Articoli di riviste sul tema "Incorporation – California – Popular works"

Classification and topic modeling are popular techniques in machine learning that extract information from large-scale datasets. By incorporating a priori information such as labels or important features, methods have been developed to perform classification and topic modeling tasks; however, most methods that can perform both do not allow for guidance of the topics or features. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely Guided Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (GSSNMF), that performs both classification and topic modeling by incorporating supervision from both pre-assigned document class labels and user-designed seed words. We test the performance of this method on legal documents provided by the California Innocence Project and the 20 Newsgroups dataset. Our results show that the proposed method improves both classification accuracy and topic coherence in comparison to past methods such as Semi-Supervised Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SSNMF), Guided Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Guided NMF), and Topic Supervised NMF.

In November 1996, California voters passed the controversial California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209) to abolish race- and gender-preference programs by amending the state constitution. Although the constitutionality of this initiative is being debated in court and the final outcome is still to be decided, the potential impact of such legislation is widespread within the public works agency administration. Historically, public works agencies have developed and defined their workplace protection policies by referencing laws or regulations that were designed to protect employees. However, in the face of initiatives such as Proposition 209, this type of referencing may facilitate gender and/or racial discrimination. This article examines the implications of “incorporation by reference” and alternative methods of effective policy development.

Most translation theorists agree that source text fidelity results in a translation that aptly transmits the foreign cultural values and meaning embedded within the source language to a target culture. While the preservation of foreignness might be beneficial for the propagation of international artistic diversity, when translating works of popular fiction, domestication is key to a novel’s successful incorporation into the target literary system. In popular fiction translation, the goal is accessibility rather than artistic influence or cultural exchange, yet the necessary domestication can be problematic. This article examines the reception of the English-to-French translation of an epic fantasy novel by Clive Barker. Online reviews written by the French-speaking readership describe the translated text as aberrant of Barker’s oeuvre and incomprehensible. While it may be easy to dismiss this translation as yet another example of poor translation practices, knowing that the translator, Jean-Daniel Brèque, is an award-winning translator and that he has translated many works by other popular artists such as Stephen King and Dan Simmons points the blame elsewhere. An analysis of Jean-Daniel Brèque’s translation of Weaveworld reveals the detrimental effect that strict adherence to the source text can have on the reception of popular literature in translation and affirms that domestication is necessary to transform the source text into a version digestible and understandable by the target audience.

This article examines the ara coeli legend, a tale in which the Tiburtine Sibyl showed Emperor Augustus a vision of a virgin holding a child proclaiming the child’s greatness. Based on both texts and art works, mainly from the Holy Roman Empire, it argues that the legend owed its widespread popularity to the way in which it was grafted onto the fifteenth-century Marian cult. While flourishing in coexistence with the humanist reconsideration of the Sibylline heritage, this incorporation into popular belief ultimately led to the legend’s decline during the Reformation, as reformers and later Catholic theologians revised Mary’s role in the unfolding of Christian salvation. In the face of Protestant and post-Tridentine theology, the ara coeli legend thus subsided into religious irrelevance, giving way to political, mythological, and gendered interests in the Sibyls.

The article depicts the connectivity of popular culture studies in the field of cultural studies with issues of postcolonial studies. The aim of the work is to answer the question about a possibility to transplant Western cultural studies research to postcolonial popular culture analysis and interpretation. The study begins with a brief reconstruction of the history of pop culture research in the scope of postcolonial methodology — the most important works, conferences, and thematic issues initiating an interest in a research field new to postcolonialism around the 1990s and at the beginning of the following millennium. In the next part of the article, the author points out two main definitions of popular culture (“the popular”) in the scope of indicated optics — by Stuart Hall and John Fiske; the author also considers terminological issues with “the popular” and its non-existent equivalent in Polish. An ambiguous movement written in popular culture was considered as its most important feature (as Hall and Fiske claimed) — at the same time, a dominant system is contained (incorporation) and meets with resistance of people who revolt by the means of the system itself (exportation). Nonetheless, the author shows why believing in the possibility of resistance can be an illusion. Next, the author comments on the stand of Kwame Anthony Appiah, who problematized the relation of postcolonialism and pop culture. The analysis of connections between these two phenomena is followed by a few examples of intertextuality in Alain Mabanckou’s novels.

Kees Mandemakers has been a leader in the study of linked population data, but not every society has the sources or resources to create linked data. This essay is about one approach that derives from a source that does not offer all that is possible with linked longitudinal data, but that nonetheless has significant value. Migration to California is one of the persistent refrains encountered in both popular and academic works about the history of the 1930s. The reason for this is simple. In literature and the arts, images of that migration are well known, but while those themes are accurate, they have not been sufficiently studied. My approach is to study migration using census data that ask a retrospective question about where each respondent lived five years earlier, in this case tracking migration from 1935 to 1940. Focusing on migrants to California and the paths that they took, I show that there was migration from much of the U.S. especially metropolitan areas across the country, from states near to California, and from places subject to the severe environmental shocks of the 1930s. I also show that while much of the general view of migration to California focuses on agricultural workers who left their homes in search of farm work further west, the large majority of migrants to California went to metropolitan destinations and worked as much in industry and commerce as in agriculture.

Steelmaking industry generates a large volume of by-products that not always can be reintroduced into production processes, such as the steelmaking process itself or the production of cement. This is the case of ladle furnace slag (LFS), whose potential use is limited and usually ends up in landfill. This work investigates the feasibility of using LFS as binder for clayey soils stabilization in substitution of lime. The main parameters evaluated are plasticity index, California Bearing Ratio (CBR) and Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS). The results show that the strength behavior of the mixtures is remarkable, obtaining increases in the CBR index between 8-14 times above unmodified clays. The mechanical performance base on UCS results show improvements of 85 % relative to natural soils three days after mixing. Moreover, if the curing time is up to 90 days, the UCS doubles or triples its value. Depending on the chemical composition of the soils, the performances of the mixtures are different, but in all cases the results are positive and encourage further research for the incorporation of ladle furnace slag as stabilizing agent.

AbstractThe campaign against thuggee in 1830s India produced a set of widely-circulated accounts of the origins and practices of thugs. In these works (both popular and scholarly), a very small amount of primary information was continually recycled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The changes visible in the manner of deployment of this information are indicative of progressive re-formulations of the narrative of the history of thuggee, and the larger history of British India. This process is examined through a study of the incorporation of an extract from The Travels of M de Thévenot into the Levant into the historical archive, which concludes that any re-appraisal of history must incorporate a consideration of the narrative underlying the production of the records, as well as the records themselves.

This article delves into the phenomenon of intertextuality in the Kabyle novel, focusing on its genesis as a literary genre and the dialogic strategies employed by Kabyle authors. The 20th century witnessed a decline in Kabyle literature due to societal changes. However, a resurgence with the emergence of Kabyle novelists who skillfully incorporated oral cultural heritage into their literary works. Notably, the first written works in prose, exemplified by Belaid At-Ali's Lwali n Udrar, signified a poetic rejuvenation in Kabyle literature. Subsequently, the 1970s witnessed the rise of the Kabyle novel, influenced by the establishment of publishing houses and the imperative to express Amazigh identity. Distinguished by its unique themes, forms, geographical specificity, and cultural roots, the Kabyle novel ingeniously incorporates oral traditions, such as proverbs and popular tales, through the art of intertextuality. The integration of oral traditions serves multiple purposes, including the preservation of Kabyle society's values, the promotion of the aesthetic significance of the Kabyle language, and the expression of personal viewpoints. Kabyle novelists employ diverse approaches to incorporate proverbs, either seamlessly blending them into the narrative fabric or demarcating them with quotation marks. Likewise, popular tales are artfully interwoven into the novels, with each author offering their distinctive interpretation. The interaction with oral tradition manifests itself through the use of narrative anachronism, references to legendary figures, and the incorporation of traditional symbolism. These elements contribute significantly to the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of Kabyle novels.

The most widespread implementation of the autonomous sovereignty of the popular sectors in the socialist policies of Chávez’s Venezuela, known as poder popular (popular power), is the consejo comunal (communal council), a neighborhood assembly that has received sizable state funding to implement self-managed projects ranging from house renovation to local public works and from social events to small-scale productive activities. Examination of the establishment and operation of these councils in Cumaná (Estado Sucre)—their successes and failures, popular involvement and personal corruption—reveals the ambiguous role within them of political brokers employed by local administrations and heading the party’s smallest organizational units and shows how incorporation of forms of direct democracy into larger institutions (the government and the party) hinders the exercise of autonomy. La implementación más extensa de la soberanía autónoma de los sectores populares en las políticas socialistas de la Venezuela de Chávez, mejor conocida como poder popular, yace en el consejo comunal, un tipo de asamblea vecinal que ha recibido considerables fondos estatales para implementar proyectos autogestionados: desde la renovación de casas hasta obras públicas locales, desde eventos sociales hasta actividades productivas a pequeña escala. Un análisis en torno al establecimiento y funcionamiento de estos consejos en Cumaná, Estado Sucre (sus éxitos y fracasos, participación popular y problemas de corrupción personal) revela el ambiguo rol que dentro de ellos jugaban los agentes políticos empleados por las administraciones locales para encabezar las unidades organizativas más pequeñas del partido. También muestra cómo la incorporación de formas de democracia directa a instituciones más grandes (el gobierno y el partido) obstaculizan el ejercicio de la autonomía.

<abstract> <p>The increasing consumer demands for healthier and more sustainable foods has pushed the food industry in the constant research of new foods, new functional ingredients and bioactive compounds, whose production can be considered as far as sustainable. In this sense, application of the edible mushrooms has attracted the attention of industries because of their good nutritional quality, simple and economically affordable growth, taste, flavor, and textural properties, as well as the presence of bioactive compounds with positive effects on human health. Among edible mushrooms, <italic>Pleurotus</italic> spp. are considered among the most popular all over the world. Their cultivation is very simple and sustainable, because <italic>Pleurotus</italic> spp. efficiently grow on several substrates and can degrade various lignocellulosic waste materials. This means that <italic>Pleurotus</italic> mushrooms can be cultivable all over the world. From the inclusion in food products as extracts to the incorporation as fresh or into powder form, several works have been published in the literature concerning the use of mushrooms as functional ingredients. However, mushroom addiction can modify functional and physicochemical properties of the supplemented foods, hence the main challenge to overcome is to not negatively affect the sensory properties. Although many scientific works have been published on the matter, further research is needed to better understand the role of mushrooms as functional ingredients, due to the different results reported. This review aims for providing the more recent information about <italic>Pleurotus</italic> incorporation into foods, with a critical vision looking forward to the future, without forgetting an overview of the more recent literature about <italic>Pleurotus</italic> spp. nutritional value and their healthy promoting compounds.</p> </abstract>

Phase change materials (PCMs) are increasingly investigated in the last years as successful in many thermal energy storage applications. In the building sector, PCMs are utilised to improve building efficiency by reducing cooling/heating loads and promoting renewable energy sources, such as solar energy. This paper shows the recent research works on integrating PCMs with building envelope for heating purposes. The main PCM categories and their main characteristics are presented, focusing on PCM types applied for building heating applications. The main methods adopted to incorporate PCMs with building elements and materials are mentioned, and the popular passive and active incorporation techniques are discussed. Lastly, the main contribution to building energy saving is discussed in terms of heating applications. The analysed studies indicated that all PCMs could improve the building energy saving in the cold climates by up to 44.16% regardless of their types and techniques. Several conclusions and recommendations are derived from the analysed studies that are believed to be a guideline for further research.

In 1492 the first edition of the bestselling almanac, the Reportorio de los tiempos, was published by Pablo Hurus in Zaragoza. Written by the converso Andrés de Li, the Reportorio incorporated in toto the Lunari, a Catalan text by Bernat de Granollachs, and published in 1485 in Barcelona. The Lunari contained month by month lunar charts of the years 1485 to 1550. These two works were enormously popular and versions of them appeared in over ninety editions in French, Catalan, Castilian, Latin, and Italian. It was probably the extreme popularity of Granollachs’ text that led to its expansion by Li and the subsequent success of the Reportorio. In the early days of printing, the success of each volume, and indeed the survival of the press, was determined for the most part by the type of work selected for production. This essay explores the evolution of the Lunari to the Reportorio de los tiempos, particularly in terms of text selection, marketability, and medieval traditions of textual incorporation.

This research aims to analyze the establishment of a communicational basis from polyrhythmic occurrences in the performance of Trio Corrente, a Brazilian jazz group from São Paulo. The analysis presents re-readings of songs already known in Brazilian popular music, restructured and shaped through the incorporation of polyrhythmic elements. Research was carried out in three stages: (1) selection and transcription of excerpts from live and studio performances of the trio; (2) musical analysis of the transcribed works, in order to explore aspects related to the non-verbal interaction presented in the performances (3) structural analysis of language proposed by Jakobson (1960) and adapted by Vuust, Ostergaard and Roepstorff (2006) to analyze communication through the rhythm. It was found that polyrhythm plays a central role in the non-verbal interactions of the group. This research is expected to contribute to the development of rhythmic teaching and non-verbal interaction among musicians. KEYWORDS:

Artists who use experiences from a life outside the heterosexual norm as inspiration have attracted increasingly more attention in contemporary art during the last decade. The author suggests that one feature they have in common is the strategy to make themselves into artistic material, by means not only of their own bodies but also of the self-perceptions. They also use explicit references to the impact of pop-culture in cultural stagings of normative and non-normative notions of identities, feelings and desires. Canadian video and performance artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay combines both these features in his production. Works from the earlier part of the 2000s as well as interviews with the artist from mainstream media, form the primary base of this article that aims to analyze how emotions and body are used as artistic material in the work of an artist who is outside the heterosexual norm, but right in the mainstream of popular culture. In the light of theories on contemporary consumer culture, the role of the subject and of the body in contemporary art as well as popular culture as arena for self-fashioning activities, particularly two works are analyzed: I am a Boy Band (2002), and Lyric (2004). The self-perception of a gay man is used as artistic material in the work of Nemerofsky Ramsay. His childhood activities of singing in a choir and taking ballet classes are linked together with his artist’s role in his adult work. With references to traditions of “camp” and lesbian and gay performance art he uses his own body in the form of flamboyant gestures and emotional facial expressions, to stage how queer appropriating and incorporation of the surrounding culture is filled with both passion and disgust and also how these practices can point to positionalities beyond the dichotomy of depth and surface.

Introduction: Wounds have a significant influence on socioeconomic and the quality of life. Many attempts have been taken to produce advanced wound dressing to fulfill demands. The incorporation of natural therapeutics like medicinal plants in wound dressings is currently popular. However, several medications have failed to enter the market due to inadequate pharmacokinetics data. Computer-aided tools are now available as advanced drug discovery methods, which can be used to screen pharmaceuticals from phytochemicals found in various medicinal plants. This study aims to evaluate the phytoconstituents of Chromolaena odorata extract and its pharmacological potential as a wound-healing agent. Methods: Phytoconstituents from C. odorata were identified using qualitative screening methods and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and their mechanistic properties were assessed using molecular docking and SwissADME tools. Results: Current works revealed that the topmost phytoconstituents in C. odorata were phytol (49.83%), hexadecanoic acid ethyl ester (9.40%), linolenic acid (8.07%), and squalene (3.53%). Through SwissADME analysis, all four topmost compounds obeyed Lipinski’s Rule of 5. In silico molecular docking study of these top phytoconstituents against several protein targets involved in wound healing revealed that squalene had the highest binding affinity to GSK3-β (-6.8 kJ/ mol), MMP-9 (-7.4 kJ/mol), and COX-2 (-8.6 kJ/mol) as compared to other ligands (phytol, linolenic acid, and hexadecenoic acid ethyl ester). Conclusion: These findings suggest that the most prominent compound that contributes to C. odorata’s wound healing capacity is squalene and the incorporation of C. odorata in potential wound dressing formulation is justified.

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.

Critical opinion over the role of popular culture in relation to ethnic and cultural identity is deeply divided. In this essay, Elizabeth Jacobs explores the dynamics of this relationship in the works of two leading Mexican American playwrights. Luis Valdez was a founding member of El Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers' Theatre) in California during the 1960s. Originally formed as a resistance theatre, its purpose was to support the Farmworkers' Union in its unionization struggle. By the early 1970s Valdez and the Teatro Campesino were moving in a different direction, and with Zoot Suit (1974) he offered a critique of the race riots that erupted in East Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, the subsequent lack of reasonable judicial process, and the media misrepresentation of events. Valdez used setting, music, slang, and dress code among other devices to construct a sense of identity and ethnic solidarity. This provided a strong voice for the Chicano group, but at the same time a particular gendered hierarchy also distinguished his aesthetic. Cherríe Moraga's work provides a balanced opposition to that of Valdez. Giving up the Ghost (1984) helped to change the direction of Chicano theatre both in terms of its performativity and its strategies of representation. Elizabeth Jacobs explores how Moraga redefines both the culturally determined characterization of identity presented by Valdez and the media representation of women. She also utilizes theatrical space as a platform for a reassertion of ethnicity, allowing for the innovation of a split subjectivity and radical lesbian desire. Giving up the Ghost, Jacobs argues, provides a trenchant critique of communal and popular culture discourses as well as a redefinition of existing identity politics.

Children's literature often serves as a tool for conveying complex phenomena, and one such phenomenon is the solar eclipse. While lunar eclipses have been a recurring theme in children's literature, solar eclipses have received less attention in this context. Nevertheless, in the wake of the remarkable total solar eclipse in the United States in 2017, certain children's literary works have been popular because of the use of the solar eclipse as a central theme. Noteworthy examples include The Total Solar Eclipse of Nestor Lopez by Andrea Cuevas and Every Soul A Star by Wendy Mass, both narrate tales set against the backdrop of a solar eclipse. This study examines the role played by the solar eclipse in character development and the incorporation of mythical elements within these selected novels by employing David Leeming's theory of myth, through a close reading. This study demonstrates how the solar eclipse symbolizes character growth, fostering enhanced self-confidence and self-acceptance, thereby reflecting the mythological notion that solar eclipses possess transformative potential. Furthermore, these novels encompass myths such as the act of biting during a solar eclipse, the transformation, the rituals during the eclipse, and the euphoria of the solar eclipse. However, this study also reveals instances of misinterpretation of these myths, thereby highlighting potential issues of cultural appropriation, which may contribute to children's misunderstanding.

AbstractThis article explores citizenship and sovereignty at the Mexico–U.S. border through jokes told about and around checkpoint encounters—most centrally, those staged at the main port of entry connecting Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California. In Tijuana, I argue, U.S. state recognition validates the proper, middle-class citizenship of Mexicans resident in Mexico. Attitudes towards the United States, however, remain ambivalent. I begin by exploring the checkpoint jokes of drug-traffickers as represented in severalnarcocorridos(popular ballads about drug-trafficking). Though this music is disapproved of by most people invested in U.S. state recognition, I show next how middle-class jokes build on the trope of the trickster-trafficker to parry state interpellation. The jokes work as performative arguments where people begin to articulate the tensions that constitute citizenship and sovereignty at the border. Finally, I examine the consular interview for the U.S. Border Crossing Card, a key site knitting together U.S. and Mexican regimes of citizenship. Folk theories of how the interview works anticipate the jokes' bald thematization of duplicity, explaining why middle-class people would turn to jokes that frame them as traffickers. Understood in the context of the BCC interview, middle-class checkpoint jokes reveal Mexican citizenship as embedded in an international system organized not by principles of authentic identity, but by ambivalence, contradiction, and undecidability.

Purpose The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and innovator regarding her pioneering efforts and the challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Maja Matarić, Chan Soon-Shiong Distinguished Professor in the Computer Science Department, Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab and Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In this interview, Matarić shares her personal and business perspectives on socially assistive robotics. Findings Matarić received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, MS in Computer Science from MIT in 1990 and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987. Inspired by the vast potential for affordable human-centered technologies, she went on to found and direct the Interaction Lab, initially at Brandeis University and then at the University of Southern California. Her lab works on developing human–robot non-physical interaction algorithms for supporting desirable behavior change; she has worked with a variety of beneficiary user populations, including children with autism, elderly with Alzheimer’s, stroke survivors and teens at risk for Type 2 diabetes, among others. Originality/value Matarić is a pioneer of the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR) with the goal of improving user health and wellness, communication, learning and autonomy. SAR uses interdisciplinary methods from computer science and engineering as well as cognitive science, social science and human studies evaluation, to endow robots with the ability to assist in mitigating critical societal problems that require sustained personalized support to supplement the efforts of parents, caregivers, clinicians and educators. Matarić is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the IEEE and AAAI, recipient of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics & Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation, Okawa Foundation Award, NSF Career Award, the MIT TR35 Innovation Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award and has received many other awards and honors. She was featured in the science documentary movie “Me & Isaac Newton”, in The New Yorker (“Robots that Care” by Jerome Groopman, 2009), Popular Science (“The New Face of Autism Therapy”, 2010), the IEEE Spectrum (“Caregiver Robots”, 2010), and is one of the LA Times Magazine 2010 Visionaries. Matarić is the author of a popular introductory robotics textbook, “The Robotics Primer” (MIT Press 2007), an associate editor of three major journals and has published extensively.

Wrist wearables are becoming more and more popular, and its use is widespread in sports, both professional and amateur. However, at present, they do not seem to exploit all their potential. The objective of this study is to explore innovative proposals for the use of wearable wrist technology in the field of sports, to understand its potential and identify new challenges and lines of future research related to this technology. A systematic review of the scientific literature, collected in 4 major repositories, was carried out to locate research initiatives where wrist wearables were introduced to address some sports-related challenges. Those works that were limited to evaluating sensor performance in sports activities and those in which wrist wearable devices did not play a significant role were excluded. 26 articles were eventually selected for full-text analysis that discuss the introduction of wrist-worn wearables to address some innovative use in the sports field. This study showcases relevant proposals in 10 different sports. The research initiatives identified are oriented to the use of wearable wrist technology (i) for the comprehensive monitoring of sportspeople’s behavior in activities not supported by the vendors, (ii) to identify specific types of movements or actions in specific sports, and (iii) to prevent injuries. There are, however, open issues that should be tackled in the future, such as the incorporation of these devices in sports activities not currently addressed, or the provision of specific recommendation services for sport practitioners.

This issue of the African Studies Review is devoted to research in the African humanities. The appearance of new approaches to the study of literary texts, oral traditions, and the popular arts has inspired us to assemble this collection. Recently, the African humanities have been neglected as an important area in which new empirical and theoretical advances have been made for the study of oral texts, art, and performance.The articles in this collection by Robert Cancel, David Coplan, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and V. Y. Mudimbe were presented at the Conference on Popular Arts and the Media in Africa held at the University of California, San Diego from May 17-19, 1982. This conference was sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank the Joint Committee for their support of this conference and our initial efforts to develop a research synthesis for the African humanities.This collection begins with V. Y. Mudimbe's commentary on the nature of African art and the limitations of research models used to study it. He questions the role and position of African arts, especially visual arts, in the post-colonial world. He suggests that the time has passed where most of these works can be judged simply as self-enclosed cultural referents, isolated from the effects of the last two hundred years of history. The process of “aesthetization” that he describes is one which, in various transformations, informs each of the papers that follow. When Fanon suggested that to take on a language is to “take on a world,” he foreshadowed the ideas that acknowledge the development of Africa's humanities in a context of cultural interchange with other world traditions. This is not to accept the Victorian pronouncements that credited all African achievements to various forms of Western influence. Rather, it is a movement towards the view that African culture, always fluid and dynamic, has been responsive to all manner of influences, both local and foreign.

Many partisans of Alfred Jarry's work have discovered Ubu roi and the ‘science’ of pataphysics via a study of the Parisian avant-garde, and the play has been discussed for a hundred years in this context. Kimberly Jannarone also assesses Jarry in the context of the world of rural puppetry – for, like many other avant-garde artists at the fin de siècle, Jarry came to Paris from a small town, and brought with him such formative experiences as the makeshift puppet shows he saw as a child. Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu's identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry's use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience's imaginations. She sees Pataphysics as a model of the avant-garde itself: a system that focuses less on products than on effects. Kimberly Jannarone has taught at the University of Washington School of Drama, and is about to take up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, where her dissertation examined the historical avant-garde through the works of Jarry and Antonin Artaud.

The study was carried out on the physico-mechanical properties of plaster of Paris (Gypsum plaster) reinforced with paper pulp in order to improve the weight of plaster paste and to obtain materials of lighter weight that solve problems such as poor flexural strength, and crack propagation. To do this experiment, the considerable basis of a standard of 2 kg of plaster of Paris was taken as the test sample. Gradually plaster of Paris was substituted with paper pulp paste in a water basin in proportions K0, K1, K2, K3, K4, K5 and K6 representing the different percentages of 0%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100% of mixture respectively. After the above observations, the following parameters on fresh and hardened samples were tested: the start time of reaction, and end time of hardening, consistency, the flexural and compressive strength, shrinkage, and apparent density. At the end of these tests, it was determined that, the incorporation of small amounts of paper pulp (2 kg samples) into the plaster paste improves its flexural properties. But from k0 to k6, properties related to bending and compression began to gradually fall which is a consequence of the augmentation of the amount of paper paste in the plaster paste. The presence of paper pulp in the plaster of Paris paste increases the time of hardening of the plaster cement from one proportion to another, reduces the workability of the mixed paste, significantly solves the problem of removal, the apparent density drops when waste paper paste is increased in the mixed plaster. Because of its light weight, low density, its acceptable Mechanical properties, these new materials are recommended for exploitation in the manufacturing of popular lightweight construction finishing like panels for ceiling or walls, staff works and other applications.

The study was carried out on the physico-mechanical properties of plaster of Paris (Gypsum plaster) reinforced with paper pulp in order to improve the weight of plaster paste and to obtain materials of lighter weight that solve problems such as poor flexural strength, and crack propagation. To do this experiment, the considerable basis of a standard of 2 kg of plaster of Paris was taken as the test sample. Gradually plaster of Paris was substituted with paper pulp paste in a water basin in proportions K0, K1, K2, K3, K4, K5 and K6 representing the different percentages of 0%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100% of mixture respectively. After the above observations, the following parameters on fresh and hardened samples were tested: the start time of reaction, and end time of hardening, consistency, the flexural and compressive strength, shrinkage, and apparent density. At the end of these tests, it was determined that, the incorporation of small amounts of paper pulp (2 kg samples) into the plaster paste improves its flexural properties. But from k0 to k6, properties related to bending and compression began to gradually fall which is a consequence of the augmentation of the amount of paper paste in the plaster paste. The presence of paper pulp in the plaster of Paris paste increases the time of hardening of the plaster cement from one proportion to another, reduces the workability of the mixed paste, significantly solves the problem of removal, the apparent density drops when waste paper paste is increased in the mixed plaster. Because of its light weight, low density, its acceptable Mechanical properties, these new materials are recommended for exploitation in the manufacturing of popular lightweight construction finishing like panels for ceiling or walls, staff works and other applications.

Urban areas worldwide are in the race to become smarter, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is no exception. Many of these have envisaged a chance to establish devoted municipal access networks to assist all kinds of city administration and preserve services needing data connectivity. Organizations unanimously concentrate on sustainability issues with key features of general trends, particularly the combination of the 3Rs (reduce waste, reuse and recycle resources). This paper demonstrates how the incorporation of the Internet of Things (IoT) with data access networks, geographic information systems and combinatorial optimization can contribute to enhancing cities’ administration systems. A waste-gathering approach based on supplying smart bins is introduced by using an IoT prototype embedded with sensors, which can read and convey bin volume data over the Internet. However, from another perspective, the population and residents’ attitudes directly affect the control of the waste management system. The conventional waste collection system does not cover all areas in the city. It works based on a planned scheme that is implemented by the authorized organization focused on specific popular and formal areas. The conventional system cannot observe a real-time update of the bin status to recognize whether the waste level condition is ‘full,’ ‘not full,’ or ‘empty.’ This paper uses IoT in the container and trucks that secure the overflow and separation of waste. Waste source locations and population density influence the volume of waste generation, especially waste food, as it has the highest amount of waste generation. The open public area and the small space location problems are solved by proposing different truck sizes based on the waste type. Each container is used for one type of waste, such as food, plastic and others, and uses the optimization algorithm to calculate and find the optimal route toward the full waste container. In this work, the situations in KSA are evaluated, and relevant aspects are explored. Issues relating to the sustainability of organic waste management are conceptually analyzed. A genetic-based optimization algorithm for waste collection transportation enhances the performance of waste-gathering truck management. The selected routes based on the volume status and free spaces of the smart bins are the most effective through those obtainable towards the urgent smart bin targets. The proposed system outperforms other systems by reducing the number of locations and smart bins that have to be visited by 46% for all waste types, whereas the conventional and existing systems have to visit all locations every day, resulting in high cost and consumption time.

Digital games that involve entertainment, relaxation and technology are very attractive to modern students, while the traditional learning/teaching methods are inefficient and unattractive to them due to the change in learning habits. Surveys testify the successful incorporation of digital games into the curricula of Nature, Mathematics, Foreign Languages and other subjects and allow assuming that they might also be incorporated into the curriculum of the subject of Arts; therefore, this article investigates and reveals the possibilities of the application of digital games in the implementation of the curriculum of Arts subject. Many different interpretations of the concept of a digital game show that it is a manifold and multifaceted phenomenon. In addition to the concept of a “digital game” which can be understood in its broadest sense as the integration of technology and entertainment, the concepts of serious games, game-based learning / digital game-based learning, edutainment, and lecture games can also be encountered in the education contexts. Digital games can be incorporated into the subject of Arts first of all as a phenomenon of modern art. In certain aspects, digital games can be attributed to pop art and they have certain connections with installation art and, no doubt, with video and optic art and other art branches. The idea of digital games as a form of art is still questioned but some researchers suggest that their artistic value should be grounded on the analogy with art cinema. Cinema is undoubtedly considered a form of art although it is understood that not all films are works of art but, instead, an expression of the popular culture. Digital games can be incorporated into art classes as a means of artistic expression in several different ways. The first method is the creation of a digital game as an art object during art classes. The second method involves playing already created digital games as the tool/means of development of certain artistic expression abilities. Surveys show that children under 10 years of age are already capable of designing games: their script, graphics and other elements. Teenagers and older students are often capable of controlling programs intended for professionals. The process of creation of a digital game is analogous to the process of creation of any other art work but, according to the researchers, the nature of such creative work offers more education possibilities in certain aspects in comparison to traditional creative activities. The playing of digital games during art classes could be applied instead of traditional methods aiming to train the composing, designing and modelling abilities of the students or to deepen their knowledge on art history. Learning through digital gaming is an attractive and engaging experience to modern students who cannot learn and read consistently but are rather inclined to act and learn through experimenting; therefore, digital games can also be incorporated into art classes as a motivating element.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The Vltava River and its surroundings had many different faces and functions in the past centuries. The Vltava is the longest river running through the heart of Bohemia, probably the most famous and popular river in the Czech Republic, one of the national symbols, important trade and transport route in the past, river with beautiful landscape favourite by poets, travellers, and tourists, place where the biggest dam reservoir system in the Czech Republic was built, popular recreational area in the present and many more. Therefore, many different documents are dealing with the Vltava River and its riverine landscape.</p><p> The main objective of the project supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic is to create comprehensive information system about the Vltava River aggregating and incorporating various historical and modern documents and data. This system will allow maintaining and documenting a wealth of information about the history of the Vltava River, including immovable and movable cultural heritage using new technologies. The project is focused on the upper three quarters of the Vltava River from its springs to confluence with the Berounka River close to Prague in the period from mid 18th century up to the present day. Riverine landscape along the Vltava underwent an intensive transformation in many aspects. Firstly, the cultural landscape with mostly minor settlement combined with appreciated but even feared wild natural narrow valleys has changed intensively along with a construction of the dam cascade especially in the middle part of the river in the second half of the 20th century. Small but widespread settlements, transport function of the river and wild nature were replaced by dams producing electric energy and retaining extensive water reservoirs providing water supply and protection from frequent inundations and last but not least being very popular for recreation. Unfortunately, many houses, water mills, chapels, churches, picturesque natural places, etc. have been flooded. The former face of the Vltava riverine landscape is preserved only in various archival documents and their online presentation is the main project goal.</p><p> There are large volumes of miscellaneous historical and modern data sources dealing with the Vltava river which are being used in the project. Extensive research of various public and institutional archives is currently still being carried out. Some resources such as old photographs and postcards are found also in private collections. First of all, there are various works from old cadastral maps, old river maps with cross sections, longitudinal profiles of the river, old site plans and interesting building plans, State Derived Map and aerial photographs from 1950s, site and constructional plans of dams to the up to date cadastral map, orthophotos and DTM. The Imperial Imprints of the Stable Cadastre (scale 1&amp;thinsp;:&amp;thinsp;2&amp;thinsp;880) from the years 1826–1843 rank among the most valuable and very useful. Due to their geometric precision and visual attractiveness, these maps are suitable for vectorization, and form an excellent base layer for the web mapping application and 3D visualization. Another very important map is the State Derived Map (scale 1&amp;thinsp;:&amp;thinsp;5&amp;thinsp;000; its first issue) from the early 1950s containing planimetry as well as altimetry. It shows situation of area just before the dam reservoirs cascade construction was started hence it allows reconstruction of former Vltava valley. Maps and plans are complemented by old photographs, postcards, iconography and also text sources.</p><p> All data sources described above have to be carefully processed before their incorporation into the information system and subsequent 2D- or 3D- applications could be designed. Speaking in particular about maps and plans, they have to be digitised, georeferenced and selected map content is vectorised. The majority of data sources are obtained in the analogue paper form, thereby a high resolution scanning has to be done to acquire digital copies of requested maps and plans. Then the scanned data is georeferenced employing suitable global or local transformations depending on the type of map. Carefully selected map content is vectorised and the database of significant features (buildings or objects of cultural, social, production and water management importance) with important attributes is being filled up. Every feature has its location, at least approximately if precise position is unknown. Also the old photographs and postcards are geolocated to be incorporated into the information system.</p><p> 2D web mapping application (Figure 1) has been created based on processed data and it is being updated. It presents and compares various layers (georeferenced maps and plans, vectorised data model, objects of interest, etc.). The application allows overlaying of various raster and vector layers from different times using the swipe tool. Objects of interest and photographs are represented by points, where each point leads to a popup with more information.</p><p> Online 3D visualisation is effective and popular way of geographical data presentation thus besides the 2D also 3D application may bring a new perspective to former Vltava landscape. The Vltava River valley, often narrow and deep, is perfect for the 3D presentation, especially if it is completed by other objects or phenomena (e.g. extinct settlements, important buildings, historical or potential floods). Precise 3D modelling of important structures in CAD software is a common but time-consuming process. Therefore, it is not possible to model the whole extinct settlements in 3D and thus procedural modelling is applied instead. It allows to visualise a simplified reconstructive model of flooded villages in the entire area of interest even in various periods of time.</p><p> The mission of the project is, in particular, to document information on the changes of the Vltava riverine landscape within the last three centuries in the context of various events, as well as to make it subsequently available to the general public. Thus, it might act as a transfer of historical science into education through modern cartographic methods. The project itself is actually in its first phase and the activities proceed continuously.</p>

Background. The article deals with the basic conceptual foundations of the "Ukrainian style" in the art of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, primarily in the field of searching for actual ways of adaptation and creative rethinking of Ukrainian folk ornament motifs. A special role in this process was played by the use of graphics, whose artistic language has evolved rapidly under the influence of contemporary European styles. However, in the graphic works of Ukrainian artists, the appeal to folk ornamentation was one of several ways of self-identification with the national artistic tradition, so the practice of integrating those ornamental motifs into the book and magazine illustration was a significant component of the creative work of many artists during that period. Objectives. This paper aims at defining the role and importance of Ukrainian folk ornament in the modern (art nouveau) graphic, based on consideration of theoretical and applied aspects of the use of ornamental motifs, their creative comprehension by graphic artists of different regions of Ukraine. Methods. In this article we rely on art historian methods and general scientific methods, such as analysis and synthesis, analogy and system analysis to outline the features of several variants of the "Ukrainian style", representing different regional differences. Comparative analysis, methods of systematization and typology were used to reveal the peculiarities of the transformation of ornamental motifs under the influence of the individual manner of each artist and to present the theoretical background of the folk ornament usage, including concepts of the development of "Ukrainian style" in the visual and decorative arts. Results. This article outlines several concepts of the use of Ukrainian folk ornament motives, elaborated by Ukrainian artists in the beginning of 20th century, period, which chronologically corresponds with the time of the paneuropean expansion of the art nouveau style. We can name an independent research of S. Vasylkivskyy, that allowed him to understand the artistic language of the Ukrainian ornament of different historical periods, and allowed the development of complex projects of interior design for new buildings. His projects demonstrate a harmonious synthesis of the traditions of folk art of the Dnieper Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna (including specimens of paintings, carpets, ceramic tiles). Instead, V. Krychevs’kyy more often appealed to the ornamentation of Ukrainian weaving, while the main sources of decorative motifs for him were the ancient manuscripts, engravings and applied art of the Hetmanate. O. Slastion also addressed the study of the semantics of ornaments and their function in the system of folk art and culture in general. At first, he applied his own ideas in the projects of decoration of new buildings, constructed at the end of the XIX century in Poltava region, and later focused on the problem of updating the language of Ukrainian graphic art. The genre differentiation of graphic arts actually accelerated the separation of the Ukrainian voice from the general eclectic Russian-imperial culture. The area through which this process could gain more momentum was an art postcard, which at that time became one of the catalysts for the formation of new communication standards in cities and towns. Popular authors in this specialization were A. Zhdakha, O. Slastion, S. Vasylkivskyy, who gave impetus to the main line of development of Ukrainian graphic design of "small forms" at an early stage of its formation. It is interesting to compare different author's approaches to the practice of incorporation and stylizing ornamental motifs – for example, M. Sosenko uses a much more extensive range of primary sources, among which not only is available local material (Ukrainian Carpathians' applied art, handwriting book of the 16th–17th centuries), but also folk art crafts of the Dnieper Ukraine and Slobozhanshchyna and at the same time he modernizes them under the influence of the secessionist style. During the early stages of the art nouveau development in Halychyna (1897–1907), which researchers call ornamental, book and magazine graphics, architecture, and fine arts became the areas where new trends emerged very fast. This process was facilitated by the similarity of artistic language in the works of graphics, monumental and decorative arts, in particular the use of sections of local color, subordinated to a clear linear pattern, which is perceived as a kind of outline for the main elements of the image. The ornamental motifs in the art of secession were interpreted as peculiar symbols – in the Ukrainian version of this style the ornamentation of folk art, especially the local Hutsul tradition, becomes especially important. Conclusions. An important part of the strategy of national art revival of the late 19th – early 20th centuries was the introduction of ethnographic motifs to contemporary works of art. Architecture and graphics have undeniable advantages over other art genres in the sense of rapidly spreading the language of the new Ukrainian style to the widest audience possible. A special place was given to the printed postcards, the authors of which – both famous and anonymous artists, addressed primarily ethnographic topics. It is also important that, regardless of the specifics of regional variants of art nouveau, the practice of introducing ornamental motifs, plots and the images of Ukrainian folk art, re-imagined in more modern way, was a significant factor in asserting national identity, and was aimed at developing a universal artistic language.

SYSTEM ERROR: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021. 352 pages. Hardcover; $27.99. ISBN: 9780063064881. *Remember when digital technology and the internet were our favorite things? When free Facebook accounts connected us with our friends, and the internet facilitated democracy movements overseas, including the Arab Spring? So do the authors of this comprehensive book. "We shifted from a wide-eyed optimism about technology's liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots" (p. 237). *This transition has not escaped the notice of the students and faculty of Stanford University, the elite institution most associated with the rise (and sustainment) of Silicon Valley. The three authors of this book teach a popular course at Stanford on the ethics and politics of technological change, and this book effectively brings their work to the public. Rob Reich is a philosopher who is associated with Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence as well as their Center for Ethics in Society. Mehran Sahami is a computer science professor who was with Google during the startup years. Jeremy Weinstein is a political science professor with experience in government during the Obama administration. *The book is breathtakingly broad, explaining the main technical and business issues concisely but not oversimplifying, and providing the history and philosophy for context. It accomplishes all this in 264 pages, but also provides thirty-six pages of notes and references for those who want to dive deeper into some topics. The most important section is doubtless the last chapter dealing with solutions, which may be politically controversial but are well supported by the remainder of the book. *Modern computer processors have enormous computational power, and a good way to take advantage of that is to do optimization, the subject of the first chapter. Engineers love optimization, but not everything should be done as quickly and cheaply as possible! Optimization requires the choice of some quantifiable metric, but often available metrics do not exactly represent the true goal of an organization. In this case, optimizers will choose a proxy metric which they feel logically or intuitively should be correlated with their goal. The authors describe the problems which result when the wrong proxy is selected, and then excessive optimization drives that measure to the exclusion of other possibly more important factors. For example, social media companies that try to increase user numbers to the exclusion of other factors may experience serious side effects, such as the promotion of toxic content. *After that discussion on the pros and cons of optimization, the book dives into the effects of optimizing money. Venture capitalists (VCs) have been around for years, but recent tech booms have swelled their numbers. The methodology of Objectives and Key Results (OKR), originally developed by Andy Grove of Intel, became popular among the VCs of Silicon Valley, whose client firms, including Google, Twitter, and Uber, adopted it. OKR enabled most of the employees to be evaluated against some metric which management believed captured the essence of their job, so naturally the employees worked hard to optimize this quantity. Again, such a narrow view of the job has led to significant unexpected and sometimes unwanted side effects. *The big tech companies are threatened by legislation designed to mitigate some of the harm they have created. They have hired a great many lobbyists, and even overtly entered the political process where possible. In California, when Assembly Bill 5 reclassified many independent contractors as employees, the affected tech companies struck back with Proposition 22 to overturn the law. An avalanche of very expensive promotion of Proposition 22 resulted in its passage by a large margin. *It is well known that very few politicians have a technical background, and the authors speculate that this probably contributes to the libertarian leaning prominent in the tech industry. The authors go back in history to show how regulation has lagged behind technology and industrial practice. An interesting chapter addresses the philosophical question of whether democracy is up to the task of governing, or whether government by experts, or Plato's "philosopher kings" would be better. *Part II of the book is the longest, addressing the fairness of algorithms, privacy, automation and human job replacement, and free speech. The authors point out some epic algorithm failures, such as Amazon being unable to automate resumé screening to find the best candidates, and Google identifying Black users as gorillas. The big advances in deep learning neural nets result from clever algorithms plus the availability of very large databases, but if you've got a database showing that you've historically hired 95% white men for a position, training an algorithm with that database is hardly going to move you into a future with greater diversity. Even more concerning are proprietary black-box algorithms used in the legal system, such as for probation recommendations. Why not just let humans have the last word, and be advised by the algorithms? The authors remind us that one of the selling points of algorithmic decision making is to remove human bias; returning the humans to power returns that bias as well. *Defining fairness is yet another ethical and philosophical question. The authors give a good overview of privacy, which is protected by law in the European Union by the General Data Protection Regulation. Although there is no such federal law in America, California has passed a similar regulation called the California Consumer Privacy Act. At this point, it's too soon to evaluate the effect of such regulations. *The automation chapter is entitled "Can humans flourish in a world of smart machines?" and it covers many philosophical and ethical issues after providing a valuable summary of the current state of AI. Although machines are able to defeat humans in games like chess, go, and even Jeopardy, more useful abilities such as self-driving cars are not yet to that level. The utopian predictions of AGI (artificial general intelligence, or strong AI), in which the machine can set its own goals in a reasonable facsimile of a human, seem quite far off. But the current state of AI (weak AI) is able to perform many tasks usefully, and automation is already displacing some human labor. The authors discuss the economics, ethics, and psychology of automation, as human flourishing involves more than financial stability. The self-esteem associated with gainful employment is not a trivial thing. The chapter raises many more important issues than can be mentioned here. *The chapter on free speech also casts a wide net. Free speech as we experience it on the internet is vastly different from the free speech of yore, standing on a soap box in the public square. The sheer volume of speech today is incredible, and the power of the social media giants to edit it or ban individuals is also great. Disinformation, misinformation, and harassment are rampant, and polarization is increasing. *Direct incitement of violence, child pornography, and video of terrorist attacks are taken down as soon as the internet publishers are able, but hate speech is more difficult to define and detect. Can AI help? As with most things, AI can detect the easier cases, but it is not effective with the more difficult ones. From a regulatory standpoint, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA 230) immunizes the platforms from legal liability due to the actions of users. Repealing or repairing CDA 230 may be difficult, but the authors make a good case that "it is realistic to think that we can pursue some commonsense reforms" (p. 225). *The final part of the book is relatively short, but addresses the very important question: "Can Democracies Rise to the Challenge?" The authors draw on the history of medicine in the US as an example of government regulation that might be used to reign in the tech giants. Digital technology does not have as long a history as medicine, so few efforts have been made to regulate it. The authors mention the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software Engineering Code of Ethics, but point out that there are no real penalties for violation besides presumably being expelled from the ACM. Efforts to license software engineers have not borne fruit to date. *The authors argue that the path forward requires progress on several fronts. First, discussion of values must take place at the early stages of development of any new technology. Second, professional societies should renew their efforts to increase the professionalism of software engineering, including strengthened codes of ethics. Finally, computer science education should be overhauled to incorporate this material into the training of technologists and aspiring entrepreneurs. *The authors conclude with the recent history of attempts to regulate technology, and the associated political failures, such as the defunding of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. It will never be easy to regulate powerful political contributors who hold out the prospect of jobs to politicians, but the authors make a persuasive case that it is necessary. China employs a very different authoritarian model of technical governance, which challenges us to show that democracy works better. *This volume is an excellent reference on the very active debate on the activities of the tech giants and their appropriate regulation. It describes many of the most relevant events of the recent past and provides good arguments for some proposed solutions. We need to be thinking and talking about these issues, and this book is a great conversation starter. *Reviewed by Tim Wallace, a retired member of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA 02421.

CREATING CONSPIRACY BELIEFS: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped by Dolores Albarracín et al. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 308 pages. Paperback; $39.99. ISBN: 9781108965026. *Conspiracy thinking is a prominent topic of discussion in American life today--and Christians, with their concern for truth, should not only be informed about, but contributing to, this discussion. This includes awareness of how scholars in the neuro-psychological and social sciences are contributing to our understanding of the nature of conspiracy thinking. *This book investigates the causes of conspiracy thinking in the United States. Its authors draw their findings from existing social scientific literature on conspiracism, general social psychology research, and six empirical statistical studies conducted during the last two years of the Trump presidency (2019-2021): three cross-sectional online surveys, a longitudinal phone panel survey on "deep state" conspiracy claims, a "manipulation" of fear experiment on the alleged relationship between the COVID-19 virus and 5G technology, and a social media study of Twitter hashtags and "fear words." *This book shares many similarities with previous academic works on conspiracy thinking--for example, Hofstadter (1965), Pipes (1997), Robins and Post (1997), Sunstein and Vermeule (2008), Barkun (2013), and Uscinski and Parent (2014)--but distinguishes itself by relying extensively on recent polling data and statistics instead of interviews, case studies, newspaper op-eds, or conspiracist media. Indeed, the authors consciously dispute psychological works that scrutinize the personality traits and life experiences of conspiracy believers, and political science works that link conspiracy fears to power asymmetries. Such approaches, they contend, insufficiently explain the process through which conspiracy beliefs are spread. They argue, instead, that psychological and political factors are themselves shaped by a mixture of personal, media, and social media contacts. *Their central aim is thus to examine how patterns of media consumption shape conspiracy beliefs, habits that are themselves affected by one's pre-existing feelings of anxiety, which is herein defined as a nonspecific "perception of threat [that] depends on relatively stable psychological motivations of belief defense [the desire to maintain a coherent set of beliefs], belief accuracy [the desire to maintain a realistic view of the world], and social integration [the desire for trust, status, and acceptance within a group], as well as sociopolitical factors and situational factors like communications and media exposure" (p. 163). *When these needs are not met, anxiety rises. But whereas desire for belief accuracy produces, on its own, an increase in critical discernment--and hence a decrease in false conspiracy beliefs--the combination of pre-existing anxiety (e.g., feelings of ostracism) with shared conspiracy narratives increases one's predisposition to believe conspiracy claims. When one's need for closure and community trumps their need for belief accuracy, new information will be interpreted in ways that justify their emotional state and existing beliefs. The emotional turmoil and social discomfort of anxious individuals make them more prone to accept conspiracist interpretations for troubling situations, drawing them into an alternative "media ecosystem." *Assent to conspiracy claims occurs when anxiety is assuaged by theories that offer plausible and unfalsifiable "proofs" of "hidden hand" driving events. Plausibility is achieved when a theory offers the believer historic similarity (similar plots occurred in the past), psychological similarity (the enemy's alleged motive is conceivable), and normative plausibility (other members of one's community share the same belief). The unfalsifiable nature of conspiracy claims lies in their assertion that proofs of a nefarious plot have been hidden or destroyed by the conspirators; such claims dovetail with the believer's existing distrust of authoritative sources of information. The repetition of conspiracist messages by like-minded others (friends, social networks, etc.), and by popular media (e.g., Fox News) reinforces these beliefs. The believer's wounded ego can further elicit schizotypy, paranoia, and narcissism, which serve as means of self-defence against debunkers and skeptics. *The influence of various media is proportional to time spent with, and trust placed in, these sources of information, along with the consumer's prior levels of neuroticism, suspiciousness, and impulsivity. Online media have an additional influence via their use of bots, individually tailored algorithms, and various forms of "information laundering" in reply threads and chatrooms. Heavy media consumption aligns the consumer's view of the world with the one shown in their preferred media. *The prime contribution of this book is its postulation that anxiety precedes conspiracy thinking (rather than the inverse), a psychological explanation for conspiracy belief that does not lead its authors to conclude, as others have, that conspiracism is inherently a form of neurosis. However, its heavy use of statistics, jargon, and unduly complicated flowcharts renders the text onerous, especially for those without statistical training. Given that this is meant to be the book's most 'important new input into the literature, it is also its greatest weakness. *Despite the great efforts made by its authors to produce a detailed empirical study of the effects of media on conspiracy beliefs, the book's conclusions are somewhat underwhelming as they echo the findings of many previous studies and offer few new insights into the topic. For instance, their claim that social interaction is the "proverbial elephant in the room" (pp. xiii, 205) is hardly convincing. The media consumption habits of conspiracy believers are a recurring theme throughout the literature, and none make the claim that conspiracy beliefs develop in an information vacuum. The book's conclusion that anxiety serves as an "intervening mechanism" (p. 87) between conspiracy claims and a person's needs for closure and social integration in not particularly revelatory either. That humans are social animals is an argument as old as Aristotle, and that conspiracy myths help insecure individuals improve their sense of social cohesion is at least as old as Karl Popper's "conspiracy theory of society."1 *The book's statistical data also exhibits several flaws, leading its authors to wrongly conclude, as Hofstadter did in 1965, that the phenomenon of conspiracy thinking is essentially a product of conservative angst2--a claim that has been powerfully disproven by many of Hofstadter's critics. This may be due to the timeframe of the authors' research studies, which were conducted mostly during and after President Trump's first impeachment trial (in 2019-2020), which elicited a massive conservative media backlash. It could also be due to their failure to examine long-term patterns of conspiracy chatter, which would have shown (see Uscinski and Parent, 2014) that conspiracy ideation ebbs and flows along political lines over longer periods of time. Their data also contains some unrepresentative samples, namely, the overrepresentation of low-wage earners, the unemployed, and the highly educated, and the underrepresentation of working-class high school graduates and Hispanics (pp. 243-44). *One could surmise that such flaws are due to an extraordinary historical context (the Trump presidency and COVID-19 restrictions), but they are also likely attributable to the implicit political biases of current social psychological research, which, as Duarte et al. demonstrated,3 is strongly skewed to the political left. This is made evident in the authors' clearly stated opinion that conservative media is the primary cause of conspiracy beliefs and related violence (pp. 224, 169-70) from which its audience--akin to cultists and terrorists--should be deprogrammed with "corrective alternatives" and ridicule (p. 215). This seems to contradict their 'primary claim that anxiety is the underlying cause (and not the product) of conspiracy beliefs, which should presumably be allayed with kinder methods than these. By identifying conspiracy theories as both a product of right-wing media and, simultaneously, as a "type of misinformation" (p. 11), the authors leave themselves open to the charge of circular reasoning. Indeed, their political bias is shown in their frequent use of contested progressive concepts and phrases such as "racialized," "Latinx," "pro-social behavior to reduce [one's] carbon footprint," and by 'connecting peaceable conservative media such as Focus on the Family to the use of gun violence by Edgar Maddison Welch in a Washington pizzeria (p. 219). *The small number of conspiracy theories on which the authors based their surveys is another example of skewed sampling. Most of these represent themes that cause far more anxiety to conservatives than liberals (for example, the "deep state," COVID-19 restrictions, illegal immigration, President Obama's birth certificate), while little attention is given to conspiracy theories that traditionally appeal to the political left (for 'example, JFK, 9/11, GMOs, "BigPharma," CIA malfeasance, Hurricane Katrina) or to progressives' fears about policing, systemic racism, abortion rights, or gender identity, making it all the more likely that their research subjects who displayed conspiracist thinking stood on the right side of the political fence. *Finally, the book spends too much time discussing tangentially pertinent psychological research (for example, the influence of music on pain and imitative suicide) and too little detailing the content and origins of the few conspiracy theories their research is based on (with the exception of the 2016 "Pizzagate" panic). This makes the book difficult for the layperson to follow, when it is compared to academic works such as those of Barkun4 or Uscinski and Parent,5 which are accessible to a nonspecialized audience. Few details are given, for instance, of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which are mentioned frequently but never in detail as an example of a genuine government conspiracy (rather than a significant but nonsinister breach of medical ethics). In the end, the book complements the rest of the literature but falls short of providing significant new insights, and is unlikely to elicit interest among laypersons, especially those who hold conspiracy beliefs. * Notes *1Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). *2Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, And Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). *3José L. Duarte et al., "Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (2015): e130, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430. *4Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). *5Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). *Reviewed by Michel Jacques Gagné, Champlain College, St. Lambert, QC J4P 3P2. Michel is a historian and author of Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2022).

Study of French political history for the period of 1789 to 1851 is exceedingly complex. Not only must one possess knowledge of a succession of regimes (with their varying constitutions, institutions, laws, and conventions), one must also grasp the essentials of political traditions such as royalism, republicanism, and liberalism, all of which altered over time, and familiarize oneself with a plethora of groups or sub groups, such as Montagnards and Girondins, authoritarian and Revolutionary Bonapartists, moderate and ultra royalists, that often adjusted their beliefs and positions according to circumstance. Matters become further complicated when one takes foreign relations into account, assessing the impact of France abroad or the role of foreign relations in shaping French domestic politics.

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

GEORGE PERKINS MARSH: Prophet of Conservation. By David LowenthalFROM WEST TO EAST: California and the Making of the American Mind. By Stephen SchwartzGEOGRAPHY AND WORLDVIEW: A Christian Reconnaissance. By Henk Aay and Sander GriffioenTHE LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN BOAT: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma. By Andrew WalkerSHADY PRACTICES: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in The Gambia. By Richard A. SchroederTHE WORKS: The Industrial Architecture of the United States. By Betsy Hunter BradleyBETWEEN MONTMARTRE AND THE MUDD CLUB: Popular Music and the Avant‐Garde. By Bernard Gendron

Panamanian composer Roque Cordero (1917-2008) is known for his use of twelve-tone technique but also for the incorporation of Panamanian music into his compositions. However, his methods for doing so have largely remained unstudied. This article examines the methodic juxtaposition of dodecaphonic technique and Panamanian elements in Cordero’s Rapsodia Panameña (1988) for unaccompanied violin. An analysis of the work, informed by a survey of Panamanian traditions and previous works for violin by Cordero, reveals how the composer weaves together a twelve-tone row and diatonic material built from deconstructed traditional elements through a series of strategies guided by a unified pitch center. The article further discusses Cordero’s “musical Panama” and how his youthful experiences with popular music and the study of Narciso Garay’s transcriptions contributed to his methods.

This essay reviews the following works: The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia. By Carwil Bjork-James. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816540150. Social Movements and Radical Populism in the Andes: Ecuador and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. By Jennifer N. Collins. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 299. $120.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4985-7233-0. La izquierda latinoamericana contra los pueblos: El caso ecuatoriano (2007–2013). By Pierre Gaussens. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América Latina y el Caribe, 2018. Pp. 390 paperback. ISBN 978–607–30–0489–3. Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia. By Sarah T. Hines. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Pp. 320. $85.00 hardcover. ISBN: 978–0520381636. Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005. By Jeffery M. Paige. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. xix +330. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816540143. Del sueño a la pesadilla: El movimiento indígena en Ecuador. By Fernando García Serrano. Quito: Editorial FLACSO Ecuador, 2021. Pp. xvi + 259. $18.00 paperback. ISBN: 9789978675519. Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. By Teresa A. Velásquez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. Pp. 288 $55 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816544738 Candidate Matters: A Study of Ethnic Parties, Campaigns, and Elections in Latin America. By Karleen Jones West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 228 $74.00 hardcover. ISBN: 978–0190068844.

Recently, antibacterial coatings based on graphene oxide (GO) nanocomposites have attracted many studies around the world. The use of polymers as the matrices of GO nanofillers in the nanocomposites has been explored to produce efficient coatings against bacteria. One of the most prospective applications is the incorporation of GO into biocompatible polymers, which can produce antibacterial coatings. Here, recent progresses on the antibacterial coatings of nanocomposites based on biocompatible polymers and GO are reviewed. The effect of GO filler concentrations, biocide materials, and biocompatibility are discussed to find the most efficient antibacterial activity and biocompatibility of nanocomposites. Among biocompatible polymers, chitosan (Cs), poly vinyl alcohol (PVA), and poly lactic acid (PLA) are the most popular matrices used for the nanocomposites. This review also elaborates challenges in the use of other biocompatible polymers. Future works on biocompatible antibacterial coatings should be conducted by considering the concentration of GO nanofillers or adding other materials such as essential oils to suppress the toxicity toward functional cells.

Advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) have revolutionized microbial studies in many fields, especially in clinical investigation. As the second human genome, microbiota has been recognized as a new approach and perspective to understand the biological and pathologic basis of various diseases. However, massive amounts of sequencing data remain a huge challenge to researchers, especially those who are unfamiliar with microbial data analysis. The mathematic algorithm and approaches introduced from another scientific field will bring a bewildering array of computational tools and acquire higher quality of script experience. Moreover, a large cohort research together with extensive meta-data including age, body mass index (BMI), gender, medical results, and others related to subjects also aggravate this situation. Thus, it is necessary to develop an efficient and convenient software for clinical microbiome data analysis. EasyMicroPlot (EMP) package aims to provide an easy-to-use microbial analysis tool based on R platform that accomplishes the core tasks of metagenomic downstream analysis, specially designed by incorporation of popular microbial analysis and visualization used in clinical microbial studies. To illustrate how EMP works, 694 bio-samples from Guangdong Gut Microbiome Project (GGMP) were selected and analyzed with EMP package. Our analysis demonstrated the influence of dietary style on gut microbiota and proved EMP package's powerful ability and excellent convenience to address problems for this field.

This essay reviews the following works: Health in the Highlands: Indigenous Healing and Scientific Medicine in Guatemala and Ecuador. By David Carey Jr. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. viii + 384. $34.95 paperback, $85.00 hardcover, $34.95 e-book. ISBN: 9780520344792. Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1910–1945. By A. Kim Clark. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. 200. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822947820. La última guerra del Siglo de las Luces: Revolución Liberal y republicanismo popular en Ecuador. By Valeria Coronel. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, 2022. Pp. xiv + 419. $18.00 paperback, $12.00 e-book. ISBN: 9789978676202. Global Governance of the Environment, Indigenous Peoples and the Rights of Nature: Extractive Industries in the Ecuadorian Amazon. By Linda Etchart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. xxxv + 270. $109.99 paperback, $109.99 hardcover, $84.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783030815219. In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador. By A. J. Faas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. Pp. ix + 246. $34.95 paperback, $120.00 hardcover, $34.95 e-book. ISBN: 9781978831568. A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador. By Christopher Krupa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 328. $39.95 paperback, $99.95 hardcover, $39.95 e-book. ISBN: 9780812225129. Transforming Ethnicity: Youth and Migration in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes. By Jorge Daniel Vásquez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xix + 105. $44.99 hardcover, $34.99 e-book. ISBN: 9783031300967. Extractivism and Universality: Inside an Uprising in the Amazon. By Japhy Wilson. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2023. Pp. x +132. $128.00 hardcover, $42.36 e-book. ISBN: 9781032386126.

Abstract Objective . Noninvasive measurement of oxygen saturation (SpO2 ) using pulse oximetry based on transmissive photoplethysmography (tPPG) is clinically accepted and widely employed. However, reflective photoplethysmography (rPPG) - present in smartwatches - has not become equally accepted, partially because the pathlengths of the red and infrared PPGs are patient-dependent. Thus, even the most popular “Ratio of Modulation” (R) method requires patient-dependent calibration to reduce the errors in the measurement of SpO2 using rPPGs. Approach . In this paper, a correction factor or “pathlength ratio” β is introduced in an existing calibration-free algorithm that compensates the patient-dependent pathlength variations, and improved accuracy is obtained in the measurement of SpO2 using rPPGs. The proposed β is derived through the analytical model of a rPPG signal. Using the new expression and data obtained from a human hypoxia study wherein arterial oxygen saturation values acquired through Blood Gas Analysis were employed as a reference, β is determined. Main results . The results of the analysis show that a specific combination of the β and the measurements on the pulsating part of the natural logarithm of the red and infrared PPG signals yields a reduced root-mean-square error (RMSE). It is shown that the average RMSE in measuring SpO2 values reduces to 1 %. Significance . The human hypoxia study data used for this work, obtained in a previous study, covers SpO2 values in the range from 70 % to 100 %, and thus shows that the pathlength ratio β proposed here works well in the range of clinical interest. This work demonstrates that the calibration-free method applicable for transmission type PPGs can be extended to determine SpO2 using reflective PPGs with the incorporation of the correction factor β. Our algorithm significantly reduces the number of parameters needed for the estimation, while keeping the RMSE below the clinically accepted 2 %.

Chemical looping is emerging as a feasible alternative to carry out reduction and oxidation processes under different process conditions. This technology proves especially useful when reduction and oxidation processes proceed with different time constants. With the possibility of incorporation of solar energy to the endothermic end of the process, chemical looping technology has recently become more popular. Chemical looping air separation (CLAS) is an alternative to cryogenic separation, by utilizing solar thermal energy. In this process a reducible metal oxide is heated to a temperature such that the metal releases its lattice oxygen. In the second step, the metal oxide is exposed to air and oxygen is captured by the oxide while pure nitrogen is released at the outlet and the loop is closed. Mn2O3 is selected as the oxygen carrier to perform chemical looping cycles. Oxygen mobility of the metal oxide and reversibility through redox cycles are tested with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The redox cycles are designed such that the air oxidizes, and the steam reduces the material. The reduction behavior of manganese (III) oxide under inert atmosphere is tested in TGA. It is proved that steam acts as an inert gas under the reaction conditions. The use of steam at the reduction stage results in a more convenient separation of the sweep gas (steam) from the oxygen released from the oxide. It is demonstrated that a redox cycle between Mn2O3 and Mn3O4 can be performed isothermally. The capability of the system to be coupled with solar energy makes it more alluring for environmentally friendly option seekers. The use of solar irradiation is tested with parabolic mirrors to observe the power output. Overall, CLAS process works on milder conditions which is crucial in reducing the energy and equipment costs, and its advantages regarding energy efficiency increase even more when solar energy is incorporated into the system.

AbstractContinual learning (CL) is one of the most promising trends in recent machine learning research. Its goal is to go beyond classical assumptions in machine learning and develop models and learning strategies that present high robustness in dynamic environments. This goal is realized by designing strategies that simultaneously foster the incorporation of new knowledge while avoiding forgetting past knowledge. The landscape of CL research is fragmented into several learning evaluation protocols, comprising different learning tasks, datasets, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, the benchmarks adopted so far are still distant from the complexity of real-world scenarios, and are usually tailored to highlight capabilities specific to certain strategies. In such a landscape, it is hard to clearly and objectively assess models and strategies. In this work, we fill this gap for CL on image data by introducing two novel CL benchmarks that involve multiple heterogeneous tasks from six image datasets, with varying levels of complexity and quality. Our aim is to fairly evaluate current state-of-the-art CL strategies on a common ground that is closer to complex real-world scenarios. We additionally structure our benchmarks so that tasks are presented in increasing and decreasing order of complexity—according to a curriculum—in order to evaluate if current CL models are able to exploit structure across tasks. We devote particular emphasis to providing the CL community with a rigorous and reproducible evaluation protocol for measuring the ability of a model to generalize and not to forget while learning. Furthermore, we provide an extensive experimental evaluation showing that popular CL strategies, when challenged with our proposed benchmarks, yield sub-par performance, high levels of forgetting, and present a limited ability to effectively leverage curriculum task ordering. We believe that these results highlight the need for rigorous comparisons in future CL works as well as pave the way to design new CL strategies that are able to deal with more complex scenarios.

Abstract Background The shoulder arthroscopic suture bridge technique is currently very popular, but scientific evidence relating to the clinical outcomes of the medial row with or without knots has not been systematic reviewed. Purpose The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical outcomes of knotted versus knotless double-row suture bridges for rotator cuff repairs. Study design Meta-analysis. Method Five databases that contain literature in English were searched (Medline, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library), with a focus on works published between 2011 and 2022. Clinical data relating to arthroscopic rotator cuff repair with the suture bridge approach was examined and the outcomes of medial row knotting contrasted with that of the knotless technique. The search phrase used was: (double row) AND (rotator cuff) AND (repair), and the search method is subject term plus free word search. Literature quality evaluation was performed using the Cochrane “risk of bias” tool 1.0 and the Newcastle–Ottawa scale quality assessment instrument. Results One randomized controlled trial, four prospective cohort studies, and five retrospective cohort studies were included in this meta-analysis. Data pertaining to 1146 patients was drawn from these ten original papers and analyzed. Meta-analyses that were performed on 11 postoperative outcomes revealed that none of the differences were statistically significant (P > 0.05) and that the publications were unbiased (P > 0.05). Postoperative retear rate and postoperative retear categorization were the outcomes assessed. Scores on postoperative pain, forward flexion, abduction, and external rotation mobility were collated and evaluated. The University of California, Los Angeles scoring systems in the first year following surgery, the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons score and Constant scales in the first and second years after surgery were the secondary outcomes spotlighted in this study. Conclusion The clinical outcomes of shoulder arthroscopic rotator cuff repair with the suture bridge technique with or without a knotted medial row was proven to be equivalent. These outcomes are about postoperative retear, postoperative retear classification, postoperative shoulder function score, postoperative shoulder mobility, and postoperative pain, respectively. It should be noted that the conclusions are based on short-term clinical follow-up data.

The Digital TurnMuch of the 19th century disappeared from public view during the 20th century. Historians recovered what they could from archives and libraries, with the easy pickings-the famous and the fortunate-coming first. Latterly, social and political historians of different hues determinedly sought out the more hidden, forgotten, and marginalised. However, there were always limitations to resources-time, money, location, as well as purpose, opportunity, and permission. 'History' was principally a professionalised and privileged activity dominated by academics who had preferential access to, and significant control over, the resources, technologies and skills required, as well as the social, economic and cultural framework within which history was recovered, interpreted, approved and disseminated.Digitisation and the broader development of new communication technologies has, however, transformed historical research processes and practice dramatically, removing many constraints, opening up many opportunities, and allowing many others than the professional historian to trace and track what would have remained hidden, forgotten, or difficult to find, as well as verify (or otherwise), what has already been claimed and concluded. In the 21st century, the SEARCH button has become a dominant tool of research. This, along with other technological and media developments, has altered the practice of historians-professional or 'public'-who can now range deep and wide in the collection, portrayal and dissemination of historical information, in and out of the confines of the traditional institutional walls of retained information, academia, location, and national boundaries.This incorporation of digital technologies into academic historical practice generally, has raised, as Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their book Digital History, identified a decade ago, not just promises, but perils. For the historian, there has been the move, through digitisation, from the relative scarcity and inaccessibility of historical material to its (over) abundance, but also the emerging acceptance that, out of both necessity and preference, a hybridity of sources will be the foreseeable way forward. There has also been a significant shift, as De Groot notes in his book Consuming History, in the often conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian. This has brought a potentially beneficial democratization of historical practice but also an associated set of concerns around the loss of control of both practice and product of the professional historian. Additionally, the development of digital tools for the collection and dissemination of 'history' has raised fears around the commercialised development of the subject's brand, products and commodities. This article considers the significance and implications of some of these changes through one protracted act of recovery and reclamation in which the digital made the difference: the life of a notorious 19th century professional agitator on both sides of the Atlantic, John De Morgan. A man thought lost, but now found."Who Is John De Morgan?" The search began in 1981, linked to the study of contemporary "race riots" in South East London. The initial purpose was to determine whether there was a history of rioting in the area. In the Local History Library, a calm and dusty backwater, an early find was a fading, but evocative and puzzling, photograph of "The Plumstead Common Riots" of 1876. It showed a group of men and women, posing for the photographer on a hillside-the technology required stillness, even in the middle of a riot-spades in hand, filling in a Mr. Jacob's sandpits, illegally dug from what was supposed to be common land. The leader of this, and other similar riots around England, was John De Morgan. A local journalist who covered the riots commented: "Of Mr. De Morgan little is known before or since the period in which he flashed meteorlike through our section of the atmosphere, but he was indisputably a remarkable man" (Vincent 588). Thus began a trek, much interrupted, sometimes unmapped and haphazard, to discover more about this 'remarkable man'. "Who is John De Morgan" was a question frequently asked by his many contemporary antagonists, and by subsequent historians, and one to which De Morgan deliberately gave few answers. The obvious place to start the search was the British Museum Reading Room, resplendent in its Victorian grandeur, the huge card catalogue still in the 1980s the dominating technology. Together with the Library's newspaper branch at Colindale, this was likely to be the repository of all that might then easily be known about De Morgan.From 1869, at the age of 21, it appeared that De Morgan had embarked on a life of radical politics that took him through the UK, made him notorious, lead to accusations of treasonable activities, sent him to jail twice, before he departed unexpectedly to the USA in 1880. During that period, he was involved with virtually every imaginable radical cause, at various times a temperance advocate, a spiritualist, a First Internationalist, a Republican, a Tichbornite, a Commoner, an anti-vaccinator, an advanced Liberal, a parliamentary candidate, a Home Ruler. As a radical, he, like many radicals of the period, "zigzagged nomadically through the mayhem of nineteenth century politics fighting various foes in the press, the clubs, the halls, the pulpit and on the street" (Kazin 202). He promoted himself as the "People's Advocate, Champion and Friend" (Allen). Never a joiner or follower, he established a variety of organizations, became a professional agitator and orator, and supported himself and his politics through lecturing and journalism. Able to attract huge crowds to "monster meetings", he achieved fame, or more correctly notoriety. And then, in 1880, broke and in despair, he disappeared from public view by emigrating to the USA.LostThe view of De Morgan as a "flashing meteor" was held by many in the 1870s. Historians of the 20th century took a similar position and, while considering him intriguing and culturally interesting, normally dispatched him to the footnotes. By the latter part of the 20th century, he was described as "one of the most notorious radicals of the 1870s yet remains a shadowy figure" and was generally dismissed as "a swashbuckling demagogue," a "democratic messiah," and" if not a bandit … at least an adventurer" (Allen 684). His politics were deemed to be reactionary, peripheral, and, worst of all, populist. He was certainly not of sufficient interest to pursue across the Atlantic. In this dismissal, he fell foul of the highly politicised professional culture of mid-to-late 20th-century academic historians. In particular, the lack of any significant direct linkage to the story of the rise of a working class, and specifically the British Labour party, left individuals like De Morgan in the margins and footnotes. However, in terms of historical practice, it was also the case that his mysterious entry into public life, his rapid rise to brief notability and notoriety, and his sudden disappearance, made the investigation of his career too technically difficult to be worthwhile.The footprints of the forgotten may occasionally turn up in the archived papers of the important, or in distant public archives and records, but the primary sources are the newspapers of the time. De Morgan was a regular, almost daily, visitor to the pages of the multitude of newspapers, local and national, that were published in Victorian Britain and Gilded Age USA. He also published his own, usually short-lived and sometimes eponymous, newspapers: De Morgan's Monthly and De Morgan's Weekly as well as the splendidly titled People's Advocate and National Vindicator of Right versus Wrong and the deceptively titled, highly radical, House and Home. He was highly mobile: he noted, without too much hyperbole, that in the 404 days between his English prison sentences in the mid-1870s, he had 465 meetings, travelled 32,000 miles, and addressed 500,000 people. Thus the newspapers of the time are littered with often detailed and vibrant accounts of his speeches, demonstrations, and riots.Nonetheless, the 20th-century technologies of access and retrieval continued to limit discovery. The white gloves, cradles, pencils and paper of the library or archive, sometimes supplemented by the century-old 'new' technology of the microfilm, all enveloped in a culture of hallowed (and pleasurable) silence, restricted the researcher looking to move into the lesser known and certainly the unknown. The fact that most of De Morgan's life was spent, it was thought, outside of England, and outside the purview of the British Library, only exacerbated the problem. At a time when a historian had to travel to the sources and then work directly on them, pencil in hand, it needed more than curiosity to keep searching. Even as many historians in the late part of the century shifted their centre of gravity from the known to the unknown and from the great to the ordinary, in any form of intellectual or resource cost-benefit analysis, De Morgan was a non-starter.UnknownOn the subject of his early life, De Morgan was tantalisingly and deliberately vague. In his speeches and newspapers, he often leaked his personal and emotional struggles as well as his political battles. However, when it came to his biographical story, he veered between the untruthful, the denial, and the obscure. To the twentieth century observer, his life began in 1869 at the age of 21 and ended at the age of 32. His various political campaign "biographies" gave some hints, but what little he did give away was often vague, coy and/or unlikely. His name was actually John Francis Morgan, but he never formally acknowledged it. He claimed, and was very proud, to be Irish and to have been educated in London and at Cambridge University (possible but untrue), and also to have been "for the first twenty years of his life directly or indirectly a railway servant," and to have been a "boy orator" from the age of ten (unlikely but true). He promised that "Some day-nay any day-that the public desire it, I am ready to tell the story of my strange life from earliest recollection to the present time" (St. Clair 4). He never did and the 20th century could unearth little evidence in relation to any of his claims.The blend of the vague, the unlikely and the unverifiable-combined with an inclination to self-glorification and hyperbole-surrounded De Morgan with an aura, for historians as well as contemporaries, of the self-seeking, untrustworthy charlatan with something to hide and little to say. Therefore, as the 20th century moved to closure, the search for John De Morgan did so as well. Though interesting, he gave most value in contextualising the lives of Victorian radicals more generally. He headed back to the footnotes.Now FoundMeanwhile, the technologies underpinning academic practice generally, and history specifically, had changed. The photocopier, personal computer, Internet, and mobile device, had arrived. They formed the basis for both resistance and revolution in academic practices. For a while, the analytical skills of the academic community were concentrated on the perils as much as the promises of a "digital history" (Cohen and Rosenzweig Digital).But as the Millennium turned, and the academic community itself spawned, inter alia, Google, the practical advantages of digitisation for history forced themselves on people. Google enabled the confident searching from a neutral place for things known and unknown; information moved to the user more easily in both time and space. The culture and technologies of gathering, retrieval, analysis, presentation and preservation altered dramatically and, as a result, the traditional powers of gatekeepers, institutions and professional historians was redistributed (De Groot). Access and abundance, arguably over-abundance, became the platform for the management of historical information. For the search for De Morgan, the door reopened. The increased global electronic access to extensive databases, catalogues, archives, and public records, as well as people who knew, or wanted to know, something, opened up opportunities that have been rapidly utilised and expanded over the last decade. Both professional and "amateur" historians moved into a space that made the previously difficult to know or unknowable now accessible.Inevitably, the development of digital newspaper archives was particularly crucial to seeking and finding John De Morgan. After some faulty starts in the early 2000s, characterised as a "wild west" and a "gold rush" (Fyfe 566), comprehensive digitised newspaper archives became available. While still not perfect, in terms of coverage and quality, it is a transforming technology. In the UK, the British Newspaper Archive (BNA)-in pursuit of the goal of the digitising of all UK newspapers-now has over 20 million pages. Each month presents some more of De Morgan. Similarly, in the US, Fulton History, a free newspaper archive run by retired computer engineer Tom Tryniski, now has nearly 40 million pages of New York newspapers. The almost daily footprints of De Morgan's radical life can now be seen, and the lives of the social networks within which he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, come easily into view even from a desk in New Zealand.The Internet also allows connections between researchers, both academic and 'public', bringing into reach resources not otherwise knowable: a Scottish genealogist with a mass of data on De Morgan's family; a Californian with the historian's pot of gold, a collection of over 200 letters received by De Morgan over a 50 year period; a Leeds Public Library blogger uncovering spectacular, but rarely seen, Victorian electoral cartoons which explain De Morgan's precipitate departure to the USA. These discoveries would not have happened without the infrastructure of the Internet, web site, blog, and e-mail. Just how different searching is can be seen in the following recent scenario, one of many now occurring. An addition in 2017 to the BNA shows a Master J.F. Morgan, aged 13, giving lectures on temperance in Ledbury in 1861, luckily a census year. A check of the census through Ancestry shows that Master Morgan was born in Lincolnshire in England, and a quick look at the 1851 census shows him living on an isolated blustery hill in Yorkshire in a railway encampment, along with 250 navvies, as his father, James, works on the construction of a tunnel. Suddenly, literally within the hour, the 20-year search for the childhood of John De Morgan, the supposedly Irish-born "gentleman who repudiated his class," has taken a significant turn.At the end of the 20th century, despite many efforts, John De Morgan was therefore a partial character bounded by what he said and didn't say, what others believed, and the intellectual and historiographical priorities, technologies, tools and processes of that century. In effect, he "lived" historically for a less than a quarter of his life. Without digitisation, much would have remained hidden; with it there has been, and will still be, much to find. De Morgan hid himself and the 20th century forgot him. But as the technologies have changed, and with it the structures of historical practice, the question that even De Morgan himself posed – "Who is John De Morgan?" – can now be addressed.SearchingDigitisation brings undoubted benefits, but its impact goes a long way beyond the improved search and detection capabilities, into a range of technological developments of communication and media that impact on practice, practitioners, institutions, and 'history' itself. A dominant issue for the academic community is the control of "history." De Groot, in his book Consuming History, considers how history now works in contemporary popular culture and, in particular, examines the development of the sometimes conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian.The traditional legitimacy of professional historians has, many argue, been eroded by shifts in technology and access with the power of traditional cultural gatekeepers being undermined, bypassing the established control of institutions and professional historian. While most academics now embrace the primary tools of so-called "digital history," they remain, De Groot argues, worried that "history" is in danger of becoming part of a discourse of leisure, not a professionalized arena (18). An additional concern is the role of the global capitalist market, which is developing, or even taking over, 'history' as a brand, product and commodity with overt fiscal value. Here the huge impact of newspaper archives and genealogical software (sometimes owned in tandem) is of particular concern.There is also the new challenge of "navigating the chaos of abundance in online resources" (De Groot 68). By 2005, it had become clear that:the digital era seems likely to confront historians-who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past-with a new 'problem' of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form seems like an incredible opportunity and a gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in mouth. (Cohen and Rosenzweig, Web).This easily accessible abundance imposes much higher standards of evidence on the historian. The acceptance within the traditional model that much could simply not be done or known with the resources available meant that there was a greater allowance for not knowing. But with a search button and public access, democratizing the process, the consumer as well as the producer can see, and find, for themselves.Taking on some of these challenges, Zaagsma, having reminded us that the history of digital humanities goes back at least 60 years, notes the need to get rid of the "myth that historical practice can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological developments, and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasis strongly enough, it is not" (14). There is no longer a digital history which is separate from history, and with digital technologies that are now ubiquitous and pervasive, historians have accepted or must quickly face a fundamental break with past practices. However, also noting that the great majority of archival material is not digitised and is unlikely to be so, Zaagsma concludes that hybridity will be the "new normal," combining "traditional/analogue and new/digital practices at least in information gathering" (17).ConclusionA decade on from Cohen and Rozenzweig's "Perils and Promises," the digital is a given. Both historical practice and historians have changed, though it is a work in progress. An early pioneer of the use of computers in the humanities, Robert Busa wrote in 1980 that "the principal aim is the enhancement of the quality, depth and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time" (89). Twenty years later, as Google was launched, Jordanov, taking on those who would dismiss public history as "mere" popularization, entertainment or propaganda, argued for the "need to develop coherent positions on the relationships between academic history, the media, institutions…and popular culture" (149). As the digital turn continues, and the SEARCH button is just one part of that, all historians-professional or "amateur"-will take advantage of opportunities that technologies have opened up. Looking across the whole range of transformations in recent decades, De Groot concludes: "Increasingly users of history are accessing the past through complex and innovative media and this is reconfiguring their sense of themselves, the world they live in and what history itself might be about" (310). ReferencesAllen, Rob. "'The People's Advocate, Champion and Friend': The Transatlantic Career of Citizen John De Morgan (1848-1926)." Historical Research 86.234 (2013): 684-711.Busa, Roberto. "The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus." Computers and the Humanities 14.2 (1980): 83-90.Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania P, 2005.———. "Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet." First Monday 10.12 (2005).De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.De Morgan, John. Who Is John De Morgan? A Few Words of Explanation, with Portrait. By a Free and Independent Elector of Leicester. London, 1877.Fyfe, Paul. "An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers." Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016): 546-77."Interchange: The Promise of Digital History." Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 452-91.Johnston, Leslie. "Before You Were Born, We Were Digitizing Texts." The Signal 9 Dec. 2012, Library of Congress. <https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/292/12/before-you-were-born-we-were-digitizing-texts>.Jordanova, Ludmilla. History in Practice. 2nd ed. London: Arnold, 2000.Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.Saint-Clair, Sylvester. Sketch of the Life and Labours of J. De Morgan, Elocutionist, and Tribune of the People. Leeds: De Morgan & Co., 1880.Vincent, William T. The Records of the Woolwich District, Vol. II. Woolwich: J.P. Jackson, 1890.Zaagsma, Gerban. "On Digital History." BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 128.4 (2013): 3-29.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. Examples include the unconventional courtship narratives of blues singers Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, the ritualised storytelling tradition of country performers Doye O’Dell and Tommy Faile, and historicised accounts of the Civil Rights struggle provided by Ron Sexsmith and Tina Turner. References Argenti, Paul. “Collaborating With Activists: How Starbucks Works With NGOs.” California Management Review 47.1 (2004): 91–116. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Bridges, John, and R. Serge Denisoff. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song: Horton and Carey revisited.” Popular Music and Society 10.3 (1986): 29–45. Carey, James. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song.” The American Journal of Sociology 74.6 (1969): 720–31. Cashmere, Ellis. The Black Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1997. “Coffee.” Theme Time Radio Hour hosted by Bob Dylan, XM Satellite Radio. 31 May 2006. Cooper, B. Lee, and William L. Schurk. “You’re the Cream in My Coffee: A Discography of Java Jive.” Popular Music and Society 23.2 (1999): 91–100. Crow, Sheryl. “Coffee Shop.” Beacon Theatre, New York City. 17 Mar. 1995. YouTube 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-bDAjASQI ›. Curry, Andrew. “Drugs in Jazz and Rock Music.” Clinical Toxicology 1.2 (1968): 235–44. Dawson, Michael C. “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s) and Black Politics.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 195–223. de Larios, Margaret. “Alone, Together: The Social Culture of Music and the Coffee Shop.” URC Student Scholarship Paper 604 (2011). 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://scholar.oxy.edu/urc_student/604›. Englis, Basil, Michael Solomon and Anna Olofsson. “Consumption Imagery in Music Television: A Bi-Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising 22.4 (1993): 21–33. Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Fox, Aaron. “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music.” Popular Music 11.1 (1992): 53–72. Garofalo, Reebee. “Culture Versus Commerce: The Marketing of Black Popular Music.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 275–87. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Hamilton, Andy. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum, 2007. Harris, Craig. “Starbucks Opens Hear Music Shop in Bellevue.” Seattle Post Intelligencer 23 Nov. 2006. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Starbucks-opens-Hear-Music-shop-in-Bellevue-1220637.php›. Harris, John. “Lay Latte Lay.” The Guardian 1 Jul. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/jul/01/2?INTCMP=SRCH›. Holt, Douglas. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 70–90. Horton, Donald. “The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Songs.” American Journal of Sociology 62.6 (1957): 569–78. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Juliano, Laura, and Roland Griffiths. “A Critical Review of Caffeine Withdrawal: Empirical Validation of Symptoms and Signs, Incidence, Severity, and Associated Features.” Psychopharmacology 176 (2004): 1–29. Koller, Veronika. “‘The World’s Local Bank’: Glocalisation as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse.” Social Semiotics 17.1 (2007): 111–31. Lawson, Rob A. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (Making the Modern South). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Love, Harold. “How Music Created A Public.” Criticism 46.2 (2004): 257–72. “Loxcel Starbucks Map”. Loxcel.com 1 Mar. 2012 ‹loxcel.com/sbux-faq.hmtl›. Lovett, Richard. “Coffee: The Demon Drink?” New Scientist 2518. 24 Sep. 2005. 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725181.700›. Lynskey, Dorian. “Stir It Up: Starbucks Has Changed the Music Industry with its Deals with Dylan and Alanis. What’s Next?”. The Guardian 6 Oct. 2005: 18. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/06/popandrock.marketingandpr›. Lyttle, Thomas, and Michael Montagne. “Drugs, Music, and Ideology: A Social Pharmacological Interpretation of the Acid House Movement.” The International Journal of the Addictions 27.10 (1992): 1159–77. McCracken, Grant. “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods.” Journal of Consumer Research 13.1 (1986): 71–84. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus, 1997. “New Music News” 120 Minutes MTV 28 Sep. 1986. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnqjqXztc0o›. O’Neil, Valerie. “Starbucks Refines its Entertainment Strategy.” Starbucks Newsroom 24 Apr. 2008. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=48›. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–34. Primack, Brian, Madeline Dalton, Mary Carroll, Aaron Agarwal, and Michael Fine. “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 162.2 (2008): 169–75. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004676/›. Ramsey, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Rojek, Chris. Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Rosenbaum, Jill, and Lorraine Prinsky. “Sex, Violence and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Youths’ Perceptions of Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 11.2 (1987): 79–89. Shapiro, Harry. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Singer, Merrill, and Greg Mirhej. “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz.” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 5.4 (2006):1–38. Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12.4 (2002): 446–68. Thompson, Craig J., and Zeynep Arsel. “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004.): 631–42. Thompson, Erik. “Secret Stash Records Releases Forgotten Music in Stylish Packages: Meet Founders Cory Wong and Eric Foss.” CityPages 18 Jan. 2012. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.citypages.com/2012-01-18/music/secret-stash-records-releases-forgotten-music-in-stylish-packages/›.Tickle, Cindy. “Sheryl Crow Performs at Starbucks Annual Shareholders Meeting.” Examiner.com24 Mar. 2010. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.examiner.com/starbucks-in-national/sheryl-crow-performs-at-starbucks-annual-shareholders-meeting-photos›.Tolson, Gerald H., and Michael J. Cuyjet. “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?”. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30 (2007): 530–38. Varma, Vivek, and Ben Packard. “Starbucks Global Responsibility Report Goals and Progress 2011”. Starbucks Corporation 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/goals-progress-report-2011.pdf›. 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On the back cover of The Art Forger’s Handbook, Eric Hebborn proclaims No drawing can lie of itself, it is only the opinion of the expert which can deceive. (Hebborn) Well certainly, but like many forgers Hebborn was dedicated to ensuring the experts have ample material with which to work. The debate about authenticity rolls into the debate about originality rolls into the debate about excellence, slipping between the verifiable and the subjective, shadowed by the expert assessing, categorising, and delivering verdicts. Yet the proclamation ‘This is authentic’ is not straightforward. It is impossible to prove that the statement ‘This is a painting by Sir Arthur Streeton’ is true. It is always possible (though not probable) that the work in question is an excellent copy, manufactured with materials identical to those employed by Streeton, with brushstrokes reflecting Streeton’s manipulation of paint, applied in the kind of sequence Streeton used and with a provenance crafted to simulate perfectly an acceptable provenance for a work by Streeton. Much easier to prove that a work is not by a particular artist; one very obvious anomaly will suffice (Sloggett 298). But an anomaly requires a context, the body of material against which to assess the new find. John Drew’s manipulation of the art market was successful not because of the quality of the pictures he paid John Myatt to produce (after all they were painted with household emulsion paint often extended with K-Y Jelly). His success lay in his ability to alter the identities of these works by penetrating the archives of the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum and manufacturing an archival history that virtually copied the history of works by his target artists, Nicholson, Giocometti, Chagall, Epstein, Dubeffet, and de Stals. While the paintings mimicked works by these artists, without a provenance (an identity and identity trail) they were nothing more than approximate copies, many which were initially rejected by the dealers and auction houses (Landesman 38). Identity requires history and context: for something to be deemed ‘real’, both need to be verifiable. The plight of stateless refugees lies in their inability to verify their history (who am I?) and their context (I exist here because…). Drew’s ability to deliver a history is only one way in which works can slip identities (or in the case of Drew’s works – can be pushed). Drew’s intention and his ability to profit by the deception denoted fraud. But authentication is more often sought to support not fraud but optimism. ‘Can you please look at this painting which hung in my grandfather’s lounge room for over 50 years? It was given to him by the artist. I remember it as a small boy, and my father also remembers it when he was a child. But I can’t sell it because someone said it didn’t look right. Can you tell if it is by the artist?’ Such a problem needs to be approached on two fronts. Firstly, how strong is the evidence that this work is by the artist and secondly, what is the hypothesis of best fit for this work? The classic authentication process examines a picture and, against a framework of knowns (usually based on securely provenanced works) looks for points of identification between the proffered work and provenanced works. From these points of identification a theory of best fit is developed. For example, a painting with the inscription ‘Arthur Streeton/1896’ is analysed for its pigment content in order to test the proposition that this is a work by Arthur Streeton from 1896. Pigment analysis indicates that titanium white (a pigment not available commercially until 1920) is found in the clouds. So the proposition must be modified: either this is a work by Streeton that has been heavily reworked after 1920, or this is not a work by Streeton, or this is a work by Streeton but the date is wrong. The authentication process will define and redefine each proposition until there is one that best fits the evidence at hand. Fluorescing the date to establish whether it is a recent addition would be part of this process. Examining other whites in the painting to check if the clouds had been added later would be another. Checking the veracity of the provenance would also be critical. We may decide that this is not an 1896 work by Streeton based on the evidence of the pigment. But what if an art historian discovers a small pigment manufacturer in Box Hill whose records show they produced titanium dioxide as a pigment in 1890? The new evidence may affect the conclusion. But more likely we would want to verify such evidence before we altered our conclusion. Between the extremes of Drew’s manufactured identities and the optimism of a third generation is the strengthened work, combining identity shift and hope. Dali pulled a reverse strengthening when he signed 20,000 blank sheets of paper for lithographs that had not yet been executed (Hebborn 79), but more usually it is the inscription not the image that is missing. Of course a signature is good, but signature works may not have, and do not need signatures. A signature may be a picture of a certain place (Heidelberg) at a certain time of day (moonrise); optimism will soon join the dots, producing a David Davies Moonrise. Often an inscription helps; a nondescript clean-shaven Victorian gentleman can become a bearded founding father, an anonymous nag the first winner of the Melbourne Cup. And if the buyer is not convinced, then a signature may win the day. Unlike Drew’s fabricated histories these changes in identity are confined to transformations of the object itself and then, by association, to its context. Art fraud is an endearing topic, partly because it challenges the subjective nature of expertise. When van Meegeren manufactured his most successful ‘Vermeer’ The Supper at Emmaus (1937) he explored the theories of experts, and then set about producing a work that copied not an existing Vermeer, but the critic’s theory of what an as-yet-undiscovered Vermeer would look like. Hannema, van Schendel and finally Bredius subscribed to the theory that Vermeer’s trip to Italy resulted in Caravaggio’s influence on the artist (Dutton 25). Van Meegeren obligingly produced such a work. So does it matter? Is an identical work as good a work? Is a sublime copyist of great artists a great artist? (Not that van Meegeren was either.) Authentication is a process of assessing claims about identity. It involves reputation, ownership, relationships and truth. When an artist executes a copy it is homage to the skill of the master. When Miss Malvina Manton produced a scene of dead poultry in 1874, she was copying the most popular painting in the fledgling collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Schendel’s The Poultry Vendor (Inglis 63), and joined a league of copyists including Henry Gritten and Nicholas Chevalier who sought permission to copy the Gallery’s paintings. When John O’Loughlin copied works by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and passed them off as original the impact on the artist was less benign (Gotting). Sid Nolan refused to identify problematic paintings attributed to his oeuvre claiming that to acknowledge such paintings would cast doubt on his entire oeuvre. Bob Dickerson assiduously tracks down and ‘outs’ problematic paintings from his oeuvre, claiming that not to do so would leave the thin edge of the wedge firmly embedded for future opportunists. Both are concerned with their identity. Creation is a fraught business, simply because the act of creation is the act of giving an identity. Whether we create a child, a musical score, a painting or a t-shirt brand, the newly created entity is located within a lineage and context that means more than the single individual creation. This is why identity theft is such a major crime. If someone steals an identity they also steal the collateral developed around that identity, the ability to deal in credit, to drive a car, to travel overseas, to purchase a house. Identity is a valuable commodity; for an artist it is their tool of trade. There is no doubt that the public celebrates the fake. Perhaps it is a celebration of the power of the object over the critic or the theoretician. But it is an extraordinarily costly celebration. Despite the earlier assertion that it is possible to make the perfect copy, very few even approximate the vibrancy and intelligence of an original. Most, if accepted, would seriously dilute the strength of the artist’s oeuvre. Forging Aboriginal art is even more disgraceful. In a society where cultural transmission has traditionally been based on complex relationships of dance, song, painting and objects to customary rights, laws and obligations, art fraud impacts on the very fabric of society. There will always be works that slip identities, and many are not pulled back. False works do damage; they dull our perceptions, dilute our ability to understand an artist’s contribution to society, and are usually no more than blunt instruments used for financial gain. References Australian Institute of Criminology. “Art Crime: Protecting Art, Protecting Artists and Protecting Consumers.” 2-3 Decembeer 1999. 1 May 2005 http://www.aic.gov.au/conferences/artcrime/>. Catterall, L. The Great Dali Art Fraud and Other Deceptions. Fort Lee, New Jersey: Barricade, 1992. Dutton, Denis, ed. The Forger’s Art Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. California: U of California P, 1983 Gotting, Peter. “Shame of Aboriginal Art Fakes.” 16 July 2000. 31 May 2005 http://www.museum-security.org/00/112.html#3>. Hebborn, Eric. The Art Forger’s Handbook. London: Cassell, 1997. Inglis, Alison. “What Did the Picture’s Surface Convey? Copies and Copying in the National Gallery of Victoria during the Colonial Period.” The Articulate Surface: Dialogues on Paintings between Conservators, Curators and Art Historians. Ed. Sue-Anne Wallace, with Jacqueline Macnaughtan and Jodi Parvey. Canberra: The Humanities Research Centre, the Australian National University and the National Gallery of Australia, 1996. 55-69. Landesman, Peter. “A 20th-Century Master Scam.” The New York Times Magazine (18 July 1999): 31-63. Sloggett, Robyn. “The Truth of the Matter: Issues and Procedures in the Authentication of Artwork.” Arts, Antiquity and Law 5.3 (September 2000): 295-303. Tallman, Susan. “Report from London Faking It.” Art in America (November 1990): 75-81. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sloggett, Robyn. "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>. APA Style Sloggett, R. (Jul. 2005) "Slipping and Sliding: Blind Optimism, Greed and the Effect of Fakes on Our Cultural Understanding," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/09-sloggett.php>.

From 1925-1929, the popular social movement of "Emperor" Flor Intrencherado in Western Visayas gained notoriety within the press local. The Iloilo-based local newspaper, the Makinaugalingon, extensively covered the movement in their press release articles. The newspaper, unsurprisingly, recreated a picture of Intrencherado and his followers in a language of ridicule, dismissing the movement and identifying its leader as a lunatic and insane despite the locality of the press. This, in turn, marginalized the movement, its goals, and objectives, as well as the leader, "Emperor" Flor Intrencherado. The goal of this study is to present, review, and analyze the different representations the local press created with the “infamous” peasant movement and give the context in which similar social movements could be understood. References Primary Materials El Tiempo. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. The issue used: August 8, 1907 Makinaugalingon. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Manila Times. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Philippines Free Press. Microfilm. Information Services and Instruction Section, University of the Philippines Main Library. Quezon City. Various Issues used. Works Cited Acevedo, Christian George. “Rosendo Mejica, the Golden Age of the Hiligaynon Literature and the Vernacularization of Jose Rizal’s Novels.” AGATHOS: An International Review of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11, no. 2 (2020): 107–18. Adamkiewicz, Andrei. “The Legitimating Aspects of Colonial Discourse.” In Culture and Texts: Representations of Philippine Society, edited by Raul Pertierra and Eduardo Ugarte, 155-176. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1994. Aguilar, Filomeno. Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. Aguilar, Filomeno Jr. “Masonic Myths and Revolutionary Feats in Negros Occidental.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (September 1997): 285–300. Alayon, John Richard. “The Empire of Flor Yntrencherado: A Study of Anti-Colonial Resistance.” Undergraduate Research, University of the Philippines in the Visayas, 1999. Bankoff, Greg. "Bandits, Banditry, and Landscapes of Crime in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29, no. 2 (September 1998): 319–39. Baumgartner, Joseph. "Newspapers as Historical Sources." Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (September 1981): 256–58. Borrinaga, George Emmanuel. “Seven Churches: The Pulahan Movement in Leyte, 1902-1907.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 43, no. 1/2 (2015): 1–139. Braünlein, Peter. "Who Defines 'the Popular'? 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Goh, Daniel. “Postcolonial Disorientations: Colonial Ethnography and the Vectors of the Philippine Nation in the Imperial Frontier.” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 259–76. Guerrero, Milagros. “The Colorum Uprisings, 1924-1931.” Asian Studies 5, no. 1 (1967): 65–78. Holt, Elizabeth Mary. Colonizing Filipinas: Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Philippines in Western Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002. Ileto, Reynaldo. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.__________. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979. Kaufmann, John. Kapulúngan Binisayá-Ininglís. Iloilo: La Editorial, 1935. https://www.gutenberg.ph/previews/kaufmann/KVED-Body.pdf. 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The plausibility of a ‘celebrity-artist’ is met with scepticism, suspicion and/or outright disdain amongst those who guard the traditions surrounding the exclusionary world of ‘High Art’. As a construct unique to the advent of media culture, the vapid and transient nature associated with contemporary celebrity negates the high-minded notion of genius retrospectively applied to a ‘hero-artist’ such as Michelangelo or Rembrandt. (Chris Rojek’s categories are useful in illustrating this difference. While the celebrity of earlier artists was based on talent, and thus, ‘achieved celebrity’, current media-generated celebrity, or what Rojek terms ‘celetoid’, is transient and artificially generated.) For media-celebrity is an immediately accessible veneer, a stopgap in our moments of boredom, and a point of ‘other’ against which we situate our desires, not expected to provide anything more or less significant than mass-entertainment. This contradicts or otherwise undermines the anticipation that Art express the ‘profound’, possess ‘essence’ if not ‘beauty’, or be part of the politically-motivated avant-garde. The two-dimensional world of ‘media-ted culture’ (a term I use to describe the manner in which the media mediates culture, as opposed to mass culture which presupposes a top-down construction of culture denying the free-play of signs and free-will of cultural consumption), with its attribute capitalist underpinnings, complicates the depth and emancipatory potential of Art, and, by extension, appears to threaten the entire elitist infrastructure of the Artworld by association to or blending with ‘mass culture’. In addition to a general malaise fuelled by the troublesome notion of a ‘Culture Industry’, these ideological Artworld constants maintain their position in the post-postmodern Nineties as the curmudgeonly core of criticism, particularly that scripted within the realm of the ‘popular’ media, aimed at contemporary art and its celebrity occupants. In his text Art and Celebrity, John Walker discusses the career trajectory of British-born artist Damien Hirst remarking that some critics “regard him as a frivolous clown whose showmanship robs art of its dignity” and further, “think his work has contributed to the dumbing down, coarsening and vulgarisation of British culture” (Walker 247). The relationship of the character of the artist to the form of his artworks, I will assert, is not an organic occurrence but a media-ted one. As an artist whose media-persona appeared to be driven by fame and the excesses and lifestyle it afforded, and who created work which seemed to reflect a rather disinterested, dispirited and dismissive attitude similar to that persona, Hirst finds himself in the conundrum of having become an artist whose financial success and art historical dilemma is his relationship to those self-same processes he utilized to achieve success at the start of his career. I will briefly sketch the mechanisms which led to Hirst’s definition within the purview of the popular, and follow by suggesting an art historical repositioning of his work. Damien Hirst currently enjoys a peaceful, rural existence as the third highest-paid British artist alive today, having sky-rocketed to success in the Nineties as the ‘founder’ of the loose-knit group known as ‘young British art’. A product of the can-do attitude associated with Thatcherism and encouraged by his teachers, particularly the American-born Conceptualist Michael Craig-Martin, Hirst actively participated within the endorsement of his works and those of his London-based Goldsmith College classmates. Freeze, his first attempt at curation, has taken on mythic status in defining the group, and its professional gloss — particularly within its marketing strategy — is viewed as the precursor to an artistic disposition far more interested in fame and fortune, than form. (For a full discussion of Freeze, from a particularly Marxist perspective, see Stallabrass. His rebranding of ‘young British art’ into ‘High Art Lite’ sums up his position quite precisely. For a more light-hearted approach, see Collings.) As he progressed in his career during the early Nineties, and in conjunction with the promotional savvy of his dealer Jay Jopling, Hirst received frequent mention in specialist and popular media alike, quickly becoming known as young British art’s enfant-terrible. His lewd public behaviour, when collapsed as a single performance with his Art, was construed as a media-friendly spectacle which actively sought to attract the voyeuristic gaze of popular culture. This ploy appeared to work. Due to the familiarity granted by extensive media coverage, his images were subsequently co-opted within a number of marketplaces, ranging from film to advertising. For the first time in Britain an unusual cultural twist placed the world of High Art, embodied within the media-ted-performance-installation piece ‘Damien Hirst’, squarely within the realm of everyday experience. The ubiquity of his forms prompted friend/author Gordon Burn to pronounce that Britain was now under the influence of “a new intangible poetry becoming part of modern life” (Burn 10), or, in other words, had entered ‘Hirstworld’. Although the collapsing of work and artist within the realm of ‘modern life’ has art historical precedents, most obviously within the oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Hirst created a juxtaposition within his personality which largely undermined notions of what constituted the ‘Artist’. In contrast with Warhol’s eclectic ‘artsy’ public persona, Hirst presented himself as an average ‘Northern lad’: rowdy, temperamental, beer-swilling. His antics were part of the common cultural vernacular and when viewed in conjunction with the supposed media-friendly nature of his works, as Rosie Millard reflects, “Even if they hated it, people felt like they could have an opinion, because they understood what was going on” (Millard 21). Yet what did the public really understand, and how did they come to understand it? While a higher than normal attendance at the Sensation exhibit was regarded as an indicator of the success of young British art, the vast majority of the non-specialist audience commenting on these works based their assessment and interpretation of them on the exposure granted them by the mass media. The media-tion of yBa, particularly in the flagrant reporting of the artists’ statements and antics, flattened complexities or intertextual meanings into a by-line, which was meant to capture the imagination of a new audience for contemporary art in an easily consumable form. Although specialist criticism predictably ran the gambit, popular criticism was quite often disparaging or otherwise derogatory, and almost always took a biographical approach to describing the objects. Thus, what the public appeared to ‘understand’ was related much more to the hype and celebrity surrounding the artists, particularly the main protagonist Hirst, than of any issue related to form, appreciation or the history of art. Even more detrimentally, this conflation of art with biography led to many misunderstandings related to form, particularly in the assumption of its intention as ‘shock-art’ (as in Sister Wendy’s statement – see Wroe). An editorial letter printed in The Times points to this problem: “I am sure I am speaking for the general public when I say that these exhibits are not challenging, not clever, not funny and certainly not art” (Taylor 5; italics are mine). Outside of the media attention it garnered, young British art was as incomprehensible to its public as contemporary Art ever had been, even if the personalities of the artists and their motifs were easily recognizable. The notoriously fickle British were suspect of the equation: shark in formaldehyde = art. As Andrew Graham-Dixon notes, “They distrust the modern artist for old-fashioned puritanical reasons, being suspicious of any work of art which appears, to them, to have involved little work. They also suspect modern art of trying to fool them with a spurious jiggery-pokery” (Graham-Dixon 202). And perhaps more significantly, a class system which remained highly stratified continued to be firmly in place in the Nineties and was intensely critical regarding the allotment of government funds. (A well-documented incidence of this is the public outcry that occurred after the Tate purchased a work by Carl Andrew consisting solely of a line of firebrick.) The only thing that seemed shocking to the public was the promotion of the decadent young British artists with their spurious forms and high-fashion lifestyle. Exposure to the allegory of yBa led to the over-riding sentiment: ‘I could make that too, now give me my fame!’ (Incidences of this were rampant in the papers, i.e. members of the ‘working-class’ were shown displaying fish and chips in the gallery, other papers suggested ways to make-your-own Hirst; for one example, see Independent.) Not only did media-ted biography influence public opinion, but it infiltrated specialist art writing as well. Creating a direct link between biography and subject, Burn conflates objects which could be read as expressing an element of alienation with Hirst’s ‘predicament’ as a celebrity figure: “Celebrity is about control and distance; it is about adding space to the space that inevitably exists between human beings and remaining apart from the flock” (Burn 10; clearly co-opting Hirst’s vitrine sculpture of a lamb caught in mid-leap Away From The Flock to highlight this sentiment.) This sort of psychoanalytical approach edges, at best, slightly out of the realm of persona and into that of the personal. Either type of reading is regarded by Julian Stallabrass as possible only because of an intentional ambiguity on the part of the artist which allows the art object to posture as Art. For instance, Hirst provides sweeping generalizations regarding his objects, often associating them to the ‘grand narratives’ of life and death, and is at times even contradictory, employing a vague multi-referentiality which Stallabrass feels heightens the sense of ‘something important going on’. (Stallabrass suggests this is accomplished by utilizing theory without either acknowledgement or political/emancipatory intent in order to provide an illusion of sophistication. Hirst thus presents ‘The Death of the Author’, an art which appears to speak to intertextuality, only to make effectual use of it.) While Stallabrass’s own critique of yBa also conflates the persona of the artist with the artworks, he feels the media-tion of the artists has worked in their favour: “…behaviour and object-making together, fosters a feeling that it must be authentic because of its intimate link with the artist’s self, no matter how sham that self may be” (Stallabrass 247). The success of yBa is, therefore, based on a mythology regarding the persona of the artist, and a misreading of works that are otherwise “[a] combination of Hammer-style schlock and high-art minimalist rigour” (Stallabrass 26). Both of these critiques point to the central issue in an assessment of yBa (and a perennial problem for contemporary art in general): the possibilities of interpretation. In yBa in particular, interpretation has become a problem based on the conflation of the persona of the artist with their works, which I would attest is part of a larger problem regarding the confusion surrounding the relationship between the aesthetic and the spectacle, and the difficulties each term represents in popular and academic discourse alike. In the instance of Damien Hirst, the outcome of this confusion is an inability to accurately historicize the objects which comprise his oeuvre, additionally denying its aesthetic potential and dismissing the climate in which it was created. Unarguably, Hirst’s art contemplates the experience of life: as a cultural phenomenon in its contemplation of spectacular society, and as a tenuous state of embodiment, of the conditions in which we experience a state of ‘alive’. His objects (as signs or texts) provide a means to consider the dynamics in which human beings experience aesthetics, as well as providing an experience of that experience: systems which emphasize the sentient experience of phenomenology. The significance of the legacy of Hirst’s art (and of yBa generally) has already begun to be written in relation to its interaction with the media: as “conceptual work in visually accessible and spectacular form” (Stallabrass 4). While it would be disingenuous to suggest that Hirst has not capitalized or intentionally pandered to the media attention he received, it would be equally naïve to presume that his effort is purely a charade, or a mass-manipulation. The conflation of a media-ted biography with form negates the more significant aspects of Hirst’s work and its various dialogues with visual culture, the viewers in that culture and otherwise, and the history of visual objects, while simultaneously undermining the relative value of the image within contemporary society generally by association to capitalism and art-as-production. Perhaps there is a middle-ground between the Death of the Author, and Obsession with the Author? In reconsidering the aesthetic as a dialectical and culturally-bound sentient response resulting from interaction with an art object and experienced beyond the constraints of the beautiful, the importance of the first-hand interaction with art returns, shifting would-be viewers away from the water-cooler and back to the wonder of the art-experience in its many spectacular guises. References Burn, Gordon. “Hirstworld.” The Guardian 31 Aug. 1996: 10. Collings, Matthew. Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. London: 21 Publishing Ltd., 1997. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British Art. Los Angeles: U of California P, 202. The Independent. “Review: Damien Hirst: DIY for Enthusiasts.” 18 Sep. 1997: 9. Millard, Rosie. The Tastemakers: UK Art Now. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite. London: Verso, 1999. Taylor, Grace. “Unpleasant Sensation.” Magazine Letter. The Times 27 Sep. 1997: 5. Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Wroe, Martin. “Sister Wendy Puts Boot into Damien.” The Guardian 12 May 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style LeBlanc, Carrie. "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>. APA Style LeBlanc, C. (Nov. 2004) "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>.