Ben-Hur and the spectacle of empire

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: For visitors to Manhattan in the last days of the nineteenth century, there could have been few more spectacular sights than the Dewey Arch. Occupying a prime spot in Madison Square, the eighty-five-foot-tall structure—flanked by six decorated columns and adorned in flamboyant beaux-arts sculpture—had been designed by Charles L. Lamb to commemorate Admiral George Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay just a few months before. As crowds gathered on September 29, 1899 to witness the parade in Dewey’s honor (not far from another and now more famous triumphal arch, this one for George Washington), the symbolism of the Dewey structure could hardly have been more resonant. It had been partly modelled, like Washington’s, on the Arch of Titus in Rome; completed in 85CE by the Emperor Domitian to commemorate his brother Titus (and in particular Titus’s victory at Jerusalem in 70CE), it was, like most Roman triumphal arches, a confident testament to the irresistible might of Rome’s imperial reach. The Dewey Arch, in a similar vein, was built to celebrate a moment of military victory, a battle which had seen U.S. forces destroy the Spanish flotilla and all but secure the Philippines as an overseas territory. It was, in David Brody’s words, the “material manifestation of America’s newfound interest in displaying the vast possibilities of empire.” Much of the violent reality of the battle is naturally enough absent from the arch’s jingoistic and idealised sculptural adornments, representing what the National Sculpture Society called the “four patriotic steps”: patriotism, war, triumph, and peace. It is this absence, this imposing statement of apparently benevolent and progressive intervention, which makes the Dewey Arch a pertinent starting point here. By way of overt iconography as well as implied analogy, the arch brought the implications of Roman imperial history into the center of modern America, and yet even as it did so it served to reinforce and perpetuate a long history of imperial denial

Dress For Our Time

Dress For Our TIme uses the power of fashion to communicate some of the world's most complex issues, notably climate change and the mass displacement of people. The dress is created from a decommissioned UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) refugee tent that once housed a displaced Syrian family at Za'atari Camp in Jordan, and was gifted to the project by UNHCR. In giving the tent a second life, it endows this public art installation with an unbreakable bond to humanity and represents the importance of nurturing and protecting all people and safeguarding generations to come. It is a symbol of what it means to be human and the precarious nature of our existence. The dress has digitally displayed scientific data, which showed us the impact of climate change on our physical world, broadened the dialogue around migration, highlighting the millions of displaced people and the paths they take in search of a better life. Dress for Our Time is a collaboration between: UNHCR, MET Office, Unilever, Tap A Street, Holition, Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion. To date the dress has been shown at UK venues and internationally, including St Pancras International train station, UN Geneva, Science Museum London, Glastonbury Music Festival, The Peace Talks in London and Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development Conference. The first ever physical embodiment of the dress was installed at St Pancras International train station in November 2015. As the gateway to Paris - the city hosting the United Nations Climate Change conference COP 21 - many of the delegates passing through the station came face to face with the dress. Digitally displaying data which detailed the impact of climate change on our physical world, showing our planet as it will be if we don’t do enough. Developed in partnership with award winning interactive creative agency Holition, with data taken from a study conducted by a team of global scientists and provided by the Met Office. The dress was exhibited at the Science Museum London, here it digitally displayed the very latest UNHCR data - representing the movement of 8 million refugees around the world - created into an animation that is projected onto the dress. The data and the dress worked together to highlight the number and location of displaced people around the globe, humanising the numbers by using a point of light for every one hundred human lives Activity: December 2015 - St Pancras International Station London 11,204 visitors (actual), 136,600 visits (digital) Social media reach to over 289,800 users Press coverage with 180 million unique page views February 2016 – UN Geneva – ‘Transforming lives’ TEDX event involving multiple international partners. TEDx Place Des Nations Event: 1,000 people in the audience, 21 viewing parties worldwide, 3,000+ people watching live. Instagram reach: over 731,000 users – an increase of around 600,000 since November; 1 million users and trending at event; 7,000 likes for the film. Glastonbury (24 June 2016) The dress appeared at Glastonbury Festival worn by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré. Instagram, 311 likes per post, Twitter, 7840 impressions Science Museum ‘Our Lives In Data’ (17th August to 4th September.) Attendees, 59,218 Twitter reach 36,354; Instagram likes, 515; CSF Facebook reach 7022 London Peace Talks hosted the dress with the theme 'Building Bridges,' which moved through London City Hall's nine stories mid way through the talks. Attendees, 200 Twitter reach, 2,000, Instagram likes and tags, 50

Should We Unbundle Free Speech and Press Freedom?

This paper presents an account of the ethical and conceptual relationship between free speech and press freedom. Many authors have argued that, despite there being some common ground between them, these two liberties should be treated as properly distinct, both theoretically and practically. The core of the argument, for this “unbundling” approach, is that conflating free speech and press freedom makes it too easy for reasonable democratic regulations on press freedom to be portrayed, by their opponents, as part of a programme of illiberal censorship. While we acknowledge the important grain of truth in that argument, we try to show how the alternative, “unbundling” approach can also be used to undermine or mischaracterise democratically justifiable opposition to media regulations in despotic regimes. In light of the problems on both sides, we defend a contextually-variable account of the relation between these two liberties

Thinking about growth : a cognitive mapping approach to understanding small business development

School of Managemen

Luminosity indicators in dusty photoionized environments

The luminosity of the central source in ionizing radiation is an essential parameter in a photoionized environment, and one of the most fundamental physical quantities one can measure. We outline a method of determining luminosity for any emission-line region using only infrared data. In dusty environments, grains compete with hydrogen in absorbing continuum radiation. Grains produce infrared emission, and hydrogen produces recombination lines. We have computed a very large variety of photoionization models, using ranges of abundances, grain mixtures, ionizing continua, densities, and ionization parameters. The conditions were appropriate for such diverse objects as H II regions, planetary nebulae, starburst galaxies, and the narrow and broad line regions of active nuclei. The ratio of the total thermal grain emission relative to H$\beta$ (IR/H$\beta$) is the primary indicator of whether the cloud behaves as a classical Str\"{o}mgren sphere (a hydrogen-bounded nebula) or whether grains absorb most of the incident continuum (a dust-bounded nebula). We find two global limits: when $IR/H\beta<100$ infrared recombination lines determine the source luminosity in ionizing photons; when $IR/H\beta\gg100$ the grains act as a bolometer to measure the luminosity.Comment: 12 pages 3 figures. Accepted ASP Sept.9

EXPLORING L1 INTERFERENCE IN THE WRITINGS OF KADAZANDUSUN ESL STUDENTS

For many ethnic KadazanDusuns from Sabah, North Borneo, English is a third language after their mother tongue and Malay. The burden of having to contend with an additional language frequently leads to errors, particularly those caused by interference from the first language (L1). This study set out to identify the types and frequency of English language errors and their correlations in the writing of KadazanDusun ESL students at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. A further aim of the study was to establish which of these errors could be attributed to L1 interference. A total of 54 students with lower Malaysian University Entrance Test (MUET) band scores were asked to complete a questionnaire and write a short essay on a designated topic. The language errors were categorized and analysed via statistical analysis. Errors considered to be related to L1 interference were then identified after consultation with an experienced KadazanDusun language lecturer. The most common errors were those involving singular /plural nouns and unusual sentence structures. The results show that approximately 25% of the errors were attributable to L1 interference, i.e. mode (normal/involuntary), voice (actor (-ing form) /undergoer (-ed form), overuse of article, linker (when linker is used, no article is needed), auxiliary verb and direct translation. The findings of this study give ESL practitioners a better insight into student errors and should lead to improved writing performance in the classroom

National Center for Biomedical Ontology: Advancing biomedicine through structured organization of scientific knowledge

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease