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This paper presents the results of a numerical study undertaken to assess the influence of residual stresses on the ductile tearing behavior of a high strength low toughness aluminum alloy. The Gurson-Tvergaard model was calibrated against conventional fracture toughness data using parameters relating to void nucleation, growth, and coalescence. The calibrated model was used to predict the load versus ductile tearing behavior of a series of full-scale and quarter-scale wide-plate tests. These center-cracked tension tests included specimens that contained a self-balancing residual stress field that was tensile in the region of the through-wall crack. Analyses of the full-scale wide-plate tests indicated that the model provides a good prediction of the load versus the ductile tearing behavior up to approximately 3 mm of stable tearing. The influence of residual stress on the load versus the crack growth behavior was accurately simulated. Predictions of the load versus the crack growth behavior of full-scale wide-plate tests for crack extensions greater than 3 mm and of the quarter-scale tests were low in terms of predicted load at a given amount of tearing. This was considered to result from (i) the 'valid' calibration range in terms of specimen thickness and crack extension, (ii) the development of shear lips, and (iii) the differences in the micromechanism of ductile void formation under plane strain and under plane stress conditions. [DOI: 10.111511.2967876] Keywords: ductile fracture, residual stresses, fracture mechanics, damage mechanics, Gurson-Tvergaard model

This article examines nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker's essay 'Anatomy of the Chess Automaton' (1839). Walker's writing frequently highlighted how spaces of urban modernity co-existed uneasily with historical memories. His tendency to highlight disreputable scenarios regarding chess-play can be set against a narrative which suggests chess-play became respectable in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Unusually for Walker, however, his 'Anatomy of the Chess Automaton' demonstrates a desire to close off meaning and complexity, to diminish the potential for disreputable acts, whilst existing at odds with the historical context in which he wrote. This cultural mode in which Walker operated in can be viewed through the conceptual frameworks of curiosity (following Barbara M. Benedict) and respectability (following Mike Huggins) which highlight ideas of regulation, consumption, performance, transgression, and ambition. This article employs the frameworks of curiosity and respectability to interrogate related leisure and sporting practices in relation to the Automaton Chess-Player which existed outside the regular boundaries of society. It continues research previously published in Sport in History and elsewhere on the nature of chess-play and chess-spectacle as a disreputable spectacle. Ultimately, I show how both Walker and the object of his essay were curiosities themselves, engaging in an infinite game which produced a jumble of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contextualise the nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker’s involvement within urban and literary culture. Continuing research published in two recent Sport in History articles concerning Walker’s essays on the chess-player in Victorian Paris, this article considers another side to the chess-player’s cultural image in a different urban setting within Walker’s historical-fiction ‘A Night in York - A Chess Adventure of 1842’, in which the author imagines a night-time meeting with a ghostly medieval chess-player. George Walker’s life was marked by an involvement within the sites of nineteenth-century literary and urban chess-play. One notable feature of Walker’s writing was his constant return to the history of the game and its influence on the present day. Indeed, the interplay between chess past and chess present has been seen as a problematic aspect of his literary output. This article considers this theme and contends that Walker’s regard for the past should be seen within the context of modernity and an attempt to recover and pay sufficient attention to the historic game before its traces and fragments disappeared forever, while acknowledging the futility of the effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Walker's March 1840 article forFraser's Magazineentitled ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’ outlined the history and method of blindfold chess (or chess-play without sight of the board and pieces). Arriving as chess was becoming increasingly visible within nineteenth-century literary and urban culture, Walker's essay covered familiar issues on the topic concerning spectacle, utility, and bodily and mental damage, as well as furthering his own concerns with the history of the game and the possibility of expanding participation. This assessment of ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, part of wider research concerning chess in urban and literary modernity, complements research published in the author's monograph on the cultural chess-player and previously withinSport in History. Prominent themes of Walker's article include the multiple identities of the blindfold chess-player and the game’s ever-changing relationship to standards of respectability. ‘Chess Without the Chess-Board’, offering a lengthy ‘how-to-play’ to the beginning player and outlining the national prestige and celebrity of historical blindfold chess-players, also presents a potentially disreputable reading of practice and player, denying any wider social utility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the relationship between the flying saucer in post-war American popular culture and the narratives of authority, home, and technology. Topics include the flying saucer as a discursive centre, as a historical object, and the decline of flying saucer sightings. Also tackled are accounts of flying saucer sightings, the history of flying saucer, and the factors that contributed to its popularity.

Between 1840 and 1851, amateur and professional chess became an increasingly prominent part of the Victorian leisure world. A rapid rise in both literary output on the game and the number of places where it was played fortified the popular image of chess as rational and respectable. This paper challenges this image through close examination of the chess-player and writer George Walker's 1840 article The Café de la Régence. By considering Mike Huggins' challenge to the idea of a homogeneous Victorian middle-class respectability and taking up his implicit call to the historian of middle-class leisure to re-examine all leisure activities, particularly those that have, as the chess-player has until recently, evaded scholarly attention, this paper builds on revisionist challenges to the homogeneous respectability discourse. Providing an alternative reading of the chess-player as a potentially disreputable figure on display in the brightly-lit, notorious Parisian night, Walker depicts a loud, noisy, crowded, ill-mannered, sexist, and money-grabbing environment filled with passion and emotion, far removed from rational recreations that aimed at the individuals' improvement of health and physique, and personal, civic and national prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]