The Violent Art: Caricatures of Conflict in Germany

War furnishes a – perhaps the – classic case of ‘black humour’, which is understood here in the broad sense, not merely as the humour of the gallows or the cheating of death, but humour deriving from a confrontation with suffering or death, either as a victim or a perpetrator. War cartoons relied on the manipulation of images for comic effect, which – at least until the absurdist experiments of the Dada and Surrealist movements during and after the First World War – appeared impossible in photography, painting and cinematography. Caricature permitted artists simultaneously to conjure up, simplify and undermine reality. The selection and exaggeration of character traits and circumstantial detail, which was fundamental to caricature, revealed graphically how cartoonists perceived the social and political world in which they lived. This chapter examines how such selection and exaggeration worked in extreme conditions during wartime

Introduction: Visualizing Violence

The Introduction explores the relationship between visual and literary representations of modern warfare. What impact have paintings, cartoons, films and television had on the reporting of conflicts? How has the visual imagery of military violence – as the most extensive and damaging form of violence – changed? Here, Susan Sontag's 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others is used as a starting point for a wider discussion of what it means to portray, and to witness portrayals of, wartime violence. Few events have been represented with such frequency, exhaustiveness, unevenness and distortion as have wars. In the modern and contemporary eras, which are the focus of this volume, such representation has become largely mediatic and increasingly visual, with the images of photographic journalism, newsreels and television supplementing and contradicting the longer-established genres of military art, monuments, cartoons, treatises, war poems, plays and novels. ‘Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience’, the cumulative offering ‘by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists,’ writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003): Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’, features conflict and violence – ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.1 This impression of knowing ‘what happens every day throughout the whole world’, with the reports of journalists placing, ‘as it were, those in agony on fields of battle under the eyes of readers’ and allowing the cries of the wounded to ‘resonate in their ears’, as the first president of the Red Cross, Gustav Moynier, expressed it in 1899, has been juxtaposed with and opposed to other means of remembering, commemorating and glorifying military conflict, which usually demand separate spaces of reflection, away from the bustle and fragmentation of everyday life.2 Here, we ask how wars were visualized in different media, as artists, photographers, film directors and TV producers sought to evoke military conflicts which many had experienced and virtually everyone had ‘seen’ and ‘heard of’. The relationship between soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare and their conceptions of it has been complicated by the clashing imperatives and changing conditions of military conflict. On the one hand, the mediatization of war – with the rise of war correspondents and the use of war photography from the Crimean War onwards, for example – combined with mass participation in politics to make governments highly sensitive to press revelations and sensationalism, which they sought to censor, and receptive to the use and abuse of propaganda, which they attempted to instigate and foster. The idea that propaganda was the preserve of the state and involved the presentation and misrepresentation of information in ways favourable to one's own country and damaging to enemies owed most to the newly formed agencies of the First World War, such as the British Department (and later Ministry) of Information, before it was taken up by the post-war dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s and condemned by critics of the Great War like Arthur Ponsonby, whose Falsehood in War-Time: Propaganda Lies of the First World War was published in 1928.3 On the other hand, citizens' direct exposure to warfare had increased as a consequence of conscription and mass mobilization, which had resulted in the military service of more than 80 per cent of men between the ages of twenty and forty-five in Germany and France between 1914 and 1918, and as a result of a widening theatre of operations, with motorized armies and aerial bombardment ensuring that about two-thirds of the casualties in the Second World War were civilians, compared to less than a third of the deaths caused by the First World War.4 Given the stakes, the conflicting claims of different kinds of combatants, victims, journalists, artists, propagandists and officials were bound to create confusion and controversy about the nature of wars, both as they were being waged and as they were later recollected, studied and memorialized.5 The proximity and disjunction of individuals' experiences, the re-presentation of events, private and public memories, and historical investigation make the interpretation of visual and literary portrayals of wartime violence difficult, but essential, to interpret and explain

Detector and data characterization at GEO 600

GEO 600 is one of a few detectors in the world searching for gravitational wave signals from various astronomical sources. The commissioning and characterization of gravitational wave detectors is a highly complex activity that requires the use of many sophisticated analysis procedures. In order to extract all possible astronomical information from the data recorded at GEO 600, the detector and the data must be understood and characterized as well as possible so that the data can make the largest possible contribution in any subsequent analyses. This paper provides a review of some of the aspects of detector and data characterization that takes place at GEO 60

Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment and Tantric Responsibility in Michael Ondaatje’s \u3cem\u3eAnil’s Ghost\u3c/em\u3e

In “Mediating Suffering: Buddhist Detachment and Tantric Responsibility in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,” Justin Hewitson argues that the global mediation of suffering following human rights abuses creates the offender-victim binary. The way in which moral judgments drive urgent peacemaking is seldom connected to long-term victimhood narratives. This psychology can exacerbate cyclical patterns of anger, exploitation, and violence by deferring responsibility. Ondaatje’s controversial novel, Anil’s Ghost, which reflects these charged accusations, refuses to settle blame on any side of the Sri Lankan conflict; instead, it offers the troubling recognition that offenders, victims, and mediators are all causal agents. Hewitson explores the text’s Buddhist and Hindu merging of detachment and responsibility as its characters, Anil, Palapina, and Ananda adopt empirical and intuitive therapies in response to the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths of suffering. It is argued that Ananda’s samādhi-like vision at the novel\u27s conclusion projects a middle way between traumatic anger and loss via detached empathy

Null-stream veto for two co-located detectors: Implementation issues

Time-series data from multiple gravitational wave (GW) detectors can be linearly combined to form a null-stream, in which all GW information will be cancelled out. This null-stream can be used to distinguish between actual GW triggers and spurious noise transients in a search for GW bursts using a network of detectors. The biggest source of error in the null-stream analysis comes from the fact that the detector data are not perfectly calibrated. In this paper, we present an implementation of the null-stream veto in the simplest network of two co-located detectors. The detectors are assumed to have calibration uncertainties and correlated noise components. We estimate the effect of calibration uncertainties in the null-stream veto analysis and propose a new formulation to overcome this. This new formulation is demonstrated by doing software injections in Gaussian noise.Comment: Minor changes; To appear in Class. Quantum Grav. (Proc. GWDAW10

Using the null-stream of GEO600 to veto transient events in the detector output

A network of gravitational wave detectors is currently being commissioned around the world. Each of these detectors will search for gravitational waves from various astronomical sources. One of the main searches underway is for un-modelled, transient gravitational wave events. The nature of these signals is such that it will be difficult to distinguish them from bursts of instrumental noise that originate in or around the detector and which then couple to the main detector output. One way to deal with this is to look for events that are coincident in more than one gravitational wave detector. However, with very large event lists (potentially thousands of events per day per detector), the number of events that pass this test due to random chance can still be large. At each detector site, various methods are being developed to veto instrumental bursts from lists of candidate events from that particular detector. This reduces the size of the event lists of each detector, and hopefully the final coincident event list, to a more manageable level. This paper presents one such veto method that can be used to veto certain classes of transient events detected in the output data stream of GEO 600. The method uses events detected in the null-stream output of GEO 600 (which contains, in principle, no gravitational wave signal) with a threshold to veto events detected in the main strain output. We show that, for the certain types of signals tested, the method is very robust, delivering high efficiency for a very low false-veto rate. In particular, it is shown that when applied to real detector data, the method is able to strongly veto a certain type of events which appear around 370 Hz in the detector output

Subtraction of temperature induced phase noise in the LISA frequency band

Temperature fluctuations are expected to be one of the limiting factors for gravitational wave detectors in the very low frequency range. Here we report the characterisation of this noise source in the LISA Pathfinder optical bench and propose a method to remove its contribution from the data. Our results show that temperature fluctuations are indeed limiting our measurement below one millihertz, and that their subtraction leads to a factor 5.6 (15 dB) reduction in the noise level at the lower end of the LISA measurement band 10^{-4} Hz, which increases to 20.2 (26 dB) at even lower frequencies, i.e., 1.5x10^{-5} Hz. The method presented here can be applied to the subtraction of other noise sources in gravitational wave detectors in the general situation where multiple sensors are used to characterise the noise source.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Myeloid Cell Phenotypes in Susceptibility and Resistance to Helminth Parasite Infections

Many major tropical diseases are caused by long-lived helminth parasites that are able to survive by modulation of the host immune system, including the innate compartment of myeloid cells. In particular, dendritic cells and macrophages show markedly altered phenotypes during parasite infections. In addition, many specialized subsets such as eosinophils and basophils expand dramatically in response to these pathogens. The changes in phenotype and function, and their effects on both immunity to infection and reactivity to bystander antigens such as allergens, are discussed

A method for characterization of coherent backgrounds in real time and its application in gravitational wave data analysis

Many experiments, and in particular gravitational wave detectors, produce continuous streams of data whose frequency representations contain discrete, relatively narrowband coherent features at high amplitude. We discuss the application of digital Fourier transforms (DFTs) to characterization of these features, hereafter frequently referred to as lines. Application of DFTs to continuously produced time domain data are achieved through an algorithm hereafter referred to as EFC for efficient time-domain determination of the Fourier coefficients of a data set. We first define EFC and discuss parameters relating to the algorithm that determine its properties and action on the data. In gravitational wave interferometers, these lines are commonly due to parasitic sources of coherent background interference coupling into the instrument. Using GEO 600 data, we next demonstrate that time domain subtraction of lines can proceed without detrimental effects either on features at frequencies separated from that of the subtracted line, or on features at the frequency of the line but having different stationarity properties.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted by Classical and Quantum Gravit