32151 research outputs found
Sort by
Just for the record
Get PDFJust for the Record is a sapphic romantic comedy with a hint of a coming-of-age story that follows Tessa, a tightly wound, classically trained pianist and Aeryn, a free-spirited, lapsed poet working a dead-end job at her family's record shop. After suffering a personal setback, Tessa moves abroad to pursue her songwriting dreams where she stumbles into a meet-cute-turned-disaster and lands an unexpected job at the very same record shop. The two women immediately butt heads over their differences in music and life choices but come to realise they have much to learn from each other.
With the help of a chaotic circle of friends, and ghosts of relationships past working to throw them off-key, Tessa and Aeryn must navigate their differences and discover a new rhythm in music and in love, unless one false note can silence what they’ve built for good.
Just for the Record was written to celebrate the style and occasionally absurd tropes of romantic comedies from the 90s and early 2000s, reshaping them for a modern audience. I grew up loving these films and wanted to write my own spin on the genre with a positive sapphic story filled with relatable queer characters.
While sapphic stories were present in romantic comedies in the 90s and early 2000s, portrayals of heterosexual relationships were far more common. The handful of films that did exist tended to reinforce harmful stereotypes, so my goal was to highlight the love between these two women without the burden of worn caricatures of queer identities or an overt emphasis on their gender. Tessa and Aeryn simply fall in love, through a series of touching and comedic moments, much in the way of the ‘golden era’ of classic romantic comedies
Adam Smith and agriculture : the political economy of the “unnatural and retrograde” order revisited
Get PDFThis paper provides a reinterpretation of Adam Smith's distinction between the natural and the unnatural and retrograde order of progress. In doing so, the paper explores Smith's idea of the division of labour and its limitations; the agrarian assumptions underlying his political economy; the significance of transportation costs to his understanding of the effects of free trade; and his desire to see the customs and laws supporting primogeniture and entails undermined in Great Britain and throughout Europe.Peer reviewe
Relations between normal state nonreciprocal transport and the superconducting diode effect in the trivial and topological phases
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the Georg H. Endress Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (ERC Starting Grant, Grant No 757725).Nonreciprocal transport effects can occur in the normal state of conductors and in superconductors when both inversion and time-reversal symmetry are broken. Here, we consider systems where magnetochiral anisotropy of the energy spectrum due to an externally applied magnetic field results in a rectification effect in the normal state and a superconducting (SC) diode effect when the system is proximitized by a superconductor. Focusing on nanowire systems, we obtain analytic expressions for both normal state rectification and SC diode effects that reveal the commonalities—as well as differences—between these two phenomena. Furthermore, we consider the nanowire brought into an (almost) helical state in the normal phase or a topological SC phase when proximitized. In both cases, this reveals that the topology of the system considerably modifies its nonreciprocal transport properties. Our results provide insights into how to determine the origin of nonreciprocal effects and further evince the strong connection of nonreciprocal transport with the topological properties of a system.Peer reviewe
Alienation perhaps : the entanglement of suffering and agency of young employees in Chinese internet companies
Get PDFHighly educated young employees in Chinese internet companies experience profound alienation, yet many refuse to identify as alienated because alienation is often seen as preferable to unemployment or failure. Instead, they perceive actively alienating themselves as a strategic means of securing a place in a highly uncertain world, aligning with corporate discipline and technological regimes in hopes of achieving future autonomy. This reflects a social imaginary in which technology appears more stable than the state, anchoring life projects to the tech industry. When anticipation gives way to stagnation, workers face temporal dislocation, somatic distress, and a loss of orientation. Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theory of alienation as a deficient relation of appropriation, this ethnography argues that the crisis lies in ruptured self-relations, when one can no longer make life one’s own. Finally, Castoriadis’s theory of social imaginaries and his philosophical writings on the “indeterminate” nature of imagination offer an anthropological insight by conceptualising alienation as a temporal and relational category, where the analytical power lies not in a fixed meaning, but in its very ambiguity.Peer reviewe
AI trends and challenges for the 21st century museum
No full textArtificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries, including the museum and cultural heritage sector. Recent advancements, such as the Nobel Prize recognition for John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton’s foundational work on artificial neural networks, highlight the transformative potential of AI alongside its ethical implications, including risks of misinformation and manipulation. Similarly, the use of AI to recreate the voice of the late critic Brian Sewell for a Van Gogh exhibition review demonstrates the intersection of innovation and controversy in the arts. This presentation explores the state of AI integration in museums, reflecting both excitement and scepticism. Despite initiatives like the Smithsonian Museum’s AI Values Statement and the establishment of the European AI Office, significant barriers remain, including a lack of digital literacy, technical infrastructure, and strategic upskilling within the sector. Findings from recent surveys reveal that many museum professionals feel underprepared for AI adoption, underscoring the need for targeted education and collaboration with AI specialists. Drawing on examples such as the AI4Culture platform and recommendations from ICOM and NEMO, this talk proposes actionable steps for fostering AI adoption. These include integrating upskilling into museum strategies, creating crossfunctional teams, and implementing phased pilot programs to ensure ethical, sustainable AI integration that aligns with museums’ missions. By embracing thoughtful collaboration and addressing barriers, museums can position themselves as active contributors to AI advancements, enhancing accessibility, education, and community engagement while preserving their cultural and ethical integrity
Paying participants : the impact of compensation on data quality
Get PDFPoor-quality data has the potential to increase error variance, reduce statistical power and effect sizes, and produce Type I or Type II errors. Paying participants is one technique researchers may use in an attempt to obtain high-quality data. Accordingly, two secondary datasets were used to examine the relationship between participant payment and data quality. The first dataset revealed that data quality did not differ between paid and unpaid undergraduates. Similarly, the second dataset showed that data quality did not differ between unpaid community participants and MTurkers. A comparison across studies showed that undergraduate students engaged in lower levels of careless responding than the community samples but the unpaid community sample outperformed the MTurk sample and both undergraduate samples. Taken together, the current findings suggest that offering financial incentives to undergraduate or community samples does not improve data quality but may improve data collection rates and increase the diversity of participants.Peer reviewe
Ethnographies of interest : theorizing knowledge between enthusiasm and instrumentalism
No full textAnthropologists and social theorists have written extensively about the ways in which economic and political interests lead people to act in social life. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to what people find “interesting,” in the sense of being engaged or enthused rather than of having a stake in something. Even more rarely have we attended to the ethnographic deployment of both of these ambiguous senses of interest in specific social contexts. This paper explores the intersection of these two versions of interest, highlighting how they are central to a range of expert knowledge practices and to the claims of professionals to know with authority. Focusing on animal rights activists, heritage bureaucrats, and behavioral scientists, we show how these different forms of interest coalesce, combine, and pull apart in practice. We argue that these observations about vernacular deployments of interest should lead us to rethink the use of interest in anthropological analysis. In particular, we caution against the unwitting universalization of normative assumptions about the proper relation between interest as enthusiasm and interest as advantage. We highlight instead the need to be alert to the dynamic ways in which these senses of interest are threaded through social practice.Peer reviewe
Quantifying plasmid movement in drug-resistant Shigella species using phylodynamic inference
Get PDFFunding: N.F.M. was supported in part by NIH NIGMS R35 GM119774. S.D. is supported by the Inception program (Investissement d’Avenir grant ANR-16-CONV-0005). R.R.W. is supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) [DE250100677]. T.B. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. B.P.H. is supported by an NHMRC Investigator Grant (GNT1196103). D.J.I. is supported by an NHMRC Investigator Grant (GNT1195210). This work was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Australia partnership grant (GNT1149991).The ‘silent pandemic’ of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a significant global public health threat. AMR genes in bacteria are often carried on mobile elements, such as plasmids. The horizontal movement of plasmids allows AMR genes and resistance to key therapeutics to disseminate in a population. However, the quantification of the movement of plasmids remains challenging with existing computational approaches. Here, we introduce a novel method that allows us to reconstruct and quantify the movement of plasmids in bacterial populations over time. To do so, we model chromosomal and plasmid DNA co-evolution using a joint coalescent and plasmid transfer process in a Bayesian phylogenetic network approach. This approach reconstructs differences in the evolutionary history of plasmids and chromosomes to reconstruct instances where plasmids likely move between bacterial lineages while accounting for parameter uncertainty. We apply this new approach to a five-year dataset of Shigella, exploring the plasmid transfer rates of five different plasmids with different AMR and virulence profiles. In doing so, we reconstruct the co-evolution of the large Shigella virulence plasmid with the chromosome DNA. We quantify higher plasmid transfer rates of three small plasmids that move between lineages of Shigella sonnei. Finally, we determine the recent dissemination of a multidrug-resistant plasmid between S. sonnei and S. flexneri lineages in multiple independent events and through steady growth in prevalence since 2010. This approach has a strong potential to improve our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of AMR-carrying plasmids as they are introduced, circulate, and are maintained in bacterial populations.Peer reviewe
Self-consistent heating of the magnetically closed solar corona : generation of nanoflares, thermodynamic response of the plasma and observational signatures
Get PDFFunding: C.D.J., L.K.S.D., J.A.K., S.S.M., and J.E.L. acknowledge support from the NASA Heliophysics Internal Scientist Funding Model (H-ISFM) competitive work package program (PI James A. Klimchuk). J.R. acknowledges financial support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) through Consolidated Grant ST/W001195/1 to the University of St Andrews.The energy that heats the magnetically closed solar corona originates in the complex motions of the massive photosphere. Turbulent photospheric convection slowly displaces the footpoints of coronal field lines, causing them to become twisted and tangled. Magnetic stresses gradually build until reaching a breaking point when the field reconnects and releases a sudden burst of energy. We simulate this basic picture of nanoflares using a high-fidelity, three-dimensional, multistranded magnetohydrodynamic simulation that starts with a fully stratified atmosphere. This simulation includes the effects of field-aligned thermal conduction and optically thin radiation and uses the state-of-the-art Transition Region Adaptive Conduction (TRAC) method to capture the response of the plasma to the nanoflare heating. We find that our physical model supports a unified explanation for both the diffuse emission observed in active regions and the bright coronal loops. Specifically, our results suggest that the diffuse emission originates from spatially and temporally uncorrelated nanoflares, whereas coherent clusters of nanoflares—nanoflare storms—are responsible for the formation of bright coronal loops. Quantitative comparisons between the simulated emission and observed characteristics of coronal loops show that key observed properties—such as loop widths, lifetimes, and cross sections—are reasonably well reproduced by the model. The idea that avalanche spread naturally leads to circular cross sections in coronal loops is strongly supported. Our results also suggest that phase differences in heating and cooling events across neighboring magnetic flux strands are a plausible explanation for the anomalous cross-field motions of coronal loops that were recently reported in high-resolution observations.Peer reviewe
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage St Andrews Research Repository? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!