Country life: agricultural technologies and the emergence of new rural subjectivities

Rural areas have long been spaces of technological experimentation, development and resistance. In the UK, this is especially true in the post-second world war era of productivist food regimes, characterised by moves to intensification. The technologies that have developed have variously aimed to increase yields, automate previously manual tasks, and create new forms of life. This review focuses on the relationships between agricultural technologies and rural lives. While there has been considerable media emphasis on the material modification, and creation, of new rural lives through emerging genetic technologies, the review highlights the role of technologies in co-producing new rural subjectivities. It does this through exploring relationships between agricultural technologies and gender, changing approaches to understanding and intervening in animal lives, and how automation shifts responsibility for productive work on farms. In each of these instances, even ostensibly mundane technologies can significantly affect what it is to be a farmer, a farm advisor or a farm animal. However, the review cautions against technological determinism, drawing on recent work from Science and Technology Studies to show that technologies do not simply reconfigure lives but are themselves transformed by the actors and activities with which they are connected. The review ends by suggesting avenues for future research

Introducing the modified paranormal belief scale: distinguishing between classic paranormal beliefs, religious paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity among undergraduates in Northern Ireland and Wales

Previous empirical studies concerned with the association between paranormal beliefs and conventional religiosity have produced conflicting evidence. Drawing on Rice's (2003) distinction between classic paranormal beliefs and religious paranormal beliefs, the present study proposed a modified form of the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale to produce separate scores for these two forms of paranormal belief, styled 'religious paranormal beliefs' and 'classic paranormal beliefs'. Data provided by a sample of 143 undergraduate students in Northern Ireland and Wales, who completed the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity alongside the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, demonstrated that conventional religiosity is positively correlated with religious paranormal beliefs, but independent of classic paranormal beliefs. These findings provide a clear framework within which previous conflicting evidence can be interpreted. It is recommended that future research should distinguish clearly between these two forms of paranormal beliefs and that the Tobacyk Revised Paranormal Beliefs Scale should be routinely modified to detach the four religious paranormal belief items from the total scale score

Some results on surfaces with p_g=q=1 and K^2=2

Following an idea of Ishida, we develop polynomial equations for certain unramified double covers of surfaces with p_g=q=1 and K^2=2. Our first main result provides an explicit surface surface X with these invariants defined over Q that has Picard number 2, which is the smallest possible for these surfaces. This is done by giving equations for the double cover Y of X, calculating the zeta function of the reduction of Y to F_3, and extracting from this the zeta function of the reduction of X to F_3; the basic idea used in this process may also be of independent interest. Our second main result is a big monodromy theorem for a family that contains all surfaces with p_g=q=1, K^2=2, and K is ample. It follows from this that a certain Hodge correspondence of Kuga and Satake, between such a surface and an abelian variety, is motivated (and hence absolute Hodge). This allows us to deduce our third main result, which is that the Tate Conjecture in characteristic zero holds for all surfaces with p_g=q=1, K^2=2, and K ample.Comment: 27 pages. Revised version with title change. To appear in Int. Math. Res. No

Religious orientation, mental health and culture : conceptual and empirical perspectives

This special edition of Mental Health, Religion and Culture brings together thirteen original empirical studies that employ theories and measures based on the notion of ‘religious orientation’. As originally conceived, Allport’s notion of religious orientation distinguished between the two motivational styles of intrinsic religiosity and extrinsic religiosity. Subsequent work distinguished between extrinsic-personal and extrinsic social motivations, and added the third orientation styled as quest religiosity. The first set of seven studies draws on a variety of measures of religious orientation developed since the mid-1960s, including single-item measures. The second set of six studies draws on the New Indices of Religious Orientation proposed by Francis in 2007. Collectively these studies confirm the continuing vitality of the notion of religious orientation for informing empirical research within the psychology of religion and strengthen the foundation for future work in this area

Bovine and human becomings in histories of dairy technologies: robotic milking systems and remaking animal and human subjectivity

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanisation of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or as requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk

Planar micromachined glass cantilevers utilising integrated Bragg Fabry-Perot cavities

Here we demonstrate a glass cantilever based on a unique micromachining and etching approach, combined with UV written Bragg gratings. We shall also discuss the increase in sensitivity by using two Bragg gratings to form Fabry-Pérot cavity. Cantilevers are in ultra sensitive force sensors used in applications such as Atomic Force Microscopy, mass sensing and acoustic transducers

Standing Swells Surveyed Showing Surprisingly Stable Solutions for the Lorenz '96 Model

The Lorenz '96 model is an adjustable dimension system of ODEs exhibiting chaotic behavior representative of dynamics observed in the Earth's atmosphere. In the present study, we characterize statistical properties of the chaotic dynamics while varying the degrees of freedom and the forcing. Tuning the dimensionality of the system, we find regions of parameter space with surprising stability in the form of standing waves traveling amongst the slow oscillators. The boundaries of these stable regions fluctuate regularly with the number of slow oscillators. These results demonstrate hidden order in the Lorenz '96 system, strengthening the evidence for its role as a hallmark representative of nonlinear dynamical behavior.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Pricing Excess-of-loss Reinsurance Contracts Against Catastrophic Loss

This paper develops a pricing methodology and pricing estimates for the proposed Federal excess-of- loss (XOL) catastrophe reinsurance contracts. The contracts, proposed by the Clinton Administration, would provide per-occurrence excess-of-loss reinsurance coverage to private insurers and reinsurers, where both the coverage layer and the fixed payout of the contract are based on insurance industry losses, not company losses. In financial terms, the Federal government would be selling earthquake and hurricane catastrophe call options to the insurance industry to cover catastrophic losses in a loss layer above that currently available in the private reinsurance market. The contracts would be sold annually at auction, with a reservation price designed to avoid a government subsidy and ensure that the program would be self supporting in expected value. If a loss were to occur that resulted in payouts in excess of the premiums collected under the policies, the Federal government would use its ability to borrow at the risk-free rate to fund the losses. During periods when the accumulated premiums paid into the program exceed the losses paid, the buyers of the contracts implicitly would be lending money to the Treasury, reducing the costs of government debt. The expected interest on these "loans" offsets the expected financing (borrowing) costs of the program as long as the contracts are priced appropriately. By accessing the Federal government's superior ability to diversify risk inter-temporally, the contracts could be sold at a rate lower than would be required in conventional reinsurance markets, which would potentially require a high cost of capital due to the possibility that a major catastrophe could bankrupt some reinsurers. By pricing the contacts at least to break even, the program would provide for eventual private-market "crowding out" through catastrophe derivatives and other innovative catastrophic risk financing mechanisms. We develop prices for the contracts using two samples of catastrophe losses: (1) historical catastrophic loss experience over the period 1949-1994 as reported by Property Claim Services; and (2) simulated catastrophe losses based on an engineering simulation analysis conducted by Risk Management Solutions. We used maximum likelihood estimation techniques to fit frequency and severity probability distributions to the catastrophic loss data, and then used the distributions to estimate expected losses under the contracts. The reservation price would be determined by adding an administrative expense charge and a risk premium to the expected losses for the specified layer of coverage. We estimate the expected loss component of the government's reservation price for proposed XOL contracts covering the entire U.S., California, Florida, and the Southeast. We used a loss layer of $25-50 billion for illustrative purposes.