The queer (spatial) economies of The Lavender Hill Mob

This essay provides a new reading of the popular Ealing comedy 'The Lavender Hill Mob' (Charles Crichton, 1951) by rethinking its relationship to wider cultural developments in Britain at the time of its release. The immediate post-war period was marked by an investment in town planning ideologies as a means to repair the devastation of the Blitz and to build a more cohesive social order through the reformation of the built environment. During the reconstruction, various pedagogical initiatives sought to infuse an idea of national citizenship within a certain mode of inhabiting, moving through and reading urban space. The early-1950s were also marked by a sudden press attention to the problems of ‘male vice’ in London and, in particular, the way queer men had their own illicit urban choreographies and ways of engaging with the city. Such queer geographies were vilified for their anti-social nature and demonised as an attack on the normative spatial dynamics being propagated elsewhere. This essay argues that 'The Lavender Hill Mob' offered a sly celebration of precisely those illicit queer geographies that were becoming problematic at the time of its release. Not only is the film deeply queer in both its characterisations and its manner, but its central narrative revolves around a displaced articulation of the ‘crime’ of homosexuality as it was being imagined in the early-1950s. Through this, the film invites its audience to participate in a range of queer engagements with the city, not as a source of social anxiety but one of comedic delight

Tank studies of the resistivity horizontal profiling method of electrical prospecting

This research project was undertaken to perfect a technique whereby theoretical horizontal resistivity profiles could be reproduced in laboratory tank studies. Several specimen materials were tried and finally an acceptable specimen material was found. It was found that carbon specimens suspended in salt water would give horizontal resistivity profiles that agree to a remarkable degree with the theoretically predicted curves. The investigations showed that the depth of burial of the specimen has a marked influence on the position of the characteristic edge effects and on the magnitude of the apparent resistivity. The studies also indicated that successful tank studies could be carried out using sand as the enclosing media, rather than a salt water media, but with a loss of some of the homogeneity --Abstract, page ii

Learning about bodies and the lived consequences

From the perspective of a final year physical education and sport and exercise science undergraduate student, this paper explores the relationship between learned and lived experiences related to the body. The research uses an autoethnographic approach that focuses on the educational and social issues that the first author faced as his physical identity changed. The author reflects on the ways in which his once acceptable body experienced declining capital (Bourdieu 1984) as his body became too ‘fat’ within the spaces that he was connected to. In an attempt to resist institutionalised understandings that imply that larger bodies are a result of neglect and poor lifestyle choices, this research demonstrates the impact of cultural understandings on the everyday life of a university student seeking an ‘acceptable body’

The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation

A theoretical investigation of elastic and Voigt transient spherical waves, and plane three-element viscoelastic waves

A mathematical model of explosive generated waves in rock is needed in many areas of engineering endeavor. Investigations to date have been unsuccessful in obtaining a model that satisfactorily represents real wave phenomena at all radial distances and in all of the important characteristics. In this investigation, spherical waves in elastic and Voigt media were investigated. Series solutions for plane waves in a three-element viscoelastic medium were obtained. A dual exponential pressure pulse, P(t) = Po (e-αt-e-ßt) was assumed because it can exhibit significant features of real pressure pulses while avoiding instantaneous rise time, which is an objectionable feature of some of the models frequently employed in the literature. The most significant correlation of elastic and real waves was their similar decay rates for peak values of particle velocity and displacement at large radial distances. At intermediate distances, Voigt waves exhibited pulse lengthening and peak value attenuation rates similar to those reported for real waves, but the arrival time was much too early. It was concluded that elastic and Voigt spherical waves, and three-element viscoelastic plane waves are not sufficient to represent explosive generated waves in rock. On the basis of this and other investigations cited in the literature it appears that a mechanism for attenuation other than, or in addition to, viscosity will be needed to satisfactorily represent waves in rock --Abstract, page ii

Mechanisms of tigecycline resistance in the Enterobacteriaceae and <i>Acinetobacter baumannii</i>

Tigecycline is the first glycylcycline to enter clinical use and displays good in vitro activity against a broad range of Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens. It is often used as an agent of last resort for the treatment of infections caused by multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria including some Enterobacteriaceae species and Acinetobacter baumannii. Therefore, the recent emergence of tigecycline resistance in some strains of these species is a serious public health concern. Efflux was investigated as a possible mechanism of tigecycline resistance using pre- and post-therapy pairs of clinical isolates and laboratory-selected, tigecycline-resistant mutants of A. baumannii and Enterobacter cloacae and a type strain, laboratory mutants, and a clinical isolate of Serratia marcescens. Minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of tigecycline and other agents were determined by agar dilution. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis was used to assign clones / determine isolate relatedness. Expression of efflux pump genes and genes thought to be implicated in their regulation was monitored by real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and their role in tigecycline resistance was further investigated by knockout mutagenesis. There was an association between increased expression of specific resistance-nodulation-division (RND) efflux pump genes and elevated tigecycline MICs in all species studied. Insertional inactivation of RND efflux pump genes implicated the AdeABC, AcrAB and SdeXY-HasF systems of A. baumannii, E. cloacae and S. marcescens, respectively. The results of this study support the hypothesis that tigecycline resistance in clinical isolates of Gram-negative bacteria arises as a result of the up-regulated activity of intrinsic efflux systems of the RND family

The problem and the agencies of character education,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1939. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Evaluation of the accuracy of the Leap Motion controller for measurements of grip aperture

The Leap Motion controller allows for a mouse-free alternative to general computing. With 200 frames/second infrared cameras, a 150 field of view and an 8 ft2 umbrella of interactive space, the Leap Motion has many potential practical applications. The device is advertised as aiming to be placed in new cars, laptops and hospitals, for example, to provide contact-free device control, while reducing the need for attentive button pressing and averting eye focus

Isolation and characterisation of a novel Nesterenkonia species from a human bloodstreaminfection

Poste

Ordinal judgments of depth in monocularly- and stereoscopically-viewed photographs of complex natural scenes

This study investigated the contribution of stereoscopic depth cues to the reliability of ordinal depth judgments in complex natural scenes. Participants viewed photographs of cluttered natural scenes, either monocularly or stereoscopically. On each trial, they judged which of two indicated points in the scene was closer in depth. We assessed the reliability of these judgments over repeated trials, and how well they correlated with the actual disparities of the points between the left and right eyes' views. The reliability of judgments increased as their depth separation increased, was higher when the points were on separate objects, and deteriorated for point pairs that were more widely separated in the image plane. Stereoscopic viewing improved sensitivity to depth for points on the same surface, but not for points on separate objects. Stereoscopic viewing thus provides depth information that is complementary to that available from monocular occlusion cues