Rurality

This chapter investigates the use of the rural setting in Folk Horror. David Gladwell's 1976 experimental feature Requiem for a Village questions the logic of such location-bred violence by looking into darker aspects of the rural. This is not simply through emphasis upon the topographical difference between urban and rural areas but more akin to the accoutrements of rural living and lifestyle; the aesthetics of farming, and other practices that are required to live off the land have a dual character of violence and history. Folk Horror regularly builds its sense of the horrific around societies and groups of people that have very specific ways of life, and it is not by sheer chance that these often happen to be rural rather than urban. This sense of divide between the two accounts for what was called ‘skewed belief systems and ideologies’, but there is more to it than the allowing of pulp forms of paganism and occultism to grow; Folk Horror uses the otherness that can be attributed to rural life to warp the very reality of its narrative worlds and often for its own explicit means.

“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)

The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscape haunted by other stories, as a language that is already in itself the “language of the other” (Derrida). In particular, it will claim that Shakespearean fragments are often used in an idiosyncratic way, and they repeatedly resonate with some of the most fundamental ethical and political issues of the film, such as the question of England as “home” and migration. The paper will also argue that the decontextualization and recontextualization of these fragments makes them re-emerge as part of an interrogation of the mediality of the medium, an interrogation that also offers insights into the circulation of Shakespeare in the contemporary mediascape.

Band structure of odd-mass lanthanum nuclei

Negative parity energy states in 121–131 La have been studied using Projected Shell Model (PSM). Some nuclear structure properties like yrast spectra, back-bending in moment of inertia, reduced transition probabilities and band diagrams have been described. The experimental feature of the co-existence of prolate–oblate shapes in 125–131 La isotopes has been satisfactorily explained by PSM results. Comparison of the theoretical data with their experimental counterparts has also been made. From the calculations, it is found that the yrast states arise because of multi-quasiparticle states.

STOCHASTIC CAR-FOLLOWING MODEL FOR EXPLAINING NONLINEAR TRAFFIC PHENOMENA

There is a common time parameter for representing the sensitivity or the lag (response) time of drivers in many car-following models. In the viewpoint of traffic psychology, this parameter could be considered as the perception–response time (PRT). Generally, this parameter is set to be a constant in previous models. However, PRT is actually not a constant but a random variable described by the lognormal distribution. Thus the probability can be naturally introduced into car-following models by recovering the probability of PRT. For demonstrating this idea, a specific stochastic model is constructed based on the optimal velocity model. By conducting simulations under periodic boundary conditions, it is found that some important traffic phenomena, such as the hysteresis and phantom traffic jams phenomena, can be reproduced more realistically. Especially, an interesting experimental feature of traffic jams, i.e., two moving jams propagating in parallel with constant speed stably and sustainably, is successfully captured by the present model.

THE SEARCH FOR DEEPLY BOUND KAONIC NUCLEAR STATES AT J-PARC

The J-PARC E15 experiment aims to search for the lightest kaonic nuclear states, namely K-pp, using in-flight (K-, n) reaction on 3 He . In this experiment, the missing mass in the (K-, n) reaction and the invariant mass of the decay such as K-pp → Λp → pπ-p will be measured simultaneously. In this article, the experimental feature and the present status are presented.

Microbial experimental evolution

Microbes have been widely used in experimental evolutionary studies because they possess a variety of valuable traits that facilitate large-scale experimentation. Many replicated populations can be cultured in the laboratory simultaneously along with appropriate controls. Short generation times and large population sizes make microbes ideal experimental subjects, ensuring that many spontaneous mutations occur every generation and that adaptive variants can spread rapidly through a population. Another highly useful experimental feature is the ability to preserve and store ancestral and evolutionarily derived clones. These can be revived in parallel to allow the direct measurement of the competitive fitness of a descendant compared with its ancestor. The extent of adaptation can thereby be measured quantitatively and compared statistically by direct competition among derived groups and with the ancestor. Thus, fitness and adaptation need not be matters of qualitative speculation, but are quantitatively measurable variables in these systems. Replication allows the quantification of heterogeneity in responses to imposed selection and thereby statistical distinction between changes that are systematic responses to the selective regimen and those that are specific to individual populations.