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1

Hemmings, Peter, Michael Mulheron, Richard J. Murphy e Matt Prescott. "Investigating the Impact of COVID-19 Disruption on the Decarbonisation Agenda at Airports: Grounded or Ready for Take-Off?" Sustainability 13, n. 21 (5 novembre 2021): 12235. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su132112235.

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COVID-19 has had wide-ranging impacts on organisations with the potential to disrupt efforts to decarbonise their operations. To understand how COVID-19 has affected the climate change mitigation strategies of Airport Operators (AOs), questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with Sustainability Managers were undertaken in late 2020 amidst a period of disruption. While all reported that COVID-19 impacted delivery of interventions and projects to mitigate climate change, the majority stated that it would not impact their long-term climate goals, such as Net Zero by 2050. The most popular climate change mitigation interventions AOs intend to deploy between now and 2030 are on-site renewables and Electric Vehicles and related infrastructure. Engineered carbon removal interventions were considered highly unlikely to be deployed in this timeframe, with potential implications for Net Zero decarbonisation pathways. Despite the severe impacts of COVID-19 on the sector, results indicate that AOs remain committed to decarbonisation, with climate change action remaining the key priority for airports. Given ongoing financial and resource constraints, AOs will need to explore new business models and partnerships and nurture collaborative approaches with other aviation stakeholders to not only maintain progress toward Net Zero but “build back better”. Government support will also be needed to stimulate the development of a sustainable, resilient, low-carbon aviation system.
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Bindra, Ishleen Kaur, Kajal Sharma e Sakshi Arora. "Emotional Abuse in Shashi Deshpande\'s "That Long Silence"". International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology 11, n. 4 (30 aprile 2023): 2051–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2023.50546.

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Abstract: Indian English Literature has its roots in the works of the 19th century writers such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sarojini Naidu. In this paper we have reflected mental harassment or emotional abuse through the literary work of famous writer Shashi Deshpande. Her novel “ That Long Silence “ is about a character “Jaya” whose journey of self discovery is a difficult one. She is the victim of the patriarchal society that has denied her the freedom to pursue her dreams. The novel highlights the struggle of women in India. It shows how women are expected to conform to the norms of society and how they are often denied basic rights to make decisions about their own lives. Deshpande encourages women to take charge of their own lives and to be independent and self-reliant.
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Parker, Max, e Richard McMahon. "Investigations into the Charge Times of Lead–Acid Cells under Different Partial-State-of-Charge Regimes". Batteries 10, n. 6 (11 giugno 2024): 201. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/batteries10060201.

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Partial state of charge (PSOC) is an important use case for lead–acid batteries. Charging times in lead–acid cells and batteries can be variable, and when used in PSOC operation, the manufacturer’s recommended charge times for single-cycle use are not necessarily applicable. Knowing how long charging will take and what the variability in time required is allows for better planning of operations and algorithm creation for battery energy storage system (BESS) manufacturers. This paper details and demonstrates a procedure for identifying the charging time of cells when different charge throughputs occur prior to reaching full charge. The results showed that the charging time in PSOC operations was highly variable when a charge-factor-controlled full-charge procedure was used. Also noted were that higher voltages for the same state of charge were reached as the number of cycles following reaching full charge increased. None of the regimes tested in this paper caused any significant capacity degradation, which demonstrates that PSOC operations can be performed even on cells not specifically designed for them, provided the correct regime is chosen.
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Campoy-Quiles, Mariano. "Will organic thermoelectrics get hot?" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 377, n. 2152 (8 luglio 2019): 20180352. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2018.0352.

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The generally low energy density from most heat sources—the Sun, Earth as well as most human activities—implies that solid-state thermoelectric devices are the most versatile heat harvesters since, unlike steam engines, they can be used on a small scale and at small temperature differences. In this opinion piece, we first discuss the materials requirements for the widespread use of thermoelectrics. We argue that carbon-based materials, such as conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes, are particularly suited for large area and low-temperature operation applications, as they are abundant, low-toxicity and easy to process. We combine experimentally observed macro-trends and basic thermoelectric relations to evaluate the major performance limitations of this technology thus far and propose a number of avenues to take the thermoelectric efficiency of organic materials beyond the state of the art. First, we emphasize how charge carrier mobility, rather than charge density, is currently limiting performance, and discuss how to improve mobility by exploiting anisotropy, high persistence length materials and composites with long and well-dispersed carbon nanotubes. We also show that reducing thermal conductivity could double efficiency while reducing doping requirements. Finally, we discuss several ways in which composites could further boost performance, introducing the concept of interface engineering to produce phonon stack-electron tunnel composites. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Energy materials for a low carbon future'.
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Abramson, Rachel. "What do you Need to Get Started in your Own Counselling Practice?" Australian Journal of Career Development 7, n. 1 (novembre 1998): 5–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/103841629800700103.

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Picture this; You are sitting in your office, seeing lots of clients. They come to you from far and wide to seek your advice. You feel good, knowing you can help them. You know that if you tell them they have to come back and see you again, they will readily accept your advice. If you are sick for a week or two, you know they will wait until you are better. You can charge what you like and you are earning a tidy sum of money. You know you will be around in the business world for a long, long, time. You look at the long list of bookings. You reach for the telephone and ring a trusted colleague. “Can you come in for a couple of days,” you ask. “I've got a backlog of clients to get through.” Your colleague wonders how you do it. Your colleague is struggling to make ends meet. If your colleague was to ask: “How did you do it?” what would your response be? Would you be talking about marketing strategies? Perhaps you would be talking about business plans? Or perhaps you had another strategy up your sleeve that works well for you? Take the time to reflect on your own strategies for a while. Then write down your own ideas for later use.
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Noguchi, Judy. "Thoughts on Growth Mindset in Language Education". Language Teacher 47, n. 5 (1 settembre 2023): 10–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.37546/jalttlt47.5-2.

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The world today is facing trying times with democracy in crisis around the world, extreme weather events, and state fragility coming on the heels of a global pandemic. However, crises have been the driving force in the evolution of human society. The problems confronting us today cannot be resolved by one organization or one country alone. What is needed is effective communication among peoples, groups, and countries. Even with technological advances in machine translation and AI tools, we as language teachers have much that we can do. This talk will suggest the importance of building social capital through communication, present evidence-based education concepts for efficient teaching, and examine how to work with Gen Z students. Education for a VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (Bennett & Lemoine, 2014) must prepare students to learn how to take charge of their own learning experiences and thus develop a growth mindset to embark on a never-ending life-long adventure of learning. They can thus contribute to social capital and a better human society.
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Venkateswarlu, Sonagiri China, Siva Ramakrishna Jeevakala, Naluguru Udaya Kumar, Pidugu Munaswamy e Dhanalaxmi Pendyala. "Emotion Recognition From Speech and Text using Long Short-Term Memory". Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research 13, n. 4 (9 agosto 2023): 11166–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.48084/etasr.6004.

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Everyday interactions depend on more than just rational discourse; they also depend on emotional reactions. Having this information is crucial to making any kind of practical or even rational decision, as it can help to better understand one another by sharing our responses and providing recommendations on how they may feel. Several studies have recently begun to focus on emotion detection and labeling, proposing different methods for organizing feelings and detecting emotions in speech. Determining how emotions are conveyed through speech has been given major emphasis in social interactions during the last decade. However, the real efficiency of identification needs to be improved because of the severe lack of data on the primary temporal link of the speech waveform. Currently, a new approach to speech recognition is recommended, which couples structured audio information with long-term neural networks to fully take advantage of the shift in emotional content across phases. In addition to time series characteristics, structural speech features taken from the waveforms are now in charge of maintaining the underlying connection between layers of the actual speech. There are several Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based algorithms for identifying emotional focus over numerous blocks. The proposed method (i) reduced overhead by optimizing the standard forgetting gate, reducing the amount of required processing time, (ii) applied an attention mechanism to both the time and feature dimension in the LSTM's final output to get task-related information, rather than using the output from the prior iteration of the standard technique, and (iii) employed a powerful strategy to locate the spatial characteristics in the final output of the LSTM to gain information, as opposed to using the findings from the prior phase of the regular method. The proposed method achieved an overall classification accuracy of 96.81%.
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Martyushev, Nikita V., Boris V. Malozyomov, Svetlana N. Sorokova, Egor A. Efremenkov e Mengxu Qi. "Mathematical Modeling of the State of the Battery of Cargo Electric Vehicles". Mathematics 11, n. 3 (19 gennaio 2023): 536. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/math11030536.

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In this paper, a mathematical simulation model of an electric vehicle traction battery has been developed, in which the battery was studied during the dynamic modes of its charge and discharge for heavy electric vehicles in various driving conditions—the conditions of the urban cycle and movement outside the city. The state of a lithium-ion battery is modeled based on operational factors, including changes in battery temperature. The simulation results will be useful for the implementation of real-time systems that take into account the processes of changing the characteristics of traction batteries. The developed mathematical model can be used in battery management systems to monitor the state of charge and battery degradation using the assessment of the state of charge (SOC) and the state of health (SOH). This is especially important when designing and operating a smart battery management system (BMS) in virtually any application of lithium-ion batteries, providing information on how long the device will run before it needs to be charged (SOC value) and when the battery should be replaced due to loss of battery capacity (SOH value). Based on the battery equivalent circuit and the system of equations, a simulation model was created to calculate the electrical and thermal characteristics. The equivalent circuit includes active and reactive elements, each of which imitates the physicochemical parameter of the battery under study or the structural element of the electrochemical battery. The input signals of the mathematical model are the current and ambient temperatures obtained during the tests of the electric vehicle, and the output signals are voltage, electrolyte temperature and degree of charge. The resulting equations make it possible to assign values of internal resistance to a certain temperature value and a certain value of the degree of charge. As a result of simulation modeling, the dependence of battery heating at various ambient temperatures was determined.
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Ohta, Kaoru, Mitsuharu Suzuki, Hiroko Yamada e Keisuke Tominaga. "(Invited) Probing Charge Carrier Dynamics in Porphyrin-Based Bulk Heterojunction Thin Films with Time-Resolved Terahertz Spectroscopy". ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2022-01, n. 13 (7 luglio 2022): 909. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2022-0113909mtgabs.

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Organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar cells have attracted much attention in recent years because of the low production cost and ease of device fabrication. However, the power conversion efficiency is still low compared to the silicon and perovskite solar cells so that further research is necessary to improve their performance. In particular, understanding of the detailed mechanisms of charge carrier generation, recombination and carrier transport process is very important for developing design principles of new compounds for OPVs. Until now, polymer-based compounds have been widely used for p-type semiconductors. However, it is not easy to obtain information on how the microscopic structure of bulk heterojunction (BHJ) blend of donor and acceptor materials affect the charge carrier dynamics because one cannot easily control the molecular weight and conformational distributions of polymer compounds. On the other hand, small molecule-based semiconductors have several unique advantages such well-defined chemical structures, ease of purification and small batch-to-batch variations. Tetrabenzoporphyrin (BP) has been frequently used as a small-molecule organic semiconductor. Recently, Yamada and coworkers synthesized diketopyrrolopyrrole-linked tetrabenzoporphyrin (DPP-BP) conjugates that have linear alkyl groups on the DPP moieties whose chain length is defined as n, namely, Cn-DPP-BP (n=4, 6, 8, or 10). For DPP-BP based solar cells, they demonstrated that alkyl chain length affects the power conversion efficiency. Therefore, it is very interesting to see how the local BHJ structures of DPP-BP based thin films affect the initial step of the charge carrier dynamics because such studies are difficult to perform for polymer-based systems. We can take advantage of small molecule-based systems to study the relationship between the local structure and the charge carrier dynamics. In this work, we used time-resolved terahertz (THz) spectroscopy to investigate the charge carrier dynamics of DPP-BP BHJ thin films blended with [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC61BM). Time-resolved THz spectroscopy is a unique method to quantify charge carrier mobility with very fast time resolution (less than picosecond). This spectroscopy reflects the charge carrier dynamics in the local spatial region because of the high-frequency nature of the THz electric field. We chose C4-DPP-BP:PC61BM and C10-DPP-BP:PC61BM thin films for the THz measurements. In the previous study, it was found that C4-DPP-BP molecule prefers to take a face-on geometry on the substrate. A grain size of the aggregates was around 100 nm or smaller which were measured by atomic force microscopy. In such a structure, one can expect that charge transport takes place very efficiently to the electrode. Actually, power conversion efficiency is 5.2 % which is highest among a series of DPP-BP chromophores. On the other hand, C10-DPP-BP adopts an edge-on geometry on the substrate and forms micrometer-sized aggregates. In this structure, molecular stacking is oriented perpendicular to the electrode so that power conversion efficiency decreases to 0.19%. In contrast to the other measurements, the THz spectroscopy has sensitivity to in-plane motion of the charge carriers with respect to the substrate, we expect to observe higher in-plane mobility of the charge carriers in the C10-DPP-BP:PC61BM BHJ films compared to C4-DPP-BP based films. In contrast to our intuitive expectation, we found that the product of the carrier mobility and the yield of the photo-generated charge carriers is similar to each other. We consider that the similarity of the charge carrier dynamics results from the high-frequency nature of the local mobility of the polarons because most of the polarons are confined in less than a 10-nm length scale. Furthermore, the lowest limit of the carrier mobility obtained from our results is about 1.0 cm2V-1s-1 when the quantum yield of the charge carrier generation is assumed to be unity. This value is much higher than those obtained by space-charge-limited current method. We expect that charge separation occurs very efficiently when the local mobility of the charge carrier is high. In this contribution, we will present importance of the local mobility of the charge carriers and difference of charge transport between short and long length scales in DPP-BP based solar cells.
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MCFARLAND, Sam, e Katarzyna HAMER. "JAK LUDOBÓJSTWO ZOSTAŁO UZNANE ZA ZBRODNIĘ – DZIEDZICTWO RAFAŁA LEMKINA". Civitas et Lex 10, n. 2 (30 giugno 2016): 69–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.31648/cetl.2306.

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Raphael Lemkin is hardly known to a Polish audiences. One of the most honored Poles of theXX century, forever revered in the history of human rights, nominated six times for the Nobel PeacePrize, Lemkin sacrificed his entire life to make a real change in the world: the creation of the term“genocide” and making it a crime under international law. How long was his struggle to establishwhat we now take as obvious, what we now take for granted?This paper offers his short biography, showing his long road from realizing that the killing oneperson was considered a murder but that under international law in 1930s the killing a million wasnot. Through coining the term “genocide” in 1944, he helped make genocide a criminal charge atthe Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders in late 1945, although there the crime of genocidedid not cover killing whole tribes when committed on inhabitants of the same country nor when notduring war. He next lobbied the new United Nations to adopt a resolution that genocide is a crimeunder international law, which it adopted on 11 December, 1946. Although not a U.N. delegate – hewas “Totally Unofficial,” the title of his autobiography – Lemkin then led the U.N. in creating theConvention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9 December, 1948.Until his death in 1958, Lemkin lobbied tirelessly to get other U.N. states to ratify the Convention.His legacy is that, as of 2015, 147 U.N. states have done so, 46 still on hold. His tomb inscriptionreads simply, “Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), Father of the Genocide Convention”. Without himthe world as we know it, would not be possible.
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Izu, Lydia, Brenda Scholtz e Ifeoluwapo Fashoro. "Wearables and Their Potential to Transform Health Management: A Step towards Sustainable Development Goal 3". Sustainability 16, n. 5 (23 febbraio 2024): 1850. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su16051850.

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In the era of rapid technological advancement, wearables have emerged as a promising tool for enhancing health and well-being. The convergence of health and technology drives an unprecedented change in the approach to health and well-being management. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the potential role of wearables in actualising health and well-being, thereby paving the way for a healthier and more sustainable future. Using the Affordance Theory lens, this paper delves into the transformative potential of wearables in health and well-being management, thereby promoting Sustainable Development Goal 3 to ensure healthy lives and well-being for all at all ages. The thematic analysis of online reviews on wearable devices captured through web scraping was carried out to explore the potential of these devices in the management of health and well-being. The paper explored how wearables, often integrated into everyday life, can monitor vital signs, track fitness metrics, and even provide therapeutic benefits for health and well-being. The findings reveal that wearables can empower individuals to take charge of their health by leveraging real-time data and personalised feedback, promoting a proactive and preventive approach to health management and resource-effective healthcare. Furthermore, the paper highlights how wearables can contribute to long-term health outcomes for the present generation without exerting excessive strain on the resources for future generations.
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Amena, Moin. "The Role of Problem Based Learning in Engaging and Empowering Omani EAP Learners: An Exploratory Study". Arab World English Journal, n. 2 (15 gennaio 2021): 184–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/mec2.13.

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Problem Based Learning (PBL) is used in various fields of study. However, there is a dearth of use of PBL and its relevance in English Language Teaching (ELT). Thus, this exploratory study focusses on the use, relevance and implementation of PBL in ELT. It describes how PBL empowers English for Academic Purposes (EAP) learners by engaging them in real-world issues. The insights gained from self- classroom observations of the teacher-researcher were integrated with insights obtained through extensive literature review. This study was done over eight semesters with around 300 students in each semester. The study showed that in English for Business 1(an EAP course), PBL fosters self-directed learning as the students make choices and take decisions about current economic problems in accomplishing the various milestones of the process throughout the semester. It also showed that EAP learners can take charge of their learning and make their connections with authentic business material. The study further showed that the use of PBL approach in English for Business 1 course helped learners reflect on the way they had learnt, improved their research skills, gave the confidence to do teamwork, helped them identify relevant research tools and inculcated self-management and time management skills in them. The study, thus, showed that the use of PBL encourages active learning and makes EAP learners become responsible for their learning as they indulge in reflective critical thinking about what is being learned, which in turn makes them life-long learners. The study makes several recommendations for an effective PBL class, including allowing students to choose their groups, providing feedback at the right time, encouraging the use of reflective journals, etc.
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Tihanyi, Miklós, Máté Sivadó, Márta Fekete e Márta Miklósi. "Is There a Relationship Between Religious Belief and Regret? Research Among Long-term Prisoners". Belügyi Szemle 72, n. 3 (3 aprile 2024): 461–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.38146/bsz-ajia.2024.v72.i3.pp461-490.

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Aim: To examine what characterises the religiosity of those offenders sentenced to long prison terms who actively participate in religious practice in prison and how these characteristics affect the crime committed and the judgment of punishment.Methodology: With the National Command of the Penitentiary Organisation’s permission, authors interviewed 16 inmates in three penal institutions. All of them have been serving more than 15 years in prison and, according to the prison chaplain, are actively involved in religious practices. The interview questions were created based on preconceived narratives, and then these narratives were analysed. Based on the analyses, authors determined what characterises the religiosity of the interview subjects and their perception of the crime they committed and their punishment. Finally, authors compared the correlations between different characteristics of religiosity with perceptions of the act and the judgment.Findings: Those who live their faith more deeply take responsibility in a typical way, most of them do not even dispute the extent of the punishment. In the case of those who admit their responsibility, the motive of regret also appears, which has a solid religious charge. This is indicated by the fact that all those who admit their actions and show remorse have the motive of a desire for forgiveness. A positive and closer connection between the quality of religious faith and responsibility is indicated by the fact that those prisoners who are characterised by scepticism towards religiosity admit to committing the act but do not show remorse. It also leads to the conclusion that those more characterised by formal faith either denied their act or did not talk about it.Value: Atonement appearing in forgiveness can positively influence the achievement of punishment goals. According to literature data, forgiveness and reconciliation significantly reduce the likelihood of recidivism. This is true for almost all directions of forgiveness. For the forgiveness of the victim as well as the forgiveness of the offender towards others. Therefore, it can be assumed that the motives of repentance and forgiveness in religiosity work against becoming a recidivist.
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Ploutz-Snyder, Robert. "CE Workshop 09: Cast Aside Traditional Notions of Statistical Significance, and Focus Instead on Characterizing the Magnitude of Effects that are Clinically or Scientifically Relevant". Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 29, s1 (novembre 2023): 501–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1355617723006495.

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Abstract & Learning ObjectivesThere is an ongoing debate among statisticians and discipline scientists about the consequences of our persistent, dogmatic reliance on evaluating all statistical results as meaningful if and only if "p<0.05," regardless of context. This was never the intended goal of Ronald Fisher, nevertheless scientists have adopted it as a convenience, and the decades long dependence on "p<0.05" has had important negative consequences. In this presentation, I review common misconceptions about interpreting p-values, why we should consider de-emphasizing p-values, and why scientists should rely more on practical, clinical, or scientifically meaningful differences over arbitrary cut-offs. I will present several different metrics for evaluating and reporting effect magnitude, and whether or not data support the null vs. alternative hypothesis, under the frequentist paradigm, how Bayesian methods can augment or replace frequentist analyses, and a few options that help to clarify how important a finding may be. Throughout this talk, I advocate that discipline scientists take charge of sharing scientific results that are not based merely on arbitrary p-value cutoffs and other default logic, but instead based on their content expertise, in light of all of the specific relevant aspects of experimental design and experimental data, balancing the consequences of Type I vs Type II errors appropriately, and focusing on characterizing effects, rather than dichotomizing research into only two categories of importance (significant vs. not).Upon conclusion of this course, learners will be able to: 1.Discuss what p-values mean and how they are commonly misinterpreted.2.Explain the leading arguments promoted by the American Statistical Association with regard to why science should carefully reconsider if and how p-values should continue to dominate our decisions about what research should be published, and how scientists should be evaluating its worth.3.Apply new practices in how to evaluate and publish their own research, as well as how to evaluate research appearing in peer-reviewed journals, whether as consumers, reviewers, or editors.
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(Asst. Prof), E. Sakthivel. "Smart Body Posture Recognition and Guiding System". INTERANTIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT 08, n. 01 (13 gennaio 2024): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.55041/ijsrem28058.

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In an era prioritizing health and wellness, the integration of the Smart Body Posture Recognition & Guiding System into self- service health kiosks signifies a paradigm shift in healthcare management. This groundbreaking research project leverages cutting-edge MediaPipe Body Tracking technology to revolutionize health monitoring capabilities. At its core, MediaPipe Body Tracking enables precise real-time identification and tracking of human body key points and movements. This breakthrough technology ensures unparalleled accuracy in health parameter measurements within the kiosk interface. A standout feature of this system is its embedded alert mechanism, surpassing conventional health monitoring by actively detecting and notifying individuals about poor body posture. Providing immediate corrective feedback, this feature significantly impacts wellness, fostering a proactive approach to posture and overall health management. This research delves into the intricacies of MediaPipe Body Tracking's algorithms and sensors, elucidating the technology's real-time feedback mechanism. The system's ability to address poor posture not only prompts immediate corrective action but also raises awareness about its long-term health implications. Beyond individual health monitoring, this innovation promises a transformative shift in healthcare paradigms, encouraging proactive health measures and empowering individuals to take charge of their well-being. The Smart Body Posture Recognition & Guiding System represents a significant advancement at the nexus of technology and healthcare, redefining how societies approach proactive health management. Keywords- MediaPipe, Posture Recognition, Heathcare
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Lloyd, Philip. "A pilot test of ethanol gel as a paraffin replacement in a low-income urban environment". Journal of Energy in Southern Africa 25, n. 3 (23 settembre 2014): 74–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3051/2014/v25i3a2660.

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This paper describes the results of a pilot programme to introduce ethanol gel as a replacement for paraffin for cooking in a low-income informal settlement, Samora Machel, in the Philippi district of Cape Town. A baseline study had shown that paraffin was the dominant source of energy in this community, and that the community knew that its use was both hazardous and unhealthy, but they had no apparent alternative. A gel fuel meeting the requirements of SANS 448 was identified and supplies ordered. A burner system meeting the requirements of SANS 666 was not available on the market; instead it was necessary to use all that could be found. The Agrifood Technology Station at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) was tasked with finding ways to cook using ethanol gel, with accent being placed on cooking safely and using the least possible quantity of gel for a standard menu. After several fruitless attempts to launch a programme, a successful meeting was held at the crèche in Samora Machel at which a number of residents agreed to take part in the pilot programme. Soon thereafter, there was a fire in which many residents lost all their possessions, and when stoves were distributed free of charge, and five litres of gel sold at a subsidised price, all stoves were eagerly taken. The demonstration of how to cook using the gel was held at the point of distribution, and people taking stoves were shown how they worked and how to keep them clean. Every week for four weeks, a sample of the participants was contacted to determine their response to cooking on gel. Virtually every response was most positive, and at the end of that period the participants in the pilot programme requested that the supply of gel should continue as long as possible.
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Dey, Debarati, Pradipta Roy e Debashis De. "Design and Electronic Characterization of Bio-Molecular QCA: A First Principle Approach". Journal of Nano Research 49 (settembre 2017): 202–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/jnanor.49.202.

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Molecular Quantum-dot Cellular Automata is the most promising and challenging technology nowadays for its high operating frequency, extremely high device density and non-cryogenic working temperature. In this paper, we report a First Principle approach based on analytical model of 3-dot Bio Molecular Quantum-dot Cellular Automata. The device is 19.62Å long and this bio molecular Quantum dot Cell has been made with two Adenine Nucleotide bio-molecules along with one Carbazole and one Thiol group. This whole molecular structure is supported onto Gold substrate. In this paper, two Adenine Nucleotides act as two quantum dots and Carbazole acts as another dot. These 3-Quantum-dots are mounted in a tree like structure supported with Thiol group. This model has been demonstrated with Extended Hückel Theory based semi-empirical method. The quantum ballistic transmission and HOMO-LUMO plot support the polarization state change. This state changing ability has been observed for this molecular device. Therefore, this property has been investigated and reported in this paper. HOMO-LUMO plot shows the two logic states along with null state for this 3-dots system. This phenomenon illustrates how the charge transfers take place. Two polarization states along with one additional null state have been obtained for this bio molecular nano device. This molecular device has been operated with 1000THz frequency. This nanoscale design approach will initiate one step towards the modeling of high frequency bio molecular Quantum dot Cell at room temperature.
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Skelton, Rebecca, e Robert G. Kelly. "A Perspective on the Repassivation Potential and a Novel Calculation Thereof". ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2022-02, n. 11 (9 ottobre 2022): 706. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2022-0211706mtgabs.

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Abstract (sommario):
Corrosion can occur on metallic surfaces in nearly any humid environment, leading to either early failure or costly repairs. Specifically, localized corrosion, such as pitting, can be difficult to identify at an early stage and can act as crack nucleation sites. Determining under which conditions pitting will take place is therefore important for maintenance and design, yet non-trivial from an electrochemical perspective. The pitting potential (Epit) and repassivation potential (Erp) have long been used in literature to determine a material’s susceptibility to pitting, with the latter acting as the lower threshold at which pitting can occur. A lower threshold of pitting can often be useful for conservative estimates, making Erp a popular parameter. However, a consensus on how to measure and define Erp has yet to be defined. Conventional cyclic potentiodynamic polarization (CPP) scans to measure Erp are shrouded in controversy, as values were found to be dependent on the scan rate and turn-around current density, unless sufficient charge densities had passed. Even once a plateau of Erp is reached at sufficient charge densities, there is debate as to if values are too conservative at that point. Two recent pitting frameworks have proposed alternative measurements of Erp, using both 1-D pit and 3-D bulk electrodes. Breakthroughs and limitations from both of these theories will be considered. In this work, the various methods of measuring and defining Erp will be discussed to provide clarity between different notation and to highlight possible paths going forward. In addition, an alternative calculation of Erp is proposed which is less conservative yet harmonized with the critical pit stability product (ix)crit, as both thresholds should represent the same lower limit of pitting. The proposed equation to calculate Erp includes dependencies on conventional parameters, such as the anodic Tafel behavior within a pit (ba), the transition potential (ET), and the critical percent saturation of metal salts (f). Validation is provided through both results found in literature and the use of Finite Element Method (FEM) modeling in conjunction with the maximum pit model.
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Kwena, Ronald, Prof Elegwa Mukulu, Dr Joyce Nzulwa e Prof Romanus Odhiambo. "INFLUENCE OF PROJECT STRENGTHENING ON PROJECT OUTCOMES IN UNITED NATIONS AGENCIES IN KENYA". Journal of Entrepreneurship and Project Management 4, n. 2 (11 settembre 2019): 38–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.47941/jepm.320.

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Abstract (sommario):
Purpose: This study addressed how project strengthening influenced project outcomes in United Nations’ Agencies in Kenya. UN agencies have valid interests in using capacity building amid humanitarian action as a means to deliver project outcomes more efficiently. They also have a responsibility to ensure that local and national actors are ultimately better able to take charge of their own work. Difficulties arise because these short- and long-term goals generally require different strategies, partnerships and funding mechanisms. These differing and sometimes conflicting goals need to be managed better if the sector is to match its rhetoric with on-the-ground programming choices.Methodology: The study adopted a descriptive research design guided by cross sectional survey. The study findings showed a great influence of project strengthening to the Project outcomes in UN agencies.Results: The results indicated a regression analysis value of t – Calculated which was greater than 2 (i.e. 6.855) and P Value is 0.018 at 95% level of significance that is less than 5%. The null hypothesis was subsequently rejected and it was concluded that project strengthening had a significant positive influence on project outcomes in UN agencies in Kenya.Unique Contribution to policy, practice and theory: The study recommended that there is need to enhance project financing mechanisms for sustainability of project outcomes as it reduces budgetary constraints, reduces cost overruns, reduces interference with implementation of the project schedule, and reduces insufficient capital to run project activities. The internal controls such as record keeping and ensuring sufficient funds are offered for the sustainability of the project outcomes.
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20

Picard, Claire-France, Sylvain Durocher e Yves Gendron. "Office design processes, strategizing and time intermingling: an agenda to shape spaces and minds in public accounting firms". Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal 33, n. 5 (15 giugno 2020): 1143–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/aaaj-03-2019-3931.

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PurposeThis paper investigates the strategic processes surrounding the development, in accounting firms, of office (re)design projects and their overarching objectives.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ investigation relies on a series of interviews with individuals from different accounting firms involved in the decision process related to office (re)design projects. A triangular template made up of strategy, space and time informs the analysis, which the authors complement by relying on a strategy-as-practice integrated framework.FindingsThe authors found that accounting firm office (re)design projects are characterized by a strategic spatial agenda that aims to define and create present organizational time, in ways that embed a particular vision of the future. The analysis brings to light the interrelationships between strategy practitioners, strategy practices and strategic work through which the future is actualized. Office design processes involve not only the physical transformation of office space; they also promote a prominent agenda to modify, in the long run, office members' minds. Hence, office (re)design processes may be conceived of as a significant device in the socialization of accounting practitioners.Research limitations/implicationsThis study underscores that spatial strategizing constitutes a major device through which the future is brought into the present. As such, the analysis provides insights not only into the processes through which space transformations take place, but also into their underlying agenda. The latter promotes the advent, in present time, of the organic office of the future.Practical implicationsThis analysis brings to the fore a concrete illustration of how the strategy-space-time triangle operates in organizational life. The authors underline the key role played by strategists in charge of designing the office of the future.Originality/valueThis study extends the burgeoning literature whose analytical gaze is informed by the strategy, space, and time triangle.
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Yawovi, Helton Agbewonou, Masato Kikuchi e Tadachika Ozono. "Who Was Wrong? An Object Detection Based Responsibility Assessment System for Crossroad Vehicle Collisions †". AI 3, n. 4 (9 ottobre 2022): 844–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ai3040051.

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Car crashes, known also as vehicle collisions, are recurrent events that occur every day. As long as vehicles exist, vehicle collisions will, unfortunately, continue to occur. When a car crash occurs, it is important to investigate and determine the actors’ responsibilities. The police in charge of that task, as well as claims adjusters, usually process manually by going to the crash spot, collecting data on the field, drafting the crash, and assessing responsibilities based on road rules. This later task of assessing responsibilities usually takes time and requires enough knowledge of road rules. With the aim to support the police and claims adjusters and simplify the process of responsibility determination, we built a system that can automatically assess actors’ responsibilities within a crossroad crash. The system is mainly based on image detection and uses a rule-based knowledge system to assess responsibilities within driving recorders’ videos. It uses the crash video recorded by one of the involved vehicles’ driving recorders as the input data source and outputs the evaluation of each actor’s responsibility within the crash. The rule-based knowledge system was implemented to make the reasoning about responsibility assessment clear and allow users to easily understand the reasons for the results. The system consists of three modules: (a) a crash time detection module, (b) a traffic sign detection module, and (c) a responsibility assessment module. To detect a crash within a video, we discovered that the simple application of existing vehicle detection models would result in wrong detections with many false positives. To solve the issue, we made our proposed model take into account only the collided vehicle, its shape, and its position within the video. Moreover, with the biggest challenge being finding data to train the system’s detection models, we built our own dataset from scratch with more than 1500 images of head-on car crashes within the context of crossroad accidents taken by the driving recorder of one of the vehicles involved in the crash. The experiment’s results show how the system performs in (1) detecting the crash time, (2) detecting traffic signs, and (3) assessing each party’s responsibility. The system performs well when light conditions and the visibility of collided objects are good and traffic lights’ view distances are close.
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Lee, Heunsuk. "The Throat-Bell Container (huryŏngt’ong) Recovered from the Wooden Seated Vairocana Buddha of Early Chosŏn in Hainsa". Korean Journal of Art History 316 (31 dicembre 2022): 5–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.31065/kjah.316.202212.001.

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In the Vairocana Hall of Haeinsa, there are two Vairocana statues made in the 9th century, during the Unified Silla period. In 1490, the statues were filled with sacred objects whose specific contents were almost identical to each other. Following the practice passed down from the Koryŏ period, five treasure bottles were put inside an offering container termed “throat-bell container” which was then topped with a sarira reliquary and a bead. It was covered with a round mirror and true-mind syllables(chinsim chongja 眞心種子) were written on the lid. There are also innovations made in the Chosŏn period: namely, five-wheel syllables(oryun chongja 五輪種字) written on the five treasure bottles that take the shape of five mirrors, bottles covered with eight-petal lotus bud, the use of yellow fabric wrappers with the written spells of the four directions(sabangju 四方呪) or five-wheel syllables and the votive inscription written in red ink on blue textile. The earliest example of the offering container with a long breathing hole was found inside the Manjushri statue of Sangwŏnsa. A well-organized system had been established by the time the offering containers at Haeinsa were prepared. As the Great Preceptors Sinmi and Hakcho, renowned Buddhist monk scholars were in charge of enshrining the offering container, it is likely that they exerted a considerable influence on the organization of the sacred objects. The Yongch’ŏnsa edition of Chosang kyŏng (Sutras on a manuscript entitled Sŏngsang sohwa pokchang ŭi (Manual on the pokchang of sculpted and painted sacred icons) preserved at Haeinsa are two important texts that dictate how to prepare the sacred objects for offerings. Inclusion of five flowers, five flags, and five parasols were the influence of Myogilsang taekyowang kyŏng (Sutra on the king of the great teaching which is sublime and auspicious) and likely began around the time the Yongch’ŏnsa edition of Chosang kyŏng was published in the sixteenth century. In conclusion, the throat-bell container from the Vairocana Buddha statues of Haeinsa can be considered as a prototype for offering containers made during the Chŏson.
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Baggyalakshmi, Dr N., A. G. Harrini e Dr R. Revathi. "Resource Organizer". International Academic Journal of Science and Engineering 11, n. 1 (29 febbraio 2024): 118–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.9756/iajse/v11i1/iajse1115.

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Abstract (sommario):
There are a lot of problems with the current system because everything is done manually. The present system's biggest flaw is the enormous physical volume of data, which makes searching for and retrieving specific pieces of information a pain. Papers containing information are susceptible to harm. It takes a long time to find out whether documents arrived or not when you have to handle everything by hand. At the time of product application, it will be rejected if any document is missing. It is really time-consuming to reapply for the product process. All these issues with the current method led them to believe that a computerised system would be better. All of these issues will be resolved by the automated system. There is a good probability that more people's time will be wasted in this communication scenario. It is quick, adaptable, and easy to use. Analysing a system is looking closely at all the different things it does and how they relate to each other and the world around them. Analysing a system involves doing things like drawing lines around it and checking to see if a potential system has to take other systems into account. Decision points and transactions processed by the current system are the subjects of data acquired during analysis. The project's backend was built in SQL Server and frontend was built in Asp.Net. A large number of managers are in charge of each and every one of an organization's operations. Manufacturing, production, marketing, and other facets of organisational management are overseen by these managers. An important problem with management is that, as time went on, they shifted their focus to human capital. Now, every company has a hierarchical structure, and each structure has its own unique purpose and character. Given that their people are their most valuable asset, larger companies in this situation must devote significant resources to human resource management. Organisational data evolved over time away from its core functions in this way. To sum up, a resource organiser is a piece of software that helps with the management and coordination of different resources. Assets can be either concrete, like machinery and buildings, or intangible, like human capital and time.
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Beberness, Benjamin. "Guest Editorial: Balancing the Barrel and Beyond". Journal of Petroleum Technology 75, n. 01 (1 gennaio 2023): 10–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.2118/0123-0010-jpt.

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_ Back in the early stages of the pandemic, a high-ranking executive at GALP told me the Portuguese company was positioning itself to become “the Amazon of Energy,” explaining that a fully digitalized operation and a diverse portfolio of products and services that extend well beyond GALP’s oil and gas roots would enable the company to thrive, even in the face of extreme disruption. Now, more than 2 years later, the disruption in energy markets has indeed reached extreme levels due to the war in Ukraine, inflation, economic uncertainty, changing climate, the global push to decarbonize, and yes, even the remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of which is testing the ability of oil, gas, and energy companies to respond to rapidly changing market signals and energy priorities. Doing business in highly volatile market conditions has long been a strong suit for hydrocarbon-focused energy companies. Now, amid a unique confluence of factors, these companies are being asked to be more responsive, agile, and Amazon-like than they have ever been, with the ability to rapidly read the signals they’re getting from the market, from geopolitical forces and other sources, then respond, reprioritize, reallocate, and scale accordingly. That could mean producing and exporting more liquefied natural gas supplies for the European market to fill the void left by Russia, for example, or accelerating timelines for renewable energy production projects to reduce reliance on coal for electricity generation. How can traditionally hydrocarbon-focused companies answer the call—and in doing so, take advantage of the opportunities that today’s unique market dynamics present? I see five keys to maintaining a high level of operational and supply chain readiness, without compromising near-term or long-term profitability. 1. Build a diverse portfolio of revenue streams that balances today’s realities with tomorrow’s priorities. Traditional hydrocarbon-focused energy companies lately have been diversifying into new energy products and services, and new lines of business, as a hedge against volatile oil and gas prices, and as a means to meet longer-term carbon-reduction and ESG (environment, social, and governance) goals. At the same time, however, shifts in the short-term energy mix in Europe and elsewhere as a result of supply disruptions have returned the energy security issue to the front burner, providing a clear reminder of the vital role oil and gas will continue to play not just in the months ahead, but for the long term. Strategically, the pursuit of lower-carbon revenue streams and the continued focus on hydrocarbon production aren’t mutually exclusive. Recent developments highlight how important it is for energy companies (and policymakers) to balance longer-term carbon-reduction goals with near-term energy market realities. At Shell, for example, near-term oil and natural gas production remains a top priority. Yet the company also is pressing forward with a plan to build a network of half a million electric vehicle charge points by 2025. Meanwhile, Occidental and its carbon-capture subsidiary 1PointFive plan to open what they tout as the world’s largest direct air capture plant in Texas by 2024, with the potential to build another 70 such plants worldwide by 2035. These are the types of markets energy companies could and should be exploring to increase their resilience, stability, and flexibility.
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Нахаев, М. Р., e А. Х. Аласханов. "PHYSICAL PROCESSES IN ELECTROSTATIC MOLDING OF FIBER-REINFORCED CONCRETE PRODUCTS". Вестник ГГНТУ. Технические науки, n. 2(28) (26 agosto 2022): 90–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.34708/gstou.2022.18.88.008.

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На производство одной тонны цемента расходуется в разных странах от 700 до 1100 кВт·ч энергии. Добыча миллионов тонн сырья и работа цементных заводов сопровождается вредными выбросами, которые наносят большой ущерб окружающей среде. Поэтому разработка новых энерго- и ресурсосберегающих строительных технологий особенно важна. Для экономии цемента в строительстве разработана новая технология. Предлагается метод послойного электростатического нанесения сухих порошковых компонентов бетонной смеси и волокон на формообразующий арматурно-сеточный каркас изделия. Нанесенные слои периодически увлажняют тонкораспыленной водой. Процесс повторяют до получения фибробетона нужной толщины. В новой технологии водоцементное отношение может быть равным теоретической величине для данного состава бетона. Это должно давать экономию цемента без снижения прочности фибробетона. Необходимо учитывать особенности, диктуемые электростатической технологией. Например, в узкие и глубокие каналы электрическое поле почти не проникает. Рассматриваются электрофизические особенности метода. Например, за какое время происходит зарядка частиц сухой бетонной смеси. От чего зависит производительность процесса нанесения покрытия, какова оптимальная скорость воздушного потока из электростатического распылителя и др. The production of cement in different countries is consuming 700-1100 kWh of energy per 1 ton. The extraction of millions of tons of raw materials and the operation of cement plants are accompanied by harmful emissions that cause great harm to the environment. Therefore, the development of energy and resource saving new building technologies is especially important. A new technology has been developed to save cement in construction. A method of layer-by-layer electrostatic deposition of dry powder components of a concrete mixture and fibers on the forming reinforcing-mesh frame of the product is proposed. The applied layers are periodically moistened with water mist. The process is repeated until the desired thickness of fiber-reinforced concrete is obtained. With the new technology, the water-cement ratio can be equal to the theoretical value for a given concrete composition. This should result in cement savings without compromising the strength of the fiber-reinforced concrete. It is necessary to account for the issues associated with the electrostatic technology. For instance, the electric field hardly propagates into narrow and deep channels. The electrophysical features of the method are considered. For example, how long does it take to charge particles of a dry concrete mixture? What determines the productivity of the coating process, what is the optimal air flow rate from an electrostatic spray gun, etc.
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May, Jeremy, e Hang Kuen Lau. "In-Operando Isothermal Microcalorimetry to Accelerate Screening of New Battery Chemistries". ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2023-01, n. 7 (28 agosto 2023): 2891. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2023-0172891mtgabs.

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Abstract (sommario):
Screening new cell chemistries using traditional electrochemical methods is a time prohibitive process that significantly slows the pace of research. These methods involve cycling the cell until signs of degradation or sufficient capacity fade are evident, and typically take months to complete. In-operando isothermal microcalorimetry is an established but underutilized technique for measuring the activity of parasitic, or non-reversible reactions during charge cycling [1,2,3,4]. A parasitic reaction is a blanket term for any side reactions that occur within a battery, including solvent breakdown, lithium plating, self-discharge reactions, and growth or decomposition of the solid electrolyte interphase. Battery formulations with high parasitic heat are strongly correlated with early cell failure. Compared to electrochemical cycling, the average parasitic heat over the full voltage range can be determined in a time frame as low as 2 weeks, allowing researchers to realize a time savings up to 75%. Additional time savings are also possible if only a narrow voltage range is of interest. In this study, we present results that demonstrate the measurement of the parasitic heat of a commercial 18650 lithium-ion battery using the TA Instruments Battery Cycler Microcalorimeter Solution. This method involves slow galvanostatic cycling at isothermal conditions with a simultaneous measurement of heat flow, voltage, and applied current. The parasitic heat is isolated from the total heat flow using the Integration-Subtraction method, with calculations performed automatically by the software [1]. The coulombic efficiency is also measured per cycle, showing an inverse relationship to the parasitic power. As a screening tool, this data could be used to select battery formulations most likely to meet performance goals in long-term cycling experiments, rather than wasting valuable time and lab space on a trial-and-error approach. The results highlight how in-operando isothermal microcalorimetry is a powerful screening tool for investigating the efficiency of new cell chemistries and electrolyte formulations in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods. [1] L.J. Krause, L.D. Jensen, V.L. Chevrier. Measurement of Li-Ion Battery Electrolyte Stability by Electrochemical Calorimetry. J. Electrochem. Soc. 2017, 164 (4), A889-A896. [2] L.J. Krause, L.D. Jensen, J.R. Dahn. Measurement of Parasitic Reactions in Li Ion Cells by Electrochemical Calorimetry. J. Electrochem. Soc. 2012, 159 (7), A937-A943. [3] J.C. Burns, Adil Kassam, N.N. Sinha, L.E. Downie, Lucie Solnickova, B.M. Way, J.R. Dahn. Predicting and Extending the Lifetime of Li-Ion Batteries. J. Electrochem. Soc. 2013, 160, A1451. [4] E. R. Logan, A. J. Louli, Matthew Genovese, Simon Trussler,and J. R. Dahn. Investigating Parasitic Reactions in Anode-Free Li Metal Cells with Isothermal Microcalorimetry. J. Electrochem. Soc. 2021, 168, 060527.
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Slamet, Joko, Yazid Basthomi, Francisca Maria Ivone e Evi Eliyanah. "Utilizing an SDL Approach in Designing a Gamification-Based MOOC to Enhance Autonomous Learning". Journal of Information Technology Education: Research 23 (2024): 010. http://dx.doi.org/10.28945/5278.

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Abstract (sommario):
Aim/Purpose: This research explores the design and development of a gamified Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) aligned with the Self-Directed Learning (SDL) approach. The focus is addressing challenges to foster autonomous learning within the MOOC context. Background: MOOCs have emerged as a prominent platform for global education; however, they face ongoing challenges, particularly in their capacity to facilitate SDL effectively. Despite their popularity, there are gaps and limitations in existing MOOC designs that hinder the cultivation of autonomous learning. This research seeks to bridge these gaps and enhance MOOCs’ ability to support SDL through systematic design improvements and the strategic integration of gamification elements. Methodology: In this study, we adopt the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) instructional design model as the foundational framework. It begins with the Analysis phase, which includes a comprehensive literature review and a questionnaire administered to 41 undergraduate students to gain insights into learner preferences. The Design phase follows, where we develop an innovative MOOC framework enriched with gamification elements. This framework is then implemented and tested during the Development and Implementation phases. Finally, during the Evaluation phase, field testing of this framework is conducted with a limited-scale participant group. Contribution: This research makes a substantial contribution to the academic field and profession by systematically addressing identified gaps and limitations in MOOC design. It delves into the crucial role of MOOCs within the self-learning environment, emphasizing their significance in catering to self-directed learners. Additionally, this research sheds light on the transformative impact of gamification on MOOCs. By showcasing how the ADDIE model can be effectively utilized, this research not only addresses existing challenges but also advocates for the optimization of MOOCs to better serve and empower self-directed learners. Findings: Our study has unveiled a transformational shift in MOOCs. Through the effective integration of gamification, we observed changes in learner engagement, motivation, and the cultivation of SDL behaviors. Participants experienced a substantial increase in their enthusiasm for learning, which led to improvements in their ability to take charge of their learning journeys. This was not merely a superficial enhancement but a profound shift that left participants consistently expressing heightened satisfaction and a deep sense of accomplishment. Recommendations for Practitioners: Our findings strongly advocate for the adoption of a systematic approach to MOOC design. Practitioners should consider leveraging the ADDIE instructional design model, as demonstrated in our study, to elevate MOOCs to new heights. By strategically incorporating gamification elements, MOOCs can become powerful tools for enhancing learner engagement and fostering autonomous learning. This transformation will not only benefit individual learners but also contribute to the broader landscape of online education. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers should delve deeper into the realm of gamification within MOOCs. The potential for refining and optimizing specific gamification strategies, especially within the structured framework of the ADDIE model, is an area ripe for exploration. Additionally, there is a need for nuanced research that delves into tailoring MOOCs to cater to self-directed learners’ unique needs. By doing so, we can continue to drive the boundaries of knowledge in online education and offer more effective solutions to learners worldwide. Impact on Society: Our study transcends the confines of academic inquiry and holds implications for society. By harnessing the power of gamification within MOOCs, we can enhance online education. This means not only making education more accessible but also rendering it more engaging and effective on a global scale. Our findings have the potential to democratize learning, empower learners, and ultimately contribute to a more educated and skillful society. Future Research: Future investigations should embark on a journey to uncover the long-term effects of gamification in MOOCs. Moreover, exploring the scalability of these approaches and their influence on diverse learner populations is paramount. As we move forward, the focus should remain on refining and expanding our understanding of how gamification, within the structured context of the ADDIE instructional design model, can continually optimize the landscape of online education.
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Björklund, Erik, e Robert S. Weatherup. "Surface Degradation of NMC Electrodes Exposed to Air and Impact on Subsequent Cycling". ECS Meeting Abstracts MA2023-02, n. 2 (22 dicembre 2023): 395. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/ma2023-022395mtgabs.

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Abstract (sommario):
To meet the ambitious international emissions commitments laid out in the Paris climate agreement making the transition of society from being dependent on fossil fuels towards increased use of renewable energy sources possible, lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are a key enabling technology. Even though LIBs are already extensively used in portable electronics and the rapidly expanding market of hybrid- and full-electric vehicles, more extensive deployment requires longer cycle-lifetimes, enhancements in energy density, and reductions in cost. In electric vehicles one of the most common materials for the positive electrodes is based on the lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (LixNi1-y-zMnyCozO2, NMC) compound with different ratios of transition metals. The NMC materials are well known for consisting of reasonably abundant materials, their high energy density and good cyclebility. In order to decrease the price while also further improving the energy density, it has become more popular during the last few years to increase the nickel content, being responsible for the redox process thereby contributing to a larger capacity. By increasing the nickel content, the quantity of cobalt required will decrease further, reducing the price. However it is also well known that in materials where the nickel content is high the surface side reactions will be augmented leading to more degradation and shorter cycle life. A high nickel content will not only affect the electrochemical side reactions during cycling, it has also been found that as NMC materials are exposed to air they will react differently, with more reactions for the nickel rich materials. It has been found that the NMC can react with H2O to form a LiOH layer and that once the layer is thick enough further side reactions would be prevented.1 It was assumed that the passivation was caused by the deintercalation of lithium, where the thin disordered rock salt layer would mitigate the Li+-water reactions through decreasing the amount of lithium deintercalation.1 Furthermore, the surface impurities formed during the air exposure have been observed to directly impact electrochemical performance during the first couple of cycles. Hatsukade et al. used isotopic labelling in order to measure the CO2 formation during the first cycles originating from the oxidative decomposition of these impurities.2 Air exposure has been shown to affect not only the first few cycles but also long term cycling as well.3 The degradation of the NMC has been found to be caused by phase transformation into rock salt and spinel structure, leading to nickel reduction and as a result formation of inter granular cracks, eventually leading to isolation of the active particles and increased charge transfer resistance.4 In this study the surface interactions at NMC electrodes during air exposure will be presented, showing both how the interactions take place as well as how the air exposure will affect the electrode-electrolyte interfaces during cycling. The NMC surface is analysed by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) and x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). Zou, L. et al. Unlocking the passivation nature of the cathode–air interfacial reactions in lithium ion batteries. Nat. Commun. 11, (2020). Hatsukade, T., Schiele, A., Hartmann, P., Brezesinski, T. & Janek, J. Origin of Carbon Dioxide Evolved during Cycling of Nickel-Rich Layered NCM Cathodes. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 10, 38892–38899 (2018). Meatza, I. De, Landa-medrano, I., Sananes-israel, S. & Eguia-barrio, A. Powder and Electrodes on the Electrochemical Performance in Li-ion Technology. Batteries 8, 1–18 (2022). Busà, C., Belekoukia, M. & Loveridge, M. J. The effects of ambient storage conditions on the structural and electrochemical properties of NMC-811 cathodes for Li-ion batteries. Electrochim. Acta 366, (2021).
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Loftus, Michael B. "Internships In Embassy Suites Hotels: Developmentthrough Management Style". Hospitality Education and Research Journal 12, n. 2 (febbraio 1988): 492–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/109634808801200265.

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Abstract (sommario):
Hotel management students of today are the future of the hotel industry. They must demonstrate unique qualities enabling them to get along with all types of people. In addition, they must possess dedication, as the hours may be long. No matter what the obstacle and with these aspects considered, students eagerly continue to sincerely pursue internships in hotel management. Conclusively, these managers of the future must have it in their hearts to be a success. Embassy Suites Hotels, through internships, cultivates these desires into realities. An internship in Embassy Suites is designed to fulfill many purposes. First, and foremost, students are encouraged to develop their management style by being given the responsibility to make their own decisions. It is through this process of trial and error that allows interns to learn by experience, a task they could not undertake in a classroom. Second, they are involved with the entire operation of the hotel, from cleaning suites and folding towels to occupancy and revenue statistics. By becoming a well-rounded individual, the intern can understand the actual mechanics of the hotel industry. In addition, this cross training is an advantage to the development of their management style. Third, they learn how to care about other employees and work as a team. Although all students applying for internship are screened meticulously, the focal points to being accepted into Embassy Suites is the way in which they can interact with people. Enthusiasm and a willingness to learn are the two basic building blocks of management. With these characteristics, as well as a solideducation, the Embassy Suites intern can only soar into the professional world. Embassy Suites employees, including intems, are given liberties most other hotel companies tend to restrict. They are encouraged to handle guest complaints and rectify negative situations before they become major problems. It is through these guest/employee relations that guests' needs are efficiently met in addition to the employees progressing to more demanding or difficult situations. Statistics regarding the hotel's occupancy, average daily rates and budgets are openly discussed. The intern immediately becomes involved with the data they had only studied previously. They now have the opportunity to actually work with their knowledge. Additionally, the interns are held responsible for their end in order to ensure the hotel's overall profit. The constant ongoing training of all interns is essential. Each perspective new intern at Embassy Suites Meadowlands is interviewed not only by at least two department heads, but also by the general manager as well as three peer employees of the hotel. If hired, the new intern spends the first night at the hotel, sensing the guests experience. His first day consists of one hour in each major department of the hotel working hands-on. This allows the intern to become familiar with his coworkers as well as learn the importance of the co-existence of all departments working as a whole unit. Furthermore, the new intern is taken to lunch at the hotel's restaurant by the manager on duty as well as the general manager. The whole orientation experience serves as a foundation for each intern to build their career path. Consequently, training is held as an essential tool. Basically, when training ceases, service suffers. In college, students are taught the theories of the hotel industry. During their internship, they experience the reality of the undertaking. However, in becoming an Embassy Suites hotel manager, they are impressed with the Embassy Suites philosophy of caring about people. It should always be remembered to take care of the employees and treat them with respect; they will, in turn, serve the guests well. It is the guests who ultimately take care of the bottom line. It is Embassy Suites policy, for example, for every general manager's desk to be easily located in the lobby of the hotel. This allows employees to be able to approach their managers whenever the feel the need. Furthermore, employees and managers relate on one level, creating a team atmosphere. It may be the general manager who pitches the ball, but he cannot win or even play without a batter or a catcher. All staff members are referred to on a first name basis creating a comfortable environment unlike the rigid management hierarchies of the past. Thus all name tags have only the first names and hometowns inscribed on them. It is realized by Embassy Suites that intimidation and lack of communication are not good examples to set. By listening to and understanding their employees, by working with their employees in their day to day duties, and by helping them, especially during peak hours, managers gain their employees respect, not demand it. Hotel management of today has quite changed since long ago. Interns are now given the opportunity to advance more rapidly in the hotel industry. By demonstrating their sense of responsibility, taking charge of situations and thinking through problems logically, they are creating an aggressive, responsive management style. It is they who will set the example for the next generation. Future interns will learn as much in the classroom as in the hotel. College instructors and hotel managers will ultimately become co-professors, working together to produce motivated, well-rounded managers. This will be accomplished by interns not only working in the hotel, but also more involvement of hotel managers and employees in the classroom. Future Embassy Suites interns will truly be future Embassy Suites managers. Their definitive goal to be a family of hotel managers and employees welcoming each guest to their home.
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Gütl, Christian. "Editorial". JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 27, n. 1 (28 gennaio 2021): 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/jucs.64585.

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Abstract (sommario):
Dear Readers, It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to our first regular issue in 2021 covering 3 very relevant and novel articles in various computer science topics. There are also many news and changes with the beginning of the new year that I am excited to report on and share. To start with, we are very happy to welcome two new consortium members and editors-in-chief: California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo represented by Prof. Christian Eckhardt from the Department of Computer Science &amp; Software Engineering and the Institute for IDEAS at American University in Washington DC represented by Prof. Krzysztof Pietroszek. On the management side of J.UCS, Dana Kaiser has retired at the end of last year, and on behalf of the journal I want to gratefully thank Dana for her devoted and great work since the foundation of this journal. I also want to give Johanna Zeisberg a warm welcome who will take over the role as Publishing Manager and collaborate and support the whole J.UCS community. On the technical side, our journal has moved to another submission and publishing platform. Since the foundation of J.UCS more than 25 years ago, the journal has offered readers, authors and editors various novel features over the course of the years. In this perspective but also in terms of the visionary view of founding a freely accessibly online journal, I want to express our deep gratitude for the contributions of Prof. Hermann Maurer to the success of J.UCS for almost 20 years. Since beginning of 2021, J.UCS is hosted by Pensoft Publishers Ltd. on the ARPHA Publishing Platform. This allows us not only to offer state-of-the-art publishing features but also to make use of integrated long-time archiving systems and various indexing services. In this context I also want to thank Internet Studio Isser and Photographer Christian Trummer for the kind support in the development of the design update and the J.UCS images. In this first issue of the year, I also want to look back on the journal&rsquo;s achievements in 2020. We are proud to report a total of 11 issues with 74 articles on novel aspects of various topics in computer science; to be more specific, 51 articles have been published in 7 special issues and 23 articles in 4 regular issues. Since last year, J.UCS publishes under the open access Creative Commons License CC BY-ND 4.0 and therefore provides even more value und openness to a broader community. In 2020, we counted more than 87 thousand unique visits and almost 65 thousand paper downloads. This success is only possible due to the great support of the involved institutions, reviewers and authors, and I want to gratefully thank them all for their valuable support and work. Over the years we have not only offered readers open access to our high-quality journal, but we also do not charge our authors publication fees. This adventurous approach together with a rigorous review process and a broad support by the community resulted in a valuable contribution in the field of computer science, which is reflected in the high number of unique visitors and article downloads. In this context I gratefully thank all consortium members for their financial support of J.UCS. I am looking forward to continuing the cooperation with our editors, the editorial team and the technical support to maintain the success of J.UCS. I would be very grateful for suggestions and feedback on how we can even improve and develop J.UCS in the future. In this regular issue, I am very pleased to introduce 3 accepted papers from 5 different countries. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the J.UCS journal, Nelson Baloian, Jos&eacute; A. Pino, Gustavo Zurita, Valeria Lobos-Ossand&oacute;n, and Hermann Maurer analyze and discuss a bibliometric overview of the first 25 years of the journal in their collaboration between Austria and Chile. In a collaborative research between China and Spain, Xin Liu, Xiaoying Song, Wei Gao, Li Zou, and Alvaro Labella Romero report on their decision making approach based on hesitant fuzzy linguistic-valued credibility reasoning. And finally, Christian Moreira Matos, Vitor Kehl Matter, Marcio Garcia Martins, Joao Elison Da Rosa Tavares, Alexandre Sturmer Wolf, Paulo Cesar Buttenbender, and Jorge Luis Victoria Barbosa from Brazil discuss a collaborative model to assist people with disabilities and the elderly people in smart assistive cities. Enjoy Reading!
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31

Hunsucker, R. Laval. "Master’s Students in History Could Benefit from a Greater Library Sensitivity and Commitment to Interdisciplinarity, and from More Efficient Document Delivery". Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 6, n. 3 (14 settembre 2011): 64. http://dx.doi.org/10.18438/b8xk81.

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Abstract (sommario):
Objective – This study sought to determine the characteristics of research materials used by history students in preparing their master’s theses. Of which information resources formats did such students make use, and in what proportions? What was the age distribution of resources used? What was the dispersal over journal titles and over subject classification, i.e., the degree of interdisciplinarity? To what extent did the master’s students make use of non-English-language materials? To what extent did their institution’s library hold the resources in question? The investigator was especially interested in finding quantitative support for what he terms two “hypotheses.” The first of these is that historical research depends to a high degree on monographs, journal articles being far less important to it than they are to research in, especially, the natural sciences and technology. The second is that the age distribution of resources important to historical research is much flatter and longer than that of resources upon which researchers in the natural sciences and technology rely. Design – Citation analysis, supplemented with comprehensive catalogue searches. Setting – Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), a mid-sized public university located in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. Subjects – MA and MS theses (N=47) successfully submitted to the Department of History over the period from academic year 1998/1999 through academic year 2007/2008, inclusive. Methods – The investigator initially identified the theses through a search of the online catalogue (“Consuls”) of the Connecticut State University system, and retrieved all of them in either electronic or hard-copy form. He then subjected all citations (N=3,498) listed in the references sections of these theses to an examination in order to identify for each cited resource the format, the age, the language, and, in the case of scholarly journal articles, the journal of publication. He carried out bibliographic searches in order to rectify any citations which he had noted to be faulty or incomplete. The study took no account of possible additional citations in footnotes or endnotes or in the text, and did not measure citation intensity (whether, for instance, a thesis referred only once, or perhaps many times, to a given resource). Duplicates “were ignored.” He furthermore performed systematic searches in Consuls and in the Library of Congress (LC) online catalogue in order to establish, insofar as possible, into which assigned LC Classification class each resource fell, and whether it belonged to the holdings of the SCSU library. “Holdings,” as used here, includes physical resources owned, as well as those resources to which the library has licensed access. Not marked as either “held” or “not held” were: resources available online without restriction or charge, items not identified in either Consuls or the LC catalogue, and all government documents. Ages of cited resources were calculated based on the edition or version date actually given in a student’s citation, without any consideration of a possible earlier date of the original version of the publication or document concerned. Main Results – Format, age distribution, and journal frequency. The local citation analysis found that 53.2% of all cited resources were monographs, 7.8% were scholarly articles, 5.3% were contributed chapters in books, and 0.6% were dissertations or theses. Non-scholarly periodicals accounted for 15.7%, government documents for 6.7%, and freely available web documents for 4.1%. The remainder, approximately 6.5%, comprised archival papers, judicial documents, directories, interviews, posters, audiovisual materials, and 13 other formats. Cited resources, measured back from the date of acceptance of the citing thesis, ranged from 0 to 479 years old; the mode was 3 years, but the median was “25” (p. 170) or “26” (p. 177) years. Just over 70% (i.e., 2,500 cited resources) were more than ten years old. Almost one thousand of the cited resources were fifty or more years old. The 274 scholarly journal articles included in the references sections were spread over 153 distinct journal titles, of which 105 titles made only one appearance, and 136 titles three or fewer appearances. The mean was 1.8 appearances. Subject dispersal and language. Of the 2,084 cited resources for which LC classification was locatable, 51.5% had a classification other than history, i.e., other than class C, D, E, or F. Nearly two thirds (66.0%) of the cited scholarly journal articles had appeared in journals with a focus other than history. (Note: table 4 is incorrect, precisely reversing the actual ratio.) Of all cited items, 98.5% were in the English language. Half (27) of the non-English-language resources cited were in Korean, all cited in the same thesis. Books (i.e., monographs plus compilations from which contributed chapters were cited) accounted for 87.0% of foreign-language citations. More than four fifths of the examined theses (83.0%) cited not a single non-English-language resource. Local holdings. Of all 3,498 cited items, 3,022 could be coded as either “held” or “not held” by the SCSU library. Of the items so coded (not, as indicated on p. 180, of all cited items), scarcely two fifths (41.0%) belonged to the library’s holdings. The holdings percentage was highest (72.6%) for the 274 scholarly journal articles cited, followed by the 186 contributed chapters (50.0%), the 550 non-scholarly periodical items (49.5%), and the 1,861 monographs (46.8%). For other cited formats, the percentage was much lower, and in some cases, e.g., for the 55 archival and the 44 judicial documents, it was 0.0%. Of the 54 foreign-language resources cited, the institution’s library held only two. Conclusion – The investigator concludes that his study’s findings do indeed lend quantitative support to his two “hypotheses.” This outcome will surprise few, if any, librarians; it is in accord with what Koenig (1978) long ago saw as a matter of “intuition” and “all conventional wisdom,” something that many subsequent studies have confirmed. Sherriff accordingly recommends, firstly, that collections which strive to support historical research should, in matters of acquisition policy and budget allocation, take serious account of that field’s relatively strong dependence on monographs. Secondly, the data on age distribution carry obvious implications for librarians’ decision-making on matters such as de-accessioning and weeding, relegation to remote storage, and retrospective acquisitions. This finding should also be considered, for instance, in connection with preservation policy and the maintaining of special collections. He even suggests that librarians “need to teach students the value of reviewing literature historically and showing them how to do so effectively” (p. 177). Sherriff considers a number of further (tentative) conclusions to be warranted or suggested by the results of this study. First of all, that historical research is now characteristically an interdisciplinary matter, in the sense that it requires extensive access to information resources, including journals, which libraries have traditionally not classified as belonging to the discipline of history itself. For a library supporting such research, this phenomenon “has implications for matters including collection budgets, reference work, bibliographic instruction, and the location of collections and departmental libraries” (p. 168). It also means “that librarians working with history students and history collections need to be aware of the relevant resources in other disciplines. This can improve reference work, research assistance, and bibliographic instruction; it may also help the coordination of acquisitions across departmental lines” (p. 179). Secondly, one may conclude that “there is no ‘core’ collection of journals for history” (p. 178) which will be able to satisfy a large proportion of master’s students’ research needs. Thirdly, the fact that a library such as SCSU’s holds significantly less than half of what master’s students require for preparing their theses “may exercise a narrowing effect on students’ awareness of the existing literature on their topics” (p. 180), “increases the importance of departmental faculty, reference librarians, and subject specialist librarians drawing students’ attention to resources beyond the library’s catalogues and collections” (p. 180), and requires that the library give serious attention to effective document delivery arrangements. Finally, this study’s finding that only a small percentage of master’s students in history made use of non-English-language materials, but then in certain cases used them rather extensively (27 Korean items cited in one thesis, ten Italian in another, nine Spanish in yet another), suggests that acquisition, or at least proactive acquisition, of such materials needn’t be a priority, as long as, once again, the students concerned have easy access to efficient and affordable document delivery services. Sherriff does concede, however, that his finding could indicate “that students are unaware of relevant resources in other languages or are aware of them but lack the language skills necessary to use them” (p. 179).
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32

Oja, Mare. "Muutused hariduselus ja ajalooõpetuse areng Eesti iseseisvuse taastamise eel 1987–91 [Abstract: Changes in educational conditions and the development of teaching in history prior to the restoration of Estonia’s independence in 1987–1991]". Ajalooline Ajakiri. The Estonian Historical Journal, n. 3/4 (16 giugno 2020): 365–401. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/aa.2019.3-4.03.

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Abstract (sommario):
Educational conditions reflect society’s cultural traditions and political system, in turn affecting society’s development. The development of the younger generation is guided by way of education, for which reason working out educational policy requires the participation of society’s various interest groups. This article analyses changes in the teaching of history in the transitional period from the Soviet era to restored independent statehood. The development of subject content, the complicated role of the history teacher, the training of history teachers, and the start of the renewal of textbooks and educational literature are examined. The aim is to ascertain in retrospect the developments that took place prior to the restoration of Estonia’s independence, in other words the first steps that laid the foundation for today’s educational system. Legislation, documents, publications, and media reports preserved in the archives of the Ministry of Education and Research and the Archival Museum of Estonian Pedagogics were drawn upon in writing this article, along with the recollections of teachers who worked in schools in that complicated period. These recollections were gathered by way of interviews (10) and questionnaires (127). Electronic correspondence has been conducted with key persons who participated in changes in education in order to clarify information, facts, conditions and circumstances. The discussion in education began with a congress of teachers in 1987, where the excessive regulation of education was criticised, along with school subjects with outdated content, and the curriculum that was in effect for the entire Soviet Union. The resolution of the congress presented the task of building a national and independent Estonian school system. The congress provided an impetus for increasing social activeness. An abundance of associations and unions of teachers and schools emerged in the course of the educational reform of the subsequent years. After the congress, the Minister of Education, Elsa Gretškina, initiated a series of expert consultations at the Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers (VÕT) for reorganising general education. The pedagogical experience of Estonia and other countries was analysed, new curricula were drawn up and evaluated, and new programmes were designed for school subjects. The solution was seen in democratising education: in shaping the distinctive character of schools, taking into account specific local peculiarities, establishing alternative schools, differentiating study, increasing awareness and the relative proportion of humanities subjects and foreign language study, better integrating school subjects, and ethical upbringing. The problems of schools where Russian was the language of instruction were also discussed. The Ministry of Education announced a competition for school programmes in 1988 to find innovative ideas for carrying out educational reform. The winning programme prescribed compulsory basic education until the end of the 9th grade, and opportunities for specialisation starting in the second year of study in secondary school, that is starting in the 11th grade. Additionally, the programme prescribed a transition to a 12-grade system of study. Schools where Russian was the language of instruction were to operate separately, but were obliged to teach the Estonian language and Estonian literature, history, music and other subjects. Hitherto devised innovative ideas for developing Estonian education were summed up in the education platform, which is a consensual document that was approved at the end of 1988 at the conference of Estonian educators and in 1989 by the board of the ESSR State Education Committee. The constant reorganisation of institutions hindered development in educational conditions. The activity of the Education Committee, which had been formed in 1988 and brought together different spheres of educational policy, was terminated at the end of 1989, when the tasks of the committee were once again transferred to the Ministry of Education. The Republic-wide Institute for In-service Training of Teachers, the ESSR Scientific-Methodical Cabinet for Higher and Secondary Education, the ESSR Teaching Methodology Cabinet, the ESSR Preschool Upbringing Methodology Cabinet, and the ESSR Vocational Education Teaching and Methodology Cabinet were all closed down in 1989. The Estonian Centre for the Development of Education was formed in July of 1989 in place of the institutions that were closed down. The Institute for Pedagogical Research was founded on 1 April 1991 as a structural subunit of the Tallinn Pedagogical Institute, and was given the task of developing study programmes for general education schools. The Institute for the Scientific Research of Pedagogy (PTUI) was also closed down as part of the same reorganisation. The work of history and social studies teachers was considered particularly complicated and responsible in that period. The salary rate of history teachers working in secondary schools was raised in 1988 by 15% over that of teachers of other subjects, since their workload was greater than that of teachers of other subjects – the renewal of teaching materials did not catch up with the changes that were taking place in society and teachers themselves had to draw up pertinent teaching materials in place of Soviet era textbooks. Articles published in the press, newer viewpoints found in the media, published collections of documents, national radio broadcasts, historical literature and school textbooks from before the Second World War, and writings of notable historians, including those that were published in the press throughout the Soviet Union, were used for this purpose. Teachers had extensive freedom in deciding on the content of their subject matter, since initially there were no definite arrangements in that regard. A history programme group consisting of volunteer enthusiasts took shape at a brainstorming session held after the teachers’ congress. This group started renewing subject matter content and working out a new programme. The PTUI had already launched developmental work. There in the PTUI, Silvia Õispuu coordinated the development of history subject matter content (this work continued until 1993, when this activity became the task of the National Bureau of Schools). The curriculum for 1988 still remained based on history programmes that were in effect throughout the Soviet Union. The greatest change was the teaching of history as a unified course in world history together with themes from the history of the Estonian SSR. The first new curriculum was approved in the spring of 1989, according to which the academic year was divided up into three trimesters. The school week was already a five-day week by then, which ensured 175 days of study per year. The teaching of history began in the 5th grade and it was taught two hours per week until the end of basic school (grades 5 – 9). Compulsory teaching of history was specified for everyone in the 10th grade in secondary school, so-called basic education for two hours a week. The general and humanities educational branches had to study history three hours a week while the sciences branch only had to study history for two hours a week. Students were left to decide on optional subjects and elective subjects based on their own preferences and on what the school was able to offer. The new conception of teaching history envisaged that students learn to know the past through teaching both in the form of a general overview as well as on the basis of events and phenomena that most characterise the particular era under consideration. The teacher was responsible for choosing how in-depth the treatment of the subject matter would be. The new programmes were implemented in their entirety in the academic year of 1990/1991. At the same time, work continued on improving subject programmes. After ideological treatments were discarded, the aim became to make teaching practice learner-oriented. The new curriculum was optional for schools where the language of instruction was Russian. Recommendations for working with renewed subject content regarding Estonian themes in particular were conveyed by way of translated materials. These schools mostly continued to work on the basis of the structure and subject content that was in effect in the Soviet Union, teaching only the history of the Soviet Union and general history. Certain themes from Estonian history were considered in parallel with and on the basis of the course on the history of the Soviet Union. The number of lessons teaching the national official language (Estonian) was increased in the academic year of 1989/1990 and a year later, subjects from the Estonian curriculum started being taught, including Estonian history. The national curriculum for Estonian basic education and secondary education was finally unified once and for all in Estonia’s educational system in 1996. During the Soviet era, the authorities attempted to make the teaching profession attractive by offering long summer breaks, pension insurance, subsidised heating and electricity for teachers in the countryside, and apartments free of charge. This did not compensate the lack of professional freedom – teachers worked under the supervision of inspectors since the Soviet system required history teachers to justify Soviet ideology. The effectiveness of each teacher’s work was assessed on the basis of social activeness and the grades of their students. The content and form of Sovietera teacher training were the object of criticism. They were assessed as not meeting the requirements of the times and the needs of schools. Changes took place in the curricula of teacher training in 1990/1991. Teachers had to reassess and expand their knowledge of history during the transitional period. Participation in social movements such as the cultural heritage preservation movement also shaped their mentality. The key question was educational literature. The government launched competitions and scholarships in order to speed up the completion of educational literature. A teaching aid for secondary school Estonian history was published in 1989 with the participation of 18 authors. Its aim was set as the presentation of historical facts that are as truthful as possible from the standpoint of the Estonian people. Eesti ajalugu (The History of Estonia) is more of a teacher’s handbook filled with facts that lacks a methodical part, and does not include maps, explanations of terms or illustrations meant for students. The compendious treatment of Estonian history Kodulugu I and II (History of our Homeland) by Mart Laar, Lauri Vahtre and Heiki Valk that was published in the Loomingu Raamatukogu series was also used as a textbook in 1989. It was not possible to publish all planned textbooks during the transitional period. The first round of textbooks with renewed content reached schools by 1994. Since the authors had no prior experience and it was difficult to obtain original material, the authors of the first textbooks were primarily academic historians and the textbooks had a scholarly slant. They were voluminous and filled with facts, and their wording was complicated, which their weak methodical part did not compensate. Here and there the effect of the Soviet era could still be felt in both assessments and the use of terminology. There were also problems with textbook design and their printing quality. Changes in education did not take place overnight. Both Soviet era tradition that had become ingrained over decades as well as innovative ideas could be encountered simultaneously in the transitional period. The problem that the teaching of history faced in the period that has been analysed here was the wording of the focus and objectives of teaching the subject, and the balancing of knowledge of history, skills, values and attitudes in the subject syllabus. First of all, Soviet rhetoric and the viewpoint centring on the Soviet Union were abandoned. The so-called blank gaps in Estonian history were restored in the content of teaching history since it was not possible to study the history of the independent Republic of Estonia during the Soviet era or to gain an overview of deportations and the different regimes that occupied Estonia. Subject content initially occupied a central position, yet numerous principles that have remained topical to this day made their way into the subject syllabus, such as the development of critical thinking in students and other such principles. It is noteworthy that programmes for teaching history changed before the restoration of Estonia’s independence, when society, including education, still operated according to Soviet laws. A great deal of work was done over the course of a couple of years. The subsequent development of the teaching of history has been affected by social processes as well as by the didactic development of the teaching of the subject. The school reform that was implemented in 1987–1989 achieved relative independence from the Soviet Union’s educational institutions, and the opportunity emerged for self-determination on the basis of curricula and the organisation of education.
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33

Højlund, Flemming. "I Paradisets Have". Kuml 50, n. 50 (1 agosto 2001): 205–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/kuml.v50i50.103162.

Testo completo
Abstract (sommario):
In the Garden of EdenThe covers of the first three volumes of Kuml show photographs of fine Danish antiquities. Inside the volumes have articles on the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Jutland, which is to be expected as Kuml is published by the Jutland Archaeological Society. However, in 1954 the scene is moved to more southern skies. This year, the cover is dominated by a date palm with two huge burial mounds in the background. In side the book one reads no less than six articles on the results from the First Danish Archaeological Bahrain Expedition. P.V. Glob begins with: Bahrain – Island of the Hundred Thousand Burial Mounds, The Flint Sites of the Bahrain Desert, Temples at Barbar and The Ancient Capital of Bahrain, followed by Bibby’s Five among Bahrain’s Hundred Thousand Burial Mounds and The Well of the Bulls. The following years, reports on excavations on Bahrain and later in the sheikhdoms of Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi are on Kuml’s repertoire.However, it all ends wit h the festschrift to mark Glob’s 60th anniversary, Kuml 1970, which has three articles on Arab archaeology and a single article in 1972. For the past thirty years almost, the journal has not had a single article on Arabia. Why is that? Primarily because the character of the museum’s work in the Arabian Gulf changed completely. The pioneers’ years of large-scale reconnaissance and excavations were succeeded by labourous studies of the excavated material – the necessary work preceding the final publications. Only in Abu Dhabi and Oman, Karen Frifelt carried on the pioneer spirit through the 1970s and 1980s, but she mainly published her results in in ternational, Englishlanguage journals.Consequently, the immediate field reports ended, but the subsequent research into Arab archaeology – carried out at the writing desk and with the collections of finds– still crept into Kuml. From 1973 , the journal contained a list of the publications made by the Jutland Archaeological Society (abbreviated JASP), and here, the Arab monographs begin to make their entry. The first ones are Holger Kapel’s Atlas of the Stone Age Cultures of Qatar from 1967 and Geoffrey Bibby’s survey in eastern Saudi Arabia from 1973. Then comes the Hellenistic excavations on the Failaka island in Kuwait with Hans Erik Mathiesen’s treatise on the terracotta figurines (1982), Lise Hannestad’s work on the ceramics (1983) and Kristian Jeppesen’s presentation of the temple and the fortifications (1989). A similar series on the Bronze Age excavations on Failaka has started with Poul Kjærum’s first volume on the stamp and cylinder seals (1983) and Flemming Højlund’s presentation of the ceramics (1987). The excavations on the island of Umm an-Nar in Abu Dhabi was published by Karen Frifelt in two volumes on the settlement (1991) and the graves (1995), and the ancient capital of Bahrain was analysed by H. Hellmuth Andersen and Flemming Højlund in two volumes on the northern city wall and the Islamic fort (1994) and the central, monumental buildings (1997) respectively.More is on its way! A volume on Islamic finds made on Bahrain has just been made ready for printing, and the Bronze Age temples at the village of Barbar is being worked up. Danish and foreign scholars are preparing other volumes, but the most important results of the expeditions to the Arabian Gulf have by now been published in voluminous series.With this, an era has ended, and Moesgård Museum’s 50th anniversary in 1999 was a welcome opportunity of looking back at the Arabian Gulf effort through the exhibition Glob and the Garden ef Eden. The Danish Bahrain expeditions and to consider what will happen in the future.How then is the relation ship between Moesgård Museum and Bahrain today, twenty-three years after the last expedition – now that most of the old excavations have been published and the two originators of the expeditions, P.V. Glob and Geoffrey Bibby have both died?In Denmark we usually consider Bahrain an exotic country with an exciting past. However, in Bahrain there is a similar fascination of Denmark and of Moesgård Museum. The Bahrain people are wondering why Danish scholars have been interested in their small island for so many years. It was probably not a coincidence when in the 1980s archaeologist and ethnographers from Moesgård Museum were invited to take part in the furnishing of the exhibitions in the new national museum of Bahrain. Today, museum staff from Arab countries consider a trip to Moesgård a near-pilgrimage: our collection of Near East artefacts from all the Gulf countries is unique, and the ethnographic collections are unusual in that they were collected with thorough information on the use, the users and the origin of each item.The Bahrain fascination of Moesgård Museum. was also evident, when the Bahrain minister of education, Abdulaziz Al-Fadl, visited the museum in connection with the opening of the Bahrain exhibition in 1999.Al-Fadl visited the museum’s oriental department, and in the photo and film archive a book with photos taken by Danish members of the expeditions to the Arabian Gulf was handed over to him. Al-Fadl was absorbed by the photos of the Bahrain of his childhood – the 1950s and 1960s – an un spoilt society very different from the modern Bahrain. His enthusiasm was not lessened when he saw a photo of his father standing next to P.V. Glob and Sheikh Salman Al Khalifa taken at the opening of Glob’s first archaeological exhibition in Manama, the capital. At a banquet given by Elisabeth Gerner Nielsen, the Danish minister of culture, on the evening following the opening of the Glob exhibition at Moesgård, Al-Fadl revealed that as a child, he had been on a school trip to the Danish excavations where – on the edge of the excavation – he had his first lesson in Bahrain’s prehistory from a Danish archaeologist (fig. 1).Another example: When attending the opening of an art exhibition at Bahrain’s Art Centre in February 1999, I met an old Bahrain painter, Abdelkarim Al-Orrayed, who turned out to be a good friend of the Danish painter Karl Bovin, who took part in Glob’s expeditions. He told me, how in 1956, Bovin had exhibited his paintings in a school in Manama. He recalled Bovin sitting in his Arabian tunic in a corner of the room, playing a flute, which he had carved in Sheikh Ibrahim’s garden.In a letter, Al-Orrayed states: ”I remember very well the day in 1956, when I met Karl Bovin for the first time. He was drawin g some narrow roads in the residential area where I lived. I followed him closely with my friend Hussain As-Suni – we were twentythree and twenty-one years old respectively. When he had finished, I invited him to my house where I showed him my drawings. He looked at them closely and gave me good advice to follow if I wanted to become a skilful artist – such as focusing on lines, form, light, distance, and shadow. He encouraged me to practice outdoors and to use different models. It was a turning point in our young artists’ lives when Hussein and I decided to follow Bovin’s instructions. We went everywhere – to the teahouses, the markets, the streets, and the countryside – and practised there, but the sea was the most fascinating phenomenon to us. In my book, An Introduction to Modern Art in Bahrain, I wrote about Bovin’s exhibitions in the 1950s and his great influence on me as an artist. Bovin’s talent inspired us greatly in rediscovering the nature and landscape on Bahrain and gave us the feeling that we had much strength to invest in art. Bovin contributed to a new start to us young painters, who had chosen the nature as our main motif.”Abdelkarim Al-Orrayed was the first Bahrain painter to live of his art, and around 1960 he opened a studio from which he sold his paintings. Two of his landscape watercolours are now at Moesgård.These two stories may have revealed that Bahrain and Moesgard Museum have a common history, which both parts value and wish to continue. The mutual fascination is a good foundation to build on and the close bonds and personal acquaintance between by now more generations is a valuable counterbalance to those tendencies that estrange people, cultures, and countries from one another.Already, more joint projects have been initiated: Danish archaeology students are taking part in excavations on Bahrain and elsewhere in the Arabic Gulf; an ethnography student is planning a long stay in a village on Bahrain for the study of parents’ expectations to their children on Bahrain as compared with the conditions in Denmark; P.V. Glob’s book, Al-Bahrain, has been translated into Arabic; Moesgård’s photos and films from the Gulf are to become universally accessible via the Internet; an exhibition on the Danish expeditions is being prepared at the National Museum of Bahrain, and so forth.Two projects are to be described in more detail here: New excavations on Bahrain that are to investigate how fresh water was exploited in the past, and the publication of a book and three CDs, Music in Bahrain, which will make Bahrain’s traditional music accessible not just to the population of Bahrain, but to the whole world.New excavations on BahrainFor millennia, Bahrain was famous for its abundance of fresh water springs, which made a belt of oases across the northern half of the island possible. Natural fertility combined with the favourable situation in the middle of the Arab Gulf made Bahrain a cultural and commercial centre that traded with the cities of Mesopotamia and the IndusValley already in the third millennium BC.Fresh water also played an important part in Bahrain’s ancient religion, as seen from ar chaeological excavations and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets: A magnificent temple of light limestone was built over a spring, and according to old texts, water was the gods’ gift to Bahrain (Dilmun).Although fresh water had an overwhelming importance to a parched desert island, no studies have been directed towards the original ”taming” of the water on Bahrain. Therefore, Moesgård Museum is now beginning to look into the earliest irrigation techniques on the island and their significance to Bahrain’s development.Near the Bahrain village of Barbar, P.V. Glob in 1954 discovered a rise in the landscape, which was excavated during the following years. It turned out that the mound covered three different temples, built on top of and around each other. The Barbar temple was built of whitish ashlars and must have been an impressive structure. It has also gained a special importance in Near East research, as this is the first and only time that the holy spring chamber, the abzu, where the god Enki lived, has been un earthed (fig. 2).On the western side of the Barbar temple a monumental flight of steps, flank ed on both sides by cult figures, was leading through a portal to an underground chamber with a fresh water spring. In the beautiful ashlar walls of this chamber were three openings, through which water flowed. Only the eastern out flow was investigated, as the outside of an underground stonebuilt aqueduct was found a few metres from the spring chamber.East of the temple another underground aqueduct was followed along a 16-m distance. It was excavated at two points and turned out almost to have the height of a man. The floor was covered with large stones with a carved canal and the ceiling was built of equally large stones (fig. 3).No doubt the spring chamber was a central part of the temple, charge d with great importance. However, the function of the aqueducts is still unknown. It seems obvious that they were to lead the fresh water away from the source chamber, but was this part of a completely ritual arrangement, or was the purpose to transport the water to the gardens to be used for irrigation?To clarify these questions we will try to trace the continuations of the aqueducts using different tracing techniques such as georadar and magnetometer. As the sur roundings of Barbar temple are covered by several metres of shifting sand, the possibilities of following the aqueducts are fine, if necessary even across a great distance, and if they turn out to lead to old gardens, then these may be exposed under the sand.Underground water canals of a similar construction, drawing water from springs or subsoil water, have been used until modern times on Bahrain, and they are still in use in Iran and on the Arabian Peninsula, especially in Oman, where they supply the gardens with water for irrigation. They are called qanats and are usually considered built by the Persians during periods when the Achaemenid or Sassanid kings controlled Arabia (c. 500 BC-c. 600 AD). However, new excavation results from the Oman peninsula indicate that at least some canal systems date from c. 1000 BC. It is therefore of utmost interest if similar sophisticated transportation systems for water on Bahrain may be proven to date from the time of the erection of the Barbar temple, i.e. c. 2000 BC.The finds suggest that around this time Bahrain underwent dramatic changes. From being a thinly inhabited island during most of the 3rd millennium BC, the northern part of the island suddenly had extensive burial grounds, showing a rapid increase in population. At the same time the major settlement on the northern coast was fortified, temples like the one at Barbar were built, and gigantic ”royal mounds” were built in the middle of the island – all pointing at a hierarchic society coming into existence.This fast social development of Dilmun must have parallelled efficiency in the exploitation of fresh water resources for farm ing to supply a growing population with the basic food, and perhaps this explains the aqueducts by Barbar?The planned excavatio ns will be carried out in close cooperation between the National Museum of Bahrain and Aarhus University, and they are supported financially by the Carlsberg Foundation and Bahrain’s Cabinet and Information Ministry.The music of BahrainThe composer Poul Rovsing Olsen (1922-1982) was inspired by Arab and Indian music, and he spent a large part of his life studying traditional music in the countries along the Arabian Gulf. In 1958 and 1962-63 he took part in P.V. Glob’s expeditions to Arabia as a music ethnologist and in the 1970s he organised stays of long duration here (fig. 4).The background for his musical fieldwork was the rapid development, which the oil finds in the Gulf countries had started. The local folk music would clearly disappear with the trades and traditions with which they were connected.” If no one goes pearl fishing anymore, then no one will need the work songs connected to this work. And if no one marries according to tradition with festivity lasting three or sometimes five days, then no one will need the old wedding songs anymore’’.It was thus in the last moment that Rovsing Olsen recorded the pearl fishers’ concerts, the seamen’s shanties, the bedouin war songs, the wedding music, the festival music etc. on his tape recorder. By doing this he saved a unique collection of song and music, which is now stored in the Dansk Folkemindesamling in Copenhagen. It comprises around 150 tapes and more than 700 pieces of music. The instruments are to be found at the Musikhistorisk Museum and Moesgård Museum (fig. 5).During the 1960s and 1970s Rovsing Olsen published a number of smaller studies on music from the Arabian Gulf, which established his name as the greatest connoisseur of music from this area – a reputation, which the twenty years that have passed since his death have not shaken. Rovsing Olsen also published an LP record with pearl fisher music, and with the music ethnologist Jean Jenkins from the Horniman Museum in London he published six LP records, Music in the World of Islam with seven numbers from the Arabian Gulf, and the book Music and Musical Instruments in the World of Islam (London 1976).Shortly before his death, Rovsing Olsen finished a comprehensive manuscript in English, Music in Bahrain, where he summed up nearly twenty-five years of studies into folk music along the Arabian Gulf, with the main emphasis on Bahrain. The manuscript has eleven chapters, and after a short introduction Rovsing Olsen deals with musical instruments, lute music, war and honour songs of the bedouins, festivity dance, working songs and concerts of the pearl fishers, music influenced front Africa, double clarinet and bag pipe music, religious songs and women’s songs. Of these, eighty-four selected pieces of music are reproduced with notes and commented in the text. A large selection of this music will be published on three CDs to go with the book.This work has been anticipated with great expectation by music ethnologists and connoisseurs of Arabic folk music, and in agreement with Rovsing Olsen’s widow, Louise Lerche-Lerchenborg and Dansk Folkemindesamling, Moesgård Museum is presently working on publishing the work.The publication is managed by the Jutland Archaeological Society and Aarhus University Press will manage the distribution. The Carlsberg Foundation and Bahrain’s Cabinet and Information Ministry will cover the editing and printing expenses.The publication of the book and the CDs on the music of Bahrain will be celebrated at a festivity on Bahrain, at the next annual cultural festival, the theme of which will be ”mutual inspiration across cultural borders” with a focus on Rovsing Olsen. In this context, Den Danske Trio Anette Slaato will perform A Dream in Violet, a music piece influenced by Arabic music. On the same occasion singers and musicians will present the traditional pearl fishers’ music from Bahrain. In connection with the concert on Bahrain, a major tour has been planned in cooperation with The Danish Institute in Damascus, where the Danish musicians will also perform in Damascus and Beirut and give ”masterclasses” in chamber music on the local music academies. The concert tour is being organised by Louise Lerche-Lerchenborg, who initiated one of the most important Danish musical events, the Lerchenborg Musical Days,in 1963 and organised them for thirty years.ConclusionPride of concerted effort is not a special Danish national sport. However,the achievements in the Arabian Gulf made by the Danish expeditions from the Århus museum are recognised everywhere. It is only fair to use this jubilee volume for drawing attention to the fact that the journal Kuml and the publications of the Jutland Archaeological Society were the instruments through which the epoch-making investigations in the Gulf were nude public nationally and internationally.Finally, the cooperationon interesting tasks between Moesgård Museum and the countries along the Arabian Gulf will continue. In the future, Kuml will again be reporting on new excavations in the palm shadows and eventually, larger investigation s will no doubt find their way to the society’s comprehensive volumes.Flemming HøjlundMoesgård MuseumTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle
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Mishra, Sarbesh, e Malay Kumar Mohanty. "FINANCING AND RISK MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES IN GREEN FIELD PROJECTS UNDER PUBLIC, PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP (PPP) MODEL: A CASE STUDY OF RAJIV GANDHI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (RGIA) LTD, HYDERABAD." Interscience Management Review, gennaio 2009, 22–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.47893/imr.2009.1021.

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PPP projects have brought a big change in Indian Infrastructure Industry. There was not only a dramatic turnaround in the time taken for completion of projects but also a big change in quality of the projects. This change was because of involvement of a private player in the project. Though projects in the range of 500 crores, 1000 crores or even more than that was earlier handled by government departments but they always lacked with timely delivery and quality of projects. This was because of lack of planning and even because of lack of modern day tracking of projects. Now this gap was merged with the entry of a private player. There are glaring examples that this model has been a big success, be it RGIA of Hyderabad or modernization of Delhi and Mumbai airports, each of these projects has been a big success. It’s not only airport projects that has become successful even there are a lot of projects in road sector, port sector which have been completed in this model. The major issue with big infrastructure projects has been financing of these projects. Since in a PPP model private player also takes up the responsibility of financing the project with adequate support from government overall funding of the project becomes easier. But the problem does not seem to end over here because the private player which takes the responsibility of financing the project during initial stage also bears the risk of revenue generation which might be a big concern during operational phase. If the actual revenue falls short of projected revenue than the ROI will have a severe impact. In order to counteract these problems associated with various PPP models several risk mitigation strategies are adopted to safeguard both the parties in a better way. Though India has taken a huge step forward by awarding several projects in this PPP model still there is a long way to go in terms understanding the pros and cons of PPP model and how well it can be adopted in Indian scenario.
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Martínez, Francisco. "Reality Holes. Undesigning the 20th Century in Eastern Estonia". Revista Diseña, 22 ottobre 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.7764/disena.23.article.4.

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Through the study of mining holes that have appeared in Kohtla-Järve, this article shows how repair work can take on a political charge by re-ordering the social and materializing different dimensions of care. In this regard, the investigation of situated forms of material failure leads us to reconsider who has, or should have, the responsibility to fix what is broken, and how repair is linked to questions of future-making and care. The conclusion points, first, to the fact that repairing entails facing the harmful consequences of past design decisions, long after; second, that, when projecting post-extractivist futures, we must confront the need to undo the pernicious elements of modernity; and third, that critiques about the social and ecological cost of infrastructural failure must include the perspectives of local population.
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Polycarpou, Georgia, e Spiros S. Skourtis. "Intra-strand phosphate-mediated pathways in microsolvated double-stranded DNA". Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 7 giugno 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-648x/ad559d.

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Abstract We argue that dry DNA charge transport in molecular junctions, over distances of tens of nanometers, can take place via independent intra-strand pathways involving the phosphate groups. Such pathways explain recent single-molecule experiments that compare currents in intact and nicked 100 base-pair double-stranded DNA. We explore the conditions that favor independent intra-strand transport channels with the participation of the phosphate groups, as opposed to purely base mediated transport involving the pi-stacked bases and inter-strand transitions. Our computations demonstrate how long-distance transport pathways in DNA are tuned by the degree of solvation, which affects the level of dynamic disorder in the pi-stacking, and the energies of phosphate-group molecular orbitals.
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Abd El Baset Abd El Halim, Ahmed, Ehab Hassan Eid Bayoumi, Walid El-Khattam e Amr Mohamed Ibrahim. "Effect of Fast Charging on Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Review". SAE International Journal of Electrified Vehicles 12, n. 3 (4 aprile 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.4271/14-12-03-0018.

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<div>In recent years we have seen a dramatic shift toward the use of lithium-ion batteries (LIB) in a variety of applications, including portable electronics, electric vehicles (EVs), and grid storage. Even though more and more car companies are making electric models, people still worry about how far the batteries will go and how long it will take to charge them. It is common knowledge that the high currents that are necessary to quicken the charging process also lower the energy efficiency of the battery and cause it to lose capacity and power more quickly. We need an understanding of atoms and systems to better comprehend fast charging (FC) and enhance its effectiveness. These difficulties are discussed in detail in this work, which examines the literature on physical phenomena limiting battery charging speeds as well as the degradation mechanisms that typically occur while charging at high currents. Special consideration is given to charging at low temperatures. The consequences for safety are investigated, including the possible impact that rapid charging could have on the characteristics of thermal runaway (TR). In conclusion, knowledge gaps are analyzed, and recommendations are made as regards the path that subsequent studies should take. Furthermore, there is a need to give more attention to creating dependable onboard methods for detecting lithium plating (LP) and mechanical damage. It has been observed that robust charge optimization processes based on models are required to ensure faster charging in any environment. Thermal management strategies to both cool batteries while these are being charged and heat them up when these are cold are important, and a lot of attention is paid to methods that can do both quickly and well.</div>
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Stanojević Gocić, Maja, e Anita Jankovic. "INVESTIGATING LEARNER AUTONOMY OF EFL AND ESP STUDENTS AT THE TERTIARY LEVEL: CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY". Journal of Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 4 gennaio 2022, 601. http://dx.doi.org/10.22190/jtesap2104601s.

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Learner autonomy is a concept developed to reiterate the need for life-long learning that goes beyond the prescribed curriculum and institutional settings. In addition, learner-centered approach shifts the burden of responsibility from teachers to learners, as learners are now obliged to take charge of their learning. In that respect, students at the tertiary level of education are expected to know how to learn, inclusive of what to learn and where to learn. In other words, they should be trained to organize their own learning, control and monitor their progress, and evaluate the results, whereas the current educational settings should be given the task to contribute to the development of learner autonomy that paves the way for life-long education. The participants in the research are EFL students from the department of English Language and Literature at Faculty of Philosophy, University of Priština in Kosovska Mitrovica, and ESP students from the Academy of Technical and Pre-School Vocational Studies Niš, Department Vranje. A Learner Autonomy Questionnaire developed by Zhang and Li (2004) was administered to measure students’ learner autonomy level. The aim of the paper is not only to outline the significance of taking control of one’s learning, but also to use certain tools in the EFL classroom that contribute to the process of building learner autonomy, as its pedagogical implication, including language learning strategies, project-based tasks, reflective journals, etc.
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Mitra, Sushmita. "Feasability of Open Schooling in Disturbed Areas: A Case Study of Afghanistan". Journal of Learning for Development 1, n. 2 (13 marzo 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v1i2.13.

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Most countries have enshrined right to education in their constitution but in reality to fulfil this commitment countries do face a number of challenges. And this is true with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which unlike other countries has a long history of war, conflicts, insurgency and hence insecurity. Although there have been positive steps towards rehabilitation of the education system and signs of promises can be seen in its achievements, access to quality education remains inequitable particularly across the provinces as a result of remoteness and geographical isolation, harsh climate, insecurity which impedes growth and sustainability of access points, high gender gap in all sectors of education particularly from lower secondary stage to higher stages of education, poor infrastructure prevalent in most schools, untrained teachers and low number of female teachers affecting participation, retention and continuity of studies.This paper highlights the current school educational status in Afghanistan to reveal the daunting challenges still existing to confront for the country to achieve its constitutional goals. It will also points out how Open schooling system can take charge of the challenges in Afghanistan to provide a channel of educational opportunities to those who cannot and do not go to school particularly the girls and women. (Note:This article was orginally presented in: The International Conference on Education for All: Role of Open Schooling, 13th -15th March 2013, New Delhi)
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"A Study on Impact of Intangible Resources on a Company Profitability with Reference of Tata Motors". INTERANTIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT 08, n. 06 (22 giugno 2024): 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.55041/ijsrem36015.

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Intangible resources are a key component of a contemporary business strategy and have a substantial impact on a company’s profitability. Intangible resources, which include human capital, organisational culture, intellectual property, and brand equity, are less measureable and less visible than tangible assets, which include things like building, machinery, and inventories. Even though they are difficult to measure, intangible are extremely valuable and and have a significant impact on a company’s ability to innovate, gain a competitive edge, and achieve long-term success. One of the most important intangible resources for firms is intellectual property. Tread secrets, copyright, patents, and trademarks are important tools that protect a business inventions, goods, and brands from imitation or unauthorised use by rivals. Businesses devote significant funds to research and development in order to produce intellectual property that can support their profitability and place in the market. Pharmaceutical corporation, for example, mostly rely on patents to safeguard the formulas of their drugs. By obtaining exclusive rights to promote and sell their products, they can earn enormous profits. Furthermore, it becomes equity is a crucial intangible asset that directly affects a business profitability. Strong brand foster consumer preference, loyalty, and trust, which helps business command higher pricing and take market share even in highly competitive environments. Customer will pay more for brand like Tata, Honda, roll Royce because of their reputation, perceived, quality, and emotional appeal. These companies are prime of how brand equity can boost profitability. Marketing, campaigns, sponsorships, and customer interaction programmes are examples of effective brand management tactics that boost brand equity and, in turn, profitability. Human capital is another essential intangible resources, it includes the knowledge, abilities and experience of an organisation’s personnel. Organisations understand the critical role that skilled workers play in fostering innovation, productivity, and profitability in todays knowledge based economy. Investing in staff training, development and retention programmes is essential to building a high performance culture and preserving human capital. In order to attract and retain top talent and ultimately increase their profitability through increased employee productive and innovation capabilities, companies such as google and Microsoft place a high priority competitive compensation packages, opportunities for career advancement, and a welcoming work environment. A company’s profitability is also greatly impacted by other intangible resources such as its relationship with customer, its capacity for innovation and its organisational agility. Maintaining revenue streams and increasing profitability require building long-term client relationship based on satisfaction, loyalty, and trust. Businesses improve customer Experience and lifetime value by using customer data and analytics to personalised goods, service and marketing initiatives. Comparably, companies with innovation capabilities can launch new goods, services or procedures that outperform rivals and adapt to changing consumer demands, resulting in higher profits and revenue maintaining competitiveness nad grabbing new chances in fast paced business context require organisational agility, which is defined as the capacity to quickly adjust to shifting market condition, technology breakthroughs, and competitive pressures. Business with an innovation, adaptability, and continuous improvement culture are better equipped to handle ambiguity and produce lon-term, sustainable revenue. Furthermore, comprehending how tangible and intangible resources interact is essential to appreciation how they affect a company overall profitability. Intangible resources boost a company value proposition, competitiveness in the market, and differentiation while tangible assets provide the framework for operations and growth. For example, a modern machinery can help manufacturing companies operate more efficiently and save money, but the real power comes for a company’s intellectual property, brand equity, and human capital because these assets allow them to innovate, make one of a kind product, charge premium prices, and ultimately increase profitability, in order to maximise profitability and shareholder value, businesses must embrace a comprehensive approach to resources management, identity the synergies between tangible and intangible assets and utilising them to all potential.
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Chesher, Chris. "Mining Robotics and Media Change". M/C Journal 16, n. 2 (8 marzo 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.626.

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Introduction Almost all industries in Australia today have adopted digital media in some way. However, uses in large scale activities such as mining may seem to be different from others. This article looks at mining practices with a media studies approach, and concludes that, just as many other industries, mining and media have converged. Many Australian mine sites are adopting new media for communication and control to manage communication, explore for ore bodies, simulate forces, automate drilling, keep records, and make transport and command robotic. Beyond sharing similar digital devices for communication and computation, new media in mining employ characteristic digital media operations, such as numerical operation, automation and managed variability. This article examines the implications of finding that some of the most material practices have become mediated by new media. Mining has become increasingly mediated through new media technologies similar to GPS, visualisation, game remote operation, similar to those adopted in consumer home and mobile digital media. The growing and diversified adoption of digital media championed by companies like Rio Tinto aims not only ‘improve’ mining, but to change it. Through remediating practices of digital mining, new media have become integral powerful tools in prospective, real time and analytical environments. This paper draws on two well-known case studies of mines in the Pilbara and Western NSW. These have been documented in press releases and media reports as representing changes in media and mining. First, the West Angelas mines in the Pilbara is an open cut iron ore mine introducing automation and remote operation. This mine is located in the remote Pilbara, and is notable for being operated remotely from a control centre 2000km away, near Perth Airport, WA. A growing fleet of Komatsu 930E haul trucks, which can drive autonomously, traverses the site. Fitted with radars, lasers and GPS, these enormous vehicles navigate through the open pit mine with no direct human control. Introducing these innovations to mine sites become more viable after iron ore mining became increasingly profitable in the mid-2000s. A boom in steel building in China drove unprecedented demand. This growing income coincided with a change in public rhetoric from companies like Rio Tinto. They pointed towards substantial investments in research, infrastructure, and accelerated introduction of new media technologies into mining practices. Rio Tinto trademarked the term ‘Mine of the future’ (US Federal News Service 1), and publicised their ambitious project for renewal of mining practice, including digital media. More recently, prices have been more volatile. The second case study site is a copper and gold underground mine at Northparkes in Western NSW. Northparkes uses substantial sensing and control, as well as hybrid autonomous and remote operated vehicles. The use of digital media begins with prospecting, and through to logistics of transportation. Engineers place explosives in optimal positions using computer modelling of the underground rock formations. They make heavy use of software to coordinate layer-by-layer use of explosives in this advanced ‘box cut’ mine. After explosives disrupt the rock layer a kilometre underground, another specialised vehicle collects and carries the ore to the surface. The Sandvik loader-hauler-dumper (LHD) can be driven conventionally by a driver, but it can also travel autonomously in and out of the mine without a direct operator. Once it reaches a collection point, where the broken up ore has accumulated, a user of the surface can change the media mode to telepresence. The human operator then takes control using something like a games controller and multiple screens. The remote operator controls the LHD to fill the scoop with ore. The fully-loaded LHD backs up, and returns autonomously using laser senses to follow a trail to the next drop off point. The LHD has become a powerful mediator, reconfiguring technical, material and social practices throughout the mine. The Meanings of Mining and Media Are Converging Until recently, mining and media typically operated ontologically separately. The media, such as newspapers and television, often tell stories about mining, following regular narrative scripts. There are controversies and conflicts, narratives of ecological crises, and the economics of national benefit. There are heroic and tragic stories such as the Beaconsfield mine collapse (Clark). There are new industry policies (Middelbeek), which are politically fraught because of the lobbying power of miners. Almost completely separately, workers in mines were consumers of media, from news to entertainment. These media practices, while important in their own right, tell nothing of the approaching changes in many other sectors of work and everyday life. It is somewhat unusual for a media studies scholar to study mine sites. Mine sites are most commonly studied by Engineering (Bellamy & Pravica), Business and labour and cultural histories (McDonald, Mayes & Pini). Until recently, media scholarship on mining has related to media institutions, such as newspapers, broadcasters and websites, and their audiences. As digital media have proliferated, the phenomena that can be considered as media phenomena has changed. This article, pointing to the growing roles of media technologies, observes the growing importance that media, in these terms, have in the rapidly changing domain of mining. Another meaning for ‘media’ studies, from cybernetics, is that a medium is any technology that translates perception, makes interpretations, and performs expressions. This meaning is more abstract, operating with a broader definition of media — not only those institutionalised as newspapers or radio stations. It is well known that computer-based media have become ubiquitous in culture. This is true in particular within the mining company’s higher ranks. Rio Tinto’s ambitious 2010 ‘Mine of the Future’ (Fisher & Schnittger, 2) program was premised on an awareness that engineers, middle managers and senior staff were already highly computer literate. It is worth remembering that such competency was relatively uncommon until the late 1980s. The meanings of digital media have been shifting for many years, as computers become experienced more as everyday personal artefacts, and less as remote information systems. Their value has always been held with some ambivalence. Zuboff’s (387-414) picture of loss, intimidation and resistance to new information technologies in the 1980s seems to have dissipated by 2011. More than simply being accepted begrudgingly, the PC platform (and variants) has become a ubiquitous platform, a lingua franca for information workers. It became an intimate companion for many professions, and in many homes. It was an inexpensive, versatile and generalised convergent medium for communication and control. And yet, writers such as Gregg observe, the flexibility of networked digital work imposes upon many workers ‘unlimited work’. The office boundaries of the office wall break down, for better or worse. Emails, utility and other work-related behaviours increasingly encroach onto domestic and public space and time. Its very attractiveness to users has tied them to these artefacts. The trail that leads the media studies discipline down the digital mine shaft has been cleared by recent work in media archaeology (Parikka), platform studies (Middelbeek; Montfort & Bogost; Maher) and new media (Manovich). Each of these redefined Media Studies practices addresses the need to diversify the field’s attention and methods. It must look at more specific, less conventional and more complex media formations. Mobile media and games (both computer-based) have turned out to be quite different from traditional media (Hjorth; Goggin). Kirschenbaum’s literary study of hard drives and digital fiction moves from materiality to aesthetics. In my study of digital mining, I present a reconfigured media studies, after the authors, that reveals heterogeneous media configurations, deserving new attention to materiality. This article also draws from the actor network theory approach and terminology (Latour). The uses of media / control / communications in the mining industry are very complex, and remain under constant development. Media such as robotics, computer modelling, remote operation and so on are bound together into complex practices. Each mine site is different — geologically, politically, and economically. Mines are subject to local and remote disasters. Mine tunnels and global prices can collapse, rendering active sites uneconomical overnight. Many technologies are still under development — including Northparkes and West Angelas. Both these sites are notable for their significant use of autonomous vehicles and remote operated vehicles. There is no doubt that the digital technologies modulate all manner of the mining processes: from rocks and mechanical devices to human actors. Each of these actors present different forms of collusion and opposition. Within a mining operation, the budgets for computerised and even robotic systems are relatively modest for their expected return. Deep in a mine, we can still see media convergence at work. Convergence refers to processes whereby previously diverse practices in media have taken on similar devices and techniques. While high-end PCs in mining, running simulators; control data systems; visualisation; telepresence, and so on may be high performance, ruggedised devices, they still share a common platform to the desktop PC. Conceptual resources developed in Media Ecology, New Media Studies, and the Digital Humanities can now inform readings of mining practices, even if their applications differ dramatically in size, reliability and cost. It is not entirely surprising that some observations by new media theorists about entertainment and media applications can also relate to features of mining technologies. Manovich argues that numerical representation is a distinctive feature of new media. Numbers have always already been key to mining engineering. However, computers visualise numerical fields in simulations that extend out of the minds of the calculators, and into visual and even haptic spaces. Specialists in geology, explosives, mechanical apparatuses, and so on, can use plaftorms that are common to everyday media. As the significance of numbers is extended by computers in the field, more and more diverse sources of data provide apparently consistent and seamless images of multiple fields of knowledge. Another feature that Manovich identifies in new media is the capacity for automation of media operations. Automation of many processes in mechanical domains clearly occurred long before industrial technologies were ported into new media. The difference with new media in mine sites is that robotic systems must vary their performance according to feedback from their extra-system environments. For our purposes, the haul trucks in WA are software-controlled devices that already qualify as robots. They sense, interpret and act in the world based on their surroundings. They evaluate multiple factors, including the sensors, GPS signals, operator instructions and so on. They can repeat the path, by sensing the differences, day after day, even if the weather changes, the track wears away or the instructions from base change. Automation compensates for differences within complex and changing environments. Automation of an open-pit mine haulage system… provides more consistent and efficient operation of mining equipment, it removes workers from potential danger, it reduces fuel consumption significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and it can help optimize vehicle repairs and equipment replacement because of more-predictable and better-controlled maintenance. (Parreire and Meech 1-13) Material components in physical mines tend to become modular and variable, as their physical shape lines up with the logic of another of Manovich’s new media themes, variability. Automatic systems also make obsolete human drivers, who previously handled those environmental variations, for better or for worse, through the dangerous, dull and dirty spaces of the mine. Drivers’ capacity to control repeat trips is no longer needed. The Komatsu driverless truck, introduced to the WA iron ore mines from 2008, proved itself to be almost as quick as human drivers at many tasks. But the driverless trucks have deeper advantages: they can run 23 hours each day with no shift breaks; they drive more cautiously and wear the equipment less than human drivers. There is no need to put up workers and their families up in town. The benefit most often mentioned is safety: even the worst accident won’t produce injuries to drivers. The other advantage less mentioned is that autonomous trucks don’t strike. Meanwhile, managers of human labour also need to adopt certain strategies of modulation to support the needs and expectations of their workers. Mobile phones, televisions and radio are popular modes of connecting workers to their loved ones, particularly in the remote and harsh West Angelas site. One solution — regular fly-in-fly out shifts — tends also to be alienating for workers and locals (Cheshire; Storey; Tonts). As with any operations, the cost of maintaining a safe and comfortable environment for workers requires trade-offs. Companies face risks from mobile phones, leaking computer networks, and espionage that expose the site to security risks. Because of such risks, miners tend be subject to disciplinary regimes. It is common to test alcohol and drug levels. There was some resistance from workers, who refused to change to saliva testing from urine testing (Latimer). Contesting these machines places the medium, in a different sense, at the centre of regulation of the workers’ bodies. In Northparkes, the solution of hybrid autonomous and remote operation is also a solution for modulating labour. It is safer and more comfortable, while also being more efficient, as one experienced driver can control three trucks at a time. This more complex mode of mediation is necessary because underground mines are more complex in geology, and working environments to suit full autonomy. These variations provide different relationships between operators and machines. The operator uses a games controller, and watches four video views from the cabin to make the vehicle fill the bucket with ore (Northparkes Mines, 9). Again, media have become a pivotal element in the mining assemblage. This combines the safety and comfort of autonomous operation (helping to retain staff) with the required use of human sensorimotor dexterity. Mine systems deserve attention from media studies because sites are combining large scale physical complexity with increasingly sophisticated computing. The conventional pictures of mining and media rarely address the specificity of subjective and artefactual encounters in and around mine sites. Any research on mining communication is typically within the instrumental frames of engineering (Duff et al.). Some of the developments in mechanical systems have contributed to efficiency and safety of many mines: larger trucks, more rock crushers, and so on. However, the single most powerful influence on mining has been adopting digital media to control, integrate and mining systems. Rio Tinto’s transformative agenda document is outlined in its high profile ‘Mine of the Future’ agenda (US Federal News Service). The media to which I refer are not only those in popular culture, but also those with digital control and communications systems used internally within mines and supply chains. The global mining industry began adopting digital communication automation (somewhat) systematically only in the 1980s. Mining companies hesitated to adopt digital media because the fundamentals of mining are so risky and bound to standard procedures. Large scale material operations, extracting and processing minerals from under the ground: hardly to be an appropriate space for delicate digital electronics. Mining is also exposed to volatile economic conditions, so investing in anything major can be unattractive. High technology perhaps contradicts an industry ethos of risk-taking and masculinity. Digital media became domesticated, and familiar to a new generation of formally educated engineers for whom databases and algorithms (Manovich) were second nature. Digital systems become simultaneously controllers of objects, and mediators of meanings and relationships. They control movements, and express communications. Computers slide from using meanings to invoking direct actions over objects in the world. Even on an everyday scale, computer operations often control physical processes. Anti-lock Braking Systems regulate a vehicle’s braking pressure to avoid the danger when wheels lock-up. Or another example, is the ATM, which involves both symbolic interactions, and also exchange of physical objects. These operations are examples of the ‘asignifying semiotic’ (Guattari), in which meanings and non-meanings interact. There is no operation essential distinction between media- and non-media digital operations. Which are symbolic, attached or non-consequential is not clear. This trend towards using computation for both meanings and actions has accelerated since 2000. Mines of the Future Beyond a relatively standard set of office and communications software, many fields, including mining, have adopted specialised packages for their domains. In 3D design, it is AutoCAD. In hard sciences, it is custom modelling. In audiovisual production, it may be Apple and Adobe products. Some platforms define their subjectivity, professional identity and practices around these platforms. This platform orientation is apparent in areas of mining, so that applications such as the Gemcom, Rockware, Geological Database and Resource Estimation Modelling from Micromine; geology/mine design software from Runge, Minemap; and mine production data management software from Corvus. However, software is only a small proportion of overall costs in the industry. Agents in mining demand solutions to peculiar problems and requirements. They are bound by their enormous scale; physical risks of environments, explosive and moving elements; need to negotiate constant change, as mining literally takes the ground from under itself; the need to incorporate geological patterns; and the importance of logistics. When digital media are the solution, there can be what is perceived as rapid gains, including greater capacities for surveillance and control. Digital media do not provide more force. Instead, they modulate the direction, speed and timing of activities. It is not a complete solution, because too many uncontrolled elements are at play. Instead, there are moment and situations when the degree of control refigures the work that can be done. Conclusions In this article I have proposed a new conception of media change, by reading digital innovations in mining practices themselves as media changes. This involved developing an initial reading of the operations of mining as digital media. With this approach, the array of media components extends far beyond the conventional ‘mass media’ of newspapers and television. It offers a more molecular media environment which is increasingly heterogeneous. It sometimes involves materiality on a huge scale, and is sometimes apparently virtual. The mining media event can be a semiotic, a signal, a material entity and so on. It can be a command to a human. It can be a measurement of location, a rock formation, a pressure or an explosion. The mining media event, as discussed above, is subject to Manovich’s principles of media, being numerical, variable and automated. In the mining media event, these principles move from the aesthetic to the instrumental and physical domains of the mine site. The role of new media operates at many levels — from the bottom of the mine site to the cruising altitude of the fly-in-fly out aeroplanes — has motivated significant changes in the Australian industry. When digital media and robotics come into play, they do not so much introduce change, but reintroduce similarity. This inversion of media is less about meaning, and more about local mastery. Media modulation extends the kinds of influence that can be exerted by the actors in control. In these situations, the degrees of control, and of resistance, are yet to be seen. Acknowledgments Thanks to Mining IQ for a researcher's pass at Mining Automation and Communication Conference, Perth in August 2012. References Bellamy, D., and L. Pravica. “Assessing the Impact of Driverless Haul Trucks in Australian Surface Mining.” Resources Policy 2011. Cheshire, L. “A Corporate Responsibility? The Constitution of Fly-In, Fly-Out Mining Companies as Governance Partners in Remote, Mine-Affected Localities.” Journal of Rural Studies 26.1 (2010): 12–20. Clark, N. “Todd and Brant Show PM Beaconsfield's Cage of Hell.” The Mercury, 6 Nov. 2008. Duff, E., C. Caris, A. Bonchis, K. Taylor, C. Gunn, and M. Adcock. “The Development of a Telerobotic Rock Breaker.” CSIRO 2009: 1–10. Fisher, B.S. and S. Schnittger. Autonomous and Remote Operation Technologies in the Mining Industry: Benefits and Costs. BAE Report 12.1 (2012). Goggin, G. Global Mobile Media. London: Routledge, 2010. Gregg, M. Work’s Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Guattari, F. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Hjorth, L. Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile. Taylor & Francis, 2008. Kirschenbaum, M.G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Campridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Latimer, Cole. “Fair Work Appeal May Change Drug Testing on Site.” Mining Australia 2012. 3 May 2013 ‹http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/fair-work-appeal-may-change-drug-testing-on-site›. Latour, B. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maher, J. The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. McDonald, P., R. Mayes, and B. Pini. “Mining Work, Family and Community: A Spatially-Oriented Approach to the Impact of the Ravensthorpe Nickel Mine Closure in Remote Australia.” Journal of Industrial Relations 2012. Middelbeek, E. “Australia Mining Tax Set to Slam Iron Ore Profits.” Metal Bulletin Weekly 2012. Montfort, N., and I. Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Parikka, J. What Is Media Archaeology? London: Polity Press, 2012. Parreira, J., and J. Meech. “Autonomous vs Manual Haulage Trucks — How Mine Simulation Contributes to Future Haulage System Developments.” Paper presented at the CIM Meeting, Vancouver, 2010. 3 May 2013 ‹http://www.infomine.com/library/publications/docs/parreira2010.pdf›. Storey, K. “Fly-In/Fly-Out and Fly-Over: Mining and Regional Development in Western Australia.” Australian Geographer 32.2 (2010): 133–148. Storey, K. “Fly-In/Fly-Out: Implications for Community Sustainability.” Sustainability 2.5 (2010): 1161–1181. 3 May 2013 ‹http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/5/1161›. Takayama, L., W. Ju, and C. Nas. “Beyond Dirty, Dangerous and Dull: What Everyday People Think Robots Should Do.” Paper presented at HRI '08, Amsterdam, 2008. 3 May 2013 ‹http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~wendyju/publications/hri114-takayama.pdf›. Tonts, M. “Labour Market Dynamics in Resource Dependent Regions: An Examination of the Western Australian Goldfields.” Geographical Research 48.2 (2010): 148-165. 3 May 2013 ‹http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2009.00624.x/abstract›. US Federal News Service, Including US State News. “USPTO Issues Trademark: Mine of the Future.” 31 Aug. 2011. Wu, S., H. Han, X. Liu, H. Wang, F. Xue. “Highly Effective Use of Australian Pilbara Blend Lump Ore in a Blast Furnace.” Revue de Métallurgie 107.5 (2010): 187-193. doi:10.1051/metal/2010021. Zuboff, S. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Heinemann Professional, 1988.
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Hunter, John C. "Organic Interfaces; or, How Human Beings Augment Their Digital Devices". M/C Journal 16, n. 6 (7 novembre 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.743.

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Abstract (sommario):
In many ways, computers are becoming invisible and will continue to do so. When we reach into our pockets and pull out our cell phones to find a place to eat or message a friend on Facebook, we are no longer consciously aware that we are interacting with a user experience that has been consciously designed for our computer or device screen—but we are.— Andy Pratt and Jason Nunes, Interactive Design In theory, cell phones and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) are just a means for us to interact with people, businesses, and data sources. They have interfaces and, in a larger sense, are interfaces between their users and the networked world. Every day, people spend more time using them to perform more different tasks and find them more indispensable (Smith). As the epigraph above suggests, however, their omnipresence makes them practically invisible and has all but erased any feelings of awe or mystery that their power once generated. There is both a historical and functional dimension to this situation. In the historical advance of technology, it is part of what Kevin Kelly calls the “technium,” the ever-more complex interactions between advancing technology, our cognitive processes, and the cultural forces in which they are enmeshed; ICTs are measurably getting more powerful as time goes on and are, in this sense, worthy of our admiration (Kelly 11-17). In the functional dimension, on the other hand, many scholars and designers have observed how hard it is to hold on to this feeling of enchantment in our digital devices (Nye 185-226; McCarthy and Wright 192-97). As one study of human-computer interfaces observes “when people let the enchanting object [ICTs] do the emotional work of experience for them . . . what could be enchanting interactivity becomes a paradoxically detached interpassivity” (McCarthy et al. 377). ICTs can be ever more powerful, then, but this power will not necessarily be appreciated by their users. This paper analyzes recent narrative representations of ICT use in spy thrillers, with a particular focus on the canon of James Bond films (a sub-genre with a long-standing and overt fascination with advanced technology, especially ICTs), in order to explore how the banality of ICT technology has become the inescapable accompaniment of its power (Willis; Britton 99-123; 195-219). Among many possible recent examples: recall how Bond uses his ordinary cell phone camera to reveal the membership of the sinister Quantum group at an opera performance in Quantum of Solace; how world-wide video surveillance is depicted as inescapable (and amoral) in The Bourne Legacy; and how the anonymous protagonist of Roman Polanski’s Ghost Writer discovers the vital piece of top secret information that explains the entire film—by searching for it on his laptop via Google. In each of these cases, ICTs are represented as both incredibly powerful and tediously quotidian. More precisely, in each case human users are represented as interfaces between ICTs and their stored knowledge, rather than the reverse. Beginning with an account of how the naturalization of ICTs has changed the perceived relations between technology and its users, this essay argues that the promotional rhetoric of human empowerment and augmentation surrounding ICTs is opposed by a persistent cinematic theme of human subordination to technological needs. The question it seeks to open is why—why do the mainstream cinematic narratives of our culture depict the ICTs that enhance our capacities to know and communicate as something that diminishes rather than augments us? One answer (which can only be provisionally sketched here) is the loss of pleasure. It does not matter whether or not technology augments our capacities if it cannot sustain the fantasy of pleasure and/or enhancement at the same time. Without this fantasy, ICTs are represented as usurping position as the knowing subject and users, in turn, become the media connecting them– even when that user is James Bond. The Rhetoric of Augmentation Until the past five years or so, the technologization of the human mind was almost always represented in popular culture as a threat to humanity—whether it be Ira Levin’s robotic Stepford Wives as the debased expression of male wish-fulfillment (Levin), or Jonathan Demme’s brainwashed assassins with computer chip implants in his remake of The Manchurian Candidate. When Captain Picard, the leader and moral centre of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, is taken over by the Borg (an alien machine race that seeks to absorb other species into its technologized collective mind) in an episode from 1990, it is described as “assimilation” rather than an augmentation. The Borg version of Picard says to his former comrades that “we only wish to raise quality of life, for all species,” and it is a chilling, completely unemotional threat to the survival of our species (“Best of Both Worlds”). By 2012, on the other hand, the very same imagery is being used to sell smart phones by celebrating the technological enhancements that allegedly make us better human beings. In Verizon’s Droid DNA phone promotions, the product is depicted as an artificial heart for its user, one that enhances memory, “neural speed,” and “predictive intelligence” (thanks to Google Now). The tagline for the Verizon ad claims that “It’s not an upgrade to your phone; it’s an upgrade to yourself”, echoing Borg-Picard’s threat but this time as an aspirational promise (“Verizon Commercial”). The same technologization of the mind that was anathema just a few years ago, is now presented as both a desirable consumer goal and a professional necessity—the final close-up of the Verizon artificial heart shows that this 21st century cyborg has to be at his job in 26 minutes; the omnipresence of work in a networked world is here literally taken to heart. There is, notably, no promise of pleasure or liberation anywhere in this advertisement. We are meant to desire this product very much, but solely because it allows us to do more and better work. Not coincidentally, the period that witnessed this inversion in popular culture also saw an exponential increase in the quantity and variety of digitally networked devices in our lives (“Mobile Cellular”) and the emergence of serious cultural, scientific, and philosophical movements exploring the idea of “enhanced” human beings, whether through digital tool use, biomedical prostheses, drugs, or genetic modifications (Buchanan; Savulescu and Bostrom; “Humanity +”). As the material boundaries of the “human” have become more permeable and malleable, and as the technologies that make this possible become everyday objects, our resistance to this possibility has receded. The discourse of the transhuman and extropian is now firmly established as a philosophical possibility (Lilley). Personal augmentation with the promise of pleasure is still, of course, very much present in the presentation of ICTs. Launching the iPad 2 in 2011, the late Steve Jobs described his new product as a “magical and revolutionary device” with an “incredible magical user interface on a much larger canvas with more resources” and gushing that “it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing” (“Apple Special Event”). This is the rhetoric of augmentation through technology and, as in the Verizon ad, it is very careful to position the consumer/user at the centre of the experience. The technology is described as wonderful not just in itself, but also precisely because it gives users “a larger canvas” with which to create. Likewise, the lifelogging movement (which encourages people to use small cameras to record every event of daily life) is at great pains to stress that “you, not your desktop’s hard drive, are the hub of your digital belongings” (Bell and Gemmell 10). But do users experience life with these devices as augmented? Is either the Verizon work cyborg or the iPad user’s singing heart representative of how these devices make us feel? It depends upon the context in which the question is asked. Extensive survey data on cell phone use shows that we are more attached than ever to our phones, that they allow us to be “productive” in otherwise dead times (such as while waiting in queues), and that only a minority of users worry about the negative effects of being “permanently connected” (Smith 9-10). Representations of technological augmentation in 21st century popular cinema, however, offer a very different perspective. Even in James Bond films, which (since Goldfinger in 1964) have been enraptured with technological devices as augmentations for its protagonists and as lures for audiences, digital devices have (in the three most recent films) lost their magic and become banal in the same way as they have in the lives of audience members (Nitins 2010; Nitins 2011; “List of James Bond Gadgets”). Rather than focusing on technological empowerment, the post 2006 Bond films emphasize (1) that ICTs “know” things and that human agents are just the media that connect them together; and (2) that the reciprocal nature of networked ICTs means that we are always visible when we use them; like Verizon phone users, our on-screen heroes have to learn that the same technology that empowers them simultaneously empowers others to know and/or control them. Using examples from the James Bond franchise, the remainder of this paper discusses the simultaneous disenchantment and power of ICT technology in the films as a representative sample of the cultural status of ICTs as a whole. “We don’t go in for that sort of thing any more...” From Goldfinger until the end of Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in 2002, technological devices were an important part of the audience’s pleasure in a Bond film (Willis; Nitins 2011). James Bond’s jetpack in Thunderball, to give one of many examples, is a quasi-magical aid for the hero with literary precursors going back to Aeneas’s golden bough; it is utterly enchanting and, equally importantly, fun. In the most recent Bond film, Skyfall, however, Q, the character who has historically made Bond’s technology, reappears after a two-film hiatus, but in the guise of a computer nerd who openly disdains the pleasures and possibilities of technological augmentation. When Bond complains about receiving only a gun and a radio from him, Q replies: “What did you expect? An exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that sort of thing any more.” Technology is henceforth to be banal and invisible albeit (as the film’s computer hacker villain Silva demonstrates) still incredibly powerful. The film’s pleasures must come from elsewhere. The post-credit sequence in Casino Royale, which involves the pursuit and eventual death of a terrorist bomb-maker, perfectly embodies the diminished importance of human agents as bearers of knowledge. It is bracketed at the beginning by the bomber looking at a text message while under surveillance by Bond and a colleague and at the end by Bond looking at the same message after having killed him. Significantly, the camera angle and setup of both shots make it impossible to distinguish between Bond’s hand and the bomber’s as they see the same piece of information on the same phone. The ideological, legal, racial, and other differences between the two men are erased in pursuit of the data (the name “Ellipsis” and a phone number) that they both covet. As digitally-transmitted data, it is there for anyone, completely unaffected by the moral or legal value attached to its users. Cell phones in these films are, in many ways, better sources of information than their owners—after killing a phone’s owner, his or her network traces can show exactly where s/he has been and to whom s/he has been talking, and this is how Bond proceeds. The bomber’s phone contacts lead Bond to the Bahamas, to the next villain in the chain, whom Bond kills and from whom he obtains another cell phone, which allows the next narrative location to be established (Miami Airport) and the next villain to be located (by calling his cell phone in a crowded room and seeing who answers) (Demetrios). There are no conventional interrogations needed here, because it is the digital devices that are the locus of knowledge rather than people. Even Bond’s lover Vesper Lynd sends her most important message to him (the name and cell phone number of the film’s arch villain) in a posthumous text, rather than in an actual conversation. Cell phones do not enable communication between people; people connect the important information that cell phones hold together. The second manifestation of the disenchantment of ICT technology is the disempowering omnipresence of surveillance. Bond and his colleague are noticed by the bomber when the colleague touches his supposedly invisible communication earpiece. With the audience’s point of view conflated with that of the secret agent, the technology of concealment becomes precisely what reveals the secret agent’s identity in the midst of a chaotic scene in which staying anonymous should be the easiest thing in the world; other villains identify Bond by the same means in a hotel hallway later in the film. While chasing the bomber, Bond is recorded by a surveillance camera in the act of killing him on the grounds of a foreign embassy. The secret agent is, as a result, made into an object of knowledge for the international media, prompting M (Bond’s boss) to exclaim that their political masters “don’t care what we do, they care what we get photographed doing.” Bond is henceforth part of the mediascape, so well known as a spy that he refuses to use the alias that MI6 provides for his climactic encounter with the main villain LeChiffre on the grounds that any well-connected master criminal will know who he is anyway. This can, of course, go both ways: Bond uses the omnipresence of surveillance to find another of his targets by using the security cameras of a casino. This one image contains many layers of reference—Bond the character has found his man; he has also found an iconic image from his own cultural past (the Aston Martin DB V car that is the only clearly delineated object in the frame) that he cannot understand as such because Casino Royale is a “reboot” and he has only just become 007. But the audience knows what it means and can insert this incarnation of James Bond in its historical sequence and enjoy the allusion to a past of which Bond is oblivious. The point is that surveillance is omnipresent, anonymity is impossible, and we are always being watched and interpreted by someone. This is true in the film’s narrative and also in the cultural/historical contexts in which the Bond films operate. It may be better to be the watcher rather than the watched, but we are always already both. By the end of the film, Bond is literally being framed by technological devices and becomes the organic connection between different pieces of technology. The literal centrality of the human agent in these images is not, in this disenchanted landscape, an indication of his importance. The cell phones to which Bond listens in these images connect him (and us) to the past, the back story or context provided by his masters that permits the audience to understand the complex plot that is unfolding before them. The devices at which he looks represent the future, the next situation or person that he must contain. He does not fully understand what is happening, but he is not there to understand – he is there to join the information held in the various devices together, which (in this film) usually means to kill someone. The third image in this sequence is from the final scene of the film, and the assault rifle marks this end—the chain of cell phone messages (direct and indirect) that has driven Casino Royale from its outset has been stopped. The narrative stops with it. Bond’s centrality amid these ICTS and their messages is simultaneously what allows him to complete his mission and what subjects him to their needs. This kind of technological power can be so banal precisely because it has been stripped of pleasure and of any kind of mystique. The conclusion of Skyfall reinforces this by inverting all of the norms that Bond films have created about their climaxes: instead of the technologically-empowered villain’s lair being destroyed, it is Bond’s childhood home that is blown up. Rather than beating the computer hacker at his own game, Bond kills him with a knife in a medieval Scottish church. It could hardly be less hi-tech if it tried, which is precisely the point. What the Bond franchise and the other films mentioned above have shown us, is that we do not rely on ICTs for enchantment any more because they are so powerfully connected to the everyday reality of work and to the loss of privacy that our digital devices exact as the price of their use. The advertising materials that sell them to us have to rely on the rhetoric of augmentation, but these films are signs that we do not experience them as empowering devices any more. The deeper irony is that (for once) the ICT consumer products being advertised to us today really do what their promotional materials claim: they are faster, more powerful, and more widely applicable in our lives than ever before. Without the user fantasy of augmentation, however, this truth has very little power to move us. We depict ourselves as the medium, and it is our digital devices that bear the message.References“Apple Special Event. March 2, 2011.” Apple Events. 21 Sep. 2013 ‹http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1103pijanbdvaaj/event/index.html›. Bell, Gordon, and Jim Gemmell. Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. New York: Dutton, 2009.“The Best of Both Worlds: Part Two.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Dir. Cliff Bole. Paramount, 2013. The Bourne Legacy. Dir. Tony Gilroy. Universal Pictures, 2012. Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Buchanan, Allen. Beyond Humanity: The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement. Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Casino Royale. Dir. Martin Campbell. Columbia Pictures, 2006. “Data’s Day.” Star Trek: The Next Generation. Dir. Robert Wiemer. Burbank, CA: Paramount, 2013. The Ghost Writer. Dir. Roman Polanski. R.P. Productions/France 2 Cinéma, 2010. “Humanity +”. 25 Aug. 2013 ‹http://humanityplus.org›. Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. Introd. Peter Straub. New York: William Morrow, 2002. Lilley, Stephen. Transhumanism and Society: The Social Debate over Human Enhancement. New York: Springer, 2013. “List of James Bond Gadgets.” Wikipedia. 11 Nov. 2013 ‹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_James_Bond_gadgets›. The Manchurian Candidate. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Paramount, 2004. McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. Technology as Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. McCarthy, John, et al. “The Experience of Enchantment in Human–Computer Interaction.” Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10 (2006): 369-78. “Mobile Cellular Subscriptions (per 100 People).” The World Bank. 25 March 2013 ‹http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2›. Nitins, Tanya L. “A Boy and His Toys: Technology and Gadgetry in the James Bond Films.” James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough. Eds. Rob Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield, and Jack Becker. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 445-58. ———. Selling James Bond: Product Placement in the James Bond Films. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Nye, David E. Technology Matters—Questions to Live With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Pratt, Andy, and Jason Nunes Interactive Design: An Introduction to the Theory and Application of User-Centered Design. Beverly, MA: Rockport, 2012. Quantum of Solace. Dir: Marc Foster, Eon Productions, 2008. DVD. Savulescu, Julian, and Nick Bostrom, eds. Human Enhancement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Skyfall. Dir. Sam Mendes. Eon Productions, 2012. Smith, Aaron. The Best and Worst of Mobile Connectivity. Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew Research Center. 25 Aug. 2013 ‹http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Best-Worst-Mobile.aspx›. Thunderball. Dir. Terence Young. Eon Productions, 1965. “Verizon Commercial – Droid DNA ‘Hyper Intelligence’.” 11 April 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYIAaBOb5Bo›. Willis, Martin. “Hard-Wear: The Millenium, Technology, and Brosnan’s Bond.” The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Ed. Christoph Linder. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. 151-65.
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Campanioni, Chris. "How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship". M/C Journal 21, n. 5 (6 dicembre 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1463.

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As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.
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Weiskopf-Ball, Emily. "Experiencing Reality through Cookbooks: How Cookbooks Shape and Reveal Our Identities". M/C Journal 16, n. 3 (23 giugno 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.650.

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Abstract (sommario):
Introduction In October of 2004, La Presse asked its Quebecois reading audience a very simple question: “What is your favourite cookbook and why?” As Marie Marquis reports in her essay “The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes,” “two weeks later, 363 e-mail responses had been received” (214). From the answers, it was clear that despite the increase in television cooking shows, Internet cooking sites, and YouTube how-to videos, cookbooks were not only still being used, but that people had strong allegiances to their favourite ones. Marquis’s essay provides concrete evidence that cookbooks are not meaningless objects. Rather, her use of relevant quotations from the survey proves that they are associated with strong memories and have been used to create bonds between individuals and across generations. Moreover, these quotations reveal that individuals use cookbooks to construct personal narratives that they share with others. In her philosophical analysis of foodmaking as a thoughtful practice, Lisa Heldke helps move the discussion of cooking and, consequently of cookbooks, forward by explaining that the age-old dichotomy between theory and practice merges in food preparation (206). Foodmaking, she explains through her example of kneading bread, requires both a theoretical understanding of what makes bread rise and a practical knowledge of the skill required to achieve the desired results. Much as Susan Leonardi argues that recipes need “a recommendation, a context, a point, a reason-to-be” (340), Heldke advocates in “Recipes for Theory Making” that recipes offer us ideas that we need to either accept or refuse. These ideas include, but are not limited to, what makes a good meal, what it means to eat healthy, what it means to be Italian or vegan. Cookbooks can take many forms. As the cover art from academic documents on the nature, role, and value of cooking and cookbooks clearly demonstrates, a “cookbook” may be an ornate box filled with recipe cards (Floyd and Forster) or may be a bunch of random pieces of paper organised by dividers and held together by a piece of elastic (Tye). The Internet has created many new options for recipe collecting and sharing. Websites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com are open access forums where people can easily upload, download, and bookmark favourite foods. Yet, Laura Shapiro argues in Something from the Oven that the mere presence of a cookbook in one’s home does not mean it is actually used. While “popular cookbooks tell us a great deal about the culinary climate of a given period [...] what they can’t convey is a sense of the day-to-day cookery as it [is] genuinely experienced in the kitchens of real life” (xxi). The same conclusion can be applied to recipe websites. Personalised and family cookbooks are much different and much more telling documents than either unpersonalised printed books or Internet options. Family cookbooks can also take any shape or form but I define them as compilations that have been created by a single person or a small group of individuals as she/he/they evolve over time. They can be handwritten or typed and inserted into either an existing cookbook, scrapbooked, or bound in some other way. The Internet may also help here as bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com allow people to make, and even sell, their own printed books. These can be personalised with pictures and scrapbook-like embellishments. The recipes in these personal collections are influenced by contact with other people as well as printed and online publications. Also impacting these works are individual realities such as gender, race, class, and work. Unfortunately, these documents have not been the focus of much academic attention as food scholars generally analyse the texts within them rather than their practical and actual use. In order to properly understand the value and role of personal and family cookbooks in our daily lives, we must move away from generalisations to specific case studies. Only by looking at people in relationship with them, who are actually using and compiling their own recipe collections or opting instead to turn to either printed books or their computers, can we see the importance and value of family cookbooks. In order to address this methodological problem, this essay analyses a number of cookbook-related experiences that I have witnessed and/or been a part of in my own home. By moving away from the theoretical and focusing on the practical, I aim to advance Heldke’s argument that recipe reading, like foodmaking, is a thoughtful practice with important lessons. Learning to Cook and Learning to Live: What Cookbooks Teach Us Once upon a time, a mother and her two, beautiful daughters decided to make chocolate chip cookies. They took out all the bowls and utensils and ingredients they needed. The mother then plopped the two girls down among all of the paraphernalia on the counter. First, they beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. The house smelled amazing! The mother and her daughters were looking forward to eating the cookies when, all of a sudden, a great big dog showed up at the door. The mother ran outside to shoo the dog home yelling, “Go home, now! Go away!” By the time she got back, the cookies had started to burn and the house stank! The mother and her two daughters took all the cookie-making stuff back out. They threw out the ruined cookies. And they restarted. They beat the butter using their super cool Kitchen Aid mixer. Then they beat in the sugar. Carefully, they cracked and beat in the eggs. Then they dumped in the flour. They dumped in the baking powder. They dumped in the vanilla. And they dumped in the chocolate chips. Together, they rolled the cookies, placed them on a baking sheet, pat them down with a fork, and placed them in a hot oven. This story that my oldest daughter and I invented together goes on to have the cookies ruined by a chatty neighbour before finally finding fruition in a batch of successfully baked cookies. This is a story that we tell together as we get her ready for bed. One person is always the narrator who lists the steps while the other makes the sound effects of the beating mixer and the dumping ingredients. Together, we act out the story by rolling the cookies, patting them, and waving our hands in front of our faces when the burnt cookies have stunk up the house. While she takes great pleasure in its narrative, I take greater pleasure in the fact that, at three years of age, she has a rudimentary understanding of how a basic recipe works. In fact, only a few months ago I observed this mixture of knowledge and skill merge when I had to leave her on the counter while I cleaned up a mess on the floor. By the time I got back to her, she had finished mixing the dry ingredients in with the wet ones. I watched her from across the kitchen as she turned off the Kitchen Aid mixer, slowly spooned the flour mixture into the bowl, and turned the machine back on. She watched the batter mix until the flour had been absorbed and then repeated the process. While I am very thankful that she did not try to add the vanilla or the chocolate chips, this experience essentially proves that one can learn through simple observation and repetition. It is true that she did not have a cookbook in front of her, that she did not know the precise measurements of the ingredients being put into the bowl, and that at her age she would not have been able to make this recipe without my help. However, this examples proves Heldke’s argument that foodmaking is a thoughtful process as it is as much about instinct as it is about following a recipe. Once she is able to read, my daughter will be able to use the instincts that she has developed in her illiterate years to help her better understand written recipes. What is also important to note about this scenario is that I did have a recipe and that I was essentially the one in charge. My culinary instincts are good. I have been baking and cooking since I was a child and it is very much a part of my life. We rarely buy cookies or cakes from the store because we make them from scratch. Yet, I am a working mother who does not spend her days in the kitchen. Thus, my instincts need prompting and guidance from written instructions. Significantly, the handwritten recipe I was using that day comes from the personal cookbook that has been evolving since I left home. In their recent works Eat My Words and Baking as Biography, Janet Theophano and Diane Tye analyse homemade, hand-crafted, and personal cookbooks to show that these texts are the means through which we can understand individuals at a given time and in a given place. Theophano, for example, analyses old cookbooks to understand the impact of social networking in identity making. By looking at the types of recipes and number of people who have written themselves into these women’s books, she shows that cookbook creation has always been a social activity that reveals personal and social identity. In a slightly different way, Tye uses her own mother’s recipes to better understand a person she can no longer talk to. Through recipes, she is able to recreate her deceased mother’s life and thus connect with her on a personal and emotional level. Although academics have traditionally ignored cookbooks as being mundane and unprofessional, the work of these recent critics illustrates the extent to which cookbooks provide an important way of understanding society and people’s places within it. While this essay cannot begin to analyse the large content of my cookbook, this one scenario echoes these recent scholarly claims that personal cookbooks are a significant addition to the academic world and must be read thoughtfully, as Heldke argues, for both the recipes’s theory and for the practical applications and stories embedded within them. In this particular example, Karena and I were making a chocolate a chip cake—a recipe that has been passed down from my Oma. It is a complicated recipe because it requires a weight scale rather than measuring cups and because instructions such as “add enough milk to make a soft dough” are far from precise. The recipe is not just a meaningless entry I found in a random book or on a random website but rather a multilayered narrative and an expression of my personal heritage. As Theophano and Tye have argued, recipes are a way to connect with family, friends, and specific groups of people either still living or long gone. Recipes are a way to create and relive memories. While I am lucky that my Oma is still very much alive, I imagine that I will someday use this recipe as a way to reconnect with her. When I serve this cake to my family members, we will surely be reminded of her. We will wonder where this recipe came from, how it is different from other chocolate chip cake recipes, and where she learned to make it. In fact, the recipe already varies considerably between homes. My Oma makes hers in a round pan, my mother in a loaf pan, and I in cupcake moulds. Each person has a different reason for her choice of presentation that is intrinsic to her reality and communicates a specific part of her identity. Thus by sharing this recipe with my daughter, I am not only ensuring that my memories are being passed on but I am also programming into her characteristics and values such as critical thinking, the worthiness of homemade food, and the importance of family time. Karena does not yet have her own cookbook but her preferences mean that some of the recipes in my collection are made more often than others. My cookbook continues to change and grow as I am currently prioritising foods I know my kids will eat. I am also shopping and surfing for children’s recipe books and websites in order to find kid-friendly meals we can make together. In her analysis of children and adolescent cookbooks published between the 1910s and 1950s, Sherrie Inness demonstrates that cookbooks have not only taught children how to cook, but also how to act. Through the titles and instructions (generally aimed at girls), the recipe choices (fluffy deserts for girls and meat dishes for boys), and the illustrations (of girls cooking and boys eating), these cookbooks have been a medium through which society has taught its youth about their future, gendered roles. Much research by critics such as Laura Shapiro, Sonia Cancian, and Inness, to name but a few, has documented this gendered division of labour in the home. However, the literature does not always reflect reality. As this next example demonstrates, men do cook and they also influence family cookbook creation. A while back, my husband spent quite a bit of time browsing through the World Wide Web to find a good recipe for a venison marinade. As an avid “barbecuer,” he has tried and tested a number of marinades and rubs over the years. Thus he knew what he was looking for in a good recipe. He found one, made it, and it was a hit! Just recently, he tried to find that recipe again. Rather than this being a simple process, after all he knew exactly which recipe he was looking for, it took quite a bit of searching before he found it. This time, he was sure to write it down to avoid having to repeat the frustrating experience. Ironically, when I went to put the written recipe into my personal cookbook, I found that he had, in fact, already copied it out. These two handwritten copies of the same recipe are but one place where my husband “speaks out” from, and claims a place within, what I had always considered “my” cookbook. His taste preferences and preferred cooking style is very different from my own—I would never have considered a venison marinade worth finding never mind copying out. By reading his and my recipes together, one can see an alternative to assumed gender roles in our kitchen. This cookbook proves a practice opposite from the conclusion that women cook to serve men which Inness and others have theorised from the cookbooks they have analysed and forces food and gender critics to reconsider stereotypical dichotomies. Another important example is a recipe that has not actually been written down and inserted into my cookbook but it is one my husband and I both take turns making. Years ago, we had found an excellent bacon-cheese dip online that we never managed to find again. Since then, we have been forced to adlib the recipe and it has, in my opinion, never been as good. Both these Internet-recipe examples illustrate the negative drawbacks to using the Internet to find, and store, recipes. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a book. It changes. Links are sometimes broken. Searches do not always yield the same results. Even with recipe-storing sites such as Allrecipes.com and Cooks.com, one must take the time to impute the information and there is no guarantee that the technology will work. While authors such as Anderson and Wagner bemoan that traditional cookbooks only give one version of most recipes, there are so many recipes online that it is sometimes overwhelming and difficult to make a choice. An amateur cook may find comfort in the illustrations and specific instruction, yet one still needs to either have an instinct for what makes a good recipe or needs to be willing to spend time trying them out. Of course the same can be said of regular cookbooks. Having printed texts in one’s home requires the patience to go through them and still requires a sense of suitability and manageability. In both cases, neither an abundance nor a lack of choice can guarantee results. It is true that both the Internet and printed cookbooks such as The Better Homes and Gardens provide numerous, step-by-step instructions and illustrations to help people learn to make food from scratch. Other encyclopedic volumes such as The Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking, like YouTube, videos break recipes down into simple steps and include visual tools to help a nervous cook. Yet there is a big difference between the theory and the practice. What in theory may appear simple still necessitates practice. A botched recipe can be the result of using different brands of ingredients, tools, or environmental conditions. Only practice can teach people how to make a recipe successfully. Furthermore, it is difficult to create an online cookbook that rivals the malleability of the personal cookbooks. It is true that recipe websites such as Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com do allow a person to store favourite recipes found on their websites. However, unless the submitter takes the time to personalise the content, recipes can lose their ties to their origins. Bookmaking sites such as Blurb.com are attractive options that do allow for personalisation. In her essay “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia,” Sian Supski uses her aunt’s Blurb family cookbook to argue that the marvel of the Internet has ensured that important family food memories will be preserved; yet once printed, even these treasures risk becoming static documents. As Supski goes on to admit, she is a nervous cook and one can conclude that even this though this recipe collection is very special, it will never become personal because she will not add to it or modify the content. As the examples in Theophano's and Tye’s works demonstrate, the personal touches, the added comments, and the handwritten alterations on the actual recipes give people authority, autonomy, and independence. Hardcopies of recipes indicate through their tattered, dog-eared, and stained pages which recipes have been tried and have been considered to be worth keeping. While Internet sites frequently allow people to comment on recipes and so allow cooks to filter their options, commenting is not a requirement and the suggestions left by others do not necessarily reflect personal preferences. Although they do continue a social, recipe-networking trend that Theophano argues has always existed in relation to cookbook creation and personal foodways, once online, their anonymity and lack of personal connection strips them of their true potential. This is also true of printed cookbooks. Even those compiled by celebrity chefs such as Rachel Ray and Jamie Oliver cannot guarantee success as individuals still need to try them. These examples of recipe reading and recipe collecting advance Heldke’s argument that theory and practice blend in this activity. Recipes are not static. They change depending on who makes them, where they come from, and on the conditions under which they are executed. As critics, we need to recognise this blending of theory and practice and read recipe collections with this reality in mind. Conclusion Despite the growing number of blogs and recipe websites now available to the average cook, personal cookbooks are still a more useful and telling way to communicate information about ourselves and our foodways. As this reflection on actual experiences clearly demonstrates, personal cookbooks teach us about more than just food. They allow us to connect to the past in order to better understand who we are today in ways that the Internet and modern technology cannot. Just as cooking combines theory and practice, reading personal and family cookbooks allows critics to see how theories about foodmaking and gender play out in actual kitchens by actual people. The nuanced merging of voices within them illustrates that individuals alter over time as they come into contact with others. While printed cookbooks and online recipe sites do provide their own narrative possibilities, the stories that can be read in personal and family cookbooks prove that reading them is a thoughtful practice worthy of academic attention. References All Recipes.com Canada. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://allrecipes.com›. Anderson, L. V. “Cookbooks Are Headed for Extinction—and That’s OK.” Slate.com 18 Jun. 2012. 24 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/the_future_of_cookbooks_they_ll_go_extinct_and_that_s_ok_.html›. Blurb.ca. 2013. 27 May 2013. ‹http://blurb.ca›. Cancian, Sonia. "'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal." Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Ed. Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, Marlene Epp. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 209–21. Cooks.com Recipe Search. 2013. 24 Apr. 2013. ‹http://www.cooks.com›. Darling, Jennifer Dorland. Ed. The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. Des Moines: Meredith, 1996. Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking. North Vancouver: Whitecap, 2003. Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. The Recipe Reader. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Heldke, Lisa."Foodmaking as a Thoughtful Practice." Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Ed Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke. Indiana UP, 1992. 203–29. ---. “Recipe for Theory Making.” Hypatia 3.2 (1988): 15–29. Inness, Sherrie. Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture. U of Iowa P, 2001. Leonardi, Susan. “Recipes for Reading: Pasta Salad, Lobster à la Riseholme, Key Lime Pie,” PMLA 104.3 (1989): 340–47. Marquis, Marie. "The Cookbooks Quebecers Prefer: More Than Just Recipes." What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History. Ed. Nathalie Cooke. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. 213–27. Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. New York: Viking, 2004. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave MacMillan: New York, 2002. Tye, Diane. Baking As Biography. Canada: McGill-Queen UP, 2010. Wagner, Vivian. “Cookbooks of the Future: Bye, Bye, Index Cards.” E-Commerce Times. Ecommercetimes.com. 20 Nov. 2011. 16 April 2013. ‹http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/73842.html›.
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Rodriguez, Mario George. "“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man". M/C Journal 17, n. 6 (10 ottobre 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.909.

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Abstract (sommario):
Introduction Burning Man (BM) is a festival of art and music that materialises for one week each year in the Nevada desert. It is considered by many to be the world’s largest countercultural event. But what is BM, really? With record attendance of 69,613 in 2013 (Griffith) (the original event in 1986 had twenty), and recent event themes that have engaged with mainstream political themes such as “Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008), can BM still be considered countercultural? Was it ever? In the first part of this article, we define counterculture as a subculture that originates in the hippie movement of 1960s America and the rejection of “mainstream” values associated with post-WWII industrial culture, that aligns itself with environmentalism and ecological consciousness, and that is distinctly anti-consumer (Roszak, Making). Second, we identify BM as an art and music festival that transcends the event to travel with its desert denizens out into the “real world.” In this way, it is also a festival that has countercultural connections. Third, though BM bears some resemblance to counterculture, given that it is founded upon “Radical Self-Reliance”, BM is actually anything but countercultural because it interlocks with the current socioeconomic zeitgeist of neoliberalism, and that reflects a “new individualism” (Elliot & Lemert). BM’s ambition to be a commercial-free zone runs aground against its entanglement with market relations, and BM is also arguably a consumer space. Finally, neoliberal ideology and “new individualism” are encoded in the space of BM at the level of the spectacle (Debord). The Uchronian’s structure from BM 2006 (a cavernous wooden construction nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle”) could be read as one example. However, opportunities for personal transformation and transcendent experience may persist as counterculture moves into a global age. Defining Counterculture To talk about BM as a counterculture, we must first define counterculture. Hebdige provided a useful distinction between subculture and counterculture in an endnote to a discussion of Teds versus Rockers (148). According to Hebdige, what distinguishes counterculture from mere subculture and related styles is its association with a specific era (1967–70), that its adherents tended to hail from educated, middle-class families, and that it is “explicitly political and ideological” and thus more easily “read” by the dominant powers. Finally, it opposes the dominant culture. Counterculture has its roots in “the hippies, the flower children, the yippies” of the 60s. However, perhaps Hebdige’s definition is too narrow; it is more of an instance of counterculture than a definition. A more general definition of counterculture might be a subculture that rejects “mainstream” values, and examples of this have existed throughout time. For example, we might include the 19th century Romantics with their rejection of the Enlightenment and distrust of capitalism (Roszak 1972), or the Beat generation and post-War America (Miller). Perhaps counterculture even requires one to be a criminal: the prominent Beat writer William S. Burroughs shot guns and heroin, was a homosexual, and accidentally shot and killed his wife in a drug haze (Severo). All of these are examples of subcultures that rejected or opposed the mainstream values of the time. But it was Roszak (Making) who originally defined counterculture as the hippie movement of 1960s era college-aged middle-class American youth who revolted against the values and society inherited not only from their parents, but from the “military-industrial complex” itself, which “quite simply was the American political system” (3). Indeed, the 1960s counterculture—what the term “counterculture” has more generally come to mean—was perhaps the most radical expression of humanity ever in its ontological overthrow of industrial culture and all that it implied (and also, Roszak speculates, in so much that it may have been an experiment gone wrong on the part of the American establishment): The Communist and Socialist Left had always been as committed to industrialism as their capitalist foes, never questioning it as an inevitable historical stage. From this viewpoint, all that needed to be debated was the ownership and control of the system. But here was a dissenting movement that yearned for an entirely different quality of life. It was not simply calling the political superstructure into question; with precocious ecological insight, it was challenging the culture of industrial cities on which that superstructure stood. And more troubling still, there were those among the dissenters who questioned the very sanity of that culture. These psychic disaffiliates took off in search of altered states of consciousness that might generate altered states of society. (8) For the purposes of this paper, then, counterculture refers specifically to those cultures that find their roots in the hippie movement of the late 1960s. I embrace both Roszak’s and Hebdige’s definitions of counterculture because they define it as a unique reaction of post-WWII American youth against industrial culture and a rejection of the accompanying values of home, marriage and career. Instead, counterculture embraced ecological awareness, rejected consumption, and even directed itself toward mystical altered states. In the case of the espoused ecological consciousness, that blossomed into the contemporary (increasingly mainstream) environmental movement toward “green” energy. In the case of counterculture, the specific instance really is the definition in this case because the response of postwar youth was so strong and idiosyncratic, and there is overlap between counterculture and the BM community. So what is Burning Man? Defining Burning Man According to the event’s website: Burning Man is an annual event and a thriving year-round culture. The event takes place the week leading up to and including Labor Day, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The Burning Man organization […] creates the infrastructure of Black Rock City, wherein attendees (or “participants”) dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace […] Outside the event, Burning Man’s vibrant year-round culture is growing through the non-profit Burning Man Project, including worldwide Regional Groups and associated non-profits who embody Burning Man’s ethos out in the world. (“What is Burning Man?”) I interpret BM as a massive art festival and party that materialises in the desert once a year to produce one of the largest cities in Nevada, but one with increasingly global reach in which the participants feel compelled to carry the ethos forward into their everyday lives. It is also an event with an increasing number of “regional burns” (Taylor) that have emerged as offshoots of the original. Creator Larry Harvey originally conceived of burning the effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 in honor of the solstice (“Burning Man Timeline”). Twenty people attended the first BM. That figure rapidly rose to 800 by 1990 when for legal reasons it became necessary to relocate to the remote Black Rock desert in Nevada, the largest expanse of flat land in the United States. In the early 90s, when BM had newly relocated and attendees numbered in the low thousands, it was not uncommon for participants to mix drugs, booze, speeding cars and firearms (Bonin) (reminiscent of the outlaw associations of counterculture). As the Internet became popular in the mid-1990s word spread quickly, leading to a surge in the population. By the early 2000s attendance regularly numbered in the tens of thousands and BM had become a global phenomenon. In 2014 the festival turned 28, but it had already been a corporation for nearly two decades before transitioning to a non-profit (“Burning Man Transitions”). Burning Man as Countercultural Event BM has connections to the counterculture, though the organisation is quick to dispel these connections as myths (“Media Myths”). For example, in response to the notion that BM is a “90s Woodstock”, the organisers point out that BM is for all ages and not a concert. Rather, it is a “noncommercial environment” where the participants come to entertain each other, and thus it is “not limited by the conventions of any subculture.” The idea that BM is a “hippie” festival is also a myth, but one with some truth to it: Hippies helped create environmental ethics, founded communes, wore colorful clothing, courted mysticism, and distrusted the modern industrial economy. In some ways, this counterculture bears a resemblance to aspects of Burning Man. Hippie society was also a youth movement that often revolved around drugs, music, and checks from home. Burning Man is about “radical self-reliance”–it is not a youth movement, and it is definitely not a subculture (“Media Myths”). There are some familiar aspects of counterculture here, particularly environmental consciousness, anti-consumer tendencies and mysticism. Yet, looking at the high attendance numbers and the progression of themes in recent years one might speculate that BM is no longer as countercultural as it once was. For instance, psychedelic themes such as “Vault of Heaven” (2004) and “Psyche” (2005) gave way to “The Green Man” (2007) and “American Dream” (2008). Although “Green Man” was an environmental theme it debuted the year after Vice President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) brought the issue of climate change to a mainstream audience. Indeed, as a global, leaderless event with a strong participatory ethos in many respects BM followed suit with the business world, particularly given it was a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) for many years (though it was ahead of the curve): “Capitalism has learned from the counter culture. But this is not news” (Rojek 355). Similarly, just in time for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election the organisational committee decided to juxtapose “the Man” with the American flag. Therefore, there has been an arguable shift toward engagement with mainstream issues and politics in recent years (and away from mysticism). Recent themes are really re-appropriations of mainstream discourses; hence they are “agonistic” readings (Mouffe). Take for example the VoterDrive Bus, an early example of political talk at BM that engaged with mainstream politics. The driver was seven-time BM veteran Corey Mervis (also known as “Misty Mocracy”) (“Jack Rabbit Speaks”). Beginning on 22 July 2004, the VoterDrive Bus wrote the word VOTE in script across the continental United States in the months before the election, stopping in the Black Rock City (BRC) for one week during the BM festival. Four years later the theme “American Dream” would reflect this countercultural re-appropriation of mainstream political themes in the final months leading up to the 2008 Presidential election. In that year, “the Man,” a massive wooden effigy that burns on the last night of the event, stood atop a platform of windows, each inscribed with the flag of a different country. “American Dream” was as politically as it was poetically inspired. Note the agonistic appeal: “This year's art theme is about patriotism—not that kind which freights the nation state with the collective weight of ego, but a patriotism that is based upon a love of country and culture. Leave ideology at home…Ask yourself, instead…What can postmodern America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, yet give to the world?” (“2008 Art Theme: American Dream”). BM has arguably retained its countercultural authenticity despite engagement with mainstream political themes by virtue of such agonistic appeals to “American Dream”, and to “Green Man” which promoted environmental awareness, and which after all started out in the counterculture. I attended BM twice in 2006 and 2007 with “The Zombie Hotel”, one among a thousand camps in the BRC, Nevada (oddly, there were numerous zombie-themed camps). The last year I attended, the festival seemed to have come of age, and 2007 was the first in its history that BM invited corporate presence in the form of green energy companies (and informational kiosks, courtesy of Google) (Taylor). Midway through the week, as I stumbled through the haphazard common area that was The Zombie Hotel hiding from the infernal heat of the desert sun, two twin fighter jets, their paths intertwining, disturbed the sanctity of the clear, blue afternoon sky followed by a collective roar from the city. One can imagine my dismay at rumours that the fighter jets—which I had initially assumed to be some sort of military reconnaissance—were in fact hired by the BM Organizational Committee to trace the event’s symbol in the sky. Speculation would later abound on Tribe.net (“What was up with the fighter jets?”). What had BM become after all? Figure 1: Misty Mocracy & the VoterDrive Bus. Photo: Erick Leskinen (2004). Reproduced with permission. “Radical Self-Reliance”, Neoliberalism and the “New Individualism” Despite overlap with elements of counterculture, there is something quite normative about BM from the standpoint of ideology, and thus “mainstream” in the sense of favouring values associated with what Roszak calls “industrial society”, namely consumption and capitalist labor relations. To understand this, let us examine “The Ten Principles of BM”. These include: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy (“Ten Principles of Burning Man”). These categories speak to BM’s strong connection to the counterculture. For example, “Decommodification” is a rejection of consumerism in favour of a culture of giving; “Immediacy” rejects mediation, and “Participation” stresses transformative change. Many of these categories also evoke political agonism, for example “Radical Inclusion” requires that “anyone may be a part of Burning Man”, and “Radical Self-Expression”, which suggests that no one other than the gift-giver can determine the content of the message. Finally, there are categories that also engage with concepts associated with traditional civil society and democracy, such as “Civic Responsibility”, which refers to the “public welfare”, “Participation”, and “Communal Effort.” Though at first it may seem to connect with countercultural values, upon closer inspection “Radical Self-Reliance” aligns BM with the larger socioeconomic zeitgeist under late-capitalism, subverting its message of “Decommodification.” Here is what it says: “Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.” That message is transformative, even mystical, but it aligns well with a neoliberal ideology and uncertain labor relations under late capitalism. Indeed, Elliot and Lemert explore the psychological impact of a “new individualism”, setting the self in opposition to the incoming forces of globalisation. They address the question of how individuals respond to globalisation, perhaps pathologically. Elliot and Lemert clarify the socio-psychological ramifications of economic fragmentation. They envision this as inextricably caught up with the erosion of personal identity and the necessity to please “self-absorbed others” in a multiplicity of incommensurate realities (20, 21). Individuals are not merely atomised socially but fragmented psychologically, while at the macroscopic level privatisation of the economy spawns this colonisation of the personal Lifeworld, as social things move into the realm of individualised dilemmas (42). It is interesting to note how BM’s principles (in particular “Radical Self-Reliance”) evoke this fracturing of identity as identities and realities multiply in the BRC. Furthermore, the spectre of neoliberal labour conditions on “the Playa” kicks down the door for consumer culture’s entrée. Consumer society “technicises” the project of the self as a series of problems having consumer solutions with reference to expert advice (Slater 86), BM provides that solution in the form of a transformative experience through “Participation”, and acolytes of the BM festival can be said to be deeply invested in the “experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore): “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation” (“Ten Principles”). Yet, while BM rejects consumption as part of “Decommodification”, the event has become something of a playground for new technological elites (with a taste for pink fur and glow tape rather than wine and cheese) with some camps charging as much as US $25,000 in fees per person for the week (most charge $300) (Bilton). BM is gentrifying, or as veteran attendee Tyler Hanson put it, “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society” (quoted in Bilton). Neoliberalism and “new individualism” are all around at BM, and a reading of space and spectacle in the Uchronian structure reveals this encoding. Figure 2: “Message Out of the Future by Night” (also known as “the Belgian Waffle). Photo: Laurent Chavanne (2006). Reproduced with permission. “Long Gone Hippies” Republican tax reformist Grover Norquist made his way to BM for the first time this year, joining the tech elites. He subsequently proclaimed that America had a lot to learn from BM: “The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance” (Norquist). As the population of the BRC surges toward seventy thousand, it may be difficult to call BM a countercultural event any longer. Given parallels between the BM ethos and neoliberal market relations and a “new individualism”, it is hard to deny that BM is deeply intertwined with counterposing forces of globalisation. However, if you ask the participants (and Norquist) they will have a different story: After you buy your ticket to Burning Man to help pay for the infrastructure, and after you pay for your own transportation, food and water, and if you optionally decide to pay to join a camp that provides some services THEN you never have to take your wallet out while at Burning Man. Folks share food, massages, alcohol, swimming pools, trampolines, many experiences. The expenses that occur prior to the festival are very reasonable and it is wonderful to walk around free from shopping or purchasing. Pockets are unnecessary. So are clothes. (Alex & Allyson Grey) Consumerism is a means to an end in an environment where the meanings of civic participation and “giving back” to the counterculture take many forms. Moreover, Thornton argued that the varied definitions of what is “mainstream” among subcultures point more to a complex and multifaceted landscape of subculture than to any coherent agreement as to what “mainstream” actually means (101), and so perhaps our entire discussion of the counterculture/mainstream binary is moot. Perhaps there is something yet to be salvaged in the spaces of participation at BM, some agonistic activity to be harnessed. The fluid spaces of the desert are the loci of community action. Jan Kriekels, founder of the Uchronia Community, holds out some hope. The Belgian based art collective hauled 150 kilometres of lumber to the BRC in the summer of 2006 to construct a freestanding, cavernous structure with a floor space of 60 by 30 metres at its center and a height of 15 metres (they promised a reforestation of the equivalent amount of trees) (Figure 1). “Don’t mistake us for long gone hippies in the desert”, wrote Kriekels in Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community, “we are trying to build a bridge between materialism and spiritualism” (102). The Uchronians announced themselves as not only desert nomads but nomads in time (“U” signifying “nothing” and “chronos” or “time”), their time-traveller personas designed to subvert commodification, their mysterious structure (nicknamed the “Belgian Waffle” by the burners, a painful misnomer in the eyes of the Uchronians) evoking a sense of timelessness. I remember standing within that “cathedral-like” (60) structure and feeling exhilarated and lonely and cold all at once for the chill of the desert at night, and later, much later, away from the Playa in conversations with a friend we recalled Guy Debord’s “Thesis 30”: “The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.” The message of the Uchronians provokes a comparison with Virilio’s conceptualisations of “world time” and “simultaneity” that emerge from globalisation and digital technologies (13), part of the rise of a “globalitarianism” (15)—“world time (‘live’) takes over from the ancient, immemorial supremacy of the local time of regions” (113). A fragmented sense of time, after all, accompanies unstable labour conditions in the 21st century. Still, I hold out hope for the “resistance” inherent in counterculture as it fosters humanity’s “bothersomely unfulfilled potentialities” (Roszak, Making 16). I wonder in closing if I have damaged the trust of burners in attempting to write about what is a transcendent experience for many. It may be argued that the space of the BRC is not merely a spectacle—rather, it contains the urban “forests of gestures” (de Certeau 102). These are the secret perambulations—physical and mental—at risk of betrayal. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Perf. Al Gore. Paramount Pictures, 2006. Bilton, Nick. “At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another.” The New York Times: Fashion & Style, 20 Aug. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-burning-man-the-tech-elite-one-up-one-another.html› “Burning Man Timeline.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/timeline/›. “Burning Man Transitions to Non-Profit Organization.” Burningman 3 Mar. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://blog.burningman.com/2014/03/news/burning-man-transitions-to-non-profit-organization/›. De Bord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1984. Dust & Illusions: 30 Years of History of Burning Man. Dir. Oliver Bonin. Perf. Jerry James, Larry Harvey, John Law. Imagine, 2009. Elliot, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism. New York: Routledge, 2006. Grey, Alex, and Alyson Grey. “Ticket 4066, Burning Man Study.” Message to the author. 30 Nov. 2007. E-mail. Griffith, Martin. “Burning Man Draws 66,000 People to the Nevada Desert.” The Huffington Post 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/02/burning-man-2014_n_5751648.html›. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen, 1979. “Jack Rabbit Speaks.” JRS 8.32 (2004). 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/jrs/vol08/jrs_v08_i32.html›. Kriekels, Jan. Message Out of the Future: Uchronia Community. 2006. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://issuu.com/harmenvdw/docs/uchronia-book-low#›. “Media Myths.” Burningman. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.burningman.com/press/myths.html›. Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999. Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political. London: Routledge, 2005. Norquist, Grover. “My First Burning Man: Confessions of a Conservative from Washington.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2014. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/my-first-burning-man-grover-norquist›. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School P, 1999. Rojek, Chris. "Leaderless Organization, World Historical Events and Their Contradictions: The ‘Burning Man’ City Case.” Cultural Sociology 8.3 (2014): 351–364. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Oakiland, Calif.: U of California P, 1995 [1968]. Roszak, Theodore. Where the Wasteland Ends. Charlottesville, Va.: U of Virginia P, 1972. Severo, Richard. “William S. Burroughs Dies at 83.” New York Times 3 Aug. 1997. 6 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/nyregion/william-s-burroughs-dies-at-83-member-of-the-beat-generation-wrote-naked-lunch.html›. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1997. Taylor, Chris. “Burning Man Grows Up.” CNN: Money. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117064›. “Ten Principles of Burning Man.” Burningman. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/›. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. “What Was Up with the Fighter Jets?” Tribe 7 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/84f762e0-2160-4e6e-b5af-1e35ce81a1b7›. “2008 Art Theme: American Dream.” Tribe 3 Sep. 2007. 10 Oct. 2014 ‹http://bm.tribe.net/thread/60b9b69c-001a-401f-b69f-25e9bdef95ce›.
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Chen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. "Bleeding Puppets: Transmediating Genre in Pili Puppetry". M/C Journal 23, n. 5 (7 ottobre 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1681.

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Abstract (sommario):
IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.
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Green, Lelia, Richard Morrison, Andrew Ewing e Cathy Henkel. "Ways of Depicting: The Presentation of One’s Self as a Brand". M/C Journal 20, n. 4 (16 agosto 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1257.

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Abstract (sommario):
Ways of Seeing"Images … define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate." (Berger 33)"Different skins, you know, different ways of seeing the world." (Morrison)The research question animating this article is: 'How does an individual creative worker re-present themselves as a contemporary - and evolving - brand?' Berger notes that the "principal aim has been to start a process of questioning" (5), and the raw material energising this exploration is the life's work of Richard Morrison, the creative director and artist who is the key moving force behind The Morrison Studio collective of designers, film makers and visual effects artists, working globally but based in London. The challenge of maintaining currency in this visually creative marketplace includes seeing what is unique about your potential contribution to a larger project, and communicating it in such a way that this forms an integral part of an evolving brand - on trend, bleeding edge, but reliably professional. One of the classic outputs of Morrison's oeuvre, for example, is the title sequence for Terry Gilliam's Brazil.Passion cannot be seen yet Morrison conceives it as the central engine that harnesses skills, information and innovative ways of working to deliver the unexpected and the unforgettable. Morrison's perception is that the design itself can come after the creative artist has really seen and understood the client's perspective. As he says: "What some clients are interested in is 'How can we make money from what we're doing?'" Seeing the client, and the client's motivating needs, is central to Morrison's presentation of self as a brand: "the broader your outlook as a creative, the more chance you have of getting it right". Jones and Warren draw attention to one aspect of this dynamic: "Wealthy and private actors, both private and state, historically saw creative practice as something that money was spent on - commissioning a painting or a sculpture, giving salaries to composers to produce new works and so forth. Today, creativity has been reimagined as something that should directly or indirectly make money" (293). As Berger notes, "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves…The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness" (9, 11). What is our consciousness around the creative image?Individuality is central to Berger's vision of the image in the "specific vision of the image-maker…the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history" (10). Yet, as Berger argues "although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing" (10). Later, Berger links the meanings viewers attribute to images as indicating the "historical experience of our relation to the past…the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives" (33). The seeing and the seeking go hand in hand, and constitute a key reason for Berger's assertion that "the entire art of the past has now become a political issue" (33). This partly reflects the ways in which it is seen, and in which it is presented for view, by whom, where and in which circumstances.The creation of stand-out images in the visually-saturated 21st century demands a nuanced understanding of ways in which an idea can be re-presented for consumption in a manner that makes it fresh and arresting. The focus on the individual also entails an understanding of the ways in which others are valuable, or vital, in completing a coherent package of skills to address the creative challenge to hand. It is self-evident that other people see things differently, and can thus enrich the broadened outlook identified as important for "getting it right". Morrison talks about "little core teams, there's four or five of you in a hub… [sometimes] spread all round the world, but because of the Internet and the way things work you can still all be connected". Team work and members' individual personalities are consequently combined, in Morrison's view, with the core requirement of passion. As Morrison argues, "personality will carry you a long way in the creative field".Morrison's key collaborator, senior designer and creative partner/art director Dean Wares lives in Valencia, Spain whereas Morrison is London-based and their clients are globally-dispersed. Although Morrison sees the Internet as a key technology for collaboratively visualising the ways in which to make a visual impact, Berger points to the role of the camera in relation to the quintessential pre-mechanical image: the painting. It is worth acknowledging here that Berger explicitly credits Walter Benjamin, including the use of his image (34), as the foundation for many of Berger's ideas, specifically referencing Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Noting that, prior to the invention of the camera, a painting could never be seen in more than one place at a time, Berger suggests that the camera foments a revolutionary transformation: "its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (19). This disruption is further fractured once that camera-facilitated image is viewed on a screen, ubiquitous to Morrison's stock in trade, but in Berger's day (1972) particularly associated with the television:The painting enters each viewer's house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified. (Berger, 19-20)Even so, that image, travelling through space and time is seen on the screen in a sequential and temporal context: "because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession constructs an argument which becomes irreversible. In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously." Both these dynamics, the still and the sequence, are key to the work of a visual artist such as Morrison responsible for branding a film, television series or event. But the works also create an unfolding sequence which tells a different story to each recipient according to the perceptions of the viewer/reader. For example, instead of valorising Gilliam's Brazil, Morrison's studio could have been tagged with Annaud's Enemy at the Gates or, even, the contemporary Sky series, Niel Jordan's Riviera. Knowing this sequence, and that the back catalogue begins with The Who's Quadrophenia (1979), changes the way we see what the Morrison Studio is doing now.Ways of WorkingRichard Morrison harnesses an evolutionary metaphor to explain his continuing contribution to the industry: "I've adapted, and not been a dinosaur who's just sunk in the mud". He argues that there is a need to explore where "the next niche is and be prepared for change 'cause the only constant thing in life is change. So as a creative you need to have that known." Effectively, adaptation and embracing innovation has become a key part of the Morrison Studio's brand. It is trumpeted in the decision that Morrison and Ware made when they decided to continue their work together, even after Ware moved to Spain. This demonstrated, in an age of faxes and landlines, that the Morrison Studio could make cross country collaboration work: the multiple locations championed the fact that they were open for business "without boundaries".There was travel, too, and in those early pre-Internet days of remote location Morrison was a frequent visitor to the United States. "I'd be working in Los Angeles and he'd be wherever he was […] we'd use snail mail to actually get stuff across, literally post it by FedEx […]." The intercontinental (as opposed to inter-Europe) collaboration had the added value of offering interlocking working days: "I'd go to sleep, he wakes up […] We were actually doubling our capacity." If anything, these dynamics are more entrenched with better communications. Currah argues that Hollywood attempts to manage the disruptive potential of the internet by "seeking to create a 'closed' sphere of innovation on a global scale […] legitimated, enacted and performed within relational networks" (359). The Morrison Studio's own dispersed existence is one element of these relational networks.The specific challenge of technological vulnerability was always present, however, long before the Internet: "We'd have a case full of D1 tapes" - the professional standard video tape (1986-96) - "and we'd carefully make sure they'd go through the airport so they don't get rubbed […] what we were doing is we were fitting ourselves up for the new change". At the same time, although the communication technologies change, there are constants in the ways that people use them. Throughout Morrison's career, "when I'm working for Americans, which I'm doing a lot, they expect me to be on the telephone at midnight [because of time zones]. […] They think 'Oh I want to speak to Richard now. Oh it's midnight, so what?' They still phone up. That's constant, that never goes away." He argues that American clients are more complex to communicate with than his Scandinavian clients, giving the example that people assume a UK-US consistency because they share the English language. But "although you think they're talking in a tongue that's the same, their meaning and understanding can sometimes be quite a bit different." He uses the example of the A4 sheet of paper. It has different dimensions in the US than in the UK, illustrating those different ways of seeing.Morrison believes that there are four key constants in his company's continuing success: deadlines; the capacity to scope a job so that you know who and how many people to pull in to it to meet the deadline; librarian skills; and insecurity. The deadlines have always been imposed on creative organisations by their clients, but being able to deliver to deadlines involves networks and self-knowledge: "If you can't do it yourself find a friend, find somebody that's good at adding up, find somebody that's good at admin. You know, don't try and take on what you can't do. Put your hand up straight away, call in somebody that can help you". Chapain and Comunian's work on creative and cultural industries (CCIs) also highlights the importance of "a new centrality to the role of individuals and their social networks in understanding the practice of CCIs" (718).Franklin et al. suggest that this approach, adopted by The Morrison Studio, is a microcosm of the independent film sector as a whole. They argue that "the lifecycle of a film is segmented into sequential stages, moving through development, financing, production, sales, distribution and exhibition stages to final consumption. Different companies, each with specialized project tasks, take on responsibility and relative financial risk and reward at each stage" (323). The importance that Morrison places on social networks, however, highlights the importance of flexibility within relationships of trust - to the point where it might be as valid to engage someone on the basis of a history of working with that person as on the basis of that person's prior experience. As Cristopherson notes, "many creative workers are in vaguely defined and rapidly changing fields, seemingly making up their careers as they go along" (543).The skills underlying Morrison's approach to creative collaboration, however, include a clear understanding of one's own strength and weaknesses and a cool evaluation of others, "just quietly research people". This people-based research includes both the capabilities of potential colleagues, in order to deliver the required product in the specified time frame, along with research into creative people whose work is admired and who might provide a blueprint for how to arrive at an individual's dream role. Morrison gives the example of Quentin Tarantino's trajectory to directing: "he started in a video rental and all he did is watch lots and lots of films, particularly westerns and Japanese samurai films and decided 'I can do that'". One of his great pleasures now is to mentor young designers to help them find their way in the industry. That's a strategy that may pay dividends into the future, via Storper and Scott's "traded and untraded interdependencies" which are, according to Gornostaeva, "expressed as the multiple economic and social transactions that the participants ought to conduct if they wish to perpetuate their existence" (39).As for the library skills, he says that they are crucial but a bit comical:It's a bit like being a constant librarian in old-fashioned terms, you know, 'Where is that stuff stored?' Because it's not stored in a plan chest anymore where you open the drawer and there it is. It's now stored in, you know, big computers, in a cloud. 'Where did we put that file? Did we dump it down? Have we marked it up? […] Where's it gone? What did we do it on?'While juggling the demands of technology, people and product The Morrison brand involves both huge confidence and chronic insecurity. The confidence is evident in the low opinion Morrison has of the opportunities offered by professional disruptor sites such as 99designs: "I can't bear anything like that. I can see why it's happening but I think what you're doing is devaluing yourself even before you start […] it would destroy your self-belief in what you're doing". At the same time, Morrison says, his security is his own insecurity: "I'm always out hunting to see what could be next […] the job you finish could be your last job."Ways of BrandingChristopherson argues that there is "considerable variation in the occupational identities of new media workers among advanced economies. In some economies, new media work is evolving in a form that is closer to that of the professional [in contrast to economies where it is] an entrepreneurial activity in which new media workers sell skills and services in a market" (543). For The Morrison Studio, its breadth, history and experience supports their desire to be branded as professional, but their working patterns entirely resonate with, and are integrated within, the entrepreneurial. Seeing their activity in this way is a juxtaposition with the proposition advanced by Berger that:The existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams (148).The role of the brand, and its publicity, is implicated by Berger in both the tension between what an individual is and what s/he would like to be; and in the creation of an envy that subjugates people. For Berger, the brand is about publicity and the commodifying of the future. Referring to publicity images, Berger argues that "they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future". Brands are created and marketed by such publicity images that are often, these days, incorporated within social media and websites. At the same time, Berger argues that "Publicity is about social relationships, not objects [or experiences]. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour." It is the dual pressure from the perception of the gap between the individual's actual and potential life, and the daydreaming and envy of that future, that helps construct Berger's powerless individual.Morrison's view, fashioned in part by his success at adapting, at not being a dinosaur that sinks into the mud, is that the authenticity lies in the congruence of the brand and the belief. "A personal brand can help you straight away but as long as you believe it […] You have to be true to what you're about and then it works. And then the thing becomes you [… you] just go for it and, you know, don't worry about failure. Failure will happen anyway".Berger's commentary on publicity is partially divergent from branding. Publicity is generally a managed message, on that is paid for and promoted by the person or entity concerned. A brand is a more holistic construction and is implicated in ways of seeing in that different people will have very different perceptions of the same brand. Morrison's view of his personal brand, and the brand of the Morrison Studio, is that it encompasses much more than design expertise and technical know-how. He lionises the role of passion and talks about the importance of ways of managing deadlines, interlocking skills sets, creative elements and the insecurity of uncertainty.For the producers who hire Morrison, and help build his brand, Berger's observation of the importance of history and the promise for the future remains key to their hiring decisions. Although carefully crafted, creative images are central to the Morrison Studio's work, it is not the surface presentation of those images that determines the way their work is perceived by people in the film industry, it is the labour and networks that underpin those images. While Morrison's outputs form part of the visual environment critiqued in Ways of Seeing, it is informed by the dynamics of international capitalism via global networks and mobility. Although one of myriad small businesses that help make the film industry the complex and productive creative sphere that it is, Morrison Studios does not so much seek to create a public brand as to be known and valued by the small group of industry players upon whom the Studio relies for its existence. Their continued future depends upon the ways in which they are seen.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States of America, 1969.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures. 1985. Film. Chapain, Caroline, and Roberta Comunian. "Enabling and Inhibiting the Creative Economy: The Role of the Local and Regional Dimensions in England." Regional Studies 44.6 (2010): 717-734. Christopherson, Susan. "The Divergent Worlds of New Media: How Policy Shapes Work in the Creative Economy." Review of Policy Research 21.4 (2004): 543-558. Currah, Andrew. "Hollywood, the Internet and the World: A Geography of Disruptive Innovation." Industry and Innovation 14.4 (2007): 359-384. Enemies at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Paramount. 2001. FilmFranklin, Michael, et al. "Innovation in the Application of Digital Tools for Managing Uncertainty: The Case of UK Independent Film." Creativity and Innovation Management 22.3 (2013): 320-333. Gornostaeva, Galina. "The Wolves and Lambs of the Creative City: The Sustainability of Film and Television Producers in London." Geographical Review (2009): 37-60. Jones, Phil, and Saskia Warren. "Time, Rhythm and the Creative Economy." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.3 (2016): 286-296. Morrison, Richard. Personal Interview. 13 Oct 2016.The Morrison Studio. The Morrison Studio, 2017. 16 June 2017 <https://themorrisonstudio.com/>.Quadrophenia. Dir. Franc Roddam. Brent Walker Film Distributing. 1979. Film.Riviera. Dir. Neil Jordan. Sky Atlantic HD. 2017. Film.Storper, Michael, and Scott, Allen. "The Geographical Foundations and Social Regulation of Flexible Production Complexes". The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. Eds. Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. New York: Routledge, 1989. 21-40.
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48

Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?" M/C Journal 10, n. 4 (1 agosto 2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2701.

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Abstract (sommario):
If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.
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Hookway, Nicholas, e Tim Graham. "‘22 Push-Ups for a Cause’: Depicting the Moral Self via Social Media Campaign #Mission22". M/C Journal 20, n. 4 (16 agosto 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1270.

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Abstract (sommario):
IntroductionIn 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.Web 2.0 Culture: Self and Mass DepictionWeb 2.0 culture such as social networking sites (eg., Facebook; Instagram), the advent of video sharing technologies (eg., YouTube) and more recently, micro-blogging services like Twitter have created new and transformative spaces to create, depict and display identity. Web 2.0 is primarily defined by user-generated content and interaction, whereby users are positioned as both consumer and producers, or ‘produsers’ of Web content (Bruns and Schmidt). Challenging traditional “broadcast” media models, Web 2.0 gives users a platform to produce their own content and for “the many” to communicate “with the many” (Castells). The growth of mass self communication, supported by broadband and wireless technologies, gives unprecedented power to individuals and groups to depict and represent their identities and relationships to a potential global audience.The rise of user-generated communication technologies dovetails with broader analyses of the changing contours of self and identity in late-modern times. Individuals in the early decades of the 21st century must take charge for how they depict, portray and self-tell as distinctive, unique and individual subjects (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim; Giddens; Bauman). As contemporary lives become less bound to the strictures of tradition, community and religion, the self becomes a project to be worked out and developed. These theorists suggest that via processes of individualisation, detraditionalisation and globalisation, contemporary subjects have become disconnected from the traditional coordinates of community and are thus faced with the imperative of self-construction and reinvention (Elliott and Lemert).More recently, theoretical and empirical work has attempted to interpret and evaluate how networks of mass self-depiction powered by new digital and wireless technologies are reshaping identity practices. For some theorists, like Bauman (Consuming 2) and Turkle, Web 2.0 is a worrying trend. Bauman suggests in the “confessional society” – think reality TV, talk shows, social media – people are compelled to curate and reflect upon their lives in the public realm. These public acts of self-depiction are part of a move to treating the self as a brand to be consumed, “as products capable of drawing attention, and attracting demands and customers” (Bauman and Lyon 33). The consumer quality of new communications sees connections replace relationships as social bonds become short-term and brittle. Turkle makes a similar argument, suggesting that our preoccupation with online curation centres on controlling our identities and depicting “perfect” versions of ourselves. The result is diminished forms of intimacy and connection; we preach authenticity and realness but practice self-curation and self-stylisation.A more positive body of literature has examined how Web technologies work as tools for the formation of self. This literature is based on more close-up and detailed readings of particular platforms and practices rather than relying on sweeping claims about technology and social change. Following Foucault, Bakardjieva & Gaden argue that personal blogs and social networking site (SNS) profiles constitute a contemporary technology of the self, whereby users employ Web 2.0 technologies in everyday life as practices of self care and self-formation. In a similar way, Sauter argues that SNSs, and in particular Facebook, are tools for self-formation through the way in which status updates provide a contemporary form of self-writing. Eschewing the notion of social media activity as narcissistic or self-obsessive, Sauter argues that SNSs are a techno-social practice of self-writing that facilitate individuals to “form relations to self and others by exposing themselves to others and obtaining their feedback” (Sauter 836). Other research has explored young people’s sustained use of social media, particularly Facebook, and how these sites are used to tell and archive “growing up” narratives and key rites of passage (Robards and Lincoln).One area of research that has been overlooked is how people use social media to construct and depict moral identity. Following Sauter’s arguments about the self work that occurs through networked self-writing, we can extend this to include the ethical self work performed and produced through online depictions. One exception is work by Hookway which analyses how people use blogs – an earlier Web 2.0 form – to write and self-examine their moral experiences. This research shows how bloggers use blogging as a form of online self-writing to construct a do-it-yourself form of morality that emphasises the self, emotions, body and ideals of authenticity. Hookway highlights the idea that morality is less about obedience to a code of rules or following external laws to becoming a particular moral person through a set of self-practices. Paralleling broader shifts in identity construction, people are no longer bound to the inherited guidelines of the past, morality becomes a project to be worked out, designed and depicted in relation to Others (Hookway).In Foucault’s terms, morality involves a process of ethical self-stylisation – an “aesthetics of existence” – based on “the ethical work of the self on the self” (Foucault 91). “Care of the self” involves a “set of occupations” or “labours” that connect and link the self to the Other through guidance, counselling and communication (Foucault 50). For Foucault, self-creation and self-care imply “care for others” as individuals perform a mutual concern with achieving an “art of existence”. This is a reciprocated ethics that obligates the individual to care for others in order to help them care for themselves.This stylisation of the ethical self has been drastically reshaped by the new opportunities for self-expression, belonging and communication offered in our digitally networked society. Digital worlds and spaces create new multi-media modes for individuals and groups to depict, perform and communicate particular moral identities and positions. Web 2.0 technologies are seeing the boundaries between the private and public sphere collapse as more people are willing to share the most intimate part of their moral lives with a diverse mix of strangers, friends, family and associates.The confessional quality of online spaces provide a unique opportunity to analyse “lay morality” or everyday moral understandings, constructions and depictions and how this is co-produced in relation to new technological affordances. Following Sayer (951), morality is defined as “how people should treat others and be treated by them, which of course is crucial for their subjective and objective well-being”. Morality is understood as a relational and evaluative practice that involves being responsive to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing.In this article, we use the #Mission22 campaign – a campaign that went “viral” across multiple social media platforms – as a unique site to analyse and visualise lay moral depictions and constructions. Specifically, we analyse the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter using a big data analysis. Much of the empirical work on online self construction and depiction is either purely theoretical in the vein of Bauman, Turkle and Sauter or based on small qualitative samples such as the work by Lincoln and Robards and Author A. This article is unique not only in investigating the crafting of moral depictions in Web 2.0 forums but also in the scale of the textual and visual representation of mass moral self-depictions it captures and analyses. Big Data Analysis of #Mission22 on TwitterIn order to empirically examine the #Mission22 campaign on Twitter, we used the Twitter API to collect over three months of tweets that contained the campaign hashtag (from 20 Aug. 2016 to 1 Dec. 2016). This resulted in a dataset of 2,908,559 tweets, of which 225,883 were non-duplicated (i.e., some tweets were collected multiple times by the crawler).There were 3,230 user accounts participating during this period, with each user tweeting 70 times on average. As Figure 1 shows, a sizeable percentage of users were quite active at the height of the campaign, although there is clearly a number of users who only tweeted once or twice. More specifically, there were 1,232 users (or 38%) who tweeted at least 100 times, and on the other hand 1080 users (or 33%) who only tweeted two times or less. In addition, a tiny number of ‘power users’ (18 or 0.006%) tweeted more than 400 times during this period. Figure 1: Frequency distribution of #Mission22 tweets for each user in the datasetTo get a sense of what users were talking about during the campaign, we constructed a wordcloud out of the text data extracted from the tweets (see Figure 2). To provide more information and context, usernames (preceded with @) and hashtags (preceded with #) were included along with the words, providing a set of terms. As a result, the wordcloud also shows the user accounts and hashtags that were mentioned most often (note that #Mission22 was excluded from the data as it, by definition of the data collection process, has to occur in every tweet). In order to remove meaningless terms from the dataset we applied several text processing steps. First, all terms were converted to lowercase, such that “Veteran” and “veteran” are treated as the same term. Next, we applied a technique known as term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) to the tweet text data. Tf-idf effectively removes terms that occur so frequently that they provide no interesting information (e.g., the term “mission22”), and also terms that occur extremely infrequently. Finally, we removed English “stop words” from the text data, thereby eliminating common words such as “the” and “and”. Figure 2: Wordcloud of the #Mission22 tweet contentAs Figure 2 shows, the most frequent terms revolve around the campaign message and call-to-action for suicide awareness, including, for example, “day”, “veteran”, “support”, “push-ups”, “band”, “challenge”, “suicide”, “fight”, and “alone”. A number of user accounts are also frequently mentioned, which largely relate to the heavily retweeted users (discussed further below). Furthermore, alongside the central #mission22 hashtag, a number of other popular hashtags were in circulation during the campaign, including “#veteran”, “#americasmission”, “#22kill”, and “#22adayis22toomany”. Table 1 provides the top 50 most frequently occurring terms in decreasing order.Table 1: Top 50 words in the #Mission22 tweet content (decreasing order)1-1011-2021-3031-4041-50day@mrbernardedlong@uc_vetsnothingveteran#veteranbetter@kappasigmauceverysupporteverydaybelieve@ucthetachimissionpush-upschallengetodaytakehelp@sandratxassuicidehaulone#22kill@defensebaronveteransawarenessjustsay@the_usofightaccepted@piedmontlax#veterans@nbcnewsaloneptsdgoodweaknessbandvets22kwrong#nevertrumpcimmunity [sic]#americasmissionshoutoutgodwillA surprising finding of our study is that the vast majority of tweets are simply just retweets of other users. The number of retweets was 223,666, which accounts for about 99% of all tweets in the dataset. Even more surprising was that the vast majority of these retweets are from a single tweet. Indeed, 221,088 (or 98%) of all tweets in the dataset were retweets of the following tweet that was authored on 2 March 2015 by @SandraTXAS (see Figure 3). Clearly we can say that this tweet went ‘viral’ (Jenders et al) in the sense that it became frequently retweeted and gained an increasing amount of attention due to its cumulative popularity and visibility over time. Figure 3: #1 most retweeted #Mission22 tweet – @SandraTXAS (https://twitter.com/SandraTXAS)This highly retweeted or viral #Mission22 tweet provides a point of departure to examine what aspects of the tweet content influence the virality or popularity of #Mission22 tweets during the height of the campaign. To do this, we extracted the next nine most retweeted tweets from our dataset, providing an analysis of the “top 10” retweets (including the @SandraTXAS tweet above). Figure 4: #2 most retweeted - @mrbernarded (https://twitter.com/mrbernarded/status/776221040582295553)This tweet was retweeted 715 times in our dataset. Figure 5: #4 most retweeted - @Mission22 (https://twitter.com/Mission22/status/799872548863414272)This was retweeted 317 times in our dataset. Figure 6: #4 most retweeted - @UCThetaChi (https://twitter.com/UCThetaChi/status/784775641430384640)This was retweeted 180 times in our dataset. Figure 7: #5 most retweeted - @PamKeith2016 (https://twitter.com/PamKeith2016/status/782975576550305792)This was retweeted 121 times in our dataset. Figure 8: #6 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/770749891698122752)This was retweeted 105 times in our dataset. Figure 9: #7 most retweeted - @PiedmontLax (https://twitter.com/PiedmontLax/status/771181070066692098) This was retweeted 78 times in our dataset. Figure 10: #8 most retweeted - @PatriotBrother (https://twitter.com/PatriotBrother/status/804387050728394752) This was retweeted 59 times in our dataset. Figure 11: #9 most retweeted - @alexgotayjr (https://twitter.com/alexgotayjr/status/787112936644849664) This was retweeted 49 times in our dataset. Figure 12: #10 most retweeted - @csjacobson89 (https://twitter.com/csjacobson89/status/772921614044233729) This was retweeted 45 times in our dataset.DiscussionThis article has provided the first “big data” analysis of the #Mission22 movement that went viral across multiple social media platforms in 2016. We began by arguing that Web 2.0 has ushered in profound changes to how people depict and construct identities that articulate with wider transformations in self and identity in conditions of late-modernity. The “confessional” quality of Web 2.0 means individuals and groups are presented with unprecedented opportunities to “mass self-depict” through new communication and Internet technologies. We suggest that the focus on how Web technologies are implicated in the formation of moral subjectivities is something that has been overlooked in the extant research on identity and Web 2.0 technologies.Filling this gap, we used the #Mission22 movement on Twitter as an empirical site to analyse how contemporary subjects construct and visually depict moral identities in online contexts. A central finding of our analysis of 225883 Twitter posts is that most engagement with #Mission22 was through retweeting. Our data show that retweets were by far the most popular way to interact and engage with the movement. In other words, most people were not producing original or new content in how they participated in the movement but were re-sharing – re-depicting – what others had shared. This finding highlights the importance of paying attention to the architectural affordances of social media platforms, in this case, the affordances of the ‘retweet’ button, and how they shape online identity practices and moral expression. We use moral expression here as a broad term to capture the different ways individuals and groups make moral evaluations based on a responsiveness to how people are faring and whether they are suffering or flourishing (Sayer). This approach provides an emic account of everyday morality and precludes, for example, wider philosophical debates about whether patriotism or nationalistic solidarity can be understood as moral values.The prominence of the retweet in driving the shape and nature of #Mission22 raises questions about the depth of moral engagement being communicated. Is the dominance of the retweet suggestive of a type of “moral slacktivism”? Like its online political equivalent, does the retweet highlight a shallow and cursory involvement with a cause or movement? Did online engagement translate to concrete moral actions such as making a donation to the cause or engaging in some other form of civic activity to draw attention to the movement? These questions are beyond the scope of this article but it is interesting to consider the link between the affordances of the platform, capacity for moral expression and how this translates to face-to-face moral action. Putting aside questions of depth, people are compelled not to ignore these posts, they move from “seeing” to “posting”, to taking action within the affordances of the architectural platform.What then is moving Twitter users to morally engage with this content? How did this movement go viral? What helped bust this movement out of the “long tail distribution” which characterises most movements – that is, few movements “take-off” and become durable within the congested attention economies of social media environments. The Top 10 most retweeted tweets provide powerful answers here. All of them feature highly emotive and affective visual depictions, either high impact photos and statements, or videos of people/groups doing pushups in solidarity together. The images and videos align affective, bodily and fitness practices with nationalistic and patriotic themes to produce a powerful and moving moral cocktail. The Top 50 words also capture the emotionally evocative use of moral language: words like: alone, fight, challenge, better, believe, good, wrong, god, help, mission, weakness and will.The emotional and embodied visual depictions that characterise the the Top 10 retweets and Top 50 words highlight how moral identity is not just a cerebral practice, but one that is fundamentally emotional and bodily. We do morality not just with our minds and heads but also with our bodies and our hearts. Part of the power of this movement, then, is the way it mobilises interest and involvement with the movement through a physical and embodied practice – doing push-ups. Visually depicting oneself doing push-ups online is a powerful display of morality identity. The “lay morality” being communicated is that not only are you somebody who cares about the flourishing and suffering of Others, you are also a fit, active and engaged citizen. And of course, the subject who actively takes responsibility for their health and well-being is highly valued in neoliberal risk contexts (Lupton).There is also a strong gendered dimensions to the visual depictions used in #Mission22. All of the Top 10 retweets feature images of men, mostly doing push-ups in groups. In the case of the second most popular retweet, it is two men in suits doing push-ups while three sexualised female singers “look-on” admiringly. Further analysis needs to be done to detail the gendered composition of movement participation, but it is interesting to speculate whether men were more likely to participate. The combination of demonstrating care for Other via a strong assertion of physical strength makes this a potentially more masculinised form of moral self-expression.Overall, Mission22 highlights how online self-work and cultivation can have a strong moral dimension. In Foucault’s language, the self-work involved in posting a video or image of yourself doing push-ups can be read as “an intensification of social relations”. It involves an ethics that is about self-creation through visual and textual depictions. Following the more pessimistic line of Bauman or Turkle, posting images of oneself doing push-ups might be seen as evidence of narcissism or a consumerist self-absorption. Rather than narcissism, we want to suggest that Mission22 highlights how a self-based moral practice – based on bodily, emotional and visual depictions – can extend to Others in an act of mutual care and exchange. Again Foucault helps clarify our argument: “the intensification of the concern for the self goes hand in hand with a valorisation of the Other”. What our work does, is show how this operates empirically on a large-scale in the new confessional contexts of Web 2.0 and its cultures of mass self-depiction. ReferencesBakardjieva, Maria, and Georgia Gaden. “Web 2.0 Technologies of the Self.” Philosophy & Technology 25.3 (2012): 399–413.Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.———. Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.———, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.Beck, Ulrich, and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim. Individualisation. London: Sage, 2001.Bruns, Axel, and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt. “Produsage: A Closer Look at Continuing Developments.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 17.1 (2011): 3–7.Dutta-Bergman, Mohan J. “Primary Sources of Health Information: Comparisons in the Domain of Health Attitudes, Health Cognitions, and Health Behaviors.” Health Communication 16.3 (2004): 273–288.Elliott, Anthony, and Charles Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2006.Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. New York: Random House, 1986.Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.Hookway, Nicholas. “The Moral Self: Class, Narcissism and the Problem of Do-It-Yourself Moralities.” The Sociological Review, 15 Mar. 2017. <http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038026117699540?journalCode=sora>.Jenders, Maximilian, et al. “Analyzing and Predicting Viral Tweets.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW). Rio de Janeiro, 13-17 May 2013.Kata, Anna. “Anti-Vaccine Activists, Web 2.0, and the Postmodern Paradigm: An Overview of Tactics and Tropes Used Online by the Anti-Vaccination Movement.” Vaccine 30.25 (2012): 3778–89.Lincoln, Sian, and Brady Robards. “Editing the Project of the Self: Sustained Facebook Use and Growing Up Online.” Journal of Youth Studies 20.4 (2017): 518–531.Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. London: Sage, 1995.Sauter, Theresa. ‘“What's on Your Mind?’ Writing on Facebook as a Tool for Self-Formation.” New Media & Society 16.5 (2014): 823–839.Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Smith, Gavin J.D., and Pat O’Malley. “Driving Politics: Data-Driven Governance and Resistance.” The British Journal of Criminology 56.1 (2016): 1–24.Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin: New York, 2015.
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Devine, Luke A., Wayne L. Gold, Andrea V. Page, Steven L. Shumak, Brian M. Wong, Natalie Wong e Lynfa Stroud. "Tips for Facilitating Morning Report". Canadian Journal of General Internal Medicine 12, n. 1 (9 maggio 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.22374/cjgim.v12i1.206.

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Abstract (sommario):
Morning report (MR) is a valued educational experience in internal medicine training programs. Many senior residents and faculty have not received formal training in how to effectively facilitate MR. Faculty at the University of Toronto were surveyed to provide insights into what they felt were key elements for the successful facilitation of MR. These insights fell within 5 major categories: planning and preparation, the case, running the show, wrapping up and closing the loop.Résumé Le rapport du matin (RM) est un outil pédagogique précieux dans les programmes de formation en médecine interne. Nombre de résidents séniors et de membres du corps enseignant n’ont toutefois jamais reçu de formation officielle sur la façon de faciliter l’élaboration du RM. Nous avons sondé les membres du corps enseignant de l’université de Toronto pour avoir un aperçu de ce qu’ils percevaient comme étant des éléments-clés susceptibles d’améliorer grandement l’élaboration du RM. Les réponses reçues se répartissent en cinq principales catégories: la planification et la préparation du RM, les caractéristiques du cas évalué, l’importance et la façon de prendre en main le processus, le résumé des informations et l’art de « boucler la boucle». Morning report (MR) has long been an integral and valued part of Internal Medicine training programs in North America.1,2 Some residents recognize MR as the most important educational activity during their training.3 Medical students, residents and faculty typically attend MR. Although the structure and function of MR can vary across institutions, it usually involves a case-based discussion facilitated by a faculty member, chief medical resident (CMR), or other senior resident. The facilitator discusses pertinent aspects of one or more clinical cases to teach medical knowledge, clinical reasoning and other important aspects of physician competencies, such as communication and collaboration skills. 4 Residents have expressed a preference for an interactive teaching session led by an individual with extensive medical knowledge and excellent clinical acumen.5Despite trainees’ perceptions about the core educational function of MR and their preference for skilled facilitators, most residents and many faculty have never received any formal training on how to conduct an effective MR. This, coupled with a lack of resources in the literature, may contribute to feelings of trepidation about assuming the role of facilitator.6 Based on this need, we were invited by the organizing group of residents at the 2015 Canadian CMR Conference, held in Toronto, Canada, to lead a seminar to introduce CMRs to the principles of effective MR facilitation. The conference was attended by over 70 current and future CMRs. In preparation for this seminar, we reviewed available literature and found that practical guidelines on how to facilitate a successful MR were generally lacking. To help us to provide guidance and to capture broad opinions and experiences, we recruited a sample of 24 faculty at the University of Toronto, including many award-winning teachers whose experience in leading MR ranges from 3 to over 30 years. We asked them to provide insights into what they felt were key elements of facilitating a successful MR. While not a systematic collection of data, their insights taken together represent a broad experience base. Given the relative lack of evidence-based literature describing how to facilitate MR, we decided to disseminate a refined summary of the shared wisdom we uncovered in hopes that it would benefit other CMRs and junior faculty as they take on this challenging role.The insights provided fall within 5 main themes (Table 1) which are discussed below, followed by a brief discussion about future directions for MR:1) Planning and preparation2) The case3) Running the show4) Wrapping up5) Closing the LoopTable 1. Experience-Based Tips to Running an Effective Morning ReportPLANNING AND PREPARATION:1) Ensure audiovisual aids are present and working before starting. 2) Start and end on time. 3) Encourage all faculty to attend and participate. 4) Know the audience (including names).THE CASE:5) The case can be undifferentiated or one for which the diagnosis and even response to treatment is known. 6) There are pros and cons to the facilitator knowing details of the case in advance. 7) If details of the case are not known to the facilitator, determine with the person presenting if the discussion should be focused on diagnosis, management or other pertinent issues. 8) Cases need not be limited to inpatients and can include ambulatory cases and case simulations.RUNNING THE SHOW:9) Establish a respectful learning climate. 10) Personal anecdotes and reflections on past cases can engage the audience. 11) Ensure time is spent discuss learning issues valuable to all present. 12) Facilitate and engage in discussion rather than deliver a lecture. 13) Use a mix of pattern recognition (heuristics) and analytical reasoning strategies. 14) Start with a question that has an obvious answer if dealing with a quiet audience. 15) Promote volunteerism for answers as much as possible, but direct a question to a specific person if no one volunteers. 16) Begin by engaging the most junior learners and advance to involve senior learners. 17) Encourage resource stewardship and evidence-based medicine. 18) Acknowledge areas of uncertainty and don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”. 19) Teaching “scripts” or the use of a systematic approach to developing a differential diagnosis can be used when discussing less familiar topics. 20) Highlight the variability in clinical approach amongst "the experts" in the room.WRAPPING-UP:21) Ensure there is time to summarize “take home points”. 22) Provide learners with the opportunity to summarize what they have learned.CLOSING THE LOOP23) Reinforcement of learning can include a distribution of a relevant paper or providing a summary of learning points via email or blog. 24) Maintain a case log to ensure a balanced curriculum. 25) Provide feedback to the case presenter and facilitator.Planning and Preparation It is important for the organizer and facilitator (these may or may not be the same person) to be diligent when preparing for MR. The person in charge of organizing MR should ensure that all necessary audiovisual equipment is in working order, which may be as simple as ensuring there is a whiteboard and working marker. To optimize housestaff attendance, the sessions and facilitators should be scheduled in a regular and predictable way. The lure of a light breakfast should not be underestimated and may add to the social aspect of this event. Sessions should begin and finish on time (or even slightly early). Ideally, deferring pages for all but critical clinical issues should occur. Having faculty regularly attend MR as audience participants, and not just as facilitators, improves the attendance of learners who see through role-modelling the importance of continuing medical education and lifelong learning. Faculty presence also raises the level of discussion around grey areas of diagnosis and management, providing trainees with a spectrum of opinions and approaches to clinical medicine, specifically role-modelling how faculty approach clinical uncertainty. The organizer must also ensure that someone, usually a trainee, is responsible for bringing the details of one or more clinical cases to be discussed.The facilitator should ensure they know the names and year of training of the housestaff in attendance. It is helpful if the organizer can provide a list (ideally with pictures) of those who will be in attendance for the facilitator to reference. Over time, this helps to develop a sense of community within the group. It also allows the facilitator to engage all participants and with the goals of first posing level-specific questions to the more junior learners and ending with the most senior learners.The Case The selected clinical case can be either a new patient seen in consultation in the past 24 hours or a patient that has been in hospital for some time and for whom results of investigations and response to treatment are known. Ideally, the majority of the cases selected should not involve particularly rare medical issues and should mirror the clinical case mix of patients being cared for by the trainees. Trainees will benefit more from discussions about common clinical problems rather. However, to highlight issues of diagnostic reasoning, it can be beneficial to occasionally discussing uncommon case including typical presentations of rare diseases or unusual presentations of common problems.The faculty surveyed expressed differing opinions when asked if they thought the details of the case should be known to the facilitator in advance. Knowing the details of the case in advance can ensure the facilitator is comfortable with the content area and allows them to focus on aspects of the case that they think will have the highest learning impact for trainees. However, when the case is not known to the facilitator, the audience will be more likely to garner insight into the clinical reasoning process of the facilitator. The opportunity to learn about the cognitive process that an “expert” uses when generating a differential diagnosis and formulating plans for investigation and management is potentially much more valuable than the discussion of content that could be read in a textbook or electronically. When the details of a case are not known, the discussion is more spontaneous and the lines of discussion are more reflective of the thoughts of the trainees, rather than the facilitator. The discussion can be guided by the case itself and the trainees’ questions and answers. A mixed approach to case discussion will provide the variety that the participants value.Although traditionally MR has focused on the diagnosis or management of one or more clinical cases from the inpatient service, its format is flexible enough to provide opportunity for discussion or for other important aspects of patient care. MR can also address ambulatory cases,7 include the presence of a real patient for the purposes of highlighting history-taking and clinical findings and also incorporate discussion of simulated cases, such as code blue scenarios. The discussion can also be enriched by the health professionals from other disciplines including, pharmacists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurses, and social workers. The case can also be selected to allow the discussion to be focused on other specific elements of management, such as resource utilization and “choosing wisely,”8 quality and safety, bioethics, and evidence-based medicine.9Running the Show In developing their skills in facilitation, many of the faculty surveyed discussed that they continuously build on the facilitation skills that they have learned over time, the basic principles of which are described elsewhere.10,11 Through feedback and reflection, they adapt to a style that reflects how they believe the MR should be conducted.The facilitator must establish a respectful climate at MR that is conducive to learning. He or she must ensure that the session is collegial and enforce that the goal of the session is learning, rather than showmanship. The environment should encourage interaction and permit people to ask questions. Trainees should feel comfortable enough to answer questions and test hypotheses, even if answers are incorrect. However, the facilitator must ensure that the correct information is conveyed to the group and that incorrect answers are explored as key teaching points. Humour can put people at ease. Self-deprecating humour can be non-threatening and freely employed if it is within the facilitator’s comfort zone. However, humour should never come at the expense of a trainee. Personal anecdotes and reflections on past cases can engage the audience, relax the atmosphere and vividly impart key facts and clinical wisdom.It is important for the facilitator to be respectful of time. Trainees often report that too much time is spent on reviewing the history and physical examination and on the development of an exhaustive differential diagnosis while less time is spent on investigation and management issues, which senior trainees find most valuable. There need not be a fixed formula related to how much time to spend on specific components of the case. A skilled facilitator will expand and abbreviate aspects of the case discussion based on the specific case presented. Some cases represent excellent opportunities to review evidence-based physical examination, some may highlight issues of resource stewardship related to investigation and some are particularly well-suited to discussion of evidence-based management.The facilitator should facilitate a clinical discussion, rather than deliver a didactic talk. He or she should coach the audience to identify key historical facts or findings on physical examination to allow everyone to fully participate in the case formulation and clinical reasoning that will follow. Demonstrating a mix of pattern recognition and heuristics (e.g., “Quick – what do you think the diagnosis is?”) and analytical reasoning strategies will help trainees learn to employ and recognize the strengths and limitations of each.In the face of a quiet audience, questions that have obvious answers should be posed first. The facilitator should promote volunteerism as much as possible; however, addressing specific members of the audience prevents silence and can help ensure everyone is engaged in the discussion. Sensitivity to the level of trainee is important. A facilitator should avoid potential embarrassment of a trainee by allowing a more junior learner to come up with the answer to a question that the more senior trainee could not answer. In other words, there should be an inviolate sequence wherein, for any given topic, the facilitator starts with trainees at an appropriate level for the questions and moves upward sequentially by level of training. This allows participants to relax and set their focus on learning, rather than avoiding eye contact and fearing embarrassment.A skilled facilitator should not allow any one person to dominate the discussion and should also refrain from asking multiple questions to the same participant. However, it can be valuable to challenge a respondent or the group to elaborate on their answers, as this can uncover gaps in knowledge and understanding and provide additional opportunities for learning.It is important to ensure that the discussion is of interest to trainees at all levels. If faculty are present, their opinions should be sought throughout the case. It is helpful to highlight the variability in approach amongst “the experts” in the room. Judicious use and justification of investigations should be encouraged to promote learning about resource stewardship and evidence-based medicine principles should be incorporated, when relevant.Many facilitators are anxious about how to handle situations where they don’t know the answer to a particular clinical problem. In these cases, a demonstration of the clinical reasoning process and a focus on an approach to clinical problems can be helpful. Some of the most useful discussions centre on how to deal with uncertainty and on how to find answers to clinical questions in real-time using available resources. The facilitator should not hesitate to say “I don’t know,” as this demonstrates that nobody has infinite knowledge and role-models the necessity of recognizing one’s limitations. Teaching scripts relating to specific topics or the use of an etiologic or body systems-based approach to developing a differential diagnosis are helpful teaching approaches6.Wrapping Up Sufficient time should be dedicated to recapitulation and repetition of one to 3 key take home messages. This serves to reinforce the important points that were discussed and to ensure that participants walk away with key messages to facilitate learning. Having a few members of the audience identify what they have learned is often beneficial as the facilitator may not identify the same issues as the trainees.Closing the Loop Further reinforcement can occur if a summary of the take home points, or a relevant paper, is circulated by email or posted to a blog.12 This must be done in a manner that protects patient confidentiality. Updates on previously presented diagnostic dilemmas will enhance learning. Finally, the organizer of MR can keep a log of cases that have been presented to avoid excessive repetition of topics and ensure a balanced curriculum.A process for the person presenting the case to be provided with feedback about their presentation skills by the facilitator or peers should be implemented. It is also important for the facilitator to receive feedback about their teaching and the session overall. Feedback will help faculty refine their facilitation skills, especially if coupled with faculty development initiatives to improve teaching skills.13 It may also be important for novice clinician teachers who need to build a teaching portfolio as part of their academic review and promotion process. 14 If it is clear the faculty utilize the feedback, it serves to role-model self-reflection and promote a culture of frequent formative feedback.The Future of MR MR has a long tradition and can be an evolving teaching format capable of meeting current educational needs. For example, with the implementation of competency-based medical education (CBME) into residency training programs, the competencies being developed for Internal Medicine trainees can provide a framework to organize aspects of learning experiences, including MR. 15 Issues of advocacy and stewardship may be highlighted as explicit learning points of cases, as MR allows for discussion of authentic core clinical tasks and problems, avoiding the reduction of competencies to endless lists taught without the necessary context needed for deeper learning.16 There are also challenges to implementing and sustaining a successful MR in today's current training climate. Issues such as duty-hour restrictions, increased volume and acuity of patients, and pressure to discharge patients early in the day17–19 have prompted some to modify the traditional MR. An “afternoon report” allows for attention to clinical duties early in the day and preserves teaching for later in the day. MR should continue to evolve to meet current education and healthcare delivery needs, and these innovations should be described in the literature and studied.Although these tips have been generated from shared experiences at a single centre, we believe they will be useful to facilitators in many other settings, as they represent the experiences of many facilitators with many cumulative years of experience. This article is intended to stimulate others to reflect upon and discuss what they have found to be the key elements to facilitating a successful MR.Acknowledgements We would like to thank our colleagues who contributed tips and whose teaching has influenced the careers of countless trainees: Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, Dr. Isaac Bogoch, Dr. Mark Cheung, Dr. Allan Detsky, Dr. Irfan Dhalla, Dr. Vera Dounaevskaia, Dr. Trevor Jamieson, Dr. Lauren Lapointe Shaw, Dr. Jerome A. Leis, Dr. Don Livingstone, Dr. Julia Lowe, Dr. Ophyr Mourad, Dr. Valerie Palda, Dr. Joel Ray, Dr. Donald Redelmeier, Dr. Steve Shadowitz, Dr. Rob Sargeant.References1. Parrino TA, Villanueva AG. The principles and practice of MR. JAMA 1986;256(6):730–33.2. Amin Z, Guajardo J, Wisniewski W, Bordage G, Tekian A, Niederman LG. MR: focus and methods over the past three decades. Acad Med 2000;75(10):S1–S5.3. Gross CP, Donnelly GB, Reisman AB, Sepkowitz KA, Callahan MA. Resident expectations of MR: a multi-institutional study. Arch Int Med 1999;159(16):1910–14.4. McNeill M, Ali SK, Banks DE, Mansi IA. MR: can an established medical education tradition be validated? J Grad Med Educ 2013;5(3):374–84.5. Ways M, Kroenke K, Umali J, Buchwald D. MR: A survey of resident attitudes. Arch Int Med 1995;155(13):1433–37.6. Sacher AG, Detsky AS. Taking the stress out of MR: an analytic approach to the differential diagnosis. J Gen Intern Med 2009;24(6):747–51.7. Wenderoth S, Pelzman F, Demopoulos B. 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Fleming VM, Schindler N, Martin GJ, DaRosa DA. Separate and equitable promotion tracks for clinician-educators. JAMA 2005;294(9):1101–1104.15. Frank JR, Snell LS, Ten Cate O, Holmboe ES, Carraccio C, Swing SR, Harris, KA. Competency-based medical education: theory to practice. Med Teach, 2010;32(8):638–45.16. Hawkins RE, Welcher CM, Holmboe ES, Kirk LM, Norcini JJ, Simons KB, Skochelak SE. Implementation of competency‐based medical education: are we addressing the concerns and challenges? Med Educ. 2015;49(11):1086–1102.17. Arora VM, Georgitis E, Siddique J, Vekhter B, Woodruff JN, Humphrey HJ, Meltzer DO. Association of workload of on-call medical interns with on-call sleep duration, shift duration, and participation in educational activities. JAMA 2008;300(10):1146–53.18. Horwitz LI, Krumholz HM, Huot SJ, Green ML. Internal medicine residents' clinical and didactic experiences after work hour regulation: a survey of chief residents. J Gen Int Med 2006;21(9):961–65.19. Khanna S, Sier D, Boyle J, Zeitz K. Discharge timeliness and its impact on hospital crowding and emergency department flow performance. Emerg Med Aus 2016;28(2):164–70.
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