Television, Musical Register, and the Franchise: Continuity and Change

This chapter proposes a model for understanding television music within a broader franchise space, exploring how continuity and change operates both within, and across, television series. Specifically, this framework proposes the concept of a musical register for analysing such musical intertextuality in television and beyond. More specific than genre, a musical register serves as a coherent, but ever-developing musical identity for a franchise. Our concept of register identifies musical practice which is flexible enough to evolve over time but remains sufficiently consistent to serve as a musical thread between fragmented elements of a franchise. This adaptable sonic language can develop alongside changing televisual aesthetics, even traversing media boundaries to film and video games, whilst satisfying fan expectations. Our model accounts for musical connections that are broader and more complex than explicit musical recapitulation, but remain distinctive enough to link texts. As franchises continue to be central to mass-market corporate entertainment strategies, this model illuminates how music serves as part of that creative and business agenda, as well as the implications of franchise music for producers, composers and fans. While this approach is applicable to a wide range of franchise contexts, this chapter will use the case study of the Star Trek television series to illustrate our model of a franchise’s musical register. <br/

Mobile calibration for bus-based urban sensing

In bus-based sensing, public transport serves as a mobile urban sensing platform. While offering much higher geographical coverage, the low-cost sensors mounted on vehicles can be less accurate and demand more frequent calibration, which may be challenging for large vehicles fleets. As calibration is performed by relating mobile sensor readings to those of fixed reference stations, the placement of reference stations is very important. In this work, we propose an algorithm for computing the optimal reference stations locations to maximize the sensing coverage. Contrary to prior work, the coverage is defined in terms of geographical area , extending a certain distance away from the route trajectory representing the actual sensing capacity of the vehicles. The proposed algorithm computes it using geographical set operations, such as spatial join and subtraction to compute the unique contribution of each bus route. We evaluate the approach using real bus trajectories from Manhattan, US and compare it with a random baseline and prior work. The results indicate that the given the bus routes, a complete sensing coverage can be achieved using a single reference station with a maximum of 2-hop calibration path

The Company of Ironmongers. Their Contribution to the Social Political and Economic Life of London between 1350 and 1580

The Company of Ironmongers. Their Contribution to the Social Political and Economic Life of London between 1350 and 1580 The thesis examines how city companies emerged to defend the commercial interests of those providing for a growing city. Chapter 1 looks at iron processing and trade in Europe and the emerging role of London ironmongers, who, with other groups, were competing to provide the iron needed for building, transport, and more specialized uses. It explores why England became a net importer of iron, and how ironmongers developed a role as middlemen supplying iron to customers.Chapter 2 examines how ironmongers began to regulate their apprentices and to control the quality of their sales. They also took on a variety of roles in the city and laid the foundations for the company’s development in the fifteenth century. Chapter 3 considers the governance of the company, based on the first surviving company records which date from 1455. This includes the role of its elected officials, together with the livery and the yeomanry, and the relations between them. Chapter 4 looks at how the Ironmongers acquired and managed a growing property portfolio, and the impact of the Reformation on this process.The next three chapters change focus from the institution to individual ironmongers, based on wills and ecclesiastical and civic records. Chapter 5 considers their roles as parishioners with religious and charitable responsibilities as they alter with the Reformation. Chapter 6 examines their roles as the heads of often extensive family and neighbourhood networks, and as city officials. Chapter 7 considers the commercial role of the company and demonstrates that it is a mercantile rather than an artisan company whose members ranged from wealthy international traders to small shopkeepers. The competitive nature of London trade meant that ironmongers were forced to diversify into other areas of commercial activity and the extent to which the company was able to compete successfully with other major companies is explored. <br/

Scene-selectivity in CA1/subicular complex:Multivoxel pattern analysis at 7T

Prior univariate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in humans suggest that the anteromedial subicular complex of the hippocampus is a hub for scene-based cognition. However, it is possible that univariate approaches were not sufficiently sensitive to detect scene-related activity in other subfields that have been implicated in spatial processing (e.g., CA1). Further, as connectivity-based functional gradients in the hippocampus do not respect classical subfield boundary definitions, category sensitivity may be distributed across anatomical subfields. Region-of-interest approaches, therefore, may limit our ability to observe category selectivity across discrete subfield boundaries. To address these issues, we applied searchlight multivariate pattern analysis to 7T fMRI data of healthy adults who undertook a simultaneous visual odd-one-out discrimination task for scene and non-scene (including face) visual stimuli, hypothesising that scene classification would be possible in multiple hippocampal regions within, but not constrained to, anteromedial subicular complex and CA1. Indeed, we found that the scene-selective searchlight map overlapped not only with anteromedial subicular complex (distal subiculum, pre/para subiculum), but also inferior CA1, alongside retrosplenial and parahippocampal cortices. Probabilistic overlap maps revealed gradients of scene category selectivity, with the strongest overlap located in the medial hippocampus, converging with searchlight findings. This was contrasted with gradients of face category selectivity, which had stronger overlap in more lateral hippocampus, supporting ideas of parallel processing streams for these two categories. Our work helps to map the scene, in contrast to, face processing networks within, and connected to, the human hippocampus