Experimental aspects of colour reconnection

This report summarises experimental aspects of the phenomena of colour reconnection in W+W- production, concentrating on charged multiplicity and event shapes, which were carried out as part of the Phenomenology Workshop on LEP2 Physics, Oxford, Physics Department and Keble College, 14-18 April, 1997. The work includes new estimates of the systematic uncertainty which may be attributed to colour reconnection effects in experimental measurements of Mw.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. To be published in proceedings of Phenomenology Workshop on LEP2 Physics, Oxford 14-18 April 199

How theories of practice can inform transition to a decarbonised transport system

In this article, I explore the potential of theories of practice to inform the socio-technical transition required to adequately decarbonise the UK transport system. To do so I push existing applications of practice theories by articulating a ‘systems of practice’ approach, which articulates theories of practice with socio-technical systems approaches. After sketching out a theory of practice, I explore the potential of a practice theory approach to illuminate systemic change in transport. I do this by confronting two key criticisms of practice theories; first of their difficulty in accounting for change; second in their limited ability to move beyond a micro-level focus on doing. The counter I offer to these criticisms leads directly into recognising how theories of practice can articulate with socio-technical systems approaches. From this basis, I go on to consider the implications of a practice theory approach for informing interventions to effect a system transition towards decarbonised transport

First Amendment Challenges to Landmark Preservation Statutes

The Interfaith Commission, religious leaders deeply concerned with the problems associated with the landmarking of religious properties, have recognized that the prohibition against demolition or alteration of landmarked religious properties effectively destroys their value. Additionally, the religious organizations are required to expend thousands of dollars of religious contributions to maintain these landmarks for the public benefit, in accordance with the regulations of the Landmarks Commission. This Comment focuses on the constitutionality of landmark preservation statutes as applied to religious properties. Using New York City as a model, this Comment examines the myriad problems presented by the landmarking of religious properties. This Comment concludes that a re-examination of the New York standard under the constitutional test requires the resolution of whether the preservation of landmarks is a compelling state interest sufficient to justify the burden of maintaining landmarks which has been placed on religious organizations

The stewardship of things: Property and responsibility in the management of manufactured goods

In the context of broad-based concerns about the need to move towards a more sustainable materials economy, particularly as they are expressed in debates around ecological modernisation (EM), we argue that product stewardship has radical potential as a means to promote significant change in the relationship between society and the material world. We focus on two important dimensions that have been neglected in approaches to product stewardship to date. Firstly, we argue that immanent within the basic concept of stewardship is a problematisation of dominant understandings of property ownership in neoliberal market economies. In the space opened up by notions of stewardship, different ways of enacting both rights and responsibilities to products and materials emerge which have potential to advance the sustainability of material economies. Secondly, through exploration of existing expressions of product stewardship, we uncover a neglected scale of action. Both policy and dominant articulations of EM focus primarily on the efficiency of production processes; and secondarily, the attitudes and behaviours of individual consumers. Missing from this is the 'meso-scale' of social collectives including households, neighbourhoods, more distributed communities and small scale social enterprises. Based on a review of existing research from Australia and the UK, including our own, we argue that understanding of embedded practices of material responsibility at the household scale can both reinvigorate the concept of product stewardship as a potentially radical intervention, and reveal the potential of the meso-scale as a challenging but worthwhile realm of policy intervention

Theories of practice and geography

Recent developments in theories of practice have seen place and space taken explicitly into account. In particular, THEODORE SCHATZKI’s ‘site ontology’ offers distinctive but as yet under-explored means of engaging with human geographies. By giving ontological priority to practices as constitutive of the social, this kind of practice theory provides an integrative conceptual framework that enables the analysis of diverse phenomena in relation to each other, over space and time, as they are constituted through practices. This article develops an outline agenda for bringing theories of practice, and particularly SCHATZKI’s ‘site ontology’, together with geographical inquiry. We elucidate this agenda through consideration of three contemporary preoccupations in human geography, comprising emotion, materiality and knowledge

Coulomb gauge confinement in the heavy quark limit

The relationship between the nonperturbative Green's functions of Yang-Mills theory and the confinement potential is investigated. By rewriting the generating functional of quantum chromodynamics in terms of a heavy quark mass expansion in Coulomb gauge, restricting to leading order in this expansion and considering only the two-point functions of the Yang-Mills sector, the rainbow-ladder approximation to the gap and Bethe-Salpeter equations is shown to be exact in this case and an analytic, nonperturbative solution is presented. It is found that there is a direct connection between the string tension and the temporal gluon propagator. Further, it is shown that for the 4-point quark correlation functions, only confined bound states of color-singlet quark-antiquark (meson) and quark-quark (baryon) pairs exist.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figure

Robust particle outline extraction and its application to digital on-line holography

Peer reviewedPostprin

Lateral fricatives and lateral emphatics in southern Saudi Arabia and Mehri

Arabic was traditionally described as lughat al-Ρād ‘the language of Ρād’ due to the perceived unusualness of the sound. From Sībawayhi’s description, early Arabic Ρād was clearly a lateral or lateralized emphatic. Lateral fricatives are assumed to have formed part of the phoneme inventory of Proto-Semitic, and are attested in Modern South Arabian languages (MSAL) today. In Arabic, a lateral realization of Ρād continues to be attested in some recitations of the QurΜān. For Arabic, the lateral Ρād described by Sībawayhi was believed to be confined to dialects spoken in ДaΡramawt. Recent fieldwork by Asiri and al-Azraqi, however, has identified lateral and lateralized emphatics in dialects of southern ΚAsīr and the Saudi Tihāmah. These sounds differ across the varieties, both in their phonation (voicing) and manner of articulation — sonorants and voiced and voiceless fricatives — in their degree of laterality, and in their phonological behaviour: the lateralized Ρād in the southern Yemeni dialect of GhaylΉabbān, for example, has a non-lateralized allophone in the environment of /r/ or /l/. Recent phonetic work conducted by Watson on the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, shows a similar range of cross-dialect variety in the realization of the lateral(ized) emphatic. In this paper, we discuss different reflexes of lateral(ized) emphatics in four dialects of the Saudi Tihāmah; we show that some of these dialects contrast cognates of *Ρ and *·; and we show that lateral emphatics attested in dialects of the Modern South Arabian language, Mehri, spoken in areas considerably to the south of the Saudi Tihāmah, show a similar degree of variation to that of the Arabic dialects of the Saudi Tihāmah

Accuracy of Measurement for Counting and Intensity-Correlation Experiments

A quantum-mechanical analysis is made of the experimental accuracy to be expected for particle-counting and intensity-correlation experiments. The mean-square fluctuation for an ensemble, consisting of a large number of experiments each conducted over a time interval T, is calculated