Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White Working Class

We draw on \'new\' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some \'new\' class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds, are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children\'s comics The Beano and The Dandy, D C Thomson and Co Ltd.Chav, Children\'s Comics, Cultural Representations, Disgust, Distinction, Humour, Middle Class, Ned, Ridicule, Working Class

Do denser urban areas save on infrastructure? Evidence from New Zealand territorial authorities

How urban planners shape urban form and longlived infrastructure in these coming few years will largely determine whether the world gets locked into a traditional model … or moves onto a better path, with more compact, connected and liveable cities, greater productivity and reduced climate risk.&nbsp

The Landau Collision Integral in the Particle Basis in the PETSc Library

The Landau collision integral is often considered the gold standard in the context of kinetic plasma simulation due to its conservative properties, despite challenges involved in its discretization. The primary challenge when implementing an efficient computation of this operator is conserving physical properties of the continuum equation when the system is discretized. Recent work has achieved continuum discretizations using the method of Finite Elements which maintain conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, but which lacks monotonic entropy production. More recently, a particle discretization has been introduced which conserves mass, momentum, and energy, but maintains the benefit of monotonic entropy production necessary for the metriplecticity of the system. We present here an implementation of the particle basis Landau collision integral in the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computing in 2 and 3V for the construction of a full geometry solver with a novel approach to computation of the entropy functional gradients. Verification of the operator is achieved with thermal equilibration and isotropization tests. All examples are available, open source, in the PETSc repository for reproduction

TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF POACEAE POLLEN IN AREAS OF SOUTHERN UNITED KINGDOM, SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

Overall, longer Poaceae pollen seasons coincided with earlier pollen season start dates. Winter rainfall noticeably affects the intensity of Poaceae pollen seasons in Mediterranean areas, but this was not as important in Worcester. Weekly data from Worcester followed a similar pattern to that of Badajoz and Évora but at a distance of more than 1500 km and 4-5 weeks later

Visioning Sunnyhill: Executive Report

The co-op undertook this project as part of the national Cooperative Housing Federation’s Compass 2020 initiative, facilitated by the Southern Alberta Housing Cooperative’s (SACHA) Vision 2020 process. Vision 2020 is intended to examine Sunnyhill’s history and evolution, current context and future opportunities. Our team was tasked with using a design methodology to support the Vision 2020 exercises while offering the Cooperative thoughtful and creative options for their future.This report and an accompanying presentation were developed as part of BALTA research project A7 - Co-op Housing Futures: A Spatial Design Research Approach. The project involved a team of Environmental Design students at the University of Calgary working with the Sunnyhill Housing Cooperative in Calgary to explore options for its future using a design approach. Elements to be considered in the design were post-carbon urban living, socio-cultural, economic and ecological sustainability and resilience, as well as intensification and diversity of land uses

Spin down of protostars through gravitational torques

Young protostars embedded in circumstellar discs accrete from an angular momentum-rich mass reservoir. Without some braking mechanism, all stars should be spinning at or near break-up velocity. In this paper, we perform simulations of the self-gravitational collapse of an isothermal cloud using the ORION adaptive mesh refinement code and investigate the role that gravitational torques might play in the spin-down of the dense central object. While magnetic effects likely dominate for low mass stars, high mass and Population III stars might be less well magnetised. We find that gravitational torques alone prevent the central object from spinning up to more than half of its breakup velocity, because higher rotation rates lead to bar-like deformations that enable efficient angular momentum transfer to the surrounding medium. We also find that the long-term spin evolution of the central object is dictated by the properties of the surrounding disc. In particular, spiral modes with azimuthal wavenumber $m=2$ couple more effectively to its spin than the lopsided $m=1$ mode, which was found to inhibit spin evolution. We suggest that even in the absence of magnetic fields, gravitational torques may provide an upper limit on stellar spin, and that moderately massive circumstellar discs can cause long-term spin down.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figures, 1 table. Accepted by MNRAS. Updated reference