Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure, Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

publication-status: Publishedtypes: Article© 2013 by Taylor & FrancisThis essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar’s Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe’s novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne’s and Frazar’s adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system

Economy, empire, extermination: the Christmas pudding, the Crystal Palace and the narrative of capitalist progress.

Post-print version of article. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2005 Manchester University Press

The cooking animal: Economic Man at the Great Exhibition.

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. © 2008 Cambridge University Press.When called upon to host a banquet celebrating the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first display of international industry, the Mayor of York turned to the period's most renowned chef for the catering. The Frenchman Alexis Soyer, who had recently resigned from his position at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, had made a name for himself in Britain through a combination of extravagant culinary endeavours and popular household cookery books. The banquet at York was an important occasion; joining Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Consort, was a long list of national luminaries from Victorian high society and the political world. Soyer did not disappoint the Mayor, or his guests. The Times commented that amongst the vast array of international cuisines on offer was featured “one dish, to which turtles, ortolans, and other rich denizens of land and sea had contributed, [which] cost not less than 100l.” The paper noted with satisfaction that the feast was consumed before an “emblematical device representing Britannia in her conventional attire receiving the industrial products of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America” (“The Banquet at York” 5). That this emblem provided the backdrop to such cosmopolitan fare was salient: it spoke to the way in which the production and consumption of food would become a crucial motif in the positive representation of globalisation as it was understood at the Exhibition; it also highlighted the important role that the Victorian metropolis would fulfil in the realisation of this new world order. Certainly, the internationalist bent of Soyer's cooking seemed entirely appropriate to the luminaries gathered at the York banquet, and it was no doubt with the French chef's culinary scope in their minds as well as their stomachs that the Exhibition's organisers invited Soyer to submit a tender to provide refreshments at the display itself (Soyer 197)

Efficient Single Photon Absorption by Optimized Superconducting Nanowire Geometries

We report on simulation results that shows optimum photon absorption by superconducting nanowires can happen at a fill-factor that is much less than 100%. We also present experimental results on high performance of our superconducting nanowire single photon detectors realized using NbTiN on oxidized silicon.Comment: \copyright 2013 IEEE. Submitted to "Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices - NUSOD 2013" on 19-April-201

What can the SEDs of first hydrostatic core candidates reveal about their nature?

The first hydrostatic core (FHSC) is the first stable object to form in simulations of star formation. This stage has yet to be observed definitively, although several candidate FHSCs have been reported. We have produced synthetic spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from 3D hydrodynamical simulations of pre-stellar cores undergoing gravitational collapse for a variety of initial conditions. Variations in the initial rotation rate, radius and mass lead to differences in the location of the SED peak and far-infrared flux. Secondly, we attempt to fit the SEDs of five FHSC candidates from the literature and five newly identified FHSC candidates located in the Serpens South molecular cloud with simulated SEDs. The most promising FHSC candidates are fitted by a limited number of model SEDs with consistent properties, which suggests the SED can be useful for placing constraints on the age and rotation rate of the source. The sources we consider most likely to be in FHSC phase are B1-bN, CB17-MMS, Aqu-MM1 and Serpens South candidate K242. We were unable to fit SerpS-MM22, Per-Bolo 58 and Chamaeleon-MMS1 with reasonable parameters, which indicates that they are likely to be more evolved.Comment: 26 pages, 28 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Graphene field-effect transistors based on boron nitride gate dielectrics

Graphene field-effect transistors are fabricated utilizing single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), an insulating isomorph of graphene, as the gate dielectric. The devices exhibit mobility values exceeding 10,000 cm2/V-sec and current saturation down to 500 nm channel lengths with intrinsic transconductance values above 400 mS/mm. The work demonstrates the favorable properties of using h-BN as a gate dielectric for graphene FETs.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figure