Longitudinal photo-documentation: Recording living walls

This working paper advocates a methodological approach to the study of street art and graffiti that is based on the documentation of single sites over time. Longitudinal photo-documentation is a form of data collection that allows street art and graffiti to be examined as visual dialogue. By capturing everyday forms of public mark making alongside both more recognizably ‘artistic’ images, and more visually ‘offensive’ tags, we aim to attend to graffiti and street art’s existence within a field of social interaction. We describe a relevant analytic tool drawn from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis – the next turn proof procedure – which may be adapted in order to study street art and graffiti as a form of asynchronous, yet sequential, communication. This form of analysis departs from existent forms of analysis in that it is not concerned with the semiotics or iconography of decontextualized individual photographs of street art or graffiti. We present a worked analytic example to demonstrate the utility of longitudinal photo-documentation in making visible the dialogue amongst artists, writers and community members, and we employ the principles of the next turn proof procedure to illustrate the ways in which each party shows their understanding of the prior work on the wall via their own contribution to the ‘conversation.

"Darling Look! It’s a Banksy!” Viewers’ Material Engagement with Street Art and Graffiti

This chapter examines viewers’ affective encounters with street art and graffiti, with attention to the critical framework provided by Rancière (2004), whose work suggests a method for investigating our aesthetic practices of participation (or exclusion) and looking (or not looking). Viewers’ material engagements with street art and graffiti represent a disruption of the expectable order that demonstrates that what we see, according to our usual division of the sensible, could be otherwise – thus revealing the contingency of our perceptual and conceptual order. Our examination of the visual dialogue on just one city wall highlights the temporal, site-specific and participatory elements of graffiti and street art as a form of communication, or visual dialogue. We demonstrate that viewers are not passive recipients of the artist’s intentions, but are instead competent social actors capable of understanding, appreciating, and actively and materially engaging with street art and graffiti

Spectropolarimetric variability in the repeating fast radio burst source FRB 20180301A

As the sample size of repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) has grown, an increasing diversity of phenomenology has emerged. Through long-term multi-epoch studies of repeating FRBs, it is possible to assess which phenomena are common to the population and which are unique to individual sources. We present a multi-epoch monitoring campaign of the repeating FRB source 20180301A using the ultra-wideband low (UWL) receiver observations with Murriyang, the Parkes 64-m radio telescope. The observations covered a wide frequency band spanning approximately 0.7--4 GHz, and yielded the detection of 46 bursts. None of the repeat bursts displayed radio emission in the range of 1.8--4 GHz, while the burst emission peaked at 1.1 GHz. We discover evidence for secular trends in the burst dispersion measure, indicating a decline at a rate of $-2.7\pm0.2\,{\rm pc\,cm^{-3}\,yr^{-1}}$. We also found significant variation in the Faraday rotation measure of the bursts across the follow-up period, including evidence of a sign reversal. While a majority of bursts did not exhibit any polarization, those that did show a decrease in the linear polarization fraction as a function of frequency, consistent with spectral depolarization due to scattering, as observed in other repeating FRB sources. Surprisingly, no significant variation in the polarization position angles was found, which is in contrast with earlier measurements reported for the FRB source. We measure the burst rate and sub-pulse drift rate variation and compare them with the previous results. These novel observations, along with the extreme polarization properties observed in other repeating FRBs, suggest that a sub-sample of FRB progenitors possess highly dynamic magneto-ionic environments.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures; accepted for publication in MNRA

Detection of a glitch in the pulsar J1709-4429

We report the detection of a glitch event in the pulsar J1709$-$4429 (also known as B1706$-$44) during regular monitoring observations with the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (UTMOST). The glitch was found during timing operations, in which we regularly observe over 400 pulsars with up to daily cadence, while commensally searching for Rotating Radio Transients, pulsars, and FRBs. With a fractional size of $\Delta\nu/\nu \approx 52.4 \times10^{-9}$, the glitch reported here is by far the smallest known for this pulsar, attesting to the efficacy of glitch searches with high cadence using UTMOST.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Changing times: resilience

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Detection and treatment of subclinical tuberculosis

SummaryReduction of active disease by preventive therapy has the potential to make an important contribution towards the goal of tuberculosis (TB) elimination. This report summarises discussions amongst a Working Group convened to consider areas of research that will be important in optimising the design and delivery of preventative therapies. The Working Group met in Cape Town on 26th February 2012, following presentation of results from the GC11 Grand Challenges in Global Health project to discover drugs for latent TB

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29