletes who all attended a large public university in the Mid-Atlantic area. Three distinct research tools (questionnaire, focus group, individual interviews) were used in this study. The data was systematically coded and analyzed using qualitative content analysis procedures. This study demonstrated that the football student-athletes were able to demonstrate their understanding of literacy through use of the discourse of football. Moreover, the participants used their football discourse to express their thoughts, support their views, and analyze texts, all literacy skills valued in the college classrooms. Also, the football student-athletes perceived a connection between academic literacy and football literacy. The participants recognized literacy in football in reading the plays, communication between players and coaches and the media, and executing plays on the field. Several implications of this study are: the value of athletic literacy and football discourse in various settings, an improved connection between education and athletics, and the creation of future literacy programs to support the football student-athletes. This study is the first step in exploring the connection between athletic and academic literacy in order to improve the development of college football student-athletes. The results of this study compel us to rethink the stigma attached to football student-athletes in connection to their literacy, the locations of literacy events and the importance of literacy in football and school at the college level

Dancing on the Dead: Death, Entertainment, and Respectability in Victorian London

As industrializing nineteenth-century London found itself in the position of a prominent world capital, the city faced problems of overcrowding, high poverty, and waves of epidemics, making the dead progressively more visible in public spheres of society. This thesis examines different forms of publicly-spectated death in Victorian London, moving from anatomical dissections to funerals to burials, following the Victorian corpse in these moments of dealing with the dead and the level of media involvement in structuring and marketing each of these spectacles to the public. While the current historiographical debate surrounding spectacles of death in nineteenth-century Europe agrees that death ceased to be a spectacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century, I argue that death took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, moving from a context of ritual or punishment to ostentatious and media sensationalist displays. These displays reveal a concern with both the commercialism and respectability of death, reflected in literature such as popular novels, newspapers, and reform-minded writings. The media’s spin of each of these types of spectacles, coupled with the culture of materiality of nineteenth-century London, indicates that Londoners sought out spectacles of death both as escapist entertainment and as pieces of the larger moral question of respectability, which was distinctly stratified along class lines: who could secure a “good” death, and whose bodies were put on display

Quantum heat transfer: A Born Oppenheimer method

We develop a Born-Oppenheimer type formalism for the description of quantum thermal transport along hybrid nanoscale objects. Our formalism is suitable for treating heat transfer in the off-resonant regime, where e.g., the relevant vibrational modes of the interlocated molecule are high relative to typical bath frequencies, and at low temperatures when tunneling effects dominate. A general expression for the thermal energy current is accomplished, in the form of a generalized Landauer formula. In the harmonic limit this expression reduces to the standard Landauer result for heat transfer, while in the presence of nonlinearities multiphonon tunneling effects are realized