'Alive after five' : constructing the neoliberal night in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The development of the ‘night-time economy’ in the UK through the 1990s has been associated with neoliberal urban governance. Academics have, however, begun to question the use and the scope of the concept ‘neoliberalism’. In this paper, I identify two common approaches to studying neoliberalism, one exploring neoliberalism as a series of policy networks, the other exploring neoliberalism as the governance of subjectivities. I argue that to understand the urban night, we need to explore both these senses of ‘neoliberalism’. As a case study, I take the ‘Alive After Five’ project, organised by the Business Improvement District in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which sought to extend shopping hours in order to encourage more people to use the city at night. Drawing from Actor-Network-Theory, I explore the planning, the translation, and the practice of this new project. In doing so, I explore the on-going nature and influence of neoliberal policy on the urban night in the UK

Improved determination of the atmospheric parameters of the pulsating sdB star Feige 48

As part of a multifaceted effort to exploit better the asteroseismological potential of the pulsating sdB star Feige 48, we present an improved spectroscopic analysis of that star based on new grids of NLTE, fully line-blanketed model atmospheres. To that end, we gathered four high S/N time-averaged optical spectra of varying spectral resolution from 1.0 \AA\ to 8.7 \AA, and we made use of the results of four independent studies to fix the abundances of the most important metals in the atmosphere of Feige 48. The mean atmospheric parameters we obtained from our four spectra of Feige 48 are : Teff= 29,850 $\pm$ 60 K, log $g$ = 5.46 $\pm$ 0.01, and log N(He)/N(H) = $-$2.88 $\pm$ 0.02. We also modeled for the first time the He II line at 1640 \AA\ from the STIS archive spectrum of the star and we found with this line an effective temperature and a surface gravity that match well the values obtained with the optical data. With some fine tuning of the abundances of the metals visible in the optical domain we were able to achieve a very good agreement between our best available spectrum and our best-fitting synthetic one. Our derived atmospheric parameters for Feige 48 are in rather good agreement with previous estimates based on less sophisticated models. This underlines the relatively small effects of the NLTE approach combined with line blanketing in the atmosphere of this particular star, implying that the current estimates of the atmospheric parameters of Feige 48 are reliable and secure.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, April 201

Corporal diagnostic work and diagnostic spaces: Clinicians' use of space and bodies during diagnosis

© 2015 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.An emerging body of literature in sociology has demonstrated that diagnosis is a useful focal point for understanding the social dimensions of health and illness. This article contributes to this work by drawing attention to the relationship between diagnostic spaces and the way in which clinicians use their own bodies during the diagnostic process. As a case study, we draw upon fieldwork conducted with a multidisciplinary clinical team providing deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat children with a movement disorder called dystonia. Interviews were conducted with team members and diagnostic examinations were observed. We illustrate that clinicians use communicative body work and verbal communication to transform a material terrain into diagnostic space, and we illustrate how this diagnostic space configures forms of embodied 'sensing-and-acting' within. We argue that a 'diagnosis' can be conceptualised as emerging from an interaction in which space, the clinician-body, and the patient-body (or body-part) mutually configure one another. By conceptualising diagnosis in this way, this article draws attention to the corporal bases of diagnostic power and counters Cartesian-like accounts of clinical work in which the patient-body is objectified by a disembodied medical discourse.The Wellcome Trust (Wellcome Trust Biomedical Strategic Award 086034

The Little Fishermaiden Waltz : From the Operette Incognito . By L. Waldman

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-ps/2094/thumbnail.jp

STS in management education: connecting theory and practice

This paper explores the value of science and technology studies (STS) to management education. The work draws on an ethnographic study of second year management undergraduates studying decision making. The nature and delivery of the decision making module is outlined and the value of STS is demonstrated in terms of both teaching method and module content. Three particular STS contributions are identified and described: the social construction of technological systems; actor network theory; and ontological politics. Affordances and sensibilities are identified for each contribution and a discussion is developed that illustrates how these versions of STS are put to use in management education. It is concluded that STS has a pivotal role to play in critical management (education) and in the process offers opportunities for new forms of managin

Sticktion: Assessing Memory for the Customer Experience

In the quest for better service design, hospitality and service firms have often been frustrated to find that service experiences that are based on what customers say they want are not always successful. A psychological analysis of this phenomenon suggests the following premises: (1) Customers’ memory of an experience fades quickly; (2) customers’ memory of an experience comprises many sub-experiences; (3) customers’ memories of experiences are multidimensional and unintuitive; and (4) consumers cannot accurately predict what they will learn or remember. The goal of an experience design is to create a series of sub-experiences that will “stick” with the customer. This “sticktion” analysis is applied to the practical challenge of redesigning the customer experience at Pizza Hut UK. This consumer research provides a test of the four premises and an application of the underlying sticktion principles. Surveys of Pizza Hut customers found that the existing experience had its bright spots but was generally forgettable. Not only could customers not predict what they would remember about the experience, but one week after visiting the restaurant, the customers also filled in memory gaps with details that did not appear on their initial description of the visit. Even more troublesome was the fact that the invented details tended to be negative. To fill these gaps, the researchers tested specific aspects of the experience that would “stick” and included those in the new restaurant concepts. Using this approach, the chain was able to roll out new concepts that met with initial favorable results

Towards a new theory of practice for community health psychology

The article sets out the value of theorizing collective action from a social science perspective that engages with the messy actuality of practice. It argues that community health psychology relies on an abstract version of Paulo Freire’s earlier writing, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which provides scholar-activists with a ‘map’ approach to collective action. The article revisits Freire’s later work, the Pedagogy of Hope, and argues for the importance of developing a ‘journey’ approach to collective action. Theories of practice are discussed for their value in theorizing such journeys, and in bringing maps (intentions) and journeys (actuality) closer together

Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?)