Teach phenomenology the bomb: Starship Troopers, the technologized body, and humanitarian warfare

Paul Verhoeven's SF films are often concerned with how the future body will be reshaped as a technological device. Starship Troopers strangely departs from Verhoeven's own work, other SF films, and current directions in cultural theory by seeing the future body as one that is more organic than mechanical. Drawing upon and challenging ideas developed by Paul Virilio, this article argues that Starship Troopers' departure from the notion of the 'post-human' mechanized body needs to be understood not as a nostalgic reassertion of de-technologized subjectivity. Rather, Verhoeven's film sees the idea of the pure body as a dangerous anachronism. And, this article further argues, Starship Troopers suggests that narratives of human salvation - such as those that arose during Nato's interventions in the Balkans - often conceal an appetite for territorial conquest

A Singular Theta Lift and the Shimura Correspondence

Modular forms play a central and critical role in the study of modern number theory. These remarkable and beautiful functions have led to many spectacular results including, most famously, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In this thesis we find connections between these enigmatic objects. In particular, we describe the construction and properties of a singular theta lift, closely related to the well known Shimura correspondence. We first define a (twisted) lift of harmonic weak Maass forms of weight 3/2-k, by integrating against a well chosen kernel Siegel theta function. Using this, we obtain a new class of automorphic objects in the upper-half plane of weight 2-2k for the group Gamma_{0}(N). We reveal these objects have intriguing singularities along a collection of geodesics. These singularities divide the upper-half plane into Weyl chambers with associated wall crossing formulas. We show our lift is harmonic away from the singularities and so is an example of a locally harmonic Maass form. We also find an explicit Fourier expansion. The Shimura/Shintani lifts provided very important correspondences between half-integral and even weight modular forms. Using a natural differential operator we link our lift to these. This connection then allows us to derive the properties of the Shimura lift. The nature of the singularities suggests we formulate all of these ideas as distributions and finally we consider the current equation encompassing them. This work provides extensions of the theta lifts considered by Borcherds (1998), Bruinier (2002), Bruinier and Funke (2004), Hövel (2012) and Bringmann, Kane and Viazovska (2013)

Adopting Sustainability: Greywater Recycling and Ontario's Transitioning Water Management Regime

Greywater is a technology with the potential to reduce water demand. This paper looks to answer, is Ontario's water management regime is undergoing a sustainability transition that is conducive of greywater technology's adoption? The multi-level perspective has been applied as a theoretical framework to comprehend this as a technological transition within a sociotechnical system. The multi-level perspective perceives transitions to be the result of interactions between actors at multiple levels of a system. Policy was identified as the dominant factor in determining the answer posed by this research. Selections from Ontario's policy-led planning structure illustrate how the province's water management regime is currently transitioning toward sustainability objectives that are accepting of greywater technology. However, widespread adoption of the technology has not occurred. A review of key barriers suggests that amendments in policy could potentially facilitate adoption of the technology

Author Correction: Task-dependent representations of stimulus and choice in mouse parietal cortex.

In the original version of this Article, the Acknowledgements section was inadvertently omitted. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article

Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants

We use UK administrative data to estimate the differential in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority benefit claimants and otherwise identical Whites. In many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated and results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For some groups, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. In these cases, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.Ethnic, employment, benefit, discrimination, matching

Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants in Great Britain

Accurate estimates of the extent of ethnic parity amongst benefit claimants are very important for policymakers who provide interventions for these groups. We use new administrative data on benefit claimants in Great Britain to document differences in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority and White claimants, both before and after controlling for rich observable characteristics. We do so using a variety of methods, from OLS to propensity score matching to difference-in-differences. We find that, in many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated, and that results are sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which may hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are being compared by parametric extrapolation. For Income Support and Incapacity Benefit claimants, however, we could calculate satisfactory results. For these groups, large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow characteristics.Non-response, bias, school survey, data linkage, PISA

When the going gets rough – studying the effect of surface roughness on the adhesive abilities of tree frogs

Tree frogs need to adhere to surfaces of various roughnesses in their natural habitats; these include bark, leaves and rocks. Rough surfaces can alter the effectiveness of their toe pads, due to factors such as a change of real contact area and abrasion of the pad epithelium. Here, we tested the effect of surface roughness on the attachment abilities of the tree frog Litoria caerulea. This was done by testing shear and adhesive forces on artificial surfaces with controlled roughness, both on single toe pads and whole animal scales. It was shown that frogs can stick 2–3 times better on small scale roughnesses (3–6 µm asperities), producing higher adhesive and frictional forces, but relatively poorly on the larger scale roughnesses tested (58.5–562.5 µm asperities). Our experiments suggested that, on such surfaces, the pads secrete insufficient fluid to fill the space under the pad, leaving air pockets that would significantly reduce the Laplace pressure component of capillarity. Therefore, we measured how well the adhesive toe pad would conform to spherical asperities of known sizes using interference reflection microscopy. Based on experiments where the conformation of the pad to individual asperities was examined microscopically, our calculations indicate that the pad epithelium has a low elastic modulus, making it highly deformable