Review: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Down to This: A Year Living with the Homeless (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007)

Abstract

the proximity to Europe entailing that the Arab world would become Europe's 'stepping stone' -soon exacerbated by geology (the 'geography of oil'): 'How can you say how much energy has been diverted away from development by the colonizer's presence? How can you quantify what the social sphere has lost to the cause of political mobilization? How can you express the sacrifice the Individual has to make in the People's debilitating struggle?' (p. 72).How, then, to emerge from the Arab malaise? The Arab 'cult of the victim', a disastrous 'refusal of the universal' (p. 81), is hardly the answer, and Kassir convicts both Al-Jazeera ('peddling a lowest-common-denominator mix of Arab nationalism and Islamic nationalism', p. 85) and the Islamists and their 'cult of death' on this count, as preparing the Arab public to accept something like the 'clash of civilizations' thesis. Re-examination from both 'civilizational' sides, under the light of a universalist democratic humanism, is, for Kassir, the way forward, and this path is being prepared by the more recent polycentric growth of a plural field of Arab culture -which has demonstrated that 'Arab culture has begun to relearn how to integrate plurality into its unity of place and time, and stop thinking of difference as a source of division' (pp. 88-9) -and by the fact that 'the Arab cultural field is beginning to be integrated into the mosaic of global culture' (p. 91). The absence, though, of an 'interface between the culture of creation and the social culture' is, for Kassir, concerning and is the site at which intervention is needed for the Arabs to be true to their real history.Quieter on the range of realities and centrality of political-economic choices ahead in an age of the global economy, more modern than postmodern, and less stridently socialist than Venn's contribution, Kassir, I am certain, would have agreed with the thrust of the former's analysis; and Venn, I am sure, would welcome Kassir's politicized re-reading of a historically hybrid Arab world that is capable of inspiring as much as troubling the postcolonial critic.

Instability of the Liquid Metal–Pattern Interface in the Lost Foam Casting of Aluminum Alloys

“…[30] The density of the mixed liquid and vapor in the interface should therefore be somewhere between these values. If a 95 pct collapse of the foam is assumed, [31] this would give a density of about 50 kg m À3 . The viscosity of the liquid polystyrene in the interface was estimated to be between about 2 to 6000 Pas in the GPC experiments.…”