Absence and Presence: Top of the Pops and the demand for music videos in the 1960s

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.Whilst there is a surprising critical consensus underpinning the myth that British music video began in the mid-1970s with Queen’s video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, few scholars have pursued Mundy’s (1999) lead in locating its origins a decade earlier. Although the relationship between film and the popular song has a much longer history, this article seeks to establish that the international success of British beat groups in the first half of the 1960s encouraged television broadcasters to target the youth audience with new shows that presented their idols performing their latest hits (which normally meant miming to recorded playback). In the UK, from 1964, the BBC’s Top of the Pops created an enduring format specifically harnessed to popular music chart rankings. The argument follows that this format created a demand for the top British artists’ regular studio presence which their busy touring schedules could seldom accommodate; American artists achieving British pop chart success rarely appeared on the show in person. This frequent absence then, coupled with the desire by broadcasters elsewhere in Europe and America to present popular British acts, created a demand for pre-recorded or filmed inserts to be produced and shown in lieu of artists’ appearance. Drawing on records held at the BBC’s Written Archives and elsewhere, and interviews with a number of 1960s music video directors, this article evidences TV’s demand-driver and illustrates how the ‘pop promo’, in the hands of some, became a creative enterprise which exceeded television’s requirement to cover for an artist’s studio absence

Processing Posting Lists Using OpenCL

One of the main requirements of internet search engines is the ability to retrieve relevant results with faster response times. Yioop is an open source search engine designed and developed in PHP by Dr. Chris Pollett. The goal of this project is to explore the possibilities of enhancing the performance of Yioop by substituting resource-intensive existing PHP functions with C based native PHP extensions and the parallel data processing technology OpenCL. OpenCL leverages the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) of a computer system for performance improvements. Some of the critical functions in search engines are resource-intensive in terms of processing power, memory, and I/O usage. The processing times vary based on the complexity and magnitude of data involved. This project involves different phases such as identifying critical resource intensive functions, initially replacing such methods with PHP Extensions, and eventually experimenting with OpenCL code. We also ran performance tests to measure the reduction in processing times. From our results, we concluded that PHP Extensions and OpenCL processing resulted in performance improvements

Learning in a Landscape: Simulation-building as Reflexive Intervention

This article makes a dual contribution to scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) on simulation-building. It both documents a specific simulation-building project, and demonstrates a concrete contribution to interdisciplinary work of STS insights. The article analyses the struggles that arise in the course of determining what counts as theory, as model and even as a simulation. Such debates are especially decisive when working across disciplinary boundaries, and their resolution is an important part of the work involved in building simulations. In particular, we show how ontological arguments about the value of simulations tend to determine the direction of simulation-building. This dynamic makes it difficult to maintain an interest in the heterogeneity of simulations and a view of simulations as unfolding scientific objects. As an outcome of our analysis of the process and reflections about interdisciplinary work around simulations, we propose a chart, as a tool to facilitate discussions about simulations. This chart can be a means to create common ground among actors in a simulation-building project, and a support for discussions that address other features of simulations besides their ontological status. Rather than foregrounding the chart's classificatory potential, we stress its (past and potential) role in discussing and reflecting on simulation-building as interdisciplinary endeavor. This chart is a concrete instance of the kinds of contributions that STS can make to better, more reflexive practice of simulation-building.Comment: 37 page

A spatial signature of sprawl: or the proportion and distribution of linear networkcircuits

This paper sets out to investigate whether the frequency distribution ofthe linear network circuits within a graph-based representation of aroad transportation system can be helpful in identifying sprawl and, inparticular, whether a 'spatial signature of sprawl' can be determined.This paper is based upon an earlier study on Peachtree City, Georgia and in particular of its dual transportation system (roads and golf cartpaths). In order to fully understand the effect that the dualtransportation system has upon Peachtree City, the frequencydistribution of its circuits are compared to three, supposed, 'suburban' areas and three, supposed, 'urban' districts. The conclusion of thispaper is that there is, unquestionably, a measurable continuum between 'suburbia' and 'urbanity' and that this is reflected in the frequency,length and distribution of the graph network circuits. The main sectionof this paper is concerned with the presentation and discussion ofalternative algorithms for calculating these circuits. This section isfollowed by an introduction of a selection of methods for interpretingthe resultant data. Finally, with respect to Peachtree City, this paperconcludes that the effect of the dual transportation system is to make it more 'urban' than it would otherwise be, although it remains adistinctly suburban environment