Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Real-time IAQ index“

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) issues have a direct impact on the health and comfort of building occupants. In this paper, an experimental low-cost system has been developed to address IAQ issues by using a distributed internet of things platform to control and monitor the indoor environment in building spaces while adopting a data-driven approach. The system is based on several real-time sensor data to model the indoor air quality and accurately control the ventilation system through algorithms to maintain a comfortable level of IAQ by balancing indoor and outdoor pollutant concentrations using the Indoor Air Quality Index approach. This paper describes hardware and software details of the system as well as the algorithms, models, and control strategies of the proposed solution which can be integrated in detached ventilation systems. Furthermore, a mobile app has been developed to inform, in real time, different-expertise-user profiles showing indoor and outdoor IAQ conditions. The system is implemented in a small prototype box and early-validated with different test cases considering various pollutant concentrations, reaching a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 3–4.

In recent years, more and more occupants have suffered from respiratory illness due to poor indoor air quality (IAQ). In order to address this issue, this paper presents a method to achieve efficient monitoring and adaptive control of IAQ. Firstly, an indoor air quality monitoring and control system (IAQMCS) is developed using IoT technology. Then, based on fuzzy inference, a novel fuzzy air quality index (FAQI) model is proposed to effectively assess IAQ. Furthermore, a simple adaptive control mechanism, called SACM, is designed to automatically control the IAQMCS according to a real-time FAQI value. Finally, extensive experiments are performed by comparing with regular control (time-based control), which show that our proposed method effectively measures various air parameters (CO2, VOC, HCHO, PM2.5, PM10, etc.) and has good performance in terms of evaluation accuracy, average FAQI value, and overall IAQ.

This study was designed to verify the effectiveness of smart gardens by improving indoor air quality (IAQ) through the installation of an indoor garden with sensor-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology that identifies pollutants such as particulate matter. In addition, the study aims to introduce indoor gardens for customized indoor air cleaning using the data and IoT technology. New apartments completed in 2016 were selected and divided into four households with indoor gardens installed and four households without indoor gardens. Real-time data and data on PM2.5, CO2, temperature, and humidity were collected through an IoT-based IAQ monitoring system. In addition, in order to examine the effects on the health of occupants, the results were analyzed based on epidemiological data, prevalence data, current maintenance, and recommendation criteria, and were presented and evaluated as indices. The indices were classified into a comfort index, which reflects the temperature and humidity, an IAQ index, which reflects PM2.5 and CO2, and an IAQ composite index. The IAQ index was divided into five grades from “good” to “hazardous”. Using a scale of 1 to 100 points, it was determined as follows: “good (0–20)”, “moderate (21–40)”, “unhealthy for sensitive group (41–60)”, “bad (61–80)”, “hazardous (81–100)”. It showed an increase in the “good” section after installing the indoor garden, and the “bad” section decreased. Additionally, the comfort index was classified into five grades from “very comfortable” to “very uncomfortable”. In the comfort index, the “uncomfortable” section decreased, and the “comfortable” section increased after the indoor garden was installed.

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is not only a determinant of occupational health but also influences all indoor human behaviours. In most university establishments, laboratories are also used as classrooms. On one hand, indoor environment quality (IEQ) conditions supervision in laboratories is relevant for experimental activities. On the other hand, it is also crucial to provide a healthy and productive workplace for learning activities. The proliferation of cost-effective sensors and microcontrollers along with the Internet of Things (IoT) architectures enhancements, enables the development of automatic solutions to supervise the Laboratory Environmental Conditions (LEC). This paper aims to present a real-time IEQ-laboratory data collection system-based IoT architecture named iAQ Plus (iAQ+). The iAQ+ incorporates an integrated Web management system along with a smartphone application to provide a historical analysis of the LEC. The iAQ+ collects IAQ index, temperature, relative humidity and barometric pressure. The results obtained are promising, representing a meaningful contribution for IEQ supervision solutions based on IoT. iAQ+ supports push notifications to alert people in a timely way for enhanced living environments and occupational health, as well as a work mode feature, so the user can configure setpoints for laboratory mode and schoolroom mode. Using the iAQ+, it is possible to provide an integrated management of data information of the spatio-temporal variations of LEC parameters which are particularly significant not only for enhanced living environments but also for laboratory experiments.

During the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc in many areas of the world, as the infection spreads through person-to-person contact. Transmission and prognosis, once infected, are potentially influenced by many factors, including indoor air pollution. Particulate Matter (PM) is a complex mixture of solid and/or liquid particles suspended in the air that can vary in size, shape, and composition and recent scientific work correlate this index with a considerable risk of COVID-19 infections. Early Warning Systems (EWS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have given rise to the development of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) based on sensors, which measure PM levels and monitor In-door Air pollution Quality (IAQ) in real-time. This article proposes an open-source platform architecture and presents the development of a Long Range (LoRa) based sensor network for IAQ and PM measurement. A few air quality sensors were tested, a network platform was implemented after simulating setup topologies, emphasizing feasible low-cost open platform architecture.

In the face of the severe global epidemic, indoor architectural space has become one of the critical issues, and the construction of a new type of “built environment” while solving “health and epidemic prevention” has become the goal of active development in countries around the world (SDGs & Pandemic Response); Pollutant concentration, optimization of indoor heat and humidity environment, and release of indoor environmental monitoring data, etc. It can not only protect the short-term needs of building users but also provide long-term health protection for building users and ultimately achieve the purpose of physical and mental health of building users. This study uses GIA-K007-12 Air Box to collect “environmental characteristics” variables; IAQ, PM1, PM2.5, PM10, CO2, TVOC, HCHO, Fungi index, TEMP, and HUMD are input variables for XGBOOST, using IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0 performs statistical analysis, modelling and using PYTHON to simulate the accuracy of the building fresh air system model and the decision ranking of essential factors. The test results are based on the XGBOOST decision tree. The accuracy value reaches 94.24%, and the order of critical environmental factors for the indoor fresh air system is PM1, HCHO, IAQ, Fungi index, TVOC, etc. The research results can provide the basis for constructing a teaching space for epidemic prevention and demonstrate that the establishment of an “air quality control platform that can be calculated in real-time” can improve the environmental health awareness (EHL) of stakeholders and provide for future development of epidemic prevention space planning and design in the post-epidemic era Reference and application of operation management.

Light and active mobility, as well as multimodal mobility, could significantly contribute to decarbonization. Air quality is a key parameter to monitor the environment in terms of health and leisure benefits. In a possible scenario, wearables and recharge stations could supply information about a distributed monitoring system of air quality. The availability of low-power, smart, low-cost, compact embedded systems, such as Arduino Nicla Sense ME, based on BME688 by Bosch, Reutlingen, Germany, and powered by suitable software tools, can provide the hardware to be easily integrated into wearables as well as in solar-powered EVSE (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) for scooters and e-bikes. In this way, each e-vehicle, bike, or EVSE can contribute to a distributed monitoring network providing real-time information about micro-climate and pollution. This work experimentally investigates the capability of the BME688 environmental sensor to provide useful and detailed information about air quality. Initial experimental results from measurements in non-controlled and controlled environments show that BME688 is suited to detect the human-perceived air quality. CO2 readout can also be significant for other gas (e.g., CO), while IAQ (Index for Air Quality, from 0 to 500) is heavily affected by relative humidity, and its significance below 250 is quite low for an outdoor uncontrolled environment.

This article describes the design and development of a low-cost, portable monitoring system for indoor environment quality (IEQ). IEQ is a holistic concept that encompasses elements of indoor air quality (IAQ), indoor lighting quality (ILQ), acoustic comfort, and thermal comfort (temperature and relative humidity). The unit is intended for the monitoring of temperature, humidity, PM2.5, PM10, total VOCs (×3), CO2, CO, illuminance, and sound levels. Experiments were conducted in various environments, including a typical indoor working environment and outdoor pollution, to evaluate the unit’s potential to monitor IEQ parameters. The developed system was successfully able to monitor parameter variations, based on specific events. A custom IEQ index was devised to rate the parameter readings with a simple scoring system to calculate an overall IEQ percentage. The advantages of the proposed system, with respect to commercial units, is associated with better customisation and flexibility to implement a variety of low-cost sensors. Moreover, low-cost sensor modules reduce the overall cost to provide a comprehensive, portable, and real-time monitoring solution. This development facilities researchers and interested enthusiasts to become engaged and proactive in participating in the study, management, and improvement of IEQ.

Assessing indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is fundamental to ensuring health, well-being, and safety. A particular type of indoor compartment, land transport cabins (LTCs), specifically those of trains and buses, was surveyed. The global rise in commute and in-cabin exposure time gives relevance to the current study. This study discusses indoor climate (IC) in LTCs to emphasize the risk to the well-being and comfort of exposed occupants linked to poor IEQ, using objective assessment and a communication method following recommendations of the CEN-EN16798-1 standard. The measurement campaign was carried out on 36 trips of real-time travel on 15 buses and 21 trains, mainly in the EU region. Although the measured operative temperature, relative humidity, CO2, and VOC levels followed EN16798-1 requirements in most cabins, compliance gaps were found in the indoor climate of these LTCs as per ventilation requirements. Also, the PMV-PPD index evaluated in two indoor velocity ranges of 0.1 and 0.3 m/s showed that 39% and 56% of the cabins, respectively, were thermally inadequate. Also, ventilation parameters showed that indoor air quality (IAQ) was defective in 83% of the studied LTCs. Therefore, gaps exist concerning the IC of the studied LTCs, suggesting potential risks to well-being and comfort and the need for improved compliance with the IEQ and ventilation criteria of EN16798-1.

Air pollution is increasing profusely in Indian cities as well as throughout the world, and it poses a major threat to climate as well as the health of all living things. Air pollution is the reason behind degraded indoor air quality (IAQ) in urban buildings. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main contributor to indoor pollution as humans themselves are one of the generating sources of this pollutant. The testing and monitoring of CO2 consume cost and time and require smart sensors. Thus, to solve these limitations, machine learning (ML) has been used to predict the concentration of CO2 inside an office room. This study is based on the data collected through real-time measurements of indoor CO2, number of occupants, area per person, outdoor temperature, outer wind speed, relative humidity, and air quality index used as input parameters. In this study, ten algorithms, namely, artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), Gaussian process regression (GPR), linear regression (LR), ensemble learning (EL), optimized GPR, optimized EL, optimized DT, and optimized SVM, were used to predict the concentration of CO2. It has been found that the optimized GPR model performs better than other selected models in terms of prediction accuracy. The result of this study indicated that the optimized GPR model can predict the concentration of CO2 with the highest prediction accuracy having R , RMSE, MAE, NS, and a20-index values of 0.98874, 4.20068 ppm, 3.35098 ppm, 0.9817, and 1, respectively. This study can be utilized by the designers, researchers, healthcare professionals, and smart city developers to analyse the indoor air quality for designing air ventilation systems and monitoring CO2 level inside the buildings.

The prospective PRIME trial applied real-time, objective imaging biomarkers to determine individualized retreatment needs with intravitreal aflibercept injections (IAI) among eyes with diabetic retinopathy (DR). 40 eyes with nonproliferative or proliferative DR without diabetic macular edema received monthly IAI until a DR severity scale (DRSS) level improvement of ≥2 steps was achieved. Eyes were randomized 1:1 to DRSS- or PLI- guided management. At the final 2-year visit, DRSS level was stable or improved compared to baseline in all eyes, and mean PLI decreased by 11% (p = 0.73) and 23.6% (p = 0.25) in the DRSS- and PLI-guided arms. In both arms, the percent of pro re nata (PRN) visits requiring IAI was significantly higher in year 2 versus 1 (p < 0.0001). The percent of PRN visits receiving IAI during year 1 was significantly correlated with the percent of PRN visits with IAI during year 2 (p < 0.0001). Through week 104, 77.4% of instances of DRSS level worsening in the DRSS-guided arm were preceded by or occurred alongside an increase of PLI. Overall, consistent IAI re-treatment interval requirements were observed longitudinally among individual patients. Additionally, PLI increases appeared to precede DRSS level worsening, highlighting PLI as a valuable biomarker in the management of DR.

This paper explores the role of automation in cloud infrastructure management, focusing on its impact on efficiency and reliability. Key use cases, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, Continuous Integration/ Continuous De- ployment (CI/CD), and real-time monitoring with the ELK stack are examined. The paper discusses how automation reduces manual effort, promotes consistency, and enhances scalability in cloud environments. It highlights the benefits of automated alerting and its role in improving security and system stability. By embracing automation, organizations can streamline cloud infrastructure management, ensuring a robust and adaptable framework that supports business continuity and agility. Index Terms—Cloud Infrastructure Management, Automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Terraform, ELK Stack (Elastic- search, Logstash, Kibana), Automated Alerting

With the development of the market economy and changes in the demand for talents in the market, the cultivation of innovation and entrepreneurship (IAE) among university students has been emphasized, and how to improve the quality of IAE education and promote the overall development of university students has become a key concern of university teachers. Therefore, the design and implementation of the IAE project management system should be explored in the study, starting from the IAE education of university students. The thesis addresses the current situation and characteristics of IAE development of university students and develops a WEB system applicable to the project management of IAE for university students at this stage. Cluster analysis is a mathematical statistical method for grouping and categorising similar data. The design of a classification system based on university innovation and entrepreneurship data proposes a new definition of outlier index for outliers detected in real time, combined with the concept of CBLOF(t). On this basis, the system also implements the monitoring function for abnormal data, thus serving as system optimisation and fault warning. The system implements the main functions such as login, registration, project release, project declaration, and management.

The decline of relative chlorophyll contents during fruit ripening is considered to be an important indicator of fruit physiological condition. The recent availability of low-cost portable visible spectrum (VIS) spectrometers has spurred research interest towards optical sensing of chlorophyll changes in intact fruit, with many scientists attempting to link the shifts in optical signals, attributed to chlorophyll changes, to different maturity and quality parameters. One of the widely available portable devices for non-destructive estimation of relative chlorophyll contents is the DA meter, which provides a maturity index that is calculated as a difference between absorption at 670 nm (near the chlorophyll-a absorption peak) and 720 nm (background of the spectrum), abbreviated as IAD. In the present study, the evolution of IAD and its relation to starch pattern index (SPI) and fruit flesh firmness (FFF) was monitored in fruit of two cv. ‘Gala’ clones during maturation and storage, aiming to identify a potential existence of a usable IAD range for the assessment and prediction of the optimal harvest window and storage potential. In both clones, canopy positions, fruit sides, and seasons IAD, SPI, and FFF generally changed in a linear fashion over time, but with partially very different slopes, i.e., they were changing at different rates. What all of these parameters had in common was the presence of a very high biological variability, which is typical of apple fruit. Significantly powerful estimations of SPI (r2 > 0.7, p < 0.005) and pre- and post-storage FFF (r2 > 0.6, p < 0.005) were achieved. However, the very large biological variability could not be neutralized, which means that the predictions always included large confidence intervals of up to 0.46–0.59 units for SPI and 0.82–1.1 kgF FFF, which ultimately makes them unusable for practical applications. Experiments done under real-life conditions in a commercial fruit storage facility on several different fruit batches confirmed that IAD measured at harvest cannot be used indiscriminately for predicting post-storage FFF of cv. ‘Gala’ originating from different orchards. Nevertheless, mean IAD values that were obtained at optimal maturity from samples of the same orchards remained stable over seasons (0.8–1.2), which strongly suggests that, provided that the calibrations and validations are not only cultivar, but also orchard-specific, IAD has a potential for estimating maturity and storability of apple fruit. In this case, IAD could replace standard maturity indices, otherwise it would be suited for use as a supplementary index for determining fruits physiological maturity status.

Hybrid Learning Community Network (HLCN) can link individuals to collectives systematically, support both virtual and actual scenarios, and share and trade knowledge, experience, and learning resources. Existing studies on HLCN are mostly theoretical research, there’re very few empirical evidences, and the integrity of the research systems is yet to be improved further. In view of these shortcomings, this paper proposed a theoretical model for HLCN and built an Evaluation Index System (EIS) for assessing the effectiveness of the hybrid learning activities and analyzing the feature parameters and centrality of the HLCN. Then in the paper, a Hybrid Learning Interactive Activity Content Network Relation (HL-IAC-NR) matrix was established based on learning community, and the indexes such as students’ learning attention on knowledge points and their learning sentiments were attained. At last, this paper used the Charnes-Cooper-Rhodes (CCR) model in Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the relative effectiveness, and the real-time effects of different types of hybrid learning interactive activities were analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed model and evaluation method was verified via experiments.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which excels at solving a wide variety of Atari and board games, is an area of machine learning that combines the deep learning approach and reinforcement learning (RL). However, to the authors’ best knowledge, there seem to be few studies that apply the latest DRL algorithms on real-world powertrain control problems. If there are any, the requirement of classical model-free DRL algorithms typically for a large number of random exploration in order to realize good control performance makes it almost impossible to implement directly on a real plant. Unlike most of the other DRL studies, whose control strategies can only be trained in a simulation environment—especially when a control strategy has to be learned from scratch—in this study, a hybrid end-to-end control strategy combining one of the latest DRL approaches—i.e., a dueling deep Q-network and traditional Proportion Integration Differentiation (PID) controller—is built, assuming no fidelity simulation model exists. Taking the boost control of a diesel engine with a variable geometry turbocharger (VGT) and cooled (exhaust gas recirculation) EGR as an example, under the common driving cycle, the integral absolute error (IAE) values with the proposed algorithm are improved by 20.66% and 9.7% respectively for the control performance and generality index, compared with a fine-tuned PID benchmark. In addition, the proposed method can also improve system adaptiveness by adding another redundant control module. This makes it attractive to real plant control problems whose simulation models do not exist, and whose environment may change over time.

Aim. To determine the advantages and disadvantages of laparoscopic (LS) and robot-assisted (RA) surgery in oncogynecological operations.Materials and methods. 282 clinical cases were retrospectively analyzed. The patients were treated in oncogynecological department No. 70 of the CS.P. Botkin City Clinical Hospital, Moscow Healthcare Department for endometrial cancer of stages IA–II, cervical cancer in situ and IA1 stages or atypical endometrial hyperplasia in the period from February 2020 to September 2022, among them 74 patients were operated with Da Vinci robotic units (models Si and Xi) and 208 using laparoscopy. The standard volumes of surgical treatment, depending on the clinical diagnosis, were: hysterectomy, hysterectomy with pelvic lymphadenectomy, hysterectomy with pelvic and retroperitoneal lumbar lymphadenectomy. To compare the technical characteristics of minimally invasive operations and the condition of patients in the intra- and postoperative periods in each group, data on the duration of operations, body mass index, age, intra- and postoperative complications, as well as the number of postoperative hospital bed-days were analyzed.Results. When comparing the average duration of operations by time, a statistically significant difference was obtained. Thus, LS hysterectomy was performed 43 minutes faster on average than RA (74.2 minutes versus 117 minutes) (p <0.001). When performing pelvic lymphadenectomy, the average duration of RA operations was 28 minutes longer than LS operations (142 minutes versus 170 minutes), and when adding the retroperitoneal lymphadenectomy stage, the average duration of RA operations was 128 minutes longer than LS operations.Conclusion. At this stage of technology development in surgery, LS operations have a number of advantages over RA ones in numerous ways. LS operations demonstrate statistically significantly shorter execution time, fewer perioperative complications, as well as a more controlled environment in the operating field. In the long term, RA surgery has serious potential and is currently at an early stage of its development. A real and sober assessment of its characteristics will determine the right direction for the development of this technology in the future.

AbstractPig’s blood and liver are valuable edible slaughter by-products which are also the major ingredients of offal-derived foodstuffs. The aim of the study was an evaluation of the occurrence of hepatitis E virus (HEV) and porcine adenovirus (pAdV) as an index virus of faecal contamination in pig’s blood and liver for human consumption. In total, 246 samples of retail liver (n = 100) and pooled pig’s blood (n = 146) were analysed for the presence of HEV and pAdV. Blood samples were individually collected from 1432 pigs at slaughter age. Viral genomic material, including RNA of a sample process control virus was isolated from food samples using a QIAamp® Viral RNA Mini Kit. Virus-specific IAC-controlled real-time PCR methods were used for detection of target viruses. HEV RNA was found in 6 (2.4%; 95% CI: 0.9–5.2) out of 246 samples of tested foodstuffs. The virus was detected in pig’s blood (3.4%; 95% CI: 1.1–7.8) and liver (1.0%; 95% CI: 0.0–5.0) with no significant differences observed in the frequency of its occurrence between the two by-products (t = 1.33; p = 0.182 > 0.05); however PAdV was detected more frequently in pig’s blood than in liver (t = 4.65; p = 0.000 < 0.05). The HEV strains belonged to the 3f and 3e subtype groups and the pAdV strains were assigned to serotype 5. PAdV was detected in pigs regardless of the farm size from which they originated. The number of animals raised on the farm (the farm size) had no influence on the occurrence of HEV or pAdV infections in pigs (F = 0.81, p = 0.447 > 0.05 for HEV; F = 0.42, p = 0.655 > 0.05 for pAdV). Although HEV was detected in pig’s offal only sporadically, consumers cannot treat its occurrence with disregard as it demonstrates that HEV-contaminated pig tissues can enter the food chain.

Background:Evaluating the long-term impacts of healthcare policies on patient’s health and treatment costs for people with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) is challenging due to its chronic nature, and the variation in individual patient journeys post-diagnosis. Agent-based simulations are a novel approach to interrogating this complexity, and allow the consequences of different policy scenarios on outcomes to be explored.Objectives:Develop and validate an agent-based simulation of the UK axial spondyloarthritis healthcare system, using real-world data.Interrogate the effects of earlier biologic treatment on costs and patient outcomes.Methods:Anonymised data were obtained from the UK National Early Inflammatory Arthritis Audit, and BSR Biologics Register (BSRBR-AS). This provided data on 162 units, and 702 patients with 1,631 patient-years of follow-up. An agent-based model was designed and programmed on the Netlogo platform to simulate patients and units individually over time. New patients were created based on national disease prevalence statistics. Patients’ disease journeys were modelled with a Bath AS Disease Activity Index (BASDAI) score. The model included hospital outpatient attendances, treatment histories, drug costs, and key patient demographics. The baseline simulation was run for two simulated years, repeated 10 times, and assessed against the BSRBR-AS dataset for validation. The model was subsequently used to explore five experimental scenarios in which the time between the date of diagnosis, to first introduction to biologics (d-b) was varied by increasing the number of appointments. The experiment was run 10 times for each parameter setting.Results:In the baseline model in a typical two year run, 13,631 new patients attended 5,167 baseline, and 6,966 follow-up appointments. Of these, 6,324 and 623 were prescribed ≥1NSAID, and biologics, respectively. The validation comparison tests showed a high-level of similarity between simulated output and target datasets. In the target data, d-b was 250 days. In the experimental scenarios, as might be expected, earlier biologic access improved outcomes but at higher-costs (Figure 1; Table 1). Reducing d-b to 150 days doubled the number of patients on biologics at 2 years from 623 to 1,286. It also led to 8% more patients achieving a BASDAI of 0 to 2.5 at 2 years, with 5%, 1%, and 2% less patients achieving 2.5 - 5, 5 to 7.5 and 7.5 to 10 BASDAI, respectively. Reducing d-b to 150 days increased drug costs from £3.2 million to £8.8 million. However, the total number of appointments (a proxy for staff costs) increased proportionality less from 16,000 to 20,000.Table 1.Influence of varying the time between diagnosis to biologic treatment (d-b) on drug-use and staffing costsDiagnosis to Biologic (d-b)Drug Costs Unit (£k)Total AppointmentsNo. patients prescribed NSAIDsNo. patients prescribed Biologics1508,79620,3847,1541,2832205,70218,5926,7969712503,25916,2146,3246212602,05414,7005,9683822651,29713,4115,562233Figure 1.Influence of varying the time between diagnosis to biologic treatment (d-b) on 2 year BASDAI outcomeConclusion:We have successfully developed, and validated an agent-based approach to model the effect of key policy changes on the whole healthcare system, providing output estimates of cost and patient outcomes, based on integrated real-world data. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to explore the patient journey in people with axSpA in this way. The model provides a useful tool for exploring the effects of changing the way healthcare is delivered to patients with this disease. Our experimental analysis lends support to the case for increasing staffing and drug expenditure to achieve current NICE standards of care in AS.Acknowledgments:Financial support National Axial Spondyloarthritis Society (NASS), data access BSR.Disclosure of Interests:Alan Roach Grant/research support from: I was awarded an I-CRP grant from Pfizer for a similar simulation in RA, this was for about £50k and ran from 1/9/15 28/2/17., Ian Scott: None declared, Gary Macfarlane: None declared, Gareth T. Jones Grant/research support from: Pfizer, AbbVie, UCB, Celgene and GSK., Alex MacGregor: None declared

The number of cases involving human death has increased due to scattered virus in the air. This has become a major concern on air quality, especially indoor air quality. The chemical compounds found in the building have limited exchange of outdoor and indoor, which results in building of contaminants such as CO2 emitted by occupants activity in the building. The usage of air conditioner is unable to removes pathogens because its only circulates in air within the area. Medical Centre has a very high potential to centralize the patient with diseases related to health problems such as asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular related-diseases. This study is conducted at medical centre of NDUM, in Kuala Lumpur. The number of patients admitted was compared to the level of CO2, temperature and relative humidity in the Medical Centre. The outdoor air index is collected from DOE Malaysia. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is used in this system as it can collect and disseminate the environmental data. Zigbee with 2.4GHz band is used as the wireless standard for the measurement. Sensors were attached to several points at the wall of the waiting room and were controlled by the PC module. Lab View is used to manage the data acquisition due to its ability to program a real-time system. The collected data of temperature, relative humidity and level of C02 determined the indoor air quality in the medical centre. This study brought to the assessment on the medical practice and the air quality that met the standard suggested by ASHRAE.

To develop an Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring and detecting system based on a new Internet of Thing (IoT) sensory technology device that incorporated nine recommended indoor pollutants by the academic literature and reliable organizations, such as World Health Organization (WHO), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The pollutants include Carbon Monoxide (CO), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Ozone (O3), Formaldehyde (HCHO), Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC), Particulate Matter 2.5 (PM2.5) as well as air humidity and temperature that are used to assess the variety of indoor pollutants and provide a new IAQ pollutants dataset. Besides, the newly developed system provides real-time air quality monitoring, reports the pollutants’ data to a cloud platform (i.e., ThingSpeak), and can trigger early warnings as a service when abnormalities occurred in the air quality index. The system was tested to ensure its conformance to the recommended pollutants by collaborating with surgeons and specializing in IAQ in a hospital surgical intensive care unit (SICU), emergency department (ED), and in the women’s ward, which accommodate patients who are either newly born mothers (in case they need that) or who have had an operation, as well as pregnant patients who need to stay in the hospital to be under the supervision of medical care. Nine pollutants were identified and collected the pollutants dataset and their thresholds that affect the air quality within the hospital facilities and services (SICU, ED) to be used for assessing the effectiveness of the amount, concentration, and diversity of the pollutants. In the SICU, the concentrations of some pollutants were high in the beginning due to the residues of the previous surgery and because of the frequent use of sterilizers to clean and prepare the surgery room. Then, the concentrations of pollutants were moderate, but minutes after the start of the surgical, an increase in CO2 and formaldehyde was observed, which exceeds the threshold limit because of the use of anesthetic gas and sterilization. In the women’s ward, was all concentrations generally moderate except for particles matter PM2.5, and the same context with the 3rd installed location in the pharmacy of ED, most concentrations were moderate, except formaldehyde which exceeded the threshold. “CO” was the highest positive correlated and strongly correlated to “NO2” and that was expected because CO influences the oxidation of NO to NO2. On the contrary, the “CO” had the highest negative correlation with “VOC”, and the “NO2” had the highest negative correlation with “VOC”, chemistry is part of the responsibility for the weak correlation observed between the pollutants.

AbstractIn an attempt to mitigate emissions and road traffic, a significant interest has been recently noted in expanding the use of shared vehicles to replace private modes of transport. However, one outstanding issue has been the hesitancy of passengers to use shared vehicles due to the substandard levels of interior cleanliness, as a result of leftover items from previous users. The current research focuses on developing a novel prediction model using computer vision capable of detecting various types of trash and valuables from a vehicle interior in a timely manner to enhance ambience and passenger comfort. The interior state is captured by a stationary wide-angled camera unit located above the seating area. The acquired images are preprocessed to remove unwanted areas and subjected to a convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of predicting the type and location of leftover items. The algorithm was validated using data collected from two research vehicles under varying conditions of light and shadow levels. The experiments yielded an accuracy of 89% over distinct classes of leftover items and an accuracy of 91% among the general classes of trash and valuables. The average execution time was 65 s from image acquisition in the vehicle to displaying the results in a remote server. A custom dataset of 1379 raw images was also made publicly available for future development work. Additionally, an indoor air quality (IAQ) unit capable of detecting specific air pollutants inside the vehicle was implemented. Based on the pilots conducted for air quality monitoring within the vehicle cabin, an IAQ index was derived which corresponded to a 6-level scale in which each level was associated with the explicit state of interior odour. Future work will focus on integrating the two systems (item detection and air quality monitoring) explicitly to produce a discrete level of cleanliness. The current dataset will also be expanded by collecting data from real shared vehicles in operation.

This research is to assess effects of a partition on thermal comfort, indoor air quality (IAQ), energy consumption, and perception in an air-conditioned space via computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. The variables of indoor air are numerically determined before/after installation/removal of a partition. Accordingly, predicted mean vote (PMV) of thermal comfort, carbon dioxide concentration, rate of energy consumption in making up air, and an overall perception index are proposed to quantify effects in a partitioned space. For a case study, a partition is used to tightly separate a study area from a rest area in a library during peak time. The CFD analysis is performed so that the mean differences between the measured and simulated variables at 14 locations are less than 5%. After partitioning in the CFD analysis, it is found that the average PMV value decreases to −1.4 in the rest area, and it remains at −0.7 in the study area where occupants perceive a slightly cool sensation. In the study area, the carbon dioxide concentration increases to 450–500 ppm, while the rate of energy consumption increases by 8.3%. From the overall perception index of 0.9, the occupants feel spacious in the partitioned areas. Therefore, installing the partition is encouraged with the recommendation that cooling supply can be reduced for energy savings. It is apparent that the proposed methodology yields quantitative indicators for decision making of installation/removal of partitions. The interior investigation of partitions in buildings can be performed before making real physical changes.

AbstractBananas were examined starting from ripening stage R2 (green) to stage R7 (overripe), to identify suitable non-invasive, real time in-situ technologies to separate the ripening stages: (1) Chlorophyll degradation, measured by the DA meter, decreased from ca. 2.1 (R2) to 0.2 IAD units (R7), i.e. tenfold decline. (2) Colour CIE-Lab a values dramatically increased as indication of chlorophyll breakdown and enable differentiation between all ripening stages R2 to R7. Colour angles declined from 98.7° hue (R2), 97.3° hue (R3), 92.7° hue (R4), 89.4° hue (R5); 87.5° hue (R6) until 82.0° hue (R7). (3) Spectroscopy showed two light reflectance troughs at 494 nm and 679 nm. A novel banana ripening index (BRI) was developed and is proposed to identify and distinguish the ripening stages of banana with values starting at 4 at R1 and peaking at 8.1 at ripening stage R7. (4) Peel gloss increased from stage R2 (150 a.u.) to stage R7 (220 a.u.) in the order of ca. 50% followed by a subsequent decrease thereafter. (5) Peel softening declined as fruit firmness dropped from 82 Shore at stage R2 to 42 Shore at stage R7 (overripe), measured also at the centre of the banana fruit. (6) After a constant 90.5% water content per fresh mass (FM) in the banana peel until stage R5, the subsequent drop to 82.9% FM at R7 and 7.6% water translocation viz displacement from the peel to pulp explained this softening. All the above results identified the fruit centre (rather than the tip) as a suitable candidate due to the most advanced ripening and least curved surface region of the fruit with easy access, when a carton is opened and the hands become accessible. This novel approach based on a comparison has shown the DA-meter, colorimeter and spectrometer as suitable candidates for the identification of each ripening stage. The combination of these three devices may be suitable for monitoring of banana ripening rooms in terms of temperature and humidity in addition to the present, colour-based ripening scale.

Aromaticity is a fundamental concept in chemistry that explains the stability and reactivity of many compounds by identifying atoms within a molecule that form an aromatic ring. Reliable aromaticity indices focus on electron delocalization and depend on atomic partitions, which give rise to the concept of an atom‐in‐the‐molecule (AIM). Real‐space atomic partitions present two important drawbacks: a high computational cost and numerical errors, limiting aromaticity measures to medium‐sized molecules with rings up to 12 atoms. This restriction hinders the study of large conjugated systems like porphyrins and nanorings. On the other hand, traditional Hilbert‐space schemes are free of the latter limitations but can be unreliable for the large basis sets required in modern computational chemistry. This paper explores AIMs based on three robust Hilbert‐space partitions ‐‐meta‐Löwdin, Natural Atomic Orbitals (NAO), and Intrinsic Atomic Orbitals (IAO)‐‐ which combine the advantages of real‐space partitions without their disadvantages. These partitions can effectively replace real‐space AIMs for evaluating the aromatic character. For the first time, we report multicenter index (MCI) and \iring values for large rings and introduce ESIpy, an open‐source Python code for aromaticity analysis in large conjugated rings.

Objectives: The primary objective of this study was to explore the relationship between the Time Below Range (TBR) and Impaired Awareness of Hypoglycemia (IAH) and Severe Hypoglycemia (SH). Methods: Our study used data from people with diabetes using isCGM in the ABCD audit. Hypoglycemia awareness was evaluated using the Gold score, with a score of ≥4 denoting Impaired Awareness of Hypoglycemia (IAH). SH was defined as hypoglycemia necessitating third-party assistance. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify the association between TBR% (&lt;70 mg/dl) at the last follow-up (used as a continuous independent variable) and follow-up Gold score and the number of SH between isCGM initiation and follow-up. Youden’s J index was used to identify the optimal TBR% cutoffs for detecting IAH and SH. Results: The study consisted of 15,777 people with diabetes with at least one follow-up, of which TBR data was available for 5030 people. The median TBR% in the study population was 4% (IQR 2%-6.6%). Following adjustment for age, gender, and BMI, TBR was significantly associated with both SH (Beta=0.02 P=0.001) and IAH (Beta=0.01 P=0.006). The determined optimal TBR cutoffs for identifying follow-up IAH and SH were 3.35% and 3.95%, respectively. These cutoffs yielded sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) of 65%, 43%, 19%, and 85% for IAH and 73%, 42%, 5%, and 97% for SH. Conclusion: Our study, based on real-world data, shows a clear association between TBR% and IAH and SH in people with diabetes. Our findings broadly align with the international consensus recommending a TBR of &lt;4% in individuals with type 1 diabetes. However, we observed that this cutoff has limited discriminatory power in predicting SH and IAH, emphasising the need for nuanced approaches in establishing optimal TBR thresholds for distinct diabetes-related outcomes. Disclosure H. Deshmukh: None. E.G. Wilmot: Other Relationship; Abbott. Speaker's Bureau; AstraZeneca. Other Relationship; Dexcom, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, Insulet Corporation, embecta, Medtronic, Novo Nordisk. Advisory Panel; Roche Diabetes Care. Other Relationship; Sanofi. Speaker's Bureau; Ypsomed AG. P. Choudhary: Advisory Panel; Abbott, Biolinq. Speaker's Bureau; Dexcom, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi. Advisory Panel; Ypsomed AG, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated. M.L. Cull: None. R.E. Ryder: Speaker's Bureau; Abbott, Besins Healtcare, BioQuest, GI Dynamics. Consultant; GI Dynamics. Other Relationship; Novo Nordisk. T. Sathyapalan: Research Support; Abbott. Advisory Panel; Rhythm Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Pfizer Inc. C. Walton: None.

Abstract In recent times, time-to-event data such as time to failure or death is routinely collected alongside high-throughput covariates. These high-dimensional bioinformatics data often challenge classical survival models, which are either infeasible to fit or produce low prediction accuracy due to overfitting. To address this issue, the focus has shifted towards introducing a novel approaches for feature selection and survival prediction. In this article, we propose a new hybrid feature selection approach that handles high-dimensional bioinformatics datasets for improved survival prediction. This study explores the efficacy of four distinct variable selection techniques: LASSO, RSF-vs, SCAD, and CoxBoost, in the context of non-parametric biomedical survival prediction. Leveraging these methods, we conducted comprehensive variable selection processes. Subsequently, survival analysis models—specifically CoxPH, RSF, and DeepHit NN—were employed to construct predictive models based on the selected variables. Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach wherein only variables consistently selected by a majority of the aforementioned feature selection techniques are considered. This innovative strategy, referred to as the proposed method, aims to enhance the reliability and robustness of variable selection, subsequently improving the predictive performance of the survival analysis models. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare the performance of the proposed approach with the existing LASSO, RSF-vs, SCAD, and CoxBoost techniques using various performance metrics including integrated brier score (IBS), concordance index (C-Index) and integrated absolute error (IAE) for numerous high-dimensional survival datasets. The real data applications reveal that the proposed method outperforms the competing methods in terms of survival prediction accuracy.

Introduction Collaboration converges with adaptation insofar as collaborative practice involves an adaptation of the differences amongst collaborators with the aim of achieving a seamless blending of personalities and practices. By contrast, this article addresses the topic of the convergence potentials between collaboration and adaptation in those cases where the unmitigated differences across personnel and practices maximize the cultural significance of a project. The case study under review here appears linked to an unusually deep level of engagement with the concerns of its audience, which suggests the significance, more generally, of combining collaboration with a ‘difference-oriented’ notion of adaptation. Adaptation, thus, has the potential to open up new vistas in collaboration’s cultural impact. The case study, of which I am the director, is a multi-product, multi-person ‘adaptation portfolio’ designed as an intervention into urban identity issues affecting the inhabitants of Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. Through my analysis in this article, I propose that collaboration benefits from cross-fertilization with adaptation in two ways. Firstly, adaptation acts as a wellspring for potentially more radical modes of ‘participant-centred’ collaboration and, secondly, adaptation suggests an extension of collaborative activity into the non-participant, or what might be termed the ‘intra-textual’, domain. The Case Study My adaptation portfolio contains a short story (‘Now You Know What Women Have to Put Up With All of the Time’ [West]), a short film script (‘Passion Play’ [West]), a short film, a film set installation-art exhibition, an artistic website, an exhibition of still photography and cinematography, and an example of inter-genre writing (‘Intercut’ [West]). I am the author, as indicated, of three of these products. The rest are being produced by artists who operate, as I do, in the Gold Coast region. With the project still in progress, the conditions are now ripe for considering the methodological issues that subtend the development of the final set of products. The diversity of the portfolio is anchored (although, importantly, not pre-determined) by the narrative of my short story, which insinuates itself along the creative product spectrum of my collaborators. The first paragraph of the story summarizes its plot and instigates its insouciant tone: “You can’t just shove a mate into the back seat of a taxi, fling the driver a hundred bucks, then say, ‘take him anywhere’. Can you?” (West, ‘Now’ 2) The mate in question is Blair Beamish, a young man on his buck’s night, who is turned upon by his supposed friends. His ‘crime’ is to create a rift in the homo-social compact binding the group. They dispatch him on a taxi trip to ‘anywhere’ as a humiliating prank. Blair must then sort out his sexual desires and life choices. At the taxi driver’s whim, his trip weaves along the highways and byways of Gold Coast City. In this way, Blair’s identity is forced into a series of ‘interfaces’ with the city, which draws attention to issues of identity construction in relationship to exopolitanism as theorized by Edward Soja. Exopolitanism and the Adaptation Portfolio It quickly became apparent that my case-study project of creative engagement with questions of identity in Gold Coast City required a multi-product approach as a foil for the nature of the place itself. Gold Coast City is an ‘exopolitan’ site, in Soja’s classic sense of that term: “perched beyond the vortex of the old agglomerative nodes, [spinning] new whorls of its own, turning the city inside-out and outside-in at the same time” (Soja 95). Similarly, Patricia Wise notices its “routine fragmentation and partiality” (Wise). Gold Coast City is a place of multiplicities and, so, multiplicities—at least, a multiplicity of creative products—are required to expose, if not to mollify, the effects of the place on its half million inhabitants. And a genuine multiplicity—a convergence of differences freed from any single dominant term—is best generated via a multi-person approach. Regarding the effects of exopolitanism, Celeste Olalquiaga proposes that the spatially unsettled dweller in the postmodern city is ‘psychasthenic’: that is, “vanishing as a differentiated entity … incapable of demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it” (Olalquiaga 2). Olalquiaga points to the typical Los Angeleno as an example of such identity confusion. However, while the scope of this project might expand in future, it is only currently designed as an enabling procedure for the ‘helplessly chameleon’ citizens of Gold Coast City, to the extent that adaptation within a portfolio of creative products suggests human-focused strategies of adaptation. People who engage with the relations amongst multiplicities in this collaborative project might draw from those relations models for dealing with the multiplicities of urbanism in their day-to-day lives. Not necessarily for overcoming or neutralizing such multiplicities, but for using them to advantage as part of the art and science of urban inhabitation itself. My narrative, therefore, acts as a springboard for the various creative endeavours of my collaborators, who are engaged across several art forms in the project of expressing aspects of Blair’s tale. The absence on my part of any deliberate control over what they might produce is crucial to the ‘ethics’ of our mode of collaboration. Adaptation becomes here an enabling tactic of collaboration because it contains the potential—notably when it operates to ‘combine’ radically different time-based and non-time-based art forms—to stimulate heightened difference rather than seamless blending. And this sort of difference is what we want for our engagement with the differences of the city. Suggestion One—Adaptation and Radical Collaboration The literature on adaptation appears to contain a better resource for such radical forms of collaboration than is offered within prevailing models of collaboration. Robert Stam, for example, provides a description of film adaptation that is immensely suggestive for the development of this collaborative project: “Film adaptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin” (Stam 66). Something like what Stam describes seems to be present in one of the conjunctions of time-based (short film) and non-time-based (installation art) products in this collaborative enterprise. Here, the project responds to David Joselit’s notion that inhabitants of sites like Gold Coast City must negotiate “a new spatial order: a space in which the virtual and the physical are absolutely coextensive, allowing a person to travel in one direction through sound or image while proceeding elsewhere physically” (Joselit 276). Installation art representing place always already operates across a fissure of the represented site and the actual site of the representation: thus, art space and place space coalesce. Inspired by Matthew Barney’s hyperbolic Cremaster Cycle creations in the Guggenheim Museum, I plan to add to this spatial (and indeed temporal) coalescence by establishing film set installation art at certain Gold Coast City locations that feature in the film, while the film itself will loop screen on monitors embedded within this same installation art (Guggenheim Museum). This element of this collaborative project will function therefore as a ‘creative laboratory’ for testing Joselit’s ‘new spatial order’ in that it involves three (inter-related) levels of adaptation: time-based with non-time-based forms; art space with place space; and the virtual (short film) with the physical or real (on-site installation art). Suggestion Two—Adaptation and ‘Intra-Textual’ Collaboration Besides insinuating a radical element into collaboration, adaptation also suggests an extension of collaborative activity into the non-participant, or (to coin a phrase) ‘intra-textual’, domain. Put differently, the notion of intra-textual adaptation allows us to unshackle collaboration from the process of collaboration (the efforts of a team of individuals) and re-situate it as an aspect of the product itself. The value of this is twofold: it sweeps the rug out from under any fusty attachment collaboration might retain to participant intentionality; relatedly, it revitalizes the theory and practices of collaboration because it suggests that the collaborative process continues even after the product is claimed to be finished. In other words, adaptation undoes the tendency in creative circles to place too much emphasis on the process of collaboration, at the expense of an appreciation of the intra-textuality of the actual product—an appreciation that might stimulate, in turn, new ways of approaching the process of collaboration. An ‘Intra-Textual’ Example The ‘core’ narrative of this collaborative project involves a taxi trip that will end when the meter hits $100.00. Any given product in my adaptation portfolio (say, the artistic website, or the film set installation-art exhibition) might represent the taxi meter in any number of ways. But what interests me here is how the meter itself is always an instance of intra-textual adaptation, of a collaboration within the text between two elements of it. In C. S. Peirce’s terms, the taxi meter could be labelled an Index. In James Monaco’s gloss on Peirce, an Index “measures a quality not because it is identical to it but because it has an inherent relationship to it” (Monaco 133). Now, isn’t this also a possible definition of adaptation, or, by extension, collaboration? A quality is measured—you might say, adapted into something else; one thing is transformed into another thing related to the first thing. Specifically, returning to the diegesis of my core narrative, the taxi meter adapts the time and space of Blair’s urban journey into the running-up of the $100.00. In this case, adaptation is a function of language itself, and it is this that makes the taxi meter a challenge to those schools of collaborative thought currently over-invested in the participant definition of collaboration, which hampers the development of new models of collaboration in that it unduly emphasizes process over product. Conclusion This article has used an in-progress collaborative case study to highlight the value for collaboration of appropriating notions of difference and intra-textuality from the domain of adaptation. On the evidence of this multi-product, multi-person adaptation portfolio, such an approach can reap the rewards of greater involvement with the cultural and identity concerns of the audience. The main problem with much artistic collaboration is that it tends to preserve an artificial homogeneity that papers over the important ways in which the world is composed of differences and multiplicities rather than of sameness and unification. The exopolitan inhabitants of Gold Coast City know this, and creative products that attempt to engage powerfully with cultural and identity issues must know it too. References Guggenheim Museum—Past Exhibitions—Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. 21 Feb.-11 June 2003. Guggenheim Museum. 2 Mar. 2006 http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/barney/index.html>. Joselit, David. “Navigating the New Territory.” Artforum 43.10 (2005): 276-80. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. Olalquiaga, Celeste. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Soja, Edward. W. “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County.” Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Ed. Michael Sorkin. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. West, Patrick. “Intercut.” Sites of Cosmopolitanism: Citizenship, Aesthetics, Culture. Eds. David Ellison and Ian Woodward. Brisbane: Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University, 2005. ———. “Now You Know What Women Have to Put Up with All of the Time.” Idiom 23 17.1 (2005): 2-4. ———. “Passion Play.” Unpublished short film script. Wise, Patricia. “Australia’s Gold Coast: A City Producing Itself.” Cityscapes Conference, Aberystwyth, Wales. 8-10 July 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style West, Patrick. "The Convergence Potentials of Collaboration & Adaptation: A Case Study in Progress." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/16-west.php>. APA Style West, P. (May 2006) "The Convergence Potentials of Collaboration & Adaptation: A Case Study in Progress," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/16-west.php>.

Cultural Studies has tended to prioritise the domain of leisure and consumption over work as an area for meaning making, in many ways defining everyday life in opposition to work. Greg Noble, a cultural researcher who examined work in the context of the early computerisation of Australian universities made the point that "discussions of everyday life often make the mistake of assuming that everyday life equates with home and family life, or leisure" (87). This article argues for the need within Cultural Studies to focus on work and media as a research area of everyday life. With the growth of flexible and creative labour and the widespread uptake of an array of new media technologies used for work, traditional ways to identify and measure the space and time of work have become increasingly flawed, with implications for how we account for work and negotiate its boundaries. New approaches are needed to address the complex media environments and technological practices that are an increasing part of contemporary working life. Cultural Studies can make a significant impact towards this research agenda by offering new ways to analyse the complex interrelations of space, time and technology in everyday work practice. To further this goal, a new material practices account of work termed Officing is introduced, developed through my doctoral research on professionals' daily use of information and communication technology (ICT). This approach builds on the key cultural concepts of "bricolage" and "appropriation" combined with the idea of "articulation work" proposed by Anselm Strauss, to support the analysis of the office workplace as a contingent and provisional arrangement or process. Officing has a number of benefits as a framework for analysing the nature of work in a highly mediated world. Highlighting the labour that goes into stabilising work platforms makes it possible to assess the claims of productivity and improved work-life balance brought about by new mobile media technologies; to identify previously unidentified sources of time pressure, overwork and intensification and ultimately, to contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments. The Turn Away from Work Work held a central position in social and cultural analysis in the first half of the twentieth century but as Strangleman observed, there was a marked shift away from the study of work from the mid 1970s (3.1). Much of the impulse for this shift came from critiques of the over-emphasis on relations of production and the workplace as the main source of meaning and value (5.1). In line with this position, feminist researchers challenged the traditional division of labour into paid and unpaid work, arguing that this division sustained the false perception of domestic work as non-productive (cf. Delphy; Folbre). Accompanying these critiques were significant changes in work itself, as traditional jobs literally began to disappear with the decline of manufacturing in industrialised countries (6.1). With the turn away from work in academia and the changes in the nature of work, attention shifted to the realm of the market and consumption. One of the important contributions of Cultural Studies has been the focus on the role of the consumer in driving social and technological change and processes of identity formation. Yet, it is a major problem that work is largely marginalised in cultural research of everyday life, especially since, in most industrialised nations, we are working in new ways, in rapidly changing conditions and more than ever before. Research shows that in Australia there has been a steady increase in the average hours of paid work and Australians are working harder (cf. Watson, Buchanan, Campbell and Briggs; Edwards and Wajcman). In the 2008 Australian Work and Life Index (AWALI) Skinner and Pocock found around 55 per cent of employees frequently felt rushed or pressed for time and this was associated with long working hours, work overload and an overall poor work–life interaction (8). These trends have coincided with long-term changes in the type and location of work. In Australia, like many other developed countries, information-based occupations have taken over manufacturing jobs and there has been an increase in part-time and casual work (cf. Watson et al.). Many employees now conduct work outside of the traditional workplace, with the ABS reporting that in 2008, 24 per cent of employees worked at least some hours at home. Many social analysts have explained the rise of casual and flexible labour as related to the transition to global capitalism driven by the expansion of networked information processes (cf. Castells; Van Dijk). This shift is not simply that more workers are producing ideas and information but that the previously separated spheres of production and consumption have blurred (cf. Ritzer and Jurgenson). With this, entirely new industries have sprung up, predicated on the often unpaid for creative labour of individuals, including users of media technologies. A growing chorus of writers are now pointing out that a fragmented, polarised and complex picture is emerging of this so-called "new economy", with significant implications for the quality of work (cf. Edwards and Wajcman; Fudge and Owens; Huws). Indeed, some claim that new conditions of insecure and poor quality employment or "precarious work" are fast becoming the norm. Moreover, this longer-term pattern runs parallel to the production of a multitude of new mobile media technologies, first taken up by professionals and then by the mainstream, challenging the notion that activities are bound to any particular place or time. Reinvigorating Work in Social and Cultural Analysis There are moves to reposition social and cultural analysis to respond to these various trends. Work-life balance is an example of a research and policy area that has emerged since the 1990s. The boundary between the household and the outside world has also been subject to scrutiny by cultural researchers, and these critically examine the intersection between work and consumption, gender and care (cf. Nippert-Eng; Sorenson and Lie; Noble and Lupton, "Consuming" and "Mine"; Lally). These responses are examples of a shift away from what Urry has dubbed "structures and stable organisations" to a concern with flows, movements and the blurring of boundaries between life spheres (5). In a similar vein, researchers recently have proposed alternative ways to describe the changing times and places of employment. In their study of UK professionals, Felstead, Jewson and Walters proposed a model of "plural workscapes" to explain a major shift in the spatial organisation of work (23). Mobility theorists Sheller and Urry have called for the need to "develop a more dynamic conceptualisation of the fluidities and mobilities that have increasingly hybridised the public and private" (113). All of this literature has reinforced a growing concern that in the face of new patterns of production and consumption and with the rise of complex media environments, traditional models and measures of space and time are inadequate to account for contemporary work. Analyses that rely on conventional measures of work based on hourly units clearly point to an increase in the volume of work, the speed of work and to the collision (cf. Pocock) of work and life but fall down in accounting for the complex and often contradictory role of technology. Media technologies are "Janus-faced" as Michael Arnold has suggested, referring to the two-faced Roman god to foreground the contradictory effects at the centre of all technologies (232). Wajcman notes this paradox in her research on mobile media and time, pointing out that mobile phones are just as likely to "save" time as to "consume" it (15). It was precisely this problematic of the complex interactions of the space, time and technology of work that was at stake in my research on the daily use of ICT by professional workers. In the context of changes to the location, activity and meaning of work, and with the multiplying array of old and new media technologies used by workers, how can the boundary and scope of work be determined? What are the implications of these shifting grounds for the experience and quality of work? Officing: A Material Practices Account of Office Work In the remaining article I introduce some of the key ideas and principles of a material practices account developed in my PhD, Officing: Professionals' Daily ICT Use and the Changing Space and Time of Work. This research took place between 2006 and 2007 focusing in-depth on the daily technology practices of twenty professional workers in a municipal council in Sydney and a unit of a global telecommunication company taking part in a trial of a new smart phone. Officing builds on efforts to develop a more accurate account of the space and time of work bringing into play the complex and highly mediated environment in which work takes place. It extends more recent practice-based, actor-network and cultural approaches that have, for some time, been moving towards a more co-constitutive and process-oriented approach to media and technology in society. Turning first to "bricolage" from the French bricole meaning something small and handmade, bricolage refers to the ways that individuals and groups borrow from existing cultural forms and meanings to create new uses, meanings and identities. Initially proposed by Levi-Strauss and then taken up by de Certeau, bricolage has been a useful concept within subculture and lifestyle studies to reveal the creative work performed on signs and meaning systems in forming cultural identities (cf. O'Sullivan et al.). Bricolage is also an important concept for understanding how meanings and uses are inscribed into forms in use rather than being read or activated off their design. This is the process of appropriation, through which both the object and the person are mutually shaped and users gain a sense of control and ownership (cf. Noble and Lupton; Lally; Silverstone and Haddon). The concept of bricolage highlights the improvisational qualities of appropriation and its status as work. A bricoleur is thus a person who constructs new meanings and forms by drawing on and assembling a wide range of resources at hand, sourced from multiple spheres of life. One of the problems with how bricolage and appropriation has been applied to date, notwithstanding the priority given to the domestic sphere, is the tendency to grant individuals and collectives too much control to stabilise the meanings and purposes of technologies. This problem is evident in the research drawing on the framework of "domestication" (cf. Silverstone and Haddon). In practice, the sheer volume of technologically-related issues encountered on a daily basis and the accompanying sense of frustration indicates there is no inevitable drift towards stability, nor are problems merely aberrational or trivial. Instead, daily limits to agency and attempts to overcome these are points at which meanings as well as uses are re-articulated and potentially re-invented. This is where "articulation work" comes in. Initially put forward by Anselm Strauss in 1985, articulation work has become an established analytical tool for informing technology design processes in such fields as Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Workplace Studies. In these, articulation work is narrowly defined to refer to the real time activities of cooperative work. It includes dealing with contingencies, keeping technologies and systems working and making adjustments to accommodate for problems (Suchman "Supporting", 407). In combination with naturalistic investigations, this concept has facilitated engagement with the increasingly complex technological and media environments of work. It has been a powerful tool for highlighting practices deemed unimportant but which are nevertheless crucial for getting work done. Articulation work, however, has the potential to be applied in a broader sense to explain the significance of the instability of technologies and the efforts to overcome these as transformative in themselves, part of the ongoing process of appropriation that goes well beyond individual tasks or technologies. With clear correspondences to actor-network theory, this expanded definition provides the basis for a new understanding of the office as a temporary and provisional condition of stability achieved through the daily creative and improvisational activities of workers. The office, then, is dependent on and inextricably bound up in its ongoing articulation and crucially, is not bound to a particular place or time. In the context of the large-scale transformations in work already discussed, this expanded definition of articulation work helps to; firstly, address how work is re-organised and re-rationalised through changes to the material conditions of work; secondly, identify the ongoing articulations that this entails and thirdly; understand the role of these articulations in the construction of the space and time of work. This expanded definition is achieved in the newly developed concept of officing. Officing describes a form of labour directed towards the production of a stable office platform. Significantly, one of the main characteristics of this work is that it often goes undetected by organisations as well as by the workers that perform it. As explained later, its "invisibility" is in part a function of its embodiment but also relates to the boundless nature of officing, taking place both inside and outside the workplace, in or out of work time. Officing is made up of a set of interwoven activities of three main types: connecting, synchronising and configuring. Connecting can be understood as aligning technical and social relations for the performance of work at a set time. Synchronising brings together and coordinates different times and temporal demands, for example, the time of "work" with "life" or the time "out in the field" with time "in the workplace". Configuring prepares the space of work, making a single technology or media environment work to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. To give an example of connecting: in the Citizens' Service Centre of the Council, Danielle's morning rituals involved a series of connections even before her work of advising customers begins: My day: get in, sit down, turn on the computer and then slowly open each software program that I will need to use…turn on the phone, key in my password, turn on the headphones and sit there and wait for the calls! (Humphry Officing, 123) These connections not only set up and initiate the performance of work but also mark Danielle's presence in her office. Through these activities, which in practice overlap and blur, the space and time of the office comes to appear as a somewhat separate and mostly invisible structure or infrastructure. The work that goes into making the office stable takes place around the boundary of work with implications for how this boundary is constituted. These efforts do not cluster around boundaries in any simple sense but become part of the process of boundary making, contributing to the construction of categories such as "work" and "life". So, for example, for staff in the smart phone trial, the phone had become their main source of information and communication. Turning their smart phone off, or losing connectivity had ramifications that cascaded throughout their lifeworld. On the one hand, this lead to the breakdown of the distinction between "work" and "life" and a sense of "ever-presence", requiring constant and vigilant "boundary work" (cf. Nippert-Eng). On the other hand, this same state also enabled workers to respond to demands in their own time and across multiple boundaries, giving workers a sense of flexibility, control and of being "in sync". Connecting, configuring and synchronising are activities performed by bodies, producing an embodied transformation. In the tradition of phenomenology, most notably in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and more recently Ihde, embodiment is used to explain the relationship between subjects and objects. This concept has since been developed to be understood as not residing in the body but as spread through social, material and discursive arrangements (cf. Haraway, "Situated" and Simians; Henke; Suchman, "Figuring"). Tracing efforts towards making the office stable is thus a way of uncovering how the body, as a constitutive part of a larger arrangement or network, is formed through embodiment, how it gains its competencies, social meanings and ultimately, how workers gain a sense of what it means to be a professional. So, in the smart phone trial, staff managed their connections by replying immediately to their voice, text and data messages. This immediacy not only acted as proof of their presence in the office. It also signalled their commitment to their office: their active participation and value to the organisation and their readiness to perform when called on. Importantly, this embodied transformation also helps to explain how officing becomes an example of "invisible work" (cf. Star and Strauss). Acts of connecting, synchronising and configuring become constituted and forgotten in and through bodies, spaces and times. Through their repeated performance these acts become habits, a transparent means through which the environment of work is navigated in the form of skills and techniques, configurations and routines. In conclusion, researching work in contemporary societies means confronting its marginalisation within cultural research and developing ways to comprehend and measure the interaction of space, time and the ever-multiplying array of media technologies. Officing provides a way to do this by shifting to an understanding of the workplace as a contingent product of work itself. The strength of this approach is that it highlights the creative and ongoing work of individuals on their media infrastructures. It also helps to identify and describe work activities that are not neatly contained in a workplace, thus adding to their invisibility. The invisibility of these practices can have significant impacts on workers: magnifying feelings of time pressure and a need to work faster, longer and harder even as discrete technologies are utilised to save time. In this way, officing exposes some of the additional contributions to the changing experience and quality of work as well as to the construction of everyday domains. Officing supports an evaluation of claims of productivity and work-life balance in relation to new media technologies. In the smart phone trial, contrary to an assumed increase in productivity, mobility of work was achieved at the expense of productivity. Making the mobile office stable—getting it up and running, keeping it working in changing environments and meeting expectations of speed and connectivity—took up time, resulting in an overall productivity loss and demanding more "boundary work". In spite of their adaptability and flexibility, staff tended to overwork to counteract this loss. This represented a major shift in the burden of effort in the production of office forms away from the organisation and towards the individual. Finally, though not addressed here in any detail, officing could conceivably have practical uses for designing more sustainable office environments that better support the work process and the balance of work and life. Thus, by accounting more accurately for the resource requirements of work, organisations can reduce the daily effort, space and time taken up by employees on their work environments. In any case, what is clear, is the ongoing need to continue a cultural research agenda on work—to address the connections between transformations in work and the myriad material practices that individuals perform in going about their daily work. References Arnold, Michael. "On the Phenomenology of Technology: The 'Janus-Faces' of Mobile Phones." Information and Organization 13.4 (2003): 231–56. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 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If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

Background “The sense of taste,” write Nelson and colleagues in a 2002 issue of Nature, “provides animals with valuable information about the nature and quality of food. Mammals can recognize and respond to a diverse repertoire of chemical entities, including sugars, salts, acids and a wide range of toxic substances” (199). The authors go on to argue that several amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—taste delicious to humans and that “having a taste pathway dedicated to their detection probably had significant evolutionary implications”. They imply, but do not specify, that the evolutionary implications are positive. This may be the case with some amino acids, but contemporary tastes, and changes in them, are far from universally beneficial. Indeed, this article argues that modern food production shapes and distorts human taste with significant implications for health and wellbeing. Take the western taste for fried chipped potatoes, for example. According to Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today [2002] the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year—and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries” (115). Nine-tenths of these chips are consumed in fast food restaurants which use mass-manufactured potato-based frozen products to provide this major “foodservice item” more quickly and cheaply than the equivalent dish prepared from raw ingredients. These choices, informed by human taste buds, have negative evolutionary implications, as does the apparently long-lasting consumer preference for fried goods cooked in trans-fats. “Numerous foods acquire their elastic properties (i.e., snap, mouth-feel, and hardness) from the colloidal fat crystal network comprised primarily of trans- and saturated fats. These hardstock fats contribute, along with numerous other factors, to the global epidemics related to metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease,” argues Michael A. Rogers (747). Policy makers and public health organisations continue to compare notes internationally about the best ways in which to persuade manufacturers and fast food purveyors to reduce the use of these trans-fats in their products (L’Abbé et al.), however, most manufacturers resist. Hank Cardello, a former fast food executive, argues that “many products are designed for ‘high hedonic value’, with carefully balanced combinations of salt, sugar and fat that, experience has shown, induce people to eat more” (quoted, Trivedi 41). Fortunately for the manufactured food industry, salt and sugar also help to preserve food, effectively prolonging the shelf life of pre-prepared and packaged goods. Physiological Factors As Glanz et al. discovered when surveying 2,967 adult Americans, “taste is the most important influence on their food choices, followed by cost” (1118). A person’s taste is to some extent an individual response to food stimuli, but the tongue’s taste buds respond to five basic categories of food: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. ‘Umami’ is a Japanese word indicating “delicious savoury taste” (Coughlan 11) and it is triggered by the amino acid glutamate. Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamate while investigating the taste of a particular seaweed which he believed was neither sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. When Ikeda combined the glutamate taste essence with sodium he formed the food additive sodium glutamate, which was patented in 1908 and subsequently went into commercial production (Japan Patent Office). Although individual, a person’s taste preferences are by no means fixed. There is ample evidence that people’s tastes are being distorted by modern food marketing practices that process foods to make them increasingly appealing to the average palate. In particular, this industrialisation of food promotes the growth of a snack market driven by salty and sugary foods, popularly constructed as posing a threat to health and wellbeing. “[E]xpanding waistlines [are] fuelled by a boom in fast food and a decline in physical activity” writes Stark, who reports upon the 2008 launch of a study into Australia’s future ‘fat bomb’. As Deborah Lupton notes, such reports were a particular feature of the mid 2000s when: intense concern about the ‘obesity epidemic’ intensified and peaked. Time magazine named 2004 ‘The Year of Obesity’. That year the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health was released and the [US] Centers for Disease Control predicted that a poor diet and lack of exercise would soon claim more lives than tobacco-related disease in the United States. (4) The American Heart Association recommends eating no more than 1500mg of salt per day (Hamzelou 11) but salt consumption in the USA averages more than twice this quantity, at 3500mg per day (Bernstein and Willett 1178). In the UK, a sustained campaign and public health-driven engagement with food manufacturers by CASH—Consensus Action on Salt and Health—resulted in a reduction of between 30 and 40 percent of added salt in processed foods between 2001 and 2011, with a knock-on 15 percent decline in the UK population’s salt intake overall. This is the largest reduction achieved by any developed nation (Brinsden et al.). “According to the [UK’s] National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), this will have reduced [UK] stroke and heart attack deaths by a minimum of 9,000 per year, with a saving in health care costs of at least £1.5bn a year” (MacGregor and Pombo). Whereas there has been some success over the past decade in reducing the amount of salt consumed, in the Western world the consumption of sugar continues to rise, as a graph cited in the New Scientist indicates (O’Callaghan). Regular warnings that sugar is associated with a range of health threats and delivers empty calories devoid of nutrition have failed to halt the increase in sugar consumption. Further, although some sugar is a natural product, processed foods tend to use a form invented in 1957: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). “HFCS is a gloopy solution of glucose and fructose” writes O’Callaghan, adding that it is “as sweet as table sugar but has typically been about 30% cheaper”. She cites Serge Ahmed, a French neuroscientist, as arguing that in a world of food sufficiency people do not need to consume more, so they need to be enticed to overeat by making food more pleasurable. Ahmed was part of a team that ran an experiment with cocaine-addicted rats, offering them a mutually exclusive choice between highly-sweetened water and cocaine: Our findings clearly indicate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus lead to addiction. (Lenoir et al.) The Tongue and the Brain One of the implications of this research about the mammalian desire for sugar is that our taste for food is about more than how these foods actually taste in the mouth on our tongues. It is also about the neural response to the food we eat. The taste of French fries thus also includes that “snap, mouth-feel, and hardness” and the “colloidal fat crystal network” (Rogers, “Novel Structuring” 747). While there is no taste receptor for fats, these nutrients have important effects upon the brain. Wang et al. offered rats a highly fatty, but palatable, diet and allowed them to eat freely. 33 percent of the calories in the food were delivered via fat, compared with 21 percent in a normal diet. The animals almost doubled their usual calorific intake, both because the food had a 37 percent increased calorific content and also because the rats ate 47 percent more than was standard (2786). The research team discovered that in as little as three days the rats “had already lost almost all of their ability to respond to leptin” (Martindale 27). Leptin is a hormone that acts on the brain to communicate feelings of fullness, and is thus important in assisting animals to maintain a healthy body weight. The rats had also become insulin resistant. “Severe resistance to the metabolic effects of both leptin and insulin ensued after just 3 days of overfeeding” (Wang et al. 2786). Fast food restaurants typically offer highly palatable, high fat, high sugar, high salt, calorific foods which can deliver 130 percent of a day’s recommended fat intake, and almost a day’s worth of an adult man’s calories, in one meal. The impacts of maintaining such a diet over a comparatively short time-frame have been recorded in documentaries such as Super Size Me (Spurlock). The after effects of what we widely call “junk food” are also evident in rat studies. Neuroscientist Paul Kenny, who like Ahmed was investigating possible similarities between food- and cocaine-addicted rats, allowed his animals unlimited access to both rat ‘junk food’ and healthy food for rats. He then changed their diets. “The rats with unlimited access to junk food essentially went on a hunger strike. ‘It was as if they had become averse to healthy food’, says Kenny. It took two weeks before the animals began eating as much [healthy food] as those in the control group” (quoted, Trivedi 40). Developing a taste for certain food is consequently about much more than how they taste in the mouth; it constitutes an individual’s response to a mixture of taste, hormonal reactions and physiological changes. Choosing Health Glanz et al. conclude their study by commenting that “campaigns attempting to change people’s perception of the importance of nutrition will be interpreted in terms of existing values and beliefs. A more promising strategy might be to stress the good taste of healthful foods” (1126). Interestingly, this is the strategy already adopted by some health-focused cookbooks. I have 66 cookery books in my kitchen. None of ten books sampled from the five spaces in which these books are kept had ‘taste’ as an index entry, but three books had ‘taste’ in their titles: The Higher Taste, Taste of Life, and The Taste of Health. All three books seek to promote healthy eating, and they all date from the mid-1980s. It might be that taste is not mentioned in cookbook indexes because it is a sine qua non: a focus upon taste is so necessary and fundamental to a cookbook that it goes without saying. Yet, as the physiological evidence makes clear, what we find palatable is highly mutable, varying between people, and capable of changing significantly in comparatively short periods of time. The good news from the research studies is that the changes wrought by high salt, high sugar, high fat diets need not be permanent. Luciano Rossetti, one of the authors on Wang et al’s paper, told Martindale that the physiological changes are reversible, but added a note of caution: “the fatter a person becomes the more resistant they will be to the effects of leptin and the harder it is to reverse those effects” (27). Morgan Spurlock’s experience also indicates this. In his case it took the actor/director 14 months to lose the 11.1 kg (13 percent of his body mass) that he gained in the 30 days of his fast-food-only experiment. Trivedi was more fortunate, stating that, “After two weeks of going cold turkey, I can report I have successfully kicked my ice cream habit” (41). A reader’s letter in response to Trivedi’s article echoes this observation. She writes that “the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruits with a small amount of fish”, adding that “cravings stopped in just a week or two, and the diet was so effective that I no longer crave junk food even when it is in front of me” (Mackeown). Popular culture indicates a range of alternative ways to resist food manufacturers. In the West, there is a growing emphasis on organic farming methods and produce (Guthman), on sl called Urban Agriculture in the inner cities (Mason and Knowd), on farmers’ markets, where consumers can meet the producers of the food they eat (Guthrie et al.), and on the work of advocates of ‘real’ food, such as Jamie Oliver (Warrin). Food and wine festivals promote gourmet tourism along with an emphasis upon the quality of the food consumed, and consumption as a peak experience (Hall and Sharples), while environmental perspectives prompt awareness of ‘food miles’ (Weber and Matthews), fair trade (Getz and Shreck) and of land degradation, animal suffering, and the inequitable use of resources in the creation of the everyday Western diet (Dare, Costello and Green). The burgeoning of these different approaches has helped to stimulate a commensurate growth in relevant disciplinary fields such as Food Studies (Wessell and Brien). One thing that all these new ways of looking at food and taste have in common is that they are options for people who feel they have the right to choose what and when to eat; and to consume the tastes they prefer. This is not true of all groups of people in all countries. Hiding behind the public health campaigns that encourage people to exercise and eat fresh fruit and vegetables are the hidden “social determinants of health: The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system” (WHO 45). As the definitions explain, it is the “social determinants of health [that] are mostly responsible for health iniquities” with evidence from all countries around the world demonstrating that “in general, the lower an individual’s socioeconomic position, the worse his or her health” (WHO 45). For the comparatively disadvantaged, it may not be the taste of fast food that attracts them but the combination of price and convenience. If there is no ready access to cooking facilities, or safe food storage, or if a caregiver is simply too time-poor to plan and prepare meals for a family, junk food becomes a sensible choice and its palatability an added bonus. For those with the education, desire, and opportunity to break free of the taste for salty and sugary fats, however, there are a range of strategies to achieve this. There is a persuasive array of evidence that embracing a plant-based diet confers a multitude of health benefits for the individual, for the planet and for the animals whose lives and welfare would otherwise be sacrificed to feed us (Green, Costello and Dare). Such a choice does involve losing the taste for foods which make up the lion’s share of the Western diet, but any sense of deprivation only lasts for a short time. The fact is that our sense of taste responds to the stimuli offered. It may be that, notwithstanding the desires of Jamie Oliver and the like, a particular child never will never get to like broccoli, but it is also the case that broccoli tastes differently to me, seven years after becoming a vegan, than it ever did in the years in which I was omnivorous. When people tell me that they would love to adopt a plant-based diet but could not possibly give up cheese, it is difficult to reassure them that the pleasure they get now from that specific cocktail of salty fats will be more than compensated for by the sheer exhilaration of eating crisp, fresh fruits and vegetables in the future. Conclusion For decades, the mass market food industry has tweaked their products to make them hyper-palatable and difficult to resist. They do this through marketing experiments and consumer behaviour research, schooling taste buds and brains to anticipate and relish specific cocktails of sweet fats (cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream) and salty fats (chips, hamburgers, cheese, salted nuts). They add ingredients to make these products stimulate taste buds more effectively, while also producing cheaper items with longer life on the shelves, reducing spoilage and the complexity of storage for retailers. Consumers are trained to like the tastes of these foods. Bitter, sour, and umami receptors are comparatively under-stimulated, with sweet, salty, and fat-based tastes favoured in their place. Western societies pay the price for this learned preference in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Public health advocate Bruce Neal and colleagues, working to reduce added salt in processed foods, note that the food and manufacturing industries can now provide most of the calories that the world needs to survive. “The challenge now”, they argue, “is to have these same industries provide foods that support long and healthy adult lives. And in this regard there remains a very considerable way to go”. If the public were to believe that their sense of taste is mutable and has been distorted for corporate and industrial gain, and if they were to demand greater access to natural foods in their unprocessed state, then that journey towards a healthier future might be far less protracted than these and many other researchers seem to believe. References Bernstein, Adam, and Walter Willett. “Trends in 24-Hr Sodium Excretion in the United States, 1957–2003: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92 (2010): 1172–1180. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. The Higher Taste: A Guide to Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking and a Karma-Free Diet, over 60 Famous Hare Krishna Recipes. Botany, NSW: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1987. Brinsden, Hannah C., Feng J. He, Katharine H. Jenner, & Graham A. MacGregor. “Surveys of the Salt Content in UK Bread: Progress Made and Further Reductions Possible.” British Medical Journal Open 3.6 (2013). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/6/e002936.full›. Coughlan, Andy. “In Good Taste.” New Scientist 2223 (2000): 11. Dare, Julie, Leesa Costello, and Lelia Green. “Nutritional Narratives: Examining Perspectives on Plant Based Diets in the Context of Dominant Western Discourse”. Proceedings of the 2013 Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference. Ed. In Terence Lee, Kathryn Trees, and Renae Desai. Fremantle, Western Australia, 3-5 Jul. 2013. 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.anzca.net/conferences/past-conferences/159.html›. Getz, Christy, and Aimee Shreck. “What Organic and Fair Trade Labels Do Not Tell Us: Towards a Place‐Based Understanding of Certification.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 30.5 (2006): 490–501. Glanz, Karen, Michael Basil, Edward Maibach, Jeanne Goldberg, & Dan Snyder. “Why Americans Eat What They Do: Taste, Nutrition, Cost, Convenience, and Weight Control Concerns as Influences on Food Consumption.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 98.10 (1988): 1118–1126. Green, Lelia, Leesa Costello, and Julie Dare. “Veganism, Health Expectancy, and the Communication of Sustainability.” Australian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2010): 87–102 Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 2004 Guthrie, John, Anna Guthrie, Rob Lawson, & Alan Cameron. “Farmers’ Markets: The Small Business Counter-Revolution in Food Production and Retailing.” British Food Journal 108.7 (2006): 560–573. Hall, Colin Michael, and Liz Sharples. Eds. Food and Wine Festivals and Events Around the World: Development, Management and Markets. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2008. Hamzelou, Jessica. “Taste Bud Trickery Needed to Cut Salt Intake.” New Scientist 2799 (2011): 11. Japan Patent Office. History of Industrial Property Rights, Ten Japanese Great Inventors: Kikunae Ikeda: Sodium Glutamate. Tokyo: Japan Patent Office, 2002. L’Abbé, Mary R., S. Stender, C. M. Skeaff, Ghafoorunissa, & M. Tavella. “Approaches to Removing Trans Fats from the Food Supply in Industrialized and Developing Countries.” European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 63 (2009): S50–S67. Lenoir, Magalie, Fuschia Serre, Lauriane Cantin, & Serge H. Ahmed. “Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward.” PLOS One (2007). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000698›. Lupton, Deborah. Fat. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2013. MacGregor, Graham, and Sonia Pombo. “The Amount of Hidden Sugar in Your Diet Might Shock You.” The Conversation 9 January (2014). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://theconversation.com/the-amount-of-hidden-sugar-in-your-diet-might-shock-you-21867›. Mackeown, Elizabeth. “Cold Turkey?” [Letter]. New Scientist 2787 (2010): 31. Martindale, Diane. “Burgers on the Brain.” New Scientist 2380 (2003): 26–29. Mason, David, and Ian Knowd. “The Emergence of Urban Agriculture: Sydney, Australia.” The International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 8.1–2 (2010): 62–71. Neal, Bruce, Jacqui Webster, and Sebastien Czernichow. “Sanguine About Salt Reduction.” European Journal of Preventative Cardiology 19.6 (2011): 1324–1325. Nelson, Greg, Jayaram Chandrashekar, Mark A. Hoon, Luxin Feng, Grace Zhao, Nicholas J. P. Ryba, & Charles S. Zuker. “An Amino-Acid Taste Receptor.” Nature 416 (2002): 199–202. O’Callaghan, Tiffany. “Sugar on Trial: What You Really Need to Know.” New Scientist 2954 (2011): 34–39. Rogers, Jenny. Ed. The Taste of Health: The BBC Guide to Healthy Cooking. London, UK: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. Rogers, Michael A. “Novel Structuring Strategies for Unsaturated Fats—Meeting the Zero-Trans, Zero-Saturated Fat Challenge: A Review.” Food Research International 42.7 August (2009): 747–753. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. London, UK: Penguin, 2002. Super Size Me. Dir. Morgan Spurlock. Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2004. Stafford, Julie. Taste of Life. Richmond, Vic: Greenhouse Publications Ltd, 1983. Stark, Jill. “Australia Now World’s Fattest Nation.” The Age 20 June (2008). 2 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/health/australia-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770886872.html›. Trivedi, Bijal. “Junkie Food: Tastes That Your Brain Cannot Resist.” New Scientist 2776 (2010): 38–41. Wang, Jiali, Silvana Obici, Kimyata Morgan, Nir Barzilai, Zhaohui Feng, & Luciano Rossetti. “Overfeeding Rapidly Increases Leptin and Insulin Resistance.” Diabetes 50.12 (2001): 2786–2791. Warin, Megan. “Foucault’s Progeny: Jamie Oliver and the Art of Governing Obesity.” Social Theory & Health 9.1 (2011): 24–40. Weber, Christopher L., and H. Scott Matthews. “Food-miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States.” Environmental Science & Technology 42.10 (2008): 3508–3513. Wessell, Adele, and Donna Lee Brien. Eds. Rewriting the Menu: the Cultural Dynamics of Contemporary Food Choices. Special Issue 9, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Programs October 2010. World Health Organisation. Closing the Gap: Policy into Practice on Social Determinants of Health [Discussion Paper]. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: World Conference on Social Determinants of Health, World Health Organisation, 19–21 October 2011.

According to The Betoota Advocate (Parker), a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) paper has recently established that “it takes roughly seven minutes on average for a vegan to tell you that they’re vegan” (qtd. in Harrington et al. 135). For such a statement to have currency as a joke means that it is grounded in a shared experience of being vegan on the one hand, and of encountering vegans on the other. Why should vegans feel such a need to justify themselves? I recognise the observation as being true of me, and this article is one way to explore this perspective: writing to find out what I currently only intuit. As Richardson notes (516), writing is “a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (qtd. in Wall 151).Autoethnography, the qualitative research methodology used for this article, is etymologically derived from Greek to indicate a process for exploring the self (autos) and the cultural (“ethno” from ethnos—nation, tribe, people, class) using a shared, understood, approach (“graphy” from graphia, writing). It relies upon critical engagement with and synthesising of the personal. In Wall’s words, this methodological analysis of human experience “says that what I know matters” (148). The autoethnographic investigation (Riggins; Sparkes) reported here interrogates the experience of “being judged” as a vegan: firstly, by myself; secondly, by other vegans; and ultimately by the wider society. As Ellis notes, autoethnography is “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection” (xix).Introspection is important because researchers’ stories of their observations are interwoven with self-reflexive critique and analysis: “illustrative materials are meant to give a sense of what the observed world is really like, while the researcher’s interpretations are meant to represent a more detached conceptualization of that reality” (Strauss and Corbin 22). Leaving aside Gans’s view that this form of enquiry represents the “climax of the preoccupation with self […] an autobiography written by sociologists” (542), an autoethnography generally has the added advantage of protecting against Glendon and Stanton’s concern that interpretive studies “are often of too short a duration to be able to provide sufficiently large samples of behaviour” (209). In my case, I have twelve years of experience of identifying as a vegan to draw upon.My experience is that being vegan is a contested activity with a significant range of variation that partly reflects the different initial motivations for adopting this increasingly mainstream identity. Greenebaum notes that “ethical vegans differentiate between those who ‘eat’ vegan (health vegans) and those who ‘live’ vegan (ethical vegans)”, going on to suggest that these differences create “hierarchies and boundaries between vegans” (131). As Greenebaum acknowledges, there is sometimes a need to balance competing priorities: “an environmental vegan […] may purchase leather products over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thinking that leather is a better choice for the environment” (130). Harrington et al. similarly critique vegan motivations as encompassing “a selfless pursuit for those who cared for other beings (animals)” to “a concern about impacts that affect all humans (environment), and an interest mostly in the self (individual health …)” (144). Wright identifies a fourth group of vegans: those searching for a means of dietary inclusivity (2). I have known Orthodox Jewish households that have adopted veganism because it is compatible with keeping Kosher, while many strict Hindus are vegan and some observant Muslims may also follow suit, to avoid meat that is not Halal certified.The Challenge of the EverydayAlthough my initial vegan promptings were firmly at the selfish end of an altruism spectrum, my experience is that motivation is not static. Being a vegan for any reason increasingly primes awareness of more altruistic motivations “at the intersection of a diversity of concerns [… promoting] a spread and expansion of meaning to view food choices holistically” (Harrington et al. 144). Even so, everyday life offers a range of temptations and challenges that require constant juggling and, sometimes, a string of justifications: to oneself, and to others. I identify as a bit of a bad vegan, and not simply because I embrace the possibility that “honey is a gray area” (Greenebaum, quoting her participant Jason, 139). I’m also flexible around wine, for example, and don’t ask too many questions about whether the wine I drink is refined using milk, or egg-shells or even (yuk!) fish bladders. The point is, there are an infinite number of acid tests as to what constitutes “a real vegan”, encouraging inter-vegan judgmentality. Some slight definitional slippage aligns with Singer and Mason’s argument, however, that vegans should avoid worrying about “trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines […] Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all” (Singer and Mason 258–9).If I were to accept a definition of non-vegan, possibly because I have a leather handbag among other infractions, that would feel inauthentic. The term “vegan” helpfully labels my approach to food and drink. Others also find it useful as a shorthand for dietary preferences (except for the small but significant minority who muddle veganism with being gluten free). From the point of view of dietary prohibitions I’m a particularly strict vegan, apart from honey. I know people who make exceptions for line-caught fish, or the eggs from garden-roaming happy chooks, but I don’t. I increasingly understand the perspectives of those who have a more radical conception of veganism than I do, however: whose vision and understanding is that “behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product [… keeping] something from being seen as having been someone” (Adams 14). The concept of the global suffering of animals inherent in the figures: “31.1 billion each year, 85.2 million each day, 3.5 million each hour, 59,170 each minute” (Adams dedication) is appalling; as well as being an under-representation of the current situation since the globe has had almost two further decades of population growth and rising “living standards”.Whatever the motivations, it’s easy to imagine that the different branches of veganism have more in common than divides them. Being a vegan of any kind helps someone identify with other variations upon the theme. For example, even though my views on animal rights did not motivate my choice to become vegan, once I stopped seeing other sentient creatures as a handy food source I began to construct them differently. I gradually realised that, as a species, we were committing the most extraordinary atrocities on a global scale in treating animals as disposable commodities without rights or feelings. The large-scale production of what we like to term “meat and poultry” is almost unadulterated animal suffering, whereas the by-catch (“waste products”) of commercial fishing represents an extraordinary disregard of the rights to life of other creatures and, as Cole and Morgan note, “The number of aquatic animals slaughtered is not recorded, their individual deaths being subsumed by aggregate weight statistics” (135). Even if we did accept that humans have the right to consume some animals some of the time, should the netting of a given weight of edible fish really entail the death of many, many time more weight of living creatures that will be “wasted”: the so-called by-catch? Such wanton destruction has increasingly visible impacts upon complex food chains, and the ecosystems that sustain us all.The Vegan Threat to the Status QuoExamining the evidence for the broader community being biased against vegetarians and vegans, MacInnis and Hodson identify that these groups are “clear targets of relatively more negative attitudes” (727) towards them than other minority groups. Indeed, “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans” (726). While “vegans were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians” (732), there was a hierarchy in negative evaluations according to the underlying motivation for someone adopting veganism or vegetarianism. People motivated by personal health received the least negative evaluations from the general population followed by those who were motivated by the environment. The greatest opprobrium was reserved for vegans who were motivated by animal rights (732). MacInnis and Hodson reason that this antipathy is because “vegetarians and vegans represent strong threats to the status quo, given that prevailing cultural norms favour meat-eating” (722). Also implied here is that fact that eating meat is itself a cultural norm associated with masculinity (Rothgerber).Adams’s work links the unthinking, normative exploitation of animals to the unthinking, normative exploitation of women, a situation so aligned that it is often expressed through the use of a common metaphor: “‘meat’ becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are ‘pieces of meat’” (2002, 59). Rothberger further interrogates the relationship between masculinity and meat by exploring gender in relation to strategies for “meat eating justification”, reflecting a 1992 United States study that showed, of all people reporting that they were vegetarian, 68% were women and 32% men (Smart, 1995). Rothberger’s argument is that:Following a vegetarian diet or deliberately reducing meat intake violates the spirit of Western hegemonic masculinity, with its socially prescribed norms of stoicism, practicality, seeking dominance, and being powerful, strong, tough, robust and invulnerable […] Such individuals have basically cast aside a relatively hidden male privilege—the freedom and ability to eat without criticism and scrutiny, something that studies have shown women lack. (371)Noting that “to raise concerns about the injustices of factory farming and to feel compelled by them would seem emotional, weak and sensitive—feminine characteristics” (366), Rothberger sets the scene for me to note two items of popular culture which achieved cut-through in my personal life. The evidence for this is, in terms of all the pro-vegan materials I encounter, these were two of a small number that I shared on social media. In line with Rothberger’s observations, both are oppositional to hegemonic masculinity:one represents a feminised, mother and child exchange that captures the moment when a child realises the “absent referent” of the dead animal in the octopus on his plate—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU03da2arE;while the other is a sentimentalised and sympathetic recording of cattle luxuriating in their first taste of pastureland after a long period of confinement—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huT5__BqY_U.Seeing cows behaving like pets does call attention to the artificial distinction between “companion animals” and other animals. As Cole and Stewart note, “the naming of other animals is useful for human beings, while it is dangerous, and frequently lethal, for other animals. This is because the words we use to name other animals are saturated with common sense knowledge claims about those animals that legitimate their habitual use for humans” (13). Thus a cat, in Western culture, has a very different life trajectory to a cow. Adams notes the contrary case where the companion animal is used as a referent for a threatened human:Child sexual abusers often use threats and/or violence against companion animals to achieve compliance from their victims. Batterers harm or kill a companion animal as a warning to their partner that she could be next; as a way of further separating her from meaningful relationships; to demonstrate his power and her powerlessness. (Adams 57)For children who are still at a stage where animals are creatures of fascination and potential friends, who may be growing up with Charlotte’s Web (White) or Peter Rabbit (Potter), the mental gymnastics of suspending identification with these fellow creatures are harder because empathy and imagination are more active and the ingrained habit of eating without thinking has not had so long to develop. Indeed, children often understand domestic animals as “members of the family”, as illustrated by an interview with Kani, a 10-year old participant in one of my research projects. “In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to [the list of] those with whom she shares her family life: ‘And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby’” (Green and Stevenson). Such perceptions may well filter through to children having a different understanding of animals-as-food, even though Cole and Stewart note that “children enter into an adult culture habituated to [the] banal conceptualization of other animals according to their (dis)utilities” (21).Evidence-Based VeganismThose M/C Journal readers who know me personally will understand that one reason why I embrace the “bad vegan” label, is that I’m no more obviously a pin-up for healthy veganism than I am for ethical or environmental veganism. In particular, my BMI (Body Mass Index) is significantly outside the “healthy” range. Even so, I attribute a dramatic change in my capacity for stamina-based activity to my embrace of veganism. A high-speed recap of the evidence would include: in 2009 I embarked on a week-long 500km Great Vic bike ride; in 2012 I successfully completed a Machu Picchu trek at high altitude; by 2013 I was ready for my first half marathon (reprised in 2014, and 2017); in 2014 I cycled from Surfers’ Paradise to Noosa—somewhat less successfully than in my 2009 venture, but even so; in 2016 I completed the Oxfam 50km in 24 hours (plus a half hour, if I’m honest); and in 2017 I completed the 227km Portuguese Camino; in 2018 I jogged an average of over 3km per day, every day, up until 20 September... Apart from indicating that I live an extremely fortunate life, these activities seem to me to demonstrate that becoming vegan in 2007 has conferred a huge health benefit. In particular, I cannot identify similar metamorphoses in the lives of my 50-to-60-something year-old empty-nester friends. My most notable physical feat pre-veganism was the irregular completion of Perth’s annual 12km City-to-Surf fun run.Although I’m a vegan for health reasons, I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide that this was now my future: I had to be coaxed and cajoled into looking at my food preferences very differently. This process entailed my enrolling in a night school-type evening course, the Coronary Health Improvement Program: 16 x 3 hour sessions over eight weeks. Its sibling course is now available online as the Complete Health Improvement Program. The first lesson of the eight weeks convincingly demonstrated that what is good for coronary health is also good for health in general, which I found persuasive and reassuring given the propensity to cancer evident in my family tree. In the generation above me, my parents each had three siblings so I have a sample of eight immediate family to draw upon. Six of these either have cancer at the moment, or have died from cancer, with the cancers concerned including breast (1), prostate (2), lung (1), pancreas (1) and brain (1). A seventh close relative passed away before her health service could deliver a diagnosis for her extraordinarily elevated eosinophil levels (100x normal rates of that particular kind of white blood cell: potentially a blood cancer, I think). The eighth relative in that generation is my “bad vegan” uncle who has been mainly plant-based in his dietary choices since 2004. At 73, he is still working three days per week as a dentist and planning a 240 km trek in Italy as his main 2019 holiday. That’s the kind of future I’m hoping for too, when I grow up.And yet, one can read volumes of health literature without stumbling upon Professor T. Colin Campbell’s early research findings via his work on rodents and rodent cells that: “nutrition [was] far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen” and that “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development” (66, italics in original). Plant was already an eminent scientist at the point where she developed breast cancer, but she noted her amazement at learning “precisely how much has been discovered already [that] has not filtered through to the public” (18). The reason for the lack of visible research in this area is not so much its absence, but more likely its political sensitivity in an era of Big Food. As Harrington et al.’s respondent Samantha noted, “I think the meat lobby’s much bigger than the vegetable lobby” (147). These arguments are addressed in greater depth in Green et al.My initiating research question—Why do I feel the need to justify being vegan?—can clearly be answered in a wide variety of ways. Veganism disrupts the status quo: it questions both the appropriateness of humanity’s systematic torturing of other species for food, and the risks that those animal-based foods pose for the long-term health of human populations. It offends many vested interests from Big Food to accepted notions of animal welfare to the conventional teachings of the health industry. Identifying as a vegan represents an outcome of one or more of a wide range of motivations, some of which are more clearly self-serving (read “bad”); while others are more easily identified as altruistic (read “good”). After a decade or more of personal experimentation in this space, I’m proud to identify as a “bad vegan”. It’s been a great choice personally and, I hope, for some other creatures whose planet I share.ReferencesAdams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.Campbell, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Cambell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspaper.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (2011): 134–53.———, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004.Gans, Herbert J. “Participant Observation in the Era of ‘Ethnography’.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28.5 (1999): 540–48.Glendon, A. 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