Absences and Silences: The Representation of the Tea Picker in Colonial and Fair Trade Advertising

Ethical consumption as a form of consumerism suggests that there can be a benign form of globalization where consumers can effect positive change by exercising the ‘choice’ of opting for fair trade. In marketing this choice, fair trade advertising of tea, cocoa and coffee in particular has adopted the image of the smiling and happy worker from the global South, often in their working environment and testifying by their presence and their smile to the ethical and moral nature of the product. They therefore condone our consumption as moral pleasure. This essay explores the history of this image in colonial advertising and considers how the smile works in contemporary advertising to silence these workers who are unable to ‘speak the truth about themselves’ (Michel Foucault interviewed by Gerard Raulet)

South Asian mobilisation in two northern cities: a comparison of Manchester and Bradford Asian youth movements

Anti-racist movements develop and maintain their energy through the establishment of local, grass root networks. To date, research on the anti-racist movement in Britain has focussed on the creation of national narratives that highlight the power and influence of the movement. This article compares two of the Asian Youth movements that operated in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the importance of investigating localised settings when researching the history and impact of the antiracist movement as a whole. Oral histories and documents produced by the Asian Youth Movements are used to reflect and understand how the organisations operated and developed differently, highlighting the influence of specific urban environments which affected local migratory experiences and therefore the makeup and operations of the movements themselves

Design and Fabrication of cross corrugated recuperator fins for a micro gas turbine

The National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore is involved in the development of a 10kW micro gas turbine (MGT). A recuperator is mandatory for an MGT to boost the thermal efficiency of the unit. This paper describes in detail the fabrication process of efficient corrugated fins for deploying in the recuperator of an MGT. The use of corrugated fins in the recuperator of the MGT gives higher effectiveness compared to conventional flat fins. The paper, in detail, describes the various materials used and the heat treatment process used for manufacturing the forming and shearing die sets. All manufacturing accuracy requirements were achieved to get the required fin geometry. The formed corrugated fins were qualified through a series of tests and large number fins were formed for use in the annular recuperator of the Micro Gas Turbine

Motivations, Values and Emotions: 3 sides of the same coin

This position paper speaks to the interrelationships between the three concepts of motivations, values, and emotion. Motivations prime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotions provide a common currency for values, and emotions implement motivations. While conceptually distinct, the three are so pragmatically intertwined as to differ primarily from our taking different points of view. To make these points more transparent, we briefly describe the three in the context a cognitive architecture, the LIDA model, for software agents and robots that models human cognition, including a developmental period. We also compare the LIDA model with other models of cognition, some involving learning and emotions. Finally, we conclude that artificial emotions will prove most valuable as implementers of motivations in situations requiring learning and development

Method of continuously determining crack length

The determination of crack lengths in an accurate and straight forward manner is very useful in studying and preventing load created flaws and cracks. A crack length sensor according to the present invention is fabricated in a rectangular or other geometrical form from a conductive powder impregnated polymer material. The long edges of the sensor are silver painted on both sides and the sensor is then bonded to a test specimen via an adhesive having sufficient thickness to also serve as an insulator. A lead wire is connected to each of the two outwardly facing silver painted edges. The resistance across the sensor changes as a function of the crack length in the specimen and sensor. The novel aspect of the present invention includes the use of relatively uncomplicated sensors and instrumentation to effectively measure the length of generated cracks

Persistent Homology of Attractors For Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for dynamical analysis of human actions from 3D motion capture data using topological data analysis. We model human actions using the topological features of the attractor of the dynamical system. We reconstruct the phase-space of time series corresponding to actions using time-delay embedding, and compute the persistent homology of the phase-space reconstruction. In order to better represent the topological properties of the phase-space, we incorporate the temporal adjacency information when computing the homology groups. The persistence of these homology groups encoded using persistence diagrams are used as features for the actions. Our experiments with action recognition using these features demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms other baseline methods.Comment: 5 pages, Under review in International Conference on Image Processin