Infectious rhythms

A commentary on the 1st Auckland Triennial, the chapter engages with the work of artists John Lyall, Mariele Neudecker, Michael Parekowhai and Bill Hammond in order to explore the biological and cultural dimensions of inhabiting an island. It links together processes of biological species introduction (and bio-invasion) with cultural transmission, suggesting that there are similar dynamics at work in the biological and cultural realms. As a site of `infectious rhythms' of invasion, catastrophe and creativity, the material experience of island life, it is suggested, is far from that of the tranquillity and timelessness often imagined by distant metropolitan centres

Defining ethnicity in a cultural and socio-legal context : the case of Scottish gypsy-travellers

Scottish Gypsy/Travellers are 'to be regarded' as an ethnic group in Scotland by both the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Executive until a test case in a court of law clarifies matters. Since 2000-01 this fact has not been contested in any meaningful way and it is now the case that Gypsy/Traveller children, if they choose, can tick their own box in school Census counts. It logically follows from this that they can, in principle, experience racial discrimination. As it stands Scottish Gypsy/Travellers are undoubtedly as much an 'ethnic group' as any other which is currently protected by the Race Relations Act 1976 (as amended 2000) despite the fact that at the moment they generally lack the substantive protection of the Act in the Scottish context. It follows that Scottish Gypsy/Travellers in Scotland or Britain can experience racial discrimination which is not dissimilar to that experienced by all the minority ethnic groups currently protected by race relations legislation, including English Gypsies and Irish Travellers. Whether they do experience racism is, of course, a matter for the police and courts to address in the individual cases that occur rather than any academic analysis. The next stage of the process will, eventually, see a test case come before the Scottish courts and complete its journey through the legal system. Only when this happens will the socio-legal status of Scottish Gypsy/Traveller ethnicity be firmly decided

Funder Perspectives: Assessing Media Investments

How are funders evaluating the outcomes of the media productions and campaigns that they support? Over the past five years, this question has informed a growing array of convenings, reports and research initiatives within the philanthropic sector, driving the emergence of a small but increasingly visible field of analysts and producers seeking to both quantify and qualify the impact of public interest media.These examinations have stimulated debate among both funders and grantees. Calls for the creation of a single media impact metric or tool have been met with both curiosity and skepticism. Those in favor of impact analysis cite its strategic usefulness in this moment of myriad new and untested media platforms, the importance of concretely tying mission to outcomes, and the need to justify media investments rather than programmatic ones. Detractors raise concerns about how an excess of evaluation might stifle creativity, needlessly limit funding to those projects whose short-term impact can be conclusively proven, or simply bog grantees down in administrative tasks that require entirely different skills, as well as resources.However, these debates have taken place in somewhat of an information vacuum. To date, the conversation about media impact has been led by a limited group of foundations. Little substantive information is available about how a broader range of funders address questions of evaluation. This research project aims to help fill that gap.The report, Funder Perspectives: Assessing Media Investments explores the multiple and sometimes overlapping lenses through which grantmakers view media evaluation, and confirms that there are still many unanswered questions

Characterizing symmetric spaces by their Lyapunov spectra

We prove that closed negatively curved locally symmetric spaces are characterized up to isometry among all homotopy equivalent negatively curved manifolds by the Lyapunov spectra of the periodic orbits of their geodesic flows. This is done by constructing a new invariant measure for the geodesic flow that we refer to as the horizontal measure. We show that the Lyapunov spectrum of the horizontal measure alone suffices to locally characterize these locally symmetric spaces up to isometry. We associate to the horizontal measure a new invariant, the horizontal dimension. We tie this invariant to extensions of curvature pinching rigidity theorems for complex hyperbolic manifolds to pinching rigidity theorems for the Lyapunov spectrum. Our methods extend to give a rigidity theorem for smooth Anosov flows $f^{t}$ orbit equivalent to the geodesic flow $g^{t}_{X}$ of a closed negatively curved locally symmetric space $X$: $f^{t}$ is smoothly orbit equivalent to $g^{t}_{X}$ if and only if its Lyapunov spectra on all periodic orbits are a multiple of the corresponding Lyapunov spectra for $g^{t}_{X}$.Comment: 92 pages. Main result has been improved significantl

Transatlantic consumptions: disease, fame and literary nationalisms in the Davidson sisters, Southey, and Poe.

This article supplements Lawlor’s Consumption and Literature by demonstrating the complex relationships between disease and literature. Lawlor shows how the consumptive American poetesses, sisters Margaret and Lucretia Davidson, became famous for their consumptive condition and early deaths on both sides of the Atlantic, and were feted as such by prominent (mostly male) literary figures like British Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the Americans Washington Irving and Samuel Finley Breeze Morse. Edgar Allan Poe took the opportunity to convert the issue of American critics fawning over Southey’s praise from the literary motherland of Britain, into a critical space for distinctively American criticism, as dictated by himself. Poe observed that the actual quality of the Davidson sisters’ poetry was poor and that critics both British and American were seduced by the image (highly popular at the time) of consumptive femininity, poetic or not. Poe, perhaps unusually for the period, argued that a distinction should be made between text and biographical context. Lawlor suggests that the literary disease consumption became a lever for Poe to intervene in the national politics of literary criticism at a time when America was attempting to establish a distinctive national and literary-critical identity for itself

Meta-Packages: Painless Domain Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages are used to provide a tailored modelling notation for a specific application domain. There are currently two main approaches to DSLs: standard notations that are tailored by adding simple properties; new notations that are designed from scratch. There are problems with both of these approaches which can be addressed by providing access to a small meta-language based on packages and classes. A meta-modelling approach based on meta-packages allows a wide range of DSLs to be defined in a standard way. The DSLs can be processed using standard object-based extension at the meta-level and existing tooling can easily be defined to adapt to the new languages. This paper introduces the concept of meta-packages and provides a simple example