Flows, Routes and Networks: The Global Dynamics of Lawrence Norfolk, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell

The notion that we have entered a global age of human relations has been the driving force behind many of the most persuasive cultural inquiries published over the last few decades, including fictional ones, into the conditions of contemporary existence, perhaps the most prominent of these being Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). In the era of mass migrations, proliferating media technologies and the deterritorialised movements of labour and capital, it has become increasingly necessary to speak of identity and citizenship in terms of 'flows', 'routes' and 'networks' that cut across the traditional boundaries of the nation-state. Though it is through various cultural productions that such transformations are at once performed, symbolised and comprehended, discussions about how these changes have impacted on modes of literary representation have largely been framed by the older discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which anticipate present circumstances while arguably offering rather limited perspectives on them. This text-focused thesis explores in detail the narrative strategies and thematic concerns of three British writers who have risen to prominence since 1990 - Lawrence Norfolk, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell - whose work announces literary developments that may be attributed to the fluidity and multiplicity of millennial relations and the phenomenon of globalisation. Informed by broader debates about multinational capitalism, transnational culture, and the emergence of new cybernetic infrastructures, this research argues that recent novels such as Lempri6re's Dictionary (Lawrence Norfolk), Transmission (Hari Kunzru) and Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) demonstrate an aesthetic consciousness of new patterns of human Interaction and geo-historical interconnectedness that is substantially different from the conceptual coordinates mapped in the fictions of a previous generation. The work of these three important authors has yet to enter fully into the mainstream of critical discussion, and the present study represents the first sustained critical contextualisation of their fiction. Following an introductory chapter that, firstly, provides a wide-ranging analysis of globalisation understood as a constellation of multidimensional processes and, secondly, considers how these material transformations articulated themselves in the cultural context of Britain in the 1980s and '90's, this thesis engages in close readings of the selected authors' complex fictions over three extensive chapters

Collateral Estoppel in Pennsylvania

This comment reviews and evaluates the difficult subject of collateral estoppel in Pennsylvania. Its purpose is not to attempt to answer all questions arising in this intricate area of the law. The article seeks only to catalogue important Pennsylvania cases, comparing them to the trend in other jurisdictions, while pointing out apparent inconsistencies. Much of the difficulty in understanding when a prior adjudicatio

SNS Use, Risk, and Executive Behavior

Organizations can suffer attacks designed to take advantage of employee vulnerabilities. Successful attacks cause firms to suffer financial damage ranging from minor information breaches to severe financial losses. Cybercriminals focus on organization executives, because the power and influence they wield affords access to more sensitive data and financial resources. The purpose of this research in progress submission is to identify the types of executive behaviors that information security professionals believe introduce risk to an organization, as well as to explore the degree of risk organizations face as a result of these behaviors

Stabilizing All Geometric Moduli in Heterotic Calabi-Yau Vacua

We propose a scenario to stabilize all geometric moduli - that is, the complex structure, Kahler moduli and the dilaton - in smooth heterotic Calabi-Yau compactifications without Neveu-Schwarz three-form flux. This is accomplished using the gauge bundle required in any heterotic compactification, whose perturbative effects on the moduli are combined with non-perturbative corrections. We argue that, for appropriate gauge bundles, all complex structure and a large number of other moduli can be perturbatively stabilized - in the most restrictive case, leaving only one combination of Kahler moduli and the dilaton as a flat direction. At this stage, the remaining moduli space consists of Minkowski vacua. That is, the perturbative superpotential vanishes in the vacuum without the necessity to fine-tune flux. Finally, we incorporate non-perturbative effects such as gaugino condensation and/or instantons. These are strongly constrained by the anomalous U(1) symmetries which arise from the required bundle constructions. We present a specific example, with a consistent choice of non-perturbative effects, where all remaining flat directions are stabilized in an AdS vacuum.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure

Intramolecular Pauson-Khand reactions of cycloheptynedicobalt complexes

Cycloheptyne-Co-2(CO)(6) complexes bearing alkenes tethered by oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen atoms undergo Pauson-Khand reactions to afford tricyclic compounds containing a fused 7,5-ring system

Non-Perturbative Tachyon Potential from the Wilsonian Renormalization Group

The derivative expansion of the Wilsonian renormalization group generates additional terms in the effective beta-functions not present in the perturbative approach. Applied to the nonlinear sigma model, to lowest order the vanishing of the beta-function for the tachyon field generates an equation analogous to that found in open string field theory. Although the nonlinear term depends on the cut-off function, this arbitrariness can be removed by a rescaling of the tachyon field.Comment: 6 pages, further references adde

Falling Incapacity Benefit claims in a former industrial city: policy impacts or labour market improvement?

This article provides an in-depth study of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claims in a major city and of the factors behind their changing level. It relates to the regime prior to the introduction of the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) in 2008. Glasgow has had one of the highest levels of IB in Britain with a peak of almost one fifth of the working age population on IB or Severe Disablement Allowance (SDA). However, over the past decade the number of IB claimants in Glasgow, as in other high claiming areas, has fallen at a faster rate than elsewhere, and Glasgow now has twice the national proportion of working-age people on IB/SDA rather than its peak of three times. The rise in IB in Glasgow can be attributed primarily to deindustrialisation; between 1971 and 1991, over 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the city. Policy response was belated. Lack of local statistics on IB led to a lengthy delay in official recognition of the scale of the issue, and targeted programmes to divert or return IB claimants to work did not begin on any scale until around 2004. Evidence presented in the article suggests that the reduction in claims, which has mainly occurred since about 2003, has been due more to a strengthening labour market than to national policy changes or local programmes. This gives strong support to the view that excess IB claims are a form of disguised unemployment. Further detailed evaluation of ongoing programmes is required to develop the evidence base for this complex area. However, the study casts some doubt on the need for the post-2006 round of IB reforms in high-claim areas, since rapid decline in the number of claimants was already occurring in these areas. The article also indicates the importance of close joint working between national and local agencies, and further development of local level statistics on IB claimants

Quantising Gravity Using Physical States of a Superstring

A symmetric zero mass tensor of rank two is constructed using the superstring modes of excitation which satisfies the physical state constraints of a superstring. These states have one to one correspondence with quantised operators and are shown to be the absorption and emission quanta of the Minkowski space Lorentz tensors using the Gupta-Bleuler method of quantisation. The principle of equivalence makes the tensor identical to the metric tensor at any arbitrary space-time point. The propagator for the quantised field is deduced. The gravitational interaction is switched on by going over from ordinary derivatives to coderivatives.The Riemann-Christoffel affine connections are calculated and the weak field Ricci tensor $R^{0}_{\mu \nu}$ is shown to vanish. The interaction part $R^{int}_{\mu \nu}$ is found out and the exact $R_{\mu \nu}$ of theory of gravity is expressed in terms of the quantised metric. The quantum mechanical self energy of the gravitational field, in vacuum, is shown to vanish. It is suggested that quantum gravity may be renormalisable by the use of the physical ground states of the superstring theory.Comment: 14 page

On the plane-wave cubic vertex

The exact bosonic Neumann matrices of the cubic vertex in plane-wave light-cone string field theory are derived using the contour integration techniques developed in our earlier paper. This simplifies the original derivation of the vertex. In particular, the Neumann matrices are written in terms of \mu-deformed Gamma-functions, thus casting them into a form that elegantly generalizes the well-known flat-space solution. The asymptotics of the \mu-deformed Gamma-functions allow one to determine the large-\mu behaviour of the Neumann matrices including exponential corrections. We provide an explicit expression for the first exponential correction and make a conjecture for the subsequent exponential correction terms.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure; harvmac (b); v4: minor corrections in appendix