Articoli di riviste sul tema "Vacated space"

AbstractAn enormous solar tornado was observed by SDO/AIA on 25 September 2011. It was mainly associated with a quiescent prominence with an overlying coronal cavity. We investigate the triggering mechanism of the solar tornado by using the data from two instruments: SDO/AIA and STEREO-A/EUVI, covering the Sun from two directions. The tornado appeared near to the active region NOAA 11303 that produced three flares. The flares directly influenced the prominence-cavity system. The release of free magnetic energy from the active region by flares resulted in the contraction of the active region field. The cavity, owing to its superior magnetic pressure, expanded to fill this vacated space in the corona. We propose that the tornado developed on the top of the prominence due to the expansion of the prominence-cavity system.

The following study centres on the motif of the mushroom in romantic poetry, discussing the questions of meaning, use, and indeterminacy that it raises. By analyzing the work of Matthew Arnold, Ludwig Tieck, and John Keats, the article outlines a particular field of semiosis, initially sought out in the border zone between natural and artificial. Importantly, however, each of the examples also actualize a disturbance in that field, suggestive of a poetic capacity beyond the dictum of functionality and efficacy. The investigation furthermore documents a fixation with detail, attempting to theorize its allure with the aid of Roland Barthes and his concept of the ‘third meaning’. Connecting the affective ‘sting’ of the detail with the question of poetic non-function, the study ultimately proposes that a concern for the reading and writing body might fill the space of meaning vacated by poets such as Tieck and Keats.

The present explanation for the evolution of flammability invokes the need for a flammable mutant parent plant (the torch) to be able to spread the negative effects of fire to less flammable, more fire-sensitive neighbouring plants (the damps). Thereafter, if the torch either produces more seedlings, or more competitive seedlings, in the post-fire environment, to take over the space vacated by both the dead damps and the torch, then torch genotypes could invade. Here, I argue that an individual flammable mutant genotype cannot invade the ‘group’ of non-flammable individuals because it implies unlikely patterns of seed dispersal and fitness advantages. The implication of this is that although flammability can evolve, it is an incidental or emergent property of species or ecosystems and that it confers no extra advantages to individual flammable plants. In contrast, anti-flammability could be both selected for, and evolve.

The planned closure of Copenhagen's commercial docks and railway yards presented the opportunity to consider not only possible uses for the vacated land but also the impact of these changes on the rest of the city. This paper is based on extracts from Urban Make, a record of a study made of this subject by a team of architects drawn from the architecture schools at Copenhagen and Århus, led by Erik Christian Sørensen. Reproduced here is an abbreviated account of the team's approach together with its proposals for three of the study areas and for reinforcing the link between the existing centre and the expanding Ørestad area across the harbour. Limitations on space preclude the inclusion of the remaining proposals and the studies made of other European cities, a series of essays on ‘The Commendable City’ and suggestions for reordering the city's streets and obtaining better value from investment in the public realm.

We examined predation habits of cougars (Puma concolor (L., 1771)) following the recent recovery of gray wolves (Canis lupus L., 1758) in the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. With the extirpation of wolves in the early 20th century, cougars likely expanded their niche space to include space vacated by wolves, and increased use of habitat better suited to the foraging of a coursing predator, like wolves. We predicted that as wolves recolonized their former range, competitive exclusion would compel cougars to cede portions of niche space occupied in the absence of wolves. To examine this hypothesis, we radio-tracked cougars and examined their predation sites from winter 2000–2001 through summer 2009. Variation in foraging by cougars was associated with increasing wolf presence. As wolf numbers increased and the mean distance between wolf pack activity centers and cougar predation sites decreased, cougars made kills at higher elevations on more north-facing slopes during summer and in more rugged areas during winter. In addition, cougars preyed on a higher proportion of mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus (Rafinesque, 1817)), consistent with predictions of exploitative competition with wolves. Observed changes in predation characteristics reflect differences in predation strategy between cougars and wolves, given that wolves are coursing predators and cougars are ambush predators. These possible predation effects should be considered when developing management strategies in systems where the recolonization of wolves may occur.

“TO RAISE A REAL SPECTRE of the antique is a craving of our own century” (104) writes “Vernon Lee” in her early collection of essays on aesthetics, Belcaro. The nineteenth century is indeed, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, an age which craves ghost stories of all kinds. Sceptical of the supernatural yet nostalgic for it (Briggs 19), the age turns to ghost stories to assuage its lost faith. Ghosts, if nothing else, might still glimmer in the empty spaces of a universe vacated by the gods but not yet filled with the space journeys of science and science fiction. Their questionable shapes thus continue to shape the questions of an age seeking reassurance, even if that reassurance comes in a spasm of terror. And terror, however subtly or ingeniously aroused, whether by the self-induced fantasies of James’s governess or the calculated self-hauntings of Stevenson’s Jekyll, remains the primary motivation and aim of the ghost story. Fear of the unknown, whether within or without, provides the last bastion of a supernaturalism under threat from the encroaching “materialism” (Briggs 24) of the modern world. The ghost story not only indulges the unstable, if sometimes deeply conventional order of fantasy at the expense of “naturalistic art” (Cavaliero 7); it also indulges the wish to believe in another, more fearful world, beyond the material order of things. The specter focuses this trouble of belief. It is there and not there. It outlines emptiness but also fills it up, embodying and disembodying its own reality at the same time.

A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space already vacated by the Congress has so far been filled by three different sets of political forces. The first force, Hindu nationalism, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Basu 1997; Hansen and Jaffrelot 1998; Jaffrelot 1993; Varshney 1993). The second force, regionalism, has also spawned considerable research of late (Baruah 1999; Singh forthcoming; Subramanian 1999). A third force, not so extensively analyzed, covers an array of political parties and organizations that encompass groups normally classified under the umbrella category of “lower castes”: the so-called scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes, and the “other backward classes” (OBCs). How should we understand the politics of parties representing these groups? How far will they go? What are the implications of their forward march, if it does take place, for Indian democracy?

Carbonic anhydrases are mostly zinc metalloenzymes that catalyze the reversible hydration/dehydration of CO2/HCO3−. Previously, the X-ray crystal structures of CO2-bound holo (zinc-bound) and apo (zinc-free) human carbonic anhydrase IIs (hCA IIs) were captured at high resolution. Here, we present sequential timeframe structures of holo- [T = 0 s (CO2-bound), 50 s, 3 min, 10 min, 25 min, and 1 h] and apo-hCA IIs [T = 0 s, 50 s, 3 min, and 10 min] during the “slow” release of CO2. Two active site waters, WDW (deep water) and WDW′ (this study), replace the vacated space created on CO2 release, and another water, WI (intermediate water), is seen to translocate to the proton wire position W1. In addition, on the rim of the active site pocket, a water W2′ (this study), in close proximity to residue His64 and W2, gradually exits the active site, whereas His64 concurrently rotates from pointing away (“out”) to pointing toward (“in”) active site rotameric conformation. This study provides for the first time, to our knowledge, structural “snapshots” of hCA II intermediate states during the formation of the His64-mediated proton wire that is induced as CO2 is released. Comparison of the holo- and apo-hCA II structures shows that the solvent network rearrangements require the presence of the zinc ion.

A new approach to organisation of container block trains is considered based on the principles of passenger traffic. The technology assumes container train’s traffic subject to the timetable with sale of cargo space in the train. The train is made up at the departure station and follows the established route with stops at intermediate container terminals or stations, where a container for which this station is designated as destination is removed and a new container is placed on the vacated place to be delivered to subsequent points of the route.The objective of this study is to develop a methodology for optimal placement of containers in a block train intended for en route cargo handling operations. The technique involves an iterative search for such an order of placement of packages so that containers assigned to each intermediate point are as close to each other as possible. The technique is an authors’ algorithm based on combinatorial optimisation methods.The implementation of the proposed algorithm makes it possible to reduce the excessive mileage of handlers and loaders at intermediate points and, consequently, to increase speed of cargo operations when rearranging containers, as well as to reduce operating costs of using the loading facilities of the container terminal.The proposed mathematical algorithm as compared to exhaustive search allows significantly reducing the number of iterations in search for a solution and can be implemented as software.

The anatomy ofCrenella decussata(Mytiloidea) is described. Individuals of this circumboreal species occupy granular crypts composed of sand grains held in place by mucus. The swollen basal region of the tubule is occupied by an individual, which connects to the sediment surface by two posterior tubes accommodating the inhalant and exhalant streams. There is reduction in musculature and, most importantly, anterior foreshortening of the outer ctenidial demibranchs and loss of the labial palps. This creates an anterior space in the mantle for the initial brooding of fertilized ova by females to the prodissoconch stage. Subsequently, these larvae are transferred to the exhalant tube of the crypt wherein they attach by a single fine byssal thread and are further brooded until the crawl-away juvenile stage is attained. Experimental studies of larval behaviour suggest that parental pheromones sustain the female/offspring bond. Newly hatched individuals responded to parental exhalant water by actively attaching themselves using a byssal thread. This response persisted for 28 days, but not after 55 days when, we suggest, the pheromonal response ceases and offspring are developed sufficiently to take up life in their own nests. Offspring retrieved from parental crypts and fed continuously reached an average shell length of 500 μm after 7.5 months. Brooded offspring thus appear to rely on embryonal energy resources until post-metamorphosis, after which suspension feeding becomes essential for further growth and development before the parental crypt is vacated.

ABSTRACT Flagella purified from Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium contain FliG, FliM, and FliN, cytoplasmic proteins that are important in torque generation and switching, and FliF, a transmembrane structural protein. The motor portion of the flagellum (the basal body complex) has a cytoplasmic C ring and a transmembrane M ring. Incubation of purified basal bodies at pH 4.5 removed FliM and FliN but not FliG or FliF. These basal bodies lacked C rings but had intact M rings, suggesting that FliM and FliN are part of the C ring but not a detectable part of the M ring. Incubation of basal bodies at pH 2.5 removed FliG, FliM, and FliN but not FliF. These basal bodies lacked the C ring, and the cytoplasmic face of the M ring was altered, suggesting that FliG makes up at least part of the cytoplasmic face of the M ring. Further insights into FliG were obtained from cells expressing a fusion protein of FliF and FliG. Flagella from these mutants still rotated but cells were not chemotactic. One mutant is a full-length fusion of FliF and FliG; the second mutant has a deletion lacking the last 56 residues of FliF and the first 94 residues of FliG. In the former, C rings appeared complete, but a portion of the M ring was shifted to higher radius. The C-ring–M-ring interaction appeared to be altered. In basal bodies with the fusion-deletion protein, the C ring was smaller in diameter, and one of its domains occupied space vacated by missing portions of FliF and FliG.

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.

Pocket gophers have long suppressed forest regeneration in clearcuts in western North America, despite the application of intensive and costly, large-scale abatement practices, which also kill non-target wildlife and may increase soil erosion. At four national forests in northern California, gophers (Thomomys bottae and T. monticola) on 50 clearcuts were baited with a 0.5% strychnine concentration on wheat or oat groats, which were presented as loose grains or in 1 × 2 cm paraffin pellets for added durability. The various baits and baiting regimes usually reduced gopher abundance by 50-100% within one month. However, gopher populations recovered too quickly to protect seedlings planted for forest regeneration, especially on plots baited with a mechanical burrow-builder. In some plots where abatement was most successful initially, gopher densities increased to levels exceeding those in control plots by 7-13 months later. As gopher populations recovered following abatement, active burrows first appeared at the plot peripheries and advanced toward the plot centres, suggesting that abated territorial residents were replaced by immigrants dispersing from the surrounding landscape.Whereas conventional abatement practices can reduce gopher abundance in clearcuts, the small spatial and temporal scales of application encourage reinvasion of vacated ecological space. These population responses defeat the goal of forest management by increasing gopher density in clearcuts; at the same time the conifer seedlings are vulnerable to gopher predation. Predation of conifer seedlings might be reduced by not abating gophers or by using alternative harvest regimes. These alternative strategies would avoid creating the conditions under which gophers contribute to slowing forest regeneration following timber harvests, and they would avoid the widespread and possibly long-term environmental damage caused by applying acute poisons and by using the burrow-builder.

The article presents the results of review and analysis of literature sources on the reconstruction and modernization of typical housing in the postwar period in Europe (Germany, France, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) and Russia. The main issues of its implementation are considered: energy efficiency, organizational and economic, architectural and planning. The organization of reconstruction and modernization of housing at the state level is described in detail, application of modern technologies during its implementation, as well as examples of implemented projects. After the Second World War in many countries of the world and especially in the countries of the socialist camp there was a massive panel and brick housing construction on typical projects of the first generation with the use of industrial structures. In the early 70's it became clear that such buildings are obsolete, lost social attractiveness, and most importantly, efficiency. Analysis of the state of old buildings and the use of a multifaceted approach to the renovation and reconstruction of obsolete housing has led to the realization that the renovation of such buildings is more economical than new buildings in vacated areas and they are available to middle-income people. Foreign experience in the modernization and reconstruction of post-war housing convincingly proves this. It should be noted that each European country finds its own ways to address organizational, technological and economic issues related to the reconstruction and modernization of residential buildings. Based on the fact that the first post-war buildings on standard projects, as a rule, were carried out in whole arrays, their reconstruction should be based not only on residential buildings but also on the residential district or neighborhood as a whole. During the reconstruction of buildings should be considered traditional or historical features of the surrounding parts of the city. Particular attention should be paid to improving transport conditions, as the number of individual transport is constantly growing. Also important are the issues of insolation and aeration, which, together with the appropriate level of landscaping, significantly affect the microclimate of residential buildings. In addition, open buildings are deprived of the individuality of the yard space, so the reconstruction of the neighborhood should be based on the principles of closed or semi-closed buildings. This can be achieved by adding or constructing additional volumes that connect individual buildings. This achieves both economic and functional efficiency of space use.

Wolf, Harald and Ansgar Büschges. Plasticity of synaptic connections in sensory-motor pathways of the adult locust flight system. J. Neurophysiol. 78: 1276–1284, 1997. We investigated possible roles of retrograde signals and competitive interactions in the lesion-induced reorganization of synaptic contacts in the locust CNS. Neuronal plasticity is elicited in the adult flight system by removal of afferents from the tegula, a mechanoreceptor organ at the base of the wing. We severed one hindwing organ and studied the resulting rearrangement of synaptic contacts between flight interneurons and afferent neurons from the remaining three tegulae (2 forewing, 1 hindwing). This was done by electric stimulation of afferents and intracellular recording from interneurons (and occasionally motoneurons). Two to three weeks after unilateral tegula lesion, connections between tegula afferents and flight interneurons were altered in the following way. 1) Axons from the forewing tegula on the operated side had established new synaptic contacts with metathoracic elevator interneurons. In addition, the amplitude of compound excitatory postsynaptic potentials elicited by electric stimulation was increased, indicating that a larger number of afferents connected to any given interneuron. 2) On the side contralateral to the lesion, connectivity between axons from the forewing tegula and elevator interneurons was decreased. 3) The efficacy of the (remaining) hindwing afferents appeared to be increased with regard to both synaptic transmission to interneurons and impact on flight motor pattern. 4) Flight motoneurons, which are normally restricted to the ipsilateral hemiganglion, sprouted across the ganglion midline after unilateral tegula removal and apparently established new synaptic contacts with tegula afferents on that side. The changes on the operated side are interpreted as occupation of synaptic space vacated on the interneurons by the severed hindwing afferents. On the contralateral side, the changes in synaptic contact must be elicited by retrograde signals from bilaterally arborizing flight interneurons, because tegula projections remain strictly ipsilateral. The pattern of changes suggests competitive interactions between forewing and hindwing afferents. The present investigation thus presents evidence that the CNS of the mature locust is capable of extensive synaptic rearrangement in response to injury and indicates for the first time the action of retrograde signals from interneurons.

Photojournalist David Butow has covered social issues, politics, and news events around the world. In his new series “After Hours,” he stays closer to home, photographing at nighttime in spaces that have been vacated or have few people. Strange colors from artificial lighting and the emptiness create a new energy and we take away a visual experience that might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

The spectacular success of BJP in the recent General Elections invited a mixed assessment from different positions. But mostly it was oversimplification and undermining of its success. On the other hand, the victory of AAP in assembly elections was taken as an alternative in making. For example along with other commenter’s in an article (published in The Indian Express, 26 May 2014, op-ed page) renowned lawyer and AAP leader Shri Shanti Bhushan analysed the electoral success of BJP and the future course for AAP that lacks in substance. It tried to under-assessed the BJP’s success and oversimplified the road ahead for AAP. As it like wait till BJP does the same blunders as Congress did. In this paper some light will be thrown on BJP’s success and legacy but will mainly discuss the AAP phenomena in Indian politics with a view to access the recent developments in party and as an emerging alternative that can also be an opportunity to capture the space vacated by the Left movement in India. First of all I would like to argue that considering the BJP after the failed Janta Party Experiment as a ‘faction of Janta Party’ (Shri Bhushan’s views) is not a correct judgment. Actually the Bhartiya Jan Sangha was the last party that remained as Janta Party coalition after the other four parties that came together without merging their distinctive identities to form Janta Party left the coalition at their will to pursue their own ambitions. Hence it was not just a matter of chance that the new party that emerged on the Indian political scene after the failed Janta experiment named Bhartiya Janta Party (Bhartiya Jana Sangha + Janta Party = Bhartiya Janta Party). The then leaders not only launched a new party with inheriting the name but also the legacy. As it was more moderate and reformed on many policy agendas by incorporating Gandhian- JP Legacy to fight against the ruling dispensation. That seed has now grown as a Banyan tree and shadowing the Indian political scene defying all ifs and buts. Although it is still to be tested that how will a full majority BJP will work in coming years as many scholars of Indian politics doubt the BJP’s course of action as a single full majority party (see Christophe Jaffrelot, 2003). It is also because the earlier BJP led government was a crippled and soft BJP as NDA coalition and also Atal Bihari Bajpai as its leader and was not able to pursue its core Hindutwa demands of building Ram temple, Uniform Civil Code and the abolition of Article 370 of the Constitution for the full merger of J&K into Indian Union.

The recent postmodern turn and concomitant reconceptualization of space in social theory have encouraged numerous investigators, cultural theorists especially, to augment, even to replace, material with metaphorical space; one whereby ‘geographical imaginations’ play constitutive roles in space-society relationships. A leading contributor has been Edward Said, who aims at refashioning spatial sensibilities not only in traditional ‘geographic’ terms but in a broader epistemological sense. Committed to transgressing established borders, Said invites us to imagine new topographies, in which units heretofore deemed separate—cultures, professions, realms of experience—become inescapably hybrid and interpenetrating. At the same time, Said's geography can be as opaque as it is suggestive—betraying an eclectic form often left unstituatrd vis-à-vis material practices. I invoke Aijaz Ahmad's work to situate Said's, tracing its affiliations to his trajectories as diasporan intellectual, Palestinian activist, and disciple of European High Philology. Ahmad thereby renders a portrait which is both enabling and self-cancelling, in which Said's generosity, complexity—and untenability—inhere from an unwillingness to vacate any spaces he has occupied; seeking instead to span often irreconcilable positions. Ahmad's stringency, however, fails to acknowledge possibilities inherent in Said's eclecticism; particularly the commitment to build bridges, oppose orthodox rigidities, and gain enrichment from that which one opposes. In this light, I invoke David Harvey's work as emblematic of a growing oeuvre that does not deny postmodernism its radical potential, but instead situates it within a revamped materialism designed to reconnect the Left. Harvey's work represents a serious—though not unproblematic—attempt to rework modernity, viewed here as an unfinished project capable of galvanizing new and varied energies.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the problem that arises when a tenant’s space needs will likely change in the future, but the property owner would prefer to continue renting the initial space to the same tenant. The study builds upon ideas on structuring option values into initial rent and proposes a method for evaluating the value of adaptability for both the tenants and the owners.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is based on real option pricing, and it includes key variables of building adaptability, lease agreement terms and property market information. The methodology explains the importance of understanding the concept of volatility related to space needs and how it affects the tenant’s decision to either remain or vacate the rented premises. Real option pricing theory highlights the problem of using linearly growing expectations for physical assets and the obvious problems that arise with that assumption.FindingsThis paper suggests that the principles of option pricing could be used in valuing building adaptability to find the optimal initial rent from both the owner’s and the tenant’s perspective. It is pointed that the volatility of the tenant’s future space requirements should drive the effective rent paid by the tenant. The paper argues as to why the owner is better off if the tenant can downscale (with building adaptability) their current space rather than vacate the whole space. Additionally, this paper presents the reasons for why the tenant should pay more for a space that has such a downscaling option. Eventually, both the owner and the tenant are better off because, from the tenant’s perspective, unnecessary relocating costs can be avoided, and from the owner’s perspective, unnecessary re-renting costs can be avoided.Practical implicationsThe paper demonstrates how the downscaling option creates value for both the owner and the tenant. The owner benefits from higher average occupancy rates, and during lease break points, only part of the premises has to be re-rented rather than the entire premises. When these higher occupancy rates are transferred into cash flows with relevant market parameters, it is evident how the rates create extra value for the property owner and for the tenant, subject to lease terms.Originality/valueThe owner benefits from the higher rent, even though there might be more lease break points where parts of the building must be rented out. If these kinds of option values can be communicated transparently, it should be possible for the owner and the tenant to agree on such terms.

Digital Humanities (DH) has emerged as a new academic employment field in the past 20 years or so. Its place within the academy remains contested, differently realized and materialized in different socio-cultural contexts. It conjoins domains conventionally female-dominated (Humanities disciplines) with technology domains that have been regarded as male-dominated. Yet while there has been much research on women within technology-driven work environments in general, there has been no research on DH as an emerging employment context, or on the impacts of gender in its formation both as workplace and as a site for professional identities. This article draws on qualitative research conducted in 2017/18. It examines how gender, DH as a materialized workplace, and professional identities within it, are imbricated in a field characterized by ‘intersectionalized identities’. These ‘intersectionalized identities’ have particular effects, producing ‘vacated spaces’ as metaphorical and as material gaps.

With the concept of sharing economic entering into our lives, many parking Apps are designed for connecting the drivers and vacated parking spaces. However, there are not many drivers who use the mobile Apps to reserve and find available parking spaces, which is largely due to the insufficient information provided by the parking App. In order to better explain, predict, and improve drivers’ acceptance of parking App, the conceptual framework based on technology acceptance model was developed to establish the relationships between the drivers’ intention to accept parking App, trust in parking App, perceived usefulness of parking App, and perceived ease of its use. Then structural equation model was established to analyze the relationship between various variables. The results show that the trust in parking App, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and parking App attributes are the main factors that determine the intention to use parking App. Through the test of direct effect, indirect effect, and total effect in the model, it is found that perceived usefulness has the largest total impact on acceptance intention, with a standardized coefficient of 0.984, followed by parking App attribute (0.743), perceived ease of use (0.384), and trust in parking App (0.381).

AbstractPelestarian warisan or heritage protection for bamboo houses with earthquake resistant needs to be encouraged at a post-disaster resilient movement in West Nusa Tenggara and other tourist islands in eastern Indonesia. The ability to be optimistic, empathy with self-efficacy accompanied by emotion regulation after the earthquake became the main aspect of the resilience of the population in the tourist area to start building bamboo houses as commercial lodging. "Kundun House" is an example of bamboo lodging on the island of Gili Trawangan, which was built in 2017 one year before the Lombok earthquake that occurred on August 5, 2018 which left the island of Gili Trawangan vacated. The psychological resilience of Kundun homeowner as well as the “Batu Bambu Inn” owner to face the earthquake as well as the solid establishment of their lodgings, the two-story lodging building made of bamboo is still intact without damage after the calamity last August. This paper refers to the theory of global village (McLuhan, 1962 and 1994), a concept that encourages people to interact intensely and live in a global space. At the theoretical level, global village terminology often intertwines with "disaster resilience" that reveals livelihoods after the earthquake in Lombok to the surrounding islands including Gili Trawangan which results in damage to school buildings, housing, roads and market infrastructure and also leaves trauma for residents and island tourism entrepreneurs (Gili Trawangan is only 15 square kilometres wide) as well as the island of Lombok. The trauma experienced by the residents of Gili Trawangan shows the need for a sturdy bamboo house model and can be used as a modeling for commercial lodging houses. The potential for more development of earthquake-resistant bamboo houses prototypes of Kundun house are now offered to be developed in the island of Sumba which on the 31st of January 2019 was also rocked by an earthquake. The movement of the bamboo lodging houses in tourist areas should be a reconstruction of the mass bamboo planting ecology as part of the protection of Indonesia's cultural heritage which is famous for its traditional houses that have been tested for earthquake resistance. Heritage protection (pelestarian warisan) rumah bambu tahan gempa bumi perlu digalakkan sebagai gerakan resilien pasca bencana di Nusa Tenggara Barat dan pulau wisata lain di timur Indonesia. Kemampuan untuk optimis, empati dengan efikasi diri yang disertai dengan regulasi emosi pasca gempa menjadi aspek utama daya lentur penduduk kawasan wisata untuk mulai membangun rumah bambu sebagai penginapan komersial. “Rumah Kundun” menjadi contoh penginapan dari bambu di pulau Gili Trawangan yang dibangun tahun 2017 satu tahun sebelum gempa Lombok yang terjadi tanggal 5 Agustus 2018 yang menyebabkan pulau Gili Trawangan dikosongkan. Kekuatan psikologis resilien pemilik rumah Kundun dan juga penginapan “Batu Bambu” menghadapi gempa serta kokoh berdirinya penginapan mereka yang bangunan penginapannya berlantai dua terbuat dari bambu masih utuh tanpa kerusakan pasca gempa bumi susulan setelah Agustus lalu. Tulisan ini merujuk teori global village (McLuhan, 1962 dan 1994), konsep yang mendorong masyarakat untuk berinteraksi secara intens dan tinggal dalam sebuah ruang global. Pada tataran teoretik, terminologi global village acap berkelindan dengan “resiliensi kebencanaan” yang mengungkap livelihood pasca kejadian gempaLombok hingga ke pulau sekitarnya termasuk Gili Trawangan yang berakibat kerusakan bangunan sekolah, perumahan, jalan dan infrastruktur pasar dan menyisakan trauma bagi penduduk dan pelaku usaha wisata (Gili Trawangan hanya seluas 15 kilometer persegi) dan pulau Lombok. Trauma yang dialami penduduk Gili Trawangan ini memperlihatkan perlunya model rumah bambu yang kokoh dan dapat menjadi percontohan sebagai rumah penginapan komersial. Potensi pengembangan rumah bambu tahan gempa prototipe dari rumah Kundun kini ditawarkan untuk dikembangkan di pulau Sumba yang pada tanggal 31 Januari 2019 lalu juga diguncang gempa bumi. Gerakan resiliansi rumah penginapan bambu di kawasan wisata hendaknya menjadi rekonstruksi ekologi penanaman massif bambu sebagai bagian dari proteksi warisan budaya Indonesia yang terkenal dengan rumah adatnya yang telah teruji tahan gempa.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the ideological foundation of open innovation strategies and the open business model, which are appearing as new industrial paradigms based on information technology (IT). Design/methodology/approach First, this paper examined the ideological foundation of Deleuze, Whitehead, and Popper. Next, Taoism was scrutinized to discover concrete bases for open innovation. Findings Here, it was found that Taoism completely coincides with the logical basis of open innovation. The theory “the supreme good is like water” of Taoism means to vacate oneself and fill the space with others to create paradoxes, thereby filling oneself with a more creative method. Originality/value Taoism provides a way to present paradoxes through the idea of vacating and opening to reach a creative stage of leaving nature as it is.

A high rate of synaptic vesicle (SV) release is required at cerebellar mossy fiber terminals for rapid information processing. As the number of release sites is limited, fast SV reloading is necessary to achieve sustained release. However, rapid reloading has not been observed directly. Here, we visualize SV movements near presynaptic membrane using total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy. Upon stimulation, SVs appeared in the TIRF-field and became tethered to the presynaptic membrane with unexpectedly rapid time course, almost as fast as SVs disappeared due to release. However, such stimulus-induced tethering was abolished by inhibiting exocytosis, suggesting that the tethering is tightly coupled to preceding exocytosis. The newly tethered vesicles became fusion competent not immediately but only 300 ms to 400 ms after tethering. Together with model simulations, we propose that rapid tethering leads to an immediate filling of vacated spaces and release sites within <100 nm of the active zone by SVs, which serve as precursors of readily releasable vesicles, thereby shortening delays during sustained activity.

In this article, I argue that atheism is different from secularism. Secularism is based on a faux elimination of theology which effectively preserves that theology in the guise of overcoming it. To achieve atheism (a term that I draw from the work of Maria Aristodemou), I argue that one needs to directly confront the theological element in order to come to terms with it. In this essay I look at how two political theological thinkers, Nietzsche and Benjamin, accomplish this. Nie-tzsche accomplishes atheism via his thesis of the “death of God,” a death that is not always literal but which creates a space for human life that is not determined by theological terms. Benjamin does the same thing with his idea that God vacates divine powers of judgment and determination in order to allow an atheistic space where human beings can engage in their own self-determination (even as the notion of God remains to challenge any would be human spokespersons for that role). I ultimately argue that atheism and anarchism are related concepts based not just on a rejection of certain forms of theology and all forms of archism, but also in terms of the way they allow a posi-tive and undetermined human response.

Spectrum availability is becoming scarce due to the rise of number of users and rapid development in wireless environment. Cognitive radio (CR) is an intelligent radio system which uses its in-built technology to use the vacant spectrum holes for the use of another service provider. In this paper, genetic algorithm (GA) is used for the best possible space allocation to cognitive radio in the spectrum available. For spectrum reuse, two criteria have to be fulfilled - 1) probability of detection has to be maximized, and 2) probability of false alarm should be minimized. It is found that with the help of genetic algorithm the optimized result is better than without using genetic algorithm. It is necessary that the secondary user should vacate the spectrum in use when licensed users are demanding and detecting the primary users accurately by the cognitive radio. Here, bit error rate (BER) is minimized for better spectrum sensing purpose using GA.

This work examines the region’s physical environment around 1600 using contemporary observations of extant fauna and flora as well as a historiography of scholarship on Native American land management, and concludes not only that there was never a primeval forest in the east, but that European intrusion actually caused the forests to grow thick with neglect. Upon European arrival, the forest was a widely-spaced, open landscape that was frequently burned and actively managed by the Native Americans. After European arrival, epidemic disease devastated indigenous populations such that the forests grew wild outside of the agrarian corridors in the Delaware Valley and Piedmont. This, combined with long-standing dehumanizing racism against Native Americans, cemented the notion of the pristine myth into popular history. The argument begins with a description of early European observations from the seventeenth century, progresses to an assessment of the evolution of modern understanding of how Native Americans managed the forest through fire and other techniques, and concludes with an analysis of the persistence of the pristine myth balanced with the reality that, as Natives were killed by epidemic disease or otherwise vacated the region, there truly was an unmanaged forest growing at the periphery of the colonial world for a brief moment in history.

This paper proposes a novel tamper detection, localization, and recovery scheme for encrypted images with Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) and Compressive Sensing (CS). The original image is first transformed into DWT domain and divided into important part, that is, low-frequency part, and unimportant part, that is, high-frequency part. For low-frequency part contains the main information of image, traditional chaotic encryption is employed. Then, high-frequency part is encrypted with CS to vacate space for watermark. The scheme takes the processed original image content as watermark, from which the characteristic digest values are generated. Comparing with the existing image authentication algorithms, the proposed scheme can realize not only tamper detection and localization but also tamper recovery. Moreover, tamper recovery is based on block division and the recovery accuracy varies with the contents that are possibly tampered. If either the watermark or low-frequency part is tampered, the recovery accuracy is 100%. The experimental results show that the scheme can not only distinguish the type of tamper and find the tampered blocks but also recover the main information of the original image. With great robustness and security, the scheme can adequately meet the need of secure image transmission under unreliable conditions.

Roots grow more rapidly through soil spaces such as vacated root channels than through undisturbed soil. This experiment was conducted to determine the extent to which transfer of nutrients is compromised by gaps between the pore wall and the root. Undisturbed cores were obtained from a no-till Dark Brown Chernozemic soil. The cores were divided into three 2.5-cm-thick segments (3.8–6.3 cm, 7.8–10.3 cm, and 11.75–14.25 cm soil layers). The density of 200–500 μm (P200) and 500–1000 μm (P500) diameter pores was visually assessed in each segment. The cores were adjusted to water potentials of − 0.01, − 0.1 and − 1.5 MPa by adding K15NO3-labelled water. Pots containing wheat (Triticum aestivum) plants were placed on top of the cores and the number of roots that appeared at the bottom of the cores, the root length within the cores, and shoot 15N content were measured after 72 h. Small pore (P200) density had no effect on root number at any moisture level. Large pore (P500) density correlated positively with root number at − 0.10 MPa (r2 = 0.57) and − 1.5 Mpa (r2 = 0.68). The equation relating shoot 15N content and root number had a common slope across all moisture treatments, suggesting that the rates of N-uptake per unit root were not compromised by macropore-assisted root growth at the investigated moisture levels. It is unclear if uptake is directly across the pore or via laterals growing outside the pore wall. N-uptake per unit root length of roots growing through soil pores may be compromised at moderate levels of soil moisture. Key words: Biopores, macroporosity, N-uptake, nitrogen, penetrometer resistance, root growth

Cruising for parking creates a moving queue of cars that are waiting for vacated parking spaces, but no one can see how many cruisers are in the queue because they are mixed in with normal cars that are actually going somewhere. In order to mitigate the influence of cruising for parking on the normal cars, the park-and-visit cruising tests with GPS and cameras was applied to collect the behavior of the cruisers, and the videotapes of traffic flows were used to measure the volume of cruising cars and the traffic status of normal cars, simultaneously. On this basis, a parking time model based on proportional hazard-based duration model was proposed, and the factors affecting cruise for parking were analyzed, including the volume, search time, speed, acceleration, lane-change frequency, and distracted time of the cruising car. The multiple linear regression model was also established to compare with proportional hazard-based duration model results. The results indicated that between 9 and 56 percent of the traffic was cruising for parking, and the average search time was about 6.03 min. The low-speed, volume, high acceleration frequency, and lane-change times of cruising cars have a negative effect on shortening travel time of the normal traffic flow. Conversely, high-speed of cruising cars has a positive effect on shortening travel time of traffic flow. Moreover, travel time changes in varying degrees due to various factors. Under postulated conditions, the model can be used to estimate the travel time. It is hoped that this study will contribute to improve the planning and management of cruising for parking.

Abstract There is no space in the innermost part of the 1QSam scroll to include 2Sam 24. The last three columns (2Sam 20–23) can be materially reconstructed with 46, 42, or 21 lines. With one of the eight literary appendices to 2Samuel missing, other appendices may be absent too. A number of factors point to a reconstruction with 21 lines and containing only three appendices: a) very few scrolls dated to 50–1 BCE have more than 40 lines, medium-sized scrolls are most common; b) a 46-line reconstruction without ch. 24 would destroy the chiastic structure of the appendices; c) a 46-line reconstruction (as preferred by Ziemer) would require the long psalm of ch. 22 to be formatted without any section breaks or vacats; d) Qumran scrolls and literary analysis evince many cases of 2nd and 1st century literary editing of biblical scrolls as well as preservation of earlier variant recensions. Further, Ziemer’s consequent critique of the linear model of literary growth in biblical studies should be welcomed but remains one-sided. Editorial growth into new recensions could develop according to different paradigms.

Droplet-laden flows with phase change are common. This study brings to light a mechanism by which droplet inertial dynamics and local phase change, taking place at sub-Kolmogorov scales, affect vortex dynamics in the inertial range of turbulence. To do this we consider vortices placed in a supersaturated ambient initially at constant temperature, homogeneous vapour concentration and uniformly distributed droplets. The droplets also act as sites of phase change. This allows the time scales associated with particle inertia and phase change, which could be significantly different from each other and from the time scale of the flow, to become coupled, and for their combined dynamics to govern the flow. The thermodynamics of condensation and evaporation have a characteristic time scale $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{s}$. The water droplets are treated as Stokesian inertial particles with a characteristic time scale $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{p}$, whose behaviour we approximate using an $O(\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{p})$ truncation of the Maxey–Riley equation for heavy particles. This inertia leads the water droplets to vacate the vicinity of vortices, leaving no nuclei for the vapour to condense. The condensation process is thus spatially inhomogeneous, and leaves vortices in the flow colder than their surroundings. The combination of buoyancy and vorticity generates a lift force on the vortices perpendicular to their velocity relative to the fluid around them. In the case of a vortex dipole, this lift force can propel the vortices towards each other and undergo collapse, a phenomenon studied by Ravichandran et al. (Phys. Rev. Fluids, vol. 2, 2017, 034702). We find, spanning the space of the two time scales, $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{p}$ and $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{s}$, the region in which lift-induced dipole collapse can occur, and show numerically that the product of the time scales is the determining parameter. Our findings agree with our results from scaling arguments. We also study the influence of varying the initial supersaturation, and find that the strength of the lift-induced mechanism has a power-law dependence on the phase-change time scale $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70F}_{s}$. We then study systems of many vortices and show that the same coupling between the two time scales alters the dynamics of such systems, by energising the smaller scales. We show that this effect is significantly more pronounced at higher Reynolds numbers. Finally, we discuss how this effect could be relevant in conditions typical of clouds.

U.S. fantasies of expansion, commercial dominion, and military prowess have long hinged on a premise of Pacific exceptionalism. Couched in the millenarian language of manifest destiny, the Pacific region and its multitudinous ecosystems, cultures, peoples, and nations have been vacated in favor of an aqua nullius that frames the region as an empty space designated for U.S. possession by divine providence.

Abstract In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature. The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person. Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person. In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap. The overarching effect of corporate personhood, which operates in tandem with privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights. Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that dynamically diminishes the personal. The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the superhuman; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.

DEED is a Brazilian research cluster, a formally recognised group of researchers and practitioners whose expertise is applied to the fields of Arts and Design. DEED activities includes, but are not limited to, lectures, study groups, master and Ph.D. researches, seminars, work-in-progress meetings, workshops, networking events, and creative artefacts developments. While working in a research cluster context this can be observed as contributing to new knowledge and gain by means of practice outcomes in a wider community. DEED is an acronym for “Design, Entertainment, and Education” and also is a noun that can etymologically means “action”, “activity”, “fact”, “practice”, “deal”, “share”, “feat”, “accomplishment”, “writ”, “muniment”, “tool”, “device”, and “fact”. All of these meanings are potentially related to the scope of the research cluster’s activities, especially those interrelated to practice-based researches and deeds. In this text, we will present some initiatives and projects developed in a partnership with “Paço das Artes”, which is an art institution of the Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy of São Paulo State (Brazil). During its 50 years of existence, the Paço das Artes has played a prominent role in the contemporary art and digital art scene in Brazil. Through this partnership, issues such as “digital museum”, “digital curatorship” and“digital collection” have been providing a broad discussion about the role of creative artefacts as the basis of the contribution to knowledge, and also about the role of research leading to new understandings about practice. The first initiative comes in 2016, when Paço das Artes was forced to vacate its headquarters, without having the definition of a new address. On thisoccasion, DEED organized “Games + Art”, an event with an exhibition of experimental games, lectures, and workshops. The event also debuts a work entitled “ExPaço” (a pun between the name “Paço das Artes” and something like “ex-space”). In this work, the public could “walk” through the threedimensional virtual space at the Paço das Artes headquarters, deliberately projected empty and abandoned. This work was also exhibited at the Computer Art Festival from Immersphere Fulldome Festival. In 2020, on the occasion of the launch of the new headquarters of Paço das Artes and celebration of its 50 years, DEED develops “Expaço VR”, an experience in Virtual Reality. In this work, the interactor could learn more about the history of Paço das Artes in a virtual tour through the five different headquarters occupied since its foundation. Currently, in addition to a mobile version, DEED is working on an online platform for digital artists based on the “Expaço” developing experience. Future improvements foresee the development of a (native) digital museum by 2022, the year that celebrates the centenary of the Modern Art Week - a turning point event for art in Brazil.

Cognitive Radio (CR) was introduced to improve the utilization of Radio Frequencies (RF) that remain under-utilized by the primary users (licensee). The main idea behind CR is to allow un-licensed (secondary) users to occupy vacancies in licensed bands. However, CR mandates the secondary user to vacate the frequency band within a specified time after the primary user attempts to use the frequency band. CR does not expect the primary users to share their frequency usage schedules and hence the secondary users have to scan and predict the vacancy. The advantage for the secondary users is that they do not pay for utilization of band, if they are conformal to the CR specifications. CR is the next generation of smart communication systems. CR requires continuous monitoring of the intended RF band in the intended geographical area. This information may be used to predict spectral vacancies (white spaces). Certain bands, e.g. Analog TV bands, will have pre declared utilization schedules but in general, spectrum utilization is a random process and hence prediction can be difficult. However, Deep Learning (DL) techniques can improve the accuracy of prediction. Deep Learning techniques require large and clean data sets to work correctly. Such data sets are also necessary to compare achievable accuracy of prediction algorithms. Towards this end, we have created data sets that can be used for simulation, training and testing of CR over GSM band (890-960MHz). A typical file with two hour of observations will have about 1.2 million samples. More than 1000 sets of data samples have been captured from urban and rural areas in India. All the data sets have been cleaned to avoid instrument errors and statistical outliers. In this paper we have used these standardized data sets to perform a comparative analysis of three DL methods for CR, viz. Auto-encoder (AE), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP). Results of the comparison are discussed.

One of the most frequent comments about Internet-based media, particularly about newsgroups and the Web, is that they provide a forum for everyone, no matter how obscure or specific their interest -- you'll find dedicated fora for every field, from high-energy physics to learning Klingon, from the campaign for an independent country in Northern Italy to Indonesian cooking. This is seen as a positive development as often as it is regarded as a negative force -- optimists see these fora as potential bases for the formation of virtual communities which may be able to reinvigorate previously neglected niche groupings, while pessimists predict a further shattering of societies into disparate fragments with mutually almost unintelligible cultural attitudes. Examples supporting either view can be found amongst the multitudes of newsgroups and Websites available on the Net, but let us skip this debate for the moment; instead, let's focus on some of the potential consequences this situation may have for academia. It requires little prescience to predict that the next few years will see an increasing use of the Web and, to a smaller extent, newsgroups in academic teaching and research. Continuously updated Websites will enable students and scholars to work with the latest developments in their disciplines, rather than limiting themselves to whatever recent books and journals their university library has managed to acquire, and newsgroups can help put interested academics in touch with each other in order to exchange news and pointers to information on the Web, as well as discuss recent research. For anyone with a computer, much of this information will also be accessible more easily electronically, via the Internet, than physically through libraries, bookstores, and photocopies. If it is organised efficiently on the Web, interested researchers may also come to be able to better target precisely the information they need, avoiding the need to leaf through volumes of journals to find the one useful article they might contain. Such research isn't limited only to academics and university students anymore, though. As hypertext scholar George P. Landow notes, "hypertext provides the individualistic learner with the perfect means for exploration and enrichment of particular areas of study. By permitting one to move from relatively familiar areas to less familiar ones, a hypertext corpus encourages the autodidact, the continuing education student, and the student with little access to instructors" (Hypertext 129-30) -- particularly the ethos of information freedom that is widespread on the Internet means that any amateur enthusiast may conduct their own self-education with the materials available on the Web. This was already possible, after a fashion, in pre-Web times, of course, but the Net increases the amount of information available, and removes the physical and psychological barrier of entering a university library as a non-student, and facilitates connections to other (self-taught as well as 'official') students through newsgroups and email. What's more, the Web also allows adding one's own voice to academic debates: "in a book one can always move one's finger or pencil across the printed page, but one's intrusion always remains physically separate from the text. One may make a mark on the page, but one's intrusion does not affect the text itself" (Landow, Hypertext 44). By creating a Web page displaying one's own thoughts on the matter, providing links to related sites, and ideally receiving links from those sites, too, any outsider may now invade the discourse in an academic discipline. In most cases, such invasions may go largely unnoticed -- but nothing's to stop a self-taught enthusiast from creating a highly useful Website that even 'proper' academics may consider relevant, and so from adding own articles to the discipline's body of knowledge. As a side-effect of such presentation on the Web, then, texts by students are no longer so easily subordinated to those by revered authors, and disparities between them are less visible. The text as a site of authority can also become a site of resistance: in hypertext, indeed, opposition to the canonised texts is more likely to succeed in conditions of hypertextuality than in the print culture, if only because hypertext makes it easier to expose the contradictions and power moves in such texts, and the multiply constructed positions from which they might be read. (Snyder 77) Both these points pose a major problem for the currently prevalent conventions of academic debate, of course, which (despite post-structuralism's argument for the "death of the author") still evaluate the relevance of academic work partly based on its authorial source. Canonisation of particular scholars and their works (a process which is not limited only to literary disciplines) must ultimately fail -- "because all electronic texts are interrelated, none has well-defined borders; instead, each text reaches out to link up with past, present and future texts. It therefore becomes difficult to cordon off and to canonise a few great texts and authors" (Snyder 75). And generally, Nunberg notes, "media like the Web tend to resist attempts to impose the sort of solutions that enable us to manage (even imperfectly) the steady increase in the number of print documents -- the ramification of discourses and forms of publication, the imposition of systems of screening or refereeing, the restriction of the right to speak to 'qualified' participants" ("Farewell" 126). The freely accessible information on the Web includes texts by revered researchers as well as badly-informed beginners, and elaborate essays as well as superficial scribblings. This realisation has caused many academics who grew up with the apparent simplicities of print to regard Internet-based media with despair and, frequently, with contempt; Nunberg himself provides a good example by stating that "any undergraduate student is free to post her night thoughts on Mary Shelley or the Klingon verb to a 'potential audience' of millions (a quick search of the Web turns up numerous examples of both), and there will be nothing in its mode of circulation to distinguish it from communications from better-qualified contributors" ("Farewell" 127). Such remarkably condescending prose indicates more than anything a paralysing fear of an invasion of the proverbial academic ivory tower by the uncouth hordes of self-taught dilettantes who have no respect for scholarly authority: Nunberg's insistence that a notion of academic 'qualification' (expressed no doubt in degrees and positions) could do any more than indicate vaguely that an author might have something valuable to say, and that anybody not 'qualified' this way cannot possibly contribute anything worth one's while, is surprisingly hierarchistic. Surely, in reality the onus for determining a text's worth should (and must) always eventually lie with the individual reader; the sense a text makes, not the source that made the text, should determine its quality. It's easy to see that this emphasis which Nunberg and others place on a text's source is in fact determined by print as the still-prevalent technology of information dissemination. As Bolter describes it, "the idea of a relatively stable canon made sense in a culture dominated by printed books. ... But the notion of a standard has now collapsed, and the collapse is mirrored in the shift from the printed to the electronic writing space, in which a stable canon of works and authors is meaningless" (237). Landow elaborates that hypertext's effects are so basic, so radical, that it reveals that many of our most cherished, most commonplace ideas and attitudes toward literature and literary production turn out to be the result of that particular form of information technology and technology of cultural memory that has provided the setting for them. This technology -- that of the printed book and of its close relations, which include the typed or printed page -- engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable. The evidence of hypertext, in other words, historicises many of our most commonplace assumptions, thereby forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollaries to a particular technology rooted in specific times and places. (33) Today, on the Web, however, where anyone can participate by adding their own texts or simply rearranging others', we lose once and for all notions of the author or the text as a stable entity. Thus, Nunberg claims, "on the Web ... you can never have the kind of experience that you can have with the informational genres of print, the experience of interpreting a text simply as a newspaper or encyclopedia article without attending to its author, its publisher, or the reliability of its recommender. We read Web documents, that is, not as information but as intelligence, which requires an explicit warrant of one form or another" ("Farewell" 127-8). Again, however, Nunberg claims a simplicity of the print media which simply doesn't exist: he goes on to say that "we should look to electronic discourse to provide a counter and complement to the informational forms of print -- a domain that privileges the personal, the private, and the subjective against the impersonal, the public, and the objective" (133). In reality, though, anyone who today still reads a newspaper or any other form of printed information as an 'objective' source, without an awareness of its publisher's or its journalists' political and economic agenda, must certainly be regarded as a naïve fool -- not just in Australia, with its atrocious standards of print journalism. If the modern media have taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as 'objective truth'; the Web, with its unprecedented opportunities for world-wide publication, just makes this fact particularly obvious. While they may contribute to more openness in dealing with contributions from non-traditionally qualified sources, however, such realisations won't completely eradicate academia's fear of an invasion by the self-trained and the untrained. Some hope is at hand, though: "at the very moment indeed when the new technologies of memory can make us fear an alarming glut of traces -- a true change of scale in the collective accumulation of archives, at once written, audio, visual, and audiovisual -- these same technologies increasingly lighten its load, at almost the same pace, by facilitating individualised retrieval" (Debray 146); more elaborate search engines and resource listings on the Web can help point interested researchers to useful contributions both from within and without the ivory tower, and multiple alternative engines and listings may cater for various definitions of what constitutes 'useful'. "In the future, it seems, there will be no fixed canons of texts and no fixed epistemological boundaries between disciplines, only paths of inquiry, modes of integration, and moments of encounter" (Hesse 31). This may also have negative implications, though. On the one hand, as Bazin writes, "the digital empire puts too much emphasis on relation and circulation per se, rather than on the acquisition of content. Instead of the substantialist metaphysics of the hidden meaning which a 'vertical' reading would attempt to reveal, it prefers the rhetoric of exchange and conversation. It counters the aesthetics of depth with a pragmatics of interface" (163-4), and researchers on the Web may stay on the surface of a discipline rather than explore the very depths of its discourse -- they may stick with digests, digest-digests, digest-digest-digests, to borrow from Ray Bradbury (55). "Electronic linking almost inevitably tends to lead to blending and mixing of genres and modes ... . Hypertextualising a text produces not an electronic book but a miniature electronic library" (Landow, "Twenty Minutes" 226-7), and sticking to one's research topic may prove difficult. On the other end of the scale, the Net's tendency to group interests off into niches may lead to specific deeply involved research being done without any awareness of related disciplines that may offer alternative approaches to a subject -- in short, without any knowledge of the bigger picture one's discipline fits into. To avoid both pitfalls demands a researcher's discipline and attention. On the positive side, the invasion of the ivory tower allows for unprecedented public involvement (as Net theorists have often promised it): we are witnessing the appearance ... of a 'dynamic textuality' ... that by freeing itself from the straitjacket of the book is transforming not only the individual's relation to the text but also the traditional model of producing and transmitting learning and practical knowledge. In the place vacated by a linear transmission, inherited from forebears and relatively individualised, a system for the coemergence of bodies of knowledge is tending to be progressively substituted -- a system in which instruction, self-apprenticing, intellectual creation, and diffusion all closely cooperate. (Bazin 163) Naturally, this process won't mean that anybody can now easily become a nuclear scientist, economic expert, or cultural historian -- in most fields, to make it to the very top of the profession will still require a level of access to materials and equipment that only academic and professional institutions can offer. Nonetheless, more self-trained amateur enthusiasts will now be able to make meaningful contributions to their discipline -- a development we already begin to see in fields as diverse as astronomy, computer sciences, and some forms of literary studies. At the very least, it will create among the participants a more interested, more informed and more involved public, thinking for themselves and questioning the commonplaces of a print-based culture. "We are promised ... less of the dogmatic and more of the ludic, less of the canonical and more of the festive. Fewer arguments from authority, though more juxtaposition of authorities" (Debray 146). The invasion of the ivory tower is no attack on the Bastille -- the new dilettante invaders come to learn and share, not to destroy. References Bazin, Patrick. "Toward Metareading." Nunberg 153-68. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. Berlin: Cornelsen-Velhagen & Klasing, 1985. Debray, Régis. "The Book as Symbolic Object." Nunberg 139-51. Hesse, Carla. "Books in Time." Nunberg 21-36. Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. ---. "Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How Are We Moving beyond the Book?" Nunberg 209-37. Nunberg, Geoffrey. "Farewell to the Information Age." Nunberg 103-38. ---, ed. The Future of the Book. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Snyder, Ilana. Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth. Carlton South: Melbourne UP, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "Invading the Ivory Tower: Hypertext and the New Dilettante Scholars." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/ivory.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "Invading the Ivory Tower: Hypertext and the New Dilettante Scholars," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/ivory.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Axel Bruns. (1999) Invading the ivory tower: hypertext and the new dilettante scholars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/ivory.php> ([your date of access]).

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role (Illich 25).The most basic definition of Stillness refers to a state of being in the absence of both motion and disturbance. Some might say it is anti-American. Stillness denies the democratic freedom of mobility in a social system where, as Ivan Illich writes in Energy and Equity, people “believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen” (26). In America, it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that most are quite used to being interpolated as some sort of subject of the screen, be it the windshield or the flat screen. Whether in transport or tele-vision, life is full of traffic and flickering images. In the best of times there is a choice between being citizen-audience member or citizen-passenger. A full day might include both.But during the summer of 2008 things seemed to change. The citizen-passenger was left beached, not in some sandy paradise but in their backyard. In this state of SIMBY (stuck in my backyard), the citizen-passenger experienced the energy crisis first hand. Middle class suburbanites were forced to come to terms with a new disturbance due to rising fuel prices: unattainable motion. Domestic travel had been exchanged for domestication. The citizen-passenger was rendered what Paul Virilio might call, “a voyager without a voyage, this passenger without a passage, the ultimate stranger, and renegade to himself” (Crepuscular 131). The threat to capitalism posed by this unattainable motion was quickly thwarted by America’s 'big box' stores, hotel chains, and news networks. What might have become a culturally transformative politics of attainable stillness was hijacked instead by The Great American Staycation. The Staycation is a neologism that refers to the activity of making a vacation out of staying at home. But the Staycation is more than a passing phrase; it is a complex cultural phenomenon that targeted middle class homes during the summer of 2008. A major constraint to a happy Staycation was the uncomfortable fact that the middle class home was not really a desirable destination as it stood. The family home would have to undergo a series of changes, one being the initiation of a set of time management strategies; and the second, the adoption of new objects for consumption. Good Morning America first featured the Staycation as a helpful parenting strategy for what was expected to be a long and arduous summer. GMA defined the parameters of the Staycation with four golden rules in May of 2008:Schedule start and end dates. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling just like another string of nights in front of the tube. Take Staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home on your vacation. Declare a 'choratorium.' That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds, or nothing, Pack that time with activities. (Leamy)Not only did GMA continue with the theme throughout the summer but the other networks also weighed in. Expert knowledge was doled out and therapeutic interventions were made to make people feel better about staying at home. Online travel companies such as expedia.com and tripadvisor.com, estimated that 60% of regular vacation takers would be staying home. With the rise and fall of gas prices, came the rise of fall of the Staycation.The emergence of the Staycation occurred precisely at a time when American citizens were confronted with the reality that their mobility and localities, including their relationship to domestic space, were structurally bound to larger geopolitical forces. The Staycation was an invention deployed by various interlocutors most threatened by the political possibilities inherent in stillness. The family home was catapulted into the circuits of production, consumption, and exchange. Big TV and Big Box stores furthered individual’s unease towards having to stay at home by discursively constructing the gas prices as an impediment to a happy domestic life and an affront to the American born right to be mobile. What was reinforced was that Americans ideally should be moving, but could not. Yet, at the same time it was rather un-American not to travel. The Staycation was couched in a powerful rhetoric of one’s moral duty to the nation while playing off of middle class anxieties and senses of privilege regarding the right to be mobile and the freedom to consume. The Staycation satiates all of these tensions by insisting that the home can become a somewhere else. Between spring and autumn of 2008, lifestyle experts, representatives from major retailers, and avid Staycationers filled morning slots on ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and CNN with Staycation tips. CNN highlighted the Staycation as a “1st Issue” in their Weekend Report on 12 June 2008 (Alban). This lead story centred on a father in South Windsor, Connecticut “who took the money he would normally spend on vacations and created a permanent Staycation residence.” The palatial home was fitted with a basketball court, swimming pool, hot tub, gardening area, and volleyball court. In the same week (and for those without several acres) CBS’s Early Show featured the editor of behindthebuy.com, a company that specialises in informing the “time starved consumer” about new commodities. The lifestyle consultant previewed the newest and most necessary items “so you could get away without leaving home.” Key essentials included a “family-sized” tent replete with an air conditioning unit, a projector TV screen amenable to the outdoors, a high-end snow-cone maker, a small beer keg, a mini-golf kit, and a fast-setting swimming pool that attaches to any garden hose. The segment also extolled the virtues of the Staycation even when gas prices might not be so high, “you have this stuff forever, if you go on vacation all you have are the pictures.” Here, the value of the consumer products outweighs the value of erstwhile experiences that would have to be left to mere recollection.Throughout the summer ABC News’ homepage included links to specific products and profiled hotels, such as Hiltons and Holiday Inns, where families could at least get a few miles away from home (Leamy). USA Today, in an article about retailers and the Staycation, reported that Wal-Mart would be “rolling back prices on everything from mosquito repellent to portable DVD players to baked beans and barbecue sauce”. Target and Kohl’s were celebrated for offering discounts on patio furniture, grills, scented candles, air fresheners and other products to make middle class homes ‘staycationable’. A Lexis Nexis count revealed over 200 news stories in various North American sources, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Investors Guide, the Christian Science Monitor, and various local Consumer Credit Counselling Guides. Staying home was not necessarily an inexpensive option. USA Today reported brand new grills, grilling meats, patio furniture and other accoutrements were still going to cost six percent more than the previous year (24 May 2008). While it was suggested that the Staycation was a cost-saving option, it is clear Staycations were for the well-enough off and would likely cost more or as much as an actual vacation. To put this in context with US vacation policies and practices, a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research called No-Vacation Nation found that the US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation (Ray and Schmidt 3). Subsequently, without government standards 25% of Americans have neither paid vacation nor paid holidays. The Staycation was not for the working poor who were having difficulty even getting to work in the first place, nor were they for the unemployed, recently job-less, or the foreclosed. No, the Staycationers were middle class suburbanites who had backyards and enough acreage for swimming pools and tents. These were people who were going to be ‘stuck’ at home for the first time and a new grill could make that palatable. The Staycation would be exciting enough to include in their vacation history repertoire.All of the families profiled on the major networks were white Americans and in most cases nuclear families. For them, unattainable motion is an affront to the privilege of their white middle class mobility which is usually easy and unencumbered, in comparison to raced mobilities. Doreen Massey’s theory of “power geometry” which argues that different people have differential and inequitable relationships to mobility is relevant here. The lack of racial representation in Staycation stories reinforces the reality that has already been well documented in the works of bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and Jeremy Packer in Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship. All of these critical works suggest that taking easily to the great open road is not the experience of all Americans. Freedom of mobility is in fact a great American fiction.The proprietors for the Great American Staycation were finding all sorts of dark corners in the American psyche to extol the virtues of staying at home. The Staycation capitalised on latent xenophobic tendencies of the insular family. Encountering cultural difference along the way could become taxing and an impediment to the fully deserved relaxation that is the stuff of dream vacations. CNN.com ran an article soon after their Weekend Report mentioned above quoting a life coach who argued Staycations were more fitting for many Americans because the “strangeness of different cultures or languages, figuring out foreign currencies or worrying about lost luggage can take a toll” (12 June 2008). The Staycation sustains a culture of insularity, consumption, distraction, and fear, but in doing so serves the national economic interests quite well. Stay at home, shop, grill, watch TV and movies, these were the economic directives programmed by mass media and retail giants. As such it was a cultural phenomenon commensurable to the mundane everyday life of the suburbs.The popular version of the Staycation is a highly managed and purified event that reflects the resort style/compound tourism of ‘Club Meds’ and cruise ships. The Staycation as a new form of domestication bears a significant resemblance to the contemporary spatial formations that Marc Augé refers to as non-places – contemporary forms of homogeneous architecture that are scattered across disparate locales. The nuclear family home becomes another point of transfer in the global circulation of capital, information, and goods. The chain hotels and big box stores that are invested in the Staycation are touted as part of the local economy but instead devalue the local by making it harder for independent restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and bed and breakfasts to thrive. In this regard the Staycation excludes the local economy and the community. It includes backyards not balconies, hot-dogs not ‘other’ types of food, and Wal-Mart rather than then a local café or deli. Playing on the American democratic ideals of freedom of mobility and activating one’s identity as a consumer left little room to re-think how life in constant motion (moving capital, moving people, moving information, and moving goods) was partially responsible for the energy crisis in the first place. Instead, staying at home became a way for the American citizen to support the floundering economy while waiting for gas prices to go back down. And, one wouldn’t have to look that much further to see that the Staycation slips discursively into a renewed mission for a just cause – the environment. For example, ABC launched at the end of the summer a ruse of a national holiday, “National Stay at Home Week” with the tag line: “With gas prices so high, the economy taking a nosedive and global warming, it's just better to stay in and enjoy great ABC TV.” It comes as no shock that none of the major networks covered this as an environmental issue or an important moment for transformation. In fact, the air conditioning units in backyard tents attest to quite the opposite. Instead, the overwhelming sense was of a nation waiting at home for it all to be over. Soon real life would resume and everyone could get moving again. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are examples of the breakdown and failure of capitalism. In a sense, a potential opened up in this breakdown for Stillness to become an alternative to life in constant and unrequited motion. That is, for the practice of non-movement and non-circulation to take on new political and cultural forms especially in the sprawling suburbs where the car moves individuals between the trifecta of home, box store, and work. The economic crisis is also a temporary stoppage of the flows. If the individual couldn’t move, global corporate capital would find a way to set the house in motion, to reinsert it back into the machinery that is now almost fully equated with freedom.The reinvention of the home into a campground or drive-in theatre makes the house a moving entity, an inverted mobile home that is both sedentary and in motion. Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia” is important here. He argues, since the advent of transportation individuals live in a state of “resident polar inertia” wherein “people don’t move, even when they’re in a high speed train. They don’t move when they travel in their jet. They are residents in absolute motion” (Crepuscular 71). Lynn Spigel has written extensively about these dynamics, including the home as mobile home, in Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse. She examines how the introduction of the television into domestic space is worked through the tension between the private space of the home and the public world outside. Spigel refers to the dual emergence of portable television and mobile homes. Her work shows how domestic space is constantly imagined and longed for “as a vehicle of transport through which they (families) could imaginatively travel to an illicit place of passion while remaining in the safe space of the family home” (Welcome 60-61). But similarly to what Virilio has inferred Spigel points out that these mobile homes stayed parked and the portable TVs were often stationary as well. The Staycation exists as an addendum to what Spigel captures about the relationship between domestic space and the television set. It provides another example of advertisers’ attempts to play off the suburban tension between domestic space and the world “out there.” The Staycation exacerbates the role of the domestic space as a site of production, distribution, and consumption. The gendered dynamics of the Staycation include redecorating possibilities targeted at women and the backyard beer and grill culture aimed at men. In fact, ‘Mom’ might suffer the most during a Staycation, but that is another topic. The point is the whole family can get involved in a way that sustains the configurations of power but with an element of novelty.The Staycation is both a cultural phenomenon that feeds off the cultural anxieties of the middle class and an economic directive. It has been constructed to maintain movement at a time when the crisis of capital contains seeds for an alternative, for Stillness to become politically and culturally transformative. But life feels dull when the passenger is stuck and the virtues of Stillness are quite difficult to locate in this cultural context. As Illich argues, “the passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control” (45). When the passenger is the mode of identification, immobility becomes unbearable. In this context a form of “still mobility” such as the Staycation might be satisfying enough. ConclusionThe still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Politics of the Very Worst Virilio argues at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility, a condition to which polar inertia attests. The Staycation fits completely within this context of this form of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing. When people are stationary, still, and calm the market suffers. It has often been argued that the advertising industries construct dissatisfaction while also marginally eliminating it through the promises of various products, yet ultimately leaving the individual in a constant state of almost satisfied but never really. The fact that the Staycation is a mode of waiting attests to this complacent dissatisfaction.The subjective and experiential dimensions of living in a capitalist society are experienced through one’s relationship to time and staying on the right path. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are also crises in pace, energy, and time. The mobility and tempo, the pace and path that capital relies on, has become unhinged and vulnerable to a resistant re-shaping. The Staycation re-sets the tempo of suburbia to meet the new needs of an economic slowdown and financial crisis. Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness, but an intensified technological and economic mode of subjection that depends on already established cultural anxieties. But what makes the Staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space. The Staycation is a particular re-territorialisation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of home, work, and leisure. In sum, Staycation and the staging of National Stay at Home Week reveals a systemic mobilising and control of a population’s pace and path. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time: “Deceleration remains a figure of speed, just as immobility is a figure of movement” (133). These processes are inexorably tied to one another. Thinking back to the opening quote from Illich, we could ask how we might stop imagining ourselves as passengers – ushered along, falling in line, or complacently floating past. To be still in the flows could be a form of ultimate resistance. In fact, Stillness has the possibility of becoming an autonomous practice of refusal. It is after all this threatening potentiality that created the frenzied invention of the Staycation in the first place. To end where I began, Illich states that “the habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world” (25-26). The horizon of political possibility is uniformly limited for the passenger. Whether people actually did follow these directives during the summer of 2008 is hard to determine. The point is that the energy crisis and economic slowdown offered a potential to vacate capital’s premises, both its pace and path. But corporate capital is doing its best to make sure that people wait, staycate, and see it through. The Staycation is not just about staying at home for vacation. It is about staying within reach, being accounted for, at a time when departing global corporate capital seems to be the best option. ReferencesAlban, Debra. “Staycations: Alternative to Pricey, Stressful Travel.” CNN News 12 June 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/12/balance.staycation/index.html›.Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Perennial Library, 1974.Leamy, Elisabeth. “Tips for Planning a Great 'Staycation'.” ABC News 23 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=4919211›.Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 1994.Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2008.Ray, Rebecca and John Schmitt. No-Vacation Nation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2007.Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1992.———. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. California: Stanford University Press, 2009.USA Today. “Retailers Promote 'Staycation' Sales.” 24 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-05-24-staycations_N.htm›.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.———. In James der Derian, ed. The Virilio Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.———. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999.———. Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.

She's the dollars, she's my protection; she's a promise, in the year of election. Sister, I can't let you go; I'm like a preacher, stealing hearts at a traveling show. For love or money, money, money... Desire -- U2, "Desire" (1988) For the love of money. In the worship of things. Desire has traditionally been employed by advertising as a means of selling product. Regardless of culture, more powerful than context, desire is invoked as one of capitalism's iron-clad codes of quality. The Uses of Desire in Advertising Specifically, two variants have been most common. That in which desire is: (1) stimulated or (2) sated by a product. Crucial to advertisers, in both cases the product is more powerful than the thing the audience finds most powerful: the physical surge, the emotional rush, the chemical compulsion we label "desire". In the case of the former, a typical approach has been to create an equation in which product intervenes in the relationship between man and woman (and it is always man and woman), stimulating the psycho-physiological desire of one for the other. A classic pre-post design. Absent the product, desire would not arise, ad text often alleges. This tack is well captured in this ad for a perfume. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that the ad reader will desire desire. If so, he or she -- equally desirous of this turn of events -- will insert him or herself into the scenario, engaging in a symbolic, if not actual purchase of the product1. As we saw above, desire is often depicted via substitute symbols -- flashing red neon, burning matches, flame-blowers, stifling heat and raging brush fires2. The product is then used to extinguish such signs -- metaphorically quenching desire. This is the satiation variant identified at the outset. Standardised Desire? This last is an Australian ad, but in a wide variety of contexts, the same formula of product/desire appears. A recent Malaysian ad, for instance, plays out like this: a motorbike roars up to a doorstep; its leather-clad rider dismounts. Removing the helmet we find beneath a ... beautiful long-haired woman. Cut to a medium shot of the front door opening. A similarly-clad male leans against the molding. Rugged, firm, slightly aloof. Cut to product name: Dashing for Men. Followed by a picture of the cologne. "The Dashing Sensation" is then posted -- ripe with the implication that the cologne has worked its magical, magnetic attraction uniting female and male. It should be pointed out that Malaysia is a market with a significant western presence. Its top advertising firms are American, British and Italian. Thus, if one were curious as to whether desire was inherently a "cultural universal" or rather due to accession (i.e. the movement of intellectual and corporate capital), Euro-American presence would certainly be a factor to consider 3. Innovating Desire Bringing us to Japan. Desire is also a major theme there, as well. However, there, Japanese firms dominate ad production. And, interestingly, though the above-mentioned formulations do appear, desire in Japan also has its own specialised discourse. Rather than a relationship between the consumable and the consumer's emotional/physical state, discourse about desire can transpire independent of the product. Desire is often simply about desire. This is in keeping with a trend (or, more formally, a stage) of development Japanese advertising has achieved -- what I call "product-least advertising"; a condition in which discourse is about many things other than consumption. One of these things being desire. In closing I will wonder what this might say about Japanese society. Japanese Approaches to Desire As noted above, it is not the case that messages of product-induced desire do not appear in Japan. They are certainly more pervasive than in their Islamic neighbor, Malaysia. And, like America, desire is treated in an array of ways. Object-Mediated Desire One approach, admittedly less conventional, posits the product as medium. Only through the product will desire be manifested. In this ad, though verbal substitutes are invoked -- "lust", "love", "lick", "pinch", bite", "touch" -- desire is the guiding force as the figures trapped inside the product's bar code move mechanically toward physical consummation. Of particular note is the product's multi-faceted relationship to desire: it subsumes desire, stimulates it, provides a forum and means for its expression, and is the device securing its culmination ... the ad text is ambiguous as to which is controlling. This is a definitive "postmodern ad", pregnant with shifting perspective, situational action, oppositional signs and interpretive possibilities. The kind of text so-called "cultural studies" intends by the term "polysemy" (the notion that multiple meanings are contained in any sign -- see Fiske). In the case of desire, postmodern ads tell us not that desire is multiple. Rather, it is a singular (i.e. universally experienced) condition which may be differentially manifested and variously interpretable vis-à-vis singular object/products. Object-Induced Desire For instance, in this ad, again for instant noodles, two salarymen contemplate the statement "this summer's new product is stimulating". Each conjures a different image of just what "stimulating" means. For the younger man, a veritable deluge of sexual adoration; for his elder, an assault by a gang of femmes toughs. And while the latter man's fantasy would not qualify as the conventional definition of "desire", the former would. Thus, despite its polysemic trappings, the ad varies little from the standard approach outlined at the outset (plates 1 and 2). It posits that the product possesses sufficient power to stimulate desire for its consumer in external, unrelated others. Object-Directed Desire One of sociology's earliest complaints about capitalism was its reduction of people to the status of things. Social relations became instrumental acts aimed at achieving rational ends; the personalities, thoughts and qualities of those human agents engaged in the exchange become secondary to the sought good. Advertising, according to early semiotic critiques (see for instance Williamson), has only intensified this predilection, though in a different way. Ads instrumentalise by creating equality between the product presented and the person doing the presenting. When the presenter and product are conflated -- as in the case where a major star clasps the product to her bosom and addresses the camera with: "it's my Nice Once" (the product name) -- the objectification of the human subject may be unavoidable. The material and corporeal meld. She cherishes the drink. If we desire her (her status, her style, her actual physical being) but are realistic (and thus willing to settle for a substitute) ... we can settle for the simulation (her drink). This kind of vicarious taking, this symbolic sharing is common in advertising. Played out over and over the audience quickly learns to draw an equal sign between the two depicted objects (product and star). Purchasing one enables us to realise our desire (however incompletely) for the other. Sometimes the product and person are separated, but in a way that the discourse is about longing. The product is consumed because the human can't be -- perhaps a less satisfactory substitute, but a replacement, nonetheless. Or, as in the ad below, the two might be interchangeable. Interior. Bright yellow room without any discernible features. No walls, windows or furniture. Tight shot of black fishnet stockings, barely covered by a yellow dress. The legs swivel in a chair, allowing a fleeting shot of the model's crotch. Cut to a darkened interior. The product sits next to a set of wrenches. Cut back to first interior. Medium tight of the model's bare shoulders. She spins in her chair. Cut to the mechanic working on the engine of a car. Female voiceover: "Hey! Work AGAIN? ... Let's play!" Cut to tight shot of her pursed lips. "Hey! ... let's go for a drive", accompanying consecutive shots of the mechanic wiping sweat from his brow and the vamp's derriere. Next, a sequence of fast, tight images: mechanic revving the engine, the model's face, then her upper body viewed through heavily-ventilated apparel. "Oh", she says, "cars are cuter, huh?" The mechanic pauses to consider. Walks over to the product, pops the top. "When it comes to that sort of man..." her VO says as he gulps the drink, "women are suckers". Tight on woman's face: "(he's a) rake", she pouts. To better appreciate this endemic correspondence between objectification and desire, consider this ad for a car named "Rosso" ("red" in Italian, "aka" in Japanese). The model, "Anna", is tinted head to toe in red (red, of course, being the universal signifier for passion and desire)4. She and/or the car rouse enough passion in a male by-stander to literally make his blood boil. This, in turn, produces steam which, in turn, sends air current of sufficient force to propel Anna's skirt skyward. This, in turn, converts the man's face into an embarrassed and/or impassioned red. "Rosso!" he gushes enthusiastically -- reference to car, his condition, Anna and, presumably, her panties5. Thus, the desire for things -- people included -- is by no means disappearing in Japanese advertising. The name of the game is still to sell that which has been produced. Although Japanese ads have moved toward a decentring of product -- an introduction of consumption-least discourse, with a concomitant increase in popular cultural and societal content -- the great majority still speak in the language of "here it is, buy it!" The prevailing tenor is still object-oriented. And the spill-over, as we just saw, is a tendency to depict humans and their interactions in objectified terms. A recent ad, for the discount store LLAOX, is rather stark in this regard. A young man displays photos of the many items (guitars, television, appliances) he found at LLAOX. In the final shot, of an attractive woman standing in front of the items, he proudly boasts: "I found her at LLAOX, too!" Subject-Oriented Desire Like ads in other countries, then, Japanese ads tend to place the object ahead of the subject. Desire for the person depicted in the ad is either ancillary to the desire expressed for the product, or else exists as a function of the subject's objectified status. However, an accreting number of Japanese ads have begun orienting desire toward one or both of the subjects in the ad, over or independent of the object for sale. A man and woman in their early thirties sit at a table sipping whiskey. The woman leans toward the man and in a perky voice utters: "Hey, let's turn in soon." The man protests, pointing to the drink: "we haven't finished this, yet." The woman tilts her head. She insists "let's head home." Then in a conspiratorial undertone "it's that day" and winks. The man's elbow falls off the tabletop. The woman blows him a kiss. Cut to a cat hiding beneath one of his paws in embarrassment. (Source: Nikka All Malt Whiskey -- Japan, 1993) Admittedly, not all ad discourse involves desire. But of late considerable ad space has been devoted to human relations and longing6. Consider this promo for a health drink. A man stands on his verandah in his t-shirt and pyjama bottoms. He looks groggy. Cut to a young woman watering her plants on the adjacent porch. "Hey!" she coos to her bushes, "are you lively?" She tends the pots along the centre divider. Is she addressing her foliage or the young man on the other side? He cranes his neck to steal a peek. She seems unaware. He lays his head on his forearms, admiring her. Cut to a shot of her regarding the product; drinking it; savouring the taste. The text reads: "With Lactia you will bloom beautifully." The woman enthuses audibly: "happiness!" Her voyeur, still in thrall, emits a sigh, suddenly straightens and declares aloud (in English): "Nice!" The previous two examples feature desire by adults. Considerable contemporary desire-centred discourse, however, focuses on teens. In these cases the product is sometimes introduced as a symbol for desire -- as in this case of a potato chip which snaps crisply each time a boy's romantic advance is repelled. A boy and girl walk along a boardwalk. The boy tentatively reaches for his partner's hand. Just then an approaching bicyclist toots his horn and cleaves a path between the two. A superimposed chip snaps. Next, seated on the shoreline, the boy reaches out again. Suddenly, a wind-blown ball rolls past, prompting his intended to abruptly vacate her position. He is left, literally clutching air. Another chip snaps again. The boy reaches out to touch the girl's handprint in the sand. He utters "I like you". The girl turns and asks "what did you say?" He impotently shrugs "nothing at all." Cut to a box of the chips. This youthful obsession with desire plays prominently in ads. First, because it fits well with the "mini-drama" format currently favoured in Japanese advertising. Second, because it is an effective technique for capturing viewer interest. The emotional tugs keep the audience attending to the ad beyond the first viewing. In the following ad, while desire for the product is the punch line, the entire ad is structured around unrequited desire. The confusion of the former for the latter not only redounds to product value, but predisposes the audience toward empathy and engagement. A teenage girl in her plaid uniform steers her bike into its berth outside school. Her voiceover identifies the bike name, shows how one touch locks the wheel in place and the seat in the vertical position. "Oh!" a quavering male voice utters off camera. "Can I ask name?" Japanese being a language that often operates without articles and pronouns, we aren't sure which name he means. Quick zoom in on the girl's expectant expression. "Eh?" she asks breathlessly. Her narration stops, her heart soars, glowing a vibrant red over her white sweater. "The bike's name", her interlocutor clarifies. All at once, the throbbing red heart is extinguished, fading to a black circular smudge. Her expectant smile dissolves into disappointment. Not all scenarios are downers, however. In the following case the product is a prop -- at best an accoutrement -- in the teenage game of expressing desire. A spry girl pours hot water into two cups. Off camera an older female voice asks whether she isn't supposed to be resting. "Don't worry about it", the girl replies. Cut to exterior shot. She's wearing a short coat, backing through the front door with the two cups in her hands. Cut to an angled reaction shot: a handsome boy leans across his bike, placing a letter in the post. He holds the letter up. "This", he says. Cut to the girl, now leaning against the entryway of the building, sipping her drink. Haltingly, in a breathy voice, she utters: "To... tomorrow... would have been... okay. But..." Japanese being the language of implication we read this as "it's fine the way it is working out." With the girl in the foreground, we see the boy leaning against the entryway on the opposite side contemplating his drink. Cut to a long angled shot from high above. The two teens sup in the cool evening air, alone, intimate, yet separated by the building's bright entrance. The narrator closes with a message about the nutritional value of the drink -- wholly unrelated to the unequivocal web of intimacy spun by these two youths. This ad offers us a perfect take on how desire is constructed and reproduced in contemporary ads in Japan. A perfect place for us to close. Evolving Desire? Desire is not new to advertising, but the form in which it is currently being expressed is. In Japan, at least, where commercials strive for polysemy in the volatile, evanescent and ultimately quixotic struggle for audience attention, communication is increasingly about things unrelated to the product. High on the list are affection, intimacy and sexuality -- aspects of human existence which bear considerable connection to desire. Reproduced in a variety of forms, played out in an array of contexts, by a variety of demographic "types", such commercial communications have the effect of centralising desire as a major theme in contemporary Japanese society7. The increase in so-called "secondary discourse"8 about human longing is palpable. But what to make of it? Clear explanations lie in "social evolution" -- factors such as: Japan's remarkable achievement of its postwar economic goals; its subsequent economic meltdown and accreting political malaise; the dramatic decline in corporate loyalty; disintegration of the family; increased urbanisation, atomisation and anomie; the stratification of generations and economic classes; increased materialism and attention to status; the concomitant loss of a personal raison d'être and collective moral beacon. In fact, all the reasons that Emile Durkheim diagnosed in fin de siècle France in inventing the discipline of sociology and Murakami Ryu has recently discerned a century later in fin de siècle Japan. Desire is a manifestation of social breakdown, as well as a plea for its resolution. As we enter a new century -- indeed a new millenium -- it is an empirical question worth monitoring whether the Japanese obsession with desire will continue to swell. Footnotes 1. Although the claims in this paper are qualitative, rather than quantitative, without question it is true that both men and women in Japanese television advertising are depicted as desiring. In this way, one could claim that desire exists independent of gender in ads. At the same time, it is almost certain that desire is often depicted as being manifested differentially by men and women. However, as one can infer from the data below, this is not always so (viz. "True Love"). Moreover, while women (or men) might more often fit one or another of the constructs below (i.e. object-mediated, object-induced, object-directed, subject-oriented) than their opposite number, cases can generally be found in which both (male and female) are depicted desiring in each of the stated relationships. 1. Thinking of this (fire-desire) symbol-set generally (and this ad specifically), one is reminded of the Springsteen lyric: At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head; Only you can cool my desire. I'm on fire. -- Bruce Springsteen: "I'm on Fire" (1984) Reminding one of the lyric by Shocking Blue from their decade-spanning Number 1 single (1970 by the Dutch band as well as the 1986 cover version by Bananarama): I'm your Venus, I'm your fire at your desire. If not the Earth, Wind and Fire phrasing from "That's the Way of the World" (1975): Hearts of fire, creates love desire... Of course, the fire/desire combo might also have become a universal association due to the easy opportunity (at least in English) to commit a rhyme (no matter how cloddish). 2. It has yet to be determined that desire is a cultural universal. However, the universal presence and relatively uniform logic of the "machinery of capitalism" (a major aspect of which is advertising) certainly serves as a powerful prod. That machinery overlaps culture and tends to act on it in relatively similar ways (one of which may just be the discourse about desire). This, of course, makes no claims about universal outcomes. I have addressed the interaction of capitalism and context and the themes of global/local, homogeneity/heterogeneity, universal/particular in a series of articles concerning information transfer, body, color, and advertising form in comparative context. Please see my home page for references to and greater detail on this work. 3. Regarding red as signifier, see Branston & Stafford (7). Also see my work on color universals ("The Color of Meaning") and culture-specific colour conventions ("The Color of Difference"). 4. Support for this interpretation can be found in other ads, as ideas and practices in Japanese advertising tend to travel in twos or threes. During this same period, Suzuki Move placed Leonardo DiCaprio behind the wheel. As he tooled around the city, his accelleration was such as to raise the skirts of two by-standers. DiCaprio promptly braked, placed the car in reverse, rolled astride the two women, and impishly pointing at each, identified the shade of underpants ("white and strawberry") they were sporting. 5. And let me reiterate: All such depictions are exclusively about sexual/emotional longing between men and women. 6. As I am mainly working with Japanese data in this article, I feel comfortable only seeking to draw conclusions about Japanese society. Certainly, one could fathom conducting the same sort of analysis and arriving at the same general conclusions about other postmodern, capitalist, commercial-centred, consumer-oriented societies. 7. The word is O'Barr's. It bears considerable similarity to Barthes's "second order signification". Plates 1 Caliente perfume (USA, 1994) 9 Georgia canned coffee (Japan, 1999) 2 Old Spice cologne (USA, 1994) 10 Rosso (Japan, 1998) 3 Coke (Australia, 1994) 11 LLAOX (Japan, 1999) 4 Dashing cologne (Malaysia, 1997) 12 Lactia (Japan, 1997) 5 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 13 5/8 and 3/5 Chips (Japan, 1993) 6 Cup Noodles (Japan, 1998) 14 Gachyarinko (Japan, 1999) 7 Nescafe Excella (ice coffee; Japan, 1999) 15 Hotpo (health drink; Japan 1999) 8 Various ads References Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Jonathan Cape, 1972 (1957). Branston, G., and R. Stafford. The Media Student's Book. London: Routledge, 1996. Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Methuen, 1987. Holden, Todd. "The Color of Meaning: The Significance of Black and White in Television Commercials." Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 3.2 (1997): 125-146. ---. "The Color of Difference: Critiquing Cultural Convergence via Television Advertising" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences 5.1 (1999): 15-36. O'Barr. Culture and the Ad: Exploring Otherness in the World of Advertising. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994. Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyers, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php>. Chicago style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden, "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Todd Joseph Miles Holden. (1999) The evolution of desire in advertising: from object-obsession to subject-affection. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/adverts.php> ([your date of access]).