More nonlocality with less entanglement in a tripartite atom-optomechanical system

Quantum effects in hybrid atomic optomechanics in a system comprising a cloud of atoms and a mobile mirror mediated by a single-mode cavity are studied. Tripartite non-locality is observed in the atom-light-mirror system, as demonstrated by the violation of the Mermin-Klyshko (MK) inequality. It has been shown [C. Genes, et al., PRA 77, 050307 (R) (2008)] that tripartite entanglement is optimized when the cavity is resonant with the anti-Stokes sideband of the driving laser and the atomic frequency matches the Stokes one. However, we show that this is not the case for the nonlocality. The MK function achieves minima when the atoms are resonant with both the Stokes and anti-Stokes sidebands, and unexpectedly, we find violation of the MK inequality only in a parameter region where entanglement is far from being maximum. A negative relation exists between nonlocality and entanglement with consideration of the possibility of bipartite nonlocality in the violation of the MK inequality. We also study the non-classicality of the mirror by post-selected measurements, e.g. Geiger-like detection, on the cavity and/or the atoms. We show that with feasible parameters Geiger-like detection on the atoms can effectively induce mechanical non-classicality.

Economic Stress and the Great Recession in Ireland: Polarization, Individualization or ‘Middle Class Squeeze’?

Following an unprecedented boom, since 2008 Ireland has experienced a severe economic crisis. Considerable debate persists as to where the heaviest burden of the recession has fallen. Conventional measures of income poverty and inequality have a limited capacity to answer this question. Our analysis, which focuses on economic stress and the mediating role of material deprivation, provides no evidence for individualization or class polarization. Instead we find that while economic stress level are highly stratified in income class and social class terms in both boom and bust periods, the changing impact of class is contingent on life course stage. The affluent income class remained largely insulated from the experience of economic stress. However, it saw its relative advantage overthe income poor class decline at the earlier stage of the life-course. At the other end of the hierarchy, the income poor experienced a relative improvement in their situation in the early life course phases. The precarious income class experienced some improvement in its situation at the earlier life course stages while the outcomes for the middle classes remain unchanged. In the mid-life course stages the precarious and lower middle classes experienced disproportionate increase in their stress levels while at the later life-cycle stage it is the combined middle classes that lost out. Additional effects over time relating to social class are restricted to the deteriorating situation of the petit bourgeoisie at the middle stage of the life-course. The pattern is clearly a good deal more complex that suggested by conventional notions of ‘middle class squeeze’ and points to the distinctive challenges relating to welfare and taxation policy faced by governments in the Great Recession.

The Landscape of Differences: Contact and Segregation in the Everyday Encounters

The article examines everyday life in Northern Ireland’s segregated communities and focus on a neglected empirical dimension of ethnic and social segregation developed within the socio-spatial relations between people and their built environment. It shows how the everyday urban encounters are reproduced through negotiating differences and the ways in which living in divided communities lead to social inequality and imbalanced use of space. The article employed qualitative research methods with individuals and community groups from the Fountain estate, a small Protestant enclave in Derry/Londonderry. Their stories were replete with cases of injustice and insights into the daily struggles that have generally occurred within theories of contact and social segregation as a whole. In fact, people in the Fountain presented their own intertextual references on what was more significant for them as a matter of routine survival and belonging, which allowed them to be more constructive about themselves. While segregation has persisted for multiple decades; time is believed to be the factor most likely to change it, as it is hoped that the younger generation will provide lasting change to Northern Ireland and eventual peace between currently segregated communities.

Mobilizing against neoliberalism? Global affirmative action in context

This article uses the example of Northern Ireland to illustrate how political mobilization may
be deployed to challenge structural forms of inequality. The experience suggests that regulatory
models can be designed for particular contexts to shape approaches that present challenges to
dominant economic and political orthodoxies. The intention is not to overstate the significance
of this specific transitional context but simply to highlight elements that might feature in any
attempt to mobilize successfully around human rights and equality, and against aspects of neoliberal
thinking.

'Pues tanto se esconde': Elusion at (inter)play in Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés

El conde Partinuplés (first published 1653) is one of only two extant plays written by the Sevillan poet/dramatist Ana Caro Mallén de Soto (‘la décima musa sevillana’). Despite McKendrick's dismissal of the play as ‘extremely bad’, it has been the object of substantial critical scrutiny since the 1970s, impelled in great part by the production of modern editions (Luna and Delgado) and by Kaminsky's bio-biographical study (1973). Two responses have dominated: analysis of the play's imaginative reconceptualization of source material (most notably the Classical myth of Cupid and Psyche as contained in Apuleius and transmitted via the anonymous French chivalric romance Portonopeus de Blois; and more contemporary models, such as Calderón's La vida es sueño); discussions of the play from a gender/feminist perspective. There is some inevitable entanglement in these approaches, areas of ideological concurrence, but also of contradiction. This article will offer a critical synthesis of these lines of enquiry around an analysis of the play's patterns of non-identical repetition and, following Hubert's theory of ‘double movement’, will move beyond these to consider the generative and potentially transcendent nature of the interplay of inscription (text) and transcription (interpretive performance). A subversive strategy of elusion underpins this interference, a dynamic, mobile frame within which ‘envidia’ (‘celos’) functions as a prominent dramatic catalyst, directed outwards, and mobilized both as a potent catalyst for the female dramatist's artistic creativity and as an antagonistic interrogation of broader socio-cultural forms of inequality. The play's (new) marvellous versions and inversions expand the functions of the sign beyond Renaissance resemblance and repetition, challenging its promotion of unity and stable identity, and opening up an interactive space between the represented (world/product) and the representing (stage/process). The power of authorities, as figured in/through the dramatic and rhetorical devices of the play, is self-consciously precarious, but it is this very anxious articulation that challenges the very authority of power.

Top incomes under finance-driven capitalism, 1990-2010: power resources and regulatory orders

This article examines the impact of financialisation on the income shares of the top 1% from 1990-2010, through a panel analysis of 14 OECD countries. Drawing together literatures stressing the dependence of income inequality on the structural bargaining power of capital relative to labour, and of the dependence of accumulation on underlying institutionalised modes of state regulation, it shows that financialisation has significantly enhanced top income shares net of underlying controls. Whilst the income shares of the top 1% appear responsive to variables typical of wider studies of personal income inequality, we emphasise distinctive mechanisms of top income growth linked to the rising dominance of financial instruments and actors, facilitated by a historically specific regulatory order. These conditions were key to the emergence of a state of ‘asymmetric bargaining’ which disproportionately enhanced the fortunes of the wealthy. Results thus emphasise the importance of class-biased power resources and underlying regulatory structures, as determinants both of income concentration and of the distribution of economic rewards beyond growth capacity alone.

Is the multiracial congregation an answer to the problem of race? Comparative perspectives from South Africa and the USAF

This paper uses a comparative perspective to analyze how multiracial congregations may contribute to racial reconciliation in South Africa. Drawing on the large-scale study of multiracial congregations in the USA by Emerson et al., it examines how they help transform antagonistic identities and make religious contributions to wider reconciliation processes. It compares the American research to an ethnographic study of a congregation in Cape Town, identifying cross-national patterns and South African distinctives, such as discourses about restitution, AIDS, inequality and women. The extent that multiracial congregations can contribute to reconciliation in South Africa is linked to the content of their worship and discourses, but especially to their ability to dismantle racially aligned power structures. © Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008.

Differential evolution combined with clonal selection for dynamic economic dispatch

Dynamic economic load dispatch (DELD) is one of the most important steps in power system operation. Various optimisation algorithms for solving the problem have been developed; however, due to the non-convex characteristics and large dimensionality of the problem, it is necessary to explore new methods to further improve the dispatch results and minimise the costs. This article proposes a hybrid differential evolution (DE) algorithm, namely clonal selection-based differential evolution (CSDE), to solve the problem. CSDE is an artificial intelligence technique that can be applied to complex optimisation problems which are for example nonlinear, large scale, non-convex and discontinuous. This hybrid algorithm combines the clonal selection algorithm (CSA) as the local search technique to update the best individual in the population, which enhances the diversity of the solutions and prevents premature convergence in DE. Furthermore, we investigate four mutation operations which are used in CSA as the hyper-mutation operations. Finally, an efficient solution repair method is designed for DELD to satisfy the complicated equality and inequality constraints of the power system to guarantee the feasibility of the solutions. Two benchmark power systems are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed CSDE/best/1 approach significantly outperforms nine other variants of CSDE and DE, as well as most other published methods, in terms of the quality of the solution and the convergence characteristics.

Environmental Inequalities and Democratic Citizenship: Linking Normative Theory with Empirical Research

The aim of this paper is to link empirical findings concerning environmental inequalities with different normative yard-sticks for assessing whether these inequalities should be deemed unjust, or not. We argue that such an inquiry must necessarily take into account some caveats regarding both empirical research and normative theory. We suggest that empirical results must be contextualised by establishing geographies of risk. As a normative yard-stick we propose a moderately demanding social-egalitarian account of justice and democratic citizenship, which we take to be best suited to identify unjust as well as legitimate instances of socio-environmental inequality.

Relationships between Religion and Two Forms of Homonegativity in Europe—A Multilevel Analysis of Effects of Believing, Belonging and Religious Practice

This paper examines relationships between religion and two forms of homonegativity
across 43 European countries using a bivariate response binary logistic multilevel model. The model analyzes effects of religious believing, belonging and practice on two response variables: a) a moral rejection of homosexuality as a practice and b) intolerance toward homosexuals as a group. The findings indicate that both forms of homonegativity are prevalent in Europe. Traditional doctrinal religious believing (belief in a personal God) is positively related to a moral rejection of homosexuality but to a much lesser extent associated with intolerance toward homosexuals as a group. Members of religious denominations are more likely than non-members to reject homosexuality as morally wrong and to reject homosexuals as neighbors. The analysis found significant differences between denominations that are likely context-dependent. Attendance at religious services is positively related to homonegativity in a majority of countries. The findings vary considerably across countries: Religion is more strongly related to homonegativity in Western than in Eastern Europe. In the post-soviet countries homonegativity appears to be largely a secular phenomenon. National contexts of high religiosity, high perceived government corruption, high income inequality and shortcomings in the implementation of gay rights in the countries’ legislations are statistically related to higher levels of both moralistic homonegativity and intolerance toward homosexuals as a group.

Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalisation, Inclusion and Democracy

Vieten's edited collection brings together papers that were given at the I M Young Memorial Symposium 'Inclusion and Democracy Revisited', held in Amsterdam in 2012. The different chapters presented explore in-depth, Young's models of a 'politics of cultural difference', and a 'politics of positional difference' read in combination with her critique of normalisation. Young regards the latter as decisive to any change for the better when reaching out politically to a fairer and more just democratic society.
With the current political, economic and socio-cultural crisis in mind, the contemporary world of global speed and transformed societies in and beyond Europe needs a refinement of what we understand 'normalisation' and 'difference' to be. How can we connect to each other, and in what ways can Young's 'structural inequality model' be applied to develop alternative outlooks on how to enhance inclusion and democracy in different nation states?

Spectacles of military urbanism in online representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro: a multimodal approach

This paper presents a multimodal analysis of online self-representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, the Special Police Operations Battalion BOPE. The analysis is placed within the wider context of a “new military urbanism”, which is evidenced in the ongoing “Pacification” of many of the city’s favelas, in which BOPE plays an active interventionist as well as a symbolic role, and is a kind of solution which clearly fails to address the root causes of violence which lie in poverty and social inequality. The paper first provides a sociocultural account of BOPE’s role in Rio’s public security and then looks at some of the mainly visual mediated discourses the Squad employs in constructing a public image of itself as a modern and efficient, yet at the same time “magical” police force.

Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has probably made the most comprehensive attempt to develop a theory of the inter-connectedness of discourse, power and ideology and is specifically concerned with the role that discourse plays in main-taining and legitimizing inequality in society. While CDA’s general thrust has been towards the analysis of linguistic structures, some critical discourse analysts have begun to focus on multimodal discourses because of the increasingly impor-tant role these play in many social and political contexts. Still, a great deal of CDA analysis has remained largely monomodal. The principal aim of this chapter is therefore to address this situation and demonstrate in what ways CDA can be deployed to analyse the ways that ideological discourses can be communicated, naturalised and legitimated beyond the linguistic level. The chapter also offers a rationale for a multimodal approach based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), by which it is directly informed

Comparing the relationship between stature and later life health in six low and middle income countries

This paper examines the relationship between stature and later life health in 6 emerging economies, each of which are expected to experience significant increases in the mean age of their populations over the coming decades. Using data from the WHO Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) and pilot data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI), I show that various measures of health are associated with height, a commonly used proxy for childhood environment. In the pooled sample, a 10 cm increase in height is associated with between a 2 and 3 percentage point increase in the probability of being in very good or good self-reported health, a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of reporting no difficulties with activities of daily living or instrumental activities of daily living, and between a fifth and a quarter of a standard deviation increase in grip strength and lung function. Adopting a methodology previously used in the research on inequality, I also summarise the height-grip strength gradient for each country using the concentration index, and provide a decomposition analysis.