Diluted Random Fields in Mixed Cyanide Crystals

A percolation argument and a dilute compressible random field Ising model are used to present a simple model for mixed cyanide crystals. The model reproduces quantitatively several features of the phase diagrams altough some crude approximations are made. In particular critical thresholds x_c at which ferroelastic first order transitions disappear, are calculated. Moreover, transitions are found to remain first order down to x_c for all mixtures except for bromine, for which the transition becomes continuous. All the results are in full agreement with experimental data.Comment: 8 pages, late

On phantom publics, clusters, and collectives: be(com)ing subject in algorithmic times

AbstractThis article starts from the observation that practices of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ or ‘governance by data’ are reconfiguring modes of social relationality and collectivity. By building, first, on an empirical exploration of digital bordering practices, we qualify these emergent algorithmic categories as ‘clusters’—pulsing patterns distilled from disaggregated data. As fluid, modular, and ever-emergent forms of association, these ‘clusters’ defy stable expressions of collective representation and social recognition. Second, we observe that this empirical analysis resonates with accounts that diagnosed algorithmic governance as a threat to legal subjectivity and socio-political cohesion, and called for a reinvigoration of democratic values and their re-alignment with new ‘infrastructural publics’. Against this backdrop, however, we explore alternatives avenues of legal imagination by pushing in a different (somewhat opposite) direction. Against the re-inscription of liberal categories, we linger with the promise and prospect of illegibility as resistance against the foreclosure of future potentialities in algorithmic forms of subject-making. Instead of falling back on the projection of autonomous human agency and liberal subjectivity to counteract the ‘cluster’, we imagine emancipatory expressions of resistance that are enacted through fugitive, opaque, and experimental collectivities.</jats:p

[New determination of the structure iron (II) chloride tetrahydrate]

The crystal structure of iron(II) chloride tetrahydrate has been redetermined with three-dimensional X-ray data from a Picker four-circle automatic diffractometer. The space group is /b P/2/sub 1///b c / with unit-cell parameters /b a/=5.885, /b b/=7.174, /b c/=8.505 A and beta =111.11 degrees . Bond distances within a group FeCl/sub 2/.4H/sub 2/O are Fe-Cl 2.53 and Fe-O 2.12 and 2.08 A.Francai