“The Future is in Good Hands”: A Pentadic Analysis of President Barack Obama’s Farewell Address

President Barack Obama’s farewell address serves as a symbolic end to an eight-year tenure as president of the United States. The standard themes in Obama’s public addresses have been hope and change, and the president continues to elaborate on those here. While describing accomplishments of his administration and thanking important people, Obama uses his last address as president to craft a narrative in three strands—past, present, and future—meant to inspire civic engagement in his audience. I use Burke’s dramatistic pentad to discover how Obama rhetorically motivates his listeners towards this end. President Obama creates a sense of empowerment and audience identification with past American heroes by initially using purpose as a driving force, later emphasizing agency, and finally focusing on the agents who can accomplish the purpose. Obama’s farewell address illustrates the importance of presidential farewell addresses to shape the politics to follow, in this case by persuading citizens to engage in democratic processes

Technology development and political and economic power: evolution of global inequality

Abstract Global inequality, in combination with various global problems, has been one of the most pressing concerns of today's world. There are numerous models that explain the development of technology, political and economic power concentration, and resulting social inequality within a single society or region. The models that apply global and long-run perspectives having world-systems as a unit of analysis, however, are rare. This study conducts simulation modeling to examine the formation of hierarchies among polities through the expansion of political economic networks and concentration of power having evolving technologies. Two types of technology-subsistence technologies and technologies of power-have evolved for successful economic and political interactions as well as dominations among polities, resulting in the formation of global hierarchy. The dynamics are modeled and simulated by numerically solving partial differential equations and integro-differential equations that describe polity interactions through trade and warfare networks and selection of advantageous technologies. The validity of the model is examined using city population and state/empire size data since 2000BCE to the present. Models with such a broader perspective allow explanation of the fundamental relationship between technological development

Vacuum-UV negative photoion spectroscopy of CF3Cl, CF3Br and CF3I

Using synchrotron radiation negative ions have been detected by mass spectrometry following vacuum-UV photoexcitation of trifluorochloromethane (CF$_3$Cl), trifluorobromomethane (CF$_3$Br) and trifluoroiodomethane (CF$_3$I). The anions F$^-$, X$^-$, F$_2^-$, FX$^-$, CF$^-$, CF$_2^-$ and CF$_3^-$ were observed from all three molecules, where X = Cl, Br or I, and their ion yields recorded in the range 8-35 eV. With the exception of Br$^-$ and I$^-$, the anions observed show a linear dependence of signal with pressure, showing that they arise from unimolecular ion-pair dissociation. Dissociative electron attachment, following photoionization of CF$_3$Br and CF$_3$I as the source of low-energy electrons, is shown to dominate the observed Br$^-$ and I$^-$ signals, respectively. Cross sections for ion-pair formation are put on to an absolute scale by calibrating the signal strengths with those of F$^-$ from both SF$_6$ and CF$_4$. These anion cross sections are normalized to vacuum-UV absorption cross sections, where available, and the resulting quantum yields are reported. Anion appearance energies are used to calculate upper limits to 298 K bond dissociation energies for $D^0$(CF$_3$-X) which are consistent with literature values. We report new data for $D^0$(CF$_2$I$^-$-F) ≤ 2.7 ± 0.2 eV and $\Delta_fH^0_{298}$ (CF$_2$I$^+$) ≤ (598 ± 22) kJ mol$^{-1}$. No ion-pair formation is observed below the ionization energy of the parent molecule for CF$_3$Cl and CF$_3$Br, and only weak signals (in both I$^-$ and F$^-$) are detected for CF$_3$I. These observations suggest neutral photodissociation is the dominant exit channel to Rydberg state photoexcitation at these lower energies

In search of unity : a new politics of solidarity and action for confronting the crisis of global capitalism

This essay is an introduction to a Special Forum by critical scholar-activists responding to the late Samir Amin's call for the establishment of a new political vehicle that would be capable of uniting diverse progressive and revolutionary movements consisting of the workers and peoples of the whole world. The purpose of this vehicle would be to confront and radically transform a global capitalist order in deep crisis. The authors of these essays tend to agree that Amin was a profound contributor to the global justice movement, and to the reformulation of Marxism to address the evolution of global capitalism and imperialism that took place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. However, some are critical of Amin's stance. The essayists differ about whether they see Samir Amin's proposal for the establishment of a global party as a good or bad idea. Among those who think it is a good idea there are differences regarding the organizational nature and issue focus of the proposed organization. There are also different attitudes toward the institution of the nation-state and regarding the sources of progressive revolutionary political forces in the contemporary world. We briefly review the main issues under contention.Peer reviewe

Vacuum-UV negative photoion spectroscopy of CH4

Using synchrotron radiation in the range 12-35 eV, negative ions are detected by mass spectrometry following vacuum-UV photoexcitation of methane. Ion yields for H$^-$, CH$^-$ and CH$_2^-$ are recorded, the spectra of CH$^-$ and CH$_2^-$ for the first time. All ions display a linear dependence of signal with pressure, showing that they arise from unimolecular ion-pair dissociation. Cross sections for ion-pair formation are put onto an absolute scale by calibrating the signal strengths with those of F$^-$ from SF$_6$ and CF$_4$. Following normalisation to total vacuum-UV absorption cross sections, quantum yields for anion production are reported. There is a major discrepancy in the H$^-$ cross section with an earlier measurement, which remains unresolved. The anions arise from both direct and indirect ion-pair mechanisms. For a generic polyatomic molecule AB, the former is defined as AB $\rightarrow$ A$^-$ + B$^+$ (+ neutrals), the latter as the predissociative crossing of an initially-excited Rydberg state of AB by an ion-pair state. In a separate experiment, the threshold photoelectron spectrum of the second valence band of CH$_4$, ionisation to CH$_4^+$ A $^2$A$_1$ at 22.4 eV, is recorded with an instrumental resolution of 0.004 eV; many of the Rydberg states observed in indirect ion-pair formation converge to this state. The widths of the peaks are lifetime limited, increasing with increasing $v$ in the $v_1$ (a$_1$) vibrational ladder. They are the first direct measurement of an upper value to the dissociation rate of these levels into fragment ions