You say you want a revolution? : Popular music and revolt in France, the United States, and Britain during the late 1960s

It is almost impossible to understand the youth protest movements of the 1960s without some appreciation of the importance of that decade's popular music. This music and ideas of personal and political liberation and self-expression were closely linked. This article analyses the role of popular music (rock music) in the 1960s' counterculture. It adopts an explicitly comparative historical approach to the phenomenon, utilising case studies of three contrasting societies – two in Western Europe, plus the United States. The argument here is that despite that this music challenged many social convention and helped to 'emancipate' its consumers, its uses and role in the USA, Britain, and France were frequently dissimilar. Often, these were determined by differing national circumstances and traditions. The piece disputes also the notion of a united and radical counterculture and attempts to illuminate the nature of youth rebellion in each of the countries that it examines. This paper seeks to suggest that the 1960s' youth-based movements for social change were frequently responding to local or parochial problems in their protests. 1968 is taken as the main focus here, partly because it permits an examination of the intense Parisian revolt that broke out in that year, but also because it is frequently conceptualised as the decade's hinge. 1968 is the year when the optimistic mind-set of the preceding five or so years started to give way to frustration and disillusionment

Conversion Efficiencies of Heteronuclear Feshbach Molecules

We study the conversion efficiency of heteronuclear Feshbach molecules in population imbalanced atomic gases formed by ramping the magnetic field adiabatically. We extend the recent work [J. E. Williams et al., New J. Phys., 8, 150 (2006)] on the theory of Feshbach molecule formations to various combinations of quantum statistics of each atomic component. A simple calculation for a harmonically trapped ideal gas is in good agreement with the recent experiment [S. B. Papp and C. E. Wieman, Phys. Rev. Lett., 97, 180404 (2006)] without any fitting parameters. We also give the conversion efficiency as an explicit function of initial peak phase space density of the majority species for population imbalanced gases. In the low-density region where Bose-Einstein condensation does not appear, the conversion efficiency is a monotonic function of the initial peak phase space density, but independent of statistics of a minority component. The quantum statistics of majority atoms has a significant effect on the conversion efficiency. In addition, Bose-Einstein condensation of an atomic component is the key element determining the maximum conversion efficiency.Comment: 46 pages, 32 figure

Semantics Through Pictures: towards a diagrammatic semantics for object-oriented modelling notations

An object-oriented (OO) model has a static component, the set of allowable snapshots or system states, and a dynamic component, the set of filmstrips or sequences of snapshots. Diagrammatic notations, such as those in UML, each places constraints on the static and/or dynamic models. A formal semantics of OO modeling notations can be constructed by providing a formal description of (i) sets of snapshots and filmstrips, (ii) constraints on those sets, and (iii) the derivation of those constraints from diagrammatic notations. In addition, since constraints are contributed by many diagrams for the same model, a way of doing this compositionally is desirable. One approach to the semantics is to use first-order logic for (i) and (ii), and theory inclusion with renaming, as in Larch, to characterize composition. A common approach to (iii) is to bootstrap: provide a semantics for a kernel of the notation and then use the kernel to give a semantics to the other notations. This only works if a kernel which is sufficiently expressive can be identified, and this is not the case for UML. However, we have developed a diagrammatic notation, dubbed constraint diagrams, which seems capable of expressing most if not all static and dynamic constraints, and it is proposed that this be used to give a diagrammatic semantics to OO models

Mind the (Digital) Gap!

The key focus of this paper revolves around the dual concepts of teachers acting as ‘digital intermediaries’ for students, pupils or marginalized persons and their ‘designing’ role in developing, maintaining and celebrating the creation of ideas, collaborative interactions and dissemination in the form of information as a sustainable commodity. The use of social (and digital) media becomes the ‘alternative’ collaborative tool that allows participants to engage in innovative learning environments, existing both inside and outside of the classroom. In using the platform of social media as a social innovation tool the project provided educators with the relevant knowledge, skills, values and capabilities required in facilitating a meaningful curriculum for the development of citizenship (in this case European) and sustainability in terms of a knowledge sharing community. The basis of this paper surrounds the intentions, implementations and outcomes of the EU-funded Comenius project ‘Learn to Teach by Social Web’ (L2T – www.learn2.teach.eu) which set out to exploit the educational potential that social media offers teachers in engaging their learners in the contextual development of skills and knowledge through an ‘alternative’ or unfamiliar learning paradigm. The project outcome is a self-study curriculum for teachers who would like to use social media in their classroom lectures

Pregnancy, risk perception and use of complementary and alternative medicine

Pregnancy and childbirth are events of major significance in women's lives. In western countries women are increasingly using complementary and alternative medicine during this time. However, there is little research exploring the factors that are influential in women's motivations to use complementary and alternative medicine during pregnancy and childbirth. This article draws on data from a narrative-based study designed to explore women's experiences of complementary and alternative medicine use during pregnancy and childbirth. The study involved 14 women living in the South-west of England, who had used complementary and alternative medicine during pregnancy and childbirth. We elicited narratives by interviewing women two to three times. The women in our study used complementary and alternative medicine both as a response to the uncertainty of pregnancy and childbirth and as a defence against manufactured risk, and in doing so indicated their desire to transform an unpredictable and unmanageable future into one which is more predictable and manageable. It was a means of dealing with the stress and anxiety associated with uncertainty which has to be dealt with. Their consciousness of the risks of biomedicine developed though the practice of complementary and alternative medicine, and their high educational status and relative affluence facilitated their choices. There was a tension evident in their narratives between a need to 'be in control' versus a desire for a natural childbirth without medical intervention. Women in the study showed their autonomy by actively pursuing complementary and alternative medicine while at the same time selectively using expert medical knowledge. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis

Monitoring in a grid cluster

The monitoring of a grid cluster (or of any piece of reasonably scaled IT infrastructure) is a key element in the robust and consistent running of that site. There are several factors which are important to the selection of a useful monitoring framework, which include ease of use, reliability, data input and output. It is critical that data can be drawn from different instrumentation packages and collected in the framework to allow for a uniform view of the running of a site. It is also very useful to allow different views and transformations of this data to allow its manipulation for different purposes, perhaps unknown at the initial time of installation. In this context, we present the findings of an investigation of the Graphite monitoring framework and its use at the ScotGrid Glasgow site. In particular, we examine the messaging system used by the framework and means to extract data from different tools, including the existing framework Ganglia which is in use at many sites, in addition to adapting and parsing data streams from external monitoring frameworks and websites

Analysis and improvement of data-set level file distribution in Disk Pool Manager

Of the three most widely used implementations of the WLCG Storage Element specification, Disk Pool Manager[1, 2] (DPM) has the simplest implementation of file placement balancing (StoRM doesn't attempt this, leaving it up to the underlying filesystem, which can be very sophisticated in itself). DPM uses a round-robin algorithm (with optional filesystem weighting), for placing files across filesystems and servers. This does a reasonable job of evenly distributing files across the storage array provided to it. However, it does not offer any guarantees of the evenness of distribution of that subset of files associated with a given "dataset" (which often maps onto a "directory" in the DPM namespace (DPNS)). It is useful to consider a concept of "balance", where an optimally balanced set of files indicates that the files are distributed evenly across all of the pool nodes. The best case performance of the round robin algorithm is to maintain balance, it has no mechanism to improve balance.<p></p> In the past year or more, larger DPM sites have noticed load spikes on individual disk servers, and suspected that these were exacerbated by excesses of files from popular datasets on those servers. We present here a software tool which analyses file distribution for all datasets in a DPM SE, providing a measure of the poorness of file location in this context. Further, the tool provides a list of file movement actions which will improve dataset-level file distribution, and can action those file movements itself. We present results of such an analysis on the UKI-SCOTGRID-GLASGOW Production DPM