The Design and Implementation of a Wireless Video Surveillance System.

Internet-enabled cameras pervade daily life, generating a huge amount of data, but most of the video they generate is transmitted over wires and analyzed offline with a human in the loop. The ubiquity of cameras limits the amount of video that can be sent to the cloud, especially on wireless networks where capacity is at a premium. In this paper, we present Vigil, a real-time distributed wireless surveillance system that leverages edge computing to support real-time tracking and surveillance in enterprise campuses, retail stores, and across smart cities. Vigil intelligently partitions video processing between edge computing nodes co-located with cameras and the cloud to save wireless capacity, which can then be dedicated to Wi-Fi hotspots, offsetting their cost. Novel video frame prioritization and traffic scheduling algorithms further optimize Vigil's bandwidth utilization. We have deployed Vigil across three sites in both whitespace and Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the level of activity in the scene, experimental results show that Vigil allows a video surveillance system to support a geographical area of coverage between five and 200 times greater than an approach that simply streams video over the wireless network. For a fixed region of coverage and bandwidth, Vigil outperforms the default equal throughput allocation strategy of Wi-Fi by delivering up to 25% more objects relevant to a user's query

Legally Containing the Uncontainable: Establishing a Liability Scheme for GE contamination in Canadian Agriculture

An increasing amount of litigation has been seen to address the spread of genetically engineered (GE) genes; however the focus has largely been on patent infringement to protect the seed developers. Farmers that lose profits due to the contamination of their fields by the (unintentional) flow of gene drift however are often overlooked. This paper tries to address this gap by asking how the current Canadian legal framework deals with the matter of recourse for GE contamination. Finding this system deficient, the paper then looks toward the common law procedures to mediate a solution. An overview of how other jurisdictions have dealt with the matter gives a basis of what opportunities may be available in the Canadian system. I use a socio-ecological framework as well as a more traditional policy analysis to assess the effectiveness of the Canadian regulations in coping with the issue of liability due to contamination. The paper concludes by recommending managing contamination through a compensatory fund on a strict liability basis at the provincial level. The funding ought to come from a seed tax paid by those who benefit financially from the introduction of the GE seeds so as to ensure that both the polluter‟s pay principle is respected as well as allowing for a type of ecological monitoring of the ecosystem

Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue

William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World

Combining explications of William Faulkner’s novels and short stories with thematic analysis, Hyatt H. Waggoner works from the close reading of a specific work outward to its most general meanings and relationships. By this method he has made a significant contribution to the understanding of Faulkner’s career and artistic achievement. Waggoner examines both better and lesser-known works, which yield valuable insights into Faulkner’s development when treated in relation to his whole body of work. The author also addresses the major themes which emerge from critical analyses of individual works: Faulkner’s uneasy relationship with his Christian background and his unchanging conception of the role of the artist related to his changing practice as a writer. Waggoner concludes that Faulkner’s artistic career reflects a creatively productive, but tortured and ambiguous, relationship with his community. Hyatt H. Waggoner, professor of American literature at Brown University, is the author of The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern American Poetry (1950); Hawthorne: A Critical Study, which was selected in 1955 for the annual Explicator Prize; and numerous articles which show his concern with the most significant trends in American literature.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1033/thumbnail.jp

The documentary mind: In the subject of a practitioner’s perspective on changes in documentary concept and production

This autoethnographic study examines the influences of recent digital technology upon the practice and philosophy of documentary filmmaking. To assess the impact of new digital methodology on the film production process, The Musicians, a wholly-digital, 55-minute documentary film, was produced as an example. This music-based subject was chosen to specifically demonstrate the potential advantages of lightweight digital equipment and its extended recording capacity in orchestral documentation. The capability of non-linear digital editing to process large amounts of imagery, together with its ability to manage multiple image and audio streams concurrently, was also examined. This exegesis also reviews the impact of recently-emerged digital multimedia and multi-platform formats on perceptions of the more standard linear documentary format, all of which have been incorporated into a single documentary category by some researchers. For a traditional documentary such as The Musicians to be categorised with open-ended, multimedia constructions seems somewhat anomalous

On owning information: intellectual property and the restitutionary impulse

Every day someone invests time, labor, or money in creating a valuable intangible. Someone collects information, creates an idea, designs a boat hull, writes a book, or comes up with a new way to market a product that someone else developed. Judicial treatment of these and other cognate occurrences has shifted dramatically in recent years

From rituals to films: a case study of the visual rhetoric of Igbo culture in Nolywood films

Many reasons have been advanced as to why the video film industry in Nigeria has been so successful financially and in building loyal audiences among Africans around the world. The present thesis argues that Nollywood films help to provide a time and a place for resolving deep-felt tensions in an increasingly modern world while affirming an authentic African [Igbo] identity. The way contemporary video films are produced brings these films close to the dominant emotional and identity questions posed by the Igbos, Nigerians and Africans alike. Particularly in Nigeria, the Nollywood film industry has brought familiar symbolic rituals of cultures on to the screen for audiences’ pleasure. Exploring the recurrent themes of these films raises consciousness about Nollywood as a new and special site where cultures are generated and regenerated. Here, major questions of values and meanings of life are explored, which raise awareness of the Igbo’s journey as a people. This thesis uses textual analysis as well as indigenous audience focus-group analysis to explore cultural representations in Nollywood. A wide range of participants were interviewed in the eight focus-group sessions that were conducted. Two in-depth interview sessions were also carried out on some Nollywood actors. Broadly, this research objectives were: • to identify a conceptual framework for understanding the culture of Africa and Nigeria, in particular, using the concept of ‘communalism’. • to determine the range of reception and consumption modalities of Nollywood products in Nigeria by means of focus-group interviews. • to explore the impact of Nollywood as an industry in the wake of globalization and in the context of current global trends. In pursuing these goals, this study looked at selected key films including, Things Fall Apart (1986), Coronation (2004), Bless Me (2005), Igodo: The Land of the Living Dead (1999), Living in Bondage (1992), My Best Friend (2003), Oil Village (2001), Widow (2007), Last Ofala (2002), Fool at 40 (2006), Festival of Fire (1999) and a lot more as listed in this study’s filmography. At the end this research found that the experience of Nollywood films is something of a centripetal process of communication for the Igbo and Nigerian viewers who believe that these texts help build their societies, culturally from below