Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A retrospective

Communication Research Trends usually charts current communication research, introducing its readers to recent developments across the range of inquiry into communication. This issue, however, takes a different tack, looking back on the writings of Walter J. Ong, S.J., who died at the age of 90 in August 2003. Ong spent his scholarly career at Saint Louis University, where he served as University Professor of Humanities, the William E. Haren Professor of English, and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In a career that spanned 60 years, Ong published 16 books, 245 articles, and 108 reviews. In addition, he edited a number of works and gave interviews that further explored his wide-ranging interests. Readers interested in a full bibliography of Ong’s works should refer to the web site prepared by Professor Betty Youngkin at the University of Dayton, at http://homepages.udayton.edu/~youngkin/biblio.htm. From the perspective of an interest in connections among many areas of human knowledge over such a long career, he explored a whole gamut of activities by careful observations of the threads that run through western culture and by insightful analysis of what he observed. Communication forms one of those many threads in the West—perhaps the dominant one—and so it occupies a similar place in Ong’s work. The tapestry Ong weaves has, bit by bit, influenced thinking about communication as well as research. And so, Communication Research Trends looks back on the writings of Walter Ong, S.J

Designing a notation for the senses

Understanding the role of the non-visual senses is difficult, as there is at present no recording medium for the olfactory, gustatory, tactile or even aural environment which is useful to the practice of urban design. In any case, recording has a different aim from drawing and notation

The phantom limb

Thesis (M.D.)—Boston Universit

Extending snBench to Support a Graphical Programming Interface for a Sensor Network Tasking Language (STEP)

The purpose of this project is the creation of a graphical "programming" interface for a sensor network tasking language called STEP. The graphical interface allows the user to specify a program execution graphically from an extensible pallet of functionalities and save the results as a properly formatted STEP file. Moreover, the software is able to load a file in STEP format and convert it into the corresponding graphical representation. During both phases a type-checker is running on the background to ensure that both the graphical representation and the STEP file are syntactically correct. This project has been motivated by the Sensorium project at Boston University. In this technical report we present the basic features of the software, the process that has been followed during the design and implementation. Finally, we describe the approach used to test and validate our software

Extending snBench to Support a Graphical Programming Interface for a Sensor Network Tasking Language (STEP)

The purpose of this project is the creation of a graphical "programming" interface for a sensor network tasking language called STEP. The graphical interface allows the user to specify a program execution graphically from an extensible pallet of functionalities and save the results as a properly formatted STEP file. Moreover, the software is able to load a file in STEP format and convert it into the corresponding graphical representation. During both phases a type-checker is running on the background to ensure that both the graphical representation and the STEP file are syntactically correct. This project has been motivated by the Sensorium project at Boston University. In this technical report we present the basic features of the software, the process that has been followed during the design and implementation. Finally, we describe the approach used to test and validate our software

On Neuron Mechanisms Used to Resolve Mental Problems of Identification and Learning in Sensorium

The paper considers some possible neuron mechanisms that do not contradict biological data. They are represented in terms of the notion of an elementary sensorium discussed in the previous authors’ works. Such mechanisms resolve problems of two large classes: when identification mechanisms are used and when sensory learning mechanisms are applied along with identification

Awakening the Sensorium in Puerto Rico’s Colonial Modernity

The reading of this beautifully crafted, exhaustively documented, and ethically inspired book by Licia Fiol-Matta, The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music, takes me back to this scene of my early youth. For The Great Woman Singer is a book about the call to open-ended aural suspension and search, about the incitement to listen to what Fiol-Matta defines as the skillfully complicated, contradictorily rich, self-reflexive, brilliant “thinking voice” that four of Puerto Rico’s greatest female pop singers, Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes (La Calandria), and Lucecita Benítez, manifested in their singing during the period encompassed by the island’s process of colonial modernity and its aftermath. In tense dialogue with the social forces that would turn their powerfully odd, singular voices into mere representative “nada” or nothingness, Fiol-Matta offers in her book alternative stories of Puerto Rico’s complex and often cruel colonial modernity as told from the most intimate and ephemeral of spaces: from the grain of the singing voice that thinks as it sonically wrestles with its gendered, racialized, and class-coded conditions, the technologies of modernity in the music industries, the sonic ideologies of progress and development of the Puerto Rican Estado Libre Asociado or Commonwealth state, and forced migration and its marginalization in the urban metropolitan setting of New York. The Great Woman Singer is thus simultaneously a tentative and thoughtful reconstruction of the performances of this singing “thinking voice,” based on a painstakingly varied acopio or collection of ephemera (interviews, reviews, programs, records, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, publicity photos, album covers, posters, newspaper clippings, wardrobe, videos, films, fan recollections, and memories), and a critical pedagogy on how to listen to these voices if we are to recover not the intent of the originally sung performances but the polysemous possibilities of interpretation that these four masterfully enduring voices inscribed in them