Rhetorical Problems and Cinematic Solutions: The Visual Arguments of the \u27Obama Infomercial\u27

Most Americans remember the outcome of the presidential election on November 2nd, 2008, and the intense media coverage of the entire campaign. Just three nights before Election Day, the Barack Obama campaign purchased primetime air slots on seven major broadcast and cable stations across the country to air a 30-minute \u27infomercial\u27 entitled American Stories: American Solutions. This thesis looks at this television program with a specific focus not on the verbal message of American Stories: American Solutions, but on how this message is framed through cinematography. The thesis first explores research in the fields of rhetoric, film, politics, and race, then using the method of compositional interpretation, outlines what visual arguments are presented through cinematography. Using a formalist approach, Chapter 3 describes how camera movements, framing, and other technical aspects of cinematography organize the rhetorical object of the film in order to make it more persuasive. Chapter 4 emphasizes the rhetorical and ideological aspects of this analysis in addressing how cinematography makes a visual argument in the form of a refutative enthymeme regarding Obama\u27s race

Benchmark Analyses for Fracture Mechanics Methods for Assessing Sub-Clad Flaws - NESC-VI Final Report

The sixth project of the Network for Evaluating Structural Integrity (NESC-VI) deals with the fracture mechanics analysis of a set of 3 tests on beam specimens with simulated sub-surface flaws, which were performed by NRI Re¿ plc for the PHARE project ¿WWER Cladded Reactor Pressure Vessel Integrity Evaluation (with Respect to PTS Events)¿. The objectives were as follows: ¿ to assess the capability to predict whether the cracks propagating into the cladding arrest or cause full fracture, and ¿ to assess the capability to predict the location of first initiation: near-surface or deep crack tip. The project was launched in December 2006 and completed in March 2009. It brought together a group of 10 organisations from NESC to perform comparative analyses of selected tests, based on a comprehensive datapack prepared by NRI. The investigations focussed almost exclusively on assessing the capability to predict the location of first initiation. The main results are as follows: ¿ Comparison of analyses performed by individual partners showed that the FE simulations produced consistent predictions of the observed force vs. load-line displacement (or crack mouth opening displacement) behaviour. However the differences in predicted crack tip stress intensity, KJ, as a function of applied loading were greater than those found in similar intercomparisons made as part of previous NESC projects. This underlines the importance of periodically performing such exercises. ¿ The influence of two modelling factors on KJ was clearly established: firstly for this type of specimen, for which the clad makes up almost 12% of the cross-section, the associated residual stresses have a significant effect in reducing KJ values and therefore need to be considered in "best-estimate" analysis. The second concerns the use of 2-D or 3-D models: in this case the 2D FE models underestimated KJ values and are considered non-conservative. ¿ For this combination of test specimen geometry and flaw, constraint loss is expected at the near-surface tip. A range of constraint parameters were evaluated (elastic T-stress, elastic-plastic T-stress and Q) to confirm this. However only in two cases these were used in quantitative analyses: constraint-modified FAD and KIeff, both using elastic T-stress. These indicate that fracture is likely to initiate at lower (deep) tip, which is consistent with the limited high-speed video camera evidence. In general more systematic application of 2- parameter approaches is needed. ¿ Both local approach models predicted initiation of cleavage fracture first from the lower crack front for medium and higher loads. Concerning the capability to predict whether the cracks propagating into the cladding arrest or cause full fracture, the two analyses performed indicate that when the load at first pop-in is low, crack arrest in the clad can be correctly predicted on the basis of the J-R curve, but that further work is needed to ensure the reliability of such approaches over the full load range.JRC.F.4-Safety of future nuclear reactor

Regulation by Software

Software is neither law nor architecture. It is its own modality of regulation. This Note builds on Larry Lessig’s famous formulation that “code is law” to argue that Lessig was wrong to equate computer software with physical architecture. Although software resembles both law and architecture in its power to constrain behavior, it has features that distinguish it from both. The Note identifies four relevant attributes of software: It is ruleish, potentially nontransparent, impossible to ignore, and vulnerable to sudden failure. By assessing the impact of these characteristics in a given context, one can decide whether software is a good or a bad choice to solve a regulatory problem. Part I situates software within Lessig’s theory of different and complementary modalities of regulation that constrain individuals. In Code, he postulates four such modalities: law, social norms, markets, and physical architecture. He then argues that software is a subspecies of physical architecture as a modality. I argue instead that three basic characteristics of software establish it as a distinct modality that should not be conflated with any of the others: First, software is automated. Once set in motion by a programmer, a computer program makes its determinations mechanically, without further human intervention. Second, software is immediate. Rather than relying on sanctions imposed after the fact to enforce its rules, it simply prevents the forbidden behavior from occurring. Third, software is plastic. Programmers can implement almost any system they can imagine and describe precisely. Software is like physical architecture and unlike law in being automated and immediate. However, plasticity is more characteristic of legal systems than of architectural ones. Software’s plasticity interacts with its automation and its immediacy to produce consequences that set it apart from both law and physical architecture. In Part II, I turn to these distinctive consequences. There are four recurring and predictable patterns present in any regulation by software: First, along the traditional continuum between rules and standards, software lies at the extreme rule-bound end. Second, software can regulate without transparency. Frequently, those regulated by software may have no reasonable way to determine the overall shape of the line between prohibited and permitted behavior. Third, software rules cannot be ignored. Parties facing a decision made by software can, at best, take steps to undo what software has wrought. Fourth, software is more fragile than other systems of regulation. Hackers can turn its plasticity against it, and its automated operation means that unintended consequences are shielded from human review. Part III applies this analysis to two case studies. It predicts that software is a good way to manage negotiations and transactions in online marketplaces such as online auction sites and electronic stock exchanges. On the other hand, it predicts several pitfalls for the use of software to restrict the distribution of digital media

Переклад термінології у галузі електроніки, електротехніки та енергетики з англійської на українську мову

У посібнику подано аутентичні матеріали та вправи з письмового та усного перекладу в галузі електротехніки, електроніки та енергетики; тексти для самостійної роботи, контрольні завдання з перекладу, а також англо-український та українсько-англійський словник термінів та понять електротехніки, електроніки та енергетики. Розраховано на студентів спеціальності "Переклад (англійська мова)" і аспірантів технічних спеціальностей.The book presents authentic materials and exercises in written and oral translation in the field of electronics, electrical engineering and power engineering; texts for independent home translation, English–Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English vocabularies of specific terms. For the students of "Translation and Interpreting" departments and post-graduate students of technical specialities

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch

Film, Relay, and System: A Systems Theory Approach to Cinema

Film theory is replete with references to systems, yet no theory has emerged to provide a cohesive explanation of how cinema, as both technology and institution, operates as a relay system. Interdisciplinary in nature, my dissertation proposes a systems theory of cinema deriving largely from the work of social scientist Niklas Luhmann. Systems theory is especially productive for the ways that it intervenes at crucial sites of conflict and irresolution within film studies. With its emphasis on nonhuman agencies, systems theory calls for reappraisal of the significance of the human to the cinema apparatus--a significance long assumed to be simply a given. With its claim that the reasoning adduced by an observer is never in fact the logic of the observed, systems theory has major implications for thinking about the role of narrative in film and film theory. And with its stress on contingency, systems theory can be seen to upset the terms of debates within the field about cultural and technological determinism, and to provide further grounding for recent work on contingency and cinematic time. Chapter one examines a defining staple of early cinema, the chase film, as a quintessential example of the construction of movement, in the evolution of film editing, via a chain of interlinked segments that relay--and tend to abrogate--human figures. Chapter two focuses on a film conceived by Rube Goldberg at the transition from silent to sound cinema, with particular attention to how the coming of sound complicates the visual relays characteristic of silent slapstick\u27s gag structures. Chapter three examines the dynamism of the long take in classical and post-classical cinema, emphasizing the gradual and incremental disclosure of elements by the camera and revealing the cinema recording process itself as a type of Goldbergian contraption. The last chapter reflects on the computerization of film and media, showing that systems theory provides a useful avenue to thinking about the continuity between analog and digital cinema due in part to an unusual but rich and suggestive conception of the notion of medium

Film, Video, and Digitality: An Analysis of Cultural Form in Time-based Media

This thesis examines the material properties of time-based image media, in particular live video. The project is practice-based with a theoretical underpinning drawn from the debates on form and meaning associated with Walter Benjamin