A study of Neanderthal physiology, engetics and behaviour

The general context of Neanderthal existence in Europe and Southwest Asia is assessed from a physiological perspective, based on studies of living populations experiencing certain roughly analogous circumstances. Various aspects of the fossil, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental records relevant to the discussion of energy balance among the Neanderthals were investigated. Within living populations exposed to cold climate, subsisting on energy deficient diets, or participating in strenuous exercise regimes, various metabolic and physiological responses are evident. These relate to an attempt to maintain energy balance under such stresses, and are mediated by the action of thyroid hormones. It is proposed that the Neanderthals, who endured similar conditions, must have adapted to a low level of circulating active thyroid hormones in the face of an energy imbalance (negative) and sacrificed linear growth (of the legs/limbs primarily) as an energy sparing mechanism, so that other more essential body functions could be maintained to enable survival. Given that the Neanderthal physique was skeletally robust and highly muscled (and that a significant degree and frequency of trauma is evident) it logical that they were engaging in very specific and stressful activity patterns. The Neanderthal physique would have prohibited certain activities but facilitated others. It is clear that modem athletes who share these attributes take part in power and speed events, involving intermittent bursts of high intensity exercise, rather than more stamina orientated ones. This information is used, in conjunction with archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence, to develop a theory of the daily subsistence practices of the Neanderthals, involving the ambushing of game in a closed environment. Such start-stop activities in a cold environment would have had a bearing on metabolism and energy balance, but also exerted pressure on thermoregulatory mechanisms. In light of this a new theory is developed to explain the evolution of the Neanderthals' exceptional cranial capacity and morphology. The elongated and unflexed basicranium is proposed to have arisen in order to accommodate an expanded cavernous sinus at the base of the brain. This would have provided a mechanism for regulating brain temperature under oscillating periods of heavy physical exertion and rest in a cold environment. The points outlined here are made with reference to previously suggested notions of ecogeographic patterning of body morphology and differential mobility at the time of the 'transition'. Finally, the aspects of Neanderthal existence discussed are placed in a broad ecological and evolutionary context alongside the contemporaneous Early Anatomically Modem Humans (EAMH)

Rupture and recuperation :technological traces in digital narrative cinema

PhD ThesisIn this thesis I analyse visual traces of digital technologies in narrative cinema as a way of exploring broader questions about the medium and the cultural status of its technological constituents. In so doing, I not only identify a number of areas of filmmaking that are currently under-researched or overlooked, but move the focus away from the questions of what digitisation means for cinema’s ‘identity’, and towards a consideration of how the implications of digitisation are at once exaggerated in rhetoric and tempered in practice by aesthetic, ideological, and economic factors. To do this, I focus on recent narrative films (1998-2013) in which digital filmmaking technologies are themselves salient features of the cinematic image. I argue that initial appearances of these digital traces are presented and received as disruptive, in that they appear to symbolise both a break with the ontological assumptions of cinema, and the potential to re-imagine the very notion of the medium itself. However, I demonstrate how each of these disruptions are, to differing extents, soon absorbed into the conventional formal structures of narrative cinema, such that their ultimate effect on the medium is to broaden its stylistic palate rather than to radically transform its identity. In so doing, I make four main scholarly contributions. Firstly, I provide an account of digital cinema contextualised in relation to the broader use of digital image technologies over this time period. Secondly, I use the technological trace as a locus for exploring intersections of aesthetic, ideological, and industrial factors in the production of these films. Thirdly, I temper hyperbolic reactions to digitisation by stressing continuities with, and echoes of, the history of analogue narrative cinema. Finally, I demonstrate how digital ontologies are shaped by popular discourses, and how these reinforce, qualify, and in some instances, contest, existing scholarly debate.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Montana Kaimin, April 25, 1995

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/9869/thumbnail.jp

Montana Kaimin, April 25, 1995

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.https://scholarworks.umt.edu/studentnewspaper/9869/thumbnail.jp

Radical Detours: A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick

In this project I read four Philip K. Dick novels against the writing of the Situationist International (SI). In doing so, I seek to disrupt two critical trends that arguably impede Dick criticism: the depoliticization of Dick and the lack of focus on his style. Through reading his work against the politics of the SI, Dick’s own radical politics can be defined and reaffirmed. I make the case that Dick is a writer predominantly concerned with politics and ideology over and above philosophy and ontology. Secondly, I argue that the political power of Dick’s work is inseparable from his avant-garde style; in particular, his frequent use of what the Situationists termed détournement. With revolutionary politics and avant-garde aesthetics in mind, I re-examine the canonical novels Martian Time-Slip and Ubik, and redeem two of Dick’s neglected novels, The Game-Players of Titan and Galactic Pot-Healer

Volume 1 – Symposium

We are pleased to present the conference proceedings for the 12th edition of the International Fluid Power Conference (IFK). The IFK is one of the world’s most significant scientific conferences on fluid power control technology and systems. It offers a common platform for the presentation and discussion of trends and innovations to manufacturers, users and scientists. The Chair of Fluid-Mechatronic Systems at the TU Dresden is organizing and hosting the IFK for the sixth time. Supporting hosts are the Fluid Power Association of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), Dresdner Verein zur Förderung der Fluidtechnik e. V. (DVF) and GWT-TUD GmbH. The organization and the conference location alternates every two years between the Chair of Fluid-Mechatronic Systems in Dresden and the Institute for Fluid Power Drives and Systems in Aachen. The symposium on the first day is dedicated to presentations focused on methodology and fundamental research. The two following conference days offer a wide variety of application and technology orientated papers about the latest state of the art in fluid power. It is this combination that makes the IFK a unique and excellent forum for the exchange of academic research and industrial application experience. A simultaneously ongoing exhibition offers the possibility to get product information and to have individual talks with manufacturers. The theme of the 12th IFK is “Fluid Power – Future Technology”, covering topics that enable the development of 5G-ready, cost-efficient and demand-driven structures, as well as individual decentralized drives. Another topic is the real-time data exchange that allows the application of numerous predictive maintenance strategies, which will significantly increase the availability of fluid power systems and their elements and ensure their improved lifetime performance. We create an atmosphere for casual exchange by offering a vast frame and cultural program. This includes a get-together, a conference banquet, laboratory festivities and some physical activities such as jogging in Dresden’s old town.:Group A: Materials Group B: System design & integration Group C: Novel system solutions Group D: Additive manufacturing Group E: Components Group F: Intelligent control Group G: Fluids Group H | K: Pumps Group I | L: Mobile applications Group J: Fundamental

Renegotiating communal autonomy: communal land rights and liberal land reform on the Bolivian altiplano: Carangas, 1860-1930

This dissertation is the result of a detailed analysis of the local dynamics generated in the context of an anti-corporatist land reform in a rural region marked by a strong communal control over land. The presented case study is informed by a broader analytical framework that allows for a critical assessment of peripheral agency within a globalizing world. With this research, I aim to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of global-local interactions in which local actors, and particularly rural communities, creatively re-negotiate the terms of their participation and autonomy in the face of state- and market-driven integration processes. This ambition leads to the question of how trajectories of rural transition are shaped by the course of world-systemic expansion and, the other way around, how processes of globalization are “fuelled” by local dynamics of rural change. Do these local-global entanglements constellate a more homogeneous world, or do they feed new trends of ? My assessment of that question seeks to grasp how autonomous spaces for communal organization have been asserted or enclosed throughout the cycles of world-systemic contraction and expansion. In view of the historical oscillations in the erosion and renewal of such spaces, it interrogates the assets and potentials but also the vulnerabilities of communal agency. I address the question on rural change and communal autonomy from the angle of land rights and the imposition of standardized land rights. This process of commodification will be specified for the rural Andes, where the outcome of centuries-long processes of colonial exploitation and post-colonial extractivism entails a remarkable (yet over the centuries increasingly more defied) “margin” for the safeguarding of communal land control. Why could such rights be preserved in certain regions? How were these rights safeguarded throughout cycles of land rights commodification? What implications did this have on the longer term? I confine my examination of these questions to Bolivia’s first land reform project launched by under the name of Exvinculación, referring to the Alienation Act of 1874. This reform emblematizes a longer and conflictive process of liberal legislation and rural transformation that subjected communal autonomy and land rights security to an enclosure operation. The central story of this research, however, tells more about the enclosure’s standstill rather than its advance. The province of Carangas, entirely located on the altiplano (Andean High Plateau), was one of the few rural zones where the land reform made no headway. While this is mainly explained by the region’s protracted marginalization and its little attractive soil for agricultural entrepreneurs, the premise of my research urges to look beyond ecological and demographic factors. The two guiding questions of my enquiry are why and how the imposed land rights reorganization of customary land systems and the related break-up of communities was kept at bay in Carangas; and what impact this had on social power relations on the long term. This assessment is based on extensive archive research as well as field work in several villages of the former province. This combination of methods allowed me to dissect the most local levels of organizing life in Carangas. The dissertation is structured by three parts. In the first part, I present the theoretical framework of my research, constructed around the notion of “frontier” and “frontier zones”. On basis of these building blocks, the first chapter proposes a “frontier perspective” as an approach towards local-global interactions in terms of a dynamic process of incorporation that has a spatial repercussion, reflected in the formation of a “frontier zone” where differently organized groups and regions come into sustained contact. The second chapter relates the movement of frontiers and the creation of frontier zones to the historical incorporation trajectory of the rural Andes and detects the “communal” as the essential framework for strategies to enter in “negotiation” with state and market actors. This “negotiated peripherality” is based on the determination and ability of community-bound actors to participate in broader structures for exchange and regulation and simultaneous secure a margin for communal modes of production and governance. In the second part of the dissertation I reconstruct the particular setting of this incorporation process. Chapter three gives insight into how rural life in Carangas is organized within a social agro-pastoralist framework on basis of land, labour and livestock management, and how people and resources are brought into circulation through a “complex exchange chain.” Chapter four assesses how local production, exchange and regulation was bound by a fiscal-legal land system, local practices and interregional patterns for exchange and mobility, and elite intermediation. The third and last part comprises the case study, focusing on the land reform experience of the communities of the Carangas province between 1860 and 1930. Chapter five explains how, nurtured by new liberal ideas on land and property, a disentailment legislation was debated and designed. While envisioning a capitalist transition of community-bound indigenous population into a smallholder class, the reform process rather nurtured the expansion of the hacienda complex, meanwhile triggering a strong reaction on part of the communities. Through a threefold resistance strategy of legal action, political lobbying and violent confrontation, they obtained important concessions for communal land tenure, thereby destabilizing the legislation. The last two chapters give a detailed reconstruction of how this process reverberated in the communities of Carangas. The analysis presented in chapter six demonstrates that already under the land reform decrees preceding the mentioned Act, the communities secured their exemption from the decrees via a fiscal arrangement. Meanwhile, however, they lost their direct control over complementary valley lands. When disentailment was brought into operation, from the 1880s on, the announcement of a land inspection to implement the law fostered rebellious reactions against that intervention as well as a raise in inter-community conflicts over land. The threat posed by the altered legislation instigated the cooperation among community leaders to formulate a joint response, which involved the forging of strategic inter-ethnic alliances, erupting in a widespread rebellion during the 1899 federal war. Chapter seven continues with the post-1899 context, indicating how pressures on the land and the extractable resources it entailed increased, but the province’s commodity frontiers proved rather immobile. With regards to the land reform, pressures to introduce the new legislation got bogged down in endless delay, converting the province in one of the few completely hacienda-free regions of the Bolivian countryside. This went together with increasing internal conflict, communal mobilization, and strong but very ambiguous elite intervention. Special attention is given to this ambiguity, detecting a shared interest in the defence of communal lands that resulted from a gradual process of simultaneous usurpation and integration on part of the village elites. The chapter closes by explaining how the role of provincial elites nurtured a shift in the national discourse on the indigenous population, signalling the adoption of an integration policy. In short, the presented analysis tests the general hypothesis that processes of globalization nurture a diversity of transformation trajectories and that these diverse local processes “nourish” the global expansive-contractive course of capitalist developments by assessing the effects of a land-commodifying reform process in a region where most of the land was ánd remained subject to communal control. It demonstrates that “exemption” from the effects of such process is not merely a matter of isolation but is actively “extorted” in a dynamic renegotiation process. From a frontier perspective, the way in which a commodifying legislation was floored through communal action reflects the operation of feedback loops in the expansive course of world-systemic developments. The result is a thwarted incorporation process, visible in the constant (re)creation and assertion of alternative spaces for communal autonomy

The World Is Old and New Again: Cultural Trauma and September 11, 2001

This dissertation explores the emergent cultural aftereffects of September 11, 2001. I consider how popular US narratives from the decade following that day's events evidence an ongoing, pervasive struggle with certain of the hijackings' especially troubling features, manifesting September 11 as a cultural trauma. I distinguish cultural trauma as an intersubjective phenomenon from psychological trauma and its individualized emphasis. I also distinguish my approach from the dominant ways historical, cultural and literary studies have typically conceptualized trauma as a primarily Freudian-theorized, pathological reaction to extreme happenings. Rather, drawing on Janoff-Bulman's shattered assumptions model of psychological trauma, I define cultural trauma as a radical disruption of basic, common, taken-for-granted, culturally-generated and -structured beliefs about what constitutes a community's ordinary life. I focus on how the hijackings' shocking and well-publicized developments shattered assumptions fundamental to mainstream American understandings of daily life. To trace these shattered assumptions, I review ten popular culture texts: three popular press oral history collections - the 2002 September 11: An Oral History, the 2002 Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, and the 2007 Tower Stories: An Oral History of 9/11 - as well as the 2002 Frontline documentary "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"; the 2003 Tom Junod Esquire article "The Falling Man"; the mid-to-late-2000s television series Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward; the 2008 Christopher Nolan film The Dark Knight; and the 2007 Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. By assessing and comparing these texts' primary thematic concerns, I outline how each narrative, situated in varying media and genres, engages vulnerability in the forms of existential insecurity and the troubling of meaningful and ethical choice, exposing fragmented foundational beliefs in the wake of September 11. However, instead of reconstructing these fragmented pieces into an unequivocal new whole, these texts ambivalently instantiate that day's unresolved cultural fallout, serving to document the still evolving structures of feeling constituting this cultural trauma. Accordingly, this study evidences how popular culture serves as a site for recognizing and negotiating September 11 as a cultural trauma while suggesting how cultural trauma might be recognized and negotiated at other times of stark cultural change

Promotional Ubiquitous Musics: New Identities and Emerging Markets in the Digitalizing Music Industry

This dissertation examines the intensifying relationship between the digitalizing music industry and corporate brands. It analyzes the ‘crisis’ and recuperation of popular music’s commodity form in the digital era; in an increasingly post-CD music marketplace, it argues, ‘artist-brands’ tied to multiple revenue streams and licensed to brand partners constitute the foundation of music’s capitalization. Contemporaneous with key shifts in music marketing and monetization strategies, advertising firms have taken increased interest in branded entertainment strategies that employ popular music. These colliding commercial dynamics have produced a proliferation of what I term ‘promotional ubiquitous musics’: original music by recording artists used by consumer and media brands with the intent of promoting something other than the featured artist or music. The attendant collapse of popular music into marketing is interpreted through a neo-Adornian theoretical frame: it is argued that the ‘culture industry’ thesis assumes new and important relevance in the digital era, even as the ubiquitous circulation of diverse musics exemplifies post-Fordist flexibility. The instrumentalization of music under this branding paradigm has produced new levels of recording artist subordination and stratification, and has placed firm limits on popular musical expression. Deploying cultural and social theory and political economy, this critical analysis also draws on an interview program with executives at record labels, music publishers, advertising firms, and music supervision companies based in Toronto, New York City, and Los Angeles; rigorous tracking of trade press; and attendance at industry conferences

Tropics of trauma: affective representations in war narratives, 1917-2006

Despite the vast scholarship on war writing and trauma, a focused study on the connection between individual and collective war traumatic affect and their representation in literature has not been written. This study close-reads and analyzes war writing between 1916 and 2006 in order to trace the narrative tropes that are recurrent in war narratives of that era. The exposition of these tropes is informed by Hayden White’s study Tropics of Discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of the ‘chronotope’ in The Dialogic Imagination, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Cathy Caruth’s writings on trauma theory. The narratives examined are Stratis Myrivilis’s novel Life in the Tomb (1923), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), and Anna Kavan’s collection of short stories I am Lazarus (1945). The analysis of these seven narratives yields the identification of a range of tropes which underpin the representation of war traumatic affect. The identified tropes include the synecdochical relationships between body and nation, the chronotopic connection between traumatized body and warscape, the traumatized mind and the repetitive narration, as well as the proleptic anticipation of traumatic future. In turn, it will be argued, these tropes form assemblages between the individual and the collective and operate on a textual continuum sustained by the representation of past, present, and future war traumas