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Giving Away the Game – Scattershot Notes on Social Class and Other Afflictions
No full textOne of my earliest jobs was driving for an unregulated car service in New York. In the days before Uber they were called ‘gypsy cabs.’ One night I found myself on the business end of a revolver. Telling the tale to my dispatcher next day, he was staggeringly nonplussed. ‘Ya gotta put up with a lot,’ he said, ‘when you’re tryin’ t’ get ahead.’ ‘Yeah,’ I replied, disgusted, ‘even gettin’ your head blown off.’ Some time later, another driver, an African-American in a similar scenario, didn’t make it, emphasizing how much higher the stakes for a person of color. These are the real wages of work, I thought, and the rules of the game.
My dispatcher’s nonchalance bespoke how invested in the game he was; in a set of beliefs, assumptions, and animating myths that keep the wheel of fortune going. Like the Monty Python skit about the collapsing tower, if too few invest in those myths, the entire edifice crumbles.
The following is a personal essay that attempts to navigate the game’s parameters - social class, aspiration, and its attendant neurosis - and the myths that animate such notions as ‘getting ahead,’ ‘climbing the ladder,’ and the ‘American Dream,’ my country’s main (ideological) export. The approach is less theory-driven than empirical, phenomenological. Hence the numbered sections, a style popularized by Wittgenstein, Herbert Read and others. Here it doesn’t represent chronology so much as the elusive, episodic nature of the beast. 
Goode, J., ed. (2019) Clever Girls: Autoethnographies of Class, Gender, and Ethnicity. Palgrave Macmillan.
No full textThe Failure of Lifestyle Environmentalism and the Promise of the Green New Deal for Working-Class People
No full textThere is an urgent need to address a range of environmental issues, including climate change, but the policies enacted to date have usually done nothing to address class inequities and have often led to increased working-class disadvantage. The causes of the climate and other environmental crises have often been located in problematic individual lifestyles, with little recognition of the time, economic and health constraints that make it difficult for working-class people to adopt green lifestyles. The Green New Deal (GND) presented an alternative policy paradigm that argued for environmental policies that, rather than increasing the pressure on disadvantaged groups, would have co-benefits for working-class people, low-income groups and communities of colour. However, the policy did not lead to electoral success for the political leaders that proposed it, in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), due to opposition representations of it as costly and threatening to working-class jobs. We interviewed 40 working-class people in the UK to find out how much they knew about the Green New Deal, what they thought about it as an environmental policy and how they felt about environmentalism, more generally. Our research indicates that there was a general lack of knowledge about GND, but great enthusiasm about it once explained, albeit with reservations about its implementation and limitations. The GND has huge potential to benefit the lives of working-class people but, we conclude, more, and better, outreach is needed for people to understand its potential to improve their lives
The Transformations of Greek Working-Class Fiction from the Interwar Period to the Present
No full textSurveying a large corpus of Modern Greek fiction from the interwar years to the decade of the financial crisis (2010-2020) we set out to delineate the national inflection of ‘working-class fiction’ along the axes of theme and style as well as answerability, i.e. the engagement with working-class interests in distinct periods (interwar years, WWII and postwar, Metapolitefsi and beyond). Characterized by quantitative and aesthetic variability, the Greek version of the genre is shown to engage actively with topical contextual issues as well as with changing imperatives of authorial commitment and the shifting composition of the working class
Rank, M., Eppard, L., and Bullock, H. (2021) Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Oxford University Press
No full textIntroduction to Series and Parallel Circuits
No full textThis lesson begins with an introduction on electricity and how it is formed at the molecular level. It then lets learners explore and define a circuit. This introduction is followed by an exploration where learners develop series and parallel circuits using LED lights and motors. Learners then consider what constitutes a series and parallel circuit, open and closed circuit, and a short circuit. The lesson concludes by having learners consider advantages, limitations, and instructional uses of various electronics kits (e.g., Snap Circuits, littleBits, LilyPad, paper circuits, conductive dough) based on their ability to display circuit paths
Generalized commutators and the Moore-Penrose inverse
No full textThis work studies the kernel of a linear operator associated with the generalized k-fold commutator. Given a set of real matrices, the commutator is denoted by. For a fixed set of matrices we introduce a multilinear skew-symmetric linear operator . For fixed and by the Amitsur--Levitski Theorem [2] , which motivated this work. The matrix representation of the linear transformation is called the k-commutator matrix. has interesting properties, e.g., it is a commutator; for odd, there is a permutation of the rows of that makes it skew-symmetric. For both and odd, a provocative matrix appears in the kernel of . By using the Moore--Penrose inverse and introducing a conjecture about the rank of , the entries of are shown to be quotients of polynomials in the entries of the matrices in . One case of the conjecture has been recently proven by Brassil. The Moore--Penrose inverse provides a full rank decomposition of
Injectivity of linear combinations in
No full textThe aim of this paper is to provide sufficient and necessary conditions under which the linear combination , for given operators and , is injective. Using these results, necessary and sufficient conditions for left (right) invertibility are given. Some special cases will be studied as well
Families of graphs with twin pendent paths and the Braess edge
No full textIn the context of a random walk on an undirected graph, Kemeny's constant can measure the average travel time for a random walk between two randomly chosen vertices. We are interested in graphs that behave counter-intuitively in regard to Kemeny's constant: in particular, we examine graphs with a cut-vertex at which at least two branches are paths, regarding whether the insertion of a particular edge into a graph results in an increase of Kemeny's constant. We provide several tools for identifying such an edge in a family of graphs and for analysing asymptotic behaviour of the family regarding the tendency to have that edge; and classes of particular graphs are given as examples. Furthermore, asymptotic behaviours of families of trees are described
Error analysis of the generalized low-rank matrix approximation
No full textIn this paper, we propose an error analysis of the generalized low-rank approximation, which is a generalization of the classical approximation of a matrix by a matrix of a rank at most , where