Setting the record straight on the Malayan counterinsurgency strategy: interview with Karl Hack

You are a long time researcher and observer of the Malayan Emergency. What were the core key ingredients that broke the back of the communist insurgents in the Malayan Emergency? The primary cause for putting the campaign on a firmly winning path? The game changer that helped at the end of the day to regain the initiative

Hokey Religions: Star Wars and Star Trek in the Age of Reboots

Disney’s recent “decanonization” of the decades-old Star Wars “Expanded Universe” in preparation for the release of The Force Awakens once again raises the question of the triangular relationship between the corporate ownership of intellectual property, the mainstream audience to whom the blockbuster films are addressed, and the much smaller hardcore fanbase whose loyalty sustains a franchise during its lean years. Considering fandom investment in the processes of world-building and continuity construction across the landscape of SF media forms, this article will focus specifically on two key franchises in mainstream SF, each in its own way paradigmatic of the “merely” science fictional, and each of which has recently undertaken a radical revision of its “expanded universe”: Star Wars and Star Trek. A concluding discussion extends these observations to other two franchises: Superman comics and the long-running British television series Doctor Who

Spartan Daily October 12, 2010

Volume 135, Issue 23https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1186/thumbnail.jp

Spaces of the Past, Histories of the Present: An Interview with Stuart Elden and Derek Gregory

The ontologies of space and territory, our experience of them and the techniques we use to govern them, the very conception of the socio-spatial formations that we inhabit, are all historically specific: they depend on a genealogy of practices, knowledges, discourses, regulations, performances and representations articulated in a way that is extremely complex yet nevertheless legible over time. In this interview we look at the logic and the patterns that intertwine space and time — both as objects and tools of inquiry — though a cross-disciplinary dialogue. The discussion with Stuart Elden and Derek Gregory covers the place of history in socio-spatial theory and in their own work, old and new ways of thinking about the intersection between history and territory, space and time, the implications of geography and history for thinking about contemporary politics, and the challenges now faced by critical thought and academic work in the current neo-liberal attack on public universities and the welfare stat

An Account of Opinion Implicatures

While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference) in text. This paper described a rule-based framework for representing and analyzing opinion implicatures which we hope will contribute to deeper automatic interpretation of subjective language. In the course of understanding implicatures, the system recognizes implicit sentiments (and beliefs) toward various events and entities in the sentence, often attributed to different sources (holders) and of mixed polarities; thus, it produces a richer interpretation than is typical in opinion analysis.Comment: 50 Pages. Submitted to the journal, Language Resources and Evaluatio

Eulogy to Architecture: The Three-Dimensional Collage City of Nostalgia

In our time of existence on the Earth, human beings have designed and realized beautiful things. As we face the challenges that confront us today, we begin to understand the fragility of humankind’s creations. Many of the world’s cities and buildings lie in ruins, gazed at by tourists, studied by scholars, while more lie buried in the ground for hundreds of years, some never to be rediscovered. Everything around us is an accumulation of knowledge and ideas built upon for centuries, now facing questionable circumstances. Of course, the more recent Aleppo and other Middle Eastern cities have fallen subject to bombings over the past years, now lost forever. Climate change threatens coastal cities around the world; natural disasters unexpectedly take from our grasp things that we have had for centuries. Nothing is for certain. Nothing lasts forever. Every built structure, no matter the value, eventually falls. What if the earth is one day no longer ours? Its livelihood depends on us, and our sustained wars and climatic abuse continue to decay the soil we walk on and the air we breathe. Will humans be forced from the planet that we have forever called home? This project imagines a new world built on the framework of nostalgia. It is a eulogy to architecture, a compilation of fragments of our world to recreate a place once lost. The city is designed as a three-dimensionalization of Rowe’s Collage City so as to create an assemblage of parts that form a whole. Various scales of fragments of earth, ranging from single buildings to neighborhood fabrics, are arranged in a volumetric space. This space is located away from the gravitational pull of the Earth, making it possible to collage fragments vertically as well as horizontally. The city embraces both the beauty and imperfections of the collected places. To call it a utopia is forward, considering that the majority of each of the employed places were not originally designed as utopian; thus one cannot project utopianism upon them simply because they have a diĐerent context. One might question how an organic system of organization could ever be considered utopian, considering the lack of planning. However, if utopianism is based on the perfection of the human itself rather than the environment, this city aims to imbue a sense of nostalgia in each human mind, with the idea that these places are inherently important to us as a species and to our connection to Earth itself. This project is a visual essay about the importance of what humans have created for themselves on the Earth. It is a conceptual idea that aims to transcend fears of loss by giving hope for a new world collaged from existing fragments of built fabric

Intellectual Property in Experience

In today’s economy, consumers demand experiences. From Star Wars to Harry Potter, fans do not just want to watch or read about their favorite characters— they want to be them. They don the robes of Gryffindor, flick their wands, and drink the butterbeer. The owners of fantasy properties understand this, expanding their offerings from light sabers to the Galaxy’s Edge®, the new Disney Star Wars immersive theme park opening in 2019. Since Star Wars, Congress and the courts have abetted what is now a $262 billion-a-year industry in merchandising, fashioning “merchandising rights” appurtenant to copyrights and trademarks that give fantasy owners exclusive rights to supply our fantasy worlds with everything from goods to a good time. But are there any limits? Do merchandising rights extend to fan activity, from fantasy-themed birthday parties and summer camps to real world Quidditch leagues? This Article challenges the conventional account, arguing that as the economic value of fantasy merchandising increases in the emergent “experience economy,” intellectual property owners may prove less keen on tolerating uncompensated uses of their creations. In fact, from Amazon’s Kindle Worlds granting licenses for fan fiction, to crackdowns on sales of fan art sold on internet sites like Etsy, to algorithms taking down fan videos from YouTube, the holders of intellectual property in popular fantasies are seeking to create a world requiring licenses to make, do, and play. This Article turns to social and cultural theories of art as experience, learning by doing, tacit knowledge, and performance to demonstrate that fan activity, from discussion sites to live-action role-playing fosters learning, creativity, and sociability. Law must be attentive to the profound effects these laws have on human imagination and knowledge creation. I apply the insights of these theories to limit merchandising rights in imaginative play through fair use, the force in the legal galaxy intended to bring balance to intellectual property law

Spartan Daily, January 29, 1946

Volume 34, Issue 42https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/3699/thumbnail.jp