• Effect of Temperature on Electromagnetic Performance of Active Phased Array Antenna

  Wang, Yan; Wang, Congsi; Lian, Peiyuan; Xue, Sone; Liu, Jing; Gao, Wei; Shi, Yu; Wang, Zhihai; Yu, Kunpeng; Peng, Xuelin; et al.

  Active phased array antennas (APAAs) can suffer from the effects of harsh thermal environments, which are caused by the large quantity of power generated by densely packed T/R modules and external thermal impacts. The situation may be worse in the case of limited room and severe thermal loads, due to heat radiation and a low temperature sink. The temperature field of the antenna can be changed. Since large numbers of temperature-sensitive electronic components exist in T/R modules, excitation current output can be significantly affected and the electromagnetic performance of APAAs can be seriously degraded. However, due to a lack of quantitative analysis, it is difficult to directly estimate the effect of temperature on the electromagnetic performance of APAAs. Therefore, this study investigated the electromagnetic performance of APAAs as affected by two key factors—the uniformly distributed temperature field and the temperature gradient field—based on different antenna shapes and sizes, to provide theoretical guidance for their thermal design.
• What’s a Little Monotony?

  Hay, Jonathan

  As this article demonstrates, the characteristic focus within Asimov scholarship exclusively upon the technological aspects of his robot stories and novels has meant that the importance of their mundane components have been systematically overlooked. By shifting critical focus to the mundane aspects of these works, it becomes newly apparent that Asimov uses a mundane foundation to problematise humanistic constructs of the human. These mundane components comprise an essential cognitive foundation of known phenomena, via which the comprehension of Asimov’s profoundly novel robots becomes plausible contextually. By readily anticipating and demonstrating the phenomenological impact of the everyday positionality of technology in the contemporary world, Asimov’s robot stories and novels recode the outdated signifier of the ‘human’ in a posthumanistic paradigm.
• The role of the local newspaper during World War One: An important link between the home front and the battle front

  Peters, Lisa; University of Chester (Chadwyck-Healey, 2018)

  This article discusses the role of the local newspapers during World War One and argues that it provided a link between the home front and the battle front, in particular as a reminder of the home front, keeping up morale and encouraging recruitment, providing war news and descriptions of wartime experiences, helping to send gifts to soldiers, alleviating boredom, and creating a community of soldiers.
• Popular geopolitics ‘beyond the screen’: Bringing Modern Warfare to the city

  Bos, Daniel; University of Chester

  Popular culture – in this case military-themed videogames – has been argued to mould and shape popular understandings of the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’. To date, most attention has been focused on the geopolitical representations of a ‘final’ popular cultural text or object. Less attention has been paid to how popular understandings of geopolitics and military violence have been constructed and commodified prior to, and ‘beyond the screen’. Empirically, the paper examines the marketing campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Through the use of experiential marketing, I show how the game’s launch night incorporated spectacular displays, performances and consumer interactions to sell the pleasures of virtual war by drawing on geopolitical fears of terrorism and military violence within major Western cities. Firstly, I demonstrate how marketing engaged with and transformed urban spaces extending the popular geopolitics of virtual war. Secondly, the paper reveals how experiential marketing targeted and encouraged connections with and between attendees’ bodies. Thirdly, I demonstrate how such events promote geopolitical encounters which extend beyond the temporal and the spatial confines of the marketing event itself. Ultimately, the paper reveals how urban fears surrounding the global ‘war on terror’ were employed to sell the pleasures and geopolitics of virtual war.
• 

  ‘What I’m not gonna buy’: Algorithmic culture jamming and anti-consumer politics on YouTube

  Wood, Rachel; University of Chester

  This article is based on an analysis of ‘anti-haul’ videos on YouTube, where a vlogger explains which beauty products they plan not to buy. Anti-haul vloggers have much in common with ‘culture jamming’ movements, which use the communicative practices and materials of promotional culture against itself to spread an anti-consumerist agenda. The article argues that anti-hauls should be understood as the reinvention of ‘culture jamming’ techniques for a contemporary promotional culture that is platform based, algorithmically governed, and mobilised through the affective, authentic performance of the ‘influencer’. I refer to this manipulation of the platform’s visibility mechanisms to spread anti-consumer messages as ‘algorithmic culture jamming’. The anti-consumer politics of anti-hauls are contradictory and ambivalent. At the same time, I argue that anti-hauls also offer important possibilities for political learning, personal and collective transformation, and alternative creative pleasures outside of continual consumer accumulation.

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