Where the interaction is: collisions of the situated and mediated in living room interactions

This article presents three ethnographic tales of interactions with living room media to help recreate the experience of significant moments in time, of affective encounters at the interface in which there is a collision or confusion of situated and virtual worlds. It draws on a year-long video ethnography of the practice and performance of everyday interactions with living room media. By studying situated activity and the lived practice of (new) media, rather than taking an exclusive focus on the virtual as a detached space, this ethnographic work demonstrates how the situated and mediated clash, or are crafted into complex emotional encounters during everyday living room life.

The sky is the limit? The determinants and constraints of European airports' commercial revenues

This study investigates the determinants of commercial and retail airport revenues as well as revenues from real estate operations. Cross-sectional OLS, 2SLS and robust regression models of European airports identify a number of significant drivers of airport revenues. Aviation revenues per passenger are mainly determined by the national income per capita in which the airport is located, the percentage of leisure travelers and the size of the airport proxied by total aviation revenues. Main drivers of commercial revenues per passenger include the total number of passengers passing through the airport, the ratio of commercial to total revenues, the national income, the share of domestic and leisure travelers and the total number of flights. These results are in line with previous findings of a negative influence of business travelers on commercial revenues per passenger. We also find that a high amount of retail space per passenger is generally associated with lower commercial revenues per square meter confirming decreasing marginal revenue effects. Real estate revenues per passenger are positively associated with national income per capita at airport location, share of intra-EU passengers and percent delayed flights. Overall, aviation and non-aviation revenues appear to be strongly interlinked, underlining the potential for a comprehensive airport management strategy above and beyond mere cost minimization of the aviation sector.

Economists are not dismal, the world is not a Petri dish and other reasons for optimism

One of the recurrent themes in the debate around how to ensure global food security concerns the capacity of the planet to support its growing population. Neo-Malthusian thinking suggests that we are in a situation in which further expansion of the population cannot be supported and that the population checks, with their dismal consequences envisaged by Malthus, will lead to a new era of stagnant incomes and population. More sophisticated models of the link between population and income are less gloomy however. They see population growth as an integral component of the economic growth which is necessary to ensure that the poorest achieve food security. An undue focus on the difficulties of meeting the demands of the increasing population risks damaging this growth. Instead, attention should be focused on ensuring that the conditions to ensure that economic growth accompanies population growth are in place.

Nonlinear saturation of baroclinic instability: part I: the two-layer model

A rigorous bound is derived which limits the finite-amplitude growth of arbitrary nonzonal disturbances to an unstable baroclinic zonal flow within the context of the two-layer model. The bound is valid for conservative (unforced) flow, as well as for forced-dissipative flow that when the dissipation is proportional to the potential vorticity. The method used to derive the bound relies on the existence of a nonlinear Liapunov (normed) stability theorem for subcritical flows, which is a finite-amplitude generalization of the Charney-Stern theorem. For the special case of the Philips model of baroclinic instability, and in the limit of infinitesimal initial nonzonal disturbance amplitude, an improved form of the bound is possible which states that the potential enstrophy of the nonzonal flow cannot exceed ϵβ2, where ϵ = (U − Ucrit)/Ucrit is the (relative) supereriticality. This upper bound turns out to be extremely similar to the maximum predicted by the weakly nonlinear theory. For unforced flow with ϵ < 1, the bound demonstrates that the nonzonal flow cannot contain all of the potential enstrophy in the system; hence in this range of initial supercriticality the total flow must remain, in a certain sense, “close” to a zonal state.

Grey matter volume in the cerebellum is related to processing of grammatical rules in a second language: a structural Voxel-Based Morphometry study

The experience of learning and using a second language (L2) has been shown to affect the grey matter (GM) structure of the brain. Importantly, GM density in several cortical and subcortical areas has been shown to be related to performance in L2 tasks. Here we show that bilingualism can lead to increased GM volume in the cerebellum, a structure that has been related to the processing of grammatical rules. Additionally, the cerebellar GM volume of highly proficient L2 speakers is correlated to their performance in a task tapping on grammatical processing in a L2, demonstrating the importance of the cerebellum for the establishment and use of grammatical rules in a L2.