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Power in fossil fuel supply-side policy: closing down and opening up opportunities to phase out fossil fuel production
No full textSupply-side climate policy initiatives that restrict fossil fuel production are gathering momentum. A growing body of academic scholarship seeks to understand this new frontier in global climate governance. What is missing, however, is a deeper analysis of the relations of power which affect the adoption of supply-side policies such as bans, moratoria, and phaseout policies whose success is critical to addressing climate change. To provide this, we first identify the main aspects and dimensions of supply-side climate policies and why they are important. Second, we explore the forms of power which ‘close down’ supply-side climate policies, focussing in turn on: (i) the power of fossil capital (ii) the geopolitical power of fossil fuels and (iii) the cultural power of fossil fuels. In each case, we propose ways countervailing forces can ‘open up’ supply-side climate policies to disrupt incumbent power and unlock the potential of alternative energy futures beyond fossil fuels</p
Towards position-dependent quantum logic operations
No full textThe work presented in this thesis focuses on two critical components required for a scheme of scalable quantum computer architecture: high-fidelity two-qubit gate operations, and the demonstration of position-dependent quantum logic operations.The first part of this thesis is centered on the assessment of two-qubit gate schemes. Initially, two Mølmer-Sørensen type gates are examined. These gates employ a set of tailored quantum control methods, exhibiting enhanced robustness to the effects of noise compared to the standard Mølmer-Sørensen gate interaction, and further rendering their implementation on the magnetic field sensitive Zeeman-state qubit possible. The advantages arising from their quantum control methods are presented, along with their limitations. Subsequently, the three-level dressed-state Mølmer-Sørensen gate is examined, which combines the advantages of the Mølmer-Sørensen gate interaction with the dephasing-free dressed-state qubit subspace. Methods of efficiently calibrating this two-qubit gate are presented. A two-qubit gate fidelity of F=0.951(11) is measured, which is found to be limited by the effects of voltage noise present in our setup.The second part of this thesis is centered on the demonstration of position-dependent quantum logic operations. Initially, it is demonstrated that a clock-state qubit can be transported through a static magnetic field gradient. Furthermore, a mapping sequence that can transfer a qubit state from the dressed-state computational qubit basis to the shuttling clock-qubit basis is presented. A series of ten characterisation experiments are then detailed, which both demonstrate and further characterise the effects of shuttling a dressed-state qubit through a static magnetic field gradient. It is observed that the shuttling operations induce a phase offset on the dressed-state qubit when shuttled through the gradient. Finally, two modifications to the CNOT gate quantum circuit are presented, which account for the phase offsets induced by the shuttling operations on the computational qubit basis. These operations pave the way towards the demonstration of position-dependent quantum logic operations on a modular quantum computing architecture.</p
DRL-GCNet: a deep reinforcement learning and graph convolutional network for harmonic drive fault diagnosis
No full textHarmonic drives (HDs) are key components of industrial robots, and their malfunction or breakdown can cause robot operational mistakes. Therefore, accurately diagnosing faults of HDs is of great significance for their applications. In this article, fault diagnosis features of HDs were extracted from vibration signals using short-time Fourier transform (STFT) by creating spatiotemporal graphs, and a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework was employed to enhance diagnostic process, wherein agents were trained to assign structure of graph neural networks and aggregation strategies. Meanwhile, the ChebGCN was used to classify the fault characteristics of HDs under various fault states and working conditions. This was the first time that DRL and ChebGCN were jointly used for HD fault diagnosis. Comprehensive experiments were run to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on two separate datasets, wherein diagnostic accuracy rates of 99.51% and 100% were achieved, respectively, indicating its great potential as a backbone for HD fault diagnosis.</p
“Living books”: reading intimately with Emma Goldman, John Cowper Powys, and Margaret Anderson
No full textThis thesis will explore how Emma Goldman, John Cowper Powys, and Margaret Anderson utilise autobiographical modes of writing in their work as a way of cultivating emancipatory relationships with their readers. All three writers are considered to have embodied the spirit of modernism in various ways, however, their work often faces similar forms of critical neglect. I argue that this neglect stems in part from the failure of critical paradigms to adequately cohere the underlying anarchist politics of their work. Goldman and Powys began their careers as lecturers, and both sought to maintain the sense of immediate presence afforded by the platform within their writing. I argue that both Goldman and Powys were significant influences of Anderson and featured heavily throughout the early editions of the Little Review. Drawing on recent scholarship on anarchism and its intersection with literary and artistic modernism, I explore how each author encodes an anarchist ethical stance on the textual level through the idea of readerly intimacy, stylistically imbuing the text with a sense of the author’s individuality which, in turn, invites the reader to explore and enrich their own individuality. I argue that, despite the varying political commitments of each of these authors, all three are motivated by an anarchist and modernist vision of the emancipatory potential of reading. The first chapter focuses on Goldman, examining the development of an autobiographical mode throughout her essays and her more explicitly autobiographical work. The second focuses on Powys, examining his connections with anarchism and how he incorporates anarchist ideas into his philosophical works and his criticism. The third focuses on Anderson, looking at how she encoded anarchist ethical concerns into the dialogical format of the Little Review as well as her later autobiographies. </p
Modulation of auditory cortex activity in salicylate-induced tinnitus rats via deep brain stimulation of the inferior colliculus
No full textBackground: Tinnitus, a self-reported perceptual disorder, is currently believed to arise from maladaptive plasticity due to reduced sensory input. While deep brain stimulation (DBS) has shown promise in alleviating tinnitus-related behaviors, its effects on neuronal activity remain unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the spontaneous firing rates (SFRs) of the primary auditory cortex (A1) before and after DBS of the external cortex of the inferior colliculus (ECIC) in a rat model of tinnitus. Methods: Tinnitus was induced in rats through sodium salicylate injections for 14 consecutive days, while the control group received normal saline injections over the same period. We conducted tinnitus and hearing assessments using the Gap Pre-Pulse Inhibition of the Acoustic Startle (GPIAS) and Pre-Pulse Inhibition (PPI) tests. From day 14, both groups underwent DBS of the ECIC and single unit recordings from the A1. Results: Before ECIC stimulation, A1 neurons in rats with potential tinnitus exhibited significantly higher spontaneous activity compared to controls. Following ECIC stimulation, the SFRs in the group displaying abnormal GPIAS responses significantly decreased, and the difference between the tinnitus and control groups was no longer significant. Additionally, inter-spike interval (ISI) analysis revealed a higher frequency of short ISIs (Conclusion: ECIC stimulation effectively modulates A1 hyperactivity, highlighting its role in tinnitus pathophysiology. These findings warrant further research into ECIC's role in tinnitus regulation, which could inform future therapeutic interventions and enhance mathematical models of tinnitus mechanisms.</p
The gender wage gap across the unconditional wage distribution in a period of uncertainty: findings from Serbia
No full textPurposeThis article investigates the degree of heterogeneity in the gender pay gap across different quantiles of the unconditional wage distribution in Serbia during a recent period of economic uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachUsing Labour Force Surveys data spanning the COVID-19 period between 2019 and 2022, this study investigates the gender pay gap using an extension of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition methodology that exploits recentered influence function regressions and incorporates a reweighting procedure to identify the pure treatment effect (see Firpo et al., 2009, 2018). The use of such a reweighting procedure ensures that the treatment effect is not influenced or confounded by differences in the distribution of observable characteristics between gender groups.FindingsOur results reveal a stronger “glass-ceiling” than “sticky-floor” effect. Although women within the higher percentiles of the wage distribution exhibit the greatest advantage relative to men in terms of their pay-determining characteristics, a large unequal treatment in the wages received for the same set of characteristics as men persists. However, this unequal treatment remains stable across the time period studied, suggesting no lasting adverse legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.Originality/valueWe use a novel methodology that enables an analysis of the gender pay gap along the unconditional wage distribution both before and after the recent COVID-19 period. Few studies have accounted for the changes in the wage differential using the methodology applied in this article, and none have examined the recent COVID-19 pandemic period using this approach.</p
Children’s use of mental state talk is connected within peer dyads, but unrelated to theory-of-mind understanding
No full textAcross two studies we explore how individual and dyadic factors influence children's (Mage = 61 months; 52% male; 55% White British) use of Mental State Talk (MST) with peers during shared play. Results from Actor-Partner Interdependence Modelling (n = 190 children) indicate that children’s MST use is significantly linked to the MST use of their play partner, but is unrelated to either their own or their play partner’s theory-of-mind understanding. Furthermore, results from One-With-Many (n = 87 children) modelling suggest there is little to no stability in children’s use of MST across play partner or their tendency to elicit MST from different peer partners: cautioning against investigating MST with peers without considering features of the dyad within which interactions occur.</p
The Didi debacle: a watershed of financial decoupling vis-à-vis resilience epitome of global data governance
No full textTechnology and data have a critical role in driving innovation and stimulating all aspects of the global economy. Particularly noteworthy is the emerging battle for data sovereignty and security as tensions between the USA and China escalate. This escalating confrontation is increasingly spilling into the capital markets, transcending institutional and ideological differences. Both the USA and China are striving to fortify their economies against geopolitical threats.1 Amidst legal uncertainties, Variable Interest Entities (VIEs), business structures that allow investors to control a company without majority voting rights, are under renewed scrutiny as China tightens oversight of US-listed Chinese companies (ULCCs). Despite Chinese laws restricting foreign investment in sensitive sectors, the VIE’s legal workaround enables tech firms to list on American stock exchanges. China views big data as a crucial asset in global competition and tightens its grip, imposing restrictions on cross-border data transfer. Through strategic investments in the digital economy, China has prioritized regulating the internet industry. Transitioning from a laissez-faire approach, it now asserts greater control over private companies with extensive data. China has cracked down on domestic tech giants, such as Didi, listed on US stock exchanges. Additionally, it faces challenges with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) regarding access to ULCCs’ audit files. In response, the USA introduced the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA) as part of a broader strategy to adopt a more assertive stance on maintaining auditing standards. The Act grants VIE-based ULCCs 3 years to allow PCAOB inspection of their audits or face delisting.2These dynamics ultimately boil down to a strategic interplay, epitomized by the plausible hypothesis of decoupling. The resolution of this challenge holds far-reaching implications for the global financial system. In response to these pressures, high-tech ULCCs will face heightened scrutiny and must navigate a landscape of increasing risk and regulatory oversight in the digital economy. This study unfolds in five sections. Section 2 examines how Chinese firms exploit regulatory and jurisdictional arbitrage, discussing cross-listing premiums from a theoretical perspective and China’s efforts to advance its national interests. Section 3 conducts a case study of Didi, serving as a focal point in the regulatory tussle between the US and Chinese authorities. Didi’s regulatory ordeal marks a turning point, showcasing China’s tightened oversight in what was once a loosely regulated sector. This section also explores the potential impact of the Didi incident on the geo-financial landscape. Section 4 evaluates whether the HFCAA could be a game-changer in addressing the long-standing challenge of PCAOB’s inability to inspect ULCCs’ audit papers. It argues that the HFCAA could prompt the delisting of ULCCs if they persistently flout US auditing standards. Section 5 examines China’s multifaceted efforts to rein in technology firms, focusing on heightened scrutiny of the Variable Interest Entity (VIE) structure through which Chinese firms seek overseas equity capital. Section 6 delves into lifting the veil on the strategic manoeuvring between the world’s two largest economic powers, exploring avenues to break the deadlock beyond mere leverage. The study concludes with a summary of findings.</p
Time-varying functional connectivity for scalable observability in microservice architectures
No full textMicroservices have transformed software architecture through the creation of modular and independent services. However, they introduce operational complexities in service integration and system management that makes swift and accurate anomaly detection and localisation challenging. Prior works on fault localisation within microservice architectures have seen the use of causal inference to infer dependencies between microservices during a fault. However, they scale poorly to real world deployments due to their reliance on computationally expensive causal inference. Furthermore, such approaches often rely on the onset of a fault being known, or on anomaly detection approaches that do not consider the dependencies between microservices. In this paper we explore the use of functional connectivity to efficiently infer statistical relationships between microservice metrics at runtime and to detect changes within microservice deployments. We demonstrate that such structural changes can be indicative of faults which in turn can be used to locate candidates for root cause analysis without incurring the significant overheads of causal inference approaches, achieving state-of-the-art localisation performance.</p
Towards decolonising an undergraduate documentary and reality TV module: an auto-ethnography of teaching practice
No full textThis article offers an auto-ethnography of decolonising work on a final-year undergraduate documentary and reality TV module. It recognises that decolonising must always be understood as an on-going process rather than something one can accomplished through a single review of curriculum. This article traces the beginning of this process. Whilst the module, which I adopted from a colleague on leave, already had a diverse range of documentary and reality TV texts and readings, I wanted to encourage students to participate in the decolonising process with me – to explicitly engage with the ways some academic writing about documentary has erased or marginalised non-Western histories of nonfiction production, how reality TV often reinforces colonial notions of representation and power which we can trace back as fundamental to the origins of cinema, and how some of the theoretical paradigms we explore in documentary studies such as ‘witnessing’ are rooted in Western epistemologies. If documentary studies is about encouraging students to be critical of what they see and hear in nonfiction production, it seemed fitting to also encourage them to be critical about the Western discourse which has shaped how we have learnt to think about such films and television programming.</p