Our Space: Online Civic Engagement Tools for Youth

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage YouthThe popularity of Facebook, MySpace, IM, and email with youth in developed countries demonstrates how second nature the online world has become for youth. People behind youth civic engagement initiatives are starting to see that the best way to engage youth is on their own terms and in the way they expect -- that is, online. With this in mind, this chapter examines the emerging world of online civic engagement sites for youth and by youth. Through a close examination of TakingITGlobal, an global online civic engagement site, combined with a landscape survey of sites with a mandate to civically engage youth, we present some initial findings on how youth are civically engaged and what it is they are actually doing on these sites

William Blake in the 1960s: counterculture and radical reception

The study begins with an account of Blake, as voiced by Allen Ginsberg, taking part in a key Sixties anti-war protest, and goes on to examine some theoretical aspects of Blake’s relationship with the Sixties. In Chapter One, I explore the relationship between ‘popular Blake’, ‘academic Blake’, and ‘countercultural Blake’. The chapter seeks to provide a revisionist account of the relationship between Blake’s Sixties popularity and his earlier reception, suggesting that all three elements of Blake’s Sixties reception – popular, academic and countercultural – have long been intertwined, and continue to interact in the Sixties themselves. In Chapters Two and Three, I focus in detail on Allen Ginsberg as a central figure not only in Blake’s countercultural popularization, but also in the creation of Sixties counterculture itself. The first of these chapters, ‘Visionary Blake, Physical Blake, Psychedelic Blake’, looks in detail at Ginsberg’s 1948 ‘Blake vision’ and the way Ginsberg later uses it to construct a Blakean narrative for the Sixties. I examine the significant differences between the versions of this event presented in Ginsberg’s early poems and in his later prose and interview accounts, and Ginsberg’s consequent attempts to develop a general theory of poetry in which the specific effects of Blake’s poetry on the consciousness are compared to those of psychedelic drugs. Finally, I suggest that there are analogies between this ‘psychedelic’ approach to Blake and the interest that Aldous Huxley had in using psychedelics to access Blake’s own visionary state of consciousness. Chapter Three, ‘Ginsberg’s Blakean Albion’, analyses a selection of Ginsberg’s poems, all linked to Blake’s myth of Albion. I use these poems to examine the tensions present within the three-way relationship between Blake, Ginsberg and British counterculture. Particular attention is given to Ginsberg’s poem ‘Wales Visitation’ (1967), a work which I suggest is founded on the joint Romantic inheritance of Blake and Wordsworth, and which demonstrates the ways in which various strands of British Romanticism interact both within Ginsberg’s poetry and within the broader Sixties counterculture. The final chapter of the study examines various aspects of the relationship between Blake and Bob Dylan, demonstrating the extent of Blake’s influence on Dylan, but also tackling the surprisingly complicated and problematic question of the route(s) by which Blake arrives in Dylan’s work

Emergent Structure and Dynamics from Stochastic Pairwise Crosslinking in Chromosomal Polymer Models

The spatio-temporal organization of the genome is critical to the ability of the cell to store huge amounts of information in highly compacted DNA while also performing vital cellular functions. Experimental methods provide a window into the geometry of the chromatin but cannot provide a full picture in space and time.Polymer models have been shown to reproduce properties of chromatin and can be used to make simulated observations, informing biological experimentation. We apply a previously-studied model of the full yeast genome with dynamic protein crosslinking in the nucleolus which showed the emergence of clustering when the crosslinking timescale was sufficiently fast. We investigate the the crosslinking timescale at finer resolution and newly identify the presence of a \textit{flexible clustering} regime for intermediate timescales, which maximizes mixing of nucleolar beads, of significant interest due to the role mixing plays in nuclear processes. In order to robustly identify spatio-temporal clustering structure, we map our problem to a multi-layer network and then apply the multi-layer modularity community detection algorithm, showing the presence of spatio-temporal community structure in the fast and intermediate clustering regimes. We perform analysis of the relationship between cluster size and the ensuing stability of clusters,revealing a heterogeneous collection of clusters in which cluster size correlates with stability. We view the stochastic switching as producing an effective thermal equilibrium byextending the WKB approach for deriving quasipotentials in switching systems to the case of an overdamped Langevin equation with switching force term, and derive the associated Hamilton-Jacobi equation. We apply the string method for finding most-probable transition paths, revealing previously unreported numerical challenges; we present modifications to the algorithms to overcome them. We show that our methods can correctly compute asymptotic escape times by comparison to Monte Carlo simulations, and verified an important principle: the effective force is often significantly weaker than a naive average of the switching suggests. Through this multifaceted approach, we have shown how stochastic crosslinking leads to complex emergent structure, with different timescales optimizing different properties, and shown how the structure can be analyzed using both network data based tools and through stochastic averaging principles.Doctor of Philosoph