Journal articles on the topic 'MSR Code Construction'

Edge computing, as an emerging computing paradigm, aims to reduce network bandwidth transmission overhead while storing and processing data on edge nodes. However, the storage strategies required for edge nodes are different from those for existing data centers. Erasure code (EC) strategies have been applied in some decentralized storage systems to ensure the privacy and security of data storage. Product-matrix (PM) regenerating codes (RGCs) as a state-of-the-art EC family are designed to minimize the repair bandwidth overhead or minimize the storage overhead. Nevertheless, the high complexity of the PM framework contains more finite-domain multiplication operations than classical ECs, which heavily consumes computational resources at the edge nodes. In this paper, a theoretical derivation of each step of the PM minimum storage regeneration (PM-MSR) and PM minimum bandwidth regeneration (PM-MBR) codes is performed and the XOR complexity over finite fields is analyzed. On this basis, a new construct called product bitmatrix (PB) is designed to reduce the complexity of XOR operations in the PM framework, and two heuristics are used to further reduce the XOR numbers of the PB-MSR and PB-MBR codes, respectively. The evaluation results show that the PB construction significantly reduces the XOR number compared to the PM-MSR, PM-MBR, Reed–Solomon (RS), and Cauchy RS codes while retaining optimal performance and reliability.

The simulation and analysis of neutronics parameters in Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) is fundamental for the design of the reactor core. However, high-fidelity neutron transport calculations of the MSR are time-consuming and require significant computational resources. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been used in various industries, and in recent years are increasingly introduced in the nuclear industry. Back-Propagation neural network (BPNN) is one type of ANN. A surrogate model based on BP neural network is developed to quickly predict two key neutronics parameters in reactor core: the effective multiplication factor (keff) and the three-dimensional channel-by-channel neutron flux distribution. The dataset samples are generated by modeling and simulating different operation states of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) using the Monte Carlo code. Hyper-parameters optimization is performed to obtain the optimal surrogate model. The numerical results on the test dataset show good agreement between the surrogate model and the Monte Carlo code. Additionally, the surrogate model significantly reduces computation time compared to the Monte Carlo code and greatly enhances efficiency. The feasibility and advantages of the proposed surrogate model is demonstrated, which has important significance for real-time prediction and design optimization of the reactor core.

The transmutation of transuranic (TRU) elements produced by pressurized water reactors (PWRs) can effectively reduce their radioactive hazards. The molten chloride salt fast reactor (MCSFR) is a type of liquid-fueled molten salt reactor (MSR) using fuel in the form of molten chloride salts. The MCSFR utilizing a fast neutron spectrum and high actinide fraction is considered to be a potential reactor type for TRU transmutation. An online refueling and reprocessing scenario is the unique feature of liquid-fueled MSRs. On account of this characteristic, a new fuel management code named ThorNEMFM with a nodal expansion method (NEM) was developed and validated with the molten salt breeder reactor (MSBR) and the molten salt fast reactor (MSFR) benchmarks. Then, the transmutation and breeding performances of the MCSFR were simulated and analyzed with the ThorNEMFM code. The MCSFR adopts TRU elements as initial fissile loads and online feeding fissile materials. The results show that the transmutation ratio of TRU elements in the MCSFR can reach 50%, and the breeding ratio can reach 1.359. Moreover, the MCSFR has low radiotoxicity due to lower buildup of fission products (FPs).

Purpose The purpose of paper is to supply a code of ethics that can be easily utilized by working professional in their day to day decision making. The accounting profession plays a vital role in the functioning of modern society. It is essential that members of this profession be ethical and stand fast against the internal and external pressures that might encourage these professionals to engage in fraudulent activities. Codes of ethics provide a coherent articulation of the ideals, responsibilities and limitations of the collective ethic of a profession’s members and can assist in guiding ethical behavior. Design/methodology/approach Our model is based on the professional values of justice, utility, competence and utility, i.e. JUCI model, which is a straightforward and easily understandable ethical decision-making model that the average accounting professional, as well as finance professionals in general, may reference when challenged with difficult ethical quandaries. Findings This code, the JUCI Code, represents a contribution to the literature in that its simple, but not simplistic, approach could be of enormous benefit to busy and pressured accountants who need help in constructing independently achieved and defensible rational ethical decisions in the practice of accounting. Originality/value In this paper, the authors build upon a review of ethical foundations and codes of conduct in other professions to construct our code of ethics for accounting professionals.

Abstract Evidentiality has often been described in narrow terms as an independent grammatical category denoting an overt source of information (e.g., perception, inference, assumption and hearsay). Drawing on fieldwork data, this paper explores how evidentiality is encoded at the copula level in Chhitkul-Rākchham (West Himalayish). In doing so, it is argued that the relevant evidentials, part of a comparatively complex scheme consisting of nine elements, together with a negative sub-system, fall under the broader umbrella of epistemic modality. The contention finds an illustration in an egophoric marker following two inflectional tracks with two resulting degrees of assertiveness, and in a handful of combinatorial constructions. Evidentiality as expressed by copulas points to the self, which builds bridges with the study of consciousness. The latter term is underappreciated within linguistics and this work emphasizes the need for a broader cross-disciplinary outlook.

This research initiative attempts to determine, from real construction cost estimates, the cost challenge and expected payback period associated with building a high-performance residence in Victoria, BC. This was accomplished through: a simulated tendering process with local contractors, an energy analysis of a case-study residence (Part I of this research initiative), and an in-depth study into the variables governing time-to-amortization. The contractors provided quotes for an as-built “above code” residence (ACR), and a “minimum-code” residence (MCR) with the same floor plan (Note: The as-built above-code residence was not built or designed to any specific performance standard; however, it was found in Part I of this research initiative that when compared to the new BC Step code that it performed at a step 3 designation, bordering on step 4 performance). The results of the tendering process were then compared to the as-built construction costs of the residence. When compared to the MCR, it was found that the ACR has a cost challenge of approximately 22.5%, an energy advantage of 22.5 kWh/m2/year, and a payback period of over 79 years when a fuel inflation rate of 2% is considered. However, many of the components in the ACR assemblies were either for aesthetic appeal (metal-roofing), or comfort (floor-cavity insulation), and therefore it was possible to reduce the cost challenge to just 2.1%, while maintaining an energy advantage of 15 kWh/m2/year and step level 3 designation. This was dubbed the hybrid-residence as it employed a combination of above-code and minimum-code construction assemblies. Based on a simple mortgage increase calculation, it was found that the reduction in operational costs produced by the energy-efficiency measures for this residence services 87% of the mortgage increase taken on by the home buyer.

This research initiative attempts to empirically determine, with reality-based (real instead of modeled) performance data from energy suppliers, the energy advantage associated with building high performance residence in Victoria, BC. In addition, this initiative created a much-needed benchmark for contractors to gain a firm understanding of the construction details required to achieve the various levels of the “Step Code” in the newest edition of the British Columbia Building Code. This was accomplished through a comparative energy analysis between a case-study high-performance “above-code residence” (ACR) to a “minimum code residence” (MCR) with the same floor plan. The ACR was built in 2015 before the step code was introduced, and therefore it was not determined what step level it achieved when it was built. It was not built to any particular performance standard, rather it was built using design details that were calculated to exceed Part 9 performance in effective R-value and airtightness. Upon investigation it was determined that the ACR achieved a performance level of “Step 3” bordering on “Step 4” performance. When compared to the MCR, it was found that the ACR has an energy advantage of 22.5 kWh/m2/year. However, many of the components in the ACR assemblies were either for aesthetic appeal (metal-roofing), or comfort (floor-cavity insulation), and therefore it was possible to remove these components (which is important for Part II of this study: An in-depth cost analysis between the two residences) while maintaining an energy advantage of 15 kWh/m2/year and step level 3 designation. This was dubbed the hybrid-residence as it employed a combination of above-code and minimum-code construction assemblies.

The main part of the computational cost required for solving the problem of optimal material design with extreme properties using a topology optimization formulation is devoted to solving the equilibrium system of equations derived through the implementation of the finite element method (FEM). To reduce this computational cost, among other methodologies, various model order reduction (MOR) approaches can be utilized. In this work, a simple Matlab code for solving the topology optimization for the design of materials combined with three different model order reduction approaches is presented. The three MOR approaches presented in the code implementation are the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), the on-the-fly reduced order model construction and the approximate reanalysis (AR) following the combined approximations approach. The complete code, containing all participating functions (including the changes made to the original ones), is provided.

In 2009, ASME incorporated the construction specifications of graphite pressure vessels (GPV) in BPV construction codes (BPV VIII-1 part UIG). It is the first time that the non-metallic pressure vessel was incorporated. For the raw materials of GPV, a special property was specified in the codes, i.e. the permeability. As the porous microstructure of impregnated graphite, the permeability becomes a key property for the construction of the GPV especially in the high toxicity applications. In this paper, the whole test technique about the permeability of graphite was discussed, including the computational derivations, design of the test equipment, the test procedure and the result data processing.

Premature deterioration of reinforced concrete structures due to corrosion of the reinforcing steel is a major concern worldwide. In this study code provisions and design considerations for using corrosion resistant reinforcing steel bars have been discussed at length. The most common corrosion resistant reinforcing bars available today are– Fusion Bonded Epoxy Coated Bars (ASTM A775), Hot Dip Galvanized Steel Bar (ASTMA767), Glass Fiber Reinforced ,Polymer Bars and Stainless Steel Rebars (ASTM A955). Especially in marine environments corrosion of reinforcement is one the major concerns regarding durability of RC Structures. Also parts of any structure that are subjected to intermittent wetting and drying (e.g. bridge piers) and those that are subjected to dampness (e.g. topmost roof slab of a building) are more susceptible to corrosion. It is well known that Bangladesh’s already struggling infrastructure is under a constant threat of deterioration due to various physical and environmental conditions while a huge shortfall in budget exists to ensure periodic maintenance and repair works. Corrosion resistant rebars are globally accepted corrosion resistant system that will ensure the structures can be used till the end of their design lives. While demand for all non-corroding bars is on the rise, expertise of engineers and construction workers in handling these bars should grow as well. Therefore recommended work practices while manufacturing, fabricating and concreting has to be included in the country’s standards and guidelines.

We construct families of cell complexes that generalize expander graphs. These families are called non-$k$-hyperfinite, generalizing the idea of a non-hyperfinite (NH) family of graphs. Roughly speaking, such a complex has the property that one cannot remove a small fraction of points and be left with an object that looks $k-1$-dimensional at large scales. We then consider certain quantum systems on these complexes. A future goal is to construct a family of Hamiltonians such that every low energy state has topological order as part of an attempt to prove the quantum PCP conjecture. This goal is approached by constructing a toric code Hamiltonian with the property that every low energy state without vertex defects has topological order, a property that would not hold for any local system in any lattice $Z^d$ or indeed on any $1$-hyperfinite complex. Further, such NH complexes find application in quantum coding theory. The hypergraph product codes\cite{hpc} of Tillich and Z\'{e}mor are generalized using NH complexes.

For the rational decision of colors on the different building objects it is recommended to use optimal colors to create the best climate at industrial enterprises. For this purpose the appropriate building codes are developed. Building constructions in the industrial enterprises, which are applied fire-retardant paint, also painted in the appropriate color with tinting paste, or applying the finishing coat with that color. It is shown, that the introduction of tinting paste in the fire-retardant paint as overcoating of the fire-retardant paint leads to chaotic effect on height of foam of the intumescing coatings. The conclusions about invalidity of coloring with the fire-retardant paints in saturated tones used tinting paste without preliminary testing on the fire retardant efficiency are made. Similar conclusions are applied to the paint systems for an intumescing fire protective coatings using surface finishing.

The objective of this study is to construct the forming rule for hourglass-like tube with magnesium alloy during hydro-forming and offer the analysis results as a guideline for magnesium alloy forming in industry. AZ31 magnesium alloy circular tube is used as the billet material for hydro-forming with hydraulic pressure as the main forming power combined with the mechanical auxiliary force from the punch to fabricate the hourglass-like tubing products. A finite element based code is utilized to investigate the forming characteristics of hourglass-like tube forming, by changing process parameters such as punch velocity, hydraulic pressure gradient and tool-workpiece interface friction etc. to investigate the material flow of tube filling, wall thickness variations, and stress and strain distributions. And the abductive network is in turn applied to synthesize the data sets obtained from the numerical simulations. Consequently, a quantitative prediction model is developed for the relationships among the process variables, corner radius and minimum tube thickness in the process of hourglass-like tube hydro-forming with magnesium alloy. The results show that proper mechanical force can help material flow, prevent large strain deformation from falling into the area of negative strain hardening rate, enhance the magnesium alloy to become easy in forming and make tube fitting may to be formed successfully.

In the pipeline construction, the girth welds tend to be the weakness because of defects and microstructural heterogeneities. The importance of suitable assessment of various defects in the weld is not only to prevent the cracks from unstable growth to cause catastrophic accident but also can effectively reduce the weld repair to reduce construction cost. Although many welding defects assessment methods and codes have been applied in this field, there are many differences among them. In this paper, the application of weld defect assessment methods was extensively studied. The key points of ECA applications, such as the pipeline axial stress and toughness, have been introduced. Furthermore, some suggestions were given on the application of girth weld ECA assessment.

PT MPR adalah perusahaan yang bergerak di bidang kontraktor. Salah satu aspek terpenting dari manajemen sumber daya manusia perusahaan adalah penilaian kinerja karyawan. Perusahaan ini menerapkan penentuan karyawan terbaik, namun dalam penerapaannya masih ditemukan beberapa kendala seperti pada proses perhitungan membutuhkan waktu yang cukup lama karena jumlah karyawan tergolong cukup banyak dan hasil perhitungan pada proses penilaian evaluasi kinerja juga diragukan ketepatannya karena perhitungannya secara manual. Tujuan dari pengembangan sistem pendukung keputusan karyawan terbaik pada PT MPR adalah membantu HRD dalam menentukan karyawan terbaik pada perusahaan, sehingga perhitungan dalam penilaian evaluasi lebih cepat dan akurat. Metodologi pengembangan sistem yang digunakan yaitu Rational Unified Process (RUP) yang terdiri dari inception, elaboration, construction, dan transition. Metode pendukung keputusan yang digunakan adalah Simple Additive Weighting (SAW). Aplikasi dibangun berbasis website menggunakan Visual Studio Code, bahasa pemograman PHP, dan MySQL. Oleh karena itu penulis membantu menyelesaikan permasalahan tersebut dengan membangun sistem pendukung keputusan dalam menentukan karyawan terbaik dengan menggunakan metode SAW.

In the pipeline construction, the girth welds tend to be the weakness because of defects and microstructure. The importance of suitable assessment of various defects in the weld is not only to prevent the cracks from unstable growth to cause catastrophic accident but also can effectively reduce the weld repair to reduce construction cost. Although many welding defects assessment methods and codes are used in this field, there are many differences among them. In this paper, the welding defect assessment methods, such as API 1104 and BS7910, were studied. The results show the key factors that affect the result of these assessment methods. The application of these methods was also discussed. The results indicate that API 1104 level1 has the highest conservatism, while API 1104 level 2 is next.

A coupled regional and local model is required when groundwater flow and solute transport are to be simulated in local areas of interest with a finer grid while regional aquifer boundary and major stresses should be retained with a coarser grid. The coupled model should also maintain interactions between the regional and local flow systems. In the Beijing Plain (China), assessment of managed aquifer recharge (MAR), groundwater pollution caused by rivers, capture zone of well fields, and land subsidence at the cone of depression requires a coupled regional and local model. This study evaluates three methods for coupling regional and local flow models for simulating MAR in the Chaobai River catchment in the Beijing Plain. These methods are the conventional grid refinement (CGR) method, the local grid refinement (LGR) method and the unstructured grid (USG) method. The assessment included the comparison of the complexity of the coupled model construction, the goodness of fit of the computed and observed groundwater heads, the consistency of regional and local groundwater budgets, and the capture zone of a well filed influenced by the MAR site. The results indicated that the CGR method based on MODFLOW-2005 is the easiest to implement the coupled model, capable of reproducing regional and local groundwater heads and budget, and already coupled with density and viscosity dependent model codes for transport simulation. However, the CGR method inherits shortcomings of finite difference grids to create multiple local models with inefficient computing efforts. The USG method based on MODFLOW-USG has the advantage of creating multi-scale models and is flexible to simulate rivers, wells, irregular boundaries, heterogeneities and the MAR site. However, it is more difficult to construct the coupled models with the unstructured grids, therefore, a good graphic user interface is necessary for efficient model construction. The LGR method based on MODFLOW-LGR can be used to create multiple local models in uniform aquifer systems. So far, little effort has been devoted to upgrade the LGR method for complex aquifer structures and develop the coupled transport models.

As part of an exploratory research project at the Institute for Energy (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission), a feasibility assessment was performed for the design and construction of a high-intensity positron facility (HIPOS) in a neutron beam tube, HB9, at the High Flux Reactor (HFR) in Petten. The full model of reactor core, reflector and reactor instrumentation at the neutron beam line HB9 were modeled and full neutronic and photonic calculations were carried out by MCNP4C3. The source file was generated in two formats: SDEF and WESSA. Consequently, two different codes were used for scoring analysis for the optimization of the concept and geometry of positron generator. The main concept including key design parameters have been evaluated independently by two computer codes, in particular MCNP-X and GEANT4. The parametric design analysis including the optimization of positron generator at the pre-selected neutron beam line is reported in this paper. The detailed assessment of the critical design parameters, specifically from technological point of view is summarised. The results of independent analysis confirmed that the best approach is to combine two concepts of positron generation, which are based on the exploiting of neutron and gamma radiation. The results verified that the proposed concept can reach the defined threshold of the positron yield and the positron beam can reach an intensity of 1013e+/sec (un-moderated). The details of completed work are reported in this paper.

The importance of a multiscale modeling to describe the behavior of materials with microstructure is commonly recognized. In general, at the different scales the material may be described by means of different models. In this paper we focus on a specific class of materials for which it is possible to identify (at the least) two relevant scales: a macroscopic scale, where continuum mechanics applies; and a microscale, where a discrete model is adopted. The conceptual framework and the theoretical model were discussed in previous work. This approach is well suited to study multifield and multiphysics problems. We present here the multiscale algorithm and the computer code that we developed to implement this strategy. The solution of the problem is searched for at the macroscale using nonlinear FEM. During the construction of the FE solution, the material behavior needs to be described at Gauss points. This step is performed numerically, formulating an equivalent problem at the microscale where the inner structure of the material is described through a lattice-like model. The two scales are conceptually independent and bridged together by means of a suitable localization-homogenization procedure. We show how different macroscopic models (e.g. Cauchy vs. Cosserat continuum) can be easily recovered starting from the same discrete system but using different bridges. The interest of this approach is shown discussing its application to few examples of engineering interest (composite materials, masonry structures, bone tissue).

L’important corpus de manuscrits coraniques produits dans la ville de Harar, dans l’actuelle Éthiopie orientale, fournit un riche matériel permettant d’étudier les circuits diachroniques d’échanges artistiques dans la mer Rouge. Centre majeur de production de manuscrits dans la Corne de l’Afrique, Harar a produit des centaines de codex entre la fin du XVIIe et le XIXe siècle. Les manuscrits du Coran et les textes poétiques religieux du début du XVIIIe siècle à Harar utilisent des styles décoratifs associés aux Mamelouks, qui ont régné sur l’Égypte, la Syrie et l’Arabie de 1250 à 1517. Les formes artistiques partagées des manuscrits égyptiens, arabes et harari suggèrent des relations artistiques complexes qui s’étendent de la fin du Moyen Âge au début de la période moderne. Cet essai vise à situer ces connexions esthétiques, qui témoignent de la mobilité des formes artistiques et de leur rôle dans la formation de cultures manuscrites interdépendantes. Il défend l’idée d’un style régional de manuscrits de la mer Rouge, défini par des répertoires ornementaux, des pratiques artistiques et des cadres organisationnels communs. Les érudits religieux ont potentiellement joué un rôle important dans la création et la diffusion de ces modes artistiques. Situés à un moment crucial, lors de la réémergence politique et économique de Harar au début du XVIIIe siècle, ces manuscrits révèlent le fonctionnement de réseaux artistiques multidirectionnels et nuancés qui, aussi paradoxal que cela puisse paraître, ont été cruciaux pour la construction d’une tradition manuscrite harari distincte.

Mongolia is a semi-arid, highly continental region with highly variable precipitation and river discharge. The groundwater aquifer located near Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, is the only one source for city water supply consumption, and it is important to ensure that groundwater is available now and in the future. The main watercourse near the capital city is the Tuul River, fed by precipitation in the Khentii Mountains. The semi-arid and cold environment shows high variability in precipitation and river discharge. However, due to absence of precipitation in winter and spring, the riverbed usually runs dry during these times of the year, and weather observations show that the dry period has been extending in recent years. However, in parallel with urban development, the extended groundwater aquifer has shown a clear decline, and the groundwater levels have dropped significantly. Therefore, a groundwater management system based on managed aquifer recharge is proposed, and a strategy to implement these measures in the Tuul River valley is presented in this paper. This strategy consists of the enhancement of natural recharge rates during the wet summer from the northern drainage canal, an additional increase in groundwater recharge through melting the ice storage in the dry period, as well as the construction of underground dams to accumulate groundwater and a surface water reservoir that releases a constant discharge in the outlet. To increase natural recharge rates of groundwater during the early dry period through the melting ice storage period, the MATLAB icing code, which was written for ice storage for limited and unlimited areas, was considered through finite element subsurface FLOW (FEFLOW) simulation scenarios as a water source in ice form on the surface. A study of the artificial permafrost of underground as an ice dam was processed in FEFLOW simulation scenarios for accumulating groundwater resources. The results of these artificial recharging methods were individually calculated, combined, and compared with the surface reservoir, which releases a constant discharge through the dam. In this paper, new ideas are presented involving managed aquifer recharge—MAR methods, and include application to aufeis, a mass of layered ice for groundwater recharge by melting. Additionally, the accumulation of groundwater using artificial permafrost is used as an underground dam. In addition, was considered recharging scenario only with constant release water amount from water reservoir also with all MAR methods together with reservoir combination.

Tumors contain multiple subpopulations of genetically distinct cancer cells. Reconstructing their evolutionary history can improve our understanding of how cancers develop and respond to treatment. Subclonal reconstruction methods cluster mutations into groups that co-occur within the same subpopulations, estimate the frequency of cells belonging to each subpopulation, and infer the ancestral relationships among the subpopulations by constructing a clone tree. However, often multiple clone trees are consistent with the data and current methods do not efficiently capture this uncertainty; nor can these methods scale to clone trees with a large number of subclonal populations. Here, we formalize the notion of a partially-defined clone tree (partial clone tree for short) that defines a subset of the pairwise ancestral relationships in a clone tree, thereby implicitly representing the set of all clone trees that have these defined pairwise relationships. Also, we introduce a special partial clone tree, the Maximally-Constrained Ancestral Reconstruction (MAR), which summarizes all clone trees fitting the input data equally well. Finally, we extend commonly used clone tree validity conditions to apply to partial clone trees and describe SubMARine, a polynomial-time algorithm producing the subMAR, which approximates the MAR and guarantees that its defined relationships are a subset of those present in the MAR. We also extend SubMARine to work with subclonal copy number aberrations and define equivalence constraints for this purpose. Further, we extend SubMARine to permit noise in the estimates of the subclonal frequencies while retaining its validity conditions and guarantees. In contrast to other clone tree reconstruction methods, SubMARine runs in time and space that scale polynomially in the number of subclones. We show through extensive noise-free simulation, a large lung cancer dataset and a prostate cancer dataset that the subMAR equals the MAR in all cases where only a single clone tree exists and that it is a perfect match to the MAR in most of the other cases. Notably, SubMARine runs in less than 70 seconds on a single thread with less than one Gb of memory on all datasets presented in this paper, including ones with 50 nodes in a clone tree. On the real-world data, SubMARine almost perfectly recovers the previously reported trees and identifies minor errors made in the expert-driven reconstructions of those trees. The freely-available open-source code implementing SubMARine can be downloaded at https://github.com/morrislab/submarine.

Background Patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) face challenges adhering to medications, given that treatment is prolonged and has a high rate of adverse effects. The Medication Event Reminder Monitor (MERM) is a digital pillbox that provides pill-taking reminders and facilitates the remote monitoring of medication adherence. Objective This study aims to assess the MERM’s acceptability to patients and health care providers (HCPs) during pilot implementation in India’s public sector MDR-TB program. Methods From October 2017 to September 2018, we conducted qualitative interviews with patients who were undergoing MDR-TB therapy and were being monitored with the MERM and HCPs in the government program in Chennai and Mumbai. Interview transcripts were independently coded by 2 researchers and analyzed to identify the emergent themes. We organized findings by using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), which outlines 4 constructs that predict technology acceptance—performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. Results We interviewed 65 patients with MDR-TB and 10 HCPs. In patient interviews, greater acceptance of the MERM was related to perceptions that the audible and visual reminders improved medication adherence and that remote monitoring reduced the frequency of clinic visits (performance expectancy), that the device’s organization and labeling of medications made it easier to take them correctly (effort expectancy), that the device facilitated positive family involvement in the patient’s care (social influences), and that remote monitoring made patients feel more cared for by the health system (facilitating conditions). Lower patient acceptance was related to problems with the durability of the MERM’s cardboard construction and difficulties with portability and storage because of its large size (effort expectancy), concerns regarding stigma and the disclosure of patients’ MDR-TB diagnoses (social influences), and the incorrect understanding of the MERM because of suboptimal counseling (facilitating conditions). In their interviews, HCPs reported that MERM implementation resulted in fewer in-person interactions with patients and thus allowed HCPs to dedicate more time to other tasks, which improved job satisfaction. Conclusions Several features of the MERM support its acceptability among patients with MDR-TB and HCPs, and some barriers to patient use could be addressed by improving the design of the device. However, some barriers, such as disease-related stigma, are more difficult to modify and may limit use of the MERM among some patients with MDR-TB. Further research is needed to assess the accuracy of MERM for measuring adherence, its effectiveness for improving treatment outcomes, and patients’ sustained use of the device in larger scale implementation.

Recent developments in cognitive and psycholinguistic research postulate that language learning is essentially the learning of grammatical construc-tions. An important type of grammatical construction with wide-ranging pedagogical implications is grammar patterns as laid out in Pattern Gram-mar. While grammar patterns have seen increasing adoption in language pedagogy, existing applications typically follow a paper-based, teacher-centered approach to instruction, which is known to be less effective in grammar learning than blended, learner-centered approaches. In this paper, we propose a blended learning model that integrates web-based technology with classroom-based instruction to facilitate efficient, personalized grammar learning. We present the design and implementation of a blended grammar learning system that provides customizable learning materials for individual learners by discovering important grammar patterns from corpora in an unsupervised manner. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed system achieves an accuracy in pattern discovery comparable to systems that rely on manually precompiled pattern lists and hard-coded rules. With a flexible architecture and an easy-to-use interface, the system can play a key role in the creation of a blended learning environment that can be integrated into a wide range of language learning curricula.

Abstract Motivation Minimizers are methods to sample k-mers from a string, with the guarantee that similar set of k-mers will be chosen on similar strings. It is parameterized by the k-mer length k, a window length w and an order on the k-mers. Minimizers are used in a large number of softwares and pipelines to improve computation efficiency and decrease memory usage. Despite the method’s popularity, many theoretical questions regarding its performance remain open. The core metric for measuring performance of a minimizer is the density, which measures the sparsity of sampled k-mers. The theoretical optimal density for a minimizer is 1/w, provably not achievable in general. For given k and w, little is known about asymptotically optimal minimizers, that is minimizers with density O(1/w). Results We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for existence of asymptotically optimal minimizers. We also provide a randomized algorithm, called the Miniception, to design minimizers with the best theoretical guarantee to date on density in practical scenarios. Constructing and using the Miniception is as easy as constructing and using a random minimizer, which allows the design of efficient minimizers that scale to the values of k and w used in current bioinformatics software programs. Availability and implementation Reference implementation of the Miniception and the codes for analysis can be found at https://github.com/kingsford-group/miniception. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Abstract Background Analytical and visual tools can be used to monitor progress for a variety of ASP key performance indicators, but few data describe the process of building disease-state specific tools to retrospectively monitor antimicrobial choice and duration. We describe process and methods for development of a pneumonia dashboard. Methods In late 2019, the Carolina ASP began construction of a dashboard to monitor antimicrobial selection and duration in patients admitted with a diagnosis code (ICD-10) consistent with pneumonia. Data extracted from the medical record after discharge included: admission date and time, admission and discharge ICD-10s, inpatient orders and administrations for agents included in the NHSN Antimicrobial Use (AU) option, and antimicrobials ordered at discharge with associated ICD-10. Extracted data fields were validated using a one-month sample. Displays were constructed to trend selection during the first 48 hours of admission, inpatient days of therapy, and total length of therapy (sum of inpatient + outpatient days) for patients who received a discharge prescription for an antimicrobial included in the AU option that was associated with an ICD-10 consistent with pneumonia. Trends observed between Jan 2020 and Mar 2021 are reported. Results 341 admissions were trended. Within the first two days of admission, monthly proportions of patients receiving an antimicrobial by category were: anti-MRSA therapies (vancomycin, linezolid), 0.20 to 0.75; broad spectrum beta-lactams (e.g., cefepime, pip/tazo), 0.40 to 0.81; CAP therapies (e.g., ceftriaxone, levofloxacin), 0.48 to 1.00 (Figure). Median inpatient duration of therapy was 5 days (IQR 3-8; range 1 to 68). Total length of therapy was median 6 days (IQR 4-10; range 1 to 68). Figure. Proportions of Patients Prescribed Antimicrobial Categories of Interest During the First 48 Hours of Admissions for Pneumonia. Legend: Anti-MRSA = vancomycin or linezolid; HAP abx = cefepime, piperacillin/tazobactam, ceftazidime, meropenem; CAP = ceftriaxone, azithromycin, ampicillin/sulbactam, amoxicillin/clavulanate, cefdinir, levofloxacin. Conclusion Automated reports and visual tools can provide actionable insights for ASP practice. From this dashboard, we identified variable but high rates of anti-MRSA and broad-spectrum beta-lactam use within the first 48 hours of admission. The median inpatient and total length of therapy of 5 and 6 days, respectively, were similar to guideline-recommended durations. The up-front cost for building analytical tools can be substantial, but can be viewed as an investment if the metrics and methods are carefully selected. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

With the aim of understanding the insertion of higher education into a new context of organization of society and State, which is managed according to the New Public Management, this work presents a comparative historical study of the organization of French and Brazilian higher education. It is concluded that the French adherence to the New Public Management is based on the knowledge economy, while the Brazilian one is based on State size reduction along the lines of the Washington Consensus; in addition, higher education institutions in both countries are organized to participate in competitions: in France, the international competition promoted by rankings, and in Brazil, the market competition.ResumoCom o objetivo de compreender a inserção do ensino superior dentro de um novo contexto de organização da sociedade e do Estado, gerido pela Nova Gestão Pública, o trabalho apresenta um estudo histórico comparativo da organização do ensino superior brasileiro e o francês. 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ABSTRACT More than 20 years ago, the survey of activities in medically assisted reproduction (MAR) was initiated in Europe and resulted in cross-sectional annual reports, as issued by the European IVF Monitoring (EIM) consortium of ESHRE. Over time, these reports mirror the continuous development of the technologies and contribute to increased transparency and surveillance of reproductive care. Meanwhile, progressive changes of existing treatment modalities and the introduction of new technologies resulted in the need of a cumulative approach in the assessment of treatment outcomes, which warrants a prospective cycle-by-cycle data registry on MAR activities, including fertility preservation. This change in the paradigm of data collection in Europe towards the construction of cumulative outcome results is expected to generate additional insights into cross-institutional but also cross-border movements of patients and reproductive material. This is essential to improve vigilance and surveillance. The European monitoring of Medically Assisted Reproduction (EuMAR) project, co-funded by the European Union, will establish a registry for the transnational collection of prospective cycle-by-cycle MAR and fertility preservation data on the basis of an individual reproductive care code (IRCC). The rationale for the project and the objectives are presented here.

There is a difference of paradigm between rural and urban people about house ownership, if urban society is influenced by Civil Code thinking where if one buys land at the same time he/she buys everything that is above it, including house building. Unlike the village community, the atmosphere of thinking about the land is influenced by customary law, which has a communal nature in which the land is owned by a citizen or otherwise known as ulayat land, so it can be understood that the minds of rural people about the house is not always merged with the land ownership, or ulayat can be built houses of some fellowship members. As a result of this paradigm, people should think of setting up funds to buy land if they want to buy a house, while the price of urban land is higher, and for the housing stake-holders, for example, housing developers, the land is used as a business commodity and a tool to achieve profits- the more so, if people want to buy a flat housing, you can imagine the meter price of the building will be charged to the land which is an integral part of the apartment unit. This raises several issues such as the number of backlog of housing is increasing, in 2015 recorded approximately reaches 14 million backlog. The government's target of providing a million homes is not achieved, including the construction of 1000 towers the year it is getting harder to achieve. This study aims to look at legal aspects that can provide solutions for the provision of housing, especially the Low Income Community (MBR) and Very Low Income Society (MBSR) so that the construction of a house is not just a project of a particular party, but a way for people to access home ownership. The method used is Sociological Jurisdiction with deep attention as well as Normative Juridical aspects as the related variables one and other.Keywords : Paradigm, Housing Law, Flat, Low-Income Community.

For nearly 50 years, the Employment Cost Index (ECI) has been providing the public with estimates of the change in employer labor costs. We explore the practicality of constructing federal wage indexes, in the spirit of the ECI, using Office of Personnel Management (OPM) salary data. To accomplish this task, we aggregate OPM records into occupation and industry groups. Although these salary data have a crosswalk for mapping OPM occupation codes into the Standard Occupational Classification system, no corresponding crosswalk exists for industries. A key hurdle, therefore, involves creating a crosswalk that assigns industry codes to OPM establishments. We create this crosswalk by developing an algorithm that uses Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data and machine-learning tools to match agencies with a unique industry. With this agency-North American Industry Classification System crosswalk, we calculate annual Laspeyres, Paasche, and Fisher wage indexes for several aggregations. The resulting wage inflation rates are plausible and do not deviate substantially from the corresponding private industry and state and local wage inflation rates.

Based on the heterogeneity of concrete constituents as well as variability in compressive strength over many magnitudes for various types of concrete, predictive methods for evaluating the compressive strength have now been given considerable attention. As a result, this research compares the performance of the Artificial Neural Network, ANN, in forecasting the compressive strength of geopolymer recycledconcrete (GPRC)based on selected pozzolans (Coal Fly Ash (CFA) and Rice Husk Ash (RHA)) at ages 7, 28, and 56 daysto the traditional Multiple Linear Regression, MLR. The compressive strength of GPRC-based CFAand RHA was determined using 65 concrete samples from eight different mixtures.The developed models were based on the experimental results, which used varying material quantities. The ANN and MLR models were built with eightinput variables: Ordinary Portland cement (OPC), RHA, CFA, Crushed granite (CG), Cupola Furnace Slag (CFS), Alkaline Solution (AS), Water-Binder Ratio (WB), and Concrete Age (CA), with compressive strength being the only predicted variable. Using MATLAB® code, approximately 75% and 25% of the input data were used for training and testing to develop an ANN model for predicting compressive strength, fcu.For ANN and MLR, the input data were trained and tested using the feedforward back-proportion and backward eliminationapproaches, respectively. Based on satisfactory performance in terms of means square error MSE, the most likely model architecture containing eight input layers, thirteen hidden layers, and one output layer neurons was chosen after several trials. According to the MLR results, only three input variables, CFA, CG, and CA, are statistically significant with p-values less than 0.05. R2= 0.9972, MSE = 0.4177, RMSE = 1.8201,for ANN and R2= 0.7410, MSE = 66.6308, RMSE = 290.4370, for MLR. The predicted results demonstrate the proposed model's dependability and computational forecasting capability. The findings of the study have the potential to help a wide range of construction industry in predicting the concrete properties and managing scarce resources.

Abstract Motivation A plethora of methods and applications share the fundamental need to associate information to words for high-throughput sequence analysis. Doing so for billions of k-mers is commonly a scalability problem, as exact associative indexes can be memory expensive. Recent works take advantage of overlaps between k-mers to leverage this challenge. Yet, existing data structures are either unable to associate information to k-mers or are not lightweight enough. Results We present BLight, a static and exact data structure able to associate unique identifiers to k-mers and determine their membership in a set without false positive that scales to huge k-mer sets with a low memory cost. This index combines an extremely compact representation along with very fast queries. Besides, its construction is efficient and needs no additional memory. Our implementation achieves to index the k-mers from the human genome using 8 GB of RAM (23 bits per k-mer) within 10 min and the k-mers from the large axolotl genome using 63 GB of memory (27 bits per k-mer) within 76 min. Furthermore, while being memory efficient, the index provides a very high throughput: 1.4 million queries per second on a single CPU or 16.1 million using 12 cores. Finally, we also present how BLight can practically represent metagenomic and transcriptomic sequencing data to highlight its wide applicative range. Availability and implementation We wrote the BLight index as an open source C++ library under the AGPL3 license available at github.com/Malfoy/BLight. It is designed as a user-friendly library and comes along with code usage samples.

Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, shows a highly dynamic urban and industrial development, with a strong increase of population. Thus, water demand is continuously rising while water availability is in general low and less reliable. The semi-arid and cold environment shows a high variability in precipitation and river discharge, with a general tendency towards decreasing water availability due to increasing air temperatures and thus rising potential evaporation. In parallel with the city’s development, the extended groundwater aquifer shows a clear decline, and the groundwater levels drop significantly. Therefore, a groundwater management system based on managed aquifer recharge is proposed and a strategy to implement these measures in the Tuul valley is presented. In this study considered enhancement of natural recharge rates during the early winter cold period, an increase of groundwater recharge through creating ice storages, due to keep water source as in ice form on surface. In dry season March to May ice storage recharge surface and groundwater by melting where Tuul River is non-flow condition. In this paper also written matlab icing code in water supply wells location, limited and unlimited area. The study of icing was processed in feflow simulation scenarios for artificially recharging groundwater resources.In this study considered feflow simulation scenarios for artificially recharging groundwater resources like enhancement of natural recharge rates during the early winter cold period, an increase of groundwater recharge through creating ice storages, due to keep water source as in ice form on surface, drainage canal recharging aquifer from opposite side, constructing underground dam that accumulates groundwater behind. The result shown that one of the possibilities recharge groundwater in dry season is icing method which creates ice sheets over ice and build ice storages in winter, keep water in ice form.

IntroductionIn metabolic engineering and synthetic biology applications, promoters with appropriate strengths are critical. However, it is time-consuming and laborious to annotate promoter strength by experiments. Nowadays, constructing mutation-based synthetic promoter libraries that span multiple orders of magnitude of promoter strength is receiving increasing attention. A number of machine learning (ML) methods are applied to synthetic promoter strength prediction, but existing models are limited by the excessive proximity between synthetic promoters.MethodsIn order to enhance ML models to better predict the synthetic promoter strength, we propose EVMP(Extended Vision Mutant Priority), a universal framework which utilize mutation information more effectively. In EVMP, synthetic promoters are equivalently transformed into base promoter and corresponding k-mer mutations, which are input into BaseEncoder and VarEncoder, respectively. EVMP also provides optional data augmentation, which generates multiple copies of the data by selecting different base promoters for the same synthetic promoter.ResultsIn Trc synthetic promoter library, EVMP was applied to multiple ML models and the model effect was enhanced to varying extents, up to 61.30% (MAE), while the SOTA(state-of-the-art) record was improved by 15.25% (MAE) and 4.03% (R2). Data augmentation based on multiple base promoters further improved the model performance by 17.95% (MAE) and 7.25% (R2) compared with non-EVMP SOTA record.DiscussionIn further study, extended vision (or k-mer) is shown to be essential for EVMP. We also found that EVMP can alleviate the over-smoothing phenomenon, which may contributes to its effectiveness. Our work suggests that EVMP can highlight the mutation information of synthetic promoters and significantly improve the prediction accuracy of strength. The source code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/Tiny-Snow/EVMP.

Abstract Motivation Circular RNA is generally formed by the “back-splicing” process between the upstream splice acceptor and the downstream donor in/not in the regulation of the corresponding RNA-binding proteins or cis-elements. Therefore, more and more software packages have been developed and they are mostly based on the identification of the back-spliced junction reads. However, recent studies developed two software tools that can detect circRNA candidates by constructing k-mer table or/and de bruijn graph rather than reads mapping. Results Here, we compared the precision, sensitivity and detection efficiency between software tools based on different algorithms. Eleven representative detection tools with two types of algorithm were selected for the overall pipeline analysis of RNA-seq datasets with/without RNase R treatment in two cell lines. Precision, sensitivity, AUC, F1 score and detection efficiency metrics were assessed to compare the prediction tools. Meanwhile, the sensitivity and distribution of highly expressed circRNAs before and after RNase R treatment were also revealed by their enrichment, unaffected and depleted candidate frequencies. Eventually, we found that compared to the k-mer based tools, CIRI2 and KNIFE based on reads mapping had relatively superior and more balanced detection performance regardless of the cell line or RNase R (-/+) datasets. Availability and implementation All predicted results and source codes can be retrieved from https://github.com/luffy563/circRNA_tools_comparison. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Abstract Motivation Pangenome variation graphs model the mutual alignment of collections of DNA sequences. A set of pairwise alignments implies a variation graph, but there are no scalable methods to generate such a graph from these alignments. Existing related approaches depend on a single reference, a specific ordering of genomes, or a de Bruijn model based on a fixed k-mer length. A scalable, self-contained method to build pangenome graphs without such limitations would be a key step in pangenome construction and manipulation pipelines. Results We design the seqwish algorithm, which builds a variation graph from a set of sequences and alignments between them. We first transform the alignment set into an implicit interval tree. To build up the variation graph, we query this tree-based representation of the alignments to reduce transitive matches into single DNA segments in a sequence graph. By recording the mapping from input sequence to output graph, we can trace the original paths through this graph, yielding a pangenome variation graph. We present an implementation that operates in external memory, using disk-backed data structures and lock-free parallel methods to drive the core graph induction step. We demonstrate that our method scales to very large graph induction problems by applying it to build pangenome graphs for several species. Availability seqwish is published as free software under the MIT open source license. Source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/ekg/seqwish. seqwish can be installed via Bioconda https://bioconda.github.io/recipes/seqwish/README.html or GNU Guix https://github.com/ekg/guix-genomics/blob/master/seqwish.scm.

Background: Since the introduction of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII), the benefits have been numerous. However, adverse events (AEs) are experienced by up to 40% of users per year, exposing them to potentially fatal risks. The available evidence on the variables that trigger AEs associated with CSII remains limited, indicating the importance of studies on the subject. Aim: To propose a taxonomy based on the prevalent AEs experienced by patients from a reference diabetes mellitus (DM) center in Brazil using different CSII devices. Methods: 118 patients participated in an online interview and answered the questions of the data collection instrument. Identifying categories and subcategories of analysis contributed to constructing the AEs taxonomy. Results: The five analysis categories identified were: CSII User Interface (n = 45), CSII Alert System (n = 13), CSII Software and Connection (n = 11), CSII Durability (n = 30), and Electrical and Mechanical System of CSII (n = 60) A total of 159 AEs were identified, including conflicting alert messages and error/warning notification failures, errors resulting from engine malfunctions, data loss, patient interface deficiencies, button problems, and battery failure. Conclusions: The study describes in a taxonomic format the AEs directly associated with the use of modern CSIIs that may contribute with additional information to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Medical Device Report (MDR) adverse event codes. In addition to guiding educational actions in the treatment of DM and providing information for health professionals and medical device developers, prospective studies examining the frequency of such problems, including the potential psychosocial impact of this technologically advanced therapy, are needed.

The significance of computer mediated communication in relation to the transmission and circulation of discourse is not restricted to the ways in which this relatively recent form of communication enables self-identifying and relatively homogeneous groups to articulate, diffuse and circulate meaning. While the Internet has certainly provided a vital medium for such activities, there is another aspect of transmission that is also significant: the transmission of codes and practices between previously unrelated cultural formations through processes of convergence that occur via their engagement in online media. Of interest here are the ways in which the codes and practices constituting various cultural formations may find their way into other such formations through online practices. Online venues which facilitate the formation of virtual communities act as scenes for the interweaving of participants’ varied interests and, in so doing, bring disparate cultural practices together in new and potentially transformative manners. Viewed from this perspective, online communication not only provides a platform for discursive acts, but constitutes a venue wherein the practical usage of the medium offers up new, and transferable, tactics of communication and cultural practice. One of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon of “convergent transmission” is the now famous case of Napster. Beyond the well-discussed implications for, and ongoing adaptive transformation of, the music industry lies a peculiar moment of convergence wherein Internet Relay Chat (IRC) groups provided a scene for the transmission of cultural codes, values, and practices between a hacking subculture built around online communication and a broader youth culture that was beginning to embrace digital media as a means to enjoy music. The lines of transmission between these two groups were therefore borne by practices related to music, gift economies, computer networking and digital media. The community constituted by the early Napster (as well as other music sharing sites and networks) and the IRC-based discussions that informed their development were more than simply the sum of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and online communication. I would argue that when taken together, Napster and IRC constituted an online scene for the sharing and dissemination of the hacking subculture’s beliefs and practices through the filter of “music-obsessed” youth culture. To understand Napster as a scene is to define it in relation to practices related to both popular and alternative modes for the production and consumption of cultural artifacts. Lee and Peterson (192-194) note that online scenes exhibit many similarities with the geographically-based scenes analyzed by Hebdige: a fair degree of demographic cohesiveness (typically defined such things as age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class), shared cultural codes and worldviews, and a spectrum of participation ranging from the frequent and enduring relationships of a core constituency to the occasional participation of more peripheral members. As a combined P2P/IRC network, Napster is a means to circulate content rather than being, itself, some form content. Napster’s online circulation of cultural artefacts within and among various communities thus makes it a point of articulation between hacking subcultures and a broader youth culture. This articulation involves both the circulation of music files among participants, and the circulation of knowledge related to the technical modalities for engaging in file sharing. With regard to Napster, and perhaps subcultures in general, it is the formation of participatory communities rather than any particular cultural artefact that is paramount: the possibilities that the Internet offers young people for cultural participation now extend far beyond the types of symbolic transformation of products and resources … . Rather, such products and resources can themselves become both the object and product of collective creativity (Bennett 172). Shawn Fanning’s testimony to the judiciary committee investigating Napster notes at the outset that his reason for undertaking the development of the P2P network that would eventually become Napster was not driven by any intentional form of hacking, but was prompted by a friend’s simple desire to solve reliability issues associated with transmitting digital music files via the Internet: The Napster system that I designed combined a real time system for finding MP3s with chat rooms and instant messaging (functionally similar to IRC). The Chat rooms and instant messaging are integral to creating the community experience; I imagined that they would be used similarly to how people use IRC – as a means for people to learn from each other and develop ongoing relationships (Fanning). The notion of community is not only applicable to those who chose to share music over Napster, but to the development of Napster itself. As Andrews notes, Fanning participated in a number of IRC channels devoted to programming (primarily #winprog for the development of Napster) as well as to channels like #mpeg3 which discussed social and technical issues related to MP3s as well as advice on where and how to get them. Spitz and Hunter focus on the role of community in the development of Napster and point out that: the technology emerged gradually from interactions between and within social groups with different degrees of inclusion in multiple overlapping frames, as opposed to there being a single theoretical breakthrough. ... Based on their involvement in other spaces, such as online communities, Fanning and company’s immediate goals were much more personal and utilitarian—to provide a tool to help themselves and other enthusiasts find and access music on the Internet (171-172). Developed with the aid of numerous long-time and occasional participants to both #winprog and #mpeg3, Napster’s technical component was the product of (at least) two scenes constituted via IRC-based online communities. The first, #winprog, consisted of a subculture of “hardcore” Windows programmers (and hackers) freely sharing ideas, advice, expertise, and computer code in an environment of mutual assistance. While the participants on #mpeg3 represented a much wider community, #mpeg3 also demonstrates the qualities of a scene inasmuch as it constituted a virtual community based not only on shared interests in a variety of musical genres, but of sharing media content in the form of MP3s and related software. One obvious commonality among these two scenes is that they both rely upon informal gift economies as a means by which to transmit cultural codes via the circulation of material objects. With Napster, the gift economy that emerges in relation to he “hacker ethic” of sharing both code and expertise (Levy; Himanen; Wark) here combines with the more generalized and abstract gift economies constituted by the tendency within youth culture to engage in the sharing of media products related to particular lifestyles and subcultures. The development of Napster therefore provided a mechanism by which these two gift economies could come together to form a single overlapping scene combining computing and youth cultures. It should be noted, however, that while Napster was (and still is) typically branded as a youth-based phenomenon, its constituency actually encompassed a broader age demographic wherein membership tended to correlate more closely with “online tenure” than age (Spitz & Hunter 173). Nonetheless, the simultaneously rancorous and laudatory discourse surrounding Napster framed it as a phenomenon indicating the emergence of an IT-savvy youth culture. What occurred with Napster was therefore a situation wherein two scenes came together—one based on hacking, the other on MP3s. Their shared propensity toward informal gift economies allowed them to converge upon notions of P2P networking and IRC-based communities, and this produced a new set of cultural practices centred upon the fusion of file transfers and popular music. The activity of music sharing and the creation of networks to carry it out have, needless to say, proved to have a transformative effect on the circulation of these cultural products. The co-mingling of cultural practices between these two online scenes seems so obvious today that it often seems that it was inevitable. It must be remembered, however, that hacking and music did not seem to be so closely related in 1998. The development of Napster is thus a testament of sorts to the potential for computer mediated communication to effect convergent transformations via the transmission of tactical and communal practices among seemingly unrelated arenas of culture. References Andrews, Robert. “Chat Room That Built the World”. Wired News. Nov. 6, 2005. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,69394-0.html>. Bennett, Andy. “Virtual Subculture? Youth, Identity and the Internet”. After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. Eds. Andy Bennett & Keith Kahn-Harris. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Fanning, Shawn. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Provo, Utah. Oct. 9, 2000. http://judiciary.senate.gov/oldsite/1092000_sf.htm>. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1991. Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic. New York: Random House Books, 2001. Lee, Steve S., & Richard A. Peterson. “Internet-Based Virtual Music Scenes: The Case of P2 in Alt.Country Music.” Music Scenes: Local, Transnational, and Virtual. Eds. Andy Bennett & Richard A. Peterson. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004. Levy, Steven. Hackers. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Spitz, David & Starling D. Hunter. “Contested Codes: The Social Construction of Napster”. The Information Society 21 (2005): 169-80. Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bradley, Dale A. "Scenes of Transmission: Youth Culture, MP3 File Sharing, and Transferable Strategies of Cultural Practice." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/05-bradley.php>. APA Style Bradley, D. (Mar. 2006) "Scenes of Transmission: Youth Culture, MP3 File Sharing, and Transferable Strategies of Cultural Practice," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/05-bradley.php>.

Image 1: A Little Free Library. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.IntroductionLittle Free Libraries give people a reason to stop and exchange things they love: books. It seemed like a really good way to build a sense of community.Dannette Lank, Little Free Library steward, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, 2013 (Rumage)Against a backdrop of stagnant literacy rates and enduring perceptions of urban decay and the decline of communities in cities (NCES, “Average Literacy”; NCES, “Average Prose”; Putnam 25; Skogan 8), legions of Little Free Libraries (LFLs) have sprung up across the United States between 2009 and the present. LFLs are small, often homemade structures housing books and other physical media for passersby to choose a book to take or leave a book to share with others. People have installed the structures in front of homes, schools, libraries, churches, fire and police stations, community gardens, and in public parks. There are currently 50,000 LFLs around the world, most of which are in the continental United States (Aldrich, “Big”). LFLs encompass building in multiple senses of the term; LFLs are literally tiny buildings to house books and people use the structures for building neighbourhood social capital. The organisation behind the movement cites “building community” as one of its three core missions (Little Free Library). Rowan Moore, theorising humans’ reasons for building, argues desire and emotion are central (16). The LFL movement provides evidence for this claim: stewards erect LFLs based on hope for increased literacy and a desire to build community through their altruistic actions. This article investigates how LFLs build urban community and explores barriers to the endeavour, specifically municipal building and right of way ordinances used in attempts to eradicate the structures. It also examines local responses to these municipal actions and potential challenges to traditional public libraries brought about by LFLs, primarily the decrease of visits to public libraries and the use of LFLs to argue for defunding of publicly provided library services. The work argues that LFLs build community in some places but may threaten other community services. This article employs qualitative content analysis of 261 stewards’ comments about their registered LFLs on the organisation’s website drawn from the two largest cities in a Midwestern state and an interview with an LFL steward in a village in the same state to analyse how LFLs build community. The two cities, located in the state where the LFL movement began, provide a cross section of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters of the book exchanges, determined by their registered charter numbers. Press coverage and municipal documents from six cities across the US gathered through a snowball sample provide data about municipal challenges to LFLs. Blog posts penned by practising librarians furnish some opinions about the movement. This research, while not a representative sample, identifies common themes and issues around LFLs and provides a basis for future research.The act of building and curating an LFL is a representation of shared beliefs about literacy, community, and altruism. Establishing an LFL is an act of civic participation. As Nico Carpentier notes, while some civic participation is macro, carried out at the level of the nation, other participation is micro, conducted in “the spheres of school, family, workplace, church, and community” (17). Ruth H. Landman investigates voluntary activities in the city, including community gardening, and community bakeries, and argues that the people associated with these projects find themselves in a “denser web of relations” than previously (2). Gretchen M. Herrmann argues that neighbourhood garage sales, although fleeting events, build an enduring sense of community amongst participants (189). Ray Oldenburg contends that people create associational webs in what he calls “great good places”; third spaces separate from home and work (20-21). Little Free Libraries and Community BuildingEmotion plays a central role in the decision to become an LFL steward, the person who establishes and maintains the LFL. People recount their desire to build a sense of community and share their love of reading with neighbours (Charter 4684; Charter 8212; Charter 9437; Charter 9705; Charter 16561). One steward in the study reported, “I love books and I want to be able to help foster that love in our neighbourhood as well” (Charter 4369). Image 2: A Little Free Library, bench, water fountain, and dog’s water bowl for passersby to enjoy. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.Relationships and emotional ties are central to some people’s decisions to have an LFL. The LFL website catalogues many instances of memorial LFLs, tributes to librarians, teachers, and avid readers. Indeed, the first Little Free Library, built by Todd Bol in 2009, was a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved reading (“Our History”). In the two city study area, ten LFLs are memorials, allowing bereaved families to pass on a loved one’s penchant for sharing books and reading (Charter 1235; Charter 1309; Charter 4604; Charter 6219; Charter 6542; Charter 6954; Charter 10326; Charter 16734; Charter 24481; Charter 30369). In some cases, urban neighbours come together to build, erect, and stock LFLs. One steward wrote: “Those of us who live in this friendly neighborhood collaborated to design[,] build and paint a bungalow themed library” to match the houses in the neighbourhood (Charter 2532). Another noted: “Our neighbor across the street is a skilled woodworker, and offered to build the library for us if we would install it in our yard and maintain it. What a deal!” (Charter 18677). Community organisations also install and maintain LFLs, including 21 in the study population (e.g. Charter 31822; Charter 27155).Stewards report increased communication with neighbours due to their LFLs. A steward noted: “We celebrated the library’s launch on a Saturday morning with neighbors of all ages. We love sitting on our front porch and catching up with the people who stop to check out the books” (Charter 9673). Another exclaimed:within 24 hours, before I had time to paint it, my Little Free Library took on a life of its own. All of a sudden there were lots of books in it and people stopping by. I wondered where these books came from as I had not put any in there. Little kids in the neighborhood are all excited about it and I have met neighbors that I had never seen before. This is going to be fun! (Charter 15981)LFLs build community through social interaction and collaboration. This occurs when neighbours come together to build, install, and fill the structures. The structures also open avenues for conversation between neighbours who had no connection previously. Like Herrmann’s neighbourhood garage sales, LFLs create and maintain social ties between neighbours and link them by the books they share. Additionally, when neighbours gather and communicate at the LFL structure, they create a transitory third space for “informal public life”, where people can casually interact at a nearby location (Oldenburg 14, 288).Building Barriers, Creating CommunityThe erection of an LFL in an urban neighbourhood is not, however, always a welcome sight. The news analysis found that LFLs most often come to the attention of municipal authorities via citizen complaints, which lead to investigations and enforcement of ordinances. In Kansas, a neighbour called an LFL an “eyesore” and an “illegal detached structure” (Tapper). In Wisconsin, well-meaning future stewards contacted their village authorities to ask about rules, inadvertently setting off a six-month ban on LFLs (Stingl; Rumage). Resulting from complaints and inquiries, municipalities regulated, and in one case banned, LFLs, thus building barriers to citizens’ desires to foster community and share books with neighbours.Municipal governments use two major areas of established code to remove or prohibit LFLs: ordinances banning unapproved structures in residents’ yards and those concerned with obstructions to right of ways when stewards locate the LFLs between the public sidewalk and street.In the first instance, municipal ordinances prohibit either front yard or detached structures. Controversies over these ordinances and LFLs erupted in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in 2012; Leawood, Kansas, in 2014; Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2015; and Dallas, Texas, in 2015. The Village of Whitefish Bay banned LFLs due to an ordinance prohibiting “front yard structures,” including mailboxes (Sanburn; Stingl). In Leawood, the city council argued that an LFL, owned by a nine-year-old boy, violated an ordinance that forbade the construction of any detached structures without city council permission. In Shreveport, the stewards of an LFL received a cease and desist letter from city council for having an “accessory structure” in the front yard (LaCasse; Burris) and Dallas officials knocked on a steward’s front door, informing her of a similar breach (Kellogg).In the second instance, some urban municipalities argued that LFLs are obstructions that block right of ways. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public works director noted that the city “uses the area between the sidewalk and the street for snow storage in the winter, light poles, mailboxes, things like that.” The director continued: “And I imagine these little libraries are meant to congregate people like a water cooler, but we don’t want people hanging around near the road by the curb” (Heady). Both Lincoln in 2014 and Los Angeles (LA), California, in 2015, cited LFLs for obstructions. In Lincoln, the city notified the Southminster United Methodist Church that their LFL, located between the public sidewalk and street, violated a municipal ordinance (Sanburn). In LA, the Bureau of Street Services notified actor Peter Cook that his LFL, situated in the right of way, was an “obstruction” that Cook had to remove or the city would levy a fine (Moss). The city agreed at a hearing to consider a “revocable permit” for Cook’s LFL, but later denied its issuance (Condes).Stewards who found themselves in violation of municipal ordinances were able to harness emotion and build outrage over limits to individuals’ ability to erect LFLs. In Kansas, the stewards created a Facebook page, Spencer’s Little Free Library, which received over 31,000 likes and messages of support. One comment left on the page reads: “The public outcry will force those lame city officials to change their minds about it. Leave it to the stupid government to rain on everybody’s parade” (“Good”). Children’s author Daniel Handler sent a letter to the nine-year-old steward, writing as Lemony Snicket, “fighting against librarians is immoral and useless in the face of brave and noble readers such as yourself” (Spencer’s). Indeed, the young steward gave a successful speech to city hall arguing that the body should allow the structures because “‘lots of people in the neighborhood used the library and the books were always changing. I think it’s good for Leawood’” (Bauman). Other local LFL supporters also attended council and spoke in favour of the structures (Harper). In LA, Cook’s neighbours started a petition that gathered over 100 signatures, where people left comments including, “No to bullies!” (Lopez). Additionally, neighbours gathered to discuss the issue (Dana). In Shreveport, neighbours left stacks of books in their front yards, without a structure housing them due to the code banning accessory structures. One noted, “I’m basically telling the [Metropolitan Planning Commission] to go sod off” (Friedersdorf; Moss). LFL proponents reacted with frustration and anger at the perceived over-reach of the government toward harmless LFLs. In addition to the actions of neighbours and supporters, the national and local press commented on the municipal constraints. The LFL movement has benefitted from a significant amount of positive press in its formative years, a press willing to publicise and criticise municipal actions to thwart LFL development. Stewards’ struggles against municipal bureaucracies building barriers to LFLs makes prime fodder for the news media. Herbert J. Gans argues an enduring value in American news is “the preservation of the freedom of the individual against the encroachments of nation and society” (50). The juxtaposition of well-meaning LFL stewards against municipal councils and committees provided a compelling opportunity to illustrate this value.National media outlets, including Time (Sanburn), Christian Science Monitor (LaCasse), and The Atlantic, drew attention to the issue. Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf critically noted:I wish I was writing this to merely extol this trend [of community building via LFLs]. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things. (Friedersdorf, n.p.)Other columnists mirrored this sentiment. Writing in the LA Times, one commentator sarcastically wrote that city officials were “cracking down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small community libraries where residents share books” (Schaub). Journalists argued this was government overreach on non-issues rather than tackling larger community problems, such as income inequality, homelessness, and aging infrastructure (Solomon; Schaub). The protests and negative press coverage led to, in the case of the municipalities with front yard and detached structure ordinances, détente between stewards and councils as the latter passed amendments permitting and regulating LFLs. Whitefish Bay, Leawood, and Shreveport amended ordinances to allow for LFLs, but also to regulate them (Everson; Topil; Siegel). Ordinances about LFLs restricted their number on city blocks, placement on private property, size and height, as well as required registration with the municipality in some cases. Lincoln officials allowed the church to relocate the LFL from the right of way to church property and waived the $500 fine for the obstruction violation (Sanburn). In addition to the amendments, the protests also led to civic participation and community building including presentations to city council, a petition, and symbolic acts of defiance. Through this protest, neighbours create communities—networks of people working toward a common goal. This aspect of community building around LFLs was unintentional but it brought people together nevertheless.Building a Challenge to Traditional Libraries?LFL marketing and communication staff member Margaret Aldrich suggests in The Little Free Library Book that LFLs are successful because they are “gratifyingly doable” projects that can be accomplished by an individual (16). It is this ease of building, erecting, and maintaining LFLs that builds concern as their proliferation could challenge aspects of library service, such as public funding and patron visits. Some professional librarians are in favour of the LFLs and are stewards themselves (Charter 121; Charter 2608; Charter 9702; Charter 41074; Rumage). Others envision great opportunities for collaboration between traditional libraries and LFLs, including the library publicising LFLs and encouraging their construction as well as using LFLs to serve areas without, or far from, a public library (Svehla; Shumaker). While lauding efforts to build community, some professional librarians question the nomenclature used by the movement. They argue the phrase Little Free Libraries is inaccurate as libraries are much more than random collections of books. Instead, critics contend, the LFL structures are closer to book swaps and exchanges than actual libraries, which offer a range of services such as Internet access, digital materials, community meeting spaces, and workshops and programming on a variety of topics (American Library Association; Annoyed Librarian). One university reference and instruction librarian worries about “the general public’s perception and lumping together of little free libraries and actual ‘real’ public libraries” (Hardenbrook). By way of illustration, he imagines someone asking, “‘why do we need our tax money to go to something that can be done for FREE?’” (Hardenbrook). Librarians holding this perspective fear the movement might add to a trend of neoliberalism, limiting or ending public funding for libraries, as politicians believe that the localised, individual solutions can replace publicly funded library services. This is a trend toward what James Ferguson calls “responsibilized” citizens, those “deployed to produce governmentalized results that do not depend on direct state intervention” (172). In other countries, this shift has already begun. In the United Kingdom (UK), governments are devolving formerly public services onto community groups and volunteers. Lindsay Findlay-King, Geoff Nichols, Deborah Forbes, and Gordon Macfadyen trace the impacts of the 2012 Localism Act in the UK, which caused “sport and library asset transfers” (12) to community and volunteer groups who were then responsible for service provision and, potentially, facility maintenance as well. Rather than being in charge of a “doable” LFL, community groups and volunteers become the operators of much larger facilities. Recent efforts in the US to privatise library services as governments attempt to cut budgets and streamline services (Streitfeld) ground this fear. Image 3: “Take a Book, Share a Book,” a Little Free Library motto. Image credit: Nadine Kozak. LFLs might have real consequences for public libraries. Another potential unintended consequence of the LFLs is decreasing visits to public libraries, which could provide officials seeking to defund them with evidence that they are no longer relevant or necessary. One LFL steward and avid reader remarked that she had not used her local public library since 2014 because “I was using the Little Free Libraries” (Steward). Academics and librarians must conduct more research to determine what impact, if any, LFLs are having on visits to traditional public libraries. ConclusionLittle Free Libraries across the United States, and increasingly in other countries, have generated discussion, promoted collaboration between neighbours, and led to sharing. In other words, they have built communities. This was the intended consequence of the LFL movement. There, however, has also been unplanned community building in response to municipal threats to the structures due to right of way, safety, and planning ordinances. The more threatening concern is not the municipal ordinances used to block LFL development, but rather the trend of privatisation of publicly provided services. While people are celebrating the community built by the LFLs, caution must be exercised lest central institutions of the public and community, traditional public libraries, be lost. Academics and communities ought to consider not just impact on their local community at the street level, but also wider structural concerns so that communities can foster many “great good places”—the Little Free Libraries and traditional public libraries as well.ReferencesAldrich, Margaret. “Big Milestone for Little Free Library: 50,000 Libraries Worldwide.” Little Free Library. 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Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004.“Good Luck Spencer.” Spencer’s Little Free Library Facebook Page 25 Jun. 2014. 26 Mar. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Hardenbrook, Joe. “A Little Rant on Little Free Libraries (AKA Probably an Unpopular Post).” Mr. Library Dude (9 Apr. 2014). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://mrlibrarydude.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/a-little-rant-on-little-free-libraries-aka-probably-an-unpopular-post/>.Harper, Deb. “Minutes.” The Leawood City Council 7 Jul. 2014. <http://www.leawood.org/pdf/cc/min/07-07-14.pdf>. Heady, Chris. “City Wants Church to Move Little Library.” Lincoln Journal Star 9 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://journalstar.com/news/local/city-wants-church-to-move-little-library/article_7753901a-42cd-5b52-9674-fc54a4d51f47.html>. 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Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.Solomon, Dan. “Dallas Is Regulating ‘Little Free Libraries’ for Some Reason.” Texas Monthly (14 Sept. 2016). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/dallas-regulating-little-free-libraries-reason/>.“Spencer’s Little Free Library.” Facebook 15 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Steward, M. 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“A bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights.”For the past five Marches, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has produced an awards show which honours its aged former performers, such as Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, as pro-wrestling Legends. This awards show, according to WWE, is ‘an elegant, emotional, star-studded event that recognizes the in-ring achievements of the inductees and offers historical insights into this century-old sports-entertainment attraction’ (WWE.com, n.p.). In an episodic storyline leading up to the 2009 awards, however, the real-life personal shortcomings of these Legends have been brought to light, and subsequently mocked in one-on-one interview segments with WWE’s Superstar of the Year 2008, the dastardly Chris Jericho. Jericho caps off these tirades by physically assaulting the Legends with handy stage props. Significantly, the performances of Jericho and his victims have garnered positive attention not only from mass audiences unaware of backstage happenings in WWE, but also from the informed community of pro-wrestling fans over at the nihilistic humour website SomethingAwful. During Jericho’s assault on the Legend Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka at the March 02 WWE Raw event, a WWE-themed forum thread on SomethingAwful logged over sixty posts all reiterating variations of ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.). This is despite the community’s passive-aggressive and ironically jaded official line that they indeed are ‘a bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights. Thank you for not telling us this several times’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.). Why were these normally cynical fans of WWE enthusiastically expressing their love for the Jericho-Legends feud? In order to answer this question, this paper argues that the feud articulates not only the ideal of the “giving wrestler”, but also Roland Barthes’s version of jouissance. Consuming and commenting on WWE texts within the SomethingAwful community is further argued to be a performative ritual in which informed wrestling fans distance themselves from audiences they perceive as uncritical and ill-informed cultural dupes. The feud, then, allows the SomethingAwful fans to perform enthusiasm on two interconnected levels: they are not only able to ironically cheer on Jericho’s morally reprehensible actions, but also to genuinely appreciate the present-day in-ring efforts of the Legends. The Passion of the SuperflyTo properly contextualise this paper, though, the fact that “pro wrestling is fake” needs to be reiterated. Each match is a choreographed sequence of moves. Victory does not result from landing more damaging bodyslams than one's opponent, but is instead predetermined by scriptwriters—among whom wrestlers are typically not numbered—backstage. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes thus commented that pro wrestling ‘is not a sport, it is a spectacle’ (Mythologies 13). Yet, pro wrestling remains popular because this theatricality allows for the display of spectacular excesses of passion—here Barthes not only means “an intensity of emotion”, but refers to the physically tortured heroes of medieval passion plays as well—giving it an advantage over the legitimate sport of amateur wrestling. ‘It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself’ (Mythologies 16). This observation still holds true in today’s WWE. On one hand, the SomethingAwful fans go ‘gently caress Jericho, [Superfly] will MURDER you’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) in disapproval of Jericho’s on-screen actions. In the same thread, though, they simultaneously fret over him being slightly injured from an off-screen real life accident. ‘Jericho looks busted up on his forehead. Dang’ (Carney, n.p.).However, Barthes’s observations, while seminal, are not the be-all and end-all of pro wrestling scholarship. The industry has undergone a significant number of changes since the 1950s. Speeches and interview segments are now seen as essential tools for furthering storylines. Correspondingly, they are given ample TV time. At over ten minutes, the Jericho-“Superfly” confrontation from the March 02 Raw is longer than both the matches following it, and a fifteen minute conversation between two top wrestlers capstones these two matches. Henry Jenkins has thus argued that pro wrestling is a male-targeted melodrama. Its ‘writers emphasize many traits that [legitimate sports such as] football share with melodrama-the clear opposition between characters, the sharp alignment of audience identification, abrupt shifts in fortune, and an emotionally satisfying resolution’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Unlike football, though, the predetermined nature of pro wrestling means that its events can be ‘staged to ensure maximum emotional impact and a satisfying climax’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Further, Jenkins notes that shouting is preferred over tears as an outlet for male affect. It ‘embodies externalised emotion; it is aggressive and noisy. Women cry from a position of emotional (and often social) vulnerability; men shout from a position of physical and social strength (however illusory)’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 80). Pro wrestling is seen to encourage this outlet for affect by offering its viewers spectacles of male physical prowess to either castigate or cheer. Jericho’s assault of the Legends, coupled with his half-screaming, half-shouting taunts of “‘Hall of Famer’? ‘Hall of Famer’ of what? You’re a has-been! Just like all the rest!” could be read to fit within this paradigm as well. Smarts vs. MarksWWE has repeatedly highlighted its scripted nature in recent years. During a 2007 CNN interview, for instance, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon constantly refers to his product as “entertainment” and laughingly agrees that “it’s all story” when discussing his on-screen interactions with his long-lost midget “son” (Griffin, n.p.). These overt acknowledgments that WWE is a highly choreographed melodrama have boosted the growth of a fan demographic referred to the "smart" in pro-wrestling argot. This “smart” fan is a figure for whom the fabricated nature of pro-wrestling necessitates an engagement with the WWE spectacle at a different level from mass audiences. The “smart” not only ‘follow[s] the WWE not just to see the shows, but to keep track of what “the Fed[eration]” is doing’ (McBride and Bird 170) with regards to off-camera events, but also 'has knowledge of the inner-workings of the wrestling business’ (PWTorch, n.p.). One of the few “GOLD”-rated threads on the SomethingAwful smart forums, accordingly, is titled “WWE News and Other Top Stories, The Insider Thread”, and has nearly 400 000 views and over 1000 posts. As a result, the smarts are in a subject position of relative insider-ness. They consume the WWE spectacle at a deeper level—one which functions roughly like an apparatus of capture for the critical/cynical affect mobilised around the binary of ‘real’ and ‘fake’—yet ultimately remain captured by the spectacle through their autodidact enthusiasm for knowledge which uncovers its inner workings.By contrast, there is the category of the “mark” fan. These “marks” are individuals who remain credulous in their reception of WWE programming. As cuteygrl08 writes regarding a recent WWE storyline involving brotherly envy:I LOVE JEFF HARDY!!!! i cried when i heard his brother say all the crap about him!! kinda weird but i love him and this video is soooo good!! JEFF hardy loves his fans and his fans love him no matter what he does i'll always love JEFF HARDY!!!!!!!!!!! (n.p.)This unstinting faith in the on-screen spectacle is understandable insofar as WWE programming trades upon powerful visual markers of authenticity—nearly-bare bodies, sweat, pained facial expressions­—and complements them with the adrenaline-producing beats of thrash metal and hard rock. Yet, smarts look down upon marks like cuteygrl08, seeing them as Frankfurt School-era hypnotised sots for whom the WWE spectacle is ‘the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness’ (Debord 117), and additionally as victims of a larger media industry which specialises in mass deception (Horkheimer and Adorno 41). As Lawrence McBride and Elizabeth Bird observe:Marks appear to believe in the authenticity of the competition—Smarts see them as the stereotypical dupes imagined by wrestling critics. Smarts approach the genre of wrestling as would-be insiders, while Marks root unreflexively for the most popular faces. Smart fans possess truly incredible amounts of knowledge about the history of wrestling, including wrestler’s real names and career histories, how various promotions began and folded, who won every Wrestlemania ever. Smart fan informants defined a Mark specifically as someone who responds to wrestling in the way intended by the people who write the storylines (the bookers), describing Marks with statements such as “Kids are Marks.” or “We were all Marks when we were kids.” Smarts view Marks with scorn. (169)Perhaps feeding on the antagonistic binaries drawn by WWE programming, there exists an “us vs them” binary in smart fan communities. Previous research has shown that fan communities often rigidly police the boundaries of “good taste”, and use negatively constructed differences as a means of identity construction (Fiske 448; Jenkins, “Get a Life!” 432; Theodoropoulou 321). This ritual Othering is especially important when supporting the WWE. Smarts are aware that they are fans of a product denigrated by non-fans as ‘trash TV’ (McKinley, n.p.). As Matt Hills finds, fandom is a mode of performative consumption. It is ‘an identity which is (dis)claimed, and which performs cultural work’ (Hills xi). Belonging to the SomethingAwful smart community, thus, exerts its own pressures on the individual smart. There, the smart must perform ‘audiencehood, knowing that other fans will act as a readership for speculation, observation, and commentaries’ (Hills 177). Wrestling, then, is not just to be watched passively. It must be analysed, and critically dissected with reference to the encyclopaedic knowledge treasured by the smart community. Mark commentary has to be pilloried, for despite all the ironic disaffection characterising their posts, the smarts display mark-like behaviour by watching and purchasing WWE programming under their own volition. A near-existential dread is hence articulated when smarts become aware of points where the boundaries between smart and mark overlap, that ‘the creatures that lurk the internet ...carry some of the same interests that we do’ (rottingtrashcan, n.p.). Any commonalities between smarts and marks must thus be disavowed as a surface resemblance: afterall, creatures are simply unthinking appetites, not smart epicures. We’re better than those plebs; in fact, we’re nothing like them any more. Yet, in one of the few forms of direct address in the glossary of smart newsletter PWTorch, to “mark out” is ‘to enthusiastically be into [a storyline] or match as if you [emphasis added] were “a mark”; to suspend one's disbelief for the sake of enjoying to a greater extent a match or [a storyline]’ (PWTorch, n.p.). The existence of the term “marking out” in a smart glossary points to an enjoyably liminal privileged position between that of defensively ironic critic and that of credulous dupe, one where smarts can stop their performance of cooler-than-thou fatigue and enthusiastically believe that there is nothing more to WWE than spontaneous alarms and excursions. The bodily reactions of the Legends in response to Jericho's physical assault helps foster this willing naiveté. These reactions are a distressing break from the generic visual conventions set forth by preceding decades of professional wrestling. As Barthes argues, wrestling is as much concerned with images of spectacular suffering as with narratives of amazing triumphs:the wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. (17)Barthes was writing of the primitively filmed wrestling matches of the 1950s notable for their static camera shots. However, WWE wrestlers yet follow this theatrical aesthetic. In the match immediately following Jericho’s bullying of Superfly, Kane considerately jumps the last two feet into a ringside turnbuckle after Mike Knox pushes him into its general vicinity. Kane grunts at the impact while the camera cuts to a low-angled shot of his back—all the better to magnify the visual of the 150 kg Knox now using his bulk to squash Kane. Whenever Jericho himself traps his opponent in his “Walls of Jericho” submission manoeuvre, both their faces are rictuses of passion. His opponent clutches for the safety of the ring ropes, shaking his head in heroic determination. Audiences see Jericho tighten his grip, his own head shaking in villainous purpose. But the Legends do not gyrate around the set when hit. Instead, they invariably slump to the ground, motionless except for weakly spasming to the rhythm of Jericho’s subsequent attacks. This atypical reaction forces audiences—smart and mark alike—to re-evaluate any assumptions that the event constitutes a typical WWE beatdown. Overblown theatricality gives way to a scene which seems more related to everyday experiences with pain: Here's an old man being beaten and whipped by a strong, young man. He's not moving. Not like other wrestlers do. I wonder... The battered bodies of these Legends are then framed in high angle camera shots, making them look ever so much more vulnerable than they were prior to Jericho’s assault. Hence the smart statements gushing that ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) and that Jericho’s actions have garnered a ‘rear end in a top hat chant [from the crowd]. It has been FOREVER since I heard one of those. I love Chris Jericho’ (Burrito, n.p.).Jouissance and “Marking Out”This uninhibited “marking out” by normally cynical smarts brings to mind Barthes's observation that texts are able to provoke two different kinds of enjoyment in their readers. On one hand, there is the text which provides pleasure born from familiarity. It ‘contents, fills, grants euphoria; [it is] the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). The Knox-Kane match engendered such a been-there-done-that-it's-ok-I-guess overall reaction from smarts. For every ‘Mike Knox throwing Mysterio at Kane was fantastic’ (Burrito, n.p.), there is an ‘Ahahaha jesus Knox [sic] that was the shittiest Hurracanrana sell ever’ (Axisillian, n.p.), and a ‘Hit the beard [sic] it is Knox's weakpoint’ (Eurotrash, n.p.). The pleasant genericity of the match enables and necessitates that these smarts maintain their tactic of ironic posturing. They are able to armchair critique Knox for making his opponent's spinning Hurracanrana throw look painless. Yet they are also allowed to reiterate their camp affection for Knox's large and bushy beard, which remains grotesque even when divorced from a WWE universe that celebrates sculpted physiques.By contrast, Barthes praises the text of rapturous jouissance. It is one where an orgasmic intensity of pleasure is born from the unravelling of its audience’s assumptions, moving them away from their comfort zone. It is a text which ‘imposes a stage of loss, [a] text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). In addition to the atypical physical reactions of the Legends, WWE cynically positions the Jericho-Legends segments during Raw events which also feature slick video montages highlighting the accomplishments of individual Legends. These montages—complete with an erudite and enthusiastic Voice-of-God narrator— introduce the long-retired Legends to marks unfamiliar with WWE's narrative continuity: “Ladies and gentlemen! Rrriiiicky “The Draaagon” Steeeeamboat!”. At the same time, they serve as a visually and aurally impressive highlight-reel-cum-nostalgic-celebration of each Legend's career accomplishments. Their authoritative narration is spliced to clips of past matches, and informs audiences that, for instance, Steamboat was ‘one of the first Superstars to combine technical skills with astounding aerial agility ... in a match widely regarded as one of the best in history, he captured the Intercontinental title from Randy Savage in front of a record-breaking 93 173 fans’ (“Raw #636”, WWE). Following the unassailably authentic video footage of past matches, other retired wrestlers speak candidly in non-WWE stages such as outdoor parks and their own homes about the Legend's strengths and contributions to the industry.The interesting thing about these didactic montages is not so much what they show —Legends mythologised into triumphant Titans — but rather, what they elide. While the Steamboat-centred package does reflect the smart consensus that his Intercontinental bout ‘was a technical classic, and to this day, is still considered one of the greatest matches of all-time’ (NPP, n.p.), it does not mention how Steamboat was treated poorly in the WWE. Despite coming to it as the widely-known World Champion of [the NWA] rival promotion, WWE producers ‘dressed Steamboat up as a dragon and even made him blow fire. ...To boot, he was never acknowledged as a World Champion and [kept losing] to the stars’ (NPP, n.p.). The montages, overtly endorsed by the gigantic WWE logo as they are, are ultimately pleasant illusions which rewrite inconvenient truths while glamorising pleasant memories.Jericho’s speeches, however, sharply break from this celebratory mode. He references Steamboat’s previous success in the NWA, ‘an organisation that according to this company never even existed’(“Raw #636”, WWE). He then castigates Steamboat for being a real-life sellout and alludes to Steamboat having personal problems unmentioned in the montage:It wasn't until you came to the WWE that you sold your soul to all of these parasites [everyone watching] that you became “The Dragon”. A glorified Karate Kid selling headbands and making poses. Feeding into stereotypes. And then you eventually came to the ring with a Komodo Dragon. Literally spitting fire like the circus freak you'd become. It was pathetic. But hey, it's all right as long as you're making a paycheck, right Steamboat? And then when you decided to retire, you ended up like all the rest. Down and out. Broken. Beaten down. Dysfunctional family ...You applied for a job working for the WWE, you got one working backstage, and now here you are. You see, Steamboat, you are a life-long sellout. And now, with the Hall of Fame induction, the loyal dog gets his bone. (WWE)Here, Jericho demonstrates an apparent unwillingness to follow the company line by not only acknowledging the NWA, but also by disrespecting a current WWE backstage authority. Yet, wrestlers having onscreen tangles with their bosses is the norm for WWE. The most famous storyline of the 1990s had “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the WWE Chairman brutalising each other for months on end, and the fifteen minute verbal exchange mentioned earlier concerns one wrestler previously attacking the Raw General Manager. Rather, it is Jericho’s reinterpretation of Steamboat’s career trajectory which gives the storyline the intensely pleasurable uncertainty of jouissance. His confrontational speeches rupture the celebratory nostalgia of the montages, forcing smarts to apply extra-textual knowledge to them. This is especially relevant in Steamboat’s case. His montage was shown just prior to his meeting with Jericho, ensuring that his iconic status was fresh in the audience’s memory. Vera Dika’s findings on the conflict between memory and history in revisionist nostalgia films are important to remember here. The tension ‘that comes from the juxtaposition of the coded material against the historical context of the film itself ...encourages a new set of meanings to arise’ (Dika 91). Jericho cynically views the seemingly virtuous and heroic Steamboat as a corporate sycophant preying on fan goodwill to enrich his own selfish ends. This viewpoint, troublingly enough for smarts, is supported by their non-WWE-produced extra-textual knowledge, allowing for a meta-level melodrama to be played out. The speeches thus speak directly to smarts, simultaneously confounding and exceeding their expectations. The comfortingly pleasant memories of Steamboat’s “amazing aerial prowess” are de-emphasised, and he is further linked to the stereotypical juvenilia of the once-popular The Karate Kid. They articulate and capitalise upon whatever misgivings smarts may have regarding Steamboat’s real-life actions. Thus, to paraphrase Dika, ‘seen in this clash, [the Jericho-Legends feud] has the structure of irony, producing a feeling of nostalgia, but also of pathos, and registering the historical events as the cause of an irretrievable loss [of a Legend’s dignity]’ (91). “C’mon Legend! Live in the past!” taunts Jericho as he stuffs Superfly’s mouth with bananas and beats him amidst the wreckage of the exactingly reproduced cheap wooden set in the same way that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper did years ago (“RAW #637”, WWE). This literal dismantling of cherished memories results from WWE producers second-guessing the smarts, and providing these fans with an enjoyably uncomfortable jouissance that cleverly confounds the performance of a smart disaffection. “Marking out” —or its performance at least—results.The Giving WrestlerLastly, the general physical passivity of the Legends also ties into the ethos of the “giving wrestler” when combined with the celebratory montages. In a business where performed passion is integral to fan enjoyment, the “giving wrestler” is an important figure who, when hit by a high-risk move, will make his co-worker’s offense look convincing (McBride and Bird 173). He ‘will give his all in a performance to ensure a dual outcome: the match will be spectacular, benefiting the fans, and each wrestler will make his “opponent” look good, helping him “get over with the fans” (McBride and Bird 172). Unsurprisingly, this figure is appreciated by smarts, who ‘often form strong emotional attachments to those wrestlers who go to the greatest lengths to bear the burden of the performance’ (McBride and Bird 173). As described earlier, the understated reactions of the Legends make Jericho’s attacks paradoxically look as though they cause extreme pain. Yet, when this pathetic image of the Legends is combined with the hypermasculine images of them in their heyday, a tragedy with real-life referents is played out on-stage. In one of Jenkins’s ‘abrupt shifts of fortune’ (“Never Trust a Snake” 81), age has grounded these Legends. They can now believably be assaulted with impunity by someone that Steamboat dismisses as ‘a snotty brat wrestler of a kid[sic] ...a hypocrite’ (“Raw #636”, WWE), and even in this, they apparently give their all to make Jericho look viciously “good”, thus exceeding the high expectations of smarts. As an appreciative thread title on SomethingAwful states, ‘WWE Discussion is the RICKY STEAMBOAT OWN [wins] ZONE for 02/23/09’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.) ConclusionThe Jericho-Legends feud culminated the day after the Hall of Fame ceremony, at the WWE’s flagship Wrestlemania event. Actor Mickey Rourke humiliated Jericho for the honour of the Legends, flattening the cocky braggart with a single punch. The maximum degree of moral order possible was thus temporarily restored to an episodic narrative centred around unprovoked acts of violence. Ultimately though, it is important to note the three strategies that WWE used The Legends were scripted to respond feebly to Jericho’s physical assault, slick recap montages were copiously deployed, and Jericho himself was allowed candid metatextual references to incidents that WWE producers normally like to pretend have “never even existed”. All these strategies were impressive in their own right, and they eventually served to reinforce each other. 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England: Blackwell 2001. 117-21. Eurotrash. “WWE RAW is IN SOVIET RUSSIA, HEART BREAKS YOU for 3/2/09.” SomethingAwful 3 Mar. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3089910&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=13 >.Fiske, John. “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.” The Cult Film Reader. Eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. England: Open UP, 2008. 446-55.Griffin, Drew. “McMahons: WWE not to blame for Benoit's actions.” CNN 7 Nov. 2007. 8 Mar. 2009 < http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/11/07/mcmahons.transcript/index.html?iref=newssearch >.Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Eds. Meenakishi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. England: Blackwell 2001. 41-72. HulkaMatt. “Wrestlehut 2000 Rules and FAQ - Last Update: 2/13/2009 - FRANK MIR FEARS BROCK LESNAR.” SomethingAwful 5 Aug. 2008. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2922167 >.HulkaMatt. “WWE Discussion is the RICKY STEAMBOAT OWN ZONE for 02/23/09.” SomethingAwful 24 Feb. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3085277 >.Jenkins, Henry. “'Get a Life!': Fans, Poachers, Nomads.” The Cult Film Reader. Eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. England: Open UP, 2008. 430-43.Jenkins, Henry. “Never Trust a Snake: WWF Wrestling as Masculine Melodrama.” The Wow Climax. New York: New York UP 2007. 75-101.Jerusalem. “WWE RAW is IN SOVIET RUSSIA, HEART BREAKS YOU for 3/2/09.” SomethingAwful 3 Mar. 2009. 5 Mar. 2009 < http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3089910&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=6 >.McBride, Lawrence B., and S. 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This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). 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Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. 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