Young Ideas Research Articles

Ethnicity, Race and Question of Englishness

Robert J.C. Young, Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell Publication, 2008), Page 291, ISBN: 9781405101295. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Over past decade, more specifically since power devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in June 1999, there has been a revival of discourses on and English national identity. Apparently terms such as English or may sound overtly familiar to us; however, their discursive formations are complex and varied, suggesting deeper cultural and historical implications. Is one's English identity synonymous with a common political citizenry of England? Or is it framed in terms of common membership of an ethnic community based on one's affinity with language, religion, history, and blood or 'race'? What constitutes true English national consciousness? Robert J.C. Young's Idea of English Ethnicity (2008) is a remarkable contribution to this renewed debate on issues of and English national identity, which go beyond the challenges of devolution, or even end of empire (1). For him, these issues are an outcome of complex historical and cultural discursive formations, in which Englishness was never really about England, its cultural essence or national character, at all (1). Framing discourse of within diverse discourses of race--in which is evoked variously as concepts of biology, genetics, lineage, physical typology, ethnicity, nation, and so on, Young fascinatingly explores cultural implications of racial discourses of nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He avers that English national identity is a diasporic global identity. To explicate cultural aspects of unstable English national identity, Young's book, from very beginning, examines different race theories and contesting ideas of race in English cultural history and science, where term race--more particularly 'Saxonism' or 'the Anglo-Saxon'--is used interchangeably with concepts of both nation and ethnicity. Similarly, he shows a dialectic between English race and Irish race, or Saxon and Celt, as a part of popular racial discourses of nineteenth century. For English as a race was usually conceived and defined in terms of their relationship with Irish as a race. Although Young alludes to different scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about race, such as notions of Aryan superiority supported by scientific evidence of cranial measurements and similar other practices, main purpose of his book seems to lay emphasis on heterogeneous and dynamic global English identity. In his attempt to define global English identity, what he prefers to call English ethnicity, Young uses lens of a binary dialectic between Saxon and Celt, especially Irish Celts, again and again. Mainly in chapter four The Times and Its Celtic Challenges, he not only discusses different race theories but also shows role of print media in disseminating a dominant racial ideology. …

Creation of vortex lattices by a wavefront division

The Young's double-slit experiment is one of the most popular stories in the history of physics. This paper, like many others, has emerged from the Young's idea. It investigates the diffraction of the plane or spherical wave produced by three or four small holes in an opaque screen. It was noticed that the interference field contained a lattice of optical vortices which were equivalent to those produced in optical vortex interferometer. The vortex lattice generated by the three holes possessed some unique properties from which the analytical formulae for vortex points position were derived. We also pointed out the differences between our case and the double-slit experiment. Finally, some remarks on possible applications of our arrangement are discussed briefly. These theoretical considerations are illustrated with the use of experimental results.

Expanding Worlds: Into the Ethnography of Narrating

I understand ethnography to mean a description of empirical mate- rial that is so meticulous that it constitutes part of the scientific analysis. An ethnography of narrating thus would include thorough descriptions of both the act of narrating itself with all its cultural, social, communicative, and emo- tional aspects, as well as of the narratives, their form, contents, meaning, func- tion, and aesthetics. Katharine Young's idea of describing a narrative situation as consisting of a number (three, four, or many) of worlds or realms (Young 1987) has proven to be extremely useful and productive. Its analytical strength lies in its ability to provide links between text-centred and performance-centred analy- ses, especially concerning the roles taken by participants during different phases of the narrative event. When applying Young's model to a short excerpt of a tape- recorded life history, its potency of reproduction becomes obvious. First, the speaker appears to set up not one, but a number of parallel taleworlds, occupy- ing different positions in time and/or space. Complicated liaisons are estab- lished between temporal and spatial elements of these taleworlds. Second, inside Young's 'Realm of the Ordinary' (or, possibly, parallel to Young's 'realm of thought', 'realm of interaction' or 'social world') there seems to be need for a 'Realm of Experience', where all the not-yet-verbalized actions take place. Fur- thermore, some taleworlds seem to belong to realms of dreams and imagina- tion, while others are situated in the future; still others (letters, diaries) typi- cally are not performed inside live narrating sessions, but appear in frozen form. At different macrolevels we find the taleworlds of the grand narratives. During the last decades, scholars from several disciplines have taken interest in narrative studies and, even outside the academic world, the word 'narrative' has achieved a broad metaphorical use, with connotations in directions like the inner meaning of…, the consistent essence of… or the symbolic connota- tions of…. In this paper I wish to develop some of my ideas on how we as folklorists can position ourselves and our field of study in relation to those of our academic colleagues in other fields, doing serious and useful research into the nature of narratives.

Iris Marion Young's Imaginations of Gift Giving: Some implications for the teacher and the student

The paper discusses Iris Marion Young's idea of asymmetric reciprocity that rethinks typical understandings of gift giving. Iris Marion Young's proposals for asymmetric ethical relationships have important implications for democratic contexts that seek to take differences seriously. Imagining oneself in the place of the other or expecting from the other what one expects from oneself levels out differences between people and hinders possibilities of interaction. The conditions of asymmetry and reciprocity of Iris Marion Young's communicative ethics, as well as that of the unexpected as understood within situations of gift giving, bring about new readings of learning and teaching situations. The paper discusses issues of power and knowledge that have important ethical implications for how the relationships between the teacher and student could be imagined and how the teacher and student imagine themselves. Following Derridean underpinnings to Young's notion of asymmetric reciprocity the paper questions pedagogic attempts that seek to minimize the asymmetric positions of the teacher and the student and challenges educational practices based on the reproduction of knowledge and reproduction of persons. The paper follows Young's arguments against Derrida's reading of asymmetry as being one sided. It argues that such a reading does away with the idea of teaching and learning altogether as teaching necessarily involves acts of responding. It continues to argue that Young's conceptualizations of gift giving as reciprocal and asymmetrical open up alternative understandings of the pedagogic relationships between teachers and students.

Color Theory and Color Imaging Systems: Past, Present and Future

James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated the first color photograph in a lecture to the Royal Society of Great Britain in 1861. He used the demonstration to illustrate Thomas Young's idea that human vision uses three kinds of light sensors. This demonstration led to a great variety of color photographic systems using both additive and subtractive color. Today, we have image-capture devices that are photographic, video, still, and scanning. We have hardcopy printers that are electrophotographic, ink jet, thermal and holographic, as well as displays that use cathode ray tubes, liquid-crystal and other light emission color devices. The major effort today is to get control of all these technologies so that the user can, without effort, move a color digital image from one technology to another without changing the appearance of the image. The strategy of choice is to use colorimetry to calibrate each device. If all prints and displays sent the same colorimetric values from every pixel, then the images, regardless of the display, would appear identical. The problem with matching prints and displays is that they have very different color gamuts. A more satisfactory solution is needed. In my view, the future emphasis of color research will be in models of human vision. The purpose of these models will shift from calculating color matches to calculating color sensations. All the technologies listed above work one pixel at a time. The response at every pixel is dependent on the input at that pixel, regardless of whether the imaging system is chemical, photonic, or electrical. Humans are different. The color they see at a pixel is controlled by that pixel and all the other pixels in the field of view. Human color vision uses a spatial calculation involving the whole image. Except for human vision, all other color systems have the same output from a single input. In other words, if an input pixel has a value of 128, and the image processing changes that value to 155, then all pixels with 128 in will have 155 out. Human vision is unique among color imaging systems because a single input value (128) will generate a range of output values (0, or 55, or 128, or 255), depending on the values of other pixels in the image. Despite the remarkable progress in our ability to control the placement of dyes and pigments on paper, we must now return to the study of Maxwell's interest—color theory—for the next advancements in color systems. In the future, we will see more models that compute the color appearance from spatial information and write color sensations on media, rather than attempting to write the quanta catch of visual receptors.

Interval measures of power

Standard power indices, introduced by Shapley and Shubik, Banzhaf, Johnston, and others, assign real numbers to the players in a simple game as a quantitative measure of their influence in the voting situation represented by the game. We consider instead two ‘interval notions of power’ that assign intervals of real numbers to the players. The first of these notions originates in the observation that although a particular choice of weights in a weighted game may not provide an accurate measure of power, the interval of all possible weights for a player is, in fact, a reasonable reflection of the player's influence. The resulting weight interval is extended to non-weighted games via the observation that every simple game is an intersection of weighted games. For example, we have shown (Taylor and Zwicker, Games and Economic behavior, 1993, 5, 170–181) that the president's weight interval in the (non-weighted) federal system is ( 15 115 , 17 117 ), suggesting that the president has between 13% and 15% of the power. The development of a combinatorial equivalent, the dispersal interval, yields a uniform method for calculating weight intervals. Our second interval index, the market interval, is based on a modification of Peyton Young's idea that the influence of players can be measured by the sizes of the bribes they can demand when they sell their votes. We show, for example, that the president's market interval in the federal system is (0, 0.2537,…); he can reasonably insist on between 0% and 25% of the total bribe. An iterated version of the market interval, based on rationality assumptions about other players' actions and linked with the notion of a bribery equilibrium, produces potentially smaller intervals that, in some cases, shrink to single points in the limit.

Optimizing the smoothed bootstrap

In this paper we develop the technique of a generalized rescaling in the smoothed bootstrap, extending Silverman and Young's idea of shrinking. Unlike most existing methods of smoothing, with a proper choice of the rescaling parameter the rescaled smoothed bootstrap method produces estimators that have the asymptotic minimum mean (integrated) squared error, asymptotically improving existing bootstrap methods, both smoothed and unsmoothed. In fact, the new method includes existing smoothed bootstrap methods as special cases. This unified approach is investigated in the problems of estimation of global and local functionals and kernel density estimation. The emphasis of this investigation is on theoretical improvements which in some cases offer practical potential.

Thomas Young's ideas on light diffraction in the context of electromagnetic theory

According to Young, diffraction fringes occur as a result of interference between the incident wave and a wave arising from the edge of a diffracting aperture or body. This approach had even been the one adopted by Fresnel himself at the beginning of his research on diffraction. However, Fresnel was forced to abandon the concept of an edge wave because of two major difficulties which he perceived and felt unable to overcome at that time. We shall examine here these two "difficulties" of Young's theory through their historical development and with regard to some recent results that we have obtained from diffraction experiments as much as from electromagnetic theory. Thus we shall demonstrate that these two "weaknesses" have become two strong evidences for the validity of Young's ideas.

Diffraction of the Hermite-Gaussian waves on opaque semi-infinite plane

The diffracted wave amplitude and the irradiance distribution are found for the case of an m, n-mode incident Hermite-Gaussian wave on an opaque semi-infinite plane. It is done by the method prescribed by Miyamoto and Wolf (see Journ. Optic. Soc. Am., vol.52, p.615 and 636, 1962), which is based on Young's idea for interpretation of diffraction phenomena. The results obtained by this method are expressed in a form which allows a suitable qualitative interpretation of the diffraction pattern. The results of the general mode theory, are specialised to the case of the fundamental mode and the first few modes of the Hermite-Gaussian incident wave beam.