The Self Field

In this incisive study of the biological and cultural origins of the human self, the author challenges readers to re-think ideas about the self and consciousness as being exclusive to humans. In their place, he expounds a metatheoretical approach to the self as a purposeful system of extended cognition common to animal life: the invisible medium maintaining mind, body and environment as an integrated ‘field of being’. Supported by recent research in evolutionary and developmental studies together with related discoveries in animal behaviour and the neurosciences, the author examines the factors that have shaped the evolution of the animal self across widely different species and times, through to the modern, technologically enmeshed human self; the differences between which, he contends, are relations of degree rather than absolute differences. We are, he concludes, instinctive and ‘fuzzy individuals’ clinging to fragile identities in an artificial and volatile world of humanity’s own making, but which we now struggle to control. This book, which restores the self to its fundamental place in identity formation, will be of great interest for students and academics in the fields of social, developmental and environmental psychology, together with readers from other disciplines in the humanities, especially philosophy, cultural theory and architecture.

This is the first text to be written on the topic of Self-Field Theory (SFT), a new mathematical description of physics distinct from quantum field theory, the physical theory of choice by physicists at the present time. SFT is a recent development that has evolved from the classical electromagnetics of the electron's self-fields that were studied

Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today.

Following his acclaimed Blackbird Song, Randy Lundy's fourth collection of poetry modulates traumatic memories with the greater spiritual affirmations offered by the natural world. Field Notes for the Self is a series of dark meditations: spiritual exercises in which the poem becomes a forensics of the soul. The poems converse with Patrick Lane, John Thompson, and Charles Wright, but their closest cousins may be Arvo P rt's tintinnabulations--overlapping structures in which notes or images are rung slowly and repeatedly like bells. The goal is freedom from illusion, freedom from memory, from "the same old stories" of Lundy's violent past; and freedom, too, from the unreachable memories of the violence done to his Indigenous ancestors, which, Lundy tells us, seem to haunt his cellular biology. Rooted in exquisitely modulated observations of the natural world, the singular achievement of these poems is mind itself, suspended before interior vision like a bit of crystal twisting in the light. Praise for Randy Lundy: "Here is a poet of whom one can say--quietly, simply, with gratitude--that highest of praises: the real thing." --Jane Hirshfield, author of The Beauty "Randy Lundy has entered the place where the masters reside..." --Patrick Lane, author of Washita

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the British cult classic movie The Italian Job. This landmark anniversary presents a unique opportunity to celebrate the film with a coffee table book packed full of images, insights and revelations. Loaded with Sixties swagger, and famed for its endlessly quotable dialogue and one of the most impressive car chases in movie history, The Italian Job is the ultimate celebration of ‘cool Britannia’. From the opening sequence of Rossano Brazzi gliding through the Alps in an orange Lamborghini Miura, to the high-speed getaway across the city of Turin in three Mini Coopers, The Italian Job is a petrolhead's dream. The Self Preservation Society will detail how all these cars, including the Aston Martin DB4 and E-Type Jaguars were found and ultimately where they are today. Over the last 20 years, author Matthew Field he has interviewed all the key people involved in the 1969 production. Through him, their stories are revealed, often for the first time. Based on more than 50 in-depth interviews with the cast and crew, and lavishly illustrated with hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and production documents, this definitive book will explode some myths, include a few revelations and tell the fascinating full story of this perennially popular movie.

This research monograph offers an introduction to advanced quantum field theoretical techniques for many-particle systems beyond perturbation theory. Several schemes for resummation of the Feynman diagrams are described. The resulting approximations are especially well suited for strongly correlated fermion and boson systems. Also considered is the crossover from BCS superconductivity to Bose--Einstein condensation in fermion systems with strong attractive interaction. In particular, a field theoretic formulation of "bosonization" is presented; it is published here for the first time. This method is applied to the fractional quantum Hall effect, to the Coulomb plasma, and to several exactly solvable models.

A comprehensive device model considering both spatial distributions of the terahertz field and the field-effect self-mixing factor has been constructed for the first time in the thesis. The author has found that it is the strongly localized terahertz field induced in a small fraction of the gated electron channel that plays an important role in the high responsivity. An AlGaN/GaN-based high-electron-mobility transistor with a 2-micron-sized gate and integrated dipole antennas has been developed and can offer a noise-equivalent power as low as 40 pW/Hz1/2 at 900 GHz. By further reducing the gate length down to 0.2 micron, a noise-equivalent power of 6 pW/Hz1/2 has been achieved. This thesis provides detailed experimental techniques and device simulation for revealing the self-mixing mechanism including a scanning probe technique for evaluating the effectiveness of terahertz antennas. As such, the thesis could be served as a valuable introduction towards further development of high-sensitivity field-effect terahertz detectors for practical applications.

Lectures on Non-linear Plasma Kinetics is an introduction to modern non-linear plasma physics showing how many of the techniques of modern non-linear physics find applications in plasma physics and how, in turn, the results of this research find applications in astrophysics. Emphasis is given to explaining the physics of nonlinear processes and the radical change of cross-sections by collective effects. The author discusses new nonlinear phenomena involving the excitation of coherent nonlinear structures and the dynamics of their random motions in relation to new self-organization processes. He also gives a detailed description of applications of the general theory to various research fields, including the interaction of powerful radiation with matter, controlled thermonuclear research, etc.