The Violent Art: Caricatures of Conflict in Germany

War furnishes a – perhaps the – classic case of ‘black humour’, which is understood here in the broad sense, not merely as the humour of the gallows or the cheating of death, but humour deriving from a confrontation with suffering or death, either as a victim or a perpetrator. War cartoons relied on the manipulation of images for comic effect, which – at least until the absurdist experiments of the Dada and Surrealist movements during and after the First World War – appeared impossible in photography, painting and cinematography. Caricature permitted artists simultaneously to conjure up, simplify and undermine reality. The selection and exaggeration of character traits and circumstantial detail, which was fundamental to caricature, revealed graphically how cartoonists perceived the social and political world in which they lived. This chapter examines how such selection and exaggeration worked in extreme conditions during wartime

In the absence of CD154, administration of interleukin-12 restores Th1 responses but not protective immunity to Schistosoma mansoni

The cytokine interplay during the development of protective immunity to the radiation-attenuated (RA) schistosome vaccine has been extensively characterized over recent years, yet the role of costimulatory molecules in the development of cell-mediated immunity is much less well understood. Here we demonstrate the importance of CD40/CD154 in vaccine-induced immunity, as CD154(-/-) mice exposed to RA schistosomes develop no protection to challenge infection. We showed that vaccinated CD154(-/-) mice have defective Th1-associated immune responses in the skin-draining lymph nodes and the lungs, with reduced or absent levels of interleukin-12p40 (IL-12p40), gamma interferon, and nitric oxide, but elevated levels of lung IL-4 and IL-5. The expression of major histocompatibility complex II (MHC-II) on antigen-presenting cells recovered from the lungs of vaccinated CD154(-/-) mice was also severely compromised. The administration of anti-CD40 monoclonal antibody (MAb) to CD154(-/-) mice did not reconstitute sustained Th1 responses in the lymph nodes or the lungs, nor did the MAb restore anti-parasite immunoglobulin G production or protective immunity. On the other hand, the administration of recombinant IL-12 (rIL-12) to CD154(-/-) mice shortly after vaccination caused elevated and sustained levels of Th1-associated cytokines, rescued MHC-II expression by lung CD11c(+) cells, and restored the appearance of inflammatory effector foci in the lungs. However, the treatment of CD154(-/-) mice with rIL-12 did not restore protection. We conclude that protective immunity to the RA schistosome vaccine is CD154 dependent but is independent of IL-12-orchestrated cellular immune mechanisms in the lungs

GEO600: building a gravitational wave observatory

An international network of laser-interferometric gravitational wave detectors is nearing the end of the main commissioning phase and will soon enter into an extended observational period, collecting data for a duration of order one year. This article outlines the construction, design and commissioning of the GEO 600 gravitational wave observatory. GEO 600 is a laser-interferometric gravitational wave detector which has 600 m long arms and uses advanced optical and suspension techniques to achieve a sensitivity comparable to the longer base-line detectors currently operating in the U.S.A and Europe

Subtraction of temperature induced phase noise in the LISA frequency band

Temperature fluctuations are expected to be one of the limiting factors for gravitational wave detectors in the very low frequency range. Here we report the characterisation of this noise source in the LISA Pathfinder optical bench and propose a method to remove its contribution from the data. Our results show that temperature fluctuations are indeed limiting our measurement below one millihertz, and that their subtraction leads to a factor 5.6 (15 dB) reduction in the noise level at the lower end of the LISA measurement band 10^{-4} Hz, which increases to 20.2 (26 dB) at even lower frequencies, i.e., 1.5x10^{-5} Hz. The method presented here can be applied to the subtraction of other noise sources in gravitational wave detectors in the general situation where multiple sensors are used to characterise the noise source.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Introduction: Visualizing Violence

The Introduction explores the relationship between visual and literary representations of modern warfare. What impact have paintings, cartoons, films and television had on the reporting of conflicts? How has the visual imagery of military violence – as the most extensive and damaging form of violence – changed? Here, Susan Sontag's 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others is used as a starting point for a wider discussion of what it means to portray, and to witness portrayals of, wartime violence. Few events have been represented with such frequency, exhaustiveness, unevenness and distortion as have wars. In the modern and contemporary eras, which are the focus of this volume, such representation has become largely mediatic and increasingly visual, with the images of photographic journalism, newsreels and television supplementing and contradicting the longer-established genres of military art, monuments, cartoons, treatises, war poems, plays and novels. ‘Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience’, the cumulative offering ‘by more than a century and a half's worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists,’ writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003): Wars are now also living room sights and sounds. Information about what is happening elsewhere, called ‘news’, features conflict and violence – ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ runs the venerable guideline of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows – to which the response is compassion, or indignation, or titillation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.1 This impression of knowing ‘what happens every day throughout the whole world’, with the reports of journalists placing, ‘as it were, those in agony on fields of battle under the eyes of readers’ and allowing the cries of the wounded to ‘resonate in their ears’, as the first president of the Red Cross, Gustav Moynier, expressed it in 1899, has been juxtaposed with and opposed to other means of remembering, commemorating and glorifying military conflict, which usually demand separate spaces of reflection, away from the bustle and fragmentation of everyday life.2 Here, we ask how wars were visualized in different media, as artists, photographers, film directors and TV producers sought to evoke military conflicts which many had experienced and virtually everyone had ‘seen’ and ‘heard of’. The relationship between soldiers' and civilians' experiences of warfare and their conceptions of it has been complicated by the clashing imperatives and changing conditions of military conflict. On the one hand, the mediatization of war – with the rise of war correspondents and the use of war photography from the Crimean War onwards, for example – combined with mass participation in politics to make governments highly sensitive to press revelations and sensationalism, which they sought to censor, and receptive to the use and abuse of propaganda, which they attempted to instigate and foster. The idea that propaganda was the preserve of the state and involved the presentation and misrepresentation of information in ways favourable to one's own country and damaging to enemies owed most to the newly formed agencies of the First World War, such as the British Department (and later Ministry) of Information, before it was taken up by the post-war dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s and condemned by critics of the Great War like Arthur Ponsonby, whose Falsehood in War-Time: Propaganda Lies of the First World War was published in 1928.3 On the other hand, citizens' direct exposure to warfare had increased as a consequence of conscription and mass mobilization, which had resulted in the military service of more than 80 per cent of men between the ages of twenty and forty-five in Germany and France between 1914 and 1918, and as a result of a widening theatre of operations, with motorized armies and aerial bombardment ensuring that about two-thirds of the casualties in the Second World War were civilians, compared to less than a third of the deaths caused by the First World War.4 Given the stakes, the conflicting claims of different kinds of combatants, victims, journalists, artists, propagandists and officials were bound to create confusion and controversy about the nature of wars, both as they were being waged and as they were later recollected, studied and memorialized.5 The proximity and disjunction of individuals' experiences, the re-presentation of events, private and public memories, and historical investigation make the interpretation of visual and literary portrayals of wartime violence difficult, but essential, to interpret and explain

Optimal time-domain combination of the two calibrated output quadratures of GEO 600

GEO 600 is an interferometric gravitational wave detector with a 600 m arm-length and which uses a dual-recycled optical configuration to give enhanced sensitivity over certain frequencies in the detection band. Due to the dual-recycling, GEO 600 has two main output signals, both of which potentially contain gravitational wave signals. These two outputs are calibrated to strain using a time-domain method. In order to simplify the analysis of the GEO 600 data set, it is desirable to combine these two calibrated outputs to form a single strain signal that has optimal signal-to-noise ratio across the detection band. This paper describes a time-domain method for doing this combination. The method presented is similar to one developed for optimally combining the outputs of two colocated gravitational wave detectors. In the scheme presented in this paper, some simplifications are made to allow its implementation using time-domain methods

Null-stream veto for two co-located detectors: Implementation issues

Time-series data from multiple gravitational wave (GW) detectors can be linearly combined to form a null-stream, in which all GW information will be cancelled out. This null-stream can be used to distinguish between actual GW triggers and spurious noise transients in a search for GW bursts using a network of detectors. The biggest source of error in the null-stream analysis comes from the fact that the detector data are not perfectly calibrated. In this paper, we present an implementation of the null-stream veto in the simplest network of two co-located detectors. The detectors are assumed to have calibration uncertainties and correlated noise components. We estimate the effect of calibration uncertainties in the null-stream veto analysis and propose a new formulation to overcome this. This new formulation is demonstrated by doing software injections in Gaussian noise.Comment: Minor changes; To appear in Class. Quantum Grav. (Proc. GWDAW10

Robust vetoes for gravitational-wave burst triggers using known instrumental couplings

The search for signatures of transient, unmodelled gravitational-wave (GW) bursts in the data of ground-based interferometric detectors typically uses `excess-power' search methods. One of the most challenging problems in the burst-data-analysis is to distinguish between actual GW bursts and spurious noise transients that trigger the detection algorithms. In this paper, we present a unique and robust strategy to `veto' the instrumental glitches. This method makes use of the phenomenological understanding of the coupling of different detector sub-systems to the main detector output. The main idea behind this method is that the noise at the detector output (channel H) can be projected into two orthogonal directions in the Fourier space -- along, and orthogonal to, the direction in which the noise in an instrumental channel X would couple into H. If a noise transient in the detector output originates from channel X, it leaves the statistics of the noise-component of H orthogonal to X unchanged, which can be verified by a statistical hypothesis testing. This strategy is demonstrated by doing software injections in simulated Gaussian noise. We also formulate a less-rigorous, but computationally inexpensive alternative to the above method. Here, the parameters of the triggers in channel X are compared to the parameters of the triggers in channel H to see whether a trigger in channel H can be `explained' by a trigger in channel X and the measured transfer function.Comment: 14 Pages, 8 Figures, To appear in Class. Quantum Gra

Calibrating spectral estimation for the LISA Technology Package with multichannel synthetic noise generation

The scientific objectives of the Lisa Technology Package (LTP) experiment, on board of the LISA Pathfinder mission, demand for an accurate calibration and validation of the data analysis tools in advance of the mission launch. The levels of confidence required on the mission outcomes can be reached only with an intense activity on synthetically generated data. A flexible procedure allowing the generation of cross-correlated stationary noise time series was set-up. Multi-channel time series with the desired cross correlation behavior can be generated once a model for a multichannel cross-spectral matrix is provided. The core of the procedure is the synthesis of a noise coloring multichannel filter through a frequency-by-frequency eigendecomposition of the model cross-spectral matrix and a Z-domain fit. The common problem of initial transients in noise time series is solved with a proper initialization of the filter recursive equations. The noise generator performances were tested in a two dimensional case study of the LTP dynamics along the two principal channels of the sensing interferometer.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review D (http://prd.aps.org/