text:
\section{Introduction}

It is usually stated that in five dimensions only the Gauss-Bonnet (GB) theory provides second-order field equations. This is due to the fact that the coefficients of the higher-order curvature invariants $R^2$, $R_{\mu\nu}R^{\mu\nu}$ and $R_{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}R^{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}$ summing up the GB Lagrangian correspond to specific choices that remove the undesired fourth-order terms. Having second-order field equations in a theory of gravity is essential in order to obtain exact solutions and get rid of troubles with ghost-like instabilities. In particular, paging through the literature, one finds a large number of black hole solutions in different GB scenarios \cite{GB-solutions}. More curvature invariant terms can be added to the GB action, leading to the general family of Lovelock Lagrangians \cite{GB}, for which black hole solutions have been found in some particular cases \cite{Lovelock-solutions}. In this family, the cosmological constant term and the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian of General Relativity (GR) represent the zeroth-order and first-order terms, respectively, GB theory the second-order, and so on. However, in five (or six) dimensions, the extra terms beyond the GB combination turn out to be a topological invariant and therefore do not contribute to the field equations.

The \emph{quasi-topological} approach \cite{quasi-topological} takes another route to this problem by adding a set of new curvature-cubed terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action in five dimensions in such a way that, though the field equations are of third-order, their linearized counterpart describing gravitons propagating in an Anti-de Sitter background are second-order (so the resulting theory could be ghost-free). Besides its unnaturalness, this approach is troubled by the great difficulty of obtaining exact solutions.

The interest in having more terms added to the action, as in the Lovelock and quasi-topological gravities, can be traced back to the fact that, via the Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, new couplings in the gravitational action may broaden the class of dual CFTs that one can study using holographic methods \cite{AdSCFT}. These new terms also arise in the quantization of fields in curved space-time \cite{quantumHC} and in approaches to quantum gravity \cite{stringHC}.

Here we note that the reason explaining why GB (and Lovelock) gravity provides second-order field equations is the fact that it actually belongs to the class of Palatini theories \cite{Borunda08}. These theories are constructed removing any a priori relation of the connection with respect to the metric. Indeed, as metric and connection carry a very different geometrical meaning, the former defining the measurements of lengths, areas, volumes, etc., and the latter being related to the existence of properties remaining invariants under affine transformations (such as parallelism), they are conceptually different and unrelated a priori (see \cite{Zanelli} for a pedagogical discussion). The connection is usually taken to be metric-compatible due to the fact that the Palatini approach for GR (and, more generally, for  the Lovelock family) gives an additional equation for the connection whose solution is precisely the Levi-Civita one. Over the debate of using the minimum number of geometrical entities (the metric approach) or the minimum number of a priori hypothesis (the Palatini approach), the former has been traditionally favored. Indeed, the coincidence of the metric and Palatini formulation of GR, which is due to the particular functional form of the Einstein-Hilbert action, has led most researchers in the field to implicitly assume that the connection must always be compatible with the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$. This is, however, not necessarily true for nonlinear extensions of GR.

In general, the mathematical and physical structures of metric-affine (or Palatini) theories largely differ from their metric counterparts \cite{Borunda08b}. Now, a nice feature of Palatini gravities is that, for a large family of functional forms in the action, the metric field equations remain second-order, as in GR. The connection turns out to be a constrained object that can be solved in terms of the metric and the matter fields. This opens the door to new scenarios where the physics of second-order modified gravity theories can be explored, without unnecessary constraints on the coefficients of the theory and/or ad hoc constructions. In particular, theories including higher-order curvature invariants do not need to be constrained to have the same form as the GB/Lovelock one, which provides new avenues for studying exact solutions of gravity theories in the context of higher-dimensions and broadens the possibilities of the AdS/CFT route. Note that due to the fact that the GB combination is a topological invariant in four dimensions, whose variation does not provide modified dynamics as compared to GR, the natural framework for the comparison between solutions of metric and Palatini approaches is that of five (and six) dimensions.

In a series of papers \cite{or12} we have developed tools to solve Palatini field equations in four dimensions coupled to several kinds of matter and worked out exact solutions. Since the variational principle provides two sets of equations, the strategy to solve them consists on identifying a new rank-two tensor $h_{\mu\nu}$ as the metric for which the independent connection $\Gamma_{\mu\nu}^{\lambda}$ becomes the Levi-Civita one. In terms of $h_{\mu\nu}$ the field equations are second-order and, since $h_{\mu\nu}$ is algebraically related (via the matter sources) to the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ appearing in the definition of the action, the field equations for $g_{\mu\nu}$ are second-order as well. The non-trivial role played by the matter sources becomes a distinctive feature of Palatini theories, giving rise to new effects such as the existence of wormhole geometries \cite{or12}, which can be supported even by elementary electric fields. In this work we shall consider the simplest scenario of Palatini gravity in extra dimensions, namely, five-dimensional $f(R)$ theories (see \cite{Olmo:2011uz} and \cite{fRr} for recent reviews) and explicitly show that the field equations remain second-order. Moreover, analytical solutions are obtained using electrovacuum fields. Discussion on the extension of this approach to the case of more general actions for the gravitational field is also provided.

\section{Theory and second-order field equations}

We consider the action of $f(R)$ gravity, defined as follows

\be \label{eq:action}
S=\frac{1}{2\kappa^2} \int d^n x \sqrt{-g} f(R) +S_m(g_{\mu\nu},\psi_m),
\en
where $n$ is the number of space-time dimensions, $\kappa^2$ is the $n$-dimensional Newton's constant in some appropriate system of units, $g$ is the determinant of the space-time metric $g_{\mu\nu}$, $f(R)$ is a given function of the curvature scalar $R=g^{\mu\nu}R_{\mu\nu}(\Gamma)$, where $\Gamma \equiv \Gamma_{\mu\nu}^{\lambda}$ is the independent connection, $S_m$ is the matter action and $\psi_m$ denotes collectively the matter fields. As we are working in the Palatini formalism, metric and connection are independent entities and, therefore, the variational principle must be applied to both of them. For simplicity, we assume vanishing torsion $\Gamma_{[\mu\nu]}^{\lambda}=0$ (see \cite{OR_torsion} for a discussion of the role of torsion in these theories). Under these conditions, the variation of the action (\ref{eq:action}) gives
\bea \label{eq:var-total}
\delta S&=& \frac{1}{2\kappa^2} \int d^n x  \sqrt{-g} \Big[ \Big(f_R R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2} f g_{\mu\nu}\Big) \delta g^{\mu\nu} \nonumber \\
&+& f_R g^{\mu\nu} \delta R_{\mu\nu}(\Gamma)\Big] + \delta S_m,
\ena
where we have used the short-hand notation $f_R \equiv df/dR$. Let us take care first of the connection piece. It can be rewritten, using $\delta R_{\mu\nu}= \nabla_{\lambda} \delta \Gamma_{\nu\mu}^{\lambda} - \nabla_{\nu} \delta \Gamma_{\lambda \mu}^{\lambda}$, as
\be \label{eq:var-con}
\delta_{\Gamma} S = \frac{1}{2\kappa^2} \int d^n x\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\mu\nu} \Big(\nabla_{\lambda} \delta \Gamma_{\nu \mu}^{\lambda} - \nabla_{\nu} \Gamma_{\lambda \mu}^{\lambda} \Big).
\en
Integrating by parts we express (\ref{eq:var-con}) as
\bea\label{eq:con-var}
\delta_{\Gamma} S&=& \frac{1}{2\kappa^2} \int d^n x \sqrt{-g} \Big[- \nabla_{\lambda} \Big(\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\mu\nu} \Big)  \\
&+& \frac{1}{2} \delta_{\lambda}^{\nu} \nabla_{\rho}(\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\mu\rho})+\frac{1}{2} \delta_{\lambda}^{\mu} \nabla_{\rho}(\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\nu\rho}) \Big] \delta \Gamma_{\nu\mu}^{\lambda} \nonumber  \ ,
\ena
where a total derivative (boundary) term has been discarded. This variation must satisfy $\delta_{\Gamma} S =0$. Noting that the contraction of the indices $\lambda$ and $\nu$ leads to $(1-n)\nabla_{\rho}(\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\mu\rho})=0$, we conclude that the variation of the connection leads to
\be
\nabla_{\lambda} \left(\sqrt{-g} f_R g^{\mu\nu} \right) =0, \label{eq:connection}
\en

On the other hand, since the energy-momentum tensor of the matter is obtained as $T_{\mu\nu}=-\frac{2}{\sqrt{-g}}\frac{\delta (\sqrt{-g}L_m)}{\delta g^{\mu\nu}}$ (note that the matter Lagrangian, $L_m$, depends on the metric only) the field equations for $g_{\mu\nu}$ can be immediately obtained from the corresponding piece in (\ref{eq:var-total}) as

\be
f_R R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{f}{2}g_{\mu\nu}=\kappa^2 T_{\mu\nu}. \label{eq:metric}
\en

It is important to note that the assumption of independence between metric and connection has been crucial to obtain Eqs.(\ref{eq:metric}) and (\ref{eq:connection}). Had we followed the traditional approach of imposing  that $\Gamma_{\mu\nu}^{\lambda}$ is \emph{a priori} the Levi-Civita connection of $g_{\mu\nu}$, then we should have replaced $\delta \Gamma_{\nu\mu}^{\lambda}$ in (\ref{eq:con-var}) by
\begin{equation}
\delta \Gamma_{\nu\mu}^{\lambda}=\frac{g^{\lambda\rho}}{2}\left[\nabla_\mu \delta g_{\rho\nu}+\nabla_\nu \delta g_{\rho\mu}-\nabla_\rho \delta g_{\mu\nu}\right]  \ .
\end{equation}
In the usual metric approach, these terms must be integrated by parts and added to (\ref{eq:var-total}) in order to get the complete variation of the metric. As a result, one would have obtained a modification of (\ref{eq:metric}) of the form
\be
f_R R_{\mu\nu}-\frac{f}{2}g_{\mu\nu}+\nabla_\mu\nabla_\nu f_R-g_{\mu\nu}\Box f_R=\kappa^2 T_{\mu\nu}  \ , \label{eq:metric-Riemann}
\en
which contains higher-order derivatives of the metric through the terms $\nabla_\mu\nabla_\nu f_R$ and $\Box f_R$ stemming from the integration by parts of $\delta \Gamma_{\nu\mu}^{\lambda}\sim g^{\lambda\rho}\nabla_\mu \delta g_{\rho\nu}$.
The independence between metric and connection is thus the key to avoid these higher-order derivative terms in the field equations (\ref{eq:metric}) and (\ref{eq:connection}). For a comparison of the dynamics of $f(R)$ theories in both their  metric and Palatini formulations see \cite{Olmo05}.

To solve the system of equations (\ref{eq:metric}) and (\ref{eq:connection}) we take advantage of the fact that the connection equation (\ref{eq:connection}) can be formally written as

\be \label{eq:newconnection}
\nabla_{\lambda} \left(\sqrt{-h} h^{\mu\nu}\right)=0,
\en
where $h_{\mu\nu}$ is a symmetric rank-two tensor. Comparison between (\ref{eq:connection}) and (\ref{eq:newconnection}) leads to the relation

\be \label{eq:h}
h_{\mu\nu}=f_R^{\frac{2}{n-2}} g_{\mu\nu} \hspace{0.1cm}; \hspace{0.1cm} h^{\mu\nu}=f_R^{\frac{2}{2-n}} g^{\mu\nu},
\en
between $h_{\mu\nu}$ and $g_{\mu\nu}$, which means that they are related by a conformal transformation. On the other hand, contracting in Eq.(\ref{eq:metric}) with the metric $g^{\mu\nu}$ it follows that

\be \label{eq:trace}
Rf_R-\frac{n}{2}f=\kappa^2 T,
\en
where $T\equiv {T_\mu}^{\mu}$ is the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. This is an algebraic equation whose formal solution $R=R(T)$ generalizes the GR relation $R=-\kappa^2 T$ to the case of nonlinear $f(R)$ Lagrangian. The conformal factor relating $g_{\mu\nu}$ and $h_{\mu\nu}$ is thus a function of the matter, $f_R=f_R(R[T])$, which becomes a constant when $T=0$ (vacuum or traceless sources). Through a constant rescaling of the metric, one can then have  $g_{\mu\nu}=h_{\mu\nu}$ when $T=0$. It is also easy to see  that in vacuum the field equations  (\ref{eq:metric}) recover the GR dynamics with an effective cosmological constant, $G_{\mu\nu}=-\Lambda_{eff} g_{\mu\nu}$, where $\Lambda_{eff}\equiv (n-2)(f/4f_R)|_{T=0}$ depends on the specific form of the Lagrangian density chosen. This is a manifestation of the observed universality of Einstein's field equations in vacuum for Palatini theories \cite{Mauro} and implies that these theories do not propagate extra degrees of freedom. Therefore, in order to obtain modified dynamics, matter sources with $T \neq 0$ must be considered regardless of the number of space-time dimensions.

Having this in mind we now contract (\ref{eq:metric}) with $h^{\mu\nu}$, and arrange terms to obtain
\be \label{eq:Rmunu}
{R_\mu}^{\nu}(h)=\frac{1}{f_R^{\frac{2}{n-2}}} \left(\frac{f}{2} \delta_{\mu}^{\nu} +\kappa^2 {T_\mu}^{\nu} \right)
\en
which is a set of second-order Einstein-like field equations for $h_{\mu\nu}$. Note that since $R=R(T)$, the $f$ and $f_R$ terms on the right-hand side of (\ref{eq:Rmunu}) are functions of the matter. As $h_{\mu\nu}$ is algebraically related to $g_{\mu\nu}$ via the matter sources, the field equations for the latter are second-order as well, which is in agreement with our initial claim regarding the absence of higher-order field equations in Palatini $f(R)$ gravity in any dimension. Once a given matter-energy source is specified, the field equations (\ref{eq:Rmunu}), together with Eqs.(\ref{eq:h}) and (\ref{eq:trace}), provide a complete solution.

A comment on the degree of differentiability of the matter fields is now in order. In fact, since the conformal factor that relates the physical and auxiliary geometries depends on the matter fields, in order to have a smooth $g_{\mu\nu}$ geometry the function $f_R(R[T])$ must have, at least, smooth derivatives up to second order in the space-time coordinates. It is thus reasonable to wonder if higher-order derivatives of the matter fields might appear in these theories. Through a Hamiltonian analysis, it was found in \cite{Olmo:2011fh} that, in general, the field equations do involve higher-order {\it spatial} derivatives of the matter fields, though time derivatives remain second-order at most. Therefore, the Cauchy problem in these theories is as well-formulated as in GR. The well-posedness depends on the particular matter fields considered and it has been shown to be well-posed for a number of reasonable sources \cite{Capo}.

\subsection{Electrovacuum fields}

As we have discussed, in order to excite the dynamics of Palatini $f(R)$ gravity, one needs a matter-energy source with non-vanishing trace. A simple scenario is to consider the case of electromagnetic fields. In this sense, note that in four dimensions the Maxwell stress-energy tensor satisfies $T=0$, which forces the consideration of  non-linear theories of electrodynamics \cite{fR} in order to achieve modifications as compared to GR. For higher dimensions, however,  the Maxwell field satisfies $T \neq 0$ and does provide modified dynamics on its own. The action of Maxwell electrodynamics is given by
\be
S_m=-\frac{1}{16\pi} \int d^n x \sqrt{-g}F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu},
\en
where $F_{\mu\nu}=\partial_{\mu}A_{\nu}-\partial_{\nu}A_{\mu}$ is the field strength tensor of the vector potential $A_{\mu}$. Let us now assume a static, spherically symmetric line element

\be
ds^2=g_{tt}dt^2 -g_{rr} dr^2 -r^2 d\Omega_{n-2}^2,
\en
where $d\Omega_{n-2}^2=d\theta_1^2+\sum_{i=2}^{n-1}\prod_{j=1}^{i-2} \sin^2 \theta_{j} d\theta_{i}^2$ is the metric on the unit ($n-2$) sphere. In this line element, from the Maxwell field equations, $\nabla_{\mu}F^{\mu\nu}=0$, one finds that the  unique non-vanishing component of a spherically symmetric, electrically charged field  reads $F^{tr}=\frac{q}{r^{(n-2)} \sqrt{-g_{tt}g_{rr}}}$, where $q$ is an integration constant identified as the electric charge. Remarkably, the invariant

\be \label{eq:X}
X=-\frac{1}{2} F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}=\frac{q^2}{r^{2(n-2)}},
\en
does not depend explicitly on the $g_{tt}$ and $g_{rr}$ components of the metric, which simplifies the calculations. This allows us to write the energy-momentum tensor of the electromagnetic field for these solutions as

\bea \label{eq:Tmunu}
{T_\mu}^{\nu}&=&-\frac{1}{4\pi} \left( {F_\mu}^{\alpha} {F_\alpha}^{\nu}-\frac{1}{4} \delta_{\mu}^{\nu}F_{\alpha\beta}F^{\alpha \beta} \right)  \nonumber \\
&=&\frac{X}{4\pi}
\left(
\begin{array}{cc}
-\hat{I}_{2\times 2}&  \hat{0}_{(n-2) \times 2} \\
\hat{0}_{2 \times (n-2)} & \hat{I}_{(n-2) \times (n-2)} \\
\end{array}
\right), \label{eq:em}
\ena
where $\hat{I}_{a \times b}$ and $\hat{0}_{a \times b}$ are the $a \times b$ dimensional identity and zero matrices, respectively. From (\ref{eq:em}) we explicitly read the non-vanishing trace $T= \frac{(n-4)q^2}{4\pi r^{2(n-2)}}$ for $n \neq 4$.

\subsection{Computation of the five-dimensional geometrical objects}

To solve the field equations (\ref{eq:Rmunu}) we must compute the objects appearing on the left-hand side. As later we shall focus on the properties of five-dimensional solutions, let us propose the following ansatz for the metric $h_{\mu\nu}$
\bea \label{eq:ansatz}
d\tilde{s}^2&=&-A(x)e^{2\xi(x)}dt^2+\frac{1}{A(x)} dx^2 \nonumber \\
&+&\tilde{r}^2(x)(d\theta^2 +\sin^2 \theta d\phi^2 + \sin^2 \theta \sin^2 \phi  d\alpha^2),
\ena
where $\tilde{r}^2(x)$ is, in general, a function of the coordinate $x$. For the problem at hand, however, the choice $\tilde{r}(x)=x$ turns out to be a consistent one. Assuming this simplification, the computation of the metric components ${R_\mu}^{\nu}(x)$ (we use the xAct package of Mathematica \cite{JM}) leads to
\bea
{R_t}^t&=&-\frac{1}{2x} [3A_x (1+x\xi_x)+xA_{xx} \nonumber \\
&+&2A(3\xi_x + x(\xi_x^2 + \xi_{xx}))] \\
{R_x}^x&=&-\frac{1}{2x} [3A_x (1+x\xi_x)+xA_{xx} \nonumber \\
&+&2A x(\xi_x^2 + \xi_{xx}))] \\
{R_\theta}^{\theta}&=&{R_\theta}^{\theta}={R_\alpha}^{\alpha}=\frac{1}{x^2}[2(1-A)-xA_x-A x \xi_x] \label{eq:Rtheta}
\ena
Using the symmetry of the matter-energy source, ${T_t}^t={T_x}^x$, from (\ref{eq:Rmunu}) it follows that $\xi_x=0$. Therefore, we may set $\xi=0$ by a redefinition of the time coordinate without loss of generality. On the other hand, the component (\ref{eq:Rtheta}) is appropriately written using a suitable mass ansatz in five dimensions, $A=1-2M(x)/x^2$, in terms of which (\ref{eq:Rtheta}) reads

\be \label{eq:Rthetatheta}
{R_\theta}^{\theta}(h)=2M_x/x^3,
\en
which provides a solution once the corresponding component of the right-hand-side of (\ref{eq:Rmunu}) is given, for which the gravity Lagrangian $f(R)$ must be specified. In the following section we shall consider two examples.

\section{Some models}

For the sake of simplicity, in this work we shall restrict ourselves to the study of polynomial models of the form

\be \label{eq:fR}
f(R)=R+\alpha R^d,
\en
where $d$ is a constant and $\alpha$ a parameter. From the trace equation (\ref{eq:trace}) we obtain the relation $R=R(T)$ as

\be \label{eq:trace1}
R\left(\frac{2-n}{2} \right)+\alpha R^d \left(\frac{2d-n}{2} \right)=\kappa^2 T,
\en
whose explicit resolution must be done case-by-case.

\subsection{$f(R)=R+\alpha R^2$}

A natural choice is that of a quadratic Lagrangian, namely, $d=2$. For dimensional consistency, $\alpha$ has dimensions of length squared. In this case the equation for the trace (\ref{eq:trace}) is solved as
\be \label{eq:Rf1}
\alpha R=-\frac{(n-2)}{2 (n-4)} \left[ 1-\sqrt{1-\frac{8(n-4)\kappa^2 \alpha T}{(n-2)^2}} \right] \ ,
\en
which indicates that $R$ is negative if $\alpha>0$ and positive if $\alpha<0$. Note that  the term under the square root might become negative if $r$ becomes smaller than $r_\alpha^{2(n-2)}=\frac{8\alpha (n-4)\kappa^2 q^2}{(n-2)^2}$. However, one can see that $r_\alpha$ is smaller than the point $r_c$ where $f_R$ vanishes, which occurs at $r_c^{2(n-2)}=\frac{8\alpha \kappa^2 q^2}{n}$, where $\alpha R=-1/2$. As in other cases already studied in four dimensions \cite{or12}, the point where $f_R=0$ sets the location of a minimum in the function $r^2(x)$, which prevents the square root in (\ref{eq:Rf1}) from becoming complex. Such a minimum signals the existence of a wormhole throat. Determining the behaviour of the metric functions at the minimum $r_c$ of the radial coordinate is, consequently, a key aspect in the characterization of solutions in these theories. In order to find the explicit relation between the function $r^2(x)$ and the coordinate $x$, let us write the line element for the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ as
\be \label{eq:ansatzg}
ds^2=-B(x)dt^2+C(x)dx^2+r^2(x) d\Omega^2_{n-3}.
\en
It is important to remember that the line elements for  $g_{\mu\nu}$ in (\ref{eq:ansatzg}) and $h_{\mu\nu}$ in (\ref{eq:ansatz}) are conformally related according to (\ref{eq:h}). This means that $r^2(x)=f_R^{\frac{2}{2-n}} x^2$. Therefore, computing $f_R$ and using Eq.(\ref{eq:Rf1}) we find
\be
x^2=r^2 \left[\frac{(n-2)}{(n-4)}\sqrt{1-\left(\frac{r_{\alpha}}{r} \right)^{2(n-2)}} - \frac{2}{(n-4)} \right]^{\frac{2}{n-2}} \ .
\en
Though the resolution of the field equations for this problem is certainly possible, the nonlinearity of the equation (\ref{eq:Rf1}) that determines the new objects appearing on the right-hand-side of the field equations (\ref{eq:Rmunu}) prevents the obtention of a clear analytical solution. This example was taken here to stress the relevance of the relation between the two-spheres of the geometries $g_{\mu\nu}$. However, as the aim of this paper is to illustrate the Palatini method in higher-dimensions we shall now choose an analytically tractable model.

\subsection{$f(R)=R+\beta |R|^{n/2}$}

The reason to consider this model (where $\beta$ is a parameter) is its technical simplicity: the trace equation is solved as
\be \label{eq:RT}
R=\frac{2}{(2-n)} \kappa^2 T \ ,
\en
which coincides with the GR expression and does not depend on the $\beta$ parameter.
The linearity of the Ricci scalar in the trace provides a simple expression of the $f(R)$ Lagrangian in terms of the matter sources as
\be
f(R)=\frac{2\kappa^2 T}{(2-n)} \left[1+\beta \left|\frac{2\kappa^2 T}{2-n} \right|^{\frac{n-2}{2}} \right].
\en
To obtain analytical solutions we shall focus on the $n=5$ dimensional case, for which we have $T=q^2/(4\pi r^6)$ and $R=-\frac{2}{3} \frac{r_q^4}{r^6}$, where we have defined the charge scale $r_q^4\equiv\kappa^2 q^2/(4\pi)$. These expressions and that of the energy-momentum tensor of electromagnetic field in (\ref{eq:Tmunu}) allow us to compute the right-hand side of the field equations (\ref{eq:Rmunu}). Therefore, using (\ref{eq:Rthetatheta}) we obtain
\be
{R_\theta}^{\theta}=\frac{2M_x}{x^3}=\frac{r_q^4}{f_R^{5/3} r^6} \left[1+\frac{1}{3} \left(1+\beta \left(\frac{2}{3} \right)^{5/2} \frac{r_q^6}{r^9}\right) \right].
\en
To integrate this equation we need the relation $x=rf_R^{1/3}$ between the spherical sectors of the line elements of $h_{\mu\nu}$ and $g_{\mu\nu}$, as follows from (\ref{eq:h}). It is easy to see that this implies $dx/dr=f_R^{1/3} \left[1+\frac{r}{3} \frac{f_{RR}}{f_R} R_r \right]$, where the explicit expression for $R_r$ follows from (\ref{eq:RT}). With this we can finally write
\be \label{eq:Mr1}
M_r=\frac{r^3}{2f_R^{1/3}} \left(1+\frac{r}{3} \frac{f_{RR}}{f_R} R_r \right) \left(\frac{r_q^4}{r^6}+\frac{ f(R)}{2} \right).
\en
The explicit expressions for $f(r)$ and $f_R(r)$ follow immediately as

\be
f(r)=-\frac{2}{3} \frac{r_q^4}{r^6} \left[1-\frac{2\tilde{\beta}}{5}\frac{r_q^6}{r^9} \right] \ ; \ f_R=1-\tilde{\beta} \frac{r_q^6}{r^9},
\en
where we have defined a new parameter $\tilde{\beta}=5\beta(2/3)^{3/2}/2$. Note that, on dimensional grounds, $\tilde{\beta}$ represents a cubic length.  If we interpret the non-linear curvature corrections as having a quantum-gravitational origin, then $\tilde{\beta}\sim l_P^3$, where $l_P$ is the Planck length. Using the fact that $f_{RR}R_r=9\tilde{\beta} \frac{r_q^6}{r^{10}}$ and defining a new scale $r_c^9 \equiv \tilde{\beta} r_q^6$, we can finally write Eq.(\ref{eq:Mr1}) for our theory as
\be
M_r=\frac{r_q^4}{3r^3} \frac{\left[1+2\left(\frac{r_c}{r} \right)^9 \right] \left[1+\frac{1}{5}\left(\frac{r_c}{r}\right)^9\right]}{\left[1-\left(\frac{r_c}{r} \right)^9 \right]^{4/3}}.
\en
Since for zero charge we have $M=M_0=$constant,  this expression can be more conveniently written in terms of a function $G(z)$ defined as
\be
\frac{M(z)}{M_0}=1+\delta_1 G(z) \ ,
\en
where we have introduced the new variable $z=r/r_c$ and the constant $\delta_1 \equiv \frac{r_q^4}{3M_0 r_c^2}$. The function $G(z)$ satisfies
\be \label{eq:Gz}
G_z=\frac{1}{z^3} \frac{\left[1+\frac{2}{z^9} \right] \left[1+\frac{1}{5z^9} \right]}{\left(1-\frac{1}{z^9} \right)^{4/3}},
\en
and contains the electromagnetic contribution. This function admits an immediate integration as

\be \label{eq:G(z)}
G(z)= \epsilon + \frac{1-25 z^9-30 z^9 (1-z^9)^{1/3} \, _2F_1\left(\frac{1}{9},\frac{1}{3};\frac{10}{9};z^9\right)}{20 z^8 (z^9-1)^{1/3}},
\en
where $_2F_1$ is a hypergeometric function and $\epsilon = 3 (-1)^{2/9} \Gamma \left(\frac{2}{9}\right) \Gamma \left(\frac{10}{9}\right)/(2 \Gamma \left(\frac{1}{3}\right))$ is a constant needed to recover the right five-dimensional GR behaviour at $z \gg 1$. Indeed, a series expansion in this region gives

\be
G(z) \approx -\frac{1}{2 z^2}-\frac{53}{165z^{11}}+O\left(\frac{1}{\text{z}}\right)^{13},
\en
where the leading-order term displays the expected GR behaviour and the corrections are largely suppressed as $1/z^9= \tilde{\beta} r_q^6/r^9\ll 1$ for any $r>l_P\sim \tilde{\beta}^{1/3}$.

We expect the effects of the correcting term in the Lagrangian to produce deviations from the five-dimensional GR solutions around the region $z=1$ (see Figure \ref{fig:1}). Expanding (\ref{eq:G(z)}) in this region we obtain

\bea \label{eq:G(z)small}
G(z) &\approx& -\frac{2 \sqrt[3]{3}}{5 \sqrt[3]{z-1}} \nonumber \\
&+&\frac{3 (-1)^{2/9} \Gamma \left(\frac{2}{9}\right) \Gamma \left(\frac{7}{9}\right)-2 \sqrt[3]{-1} \sqrt{3} \pi  \Gamma \left(\frac{10}{9}\right)}{2 \Gamma \left(\frac{1}{3}\right) \Gamma \left(\frac{7}{9}\right)} \nonumber \\
&-& \left(\frac{1}{20\ 3^{2/3}}-\frac{\pi }{\sqrt[6]{3} \Gamma \left(\frac{1}{3}\right) \Gamma \left(\frac{5}{3}\right)}\right) (z-1)^{2/3} \nonumber \\
&+&O\left(z-1 \right)^1,
\ena

\begin{figure}[h]
\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{fig1fR.eps}
\caption{Behaviour of the function $G(z)$ (solid) in Eq.(\ref{eq:G(z)}), as compared to the GR case (dashed). Far from the center, $z \gg 1$, the solution quickly converges to that of GR, $G(z)=-1/(2z^2)$, but in the other region of interest it undergoes relevant modifications as a core of non-vanishing radius $z=1$ arises. At this core curvature invariants diverge (see Eq.(\ref{eq:Kret}) below).
\label{fig:1}}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[h]
\includegraphics[width=0.45\textwidth]{radial.eps}
\caption{Representation of the radial function $z=z(x)$. Note the rapid transition from linearity as $x\to 0$ is approached. The surface $x=0$ represents a minimum of the area function $r^2(x)=r_c^2 z^2(x)$ and can be interpreted as the throat of a wormhole.
\label{fig:2}}
\end{figure}

\noindent where $\Gamma[a]$ is Euler's gamma function. This expansion reveals that $G(z)$ is (slowly) divergent around $z=1$. To determine the impact of this divergence on the geometry, we note that the physical metric component in the line element (\ref{eq:ansatzg}) is completely determined via the conformal transformation (\ref{eq:h}) as
\be
B(z)=\frac{1}{f_R^{2/3}} \left(1-\frac{2M(z)}{r_c^2 z^2 f_R^{2/3}} \right).
\en
Expanding in series around $z=1$ this function behaves as
\bea
B & \approx& \frac{4 M_0 \delta_1}{45 (3)^{1/3} r_c^2 (z-1)^{5/3}} - \frac{2M_0(\delta_1 + C_1)}{9 3^{2/3} r_c^2 (z-1)^{4/3}} \nonumber \\
&+& \frac{90\sqrt{3}r_c^2 + C_2 M_0 \delta_2}{270 3^{5/6}r_c^2 (z-1)^{2/3}} + O(z-1)^{1/3},
\ena
where $C_1$ and $C_2$ are two constants whose explicit form is too large and of no particular interest for our purposes. The leading term in this expansion diverges as $1/(z-1)^{5/3}$. This allows to compute the behaviour of the curvature invariants at $z=1$, in particular, the Kretchsmann behaves there as

\be \label{eq:Kret}
R_{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}R^{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta} \simeq \frac{1024 \delta_1^2 M_0^2}{65613^{2/3} r_c^8 (z-1)^{22/3}}+ O\left(\frac{1}{(z-1)^{20/3}} \right),
\en
which is thus divergent, regardless of the specific value of the constant $\delta_1$.

We would like to point out that the presence of a curvature divergence at $x=0$, where the minimum value $z=1$ is reached (see Fig.\ref{fig:2}), is not an obstacle for the existence of a wormhole (in fact, the geometry does not dictate the topology of a space). Our theory is defined by a gravity action coupled to a {\it sourceless} electric field and the resulting dynamics forces the radial function $r^2(x)$ to have a minimum at $x=0$ ($r=r_c$ or $z=1$). The non-zero electric flux through the $x=0$ surface allows to define the electric charge $q$ that characterizes our solutions in purely topological terms \cite{Misner-Wheeler}. Therefore, rather than being generated by a point-like source, the charge of our solutions is a topological property, which allows to interpret these solutions as geons in Wheeler's sense \cite{Geons}. We note that similar solutions but with completely smooth curvature scalars have been found in four-dimensional Palatini theories \cite{or12,ors,Guendelman:2013sca}. Moreover, it has been recently shown that  wormhole solutions of this kind can be dynamically generated out of Minkowski space by means of an ingoing stream of charged null particles \cite{Dynamical}.

Though different aspects such as the classification of the solutions in terms of their horizons, or their thermodynamical aspects could be certainly studied, we shall not keep going with the geometric analysis of these solutions as this model was introduced as an example that illustrates the analytical tractability of the second-order equations of Palatini $f(R)$ theories in five dimensions.  The important point of bringing this example is to show that the Palatini approach provides a new framework to consistently study extensions of GR with new curvature couplings and second-order equations in arbitrary dimension. Perturbations of these solutions will be considered elsewhere.

\section{Summary and outlook}

It is widely known that in the standard metric (or Riemannian) approach the addition in the action of higher-curvature terms with arbitrary coefficients in $d\ge 4$ dimensions breaks the second-order character of the field equations. The metric-affine or Palatini formulation, however, naturally avoids this shortcoming in a large family of models. In this paper we have illustrated this fact with the particular case of $f(R)$ theories, though this procedure can be easily extended to theories containing powers of the Ricci tensor (and possibly the Kretchsmann as well), which would extend the scope of these methods.

The second-order character of the Palatini field equations makes it possible to obtain exact solutions regardless of the dimension. We have explicitly run this idea by using the fact that, though the independent connection is not metric-compatible, it is compatible with a new metric, $h_{\mu\nu}$, algebraically related to the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ via the (trace of the) energy-momentum tensor of the matter. The field equations in terms of $h_{\mu\nu}$ can be cast in Einstein-like form, which simplifies their analysis and resolution. This procedure provides a full solution for a given matter-energy source. It is worth mentioning that in theories beyond $f(R)$ the algebraic relation between $h_{\mu\nu}$ and $g_{\mu\nu}$ transcends the conformal case but its determination is, in principle, possible in many cases of interest \cite{Olmo:2011uz,Olmo:2009xy}.

We have studied a scenario in which an electromagnetic (Maxwell) field in $n>4$ dimensions sources a family of polynomial $f(R)$ theories. Unlike in the $n=4$ case, where the Maxwell stress-energy tensor is traceless, in $n=5$ the trace of electromagnetic field is non-vanishing,  which allows to probe the modified gravitational dynamics. We have successfully obtained exact solutions to the field equations of the model $f(R)=R+\beta |R|^{5/2}$, which was chosen by its analytical tractability, and studied how the region close to $r=0$ is modified by the new high-energy dynamics. The main novelty is the fact that these solutions do not extend all the way down to $r=0$ but, instead, a sphere of minimum area arises as a consequence of the new dynamics and the conformal relation between the $2$-spheres of the $h_{\mu\nu}$ and $g_{\mu\nu}$ geometries. The existence of this {\it core}, which is a manifestation of the existence of a wormhole, seems to be a generic prediction of Palatini theories sourced by electrovacuum fields, as it has been found to arise in the context of four-dimensional $f(R)$ coupled to Born-Infeld electrodynamics \cite{fR}, and also in quadratic gravity \cite{or12} and Born-Infeld-like gravity \cite{ors}. In the present case, curvature invariants for the particular model considered diverge at the core in all cases, a situation similar  to that found in the four-dimensional $f(R)$ context \cite{fR} but which can be cured in other extensions beyond the $f(R)$ scenario \cite{or12,ors,Guendelman:2013sca}.

The important lesson that follows from our discussion is that a foundational aspect of gravity, namely, whether the underlying structure of space-time is Riemannian or not, has a great influence on both the mathematical and physical aspects of the corresponding theory. The Palatini approach to $f(R)$ gravities shows that one can add to the action as many new couplings in the gravitational field as desired without spoiling the second-order character of the field equations. One may wonder whether the addition of other curvature invariants such as $R_{\mu\nu}R^{\mu\nu}$ or $R_{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}R^{\alpha\beta\gamma\delta}$ keeps the second-order character. We have already checked that this is so in the case of four-dimensional Born-Infeld  \cite{ors,Deser} and quadratic gravity \cite{Guendelman:2013sca,or12}, which contain non-trivial corrections on the Ricci-squared invariant.

We stress that the vacuum field equations of Palatini $f(R)$ (and further extensions) boil down to those of GR plus a cosmological constant. Alternatively a cosmological constant term can be directly added to the action in a standard way, or generated through non-linear corrections in the electromagnetic field \cite{Guendelman:2013sca}, neither of these ways spoiling the second-order character of the field equations. In summary, the Palatini approach provides an interesting framework to explore new domains of the AdS/CFT correspondence and to potentially broaden the class of CFTs that can be studied using holographic methods. A better understanding of the theory of quantized fields in these backgrounds is, however, necessary to  fully understand how this correspondence manifests itself in such scenarios. These are aspects to be explored elsewhere.

\section*{Acknowledgments}

D.B. and L.L. would like to thank CAPES and CNPq for financial support. G.J.O. is supported by the Spanish grant FIS2011-29813-C02-02, the Consolider Program CPANPHY-1205388, the JAE-doc program of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), and the i-LINK0780 grant of CSIC. D.R.-G. is supported by CNPq through project No. 561069/2010-7. The authors also acknowledge funding support of CNPq project No. 301137/2014-5.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


For Sativa lovers, we chose one with a cinnamon smell and exceptional buzz. This is based on a rare Jack Herer phenotype and can be put under 12/12 hours after one week.
For Sativa lovers, we chose one with a cinnamon smell and exceptional buzz. This is based on a rare Jack Herer phenotype and can be put under 12/12 hours after one week. Maximum yields indoors are possible, by putting the best flowering individuals together (6-7 out of 10). Please note they do reach height! (approx. 1.5m). Perfect performance outdoors amongst orange or olive trees. 90% Sativa.
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Big, massive colas and it smells good but not to strong.


text:
New Trojan asteroid found in Neptune's dead zone
By Howard Falcon-Lang
duration 12 August 2010
image captionMany new Trojan asteroids await discovery
Astronomers have found a new 100km diameter Trojan asteroid near Neptune.
Trojans are a type of asteroid found in space graveyards. They shed light on what the early Solar System was like.
Scientists say up to 150 similar objects could await discovery in the same area.
The new asteroid was discovered by Dr Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution and Dr Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, Hawaii.
Their findings are published in the journal Science.
Space graveyard
Trojan asteroids orbit in the same plane as a planet, but don't collide with it. This is because they occur in "dead zones" where gravitational forces allow the asteroid to orbit at precisely the same speed as the planet.
These Lagrangian points, as the dead zones are called, occur 60 degrees ahead and behind the planet. They are graveyards of space junk "frozen in time" since the formation of the Solar System.
Almost all of the 200,000 Trojan asteroids larger than 1km found to date orbit with Jupiter. However, the newly discovered Trojan is one of only six associated with Neptune.
Asteroid 2008LC18 occurs in an area of the sky where the Milky Way, our own galaxy, is especially bright.
Dr Sheppard said that his team had to devise a "a unique observing strategy" to spot the asteroid against this bright star field. They used interstellar dust to mask the star light so the 100km asteroid became clearly visible.
The breakthrough was made using the 8.2m Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii.
The scientists believe that there could be as many as 150 similar-sized objects in the cloud. Eventually, the Trojan cloud associated with Neptune could prove to be as big as that orbiting with Jupiter.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons of Queens University Belfast, an expert on asteroids, said that it was "an incredibly exciting discovery. It's another important clue for unravelling the early evolution of the Solar System".

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Onamia, Minn. – Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures (MLCV) announced today that CEO Joe Nayquonabe will travel to Kuwait May 13-18 with the Serving Our Troops organization to serve a meal to 4,000 troops at Camp Arifijan, Kuwait. Minnesota National Guard members from the 682nd Engineer Battalion are among these troops. While Nayquonabe is serving meals in Kuwait, MLCV will be serving free meals to veterans and military members at businesses right here in Minnesota. The free meals are a part of MLCV's recognition of National Military Appreciation Month (NMAM).
Serving Our Troops was formed by a group of community and business leaders with a common interest in supporting those who put themselves in harm's way so that we may enjoy all that is great about our Country. Since 2004, the all-volunteer Serving our Troops organization has conducted 11 volunteer-driven projects, serving more than 85,000 steak dinners to soldiers and families around the world. Nayquonabe is part of a group of 25 volunteers traveling to Kuwait this month.
Nayquonabe said that serving meals to veterans and troops – whether here or abroad – is a reflection of MLCV's overall commitment to giving back to veterans for the sacrifices they have made.
On Sunday, May 15, Veterans and active military will need to be Grand Rewards members and show any military identification at the Grand Rewards counter to verify their eligibility and receive their free buffet ticket. Meals will be served during normal business hours at the Grand Buffet.
On Monday, May 16, Veterans and current military can show their military ID to receive a free meal.
On Tuesday, May 17, Veterans and current military can show their military ID for a free meal.
For more information about Serving Our Troops please visit www.servingourtroops.com.
Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures manages all the Mille Lacs Band's businesses, including Grand Casino Mille Lacs, Grand Casino Hinckley, Eddy's Resort on Lake Mille Lacs, InterContinental Saint Paul Riverfront Hotel and the DoubleTree Hilton in St. Paul, Minn., the DoubleTree Minneapolis Park Place in St. Louis Park, Minn., 2020 Brand Solutions, Embassy Suites Oklahoma City, Big Sandy Lodge & Resort in McGregor, Minn., and other Band-owned businesses such as a cinema, a grocery store, gas/convenience stores, a golf course, wastewater treatment plant, a commercial laundry facility, a medical office building and a print shop. It also oversees certain amount of the Band's investments and considers new business opportunities to provide economic support for the Band's future. Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures has over 3,500 employees and its board of directors is comprised of five members, who guide the business and investment decisions for the Band. Visit www.mlcorporateventures.com for more information.


On Tuesday 13th November, BBC North West Tonight went live from Unique Kidz and Co after a Plod for Pudsey!
It was all part of their Plod for Pudsey campaign which has presenters from the television show walking 100 miles around the coastline of the North West to raise money for Children in Need. A big Pudsey Tea Party took place for some of our children, young adults and their families to celebrate being their final stop that day.
Beccy Barr and Richard Askam finished their walk around 5:30pm. They arrived at Unique Kidz and Co with Pudsey greeted by our children and families cheering them in! At 6:30pm, the cameras went live and showed off what a fantastic place Unique Kidz and Co really is! We are so proud to be supported by Children in Need and we are currently in our third round of funding. Support from Children in Need has made a huge difference to Unique Kidz and Co. It has allowed us to extend our services and provide the support that our families really need.
If you didn't catch us live on TV, head over to our Facebook page. You can watch a behind the scenes video and see some of the pictures from the night!
A huge thank you to everyone who has supported our events through Children in Need Week. Wednesday morning saw our biggest numbers yet at Stay and Play where we held a Children in Need Coffee Morning. Throughout the week we are selling tickets for our Children in Need Raffle.


Australia is often portrayed as a nation of excessive beer drinkers, but it is the nectar of the Gods- the wine industry, that has boomed over the last 10 years! Australia is currently in the top 10 of the largest wine producers in the world and has more than 2400 wineries in 65 wine regions around the country. These regions grow more than 100 grape varieties and over 30 million glasses of Australian wine are enjoyed around the world every day. Wine lovers are continuing to discover the variety and quality available from wine regions, with domestic consumption and increasing export volumes encouraging further expansion.
Due to its diverse geography and climate the country produces a wide range of wines across each of its states. Each region reflects its own unique characteristic taste and flavour imparted to the wine by the environment in which it is produced. Most of the wine production is concentrated around the southern parts, near the coast where the climate is cooler and more Mediterranean, with the north being just too tropical and the centre too hot and dry. The three major wine regions in Australia are South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. South Australia and NSW tend to be more famous for their warm climate varieties such as Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon whereas Victoria is known for cool climate-loving Pinot Noir. In recent years, the island of Tasmania and the state of Queensland started to have their success with its cooler more moderate maritime climate, cooled by prevailing westerly winds off the Southern Ocean.
In Australia the more popular Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris Muscat, Riesling Semillon, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Grenache, Pinot Noir and Merlot are found however European varieties are also increasing their popularity such as Tempranillo, Sangiovese, Touriga, Barbera, Vermentino and Fiano.
Acclaimed throughout the world and located less than two hours' drive from Sydney, the Hunter Valley is Australia's oldest wine region. Established in 1832 the Godfather of Australian wine, James Busby, brought 20,000 vine cuttings to Australia from Europe and so helped make the Hunter Valley a key wine region and in turn establishing Australia as a grape-growing country. Understanding that the region's warm and humid growing conditions combined with red clay loam soils now produce some outstandingly earthy Shiraz, which develop unique complexities with age, as well as the Hunter Valley Semillion and full flavoured Chardonnay being iconic Australian white wines. Young winemakers are exploring innovative new varieties and styles such as Tempranillo, Barbera and Fiano.
Two hours' drive from Sydney the Hunter Valley is one of the more accessible wine regions in the country and is the sixth most visited place in Australia, attracting more than 2.5 million people annually. The Hunter Valley's proximity to Sydney lures event organisers and famous performers such as Elton John and The Rolling Stones. A dynamic wine region with more than 150 premium wines and well-known names as Brokenwood, Peppertree Wines, Tyrrells, Audrey Wilkinson, Waverley Estate, Peterson House and Scarborough Wine Co. Visiting the generational family wineries is a wonderful history lesson steeped in superb wine as well as being one of the iconic experiences for those visiting Australia.
Barossa Valley is home to some of the oldest living vineyards of the world, some of the vines being over a century old! Established by German settlers dating back to 1842 many of the vineyards are still abundant today. For over 160 years generations of grape-growers and winemakers have established this fertile land with the most common grape being the Shiraz. Located about 50 minutes from Adelaide, Australia's most famous wine region is set in the picturesque rolling hills of the Barossa Valley, clusters of villages, stone churches and most importantly over 13,000 hectares of vines. Home to more than 550 grape-growing families the region has more than 150 wineries and 80 cellar doors, so there are plenty of varieties to sample.
North of Adelaide, the Barossa region is one of the only wine regions in Australia to have neighbouring warm and cool climate growing conditions for its vines. The full bodied, smoky and rich with spice Shiraz, as well as Cabinet Sauvignon, comes from the warm Barossa Valley. The region also grows grapes for Barossa Sémillon, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with the Barossa Grenache and Mourvedre, growing in reputation.
The cooler white wine bordering regions of the Eden Valley, produces its mineralised and dry Rieslings, with the neighbouring Clare Valley having a warm ripening period, producing some of the richest Riesling in Australia.
Famous producers in the Barossa area include Penfolds, Jacob's Creek, Elderton and Rockford. With such a range of growing conditions and soil types, as well as vineyards which have been established by several generations of grape growers and wine makers, you are certain to find a wine you will fall in love with.
Located less than one hour's drive from Melbourne, Yarra Valley is set amongst rolling green hills and a backdrop of blue mountains. This picturesque valley produces some of the world's best cool-climate wines and is known for the restaurants serving locally produced food to match the flavour of their wines.
The Yarra Valley has been producing premium wine for more than 150 years and was Victoria's first wine growing district as well as the birthplace of Victoria's wine industry. It boasts 300 vineyards and 160 wineries with the region's cooler climate enabling the production of modern classics, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and sparkling wine. Nowadays the Yarra Valley is home to a new frontier of revolutionary winemakers who are using the fertility and diversity of soil types to produce emerging varieties of promising wines such as Arneis, Gruner Veltliner, Gamay, Nebbiola and Innovative savoury Rosés.
Home to some of Australia's largest wine companies, such as Rochfords, De Bortoli, and Yering Station as well as rustic family owned cellar doors and small boutique wineries such as Oakridge or Sutherland Estate, offer sensationally unique experiences.
The Margaret River Wine Region first saw European settlement as late as the early 1830's, but did not become a wine producing region until the 1970's when scientific work recognised its gravelly sandy loam and Mediterranean climate as being perfect for growing grapes. In only 50 years the region has built up a reputation as capable of achieving equivalent world class wine quality with over 5,000 hectares under vine and over 150 wine producers in the region.
Just over three hours' drive from Perth, the Mediterranean climate of cool frost free winters, good soil, low summer rainfall and long slow ripening period, the conditions are nearly perfect for grape growing and so together with viticulture practices produces consistently high quality fruit of intense flavour. Powerful Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon are the region's flagship varieties there are also formidable Semillon, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Merlot and Shiraz. Even though the region contributes only 3% of the country's wine grapes it dominates over 20% of today's premium wine market. Margaret River has a vibrant and innovative wine making industry with boutique wines and progressive attitudes and trends in growing grapes and winemaking. Grand estates such as Leeuwin, Voyager, Sandalford, Devil's Lair, Brookland Valley and Xanadu wines are just some of the regions wineries which produce premium wines that are internationally renowned.
Located in the south eastern corner of South Australia, almost midway between Adelaide and Melbourne, Coonawarra is well regarded as Australia's top producer of premium red wines. The region was first planted in the 1880's but did not survive, as there was a period up until 1945, when most of its wine was distilled into brandy. There was a comeback to wine in the 1950's and now Coonawarra is regarded as Australia's most famous piece of dirt, renowned for its affinity with Cabernet Sauvignon wines.
Coonawarra is a small region, about 20 km in length and 2km in diameter. The area, otherwise known as the other "red centre", has rich paprika-red terra rossa soil which along with the red clay, eroded limestone rich soil and pure underground water. Coonawarra is only 100km inland and so a mainly maritime climate prevails with dry and moderately cool summers, that combined regular cloud cover moderates the summer ripening period, creating perfect conditions for grape-growing.
The area has 36 wineries and vineyards all being close together and well signposted. Most cellar doors offer wine tasting and there are plenty of wine tour operators available which together many onsite restaurants you can match local produce or food dishes with quality house wines.
Some of the most popular brands located at Coonawarra are Wynns, Hollick, Katnook Estate, Di Giorgio, Zema, Rymill, and Majella Wines with their premium red wines winning many awards.
A 40 minutes' drive south of Adelaide, McLaren Vale is Australia's most environmentally progressive wine region and is one of only a few Australian wine regions to have been given special 'character preservation' legislation. As the birthplace of wine in South Australia dating back to 1838, it offers abundance of soils which bask under a Mediterranean climate and is a draw for some of the most creative winemakers around. With over 110 wineries these winemakers add an energy to a region and are adding change to the region with newer arrivals like Nero d'Avola. Vermentino and Fiano. The ability to produce first class varieties like Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Chardonnay still overflow in the region with other varieties including Tempranillo, Viognier, Marsanne, Barbera, Sangiovese and Rousanne on offer.
McLaren Vale is et amongst rolling vineyards, a rugged coastline and a charming collection of villages. There is a distinctly Mediterranean vibe as a result of being founded by Italian inspired wineries, such as Coriole, producing stunning wines like Sangioverse and Fiano or delightfully soft juicy Merlot. Primo Estate provides a touch of Tuscany, with a modern winery and a dash of Italian architectural panache. One of the best organic wineries is the Battle of Bosworth and Spring Seed Wine Co, who can be found on the same estate and produce Australia's only organic Pinot Grigio as well as a fine Chardonnay, Moscato and Shiraz. Another new generation winery is Alpha Box & Dice who turn their wines into names like Golden Mullet Fury, Blood of Jupiter and Dead Winemakers Society! Other first class wineries include the long established d'Arenberg where you will find and exciting 'Rubik's cube' cellar door and Wirra Wirra, famous for its Chruch Block Shiraz and its intense flavour Tempranillo wines.
Located east of the Barossa Valley and set within a panoramic backdrop of limestone cliffs, the Riverland area follows the twists and turns of the Murray River to the Victorian border. The Riverland is one of Australia's largest grape growing regions and by producing some 380,000 tonnes of grapes a year it contributes over a third of Australia's wine grapes. With a warm and temperate climate, wine is produced to exacting and consistent standards each time and is home to some of Australia's largest wine growing producers.
Offering a diverse array of wineries both small and large, each winery offers its own unique or innovative varieties and blends. In Riverland, grape growers and winemakers are encouraged to make new styles and full flavoured wines. Some of the region's best wineries include Banrock Station, Berri Estates, Angrove Wines, 919 Wines, Salena Estate and Mallee Estates. As the region continues to grow and explore new grape varieties, southern Mediterranean varieties such as Montepulciano, Nero d'Avola and Vermentino are gaining popularity. The Riverland has breweries too, which celebrate the German heritage influence. Wilkadene-Woolshed the Riverland's only micro-brewery and is located on the historic sheep and wheat station Wilkadene on the banks of the Murray River.
Riverina is located around the city of Griffin and Wagga Wagga. It is the largest wine producing region in NSW, covering an area of over 15,000 hectares. Located on flat tract of land on NSW's south-west plains and lying at the foothills of a low range of hills above the Murrumbidgee Valley. The Italian influenced area, started grape production when irrigated water became available through the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme in 1912. However it was waves of European migrants after the first and second world wars that gave the Riverina and its wine industry, a cultural identity unique to anywhere else in Australia. Their descendants are now third and fourth generation family wine making businesses and account for a significant proportion of Australia's export success and acknowledgement around the world.
With a strong Italian wine and food culture the Riverina is also popular for its food and wine events during the year. As well as being the second largest wine producer in the country it is best known for its Bulk wines, so if you have ever tried an Australian cask wine you have most likely drunk Riverina wine! Of the fine wine producers two world famous ones are the De Bortoli family (who also have a large vineyard in the Yarra valley) renowned for 'Noble One' and the Casella family, famous for their 'Yellow Tail' brand.
The region is very hot in the summer, comparable to other major irrigation areas in Murray Darling and Riverland regions. Hot dry growing seasons mean that the region is very efficient at growing grapes for wine and although it would seem that the region is too hot for white wines, modern technology has allowed the area to produce some good wines. Today the region boasts over a dozen different Botrytis Semillion wines each delicious and unique to their winery.
Alternative varieties are grown as well and amongst these the prominent red varieties of Durif and Petit Verdot reflect the warmer climate. A rare Bordeaux variety is also made by the Calabria family called, Saint Macaire.
Rutherglen's history is steeped in gold and vines! Victoria's wine industry has emerged as a consequence of supplying the rich prospectors in the 1850's gold rush. With more than 150 years of tradition, there is a long tradition of passionate family owned wineries making award winning wines. Many wineries are housed in historic gold era buildings that provide an appropriate setting to taste the esteemed wines. The old vines that are the backbone of Rutherglen's great fortified wines are grown on a band of loam on the lower slopes of gentle rolling hills called the Rutherglen loam. The climate is strongly Continental with very hot summer days and cold nights and when conditions are favourable the high sugar levels needed for fortified wines are attained.
Impressive full bodied reds enjoy success including the classic varieties Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot. Durif is the region's speciality red wine, being full bodied with dark fruit and cola characteristics. There is also an ample quantity of Pinot Noir and Gamay, as well as other varieties on offer. Arguably the iconic king of Australian fortified wines is the elegant Rutherglen Port, Muscat and Topaque which all enjoy world class recognition. Today crisp whites, full bodied reds and well as world famous fortified wines are produced with unique regional character. In contrast you will find the next generation winemakers who are branching out to test their skills on new varieties, bringing a new style of wines to this traditional winemaking region. These include Savagnin, Tempranillo, Viognier, Marsanne and Fiano.
The oldest of Tasmania's wine areas date back to the middle of the 1800s with serious winemaking starting in the late 1970s with the establishment of vineyards in the Pipers Brook region with the Tamar Valley north of Lauceston producing about 40% of the state's wine. With a cool climate that has long sunny days and dry autumns, Tasmania has ideal growing conditions for developing naturally elegant, pristine and intensely flavoured, aromatic wines. The area is fast becoming the region to beat these cool climate wines and is producing some world class Pinot noir and Reisling, with Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc and Gewurtztraminer, gaining recognition as top notch. The Tasmanian sparkling wines follow the Champagne varietal template of Chardonnay, Meunier and Pinot Noir.


text:
A luminary of her own epistolary novel finds herself out of her genre
Tara Isabella Burton March 06, 2017 share
Image: Jaws (Naked Eye) by Erica Baum. Courtesy of the artist and Bureau New York.
One of my first loves didn't exist. His name was Luigi Alessandro Massimo-Lancelotti, but he usually went by Alex. He was an Italian aristocrat. He had gone to Exeter, my alma mater, a few years before I did, followed by music school in Duino, Italy, in the shadow of the castle where Rainer Marie Rilke used to stay. He'd studied at Santa Cecilia, the Juilliard of Rome. He was doing his Ph.D. in music at Cambridge. He was also a male model. He liked Kierkegaard. We wrote each other long emails from the time I was 14 until I started college. We knew everything about each other's lives — or at least he knew everything about mine.
We'd met on LiveJournal: the early-2000s blogging platform that preceded and, in some ways, foretold the emergence of social media culture. Whereas social media since MySpace and Facebook has largely trended toward increasing publicity, self-broadcasting, and illusions of open access — Instagram selfies, tweeting at celebrities, monetized YouTube channels — LiveJournal often felt intensely private. Some posts on LiveJournal were public, but the platform's "friends feed" meant that we were always consciously writing to a ramshackle community that emerged and we solidified on the platform. In intense diary-style posts, comments, semi-public replies, and replies to replies, we'd carry on lengthy correspondences worthy of 18th century epistolary novels. The intensity of our back and forth, blending public and private with our narrow audience in mind, continued the narrative through an array of dialogues. We wrote ourselves not just in our own journals but also in our engagement with one another.
I played a role, but I also genuinely wanted poetry, I wanted to live life as a novel. Each entry allowed us to continue, like Scheherazade, the story of our own lives
I made many LiveJournal friends — many of whom eventually became close friends off the platform — but Alex was my one real LiveJournal crush. Of course, Alex was improbable, but when I was a teenager, the sheer fact of adulthood felt improbable. Nothing about it ever felt truly impossible. Besides, I was the kind of electrically hungry teenager that wanted everything, or at least the sort of everything that involved Italian counts and studious hours in Gothic English university libraries and beautiful stories about heirloom pianos and the pain of art and long emails about Kierkegaard and self-creation. I had not yet fully grasped that life didn't automatically manifest itself in the shape of my untested desires. Alex was, in effect, the "perfect man" and his perfection (or so I realized later) was in his dynamism: Every time I indicated, in diary form, my own desires, Alex would seem to not just understand them but fulfill them. The platform allowed him to appear as a deeply attentive reader of me and then perform his interpretations. He'd comfort me when I needed comforting, decry other boys who had broken my heart as blackguards, edit my manuscripts, tell me what a singular writer I was, remind me that — as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge — he knew his fair share of writers.
The pure wish fulfillment of his responses didn't seem suspicious; they simply corresponded to my LiveJournal self, which stemmed from both my own adolescent emotional gawkiness and the relative adolescence of the internet as a performance space. Breathlessly aspirational self-expression met a staggeringly naive lack of self-awareness. I was and was not myself: I played a role to be sure, but I also genuinely wanted beauty and poetry, I wanted to live life as a novel in a way that didn't feel safe to express outside the confines of Alex and my created LiveJournal world. Because I was writing for an audience of people who seemed to have pre-approved my brand of insistent, pink-haired sehnsucht by adding me, I felt far safer to project what I believed was an authentic version of myself than I did, say, at my New England boarding school. My authentic self existed in the future; it didn't merely consist of where I was or was from. The person I was when I wrote was my truest self: an expression of who, exactly, I'd like to be. The platform offered a means to perform this self into existence.
LiveJournal offered a chance to create not just a static persona but a continuing narrative. And this narrative was not merely the bits of our lives that we chose to render into story but also an evolving account of our relations with one another on (and outside) the platform. Because we read one another's journals so regularly and because our list of followers was relatively small, each entry allowed us to continue, like Scheherazade, the story of our own lives. We worried if one of us stopped writing: Silence was coded as a sign of despair, if not literal death. It was impossible not to be conscious of the plot threads we dangled before one another — the birth, explosion, and aftermath of one relationship, the subtle negotiation of another, my hunger for what I constantly called the "poetic life." Our engagement with one another intensified our nascent identities. As novelist-readers, engaging with other novelist-readers, we shaped each other, weaving our own micro-narratives in the larger experience of who we were to each other and ourselves.
"Alex" recognized and played to this. He flirted with me, even as he presented me with a fantastical image of what romantic life could be like. He was clever enough to blend lies with truth, which was in some ways just an extreme version of what we all were doing. He described an on-again, off-again relationship with another academic, a Harvard classics major/underwear model called Adriana, who, the day before Alex and I were to meet in person, was suddenly revealed to be pregnant. Her Harvard teaching schedule and some of the photographs he shared of her were stolen from a classicist who, I eventually discovered, actually did work there. To represent himself, Alex used images of a model called Louis Prades, as I found out through a later Google reverse-image search. When I finally confronted Alex about his deception, asking who he "really" was, I got a loquaciously vague, in-character apology for misleading me. Ultimately he deleted the accounts by which I knew him: his entire narrative, several years of history, his advice to me about my life, my boyfriends, about novels I had written or would write, our constantly unfulfilled flirtations — all of it gone.
My experience was not altogether unusual, judging from an informal poll of my LiveJournal-derived friends, but it seems almost unthinkable now. Public-facing social media tends to be geared toward IRL friends, as with Facebook, or toward strangers we would like to be connected to for professional reasons — Twitter, for journalists; Instagram, for would-be bloggers and influencers; LinkedIn, for people who don't blanch at using network as verb. On these platforms, strategic personal branding in images and slogan-like bursts of text took over from baroquely constructed bildungsromans. Alex's lack of a plausible Facebook profile would now require a lot more suspension of disbelief that I'd probably be able to muster.
Social media platforms rarely take a confessional tone or consist of the long, rambling posts of LiveJournal. The varying expectations of self-revelation are already built in
Today's hoaxes usually don't look like Alex. The creation of self-as-novel — the length of the posts, their frequency, their intensity, the intimacy of a story written for the eyes of a select few — is no longer the governing narrative framework of internet culture. Catfishing and debunking catfishers (as in this LJ community) are no longer epistolary genres. The drama of becoming who you wanted to be — seeing if you could write it into more than pretending for actual audiences who become increasingly invested in your shared narrative — has dispersed into multiple mediums. If there is an inheritor to LiveJournal, it is probably Tumblr, but Tumblr is an image-heavy, hashtag-searchable platform whose emphasis on reblogging breaks apart narrative and encourages the construction of a persona from series of memes. You could do a Tumblr hoax. But it would be hard to make a Tumblr catfish.
The more I sought to know Alex — as a person; then later, as a potential hoaxer — the more I became myself, or at least the version of myself Alex capitalized on. The longer Alex catfished me, the closer my vision of myself, as the sort of girl Alex would be interested in, became grounded. I read the books he recommended. I edited my novel to fit his notes. If we are not our words, I thought, what are we? The epistolary genre — in which dialogue engenders self-creation, in which we become more ourselves "in performance" (and in dialogue with) each other — makes even would-be fishermen into catfish.
The zeitgeist of LiveJournal-style online intimacy, and the intensity with which our intimacy represented an aspirational rather than factual foundational understanding of the self, has passed. The great internet falsehoods of our current era are more likely to be faked viral videos or (what else) fake news with a specific, often capitalistic, agenda that transcends the personal satisfaction of more intimate catfishing. Instead of years-long correspondences with strangers, we get Balloon Boy or Belle Gibson, the Australian health blogger who insisted her natural remedies (she sold an app and a cookbook through Penguin) helped her cure the cancer she never had.
The social media landscape today is one where the habitual use of multiple platforms is normalized, and not just for self-dramatizing teens. Our constructed identities are both more nebulous and more fragmented. The personas we adopt are more diffuse: a photograph of us on vacation here, a re-tweeted article there, a pithy joke or two about misandry on Twitter, an ironic meta-layer of hashtagging. We use social media platforms far more continuously than LiveJournal users could, even if they had wanted to, and constantly add to our public online profiles and feeds. These touch a far broader spectrum of people who are aware of us in many different contexts; they no longer consist of long, rambling posts, and they rarely take a confessional tone. The varying expectations of self-revelation are already built in.
A different sense of obligation now structures the compulsion to update. My LiveJournal posts stemmed from my sense that I needed to write to my community to continue the thread of our constructed "plots" in specifically targeted updates — it's telling that I remember the relationship sagas among my LiveJournal friends, including their ex-boyfriends' joke nicknames (everybody discussed on LJ, it seemed, got a joke nickname), with far more clarity than I do most of the contemporaneous relationships of my high school friends. But the intrusion of wider market forces — the capitalist appropriation of personal self-expression as a vehicle to sell oneself as product — has also rendered the story we tell about ourselves online less unfiltered, less governed by our wants and more by how we want (and perhaps even financially need) others to see (and hire, and like) us. The part of our online performances that serve as a résumé can seem inseparable from the parts that are expressive or aspirational.
If our social media presences don't resemble novels anymore, they resemble instead strange mixed-media collages, a jumble from which no single meaning can be ascertained
Much of the social media landscape now tends to reflect a static sense of the self: justifying and verifying an offline presence even as it intensifies it. Today, if we met a potential dating partner, say, at a bar, and they didn't have a Facebook profile or an internet presence, it would be a red flag, sparking the kind of concern once reserved for strangers we met on the internet: How do we know they are not an ax murderer? How do we even know that's their name?
The diffusion of personas and responsibilities makes us less like characters in epistolary novels, online and off. Some of that is age, of course — maturity tempers the worst of our narrative fixations. But some of that too is a matter of genre. The narrative updates we gave on LiveJournal had arcs we chose (my search for the "poetic life"; Alex's quest to establish himself as a great composer) and that our audience helped refine. These easily identifiable, governing wants were easy to track for one another over years. It's much harder to posit an ideal reader over the variety of platforms.
Even if someone follows me on all the platforms across which I've made my juxtapositions, there is no guarantee they will see all I post. I may contain multitudes in my contradictory, Whitmanesque account of myself across these platforms, but few of my friends may even see the dissonance.
To an extent, this is a good thing. Less governed by the constraints of storytelling inherent in a purely verbal (long)form, we're free to use the staccato burst of content that these new multiple social media landscapes provide to embrace a far less prescriptive — and constricting — vision of ourselves: Whitman's celebration of self-contradiction mediated through a Heideggerian reimagining of being as an active rather than static state. If our social media presences don't resemble novels anymore, they resemble instead strange mixed-media collages, a jumble from which no single meaning can be ascertained.
But there's another, less obvious parallel here. As much as Finnegan's Wake, we also resemble the Bible, or indeed any number of sacred or religious texts. After all, what is the Judeo-Christian Bible but a compendium of literary and poetic fragments — written at different points in history by different authors — that time and circumstance (and self-reflection) have fashioned into a single but nonlinear account of being: a polyphony of constant variation that intimates sacred truths of the self.
The people I first met on LiveJournal knew me when I was far less diffuse, far less arch or knowing — when the story I told of myself was entirely aligned with my vision of who I wanted to be, and every entry was a continuation of that governing, limiting narrative. Some of that was adolescence, but the relationships I formed there retain some of that intimacy and intensity. The irony that is so necessary to my "personal brand," the half-intentional dissonance that comes when contrasting my Facebook photos of drunken outings with the articles I post on LinkedIn, is at once freeing and disarming: The more I am able to be myself through the refractions and juxtapositions that online presence across platforms affords us, the less I feel I can safely mean what I say.
Even now, sometimes, I look back at my old entries — so frequent until 2012, then tapering off sporadically into nothing — and miss the person I was then. How intently I distilled my life into a story that seemed to be always unfolding before me. It was easy to think I was most myself then. I wonder whether Alex was too, whoever he was.
Tara Isabella Burton has written on religion and culture for National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the American Interest, and more. She is finishing a doctorate in theology and literature as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford.


The grill scraper that came with my (very used) K7 has a broken/taped handle. Anyone have the ceramic handle that they want to let go of? I can certainly make one out of wood, but if someone has one kicking around please let me know.


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Home » "Bad Linguistics" » Is language a vehicle for happiness?
Is language a vehicle for happiness?
Sep 2, 2011 by Asya Pereltsvaig
In the last few postings, we've discussed several examples of "amateurish linguistics", chiefly involving the assumption that language is a cause rather than vehicle of conceptualizing the world in a certain way. Here is another example that comes not from laymen and not from professional linguists, but from scholars in another field trying to "do linguistics".
A group of mathematicians from Cornell University and the University of Vermont conducted a large-scale study of texts in order to find out if English speakers use more positive or negative words. This is how it worked: the researchers examined huge amounts of English texts: 3.29 million books on Google Books, 20 years worth of New York Times, 2 years worth of tweets and the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs. For each of the sources they compiled a list of the 5,000 most-used words and produced a master list of 10,122 words. Each word has been evaluated by 50 people (using Amazon's Mechanical Turk labor-outsourcing service) who scored each word from negative to positive on a scale of 1 to 9. The word "terrorist", for example, received an average score of 1.30, while "laughter" merited an 8.50, the highest of any word. The results: altogether, positive words outnumbered the negative, and were used more frequently.
Great! So English speakers overall are an upbeat, optimistic, positive-thinking crowd. I could tell you that without spending a dime on a study. But this group of researchers jumped to far-reaching conclusions about human nature. One of the principal researchers, the University of Vermont's Isabel Klouman wrote that the findings
"suggest that a positivity bias is universal… In our stories and writings we tend toward pro-social communication."
(Pro-social behavior includes sharing, altruism, etc.)
Honestly, I don't see how this conclusion is supported by the actual study. How is it that Dr. Klouman sees the positivity bias as universal if the only language that was studied is English (biased towards American English at that!). What about other languages? Would this positivity bias be found in other languages as well? Or are there "positive" and "negative" languages? That's a big question.
But in addition to this grand posturing, there are significant problems with this type of what I call "accounting linguistics", a branch of "amateurish linguistics". Applying mathematical methods to language is all well and dandy. But math must be a tool to understanding linguistic issues, not a self-serving goal. And a solid foundation of basic linguistics is necessary before any mathematical methods can be applied. (By the way, I wonder if these researchers consulted with their colleagues in the linguistics department, such as the one at Cornell, one of the best linguistics departments in the country).
But from the point of view of basic linguistic knowledge, the study by Klouman and her colleagues is rather flawed. One thing to note is that even though connotation in general is an important part of a word's meaning, most words have a neutral connotation. In fact, the most frequent words of any language — which includes such grammatical words as conjunctions (and), prepositions (in, on), pronouns (I, he), negation markers (not), as well as verbs (to be), to speak, to know) and nouns (man, day, house) — are neutral in connotation. Second, many words receive a connotation only in context. Take the word bear, for example. In the context of a zoo or a plush toy, it's a positive word, but in the context of hikers in Alaska — not so much!
Even synonym pairs that seem to differ in connotation, such as hide and conceal, thrifty and stingy, overweight and fat, often have additional differences, whether in the denotation component of meaning (e.g., a fat person can be much heavier than someone who is just overweight) or in register/style. Take, for example, the following quote from Joseph Brodsky's Watermark:
"A smell is, after all, a violation of oxygen balance, an invasion into it of other elements… Depending on that invasion's intensity, you get a scent, a smell, a stench."
Note that synonyms of smell differ in connotation: for instance, scent is positive and stench is negative. But they also differ in their denotational meaning: scent is more subtle than stench. Synonyms of smell also differ with respect to their register: compare, for example, effluvium (higher register) and stink (lower register). And the word smell itself is rather neutral in connotation, outside of context, that is.
Given the need to control for context, I attempted to replicated the study of Dr. Klouman and her colleagues with just a pair of words that differ (mostly) in their connotation. Also, to test their universal positivity bias conclusion, I've chosen a pair of words from Russian, a language (and culture) often blamed for a negative bias. The two words are: shpion and ravedchik, both meaning 'spy'. The former word has a strong negative connotation and is most often applied to an enemy spy, whereas the latter word has a strong positive connotation and is typically applied to 'our spy'. In short, shpion is a bad guy and ravedchik is a good guy. For example, Francis Gary Powers, an American spy shot down by the Soviets in 1960, is a shpion, and Willie Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, who was exchanged for Powers in Berlin 1962, is a ravedchik.
If Klouman et al. are correct in saying that the positivity bias is universal, we expect to find that ravedchik is more frequent in Russian texts than shpion. But quite the opposite is the case. A Google search brought back 12,900,000 hits for shpion and only 7,220,000 hits for ravedchik. The frequency bias towards the negative word is even more pronounced in Yandex searchers (is it because Yandex is a Russian-made search engine, and Google an American-made one?): 17 million hits for shpion and only 7 million hits for ravedchik. Finally, a search in the National Corpus of Russian brought back 1,447 hits for shpion and only 838 hits for ravedchik. The clear frequency bias towards shpion is particularly interesting in light of the fact that only the word ravedchik can be applied to an inanimate 'spy': for example, the U-2 plane that Gary Powers flew of the USSR is samolet-razvedčik (literally 'aircraft-spy').
And speaking of connotation and spies, let me conclude with a quote from a spy thriller Die another day:
James Bond: I'm looking for a North Korean.
Raul: Tourist?
James Bond: Terrorist.
Raul: One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
P.S. A quick Google search revealed that the negative terrorist trumps the positive freedom fighter by nearly 13 to 1 (96,500,000 hits for terrorist and 7,550,000 hits for freedom fighter). That much for the positivity bias there!
« More on endangered languages and saving ideas	 | Next Post
On language on film, again »
On God, Politeness, and the T-V Distinction
Does Google Translate Output Accord with Reality?—And Remarks on the Morphosyntax of Russian Nominalizations
Some Observations on Morphophonological Adaptation of English-derived Loanwords in Russian Slang
amateurish linguistics
frequency count
So how hard can it be, learning a new language?
Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke
Modern Hebrew: old or new? (Part 4: Conclusion)
Languages and genes don't always match — part 2


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Top 10: Classic Crooners
Matthew Simpson
An actor in the '40s, show business has always been in his blood. A true lounge lizard, Torme wanted to be a jazz singer but his manager convinced him that being a crooner would be more lucrative. Nicknamed "The Velvet Fog" because of his distinctive voice (a nickname he always tried to shake), he wrote close to 300 songs. He also acted on television and wrote numerous nonfiction books. In addition, he went through a phase in the late '60s where he genuinely contemplated becoming an airline pilot. Those from the '80s generation might recognize his name from his list of Night Court appearances, as Judge Harry "T" Stone (Harry Anderson) was his biggest fan. Whatever he was doing, his name is synonymous with crooning and scatting.
Popular songs: "Careless Love," "Mountain Greenery"
Barely 5'3" tall, you'd think there was no way this Frenchman could ever become famous. His voice didn't even have that honey flavor that was almost mandatory to be labeled a crooner. He sang more about misery than he did about love and yet it was this freshness that made him an icon. This philosophy was noticed by Edith Piaf, and she took him under her wing. This charismatic populist has been adored all over the world for over 50 years, has appeared in over 60 movies, and has sold more than a 100 million records.
Popular songs: "La Mamma," "La Bohème"
Born into a poor Alabama family, Cole grew up playing the piano. He became famous for having played in most bars in Los Angeles. He was often criticized for not taking a more aggressive stand against the mistreatment of racial minorities; he believed that goodwill and his talent would be a more effective way to help combat racism. His sweet voice was always soothing and he made good use of it with hits like "The Christmas Song." Unfortunately, his heavy smoking cut his career short in 1965, when he died of lung cancer. Since then, his daughter Natalie has made him famous all over again thanks to her digital "duet" with her father.
Popular songs: "Unforgettable," "Mona Lisa"
After a number of odd jobs — being a boxer amongst others — Dino Paul Crocetti got involved with the smuggling of illegal liquor and gambling. Since gambling seems to go hand in hand with entertainment, he began singing. After signing a record deal with MCA, Martin met Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis (he teamed up with the comedian for films like At War with the Army ). He became even more famous in the early '60s when he teamed up with Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford to form the "Rat Pack." His suave grin and party demeanor were what helped make him so fascinating.
Popular songs: "That's Amore," "You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You"
The father of one of today's biggest pop stars and the top three crooners...
Martini Lounge


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Q: How to take multiple strings from inputs and place them into the same array? How can I take a string from each input field and place them in the same array?
The code I have currently is this..

var input1 = document.querySelector('.form');
var btn = document.getElementById('btn');
var array = [];

btn.addEventListener('click', function(){

  array.push(input.value);

  console.log(array);

});

      <input type="text" class="form">

      <input type="text" class="form">

<button class="btn btn-primary text-center" id="btn">SUBMIT</button>

Thanks in advance.

A: Use Array.from to select all .forms with querySelectorAll, and pass a mapping function that extracts the .value from each:

const inputs = document.querySelectorAll('.form');
var btn = document.getElementById('btn');

btn.addEventListener('click', function(){
  const arr = Array.from(inputs, elm => elm.value);
  console.log(arr);
});

      <input type="text" class="form">

      <input type="text" class="form">

<button class="btn btn-primary text-center" id="btn">SUBMIT</button>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Godzilla: King of the Monsters is stomping into theaters next month, but the giant lizard isn't the only monster making noise this time. The sequel to 2014's blockbuster reboot of the classic franchise is bringing Motrha, Rodan and the three-headed Ghidorah into battle, but people are having a little trouble pronouncing the name of the final titan in that roster. You'll see what I'm talking about in the new Godzilla King of the Monsters TV spots below.
This one has the most humor we've seen from Godzilla: King of the Monsters so far. Unfortunately, both of the jokes are lame, and they come from Thomas Middleditch's new character, which makes me think he's going to be the worst part of movie. Sure, cheesy jokes have always been a staple of the Godzilla franchise, but these aren't landing for me. Hopefully they'll be used sparingly throughout the rest of the film.
At the very least, this TV spot brings some incredible new shots of the three-headed Ghidorah, including one where Godzilla is blasting the hell out of his rival with that atomic breath of his.
This TV spot takes a different approach, choosing to focus on Millie Bobby Brown's character being upset with her mother Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) for misusing the titans. As the actress revealed awhile back, she has figured out how to communicate with them "using their bioacoustics on a sonar level." That doesn't sit well with her daughter, who seems to hold Godzilla close to her heart, like a misunderstood pet.
We're trying to keep our expectations in check since 2014's Godzilla wasn't the best it could have been. This sequel looks to up the ante in a number of ways, especially visually. There are shots in here that are pure showstoppers, and this is going to look amazing on an IMAX screen.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters also stars Kyle Chandler, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Aisha Hinds, O'Shea Jackson Jr., David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe, and Zhang Ziyi.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters tears through theaters starting May 31, 2019.


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Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War
Richard M. Ketchum
In the summer of 1777 (twelve months after the Declaration of Indepence) the British launched an invasion from Canada under General John Burgoyne. It was the campaign that was supposed to the rebellion, but it resulted in a series of battles that changed America's history and that of the world. Stirring narrative history, skillfully told through the perspective of those who fought in the campaign, Saratoga brings to life as never before the inspiring story of Americans who did their utmost in what seemed a lost cause, achieving what proved to be the crucial victory of the Revolution.
A New York Times Notable Book, 1997
Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Award, 1997
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SEP 29, 1997
In 1777, the British government mounted an invasion from Canada with the objective of splitting the rebellious American colonies into manageable fractions. On a map the task seemed easy. But on the ground, Ketchum shows, Sir John Burgoyne's route was dominated by rugged terrain, creating insoluble logistics problems. Even had Sir William Howe advanced toward Albany instead of turning south to Philadelphia, Burgoyne, Ketchum convincingly argues, was unlikely to have gone much farther. The American northern army, Continentals and militiamen effectively delayed the British until enough reinforcements could be concentrated to offer battle around Saratoga. While rehabilitating the reputation of the conflict's initial commanders, Philip Schuyler and Arthur St. Claire, Ketchum also provides a balanced account of the feud between eventual commander Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold--a subject often clouded by the former's subsequent incompetence and the latter's subsequent treason. Arnold's energy and coup d'oeil proved the tactical mainsprings of victory. Gates was the organizer, the "chairman of the board" able to weld the disparate elements of his army into the sword that Arnold wielded with such devastating effect on October 7, 1777. Moving beyond the generals and battles, Ketchum puts his readers alongside the enlisted men and the regimental officers who did the fighting and dying, the women who followed them and the civilians who got in war's way. His fast-paced popular history relies on their experiences, recorded in letters, diaries and memoirs, to tell the human side of the American Revolution's galvanizing turning point. Illustrations not seen by PW. History Book Club alternate; first serial to Military History Quarterly.
More Books by Richard M. Ketchum
The Secret Life of the Forest
American Heritage History of the Pioneers
The Battle for Bunker Hill
Decisive Day
Victory at Yorktown


How does MasterTile 434 work?
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South Florida native Raul Esparza has done very well by moving to New York City. Most recently, he's recieved praise for his work in David Mamet's Speed the Plow. (He was not the one who dropped out due to mercury poisoning).
Next month he'll be appearing in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. But in the meantime, he's made a mixtape, brought to you courtesy of the New York TimeOut.
It's a good listen. Enjoy!


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Associate Professor-Department of Informatics.
Oslo, (NO)
Physical Sciences, Mathematics & Statistics
Academic Posts, Principal / Senior Lecturers / Associate Professors
A temporary position as associate professor is available at the Department of Informatics.
Starting as soon as possible, and ending on 31 December 2021.
Description of the research group
The position will be affiliated with the research group for Analytical Solutions and Reasoning (ASR). The core research themes of ASR are applied logic, semantic technology, data integration, formal models and analysis, with applications within Big Data related to the oil and gas domain and the health domain. In accordance with this, the group's course portfolio comprises courses within formal logic and logical methods, semantic technologies, and databases.
To strengthen the Data Science profile of the Department as well as of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the group has cooperated with researchers at the Department of Mathematics on establishing a study programme in Data Science. ASR is a key participant in the Sirius Centre for Research-based Innovation on Scalable Data Access funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN), and also participates in a number of research projects funded by RCN, the European Commission, and others.
Description of the position
The successful applicant is expected to partake in and contribute to ASR's research activities, with a particular focus on database theory and logic. The applicant is expected to strengthen the group's database teaching with a special responsibility for the course IN3020/IN4020 – Database Systems.
The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has the ambition to be a leading research faculty. The candidate will be selected in line with this ambition and is expected to have strong academic qualifications.
The applicant must hold a
doctorate degree within an area of expertise that is relevant to the position, and
must have achieved qualifications pertinent to the level of associate professor in informatics.
Fluent oral and written communication skills in English
Since the position is assigned obligations related to the database courses, it is required that the applicant can document knowledge within databases and database theory of an extent and profundity that justifies the applicant's abilities to contribute professionally to the teaching and development of the database and data science portfolio. Moreover, the Faculty has ambitions to provide teaching closely connected to research. Applicants are asked to document their experience and qualifications in teaching and education and the development of academic courses.
The applicant must be proficient in English.
The basis for assessment will be the scholarly production of the applicant, other qualifications, pedagogical or educational, the applicant's qualifications within leadership and administration as well as the general personal suitability. In ranking the competent applicants, the full range of qualifications will be considered and explicitly assessed.
We offer salary NOK 640 200 – 741 300 per annum depending on qualifications in position as Associate professor (position code 1011) a professionally stimulating working environment attractive welfare benefits and a generous pension agreement, in addition to Oslo's family-friendly environment with its rich opportunities for culture and outdoor activities
Formal regulations
Please see the rules for Appointments to Professorships and Associate Professorships and Rules for the assessment and weighting of pedagogical competence.
According to the Norwegian Freedom and Information Act (Offentleglova) information about the appliant may be included in the public applicant list, also in cases where the applicant has requested non-disclosure
The University of Oslo has an agreement for all employees, aiming to secure rights to research results etc.
The University of Oslo aims to achieve a balanced gender composition in the workforce and to recruit people with ethnic minority backgrounds.
The application must include:
An application letter describing how the applicant meets the requirements of the position
A research plan (2-4 pages) describing the applicant's scientific ambitions for the near future, including plans for funding proposals
Detailed CV (including complete list of education, positions, pedagogical experience, administrative experience, project acquisition and coordination experience, funding and awards, and other qualifying activities)
Copies of educational certificates, PhD diploma, transcript of records and letters of recommendation
A complete list of all scientific production with bibliographic references and academic merits and awards (if not included in the CV) Full text of up to 5 selected publications the applicant wishes to include in the evaluation
Documentation of teaching and supervising Master and PhD students
Documentation of other competence of relevance for the position such as teaching experience, publications in the popular press, capabilities of fund raising, etc.
List of 3 reference persons (name, relation to candidate, e-mail and phone number)
The application with attachments must be delivered in our electronic recruiting system. Please note that all documents should be in English (or a Scandinavian language).
In the evaluation of the qualified candidates the full range of these criteria will be explicitly addressed and assessed.Interviews will be part of the appointment process, eventuelt: along with a trial lecture.
Contact information Professor Martin Giese, email: martingi@ifi.uio.no, tel. +47 22852737
For technical questions about the recruitment system, HR Adviser Torunn Standal Guttormsen, email: t.s.guttormsen@mn.uio.no, tel. +47 22 85 42 72
About the University of Oslo
The University of Oslo is Norway's oldest and highest rated institution of research and education with 28 000 students and 7000 employees. Its broad range of academic disciplines and internationally esteemed research communities make UiO an important contributor to society.
The Department of Informatics (IFI) is one of nine departments belonging to the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. IFI is Norway's largest university department for general education and research in Computer Science and related topics.
The Department has more than 1600 students on bachelor level, 600 master students, and over 240 PhDs and postdocs. The overall staff of the Department is close to 370 employees, about 280 of these in full time positions. The full time tenured academic staff is 75, mostly Full/Associate Professors
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