West Indian intellectuals in Britain

Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things - new musics, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This lively, innovative book explores the intellectual ideas which the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that for more than a century West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. This is the first comprehensive discussion of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to live in twentieth-century Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors to this fascinating volume draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a dramatic picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. A lucid introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home-territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain. Written in an accessible manner, undergraduates and general readers interested in relations between the Caribbean and Britain, imperial history, literature, cultural and black studies will all find much of interest in this collection

Best Crop

Students will match the best conditions for a crop to the existing conditions around the state of Iowa

Topological Field Theory Interpretation of String Topology

The string bracket introduced by Chas and Sullivan [math.GT/9911159] is reinterpreted from the point of view of topological field theories in the Batalin-Vilkovisky or BRST formalisms. Namely, topological action functionals for gauge fields (generalizing Chern-Simons and BF theories) are considered together with generalized Wilson loops. The latter generate a (Poisson or Gerstenhaber) algebra of functionals with values in the $S^1$-equivariant cohomology of the loop space of the manifold on which the theory is defined. It is proved that, in the case of $GL_n$ with standard representation, the (Poisson or BV) bracket of two generalized Wilson loops applied to two cycles is the same as the generalized Wilson loop applied to the string bracket of the cycles. Generalizations to other groups are briefly described.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figure

Reflect and Redefine: Deans’ Perspectives on the Positioning of IS within the Business School

Over the 12 years since the glory days of the dot com and Y2K phenomena at the turn of the last century, IS departments at many colleges and schools of business have suffered significant declines in student enrolments, elimination from core curricula, reduced faculty numbers, and overall a weakened strategic positioning within the business school. Recent AACSB faculty hiring and salary reports indicate that “CIS” is the only discipline which has seen an overall decline in faculty hiring over the past 10 years, in contrast with significant growth in all other disciplines. Many IS departments have been merged with other disciplines, or closed entirely. In contrast, however, a number of IS departments have continued to enjoy significant growth and success. This panel of five current/recent business school deans and members of the IS community will offer their perspectives on the strategic positioning of IS within the business school, and share their recommendations on what IS departments need to do to strengthen their positioning within the business school across the domains of teaching, research and relationships with the broader academic and business communities

Presupposition projection from the scope of None: Universal, existential, or both?

The nature of presupposition projection from the scope of quantificational expressions, particularly negative ones, continues to be both theoretically and empirically controversial. We experimentally investigate the interpretation of sentences like None of the bears won the race, which could in principle be associated with three projection options, giving rise to: an existential reading, on which at least one of the bears participated and none won; a universal reading, on which all of the bears participated and none won; and a presuppositionless reading on which none of the bears both participated and won. We used a covered box task to investigate English-speaking adults' and children's interpretations of such sentences. The results from the adult participants provide empirical evidence for all three readings; the results from the child participants, however, reveal no evidence for the existential reading. We discuss our results in light of competing theoretical accounts, focusing on options for reconciling the theories with the experimental data from both adults and children

Processing presuppositions and implicatures: Similarities and differences

Presuppositions and scalar implicatures are traditionally considered to be distinct phenomena, but recent accounts analyze (at least some of) the former as the latter. All else being equal, this “scalar implicature approach to presuppositions” predicts uniform behavior for the two types of inferences. Initial experimental studies comparing them yielded conflicting results. While some found a difference in the Response Time (RT) patterns of scalar implicatures and presuppositions, others found them to be uniform. We argue that the difference in outcomes is attributable to a difference in the type of response being measured: RTs associated with acceptance and rejection responses seem to pattern in opposite ways. Next, we report on a series of experiments to support this, and to compare the behavior of the two inferences more comprehensively. Experiments Ia and Ib look at both acceptance and rejection responses for both inference types, and find uniform patterns once the acceptance vs. rejection variable is factored in. Experiment II adds a new dimension by testing for the influence of prosody on the two inference types, and in this regard a clear difference between them emerges, posing a first substantive challenge to the scalar implicature approach to presuppositions. A third set of experiments investigates yet another prediction of this approach, according to which the presuppositional inference is introduced as a simple entailment in affirmative contexts. This predicts that these presuppositional inferences behave parallel to other entailments. Experiment IIIa compares rejections of affirmative sentences based on either their presuppositional inference or their entailed content and finds that they differ, with greater RTs for the former. As an additional control, Experiments IIIb and IIIc test for parallel differences between two entailments associated with always, which yield uniform results. In sum, while Experiments Ia and Ib are in line with previous findings that presuppositions and scalar implicatures under negation show uniform response time patterns, the differences found in Experiments II and IIIa-c pose a substantial challenge to approaches assimilating the two phenomena, while being entirely in line with the traditional perspective of seeing them as distinct

‘Re-reading Raphael Samuel: Politics, Personality and Performance’

For British historian Raphael Samuel, history and politics were inextricable. Best known as the founder of the history workshop movement, the controversial historian took his stance on the democratisation of history-making, becoming an outspoken advocate for public history. Despite making a significant contribution to contemporary historiography, he remains a neglected, even disparaged, figure. This paper contends that the most significant aspect of Samuel’s historical work was not one or other theory of history or argument about the past but his entire way of being an historian. Samuel embodied as much as expressed his ideas, consciously using his personality as a powerful political tool. It is further argued that conventional approaches to intellectual history, focusing on textual outputs, do not fully recognise the significance of performative modes of thinking. Theoretical approaches to performance as identity offer important insight here but can be too schematic in their view of applied and enacted thought. A biographical approach, by contrast, provides the intimate perspective necessary to fully appreciate the fluidity and complexity of such a personality. The paper first situates Samuel in the context of his earlier life, focusing on how and why he created such a public persona and how he adapted it in response to changing circumstances. It then considers the implications and effectiveness of this persona by assessing how it was perceived and narrated by others, acknowledging, in the process, why different groups engaged with and interpreted it differently

Two mini-Neptunes Transiting the Adolescent K-star HIP 113103 Confirmed with TESS and CHEOPS

We report the discovery of two mini-Neptunes in near 2:1 resonance orbits ($P=7.610303$ d for HIP 113103 b and $P=14.245651$ d for HIP 113103 c) around the adolescent K-star HIP 113103 (TIC 121490076). The planet system was first identified from the TESS mission, and was confirmed via additional photometric and spectroscopic observations, including a $\sim$17.5 hour observation for the transits of both planets using ESA CHEOPS. We place $\leq4.5$ min and $\leq2.5$ min limits on the absence of transit timing variations over the three year photometric baseline, allowing further constraints on the orbital eccentricities of the system beyond that available from the photometric transit duration alone. With a planetary radius of $R_{p}=1.829^{+0.096}_{-0.067}\,R_{\oplus}$, HIP 113103 b resides within the radius gap, and this might provide invaluable information on the formation disparities between super-Earths and mini-Neptunes. Given the larger radius $R_{p}=2.40^{+0.10}_{-0.08}\,R_{\oplus}$ for HIP 113103 c, and close proximity of both planets to HIP 113103, it is likely that HIP 113103 b might have lost (or is still losing) its primordial atmosphere. We therefore present simulated atmospheric transmission spectra of both planets using JWST, HST, and Twinkle. It demonstrates a potential metallicity difference (due to differences in their evolution) would be a challenge to detect if the atmospheres are in chemical equilibrium. As one of the brightest multi sub-Neptune planet systems suitable for atmosphere follow up, HIP 113103 b and HIP 113103 c could provide insight on planetary evolution for the sub-Neptune K-star population.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ