Journal articles on the topic 'Manipulator pose selection'

Large components such as wing sections should be aligned and positioned in a desired position prior to the final manufacturing or assembly, so a digital alignment and position device based on six degree of freedom parallel manipulator with several prismatic-prismatic-prismatic-spherical branches was designed and fabricated to meet the needs. The digital alignment and position device is an alignment device based on the parallel manipulator, and it is also a positioning and holding fixture for large components manufacturing or assembly. In order to effectively and efficiently select the supporting points of large component where the digital alignment and position device branch is connected with, the performance of the parallel manipulator and the fixture should be comprehensively analyzed at the same time. The global performance indices such as the dexterity index, the bearing capacity index, and the stiffness index are calculated based on the mechanism Jacobean matrix of the parallel manipulator, and the positioning stability index is calculated based on the position Jacobean matrix of the fixture. The results show that the global performance indices are not related to the pose, but the positioning stability index is; in addition, all indices rely on the originally selected supporting points and provide the basis for the effective selection of the supporting points for large component aligned and positioned by the digital alignment and position device, which is based on parallel manipulator with prismatic- prismatic-prismatic-spherical pairs.

The paper focuses on the calibration of elastostatic parameters of spatial anthropomorphic robots. It proposes a new strategy for optimal selection of the measurement configurations that essentially increases the efficiency of robot calibration. This strategy is based on the concept of the robot test-pose and ensures the best compliance error compensation for the test configuration. The advantages of the proposed approach and its suitability for practical applications are illustrated by numerical examples, which deal with calibration of elastostatic parameters of a 3 degrees of freedom anthropomorphic manipulator with rigid links and compliant actuated joints.

A new improved differential evolution constrained optimization algorithm is proposed to determine the optimum path generation of a rock-drilling manipulator with nine degrees of freedom. This algorithm is developed to minimize the total joint displacement without compromising the pose accuracy of the end-effector. Considering the rule for optimal operation time and smooth joint motion, total joint displacement and minimization of the end-effector pose error are respectively taken as the optimization objective and constraints. In the proposed algorithm, the inverse kinematics solution is computed by self-adaptive mutation differential evolution constrained optimization (SAMDECO) algorithm. Unlike conventional differential evolution (DE) algorithms, in the process of selection operation, the proposed algorithm takes full advantages of the information of excellent infeasible solutions in the contemporary population and scales the contribution of position constraint and orientation constraint. Consequently, the search process is guided to approach the optimal solution from both feasible and infeasible regions, which tremendously improves convergence accuracy and convergence rate. Some contrastive experiments are conducted with the basic self-adaptive mutation differential evoluton (SAMDE) algorithm. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the basic SAMDE algorithm in terms of compliance of joints, which raises operation efficiency and plays an important role in engineering services value.

This article proposes a new type of multi-actuated mechanical press with parallel topology to develop high stamping capacity. Four active limbs actuated by servomotor deliver forces and motions to moving platform, and the passive limbs are driven by moving platform to push or pull the ram. This four-input-single-output system realizes multiple actuations without causing being over-constrained. Due to infinite number of solutions for the inverse kinematics, selection of actuation schemes for given ram trajectories is more crucial. Further, the principle of virtual work is used in the inverse dynamic problem. By choosing the pose variables of moving platform as generalized coordinates to describe the manipulator system, the linear form of dynamic models is derived. A typical deep-drawing process with nominal 25,000 kN capacity and 1200 mm stroke is simulated, and the required driving torques are computed. These performance analyses provide a basis to the design of the control law or the estimation of servomotor parameters for the mechanical press.

This paper deals with the wrench workspace (WW) determination of parallel manipulators. The WW is the set of end-effector poses (positions and orientations) for which the active joints are able to balance a set of external wrenches acting at the end-effector. The determination of the WW is important when selecting an appropriate manipulator design since the size and shape of the WW are dependent on the manipulator’s geometry (design) and selected actuators. Algorithms for the determination of the reachable workspace and the WW are presented. The algorithms are applicable to manipulator architectures utilizing actuators with positive and negative limits on the force/torque they can generate, as well as cable-driven parallel manipulator architectures which require nonnegative actuator limits to maintain positive cable tensions. The developed algorithms are demonstrated in case studies applied to a cable-driven parallel manipulator with 2-degrees-of-freedom and three cables and to a 3-RRR parallel manipulator. The approaches used in this paper provide guaranteed results and are based on methods utilizing interval analysis techniques for the representation of end-effector poses and design parameters.

We study hand poses selection in bimanual fine motor skills. To understand how roles and control variables are distributed across the hands and fingers, we compared two conditions when unscrewing a screw from a watch face. When the watch face needed positioning, role distribution was strongly influenced by hand dominance; when the watch face was stationary, a variety of hand pose combinations emerged. Control of independent task demands is distributed either across hands or across distinct groups of fingers.

Current hand-held smart devices are supplied with powerful processors, high resolution screens, and sharp cameras that make them suitable for Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Such applications commonly use interaction techniques adapted for touch, such as touch selection and multi-touch pose manipulation, mapping 2D gestures to 3D action. To enable direct 3D interaction for hand-held AR, an alternative is to use the changes of the device pose for 6 degrees-of-freedom interaction. In this article we explore selection and pose manipulation techniques that aim to minimize the amount of touch. For this, we explore and study the characteristics of both non-touch selection and non-touch pose manipulation techniques. We present two studies that, on the one hand, compare selection techniques with the common touch selection and, on the other, investigate the effect of user gaze control on the non-touch pose manipulation techniques.

A typical serial manipulator consists of a servo motor, a serial mechanism and an independent joint placed between the motor and the serial mechanism. Both the time-varying characteristics of the inertia of the serial mechanism and the flexibility characteristics of the independent joint are widely found in serial manipulator servo drive systems. These two characteristics not only increase the resonance magnitude of serial manipulators, but also affect the dynamic characteristics of the system. In order to obtain a stable output speed of serial manipulators, the variable parameters of a PI control strategy is applied to a serial manipulator servo drive system. Firstly, dynamic model of a serial manipulator servo drive system is established based on a two-inertia system. Then the transfer function from motor speed to motor electromagnetic torque is derived by the state-space equation. Furthermore, the parameters of the PI controller are designed and optimized utilizing three different pole assignment strategies with the identical radius, the identical damping coefficients, and the identical real parts. The results indicate that a serial manipulator servo drive system can obtain good dynamic characteristics by selecting parameters of the PI controller appropriately.

Input devices such as Nintendo Wiimotes are often used to select and manipulate virtual objects. While simple to use and easily available, these devices have some limitations. When used with common large displays such as televisions, they support only indirect manipulation. These devices also require the user to learn and remember which buttons map to which functions. We propose overcoming these limitations by using a smartphone as an interaction device. Smartphones, like Wiimotes, are readily available and easy to operate. Unlike the Wiimote, the smartphone has a touchscreen that can display the selected object, allowing the user to directly manipulate the object. Further, the touchscreen can customize the interface and provide buttons with clearly labeled functions specific to the object. We report on the lessons learned in integrating and using a smartphone as the interaction device for two applications. The first is a mixed reality game focused on general object selection and pose manipulation. We used this game in a pilot study evaluating usability. The second is an adaptation of an existing virtual reality application. This application demonstrated the ease of adaptation as well as improvements from using a smartphone.

In computerized adaptive testing, the most commonly used valuating function is the Fisher information function. When the goal is to keep item bank security at a maximum, the valuating function that seems most convenient is the matching criterion, valuating the distance between the estimated trait level and the point where the maximum of the information function is located. Recently, it has been proposed not to keep the same valuating function constant for all the items in the test. In this study we expand the idea of combining the matching criterion with the Fisher information function. We also manipulate the number of strata into which the bank is divided. We find that the manipulation of the number of items administered with each function makes it possible to move from the pole of high accuracy and low security to the opposite pole. It is possible to greatly improve item bank security with much fewer losses in accuracy by selecting several items with the matching criterion. In general, it seems more appropriate not to stratify the bank.

There is a growing need for usable and secure authentication in immersive virtual reality (VR). Established concepts (e.g., 2D authentication schemes) are vulnerable to observation attacks, and most alternatives are relatively slow. We present RubikAuth, an authentication scheme for VR where users authenticate quickly and secure by selecting digits from a virtual 3D cube that leverages coordinated 3D manipulation and pointing. We report on results from three studies comparing how pointing using eye gaze, head pose, and controller tapping impact RubikAuth’s usability, memorability, and observation resistance under three realistic threat models. We found that entering a four-symbol RubikAuth password is fast: 1.69–3.5 s using controller tapping, 2.35–4.68 s using head pose and 2.39 –4.92 s using eye gaze, and highly resilient to observations: 96–99.55% of observation attacks were unsuccessful. RubikAuth also has a large theoretical password space: 45 n for an n -symbols password. Our work underlines the importance of considering novel but realistic threat models beyond standard one-time attacks to fully assess the observation-resistance of authentication schemes. We conclude with an in-depth discussion of authentication systems for VR and outline five learned lessons for designing and evaluating authentication schemes.

This paper discusses a control architecture to equip humanoid robots with dynamic manipulation skills. Such skills are beneficial, as they increase the dexterity of humanoid robots and improve their handling of unforeseen situations. The nature of manipulation poses challenges with respect to environment perception, action planning, and motion control. These challenges are addressed in the paper: a dynamic force/torque (F/T) observer is discussed to reconstruct the environment F/Ts and to improve the interaction control. A method for online motion planning is investigated, which generates trajectories based on different selection criteria. These elements are integrated in a control design for dynamic manipulation and experimentally validated for two tasks: two-handed ball throwing and one-handed ball catching. Based on the experimental results, a modified end effector design with intrinsic compliance is proposed to improve the system performance that is demonstrated in case studies.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a remotecontrolled robot system capable of accurate highspeed performance of the same operation strictly conforming to human operator movement without sensors or special control means. We specifically intend to implement high-precision high-speed 3D hand pose estimation enabling a remote-controlled robot to be operated using two cameras installed loosely orthogonally using one ordinary PC. The two cameras have their own database. Once sequential hand images are shot at high speed, the system starts selecting one database with bigger size of hand region in each recorded image. Coarse screening then proceeds based on proportional hand image information roughly corresponding to wrist rotation or thumb or finger extension. Finally, a detailed search is done for similarity among selected candidates. Experiments show that mean and standard deviation scores of errors in estimated angles at the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) index are 0.45 ± 14.57 and at the carpometacarpal (CM) thumb 4.7 ± 10.82, respectively, indicating it as a high-precision 3D hand pose estimation. Remote control of a robot with the proposed vision system shows high performance as well.

Multi-functionalized MCM-41 has been successfully synthesized by site-selective manipulation of pore surface. The external surface of as-synthesized MCM-41 including surfactant template was deactivated by replacing the hydroxyl group with the highly electronegative fluorine. It allows one to fabricate the nanovessel with desired functionalities for the advanced applications such as targeted drug delivery.

SUMMARYThe Secondary Adjustable System (SAS) addressed here is a central component of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). It is a 6-degree-of-freedom rigid Stewart manipulator, in which one platform (the end-effector) should be controlled to track-desired trajectory when another platform (denoted as the base) is moving. Driving force analysis of the SAS is the basis for selecting rational servomotors and guaranteeing the dynamic performance, which will affect the terminal pose accuracy of the FAST. In order to determine the driving forces of the SAS, using the Newton–Euler method, the inverse dynamics of the Stewart manipulator is modeled by considering the motion of the base. Compared with the traditional dynamic models, the inverse dynamic model introduced here possesses an inherent wider application range. By adopting the kinematic and dynamic parameters of the FAST prototype, the driving force analysis of the SAS is carried out, and the driving force optimization strategies are proposed. Calculation and analysis presented in the paper reveal that there are three main factors affecting the driving forces of the SAS. In addition, the driving force analysis of this paper lays out guidelines for the design and control of the FAST prototype, as well as the structure and trajectory optimization.

Carotene and tocopherol are valuable products that exist as minor compounds in palm oil and mostly extracted out during many stages of palm oil processing. Hence, most of it ended up in wastewater or palm oil mill effluent (POME). Fortunately, adsorption is potentially one of the most efficient method as compared to the others. In fact, it is widely studied in laboratory scale, in order to obtain equilibrium data for the steady state system. However, industrial practices are mostly operated in unsteady state in a continuous manner. Consequently, this study is executed to design a recovery process of one of the minor compounds in palm oil mill effluent (POME), which is carotene, using silica gel. It aims to predict the dynamic adsorption of recovery of minor compounds from palm oil mill effluent based on available equilibrium data, investigate the effects of dynamic and physical properties of the system towards the process by analyzing the breakthrough curve and study the feasibility of the scale up process by performing a sensitivity analysis on the system. Then, a base simulation was prepared by using available equilibrium data. Operating and design parameters such as, bed height, inlet flowrate and concentration were manipulated. Consistent with previous packed column studies, increase flow and concentration will reduce the time required for the column to achieve saturation, while increase bed height effects were vice versa. Finally, the last objective to achieve was to study the practicality of the packed bed column and perform a sensitivity on assumptions and predictions such as predicted mass transfer coefficient and isotherm model. It is proven that the selection of isotherm model and prediction in coefficient did not pose a large impact to the breakthrough curve and the average time required for the column of 1.5 m tall and 0.8 in diameter, to reach breakthrough time is 1.7 days. Hence, it can be concluded that adsorption technology using silica gel as its adsorbent can be applied is recovering minor compounds in palm oil mills.

Abstract Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) encodes cellular machinery vital for cell and organism survival. Mutations, genetic manipulation, and gene therapies may produce cells where different types of mtDNA coexist in admixed populations. In these admixtures, one mtDNA type is often observed to proliferate over another, with different types dominating in different tissues. This ‘segregation bias’ is a long-standing biological mystery that may pose challenges to modern mtDNA disease therapies, leading to substantial recent attention in biological and medical circles. Here, we show how an mtDNA sequence’s balance between replication and transcription, corresponding to molecular ‘selfishness’, in conjunction with cellular selection, can potentially modulate segregation bias. We combine a new replication-transcription-selection (RTS) model with a meta-analysis of existing data to show that this simple theory predicts complex tissue-specific patterns of segregation in mouse experiments, and reversion in human stem cells. We propose the stability of G-quadruplexes in the mtDNA control region, influencing the balance between transcription and replication primer formation, as a potential molecular mechanism governing this balance. Linking mtDNA sequence features, through this molecular mechanism, to cellular population dynamics, we use sequence data to obtain and verify the sequence-specific predictions from this hypothesis on segregation behaviour in mouse and human mtDNA.

The robots which are composed of mechanisms with Delta 3 DOF parallel structure are increasingly used due to the advantages they poses such as high rigidity and that they can be used at high speed and acceleration. When the mechanical structure of the parallel robots with Delta 3 DOF structure is designed, a proper selection of the drive servomotors is imposed. The drive servomotors are chosen according to the values of the torque needed for the manipulated object to move in the workspace along a trajectory with a specific speed and acceleration. In this paper, the authors approach the study regarding the variation of the drive torques of parallel robots with Delta 3 DOF structure, when the manipulated object moves along a trajectory with imposed speed and acceleration, in order to choose the drive servomotors. In order to determine the value of the drive torque, SolidWorks software was used. From the results obtained by experimental means, it has been revealed that the usage of the software packages in the dynamic simulation of the mechanical assemblies determines the shorten of time, costs of projection, in comparison with practical testing which supposes the realization of the prototypes physically, expensive and time consuming process.

When searching for relevant objects in our environment (say, an apple), we create a memory template (a red sphere), which causes our visual system to favor template-matching visual input (applelike objects) at the expense of template-mismatching visual input (e.g., leaves). Although this principle seems straightforward in a lab setting, it poses a problem in naturalistic viewing: Two objects that have the same size on the retina will differ in real-world size if one is nearby and the other is far away. Using the Ponzo illusion to manipulate perceived size while keeping retinal size constant, we demonstrated across 71 participants that visual objects attract attention when their perceived size matches a memory template, compared with mismatching objects that have the same size on the retina. This shows that memory templates affect visual selection after object representations are modulated by scene context, thus providing a working mechanism for template-based search in naturalistic vision.

This article explores the discursive patterns of legitimization of anti-immigration policies adopted by the Polish right-wing government which has been ruling the country since October 2015. It argues that legitimization of anti-immigration policies is essentially threat-based and coercive, involving a specific selection of rhetorical tools deployed to characterize different immigrant groups and individual immigrants from mainly Middle East and East African territories. Construed as ‘different’, ‘alien’ and ‘unbelonging’, in a whole lot of cultural, ideological and religious terms, they are claimed to pose an emerging threat to the safety of Poland and the personal safety and well-being of Polish citizens. The article draws on discourse space models and Proximization Theory in particular, revealing how the concepts of closeness and remoteness are manipulated in the service of threat construction and the sanctioning of tough anti-immigration measures, such as the refusal to accept non-Christian refugees from war territories in Syria. It demonstrates how Poland’s government manufactures and discursively perpetuates the aura of fear by conflating the issue of refugee migration into Europe with the problem of global terrorism, and how virtual threats to Polish cultural legacy and values are conceived to justify the government’s opposition to the idea of the multiethnic and multicultural state in general.

Some of the most important trafficking processes in cells involve transport across the nuclear envelope. Whether it is the import of transcription factors or the export of RNA, the only known portal across the double lipid bilayer that forms the nuclear envelope are the macromolecular pores known as nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). Understanding how signals influence the conformation of the NPC is important for testing models of, and perhaps modifying, transport across the nuclear envelope. Here we summarize high-resolution atomic force microscopy studies of NPC structure following manipulation of nuclear envelope calcium stores of nuclei from Xenopus laevis oocytes. The results show that the release of calcium from these stores through the specific activation of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptors leads to changes in NPC structure observable from both sides of the nuclear envelope. The diameter of the NPC is also sensitive to these calcium stores and increases upon calcium release. Western blot analysis reveals the presence of ryanodine receptors in the nuclear envelope of X. laevis oocytes, although in low abundance. Activation of these calcium channels also leads to the displacement of the central mass and changes in NPC diameter. This change in structure may involve a displacement of the cytoplasmic and nuclear rings of the NPC towards each other, leading to the apparent emergence of the central mass from both sides of the NPC. The changes in conformation and diameter of the NPC may alter cargo access and binding to phenylalanine-glycine repeats lining the pore, thus altering transport.

The multiplicity of targets of the 5G and further future technologies, set by the modern societies and industry, lacks the establishment of design methods for the highly multidisciplinary application of wireless platforms for small cells. Constraints are set by the overall energy concept, structural safety and sustainability. Various Smart poles and Light poles exist but it is challenging to define the design drivers especially for a composite load-carrying structure. In this study, the design drivers of a composite 5G smart pole are determined and the connecting design between finite element modelling (FEM), signal penetration and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for thermal analysis are reported as an interdisciplinary process. The results emphasize the significant effects of thermal loading on the material selection. The physical architecture, including various cutouts, is manipulated by the needs of the mmW radios, structural safety and the societal preferences of sustainable city planning, i.e., heat management and aesthetic reasons. Finally, the paint thickness and paint type must be optimized due to radome-integrated radios. In the future, sustainability regulations and realized business models will define the cost-structure and the response by customers.

We have developed software for the Apple IIe series of microcomputers for use in labs in an introductory astronomy course. This software emphasizes a toolkit approach to data analysis; it has been class tested with over 170 students and was a resounding success as a replacement for previously used graphical approximations. A unique feature of this software is the incorporation of image-processing techniques into a course designed for non-science majors.The five software packages are:(a)Datasheet - A six-column spreadsheet with columnwise operations, statistical functions, and double-high-resolution graphics.(b)Image-Processor Program - Allows 37 × 27 pixel × 8 bit video captured images to be manipulated using standard image-processing techniques such as low pass/high pass filtering and histogram equalization.(c)Picture-Processor Program - Allows 256 × 192 bilevel pictures to be manipulated and measured with functions that include calipers, odometer, planimeter, and protractor.(d)Orrery Program - Simulates planet configurations along the ecliptic. A movable cursor allows selection of specific configurations. Since both relative times and angular positions are given, students can deduce the scale of the solar system using simple trigonometry.(e)Plot Program - Allows orbital positions as observed from above the pole to be plotted on the screen. By entering trial values of elliptical orbit parameters, students obtain and the program plots the best fitting ellipse to the data. The sum of the squares of the residuals in the radial coordinate is given after each trial so that students can discover convergence more easily than by simple visual examination of a plot comparing the trial theoretical points with the raw data points.

Eukaryotic CBDs (cAMP-binding domains) control multiple cellular functions (e.g. phosphorylation, guanine exchange and ion channel gating). Hence the manipulation of cAMP-dependent signalling pathways has a high translational potential. However, the ubiquity of eukaryotic CBDs also poses a challenge in terms of selectivity. Before the full translational potential of cAMP signalling can be tapped, it is critical to understand the structural basis for selective cAMP agonism and antagonism. Recent NMR investigations have shown that structurally homologous CBDs respond differently to several CBD ligands and that these unexpected differences arise at the level of either binding (i.e. affinity) or allostery (i.e. modulation of the autoinhibitory equilibria). In the present article, we specifically address how the highly conserved CBD fold binds cAMP with markedly different affinities in PKA (protein kinase A) relative to other eukaryotic cAMP receptors, such as Epac (exchange protein directly activated by cAMP) and HCN (hyperpolarization-activated cyclic-nucleotide-modulated channel). A major emerging determinant of cAMP affinity is hypothesized to be the position of the autoinhibitory equilibrium of the apo-CBD, which appears to vary significantly across different CBDs. These analyses may assist the development of selective CBD effectors that serve as potential drug leads for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases.

Abstract. Amiri M. 2019. Some structural characteristics of mixed natural forest stand at a 10-year period in the Hyrcanian Region: Case study of Shourab Forest, Mazandaran Province, Iran. . Biodiversitas 20: 950-955. This research was carried out in Shourab Forest in the Hyrcanian region, Northern Iran over a 10-year period (1996-2005) and data were analyzed based on systematic random sampling with permanent sample plots; 0.1 ha. The results revealed that n.ha-1 and v.ha-1 in study area increased from 126.3 and 245.2 in 1966 to 202.8 and 313.1 in 2006, respectively. The analysis of tree frequency in diameter classes at the first and the end of the period indicated un-even aged regular stands. The highest increase of number of trees was observed in 15, 20 and 25cm diameter classes, While the maximum change in volume per hectare, is related to the diameter classes 30, 65, 70 and 100cm. The regeneration values in most of the vegetation stages (except; 0-2.5cm) increased after a 10 years harvesting period. Development stages of this regeneration were seedling (53.4-53.3%), sapling (37.3-33.5%), thicket (6.8-10.4%) and small pole (2.5-2.8%), in 1996 and 2006, respectively. These conditions show that the selection method has been successful in our study area. The change in the utilization method of shelter-wood system to selection cutting method had been a positive impact on the quantitative forest condition after a 10-year period. In general, it can conclude that structural characteristics of mixed beech-hornbeam stands such as live trees dimension including tree height and diameter, number and volume of trees per hectare are different during the time. And eventually, the manipulation in the stands should be well timed and planned based on quantified structural properties of stands.

Mesoporous materials bear great potential for biotechnological applications due to their biocompatibility and versatility. Their high surface area and pore interconnection allow the immobilization of molecules and their subsequent controlled delivery. Modifications of the mesoporous material with the addition of different chemical species, make them particularly suitable for the production of bioactive coatings. Functionalized thin films of mesoporous silica and titania can be used as scaffolds with properties as diverse as promotion of cell growth, inhibition of biofilms formation, or development of sensors based on immobilized enzymes. The possibility to pattern them increase their appeal as they can be incorporated into devices and can be tailored both with respect to architecture and functionalization. In fact, selective surface manipulation is the ground for the fabrication of advanced micro devices that combine standard micro/nanofluids with functional materials. In this review, we will present the advantages of the functionalization of silica and titania mesoporous materials deposited in thin film. Different functional groups used to modify their properties will be summarized, as well as functionalization methods and some examples of applications of modified materials, thus giving an overview of the essential role of functionalization to improve the performance of such innovative materials.

Abstract Introduction Immune-mediated liver and gastrointestinal diseases are chronic conditions that lack curative treatments. Despite advances in the understanding and treatment of these conditions, they frequently remain refractory to treatment and represent a significant unmet need. Cellular therapies are an emerging option and hold the potential to have a major impact. Data sources A literature review was carried out using Pubmed. Keywords used for search were ‘ATMP’, ‘immune mediated’, ‘autoimmune liver disease’ and ‘immune mediated gastrointestinal conditions’, ‘cell therapy’, ‘MSC’, ‘HSCT’, ‘Regulatory T cells’, ‘GVHD’, ‘Coeliac disease’ ‘IBD’, ‘PSC’, ‘AIH’, ‘PBC’. No new data were generated or analysed in support of this review. Areas of agreement There is substantial evidence from clinical trials to support the use of cell therapies as a treatment for immune-mediated liver and gastrointestinal conditions. Cellular therapy products have the ability to ‘reset’ the dysregulated immune system and this in turn can offer a longer term remission. There are ongoing clinical trials with mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) and other cells to evidence their efficacy profile and fill the gaps in current knowledge. Insights gained will inform future trial designs and subsequent therapeutic applications. Areas of controversy There remains some uncertainty around the extrapolation of results from animal studies to clinical trials. Longevity of the therapeutic effects seen after the use of cell therapy needs to be scrutinized further. Heterogeneity in the selection of cells, source, methods of productions and cell administration pose challenges to the interpretation of the data. Growing points MSCs are emerging as a key therapeutic cells in immune-mediated liver and gastrointestinal conditions. Ongoing trials with these cells will provide new insights and a better understanding thus informing future larger scale studies. Areas timely for developing research Larger scale clinical trials to build on the evidence from small studies regarding safety and efficacy of cellular therapy are still needed before cellular therapies can become off the shelf treatments. Alignment of academia and industry to standardize the processes involved in cell selection, manipulation and expansion and subsequent use in clinical trials is an important avenue to explore further.

The complex interrelationships among individuals within social environments can exert selection pressures on social skills: those behaviours and cognitive processes that allow animals to manipulate and out-reproduce others. Social complexity can also have a developmental effect on social skills by providing individuals with opportunities to hone their skills by dealing with the challenges posed in within-group interactions. We examined how social skills develop in captive, adult male brown-headed cowbirds ( Molothrus ater ) that were exposed to differing levels of ‘social complexity’ across a 2-year experiment. After each year, subjects housed in groups with dynamic social structure (where many individuals entered and exited the groups during the year) outcompeted birds who had been housed in static groups. Exposure to dynamic structure subsequently led to substantial changes to the social networks of the home conditions during the breeding season. Static groups were characterized by a predictable relationship between singing and reproductive success that was stable across years. In dynamic conditions, however, males showed significant variability in their dominance status, their courting and even in their mating success. Reproductive success of males varied dramatically across years and was responsive to social learning in adulthood, and socially dynamic environments ‘trained’ individuals to be better competitors, even at an age when the development of many traits important for breeding (like song quality) had ended.

Há fortes evidências que as atividades humanas estão afetando o clima global por meio da produção de Gases de Efeito Estufa (GEE), dos quais o metano (CH4) tem elevado potencial de aquecimento. A fermentação entérica e o esterco dos ruminantes representam cerca de 30 a 40% do total das emissões antropogênicas de CH4. Este artigo traz um resumo de tecnologias existentes para reduzir as emissões de CH4 entéricas dos ruminantes, com ênfase à manipulação dietética e ruminal, à seleção/reprodução animal e à melhoria dos sistemas de produção. As diferenças na produção de CH4 entérica entre as espécies animais com base na anatomia do trato gastrointestinal, fisiologia digestiva, fermentação ruminal e nos hábitos de pastejo também são discutidas. A inibição da emissão de CH4 entérica é possível por meio do uso de ionóforos, ácidos orgânicos e óleos. Plantas alimentares contendo metabólitos secundários (taninos e saponinas i.e.) também podem reduzir a produção de CH4. O uso de animais reprodutores para melhorar a eficiência de conversão alimentar (menor consumo residual) pode contribuir com a redução da emissão total de CH4, além de reduzir a emissão por unidade de produto. Resultados utilizando o modelo IPCC nível II prevê que caprinos e vacas de elevada produção leiteira podem apresentar menor emissão de CH4 por unidade de produto em comparação com animais zebuínos e ovinos, enquanto os pequenos ruminantes (caprinos e ovinos) produzem menos CH4 por unidade de ganho de peso corporal (carne), em relação aos bovinos. A melhoria da qualidade das forragens e a implementação de práticas eficientes de uso das pastagens (sistema de pastejo e taxas de lotação) podem na maioria dos casos promover maior produção animal e incrementar a emissão absoluta de CH4, mas também reduzir a emissão de CH4 por unidade de produto animal. Palavras - chave: mudanças climáticas, gases do efeito estufa, bovinos, ovinos, caprinos, manipulação da dieta, manipulação ruminal, criação de animais, intensificação, modelagem. Estratégias para a Redução da Emissão de Metano por Ruminantes A B S T R A C T There is irrefutable evidence that human activities are affecting the global climate through the production of Green House Gases (GHG) of which methane (CH4) has a high warming potential. Enteric fermentation and manure from ruminants represent about 30 to 40% of the total anthropogenic CH4 emissions. This paper summarizes existing technologies to reduce enteric CH4 emissions in ruminants given emphasis to dietary and rumen manipulation, animal selection/ breeding and improvement of production systems. Differences in enteric CH4 production among animal species based on anatomy of the GI tract, digestive physiology, rumen fermentation and grazing habits are also discussed. Inhibition of enteric CH4 emission is possible through the use of ionophores, organic acids and oils. Feeding plants containing secondary metabolites (i.e. tannins and saponins) can reduce CH4 production. Breeding for improved feed conversion efficiency (lower residual feed intake) is likely to reduce total and per unit product CH4 emissions. Results using the IPCC Tier II model predict that goats and high producing dairy cattle can potentially produce less CH4 emissions per unit of milk than Cebu cattle or sheep, while small ruminants (goats and sheep) produce less CH4 per unit of live weight gain (meat) than cattle. The introduction of improved high quality forages and the implementation of efficient pasture utilization practices (grazing system and stocking rate) can result in most cases in improved animal production and in increased absolute CH4 emissions, but in reduced CH4 per unit of animal product. Keywords: climate change, greenhouse gases, cattle, sheep, goats, dietary manipulation, rumen manipulation, animal breeding, intensification, modelling

Abstract Background Ketamine is a general anesthetic thought to act by antagonizing N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors. However, ketamine acts on multiple channels, many of which are potential targets―including hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated and potassium channels. In this study we tested the hypothesis that potassium leak channels contribute to the anesthetic action of ketamine. Methods Adult mouse cortical slices (400 µm) were exposed to no-magnesium artificial cerebrospinal fluid to generate seizure-like event activity. The reduction in seizure-like event frequency after exposure to ketamine (n = 14) was quantified as a signature of anesthetic effect. Pharmacologic manipulation of hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated and potassium channels using ZD7288 (n = 11), cesium chloride (n = 10), barium chloride (n = 10), low-potassium (1.5 mM) artificial cerebrospinal fluid (n = 10), and urethane (n = 7) were investigated. Results Ketamine reduced the frequency of seizure-like events (mean [SD], –62 [22]%, P < 0.0001). Selective hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channel block with ZD7288 did not significantly alter the potency of ketamine to inhibit seizure-like event activity. The inhibition of seizure-like event frequency by ketamine was fully antagonized by the potassium channel blockers cesium chloride and barium chloride (8 [26]% and 39 [58%] increase, respectively, P < 0.0001, compared to ketamine control) and was facilitated by the potassium leak channel opener urethane (–93 [8]%, P = 0.002 compared to ketamine control) and low potassium artificial cerebrospinal fluid (–86 [11]%, P = 0.004 compared to ketamine control). Conclusions The results of this study show that mechanisms additional to hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated channel block are likely to explain the anesthetic action of ketamine and suggest facilitatory action at two-pore potassium leak channels.

The goal of the research was to analyse the development of the idea of the public service broadcasting (PSB) in Lithuania as one of Post-Soviet countries that restored its independence in 1990. The Lithuanian case serves in revealing the great variety of ways to interpret the idea of the PSB, the possibilities to manipulate various notions, and the way the fate of the PSB can be affected by politicians and competing business groups. In this research we distinguished the following stages of the PSB concept formation in Lithuania: the first debates (the development of legislative basis), and attempts of influence – the so-called depoliticisation, decommercialisation, and optimization. In order to achieve it, we analysed the Lithuanian legislation and its amendments, parliamentary discussions, and press publications. We also compared the Lithuanian PSB concept with the Western perception. It was concluded that despite of the official declarations about further limiting the interference with the national service broadcaster, there actually were the attempts of influence and politicisation. Politicisation by depoliticising. In pursuit of changing the Lithuanian Radio and Television (LRT) management the procedure of LRT Council formation was changed in 1996-1997: representatives were delegated by 15 creative and public organisations. The principles of public organisations selection have been criticised. Politicisation by de-commercialising. In 2000-2002, the LRT was criticised because of its commercialisation and non-performance of its mission. It was intended to develop a special funding system whereby the LRT should submit the Seimas with a funding plan and evidences justifying that the anticipated programmes are in compliance with the national mission. Introduction of such amendments could pose a risk of direct political interference with the LRT management and formation of the programme content. Politicisation by optimising. In 2009-2010 the attempts were made to radically reform the LRT management. The criticism related to linkage of the LRT Council members mandate with the political calendar, possibility of recalling the Council members by the delegating institutions and organisations, and the right of the Seimas Committee to approve or reject the strategy of the LRT programming. In 2014, a new financing model of the LRT has been developed, following which the LRT in 2015 discontinued broadcasting the commercial ads (except for certain established cases). The LRT financing is known in advance and calculated on the basis of the budget revenue and excise duty collection results of a preceding calendar year.

Abstract Abstract 564 Insertional oncogenesis poses a severe hurdle to current gene therapy for blood disorders. The semi-random insertion of retroviral vectors combined with the inability for prolonged ex vivo culture of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) prohibits prospective integration site selection. The advent of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) offers for the first time the possibility of generating patient-specific stem cells that can be extensively manipulated in vitro, thus creating a unique platform for precise genetic engineering. Here, we present a novel strategy for the genetic correction of ß-thalassemia major based on the identification and selection of patient-specific iPSC clones harboring a normal ß-globin gene integrated in genomic “safe harbor” sites that permit therapeutic levels of expression while minimizing the possibility of oncogenic risks. We generated a total of 20 iPSC lines from bone marrow stromal cells or skin fibroblasts from 4 patients with ß-thalassemia major of various genotypes using our traceable lentiviral vector system (Papapetrou et al., PNAS, 2009; Lee et al., Nature, 2009), as well as an excisable single polycistronic vector co-expressing OCT4, SOX2, KLF4 and cMYC. Additional transgene-free thal-iPSC lines were generated following Cre recombinase-mediated excision of the reprogramming vector. Seven thal-iPSC lines were selected for further characterization and were shown to fulfill multiple criteria of pluripotency, including teratoma formation. Four thal-iPSC lines were transduced with a lentiviral vector encoding the human ß-globin gene cis-linked to its hypersensitive site (HS) 2, HS3 and HS4 locus control region elements, derived from the TNS9 vector, previously shown to confer erythroid-specific ß-globin gene expression at therapeutic levels (May et al., Nature, 2000). Thal-iPSC clones harboring single vector copies were selected and vector integration sites were mapped to the human genome. To identify safe harbor sites we adopted a set of 5 criteria: (1) distance of at least 50 kb from the 5' end of any gene, (2) distance of at least 300 kb from any cancer-related gene, (3) distance of at least 300 kb from any miRNA, (4) location outside a transcription unit and (5) location outside ultraconserved regions. A survey of 5840 integration sites of the globin lentiviral vector that we mapped in thal-iPSCs revealed that 17.3% meet all five “safe harbor” criteria, supporting the feasibility of recovering thal-iPSC clones harboring vector integrations in “safe harbors” by screening a relatively small set of single-copy clones. Indeed, 3 “safe harbor” integrations were retrieved amongst 36 sites mapped in thal-iPSC clones. Among 13 clones randomly selected and thoroughly confirmed to harbor a single copy of the globin vector, we found one clone, thal5.10-2, with an integration that meets all five “safe harbor” criteria. Upon erythroid differentiation, 12 of the 13 single copy thal-iPSC clones expressed detectable vector-encoded ß-globin at levels ranging from 9% to 159% (mean 53%) of a normal endogenous ß-globin allele. 9 out of 13 clones expressed the ß-globin transgene at levels higher than 30%. Remarkably, the “safe harbor” clone 5.10-2, expressed 85% of a normal ß-globin allele. Microarray analysis of undifferentiated thal-iPSC clones and their erythroid progeny revealed that 3 out of 5 integrations eliminated by our “safe harbor” criteria result in perturbed expression of neighboring genes at a distance ranging between 9 and 275 kb from the vector insertion. Of note, the “safe harbor' integration site in clone 5.10-2 is in a genomic region with no genes within 300 kb on either side, while no significant differentially expressed genes were found elsewhere in the genome. These data demonstrate that the selection of iPSC clones, wherein therapeutic levels of transgene expression without perturbation of endogenous genes is obtained from selected chromosomal sites is feasible by screening a limited number of single-copy clones and applying five “safe harbor” criteria. This study provides a framework and a strategy combining bioinformatics and functional analyses for identifying “safe harbors” for transgene integration and expression in the human genome. This approach may be broadly applicable to introducing therapeutic, suicide or marker genes into patient-specific iPSCs towards the development of safer stem cell therapies. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract. Airline route maps show the flights an airline operates between destination airports. Maps like these tend to become cluttered quickly. The clutter depends on the amount of flights to display; the routes of flight paths, the balance between shorter (e.g., domestic) and longer (e.g., intercontinental) flights, and the geographic locations of route endpoints each influence the amount of clutter.Flights are typically shown as semantically uniform, despite having varied characteristics such as departure or arrival times, frequencies, or passenger volumes, among others. Most maps only indicate the existence of a connection since the main purpose is to impress the customers with the connectivity of the airline in question (i.e., the order or size of the network graph, corresponding to the number of locations served and the number of flight connections, respectively).What are good strategies to design an airline route map? To answer this question, we looked at hundreds of airlines map from the past. From these maps we identified seven distinct strategies. Some rely on geometric transformations (i.e., typically warping or scaling, or the use of abstract space), while others use significant artistic freedom in symbol selection and design.1. Projection Selection. A common strategy is to select a map projection that spreads or “unravels” the network. Figure A shows the JAL network in a polar azimuthal projection, in which regions farther away from the north pole are increasingly spread out, opening up map surface space for nodes, edges, and labels. Uncommon projection choices can help deal with networks containing routes that cross polar regions, or that have dense sets of connections in a region whose area the projection expands.2. Topographic Manipulation. Segments of the map such as whole continents can be brought closer together, selectively scaled, or displaced to emptier areas of the map, to open up map surface space in a manner that is convenient for the network being drawn. In Figure B, Egypt has been conveniently moved into the Atlantic Ocean to allow for a more spread-out network of routes to locations in Europe. This strategy is frequently used when there are relatively spatially-distinct but densely-packed clusters of endpoints in the network (e.g., multiple European and multiple North American destinations, but little elsewhere), or when moving one or a few topologically-central endpoints away from mass of its connecting nodes conveniently fans-out the network edges, such as in the provided Egyptian case.3. Insets and Blow-Ups. The use of a main map for global connections and insets for smaller, busy areas or domestic networks is another frequently executed strategy. Figure C displays Pan Am’s global network with insets for Europe and the eastern US. This strategy is particularly useful for networks that are “multiscale”, in that their routes tend to cluster across short-haul, local tiers and long-haul, distant tiers.4. Schematization. Schematic maps, where space is selectively distorted to produce relatively rectilinear or angular shapes, and exemplified by many public transport maps, are used as well. Usually, both the networks and the basemaps are schematized. Geographic distortions are varied, but generally ubiquitous. An example is found in Figure D, showing Air Canada’s network. Schematization applies broadly, since geometric distortions can be selected at the designer’s convenience, given the network in question.5. Leaving Out Basemaps. Some airline route maps only show connections between destinations, leaving out any contextualizing basemap. The layout of network endpoints is not always consistent; they are sometimes planimetrically precise according to some map projection, and sometimes systematically or arbitrarily distributed across the map surface. The New York Air map in figure E is an example. Leaving out basemaps creates more whitespace on the map, which is either useful for drawing network information more densely, or left bare as an aesthetic choice.6. Abstract Diagrams. Finally, one can find non-map solutions, using diagrammatic techniques to visualize the network, even though these are frequently similar or evocative of maps. The characteristics of the geography in question, such as scale or directions, tend to be lost. Figure F show the connectivity of Turkish Airlines as a radial diagram; the globe in the center is decorative and suggestive only. For reasons similar to schematization, this strategy applies broadly, though it is interesting to note that it is relatively uncommon, perhaps because it tends to not produce maps.7. Point Locations Only. A simple and minimalist approach sometimes taken is to plot destinations on a map while leaving out connection lines. As with leaving out basemaps, this creates more whitespace. Figure G shows an example for Air France.The strategy applied appears to depend in part on the order and size of the network (i.e., number of endpoints and connections) and the geographic extent of the network. Smaller, more local airlines have less design challenges compared to global carriers.How can we benefit from the existing design solutions described above to decide on a fitting design for illustrating any given airline’s full network? Can we include and make use of further information from an airline’s timetable in the map to visualize characteristics such as flight frequency, scheduling and duration?

Abstract Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia (APL) accounts for 5% of all cases of acute myeloid leukemia (AML). This disease is highly curable with all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA) based therapy. In non-APL AML, ATRA has limited activity, and little is known about mechanisms of ATRA resistance. The apparent selective efficacy of ATRA in PML/RARα-associated APL poses an important question as to whether the presence of this fusion protein renders APL uniquely susceptible. Two compelling arguments can be made to counter this view. First, experiments in vitro show that ATRA effectively differentiates HL-60 cell lines, which lack the PML/RARα fusion protein. Second, clinical studies with ATRA in previously untreated older AML patients (excluding APL) have reported clinical activity. These observations confirm the therapeutic potential of ATRA beyond APL. In this context, our group has previously identified the lysine demethylase LSD-1, as a therapeutic target to re-sensitize leukemic blasts to ATRA. A clinical investigation of ATRA combined with LSD-1 inhibition is currently underway (NCT02273102). It is likely that other defects leading to ATRA resistance will be similarly amenable to pharmacologic manipulation. Defects in the proto-oncogene c-Myc have been widely implicated in the initiation and maintenance of AML. Over-expression of c-Myc in leukemic blasts enhances clonogenic survival and blocks ATRA induced differentiation. We hypothesized that down-regulation of c-Myc might increase the anti-leukemic effects of ATRA in AML. To date, c-Myc has been an evasive target for direct pharmacologic inhibition however, inhibitors of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway have been shown to indirectly lower levels of c-Myc in leukemic blasts. In the current study, we show that the pro-differentiation effects of ATRA are markedly potentiated when combined with agents that target PI3K/AKT/mTOR signalling. In AML cell lines and primary patient samples, we observed additive pro-differentiation effects when ATRA was combined with inhibitors of PI3K (ZSTK474) and mTOR complex proteins (Torin-1, WYE-125132). However, when combined with the bromodomain inhibitor NVP-BEZ235, a dual inhibitor of PI3K and mTOR, we observed synergistic induction of CD11b by FACS analysis. Combination studies revealed loss of cell viability, cell cycle arrest in G1 phase, and impaired clonogenic survival, which was more prominent for ATRA combination treatments than with any agent used alone (Figure 1). To assess the role of c-Myc in mediating these effects, we measured c-Myc protein levels and PI3K/AKt/mTOR pathway markers at different time-points following treatment with ATRA alone and in combination with the inhibitors described above (Figure 2). Our findings suggest that ATRA alone quickly down-regulates c-Myc (within 6 hours) through transcriptional repression. Disruption of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway further down-regulates c-Myc (within 3 hours) through destabilization and enhanced degradation. ATRA combined with NVP-BEZ235 produced maximal c-Myc suppression, and led to more cell kill than any other combination tested. Detailed analysis of changes in the transcriptome in MV-411 cells following treatment with ATRA and NVP-BEZ235 revealed that both agents act jointly on the regulation of the same biological pathways and processes, but regulate different sets of genes within these pathways. Updated mechanism based studies will be presented. In conclusion, suppression of c-Myc levels through disruption of PI3K/AKT/mTOR signalling augments the anti-leukemic effects of ATRA. These data support the clinical investigation of ATRA combined with rapalogs or bromodomain inhibitors. Figure 1. Combination treatment with PI3K/mTORC inhibitors and ATRA decreases cell viability in AML cells. MV4-11 cells were treated as indicated with combinations of BEZ (1µM), WYE (1µM) or ZSTK (2.5µM) and ATRA (0.1 µM). Number of cells was determined by CellTiter-Glo¨ luminescent cell viability assay (Promega). Data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA (P < 0.0001) followed by TukeyÕs post-hoc test. * P< 0.05, ** P < 0.01, *** P < 0.001,**** P < 0.0001. Figure 1. Combination treatment with PI3K/mTORC inhibitors and ATRA decreases cell viability in AML cells. MV4-11 cells were treated as indicated with combinations of BEZ (1µM), WYE (1µM) or ZSTK (2.5µM) and ATRA (0.1 µM). Number of cells was determined by CellTiter-Glo¨ luminescent cell viability assay (Promega). Data were analyzed by one-way ANOVA (P < 0.0001) followed by TukeyÕs post-hoc test. * P< 0.05, ** P < 0.01, *** P < 0.001,**** P < 0.0001. Figure 2. Reduced expression of MYC protein by inhibition of the PI3K/AKT/mTORC pathways. Immunoblotting/quantification of MYC protein levels in MV4-11 cells following treatment with combinations of WYE (1µM), BEZ (1µM), ZSTK (2.5µM) and ATRA (0.1 µM). Figure 2. Reduced expression of MYC protein by inhibition of the PI3K/AKT/mTORC pathways. Immunoblotting/quantification of MYC protein levels in MV4-11 cells following treatment with combinations of WYE (1µM), BEZ (1µM), ZSTK (2.5µM) and ATRA (0.1 µM). Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Genetic manipulation as selective reproduction – a preliminary theological-ethical assessment Genetic manipulation – the technology in which genes are placed in embryos and gametes of animals – with the purpose of creating certain intended genetic characteristics, has taken place on a limited but indeed astonishing scale. Although the application of genetic manipulation is not yet possible for humans, because of a number of genetic and technical problems, research in this field is taking place at a terrific speed. In this article attention is given to the question whether genetic manipulations may, currently and in the future, pose a reproductive option for prospective Christian parents. A preliminary ethical assessment of genetic manipulation founded on God’s Word is given.

AbstractA selection of nanoscale membrane pores is being constructed by genetic manipulation of α-hemolysin (αHL), a 33.2 kDa polypeptide secreted by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which can self-assemble into hexameric cylindrical channels -1 to 2 nm In Internal diameter. Ultimately, the new pores will be used to confer novel permeability properties upon materials such as thin films utilizing, for example, monolayer sheets of the hexamer. Recombinant αHL (r-αHL) has now been obtained in multimilligram amounts and purified to homogeneity after overexpression of the αHL gene in Escherichia coli. The properties of r-αHL are closely similar to those of αHL purified from S. aureus. Recent deletion mutagenesis experiments have given us new insight into the assembly mechanism of the pore. Three intermediates have been identified: a membrane-bound monomer; an oligomeric pore precursor; and the hexameric pore itself. Currently, point mutogenesis combined with chemical modification is being used to produce new pores of different internal diameter, with selectivity for the passage of molecules and Ions, and with gating properties (the ability to open and close in response to a physical stimulus, e.g. an electric field or light).

Abstract Sexual reproduction often leads to selection that favors the evolution of sex-limited traits or sex-specific variation for shared traits. These sexual dimorphisms manifest due to sex-specific genetic architectures and sex-biased gene expression across development, yet the molecular mechanisms underlying these patterns are largely unknown. The first step is to understand how sexual dimorphisms arise across the genotype-phenotype-fitness map. The emergence of “4D genome technologies” allows for efficient, high-throughput, and cost-effective manipulation and observations of this process. Studies of sexual dimorphism will benefit from combining these technological advances (e.g., precision genome editing, inducible transgenic systems, and single-cell RNA sequencing) with clever experiments inspired by classic designs (e.g., bulked segregant analysis, experimental evolution, and pedigree tracing). This perspective poses a synthetic view of how manipulative approaches coupled with cutting-edge observational methods and evolutionary theory are poised to uncover the molecular genetic basis of sexual dimorphism with unprecedented resolution. We outline hypothesis-driven experimental paradigms for identifying genetic mechanisms of sexual dimorphism among tissues, across development, and over evolutionary time.

Automating the double-hull block welding improves the shipbuilding efficiency and mitigates health risk to the welders. Due to the unique challenge posed by the internal structures, existing technologies are at most semi-autonomous. Believing that mobility is key to full autonomy, we employ mobile robot technology to transport the welding manipulator, treating the internal structures as obstacles. Though many robot designs for obstacle scaling exist, there is no selection guideline. To this end, we surveyed existing robots and came out with a taxonomy to explain the design philosophies behind them. From the survey, it is ascertained that there are two suitable philosophies: bridging and conforming. Bridging mechanisms create links between points on obstacles while conforming mechanisms have the robot’s body attuned to the surface contour of obstacles. Understanding the pros and cons, we conclude that having a hybrid mechanism with tracked arms and articulated body would be ideal for the structured environment. Subsequently, we studied the feasibility of the design in terms of configuration, geometry, kinematics, and stability. Lastly, the proposed design was tested by building a 1/3 scale prototype robot. It was made to perform the expected motions in a mock double-hull block setup. The experiment proved that the design achieves the mobility objectives of the robot. With this mobility design, we solved the most challenging issue in enabling fully autonomous welding in double-hull blocks. The taxonomy is instrumental in our design selection and could be helpful for other robot designers too.

Global agriculture production is under serious threat from rapidly increasing population and adverse climate changes. Food security is currently a huge challenge to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Crop domestication through conventional approaches is not good enough to meet the food demands and unable to fast-track the crop yields. Also, intensive breeding and rigorous selection of superior traits causes genetic erosion and eliminates stress-responsive genes, which makes crops more prone to abiotic stresses. Salt stress is one of the most prevailing abiotic stresses that poses severe damages to crop yield around the globe. Recent innovations in state-of-the-art genomics and transcriptomics technologies have paved the way to develop salinity tolerant crops. De novo domestication is one of the promising strategies to produce superior new crop genotypes through exploiting the genetic diversity of crop wild relatives (CWRs). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies open new avenues to identifying the unique salt-tolerant genes from the CWRs. It has also led to the assembly of highly annotated crop pan-genomes to snapshot the full landscape of genetic diversity and recapture the huge gene repertoire of a species. The identification of novel genes alongside the emergence of cutting-edge genome editing tools for targeted manipulation renders de novo domestication a way forward for developing salt-tolerance crops. However, some risk associated with gene-edited crops causes hurdles for its adoption worldwide. Halophytes-led breeding for salinity tolerance provides an alternative strategy to identify extremely salt tolerant varieties that can be used to develop new crops to mitigate salinity stress.

Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic emphasises the need for antiviral materials that can reduce airborne and surface-based virus transmission. This study aims to propose the use of additive manufacturing (AM) and surrogate modelling for the rapid development and deployment of novel copper-tungsten-silver (Cu-W-Ag) microporous architecture that shows strong antiviral behaviour against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Design/methodology/approach The research combines selective laser melting (SLM), in-situ alloying and surrogate modelling to conceive the antiviral Cu-W-Ag architecture. The approach is shown to be suitable for redistributed manufacturing by representing the pore morphology through a surrogate model that parametrically manipulates the SLM process parameters: hatch distance (h_d), scan speed (S_s) and laser power (L_p). The method drastically simplifies the three-dimensional (3D) printing of microporous materials by requiring only global geometrical dimensions solving current bottlenecks associated with high computed aided design data transfer required for the AM of porous materials. Findings The surrogate model developed in this study achieved an optimum parametric combination that resulted in microporous Cu-W-Ag with average pore sizes of 80 µm. Subsequent antiviral evaluation of the optimum architecture showed 100% viral inactivation within 5 h against a biosafe enveloped ribonucleic acid viral model of SARS-CoV-2. Research limitations/implications The Cu-W-Ag architecture is suitable for redistributed manufacturing and can help reduce surface contamination of SARS-CoV-2. Nevertheless, further optimisation may improve the virus inactivation time. Practical implications The study was extended to demonstrate an open-source 3D printed Cu-W-Ag antiviral mask filter prototype. Social implications The evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic brings new and unpredictable challenges where redistributed manufacturing of 3D printed antiviral materials can achieve rapid solutions. Originality/value The papers present for the first time a methodology to digitally conceive and print-on-demand a novel Cu-W-Ag alloy that shows high antiviral behaviour against SARS-CoV-2.

Perfume is a Japanese “techno-pop” idol trio formed in 2000 consisting of three women–Ayano Omoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki. Since 2007, when one of their songs was selected for a recycling awareness campaign by Japan's national public broadcaster, Perfume has been a consistent fixture in the Japanese pop music charts. They have been involved in the full gamut of typical idol activities, from television and radio shows to commercials for clothing brands, candy, and drinks. Their success reflects Japanese pop culture's long-standing obsession with pop idols, who once breaking into the mainstream, become ubiquitous cross-media presences. Perfume’s fame in Japan is due in large part to their masterful performance of traditional female idol roles, through which they assume the kaleidoscopic positions of daughter, sister, platonic friend, and heterosexual romantic partner depending on the standpoint of the beholder. In the lyrical content of their songs, they play the various parts of the cute but shy girl who loves from a distance, the strong compatriot that pushes the listener to keep striving for their dreams, and the kindred spirit with whom the listener can face life's ordinary challenges. Like other successful idols, their extensive lines of Perfume-branded merchandise and product endorsements make the exercise of consumer spending power by their fans a vehicle for them to approach the ideals and experiences that Perfume embodies. Yet, Perfume's videos, music, and stage performances are also replete with subversive images of machines, virtual cities and landscapes, and computer generated apparitions. In their works, the traditional idol as an object of consumer desire co-exists with images of the fragmentation of identity, distrust in the world and the senses, and the desire to escape from illusion, all presented in terms of encounters with technology. In what their fans call the "Near Future Trilogy", a set of three singles released soon after their major label debut (2005-06), lyrics refer to the artificiality and transience of virtual worlds ("Nothing I see or touch has any reality" from "Electro-World," or "I want to escape. I want to destroy this city created by immaculate computation" from "Computer City"). In their later work, explicit lyrical references to virtual worlds and machines largely disappear, but they are replaced with images and bodily performances of Perfume with robotic machinery and electronic information. Perfume is an idol group augmented by technology. In this paper, I explore the significance of these images of technological augmentation of the human body in the work of Perfume. I suggest that the ways these bodily encounters of the human body and technology are articulated in their work reflect broader social and economic anxieties and hopes in Japan. I focus in the first section of this paper on describing some of the recurring technological motifs in their works. Next, I show how their recent work is an experiment with the emergent possibilities of human-technology relationships for imagining Japan's future development. Not only in their visual and performance style, but in their modes of engagement with their fans through new media, I suggest that Perfume itself is attempting to seek out new forms of value creation, which hold the promise of pushing Japan out of the extended economic and social stagnation of its 1990s post-bubble "Lost Decade,” particularly by articulating how they connect with the world. The idol's technologically augmented body becomes both icon and experiment for rethinking Japan and staking out a new global position for it. Though I have referred above to Perfume as its three members, I also use the term to signify the broader group of managers and collaborating artists that surrounds them. Perfume is a creation of corporate media companies and the output of development institutions designed to train multi-talented entertainers from a young age. In addition to the three women who form the public face of Perfume, main figures include music producer Yasutaka Nakata, producer and choreographer MIKIKO, and more recently, the new media artist Daito Manabe and his company, Rhizomatiks. Though Perfume very rarely appear on stage or in their videos with any other identifiable human performers, every production is an effort involving dozens of professional staff. In this respect, Perfume is a very conventional pop idol unit. The attraction of these idols for their fans is not primarily their originality, creativity, or musicality, but their professionalism and image as striving servants (Yano 336). Idols are beloved because they "are well-polished, are trained to sing and act, maintain the mask of stardom, and are extremely skillful at entertaining the audience" (Iwabuchi 561). Moreover, their charisma is based on a relationship of omoiyari or mutual empathy and service. As Christine Yano has argued for Japanese Enka music, the singer must maintain the image of service to his or her fans and reach out to them as if engaged in a personal relationship with each (337). Fans reciprocate by caring for the singer, and making his or her needs their own, not the least of which are financial. The omoiyari relationship of mutual empathy and care is essential to the singer’s charismatic appeal (Yano 347). Thus it does not matter to their fans that Perfume do not play their own instruments or write their own songs. These are jobs for other professionals. However, mirroring the role of the employee in the Japanese company-as-family (see Kondo), their devotion to their jobs as entertainers, and their care and respect for their fans must be evident at all times. The tarnishing of this image, for instance through revelations of underage smoking or drinking, can be fatal, and has resulted in banishment from the media spotlight for some former stars. A large part of Japanese stars' conventional appeal is based on their appearance as devoted workers, consummate professionals, and partners in mutual empathy. As charismatic figures that exchange cultural ideals for fans’ disposable income, it is not surprising that many authors have tied the emergence of the pop idol to the height of Japan's economic prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s, when the social contract between labor and corporations that provided both lifelong employment and social identity had yet to be seriously threatened. Aoyagi suggests (82) that the idol system is tied to post-war consumerism and the increased importance of young adults, particularly women, as consumers. As this correlation between the health of idols and the economy might imply, there is a strong popular connection between concerns of social fission and discontent and economic stagnation. Koichi Iwabuchi writes that Japanese media accounts in the 1990s connected the health of the idol system to the "vigor of society" (555). As Iwabuchi describes, some Japanese fans have looked for their idols abroad in places such as Hong Kong, with a sense of nostalgia for a kind of stardom that has waned in Japan and because of "a deep sense of disillusionment and discontent with Japanese society" (Iwabuchi 561) following the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in the early 1990s. In reaction to the same conditions, some Japanese idols have attempted to exploit this nostalgia. During a brief period of fin-de-siècle optimism that coincided with neoliberal structural reforms under the government of Junichiro Koizumi, Morning Musume, the most popular female idol group at the time, had a hit single entitled "Love Machine" that ended the 1990s in Japan. The song's lyrics tie together dreams of life-long employment, romantic love, stable traditional families, and national resurgence, linking Japan's prosperity in the world at large to its internal social, emotional, and economic health. The song’s chorus declares, "The world will be envious of Japan's future!", although that future still has yet to materialize. In its place has appeared the "near-future" imaginary of Perfume. As mentioned above, the lyrics of some of their early songs referenced illusory virtual worlds that need to be destroyed or transcended. In their later works, these themes are continued in images of the bodies of the three performers augmented by technology in various ways, depicting the performers themselves as robots. Images of the three performers as robots are first introduced in the music video for their single "Secret Secret" (2007). At the outset of the video, three mannequins resembling Perfume are frozen on a futuristic TV soundstage being dressed by masked attendants who march off screen in lock step. The camera fades in and out, and the mannequins are replaced with the human members frozen in the same poses. Other attendants raise pieces of chocolate-covered ice cream (the music video also served as an advertisement for the ice cream) to the performers' mouths, which when consumed, activate them, launching them into a dance consisting of stilted, mechanical steps, and orthogonal arm positions. Later, one of the performers falls on stairs and appears to malfunction, becoming frozen in place until she receives another piece of ice cream. They are later more explicitly made into robots in the video for "Spring of Life" (2012), in which each of the three members are shown with sections of skin lifted back to reveal shiny, metallic parts inside. Throughout this video, their backs are connected to coiled cables hanging from the ceiling, which serve as a further visual sign of their robotic characters. In the same video, they are also shown in states of distress, each sitting on the floor with parts exposed, limbs rigid and performing repetitive motions, as though their control systems have failed. In their live shows, themes of augmentation are much more apparent. At a 2010 performance at the Tokyo Dome, which was awarded the jury selection prize in the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the centerpiece was a special performance entitled "Perfume no Okite" or "The Laws of Perfume." Like "Secret Secret," the performance begins with the emergence of three mannequins posed at the center of the stadium. During the introductory sequence, the members rise out of a different stage to the side. They begin to dance, synchronized to massively magnified, computer generated projections of themselves. The projections fluctuate between photorealistic representations of each member and ghostly CG figures consisting of oscillating lines and shimmering particles that perform the same movements. At the midpoint, the members each face their own images, and state their names and dates of birth before uttering a series of commands: "The right hand and right leg are together. The height of the hands must be precise. Check the motion of the fingers. The movement of the legs must be smooth. The palms of the hands must be here." With each command, the members move their own bodies mechanically, mirrored by the CG figures. After more dancing with their avatars, the performance ends with Perfume slowly lowered down on the platform at the center of the stage, frozen in the same poses and positions as the mannequins, which have now disappeared. These performances cleverly use images of robotic machinery in order to subvert Perfume's idol personas. The robotic augmentations are portrayed as vectors for control by some unseen external party, and each of the members must have their life injected into them through cables, ice cream, or external command, before they can begin to dance and sing as pop idols. Pop idols have always been manufactured products, but through such technological imagery Perfume make their own artificiality explicit, revealing to the audience that it is not the performers they love, but the emergent and contingently human forms of a social, technological, and commercial system that they desire. In this way, these images subvert the performers' charisma and idol fans' own feelings of adoration, revealing the premise of the idol system to have been manufactured to manipulate consumer affect and desire. If, as Iwabuchi suggests, some fans of idols are attracted to their stars by a sense of nostalgia for an age of economic prosperity, then Perfume's robotic augmentations offer a reflexive critique of this industrial form. In "The Laws of Perfume", the commands that comport their bodies may be stated in their own voices, yet they issue not from the members themselves, but their magnified and processed avatars. It is Perfume the commercial entity speaking. The malfunctioning bodies of Perfume depicted in "Secret Secret" and "Spring of Life" do not detract from their charisma as idols as an incident of public drunkenness might, because the represented breakdowns in their performances are linked not to the moral purity or professionalism of the humans, but to failures of the technological and economic systems that have supported them. If idols of a past age were defined by their seamless and idealized personas as entertainers and employees, then it is fitting that in an age of much greater economic and social uncertainty that they should acknowledge the cracks in the social and commercial mechanisms from which their carefully designed personas emerge. In these videos and performances, the visual trope of technological body augmentation serves as a means for representing both the dependence of the idol persona on consumer capitalism, and the fracturing of that system. However, they do not provide an answer to the question of what might lie beyond the fracturing. The only suggestions provided are the disappearance of that world, as in the end of "Computer City," or in the reproduction of the same structure, as when the members of Perfume become mannequins in "The Laws of Perfume" and "Secret Secret." Interestingly, it was with Perfume's management's decision to switch record labels and market Perfume to an international audience that Perfume became newly augmented, and a suggestion of an answer became visible. Perfume began their international push in 2012 with the release of a compilation album, "Love the World," and live shows and new media works in Asia and Europe. The album made their music available for purchase outside of Japan for the first time. Its cover depicts three posed figures computer rendered as clouds of colored dots produced from 3D scans of the members. The same scans were used to create 3D-printed plastic figures, whose fabrication process is shown in the Japanese television ad for the album. The robotic images of bodily augmentation have been replaced by a more powerful form of augmentation–digital information. The website which accompanied their international debut received the Grand Prix of the 17th Japan Media Arts Prize. Developed by Daito Manabe and Rhizomatiks, visitors to the Perfume Global website were greeted by a video of three figures composed of pulsating clouds of triangles, dancing to a heavy, glitch-laden electronic track produced by Nakata. Behind them, dozens of tweets about Perfume collected in real-time scroll across the background. Controls to the side let visitors change not only the volume of the music, but also the angle of their perspective, and the number and responsiveness of the pulsating polygons. The citation for the site's prize refers to the innovative participatory features of the website. Motion capture data from Perfume, music, and programming examples used to render the digital performance were made available for free to visitors, who were encouraged to create their own versions. This resulted in hundreds of fan-produced videos showing various figures, from animals and cartoon characters to swooshing multi-colored lines, dancing the same routine. Several of these were selected to be featured on the website, and were later integrated into the stage performance of the piece during Perfume's Asia tour. A later project extended this idea in a different direction, letting website visitors paint animations on computer representations of the members, and use a simple programming language to control the images. Many of these user creations were integrated into Perfume's 2013 performance at the Cannes Lions International Festival as advertising. Their Cannes performance begins with rapidly shifting computer graphics projected onto their costumes as they speak in unison, as though they are visitors from another realm: "We are Perfume. We have come. Japan is far to the east. To encounter the world, the three of us and everyone stand before you: to connect you with Japan, and to communicate with you, the world." The user-contributed designs were projected on to the members' costumes as they danced. This new mode of augmentation–through information rather than machinery–shows Perfume to be more than a representation of Japan's socio-economic transitions, but a live experiment in effecting these transitions. In their international performances, their bodies are synthesized in real-time from the performers' motions and the informatic layer generated from tweets and user-generated creations. This creates the conditions for fans to inscribe their own marks on to Perfume, transforming the emotional engagement between fan and idol into a technological linkage through which the idols’ bodies can be modified. Perfume’s augmented bodies are not just seen and desired, but made by their fans. The value added by this new mode of connection is imagined as the critical difference needed to transform Perfume from a local Japanese idol group into an entity capable of moving around the world, embodying the promise of a new global position for Japan enabled through information. In Perfume, augmentation suggests a possible answer to Japan’s economic stagnation and social fragmentation. It points past a longing for the past towards new values produced in encounters with the world beyond Japan. Augmentations newly connect Perfume and Japan with the world economically and culturally. At the same time, a vision of Japan emerges, more mobile, flexible, and connected perhaps, yet one that attempts to keep Japan a distinct entity in the world. Bodily augmentations, in media representations and as technological practices, do more than figuratively and materially link silicon and metal with flesh. They mark the interface of the body and technology as a site of transnational connection, where borders between the nation and what lies outside are made References Aoyagi, Hiroshi. Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Iwabuchi, Koichi. "Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of "Asia" in Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 10.3 (2002): 547-573. Kondo, Dorinne K. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Morning Musume. “Morning Musume ‘Love Machine’ (MV).” 15 Oct. 2010. 4 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A7j6eryPV4›. Perfume. “[HD] Perfume Performance Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.” 20 June 2013. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI0x5vA7fLo›. ———. “[SPOT] Perfume Global Compilation “LOVE THE WORLD.”” 11 Sep. 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28SUmWDztxI›. ———. “Computer City.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOXGKTrsRNg›. ———. “Electro World.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zh0ouiYIZc›. ———. “Perfume no Okite.” 8 May 2011. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EjOistJABM›. ———. “Perfume Official Global Website.” 2012. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://perfume-global.com/project.html›. ———. “Secret Secret.” 18 Jan. 2012. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=birLzegOHyU›. ———. “Spring of Life.” 18 June 2013. 10 Oct. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PtvnaEo9-0›. Yano, Christine. "Charisma's Realm: Fandom in Japan." Ethnology 36.4 (1997): 335-49.

IntroductionThe common origin of the adjective “corporeal” and the noun “corpse” in the Latin root corpus points to the value of mortuary practices for investigating how the human body is objectified. In post-mortem rituals, the body—formerly the manipulator of objects—becomes itself the object that is manipulated. Thus, these funerary rituals provide a type of double reflexivity, where the object and subject of manipulation can be used to reciprocally illuminate one another. To this extent, any consideration of corporeality can only benefit from a discussion of how the body is objectified through mortuary practices. This paper offers just such a discussion with respect to a selection of two contrasting mortuary practices, in the context of the prehistoric past and the Classical Era respectively. At the most general level, we are motivated by the same intellectual impulse that has stimulated expositions on corporeality, materiality, and incarnation in areas like phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 77–234), Marxism (Adorno 112–119), gender studies (Grosz vii–xvi), history (Laqueur 193–244), and theology (Henry 33–53). That is to say, our goal is to show that the body, far from being a transparent frame through which we encounter the world, is in fact a locus where historical, social, cultural, and psychological forces intersect. On this view, “the body vanishes as a biological entity and becomes an infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78). However, for all that the cited paradigms offer culturally situated appreciations of corporeality; our particular intellectual framework will be provided by cognitive science. Two reasons impel us towards this methodological choice.In the first instance, the study of ritual has, after several decades of stagnation, been rewarded—even revolutionised—by the application of insights from the new sciences of the mind (Whitehouse 1–12; McCauley and Lawson 1–37). Thus, there are good reasons to think that ritual treatments of the body will refract historical and social forces through empirically attested tendencies in human cognition. In the present connection, this means that knowledge of these tendencies will reward any attempt to theorise the objectification of the body in mortuary rituals.In the second instance, because beliefs concerning the afterlife can never be definitively judged to be true or false, they give free expression to tendencies in cognition that are otherwise constrained by the need to reflect external realities accurately. To this extent, they grant direct access to the intuitive ideas and biases that shape how we think about the world. Already, this idea has been exploited to good effect in areas like the cognitive anthropology of religion, which explores how counterfactual beings like ghosts, spirits, and gods conform to (and deviate from) pre-reflective cognitive patterns (Atran 83–112; Barrett and Keil 219–224; Barrett and Reed 252–255; Boyer 876–886). Necessarily, this implies that targeting post-mortem treatments of the body will offer unmediated access to some of the conceptual schemes that inform thinking about human corporeality.At a more detailed level, the specific methodology we propose to use will be provided by conceptual blending theory—a framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner, and others to describe how structures from different areas of experience are creatively blended to form a new conceptual frame. In this system, a generic space provides the ground for coordinating two or more input spaces into a blended space that synthesises them into a single output. Here this would entail using natural or technological processes to structure mortuary practices in a way that satisfies various psychological needs.Take, for instance, W.B. Yeats’s famous claim that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart” (“Easter 1916” in Yeats 57-8). Here, the poet exploits a generic space—that of everyday objects and the effort involved in manipulating them—to coordinate an organic input from that taxonomy (the heart) with an inorganic input (a stone) to create the blended idea that too energetic a pursuit of an abstract ideal turns a person into an unfeeling object (the heart-as-stone). Although this particular example corresponds to a familiar rhetorical figure (the metaphor), the value of conceptual blending theory is that it cuts across distinctions of genre, media, language, and discourse level to provide a versatile framework for expressing how one area of human experience is related to another.As indicated, we will exploit this versatility to investigate two ways of objectifying the body through the examination of two contrasting mortuary practices—cremation and inhumation—against different cultural horizons. The first of these is the conceptualisation of the body as an object of a technical process, where the post-mortem cremation of the corpse is analogically correlated with the metallurgical refining of ore into base metal. Our area of focus here will be Bronze Age cremation practices. The second conceptual scheme we will investigate focuses on treatments of the body as a vegetable object; here, the relevant analogy likens the inhumation of the corpse to the planting of a seed in the soil from which future growth will come. This discussion will centre on the Classical Era. Burning: The Body as Manufactured ObjectThe Early and Middle Bronze Age in Western Europe (2500-1200 BCE) represented a period of change in funerary practices relative to the preceding Neolithic, exemplified by a move away from the use of Megalithic monuments, a proliferation of grave goods, and an increase in the use of cremation (Barrett 38-9; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Brück, Material Metaphors 308; Waddell, Bronze Age 141-149). Moreover, the Western European Bronze Age is characterised by a shift away from communal burial towards single interment (Barrett 32; Bradley 158-168). Equally, the Bronze Age in Western Europe provides us with evidence of an increased use of cist and pit cremation burials concentrated in low-lying areas (Woodman 254; Waddell, Prehistoric 16; Cooney and Grogan 105-121; Bettencourt 103). This greater preference for lower-lying location appears to reflect a distinctive change in comparison to the distribution patterns of the Neolithic burials; these are often located on prominent, visible aspects of a landscape (Cooney and Grogan 53-61). These new Bronze Age burial practices appear to reflect a distancing in relation to the territories of the “old ancestors” typified by Megalithic monuments (Bettencourt 101-103). Crucially, the Bronze Age archaeological record provides us with evidence that indicates that cremation was becoming the dominant form of deposition of human remains throughout Central and Western Europe (Sørensen and Rebay 59-60).The activities associated with Bronze Age cremations such as the burning of the body and the fragmentation of the remains have often been considered as corporeal equivalents (or expressions) of the activities involved in metal (bronze) production (Brück, Death 84-86; Sørensen and Rebay 60–1; Rebay-Salisbury, Cremations 66-67). There are unequivocal similarities between the practices of cremation and contemporary bronze production technologies—particularly as both processes involve the transformation of material through the application of fire at temperatures between 700 ºC to 1000 ºC (Musgrove 272-276; Walker et al. 132; de Becdelievre et al. 222-223).We assert that the technologies that define the European Bronze Age—those involved in alloying copper and tin to produce bronze—offered a new conceptual frame that enabled the body to be objectified in new ways. The fundamental idea explored here is that the displacement of inhumation by cremation in the European Bronze Age was motivated by a cognitive shift, where new smelting technologies provided novel conceptual metaphors for thinking about age-old problems concerning human mortality and post-mortem survival. The increased use of cremation in the European Bronze Age contrasts with the archaeological record of the Near Eastern—where, despite the earlier emergence of metallurgy (3300–3000 BCE), we do not see a notable proliferation in the use of cremation in this region. Thus, mortuary practices (i.e. cremation) provide us with an insight into how Western European Bronze Age cultures mediated the body through changes in technological objects and processes.In the terminology of conceptual blending, the generic space in question centres on the technical manipulation of the material world. The first input space is associated with the anxiety attending mortality—specifically, the cessation of personal identity and the extinction of interpersonal relationships. The second input space represents the technical knowledge associated with bronze production; in particular, the extraction of ore from source material and its mixing with other metals to form an alloy. The blended space coordinates these inputs to objectify the human body as an object that is ritually transformed into a new but more durable substance via the cremation process. In this contention we use the archaeological record to draw a conceptual parallel between the emergence of bronze production technology—centring on transition of naturally occurring material to a new subsistence (bronze)—and the transitional nature of the cremation process.In this theoretical framework, treating the body as a mixture of substances that can be reduced to its constituents and transformed through technologies of cremation enabled Western European Bronze Age society to intervene in the natural process of putrefaction and transform the organic matter into something more permanent. This transformative aspect of the cremation is seen in the evidence we have for secondary burial practices involving the curation and circulation of cremated bones of deceased members of a group (Brück, Death 87-93). This evidence allows us to assert that cremated human remains and objects were considered products of the same transformation into a more permanent state via burning, fragmentation, dispersal, and curation. Sofaer (62-69) states that the living body is regarded as a person, but as soon as the transition to death is made, the body becomes an object; this is an “ontological shift in the perception of the body that assumes a sudden change in its qualities” (62).Moreover, some authors have proposed that the exchange of fragmented human remains was central to mortuary practices and was central in establishing and maintaining social relations (Brück, Death 76-88). It is suggested that in the Early Bronze Age the perceptions of the human body mirrored the perceptions of objects associated with the arrival of the new bronze technology (Brück, Death 88-92). This idea is more pronounced if we consider the emergence of bronze technology as the beginning of a period of capital intensification of natural resources. Through this connection, the Bronze Age can be regarded as the point at which a particular natural resource—in this case, copper—went through myriad intensive manufacturing stages, which are still present today (intensive extraction, production/manufacturing, and distribution). Unlike stone tool production, bronze production had the addition of fire as the explicit method of transformation (Brück, Death 88-92). Thus, such views maintain that the transition achieved by cremation—i.e. reducing the human remains to objects or tokens that could be exchanged and curated relatively soon after the death of the individual—is equivalent to the framework of commodification connected with bronze production.A sample of cremated remains from Castlehyde in County Cork, Ireland, provides us with an example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in a Western European context (McCarthy). This is chosen because it is a typical example of a Bronze Age cremation burial in the context of Western Europe; also, one of the authors (MG) has first-hand experience in the analysis of its associated remains. The Castlehyde cremation burial consisted of a rectangular, stone-lined cist (McCarthy). The cist contained cremated, calcined human remains, with the fragments generally ranging from a greyish white to white in colour; this indicates that the bones were subject to a temperature range of 700-900ºC. The organic content of bone was destroyed during the cremation process, leaving only the inorganic matrix (brittle bone which is, often, described as metallic in consistency—e.g. Gejvall 470-475). There is evidence that remains may have been circulated in a manner akin to valuable metal objects. First of all, the absence of long bones indicates that there may have been a practice of removing salient remains as curatable records of ancestral ties. Secondly, remains show traces of metal staining from objects that are no longer extant, which suggests that graves were subject to secondary burial practices involving the removal of metal objects and/or human bone. To this extent, we can discern that human remains were being processed, curated, and circulated in a similar manner to metal objects.Thus, there are remarkable similarities between the treatment of the human body in cremation and bronze metal production technologies in the European Bronze Age. On the one hand, the parallel between smelting and cremation allowed death to be understood as a process of transformation in which the individual was removed from processes of organic decay. On the other hand, the circulation of the transformed remains conferred a type of post-mortem survival on the deceased. In this way, cremation practices may have enabled Bronze Age society to symbolically overcome the existential anxiety concerning the loss of personhood and the breaking of human relationships through death. In relation to the former point, the resurgence of cremation in nineteenth century Europe provides us with an example of how the disposal of a human body can be contextualised in relation to socio-technological advancements. The (re)emergence of cremation in this period reflects the post-Enlightenment shift from an understanding of the world through religious beliefs to the use of rational, scientific approaches to examine the natural world, including the human body (and death). The controlled use of fire in the cremation process, as well as the architecture of crematories, reflected the industrial context of the period (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 16).With respect to the circulation of cremated remains, Smith suggests that Early Medieval Christian relics of individual bones or bone fragments reflect a reconceptualised continuation of pre-Christian practices (beginning in Christian areas of the Roman Empire). In this context, it is claimed, firstly, that the curation of bone relics and the use of mobile bone relics of important, saintly individuals provided an embodied connection between the sacred sphere and the earthly world; and secondly, that the use of individual bones or fragments of bone made the Christian message something portable, which could be used to reinforce individual or collective adherence to Christianity (Smith 143-167). Using the example of the Christian bone relics, we can thus propose that the curation and circulation of Bronze Age cremated material may have served a role similar to tools for focusing religiously oriented cognition. Burying: The Body as a Vegetable ObjectGiven that the designation “the Classical Era” nominates the entirety of the Graeco-Roman world (including the Near East and North Africa) from about 800 BCE to 600 CE, there were obviously no mortuary practices common to all cultures. Nevertheless, in both classical Greece and Rome, we have examples of periods when either cremation or inhumation was the principal funerary custom (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21).For instance, the ancient Homeric texts inform us that the ancient Greeks believed that “the spirit of the departed was sentient and still in the world of the living as long as the flesh was in existence […] and would rather have the body devoured by purifying fire than by dogs or worms” (Mylonas 484). However, the primary sources and archaeological record indicate that cremation practices declined in Athens circa 400 BCE (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 20). With respect to the Roman Empire, scholarly opinion argues that inhumation was the dominant funerary rite in the eastern part of the Empire (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 17-21; Morris 52). Complementing this, the archaeological and historical record indicates that inhumation became the primary rite throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE. Inhumation was considered to be an essential rite in the context of an emerging belief that a peaceful afterlife was reflected by a peaceful burial in which bodily integrity was maintained (Rebay-Salisbury, Inhumation 19-21; Morris 52; Toynbee 41). The question that this poses is how these beliefs were framed in the broader discourses of Classical culture.In this regard, our claim is that the growth in inhumation was driven (at least in part) by the spread of a conceptual scheme, implicit in Greek fertility myths that objectify the body as a seed. The conceptual logic here is that the post-mortem continuation of personal identity is (symbolically) achieved by objectifying the body as a vegetable object that will re-grow from its own physical remains. Although the dominant metaphor here is vegetable, there is no doubt that the motivating concern of this mythological fabulation is human mortality. As Jon Davies notes, “the myths of Hades, Persephone and Demeter, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Adonis and Aphrodite, of Selene and Endymion, of Herakles and Dionysus, are myths of death and rebirth, of journeys into and out of the underworld, of transactions and transformations between gods and humans” (128). Thus, such myths reveal important patterns in how the post-mortem fate of the body was conceptualised.In the terminology of mental mapping, the generic space relevant to inhumation contains knowledge pertaining to folk biology—specifically, pre-theoretical ideas concerning regeneration, survival, and mortality. The first input space attaches to human mortality; it departs from the anxiety associated with the seeming cessation of personal identity and dissolution of kin relationships subsequent to death. The second input space is the subset of knowledge concerning vegetable life, and how the immersion of seeds in the soil produces a new generation of plants with the passage of time. The blended space combines the two input spaces by way of the funerary script, which involves depositing the body in the soil with a view to securing its eventual rebirth by analogy with the sprouting of a planted seed.As indicated, the most important illustration of this conceptual pattern can be found in the fertility myths of ancient Greece. The Homeric Hymns, in particular, provide a number of narratives that trace out correspondences between vegetation cycles, human mortality, and inhumation, which inform ritual practice (Frazer 223–404; Carney 355–65; Sowa 121–44). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, charts how Persephone is abducted by Hades, god of the dead, and taken to his underground kingdom. While searching for her missing daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, neglects the earth, causing widespread devastation. Matters are resolved when Zeus intervenes to restore Persephone to Demeter. However, having ingested part of Hades’s kingdom (a pomegranate seed), Persephone is obliged to spend half the year below ground with her captor and the other half above ground with her mother.The objectification of Persephone as both a seed and a corpse in this narrative is clearly signalled by her seasonal inhumation in Hades’ chthonic realm, which is at once both the soil and the grave. And, just as the planting of seeds in autumn ensures rebirth in spring, Persephone’s seasonal passage from the Kingdom of the Dead nominates the individual human life as just one season in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. A further signifying element is added by the ingestion of the pomegranate seed. This is evocative of her being inseminated by Hades; thus, the coordination of vegetation cycles with life and death is correlated with secondary transition—that from childhood to adulthood (Kerényi 119–183).In the examples given, we can see how the Homeric Hymn objectifies both the mortal and sexual destiny of the body in terms of thresholds derived from the vegetable world. Moreover, this mapping is not merely an intellectual exercise. Its emotional and social appeal is visible in the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries—which offered the ritual homologue to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter—persisted from the Mycenaean period to 396 CE, one of the longest recorded durations for any ritual (Ferguson 254–9; Cosmopoulos 1–24). In sum, then, classical myth provided a precedent for treating the body as a vegetable object—most often, a seed—that would, in turn, have driven the move towards inhumation as an important mortuary practice. The result is to create a ritual form that makes key aspects of human experience intelligible by connecting them with cyclical processes like the seasons of the year, the harvesting of crops, and the intergenerational oscillation between the roles of parent and child. Indeed, this pattern remains visible in the germination metaphors and burial practices of contemporary religions such as Christianity, which draw heavily on the symbolism associated with mystery cults like that at Eleusis (Nock 177–213).ConclusionWe acknowledge that our examples offer a limited reflection of the ethnographic and archaeological data, and that they need to be expanded to a much greater degree if they are to be more than merely suggestive. Nevertheless, suggestiveness has its value, too, and we submit that the speculations explored here may well offer a useful starting point for a larger survey. In particular, they showcase how a recurring existential anxiety concerning death—involving the fear of loss of personal identity and kinship relations—is addressed by different ways of objectifying the body. Given that the body is not reducible to the objects with which it is identified, these objectifications can never be entirely successful in negotiating the boundary between life and death. In the words of Jon Davies, “there is simply no let-up in the efforts by human beings to transcend this boundary, no matter how poignantly each failure seemed to reinforce it” (128). For this reason, we can expect that the record will be replete with conceptual and cognitive schemes that mediate the experience of death.At a more general level, it should also be clear that our understanding of human corporeality is rewarded by the study of mortuary practices. No less than having a body is coextensive with being human, so too is dying, with the consequence that investigating the intersection of both areas is likely to reveal insights into issues of universal cultural concern. For this reason, we advocate the study of mortuary practices as an evolving record of how various cultures understand human corporeality by way of external objects.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Trans. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Barrett, John C. “The Living, the Dead and the Ancestors: Neolithic and Bronze Age Mortuary Practices.” The Archaeology of Context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age: Recent Trends. Eds. John. C. Barrett and Ian. A. Kinnes. University of Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, 1988. 30-41.Barrett, Justin, and Frank Keil. “Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts.” Cognitive Psychology 31.3 (1996): 219–47.Barrett, Justin, and Emily Reed. “The Cognitive Science of Religion.” The Psychologist 24.4 (2011): 252–255.Bettencourt, Ana. “Life and Death in the Bronze Age of the NW of the Iberian Peninsula.” The Materiality of Death: Bodies, Burials, Beliefs. Eds. Fredrik Fahlanderand and Terje Osstedaard. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008. 99-105.Boyer, Pascal. “Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission.” American Anthropologist 100.4 (1999): 876–889.Bradley, Richard. The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Brück, Joanna. “Material Metaphors: The Relational Construction of Identity in Bronze Age Burials in Ireland and Britain” Journal of Social Archaeology 4(3) (2004): 307-333.———. “Death, Exchange and Reproduction in the British Bronze Age.” European Journal of Archaeology 9.1 (2006): 73–101.Carney, James. “Narrative and Ontology in Hesiod’s Homeric Hymn to Demeter: A Catastrophist Approach.” Semiotica 167.1 (2007): 337–368.Cooney, Gabriel, and Eoin Grogan. Irish Prehistory: A Social Perspective. Dublin: Wordwell, 1999.Cosmopoulos, Michael B. “Mycenean Religion at Eleusis: The Architecture and Stratigraphy of Megaron B.” Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults. Ed. Michael B. Cosmopoulos. London: Routledge, 2003. 1–24.Davies, Jon. Death, Burial, and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity. London: Psychology Press, 1999.De Becdelievre, Camille, Sandrine Thiol, and Frédéric Santos. “From Fire-Induced Alterations on Human Bones to the Original Circumstances of the Fire: An Integrated Approach of Human Remains Drawn from a Neolithic Collective Burial”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 4 (2015) 210–225.Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Ferguson, Everett. Backgrounds of Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003.Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Gejvall, Nils. "Cremations." Science and Archaeology: A Survey of Progress and Research. Eds. Don Brothwell and Eric Higgs. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. 468-479.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.Henry, Michel. I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Kerényi, Karl. “Kore.” The Science of Mythology. Trans. Richard F.C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1985. 119–183.Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1990.McCarthy, Margaret. “2003:0195 - Castlehyde, Co. Cork.” Excavations.ie. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, 4 July 2003. 12 Jan. 2016 <http://www.excavations.ie/report/2003/Cork/0009503/>.McCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans: Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2002.Morris, Ian. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.Musgrove, Jonathan. “Dust and Damn'd Oblivion: A Study of Cremation in Ancient Greece.” The Annual of the British School at Athens 85 (1990), 271-299.Mylonas, George. “Burial Customs.” A Companion to Homer. Eds. Alan Wace and Frank. H. Stubbings. London: Macmillan, 1962. 478-488.Nock, Arthur. D. “Hellenistic Mysteries and Christian Sacraments.” Mnemosyne 1 (1952): 177–213.Rebay-Salisbury, Katherina. "Cremations: Fragmented Bodies in the Bronze and Iron Ages." Body Parts and Bodies Whole: Changing Relations and Meanings. Eds. Katherina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie. L. S. Sørensen, and Jessica Hughes. Oxford: Oxbow, 2010. 64-71.———. “Inhumation and Cremation: How Burial Practices Are Linked to Beliefs.” Embodied Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on Technology and Belief. Eds Marie. L.S. Sørensen and Katherina Rebay-Salisbury. Oxford: Oxbow, 2012. 15-26.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. Nottingham: SAGE, 2012.Smith, Julia M.H. “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200).” Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 143–167.Sofaer, Joanna R. The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Sørensen, Marie L.S., and Katharina Rebay-Salisbury. “From Substantial Bodies to the Substance of Bodies: Analysis of the Transition from Inhumation to Cremation during the Middle Bronze Age in Europe.” Past Bodies: Body-Centered Research in Archaeology. Eds. Dušan Broić and John Robb. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008. 59–68.Sowa, Cora Angier. Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1984.Toynbee, Jocelyn M.C. Death and Burial in the Roman World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.Waddell, John. The Bronze Age Burials of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 1990.———. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland. Galway: Galway UP, 2005.Walker, Philip L., Kevin W.P. Miller, and Rebecca Richman. “Time, Temperature, and Oxygen Availability: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Environmental Conditions on the Colour and Organic Content of Cremated Bone.” The Analysis of Burned Human Remains. Eds. Christopher W. Schmidt and Steven A. Symes. London: Academic Press, 2008. 129–135.Whitehouse, Harvey. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Woodman Peter. “Prehistoric Settlements and Environment.” The Quaternary History of Ireland. Eds. Kevin J. Edwards and William P. Warren. London: Academic Press, 1985. 251-278.Yeats, William Butler. “Easter 1916.” W.B. Yeats: The Major Works. Ed. Edward Larrissey. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. 85–87.

Introduction In a 1984 New York Times interview, Germaine Greer discussed the quite different views that have surrounded her supposed attitude towards sex. As she put it, “People seem to think I'm Hugh Hefner and that the reason women started having sex is because I told them to” (qtd. in De Lacy). This view had, however, shifted by the 1980s. As she told reporter Justine De Lacy, “Now they are saying that I'm against sex.” In this article, I tease out Greer’s remarks about the supposed transformation of her political persona. I do so with reference to her work on Suck Magazine, which was billed by its editors as “The First European Sex Paper,” and which was first published in 1969 (cited in Gleeson 86). The article has two key aims. The first is to demonstrate that Greer has not (as it might seem) transformed from a sexual revolutionary to an anti-sex ideologue. This view is too simplistic. The article’s second aim is to explore Greer’s significant but under-acknowledged contribution to feminist debates about pornography. Far from being strictly anti- or pro-porn, Greer’s work on Suck actually aligns with both of these positions, and it appeared before the feminist porn debates really gained traction. Germaine Greer as Sexual Revolutionary and/or Anti-Sex Ideologue? The apparent political transformation that Greer mentioned in 1984 has been particularly apparent since the 1990s. Since that decade, she has criticised pornography on several occasions. For example, in her book The Whole Woman (1999), Greer argued, “Pornography is the flight from woman, men’s denial of sex as a medium of communication . . .” (181). In an article published in The Guardian in 2000, Greer wrote, “Can [pornography] go too far? No, it can't. As far as male sexual fantasy is concerned there is no too far.” In a 2012 episode of the Australian current affairs program Q&A, Greer argued, “Pornography is the advertisement of prostitution.”Greer’s stance on pornography, and particularly her invocation of female sexual subordination, might seem to represent a radical shift from the political persona that she cultivated during the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, Greer was arguing for female sexual empowerment. She posed nude for Suck. In 1971, the US magazine Life described Greer as a “saucy feminist that even men like” (qtd. in Wallace, unpaginated photograph). There is nothing “saucy” about her more recent anti-porn posture; this posture is not concerned with “empowerment” in any obvious way. Yet I would suggest that Greer at least anticipated this posture in her work on Suck. In that magazine, she did not frame sex as being entirely emancipatory. Rather, Greer argued for sexual liberation (particularly for women), but (in doing so) she also invoked the hierarchical gender roles that would later be invoked in anti-porn feminist arguments. Examining some of Greer’s contributions to Suck will make clear the important contribution that she has made to feminist debates about pornography. These are debates which she has not generally been associated with, or at least not to the extent that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon (both US feminists who have very publicly remonstrated against porn) have (see Dworkin; MacKinnon and Dworkin). The feminist porn debates gained ascendance during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and seem to have been liveliest in North America (see Bronstein; Duggan and Hunter; MacKinnon and Dworkin). These debates are significant because of what they say about the truly complex and contentious relationship between sex, gender, power, and representation. The feminist porn debates have been broad-ranging (Sullivan and McKee 10), though they tend to have been framed as polarised conflicts between anti-pornography feminists and “sex-positive”/“anti-censorship” feminists. For anti-pornography feminists, pornography always symptomatises and perpetuates gender hierarchy. Andrea Dworkin famously defined “pornography” as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, buttocks—exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or women presented as whores by nature . . . (xxxiii) Conversely, sex-positive/anti-censorship feminists tend to assess pornography “on a case by case basis”; porn can range from woman-hating to politically progressive (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 22). For these feminists, attempts to legislate against pornography (for example, via the anti-porn ordinance drawn up in the US during the 1980s by Dworkin and MacKinnon) amount to censorship, and are not in the interest of women, feminism, or sexual liberation (Duggan and Hunter 29–39; and see also MacKinnon and Dworkin). Among the most striking aspects of Greer’s work on Suck is that it actually mobilises aspects of both these (loosely-defined) feminist positions, and appeared almost a decade before pornography became an issue of contention amongst feminists. This work was published not in North America, but in Europe; the Australian-born Greer was living in the United Kingdom at the time of that magazine’s publication, and indeed she has been described as “Britain’s . . . most well-known feminist” (Taylor 759; and see also Gleeson). Does Porn Suck? Greer co-founded Suck in 1969, the year before The Female Eunuch was published. Greer had already established a minor public profile through her journalistic contributions to the London-based Oz Magazine. Several of those contributions were written under the guise of “Dr G—the only groupie with a Ph.D in captivity,” and featured references to “groupiedom” and “cunt power” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Suck was published in Amsterdam to circumvent “British censorship laws” (Wallace 15). The magazine was very much a product of the then-current sexual revolution, as suggested by the following passage from a 1971 editorial: “Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic is the defiance of censorship” (University of Melbourne Archives). Suck comprised sexually-explicit imagery (for example, nudity and shots of (hetero)sexual penetration) and similarly explicit articles. These articles are furnished with the vivid, deliberately provocative prose for which Greer is renowned.In some articles, Greer argues that women’s acceptance of their bodies constitutes a rebellion against patriarchy. In a 1971 article, she writes, “Primitive man feared the vagina . . . as the most magical of magical orifices of the body” (University of Melbourne Archives). The title of this piece is “Lady Love Your Cunt,” and indicates Greer’s view that patriarchal fears—or, as she puts it, the fears of “primitive man”—have contributed to stigma that has surrounded the vagina. Greer concludes thus: “Why not send a photograph of your own cunt, with your names labelled on?” (Whether any readers responded to this invitation remains unclear.) In “Bounce Titty Bounce,” she describes a “Mafia that controls the shapes of [women’s] bodies” (University of Melbourne Archives). This control is particularly evident in the brassiere, which Greer calls “a muzzle, a mask, binding joys and desires with wire and rubber and nylon and clips and cotton.” In a 1970 article entitled “Ladies get on top for better orgasms,” Greer opens with the statement: “The prevalence of the missionary position of fucking in the Western World [sic] seems to mean a widespread unfairness in sex.” She elaborates: Even if women were not . . . slighter than men, the missionary position would have little to commend it. The hands of the man are not free to play with his lover’s breasts or clitoris . . . because he must support himself, at least partially by them . . . The male ismin [sic] full control. Greer concedes that the “female on top position is perhaps the least popular of the alternatives to the missionary position.” The “female on top” position does, however, have advantages for women, one being that a woman “can arrive at a position to accept the cock without having to take her weight on her hands.” Greer’s best-known contribution to Suck is a selection of nude photographs that were published in a 1971 edition. In one shot, Greer is lying on her back, her legs behind her ears, her anus directly in front of the camera. In another shot, she is positioned in the same manner, although her anus and vagina are more central within the frame. In both shots, Greer is gazing directly into the camera and smiling. On one level, the textual and photographic examples described above—and, in fact, the very publication of Suck—suggest a rebellion against sexual repression. This rebellion was characteristic of the sexual revolution (Gleeson 86). Yet, in advocating female sexual empowerment, Greer distanced herself from the masculine bias of that movement. In her 1984 New York Times interview, Greer was quoted as saying that “. . . the sexual revolution never happened. Permissiveness happened, and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men” (qtd. in De Lacy). Here, she anticipates arguments (e.g. Jeffreys) that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually sanctioned (heterosexual) male desire and men’s sexual access to women. In Suck, then, Greer argued that women need to liberate themselves sexually, and not only be seen as instruments for male sexual liberation. Greer did pose nude, but, in doing so, she stared back into the camera/at the spectator—thus returning the gaze, rather than being objectified by this gaze (Mulvey). Greer has described her shots thus: “Face, pubes and anus, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). In 2013, Greer wrote of that photo shoot: “Women’s bodies were merchandised. Each week we saw a little more: nipples, then pussy . . . drip-feeding the masturbation fantasies of a [male] generation. My gesture aimed to short-circuit that process.” She has also been quoted as saying that she envisioned Suck as an “antidote to the exploitative papers like Screw and Hustler,” by “developing a new kind of erotic art, away from the tits ‘n’ ass and the peep show syndrome” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Thus, Greer’s Suck contributions seem to foreshadow the “sex-positive” feminism that would emerge later in the 1970s in North America (e.g. Duggan and Hunter). Her work would also anticipate feminist uses of porn to explore female sexuality from specifically female and feminist perspectives (see Taormino et al.). A closer examination of these contributions, however, suggests a more complex picture. Witness Greer’s reference to the popularity of “missionary sex” as a reason for “widespread unfairness in sex,” or her description of a (presumably) male-dominated “Mafia” who control women’s bodies (for example, via the bra). In a newspaper interview that was published around the time of The Female Eunuch’s 1970 publication, Greer argued that sex needs to be “rescued” from the patriarchy by feminists. This is because sex under patriarchy has been characterised by the dichotomised positions of “powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered.” In this scenario, women are the ones who are “powerless” and “mastered.” The title of that interview is “Author Attacks Dominating Male” (University of Melbourne Archives).The above statements suggest a sexual landscape characterised by “potentially violent, dominant men and subordinated, silenced women” (Duggan and Hunter 7). In this landscape, sex is a site of gender inequality; and even something as apparently innocuous as underwear is used by men to control women. The pervasive sense of patriarchy invoked here would (as scholars such as Duggan and Hunter have argued) be invoked in much anti-pornography feminist writing. And Greer would go on to concur with the anti-porn stance, as the three pronouncements cited at the beginning of this article attest. (In Suck, Greer does not attempt to define “pornography,” and nor does she classify her contributions as being “pornography” or “anti-pornography.”)ConclusionI have argued that it is useful to revisit some of Germaine Greer’s contributions to Suck Magazine in order to reassess her apparent transformation from sexual revolutionary to anti-sex ideologue. These contributions (which include articles and photographs) are celebrations of female sexual empowerment and critiques of what Greer sees as a pervasive gender hierarchy. I have argued that this work is also useful in that it anticipates the feminist debates about pornography that would gain ascendance in North America almost a decade after Suck’s publication. Greer articulates arguments that would come to be aligned with both “sex-positive” and “anti-pornography” feminist discourses. To this extent, she has made an important and thus far largely unacknowledged contribution to these highly polarised feminist debates. ReferencesBronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.De Lacy, Justine. “Germaine Greer’s New Book Stirs a Debate.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1984. 21 Oct. 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-debate.html>.Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter, eds. “Introduction.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–13.Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1989. Gleeson, Kate. “From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia: Feminism and Pornograph—Remembering the Australian Way.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 83–96.Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers, 1999. ———. “Gluttons for Porn.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2000. 21 Oct. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society>.———. “As Women Bare All in Feminist Protest, Germaine Greer Asks: Is This Feminism?” News.com.au 17 Mar. 2013. 30 July 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/as-women-bare-all-in-feminist-protest-germaine-greer-asks-is-this-feminism/story-fneszs56-1226598414628>.Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1990. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury, and Catharine Lumby. The Porn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Q&A. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” First screened 19 Mar. 2012. 20 May 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.Suck Magazine. Copies held by Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Taylor, Anthea. “Germaine Greer’s Adaptable Celebrity: Feminism, Unruliness, and Humour on the British Small Screen.” Feminist Media Studies 14.5 (2014): 759–74.University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer archive. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 216. File name “(Drawer 158) Press clippings about Germaine Greer.” “Author Attacks Dominating Male.” Interview with Germaine Greer. Interviewer and place of publication unknown. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Bounce Titty Bounce.” “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Suck Editorial 1971?” “Editorial.” Suck Magazine. Issue number not provided. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Lady Love Your Cunt Suck.” “Lady Love Your Cunt.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Suck Correspondence 73.” Untitled photographs of Germaine Greer. Originally published in Suck Magazine. Unpaginated. Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer, Untamed Shrew. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1997.

IntroductionFor many, north is an abstract point on a compass, an arrow that tells you which way to hold up a map. Though scientifically defined according to the magnetic north pole, and/or the earth’s axis of rotation, these facts are not necessarily discernible to the average person. Perhaps for this reason, the Oxford English Dictionary begins with reference to the far more mundane and accessible sun and features of the human body, in defining north as; “in the direction of the part of the horizon on the left-hand side of a person facing the rising sun” (OED Online). Indeed, many of the words for ‘north’ around the world are etymologically linked to the left hand side (for example Cornish clēth ‘north, left’). We shall see later that even in English, many speakers conceptualise ‘north’ in an egocentric way. Other languages define ‘north’ in opposition to an orthogonal east-west axis defined by the sun’s rising and setting points (see, e.g., the extensive survey of Brown).Etymology aside, however, studies such as Brown’s presume a set of four cardinal directions which are available as primordial ontological categories which may (or may not) be labelled by the languages of the world. If we accept this premise, the fact that a word is translated as ‘north’ is sufficient to understand the direction it describes. There is good reason to reject this premise, however. We present data from three languages among which there is considerable variance in how the words translated as ‘north’ are typically used and understood. These languages are Kuuk Thaayorre (an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on Cape York Peninsula), Marshallese (an Oceanic language spoken in the Republic of the Marshall Islands), and Dhivehi (an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Maldives). Lastly, we consider the results of an experiment that show Australian English speakers tend to interpret the word north according to the orientation of their own bodies and the objects they manipulate, rather than as a cardinal direction as such.‘North’ in Kuuk ThaayorreKuuk Thaayorre is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken on the west coast of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula in the community of Pormpuraaw. The Kuuk Thaayorre words equivalent to north, south, east and west (hereafter, ‘directionals’) are both complex and frequently used. They are complex in the sense that they combine with prefixes and suffixes to form dozens of words which indicate not only the direction involved, but also the degree of distance, whether there is motion from, towards, to a fixed point, or within a bounded area in that location, proximity to the local river, and more. The ubiquity of these words is illustrated by the fact that the most common greeting formula involves one person asking nhunt wanthan pal yan? ‘where are you going’ and the other responding, for example, ngay yuurriparrop yan ‘I’m going a long way southwards towards the river’, or ngay iilungkarruw yan ‘I’m coming from the northwest’. Directional terms are strewn liberally throughout Kuuk Thaayorre speech. They are employed in the description of both large-scale and small-scale spaces, whether giving directions to a far-off town, asking another person to ‘move a little to the north’, or identifying the person ‘to the east’ of another in a photograph. Likewise, directional gestures are highly frequent, sometimes augmenting the information given in the speech stream, sometimes used in the absence of spoken directions, and other times redundantly duplicating the information given by a directional word.The forms and meanings of directional words are described in detail in Gaby (Gaby 344–52). At the core of this system are six directional roots referring to the north and south banks of the nearby Edward River as well as two intersecting axes. One of these axes is equivalent to the east—west axis familiar to English speakers, and is defined by the apparent diurnal trajectory of the sun. (At a latitude of 14 degrees 54 minutes south, the Kuuk Thaayorre homeland sees little variation in the location of sunrise and sunset through the year.) While the poles of the second axis are translated by the English terms north and south, from a Western perspective this axis is skewed such that Kuuk Thaayorre -ungkarr ‘~north’ lies approximately 35 degrees west of magnetic north. Rather than being defined by magnetic or polar north, this axis aligns with the local coastline. This is true even when the terms are used at inland locations where there is no visual access to the water or parallel sand ridges. How Kuuk Thaayorre speakers apply this system to environments further removed from this particular stretch of coast—especially in the presence of a differently-oriented coast—remains a topic for future research.‘North’ in MarshalleseMarshallese is the language of the people of the Marshall Islands, an expansive archipelago consisting of 22 inhabited atolls and three inhabited non-atoll islands located in the Northern Pacific. The Marshallese have a long history as master navigators, a skill necessary to keep strong links between far-flung and disparate islands (Lewis; Genz).Figure 1: The location of the Marshall IslandsAs with other Pacific languages (e.g. Palmer; Ross; François), Marshallese deploys a complex system of geocentric references. Cardinal directions are historically derived from the Pacific trade winds, reflecting the importance of these winds for navigation and wayfinding. The etymologies of the Marshallese directions are shown in Table 1 below. The terms given in this table are in the Ralik dialect, spoken in the western Marshall Islands. The terms used in the Ratak (eastern) dialect are related, but slightly different in form. See Schlossberg for more detailed discussion. Etymologies originally sourced from Bender et al. and Ross.Table 1: Marshallese cardinal direction words with etymological source semantics EastWestNorthSouthNoun formrearrilik iōn̄ rōkEtymology‘calm shore (of islet)’‘rough shore (of islet)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’Verb modifier formtatonin̄a rōn̄aEtymology‘up(wind)’‘down(wind)’‘windy season’; ‘season of northerly winds’‘dry season’; ‘season of southerly winds’As with many other Oceanic languages, Marshallese has three domains of spatial language use: the local domain, the inshore-maritime domain and the navigational domain. Cardinal directions are the sole strategy employed in the navigational domain, which occurs when sailing on the open ocean. In the inshore-maritime domain, which applies when sailing on the ocean or lagoon in sight of land, a land-sea axis is used (The question of whether, in fact, these directions form axes as such is considered further below). Similarly, when walking around an island, a calm side-rough side (of island) axis is employed. In both situations, either the cardinal north-south axis or east-west axis is used to form a secondary cross-axis to the topography-based axis. The cardinal axis parallel to the calm-rough or land-sea axis is rarely used. When the island is not oriented perfectly perpendicular to one of the cardinal axes, the cardinal axes rotate such that they are perpendicular to the primary axis. This can result in the orientation of iōn̄ ‘north’ being quite skewed away from ‘true’ north. An example of how the cardinal and topographic axes prototypically work is exemplified in Figure 2, which shows Jabor, an islet in Jaluit Atoll in the south-west Marshalls.Figure 2: The geocentric directional system of Jabor, Jaluit AtollWhile cartographic cardinal directions comprise two perpendicular axes, this is not the case for many Marshallese. The clearest evidence for this is the directional system of Kili Island, a small non-atoll island approximately 50km west of Jaluit Atoll. The directional system of Kili is similar to that of Jabor, with one notable exception; the iōn̄-rōk ‘north-south’ and rear-rilik ‘east-west’ axes are not perpendicular but rather parallel (Figure 3) The rear-rilik axis takes precedence and the iōn̄-rōk axis is rarely used, showing the primacy of the east-west axis on Kili. This is a clear indication that the Western abstraction of crossed cardinal axes is not in play in the Marshall Islands; the iōn̄-rōk and rear-rilik axes can function completely independently of one another.Figure 3: Geocentric system of spatial reference on KiliSpringdale is a small city in north-west of the landlocked state of Arkansas. It hosts the largest number of expatriate Marshallese in the United States. Of 26 participants in an object placement task, four respondents were able to correctly identify the four cardinal points (Schlossberg). Aside from some who said they simply did not know others gave a variety of answers, including that iōn̄, rōk, rilik and rear only exist in the Marshall Islands. Others imagined a canonical orientation derived from their home atoll and transposed this onto their current environment; one person who was facing the front door in their house in Springdale reported that they imagined they were in their house in the Marshall Islands, where when oriented towards the door, they were facing iōn̄ ‘north’, thus deriving an orientation with respect to a Marshallese cardinal direction. Aside from the four participants who identified the directions correctly, a further six participants responded in a consistent—if incorrect—way, i.e. although the directions were not correctly identified, the responses were consistent with the conceptualisation of crossed cardinal axes, merely that the locations identified were rotated from their true referents. This leaves 16 of the 26 participants (62%) who did not display evidence of having a conceptual system of two crossed cardinal axes.If one were to point in a direction and say ‘this is north’, most Westerners would easily be able to identify ‘south’ by pointing in the opposite direction. This is not the case with Marshallese speakers, many of whom are unable to do the same if given a Marshallese cardinal direction and asked to name its opposite (cf. Schlossberg). This demonstrates that for many Marshallese, each of these cardinal terms do not form axes at all, but rather are four unique locally-anchored points.‘North’ in DhivehiDhivehi is spoken in the Maldives, an archipelago to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean (see Figure 4). Maldivians have a long history of sailing on the open waters, in order to fish and to trade. Traditionally, much of the adult male population would spend long periods of time on such voyages, riding the trade winds and navigating by the stars. For Maldivians, uturu ‘north’ is a direction of safety—the long axis of the Maldivian archipelago runs north to south, and so by sailing north, one has the best possible chance of reaching another island or (eventually) the mainlands of India or Sri Lanka.Figure 4: Location of the MaldivesIt is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many Maldivians are well attuned to the direction denoted by uturu ‘north’, as well as to the other cardinal directions. In an object placement task performed by 41 participants in Laamu Atoll, 32 participants (78%) correctly placed a plastic block ‘to the north’ (uturaṣ̊) of another block when instructed to do so (Lum). The prompts dekonaṣ̊ ‘to the south’ and huḷangaṣ̊ ‘to the west’ yielded similarly high rates of correct responses, though as many as 37 participants (90%) responded correctly to the prompt iraṣ̊ ‘to the east’—this is perhaps because the term for ‘east’ also means ‘sun’ and is strongly associated with the sunrise, whereas the terms for the other cardinal directions are comparatively opaque. However, the path of the sun is not the only environmental cue that shapes the use of Dhivehi cardinal directions. As in Kuuk Thaayorre and Marshallese, cardinal directions in Dhivehi are often ‘calibrated’ according to the orientation of local coastlines. In Fonadhoo, for example, which is oriented northeast to southwest, the system of cardinal directions is rotated about 45 degrees clockwise: uturu ‘north’ points to what is actually northeast and dekona/dekunu ‘south’ to what is actually southwest (i.e., along the length of the island), while iru/iramati ‘east’ and huḷangu ‘west’ are perpendicular to shore (see Figure 5). However, despite this rotated system being in use, residents of Fonadhoo often comment that these are not the ‘real’ cardinal directions, which are determined by the path of the sun.Figure 5: Directions in Fonadhoo, Laamu Atoll, MaldivesIn addition to the four cardinal directions, Dhivehi possesses four intercardinal directions, which are compound terms: iru-uturu ‘northeast’, iru-dekunu ‘southeast’, huḷangu-uturu ‘northwest’, and huḷangu-dekunu ‘southwest’. Yet even a system of eight compass points is not sufficient for describing directions over long distances, especially on the open sea where there are no landmarks to refer to. A system of 32 ‘sidereal’ compass directions (see Figure 6), based on the rising and setting points of stars in the night sky, is available for such purposes—for example, simāgu īran̊ ‘Arcturus rising’ points ENE or 67.5°, while simāgu astamān̊ ‘Arcturus setting’ points WNW or 292.5°. (These Dhivehi names for the sidereal directions are borrowings from Arabic, and were probably introduced by Arab seafarers in the medieval period, see Lum 174-79). Eight sidereal directions coincide with the basic (inter)cardinal directions of the solar compass described earlier. For example, gahā ‘Polaris’ in the sidereal compass corresponds exactly with uturu ‘north’ in the solar compass. Thus Dhivehi has both a sidereal ‘north’ and a solar ‘north’, though the latter is sometimes rotated according to local topography. However, the system of sidereal compass directions has largely fallen out of use, and is known only to older and some middle-aged men. This appears to be due to the diversification of the Maldivian economy in recent decades along with the modernisation of Maldivian fishing vessels, including the introduction of GPS technology. Nonetheless, fishermen and fishing communities use solar compass directions much more frequently than other groups in the Maldives (Lum; Palmer et al.), and some of the oldest men still use sidereal compass directions occasionally.Figure 6: Dhivehi sidereal compass with directions in Thaana script (used with kind permission of Abdulla Rasheed and Abdulla Zuhury)‘North’ in EnglishThe traditional definition of north in terms of Magnetic North or Geographic North is well known to native English speakers and may appear relatively straightforward. In practice, however, the use and interpretation of north is more variable. English speakers generally draw on cardinal directions only in restricted circumstances, i.e. in large-scale geographical or navigational contexts rather than, for example, small-scale configurations of manipulable objects (Majid et al. 108). Consequently, most English speakers do not need to maintain a mental compass to keep track of North at all times. So, if English speakers are generally unaware of where North is, how do they perform when required to use it?A group of 36 Australian English speakers participated in an experimental task where they were presented with a stimulus object (in this case, a 10cm wide cube) while facing S72ºE (Poulton). They were then handed another cube and asked to place it next to the stimulus cube in a particular direction (e.g. ‘put this cube to the north of that cube’). Participants completed a total of 48 trials, including each of the four cardinal directions as target, as well as expressions such as behind, in front of and to the left of. As shown in Figure 7, participants’ responses were categorised in one of three ways: correct, near-correct, or incorrect.Figure 7: Possible responses to prompt of north: A = correct, B = near-correct (aligned with the side of stimulus object closest to north), C = incorrect.Every participant placed their cube in alignment with the axes of the stimulus object (i.e. responses B and C in Figure 7). Orientation to Magnetic/Geographic North was thus insufficient to override the local cues of the task at hand. The 9% of participants showed some awareness of the location of Magnetic/Geographic North, however, by making the near-correct response type B. No participants who behaved in such a way expressed certainty in their responses, however. Most commonly, they calculated the rough direction concerned by triangulating with local landmarks such as nearby roads, or the location of Melbourne’s CBD (as verbally expressed both during the task and during an informal interview afterwards).The remaining 91% of participants’ responses were entirely incorrect. Of these, 13.2% involved similar thought processes as the near-correct responses, but did not result in the identification of the closest side of the stimulus to the instructed direction. However, 77.8% of the total participants interpreted north as the far side of the stimulus. While such responses were classified incorrect on the basis of Magnetic or Geographic North, they were consistent with one another and correct with respect to an alternative definition of English north in terms of the participant’s own body. One of the participants alludes to this alternative definition, asking “Do you mean my North or physical North?”. We refer to this alternative definition as Relative North. Relative North is not bound to any given point on the Earth or a derivation of the sun’s position; instead, it is entirely bound to the perceiver’s own orientation. This equates the north direction with forward and the other cardinals’ points are derived from this reference point (see Figure 8). Map-reading practices likely support the development of the secondary, Relative sense of North.Figure 8: Relative North and the Relative directions derived from itConclusionWe have compared the words closest in meaning to the English word north in four entirely unrelated languages. In the Australian Aboriginal language Kuuk Thaayorre, the ‘north’ direction aligns with the local coast, pointing in a direction 35 degrees west of Magnetic North. In Marshallese, the compass direction corresponding to ‘north’ is different for each island, being defined in opposition to an axis running between the ocean and lagoon sides of that island. The Dhivehi ‘north’ direction may be defined either in opposition to the (sun-based) east-west axis, calibrated to the configuration of the local island, as in Marshallese, or defined in terms of Polaris, the Pole star. In all these cases, though, the system of directions is anchored by properties of the external environment. English speakers, by contrast, are shown to—at least some of the time—define north with reference to their own embodied perspective, as the direction extending outwards from the front of their bodies. These findings demonstrate that, far from being universal, ‘north’ is a culture-specific category. As such, great care must be taken when translating or drawing equivalencies between these concepts across languages.ReferencesBender, Byron W., et al. “Proto-Micronesian Reconstructions: I.” Oceanic Linguistics 42.1 (2003): 1–110.Brown, Cecil H. “Where Do Cardinal Direction Terms Come From?” Anthropological Linguistics 25.2 (1983): 121–161. François, Alexandre. “Reconstructing the Geocentric System of Proto-Oceanic.” Oceanic Linguistics 43.1 (2004): 1–31. Gaby, Alice R. A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. Vol. 74. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017.Genz, Joseph. “Complementarity of Cognitive and Experiential Ways of Knowing the Ocean in Marshallese Navigation.” Ethos 42.3 (2014): 332–351.Lewis, David Henry. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. 2nd ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994. Lum, Jonathon. "Frames of Spatial Reference in Dhivehi Language and Cognition." PhD Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2018. Majid, Asifa, et al. “Can Language Restructure Cognition? The Case for Space.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8.3 (2004): 108–114.OED Online. “North, Adv., Adj., and N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/view/Entry/128325>.Palmer, Bill. “Absolute Spatial Reference and the Grammaticalisation of Perceptually Salient Phenomena.” Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2002. 107–133. ———, et al. "“Sociotopography: The Interplay of Language, Culture, and Environment.” Linguistic Typology 21.3 (2017). DOI:10.1515/lingty-2017-0011.Poulton, Thomas. “Exploring Space: Frame-of-Reference Selection in English.” Honours Thesis. Melbourne: Monash University, 2016.Ross, Malcolm D. “Talking about Space: Terms of Location and Direction.” The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society: The Physical Environment. Eds. Malcolm D. Ross, Andrew Pawley, and Meredith Osmond. Vol. 2. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003. 229–294. Schlossberg, Jonathan. Atolls, Islands and Endless Suburbia: Spatial Reference in Marshallese. PhD thesis. Newcastle: University of Newcastle, in preparation.

Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. As these debut micro-microcelebrities grow older and inherit digital publics, personae, and careers, future research should focus on the transition of their ownership, engagement, and reactions to a branded childhood in which babies were postured for an initimate public.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, & Technology. Forthcoming, Nov 2015.Aiello, Marianne. “Mommy Blog Banner Ads Get Results.” Healthcare Marketing Advisor 17 Nov. 2010. HealthLeaders Media. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://healthleadersmedia.com/content/MAR-259215/Mommy-Blog-Banner-Ads-Get-Results›.Azzarone, Stephanie. “When Consumers Report: Mommy Blogging Your Way to Success.” Playthings 18 Feb. 2009. 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On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. 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Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.