A three-dimensional analysis of power and engaged scholarship

This dissertation investigates the nature of power in university-industry linkages and how such power affects the process of knowledge production in engaged scholarship. The most critical finding of this dissertation is that the theory of engaged scholarship fails to account for the socialised beliefs regarding the superior value of academic knowledge, which governs the behaviour and perceptions of academics and industry partners within university-industry linkages. The dissertation is supported by data sourced from interviews with 48 academic and industry partners’ project leaders from 24 large scale research projects and thematic analysis guided by Steven Lukes’ (1974) radical framework of power.

Collective equipments of power: The road and the city

A year ago, I became aware of the historical existence of the group CERFI— Le centre d’etudes, de recherches, et de formation institutionelles, or The Study Center for Institutional Research and Formation. CERFI emerged in 1967 under the hand of Lacanian psychiatrist and Trotskyite activist Félix Guattari, whose antonymous journal Recherches chronicled the group’s subversive experiences, experiments, and government-sponsored urban projects. It was a singularly bizarre meeting of the French bureaucracy with militant activist groups, the French intelligentsia, and architectural and planning practitioners at the close of the ‘60s. Nevertheless, CERFI’s analysis of the problems of society was undertaken precisely from the perspective of the state, and the Institute acknowledged a “deep complicity between the intellectual and statesman ... because the first critics of the State, are officials themselves!”1 CERFI developed out of FGERI (The Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research), started by Guattari two years earlier. While FGERI was created for the analysis of mental institutions stemming from Guattari’s work at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic, CERFI marks the group’s shift toward urbanism—to the interrogation of the city itself. Not only a platform for radical debate on architecture and the city, CERFI was a direct agent in the development of urban planning schemata for new towns in France. 2 CERFI’s founding members were Guattari, the economist and urban theorist François Fourquet, feminist philosopher Liane Mozère, and urban planner and editor of Multitides Anne Querrien—Guattari’s close friend and collaborator. The architects Antoine Grumback, Alain Fabre, Macary, and Janine Joutel were also members, as well as urbanists Bruno Fortier, Rainier Hoddé, and Christian de Portzamparc. 3 CERFI was the quintessential social project of post-‘68 French urbanism. Located on the Far Left and openly opposed to the Communist Party, this Trotskyist cooperative was able to achieve what other institutions, according to Fourquet, with their “customary devices—the politburo, central committee, and the basic cells—had failed to do.”4 The decentralized institute recognized that any formal integration of the group was to “sign its own death warrant; so it embraced a skein of directors, entangled, forming knots, liquidating all at once, and spinning in an unknown direction, stopping short and returning back to another node.” Allergic to the very idea of “party,” CERFI was a creative project of free, hybrid-aesthetic blocs talking and acting together, whose goal was none other than the “transformation of the libidinal economy of the militant revolutionary.” The group believed that by recognizing and affirming a “group unconscious,” as well as their individual unconscious desires, they would be able to avoid the political stalemates and splinter groups of the traditional Left. CERFI thus situated itself “on the side of psychosis”—its confessed goal was to serve rather than repress the utter madness of the urban malaise, because it was only from this mad perspective on the ground that a properly social discourse on the city could be forged.

Multi-time scale analysis applied to long time simulation of power systems

The results are presented of applying multi-time scale analysis using the singular perturbation technique for long time simulation of power system problems. A linear system represented in state-space form can be decoupled into slow and fast subsystems. These subsystems can be simulated with different time steps and then recombined to obtain the system response. Simulation results with a two-time scale analysis of a power system show a large saving in computational costs.

Photogenerated radical intermediates of vitamin K-1: a time-resolved resonance Raman study

Quinones play a vital role in the process of electron transfer in bacterial photosynthetic reaction centers. It is of interest to investigate the photochemical reactions involving quinones with a view to elucidating the structure-function relationships in the biological processes. Resonance Raman spectra of radical anions and the time-resolved resonance Raman spectra of vitamin K-1 (model compound for Q(A) in Rhodopseudomonas viridis, a bacterial photosynthetic reception center) are presented. The photochemical intermediates of vitamin K-1, viz. radical anion, ketyl radical and o-quinone methide have been identified. The vibrational assignments of all these intermediates are made on the basis of comparison with our earlier TR3 studies on radical anions of naphthoquinone and menaquinone. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

A unified view of energetic efficiency in active drag reduction, thrust generation and self-propulsion through a loss coefficient with some applications

An analysis of the energy budget for the general case of a body translating in a stationary fluid under the action of an external force is used to define a power loss coefficient. This universal definition of power loss coefficient gives a measure of the energy lost in the wake of the translating body and, in general, is applicable to a variety of flow configurations including active drag reduction, self-propulsion and thrust generation. The utility of the power loss coefficient is demonstrated on a model bluff body flow problem concerning a two-dimensional elliptical cylinder in a uniform cross-flow. The upper and lower boundaries of the elliptic cylinder undergo continuous motion due to a prescribed reflectionally symmetric constant tangential surface velocity. It is shown that a decrease in drag resulting from an increase in the strength of tangential surface velocity leads to an initial reduction and eventual rise in the power loss coefficient. A maximum in energetic efficiency is attained for a drag reducing tangential surface velocity which minimizes the power loss coefficient. The effect of the tangential surface velocity on drag reduction and self-propulsion of both bluff and streamlined bodies is explored through a variation in the thickness ratio (ratio of the minor and major axes) of the elliptical cylinders.

A Suzaku view of IGR J16393-4643

The pulsar IGR J16393-4643 belongs to a class of highly absorbed supergiant high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs), characterized by a very high column density of absorbing matter. We present the results of simultaneous broad-band pulsation and spectrum analysis from a 44-ks Suzaku observation of the source. The orbital intensity profile created with the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (Swift-BAT) light curve shows an indication of IGR J16393-4643 being an eclipsing system with a short eclipse semi-angle theta(E) similar to 17 degrees. For a supergiant companion star with a 20-R-circle dot radius, this implies an inclination of the orbital plane in the range 39 degrees-57 degrees, whereas for a main-sequence B star as the companion with a 10-R-circle dot radius, the inclination of the orbital plane is in the range 60 degrees-77 degrees. Pulse profiles created for different energy bands have complex morphology, which shows some energy dependence and increases in pulse fraction with energy. We have also investigated broad-band spectral characteristics, phase-averaged spectra and resolving the pulse phase into peak and trough phases. The phase-averaged spectrum has a very high N-H(similar to 3 x 10(23) cm(-2)) and is described by a power law (Gamma similar to 0.9) with a high-energy cut-off above 20 keV. We find a change in the spectral index in the peak and trough phases, implying an underlying change in the source spectrum.

A Synoptic View of a Coastal Plain Estuary.

During October, 1972 the Patuxent River Estuary was monitored intensively and synoptically over two tidal cycles to determine the spatial and temporal patterns of various hydrodynamic, chemical and biological features. Forty-one depths at eleven stations along nine transects were sampled simultaneously at hourly intervals for salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, chlorohyll a, particulate nitrogen, nitrate, nitrite, total kjeldahl nitrogen, ammonia, particulate carbohydrate, dissolved organic carbon, total hydrolizable phosphorous, dissolved inorganic phosphorous, suspended sediment, particle size distribution, and zooplankton. Tidal velocity was continuously monitored at each depth by recording current meters. Riverine input and meteorological conditions were relatively stable for two weeks preceeding the deployment. This communication describes the calculation of the intrinsic rates of change of the observed variables from their measured distributions in the Estuary. The steady-state, one-dimensional equation of species continuity is employed to separate the advection and tidal dispersion of a hydrodynamically passive substance frbm its intrinsic rate of change at point. A new spatial transform is introduced for the purpose of interpolation and extrapolation of data.The intrinsic rate of change profiles reveal a region of heavy bloom activity in the upper estuary and a secondary bloom near the point in the River that most of the suspended material settles out. The changes in ammonia and nitrates are highly correlated to the productivity patterns. Phosphorous rates are less closely correlated to productivity. The perturbations that the Chalk Point steam electric power plant have on the heat and oxygen balances are easily discernible.

Popular culture, relational history, and the question of power in Palestine and Israel

The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography and political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close allention to the ways that popular culture "articulates" with broader political, social, and economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine and Israel, and hence the possible arenas and modalities of struggle. © 2004 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved.

Vis-á-Vis-á-Vis. The Three-dimensional and artistic view of a problem

ANPO (A Non-predefined Outcome) is an an art-making methodology that employs structuralist theory of language (Saussure, Lacan, Foucault) combined with Hegel’s dialectic and the theory of creation of space by Lefebvre to generate spaces of dialogue and conversation between community members and different stakeholders. These theories of language are used to find artistic ways of representing a topic that community members have previously chosen. The topic is approached in a way that allows a visual, aural, performative and gustative form. To achieve this, the methodology is split in four main steps: step 1 ‘This is not a chair’, Step 2 ‘The topic’, Step 3 ‘ Vis-á-vis-á-vis’ and step 4. ‘Dialectical representation’ where the defined topic is used to generate artistic representations.The step 1 is a warm up exercise informed by the Rene Magritte painting ‘This is not a Pipe’. This exercise aims to help the participants to see an object as something else than an object but as a consequence of social implications. Step 2, participants choose a random topic and vote for it. The artist/facilitator does not predetermine the topic, participants are the one who propose it and choose it. Step 3, will be analysed in this publication and finally step 4, the broken down topic is taken to be represented and analysed in different ways. 

Distributed Adaptive Learning Framework for Wide Area Monitoring of Power Systems Integrated with Distributed Generations

This paper presents a preliminary study of developing a novel distributed adaptive real-time learning framework for wide area monitoring of power systems integrated with distributed generations using synchrophasor technology. The framework comprises distributed agents (synchrophasors) for autonomous local condition monitoring and fault detection, and a central unit for generating global view for situation awareness and decision making. Key technologies that can be integrated into this hierarchical distributed learning scheme are discussed to enable real-time information extraction and knowledge discovery for decision making, without explicitly accumulating and storing all raw data by the central unit. Based on this, the configuration of a wide area monitoring system of power systems using synchrophasor technology, and the functionalities for locally installed open-phasor-measurement-units (OpenPMUs) and a central unit are presented. Initial results on anti-islanding protection using the proposed approach are given to illustrate the effectiveness.