Revelations of the World: Transnationalism and the Politics of Perception in Papua New Guinea

Like many over the past century, people in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea have experienced a burgeoning of connections with people across great geographical distances. Building on Benedict Anderson’s well-known discussion of the nation as a “community” imagined in part through the realist framing of newspaper reporting, novels, censuses, and so on, I argue that revelation is an interactional frame central to an emerging global imaginary in the Yopno Valley, one that lies at the heart of Yopno engagements with transnational projects ranging from Christian missionization to environmental conservation and development through Western-style education. In the course of sermons, community meetings, public announcements, and the like, people frequently reveal knowledge of transnational institutions to others, presenting themselves as the necessary mediators between an “out-of-touch” community and a knowledgeable, powerful, and yet obscure world of transnational actors. The world perceived through revelation is one in which persons are defined by their place in a global hierarchy organized by the trajectory of knowledge in circulation, with the Yopno, the last to know, at the bottom. This imaginary, in turn, is reshaping power relations in Yopno communities and influencing people’s understanding of and interest in various transnational projects.Anthropolog

Can the Subaltern Listen? Self-determination and the Provisioning of Expertise in Papua New Guinea

Voice is a major concern in contemporary liberal-democratic politics, one that stresses the political importance of speaking (“giving voice,” “speaking up”). But in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea, where NGO and government projects are expanding, people’s sense that they are losing control of their future has led them to worry about their capacity to listen, not their capacity to speak. In largely acephalous villages, people’s self-determination seems particularly threatened by their ignorance of the true nature of their own actions. From a perspective in which the antecedents and the consequences of action are deeply unclear—a perspective stressed in the provisioning of expertise prevalent in political discourse—self-determination hinges on listening and gaining the understanding needed to shape one’s future.Anthropolog

Named relations: A universal in the pragmatics of reference within the kin group

Anthropolog

Structural Design using Cellular Automata

Traditional parallel methods for structural design do not scale well. This paper discusses the application of massively scalable cellular automata (CA) techniques to structural design. There are two sets of CA rules, one used to propagate stresses and strains, and one to perform design analysis. These rules can be applied serially,periodically,or concurrently, and Jacobi or Gauss- Seidel style updating can be done. These options are compared with respect to convergence,speed, and stability

The Vibration Spectra of Hydrazoic Acid, Methyl Azide, and Methyl Isocyanate The Thermodynamic Functions of Hydrazoic Acid

The vibration spectra of hydrazoic acid, methyl azide, and methyl isocyanate have been investigated in the spectral region between 2 and 20μ. Correlation of the spectra of these structurally similar molecules has made possible the determination of all the fundamental frequencies of hydrazoic acid and all but the methyl torsion frequency in the methyl compounds. From these fundamental frequencies and the known rotational constants, the usual thermodynamic functions of hydrazoic acid have been calculated to the harmonic oscillator‐rigid rotator approximation. Equilibrium constants for some characteristic reactions have also been obtained.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70737/2/JCPSA6-8-5-369-1.pd

Chemical Equilibrium in Collisions of Small Systems

The system-size dependence of particle production in heavy-ion collisions at the top SPS energy is analyzed in terms of the statistical model. A systematic comparison is made of two suppression mechanisms that quantify strange particle yields in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions: the canonical model with strangeness correlation radius determined from the data and the model formulated in the canonical ensemble using chemical off-equilibrium strangeness suppression factor. The system-size dependence of the correlation radius and the thermal parameters are obtained for p-p, C-C, Si-Si and Pb-Pb collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 17.3 AGeV. It is shown that on the basis of a consistent set of data there is no clear difference between the two suppression patterns. In the present study the strangeness correlation radius was found to exhibit a rather weak dependence on the system size.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Physical Review

Rapidity Dependence of Strange Particle Ratios in Nuclear Collisions

It was recently found that in sulphur-induced nuclear collisions at 200 A GeV the observed strange hadron abundances can be explained within a thermodynamic model where baryons and mesons separately are in a state of relative chemical equilibrium, with overall strangeness being slightly undersaturated, but distributed among the strange hadron channels according to relative chemical equilibrium with a vanishing strange quark chemical potential. We develop a consistent thermodynamic formulation of the concept of relative chemical equilibrium and show how to introduce into the partition function deviations from absolute chemical equilibrium, e.~g.~an undersaturation of overall strangeness or the breaking of chemical equilibrium between mesons and baryons. We then proceed to test on the available data the hypothesis that the strange quark chemical potential vanishes everywhere, and that the rapidity distributions of all the observed hadrons can be explained in terms of one common, rapidity-dependent function $\mu_{\rm q}(\eta)$ for the baryon chemical potential only. The aim of this study is to shed light on the observed strong rapidity dependence of the strange baryon ratios in the NA36 experiment.Comment: uses REVTeX, 14 pages, 17 ps-figures (uuencoded) added with figures comman