Precision Measurement of the Proton Flux in Primary Cosmic Rays from Rigidity 1 GV to 1.8 TV with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station

A precise measurement of the proton flux in primary cosmic rays with rigidity (momentum/charge) from 1 GV to 1.8 TV is presented based on 300 million events. Knowledge of the rigidity dependence of the proton flux is important in understanding the origin, acceleration, and propagation of cosmic rays. We present the detailed variation with rigidity of the flux spectral index for the first time. The spectral index progressively hardens at high rigidities.</p

Ice cream and incarceration On appetites for security and punishment

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated, in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penality. In so doing, it proceeds as follows: I begin with a discussion of how the concept of excess (and its close cousins) has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. I then make a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and consider how we might examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the State in ways that can shed new light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. I conclude with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how one may seek to moderate or counteract them. © 2009 SAGE Publications

O primado do direito e as exclusões abissais: reconstruir velhos conceitos, desafiar o cânone

O direito moderno eurocêntrico é um instrumento poderoso de reprodução do colonialismo, promovendo exclusões abissais e circunscrevendo o horizonte de possibilidades à narrativa linear de progresso. A linha abissal é, pois, tanto epistemológica como jurídica. Do outro lado da linha, uma multiplicidade de universos jurídicos são desperdiçados, invisibilizados e classificados como inferiores, primitivos, locais, residuais ou improdutivos. Este texto assume o desafio de cruzar as Epistemologias do Sul com a sociologia do direito. Mais concretamente, recupera o conceito de pluralismo jurídico, reconfigurando-o como instrumento de ampliação do presente enquanto ecologia de direitos e de justiças. Começo por mostrar como a imposição global do primado do direito é um mecanismo de expansão do projeto capitalista e colonial, argumentando que a colonialidade jurídica mimetiza a colonialidade do saber. Em seguida, mostro como o reconhecimento do pluralismo jurídico não significa necessariamente a superação do modelo expansionista. Finalmente, defendo a ampliação do cânone jurídico pela dilatação do leque de experiências jurídicas conhecidas, um processo que impõe o reconhecimento dos direitos reivindicados no âmbito de uma legalidade cosmopolita e uma sociologia das ausências dos direitos dos oprimidos mais silenciados que se expressam em dimensões mais invisíveis, enunciando-se fora das lutas jurídicas formuladas nos termos modernos do direito e da política.Modern Eurocentric law is a powerful instrument for the reproduction of colonialism, promoting abyssal exclusions and circumscribing the horizon of possibilities to the modern linear narrative of progress. The abyssal line is, consequently, as much epistemological as it is legal. Across the line, a multiplicity of legal universes is wasted, invisibilised and classified as inferior, primitive, local, residual or un- productive. This paper takes on the challenge of crossing Epistemologies of the South and sociology of law. In particular, it recovers the concept of legal pluralism, reconfiguring it as an instrument of expansion of the present as part of an ecology of law and justices. I begin by showing how the global imposition of the rule of law is a mechanism of expansion of the capitalist and colonial project, arguing that legal coloniality mimics coloniality of knowledge. Subsequently, I demonstrate how the recognition of legal pluralism does not necessarily mean overcoming the expansionist model. In conclusion, I argue for the broadening of the legal canon with the extension of the range of known legal experiences, a process that requires the recognition of rights claimed as cosmopolitan subaltern legality and a sociology of absences of the law of the most silenced oppressed which are expressed in more invisible dimensions, voiced outside of the legal struggles formulated in the modern terms of law and politics