Sonic Modernities in the Malay World : A History of Popular Music, Social Distinction and Novel Lifestyles (1930s – 2000s)

Sonic Modernities analyses the interplay between the production of popular music, shifting ideas of the modern and, in its aftermath, processes of social differentiation in twentieth-century Southeast Asia

The Sound of Islam Southeast Asian Boy Bands

Since the early 1990s nasyid music has become widely popular among the Islamic youth of Indonesia and Malaysia. Imported from the Middle East, the verbal art attracts proponents particularly in universities, above all among student activists. However, the Middle East is not the sole role model; present-day nasyid music reveals the careful and often delicate mix of religion and pop that is currently so much debated throughout the Islamic world

The changing art of seduction: ritual courtship, performing prostitutes, erotic entertainment

Do the performing arts play a role in sexual selection? How does music influence mating practices in different cultures? an the performing arts create social settings where sexual relationships germinate and grow - even where sex is a disruptive force, an arena for competition and conflict? And if so, where does this power of the performing arts come from

The art of no-seduction: Muslim boy-band music in Southeast Asia and the fear of the female voice

Religion, more often than not, equates the arts of seduction - whether in traditional performances or popular music - with immoral behaviour. The status of music and dance in the Islamic world, especially the fear of its sensuous powers, has been heatedly discussed in religious treatises; with its clean-cut performers and moral messages, nasyid, the Islamic boy-band music of Southeast Asia, seems to epitomise the art of no-seduction. Reality, however, is more complex, as Muslim pop music struggles to combine two competing powers - the eroticism of pop music and the persuasive power of religion. And especially when the female voice comes into play...

Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia: In Between Religious Politics and Popular Pious Practices

This article introduces the special issue ‘Online Publics in Muslim Southeast Asia: In Between Religious Politics and Popular Pious Practices’ by discussing prominent ap- proaches in the study of media and the public sphere in light of the specific history of digital media’s rise in Muslim Southeast Asia. It focuses on earlier and current expres- sions of mobile and Islamic modernity as well as on changing moralities and forms of Islamic authority. Referencing the other contributions to this special issue, it particu- larly emphasizes the (discursive and visual) contestations and social dramas that take place in the region’s media spaces providing for a variety of Islamic forms, practices, and socialities that can best be grasped, the authors argue, by considering politics, the pious, and the popular not as separate, but as mutually constitutive domains.  Global Challenges (FSW

Strong Zonation of Benthic Communities Across a Tidal Freshwater Height Gradient

Trade-offs associated with environmental gradients generate patterns of diversity and govern community organisation in a landscape. In freshwaters, benthic community structure is driven by trade-offs along generally orthogonal gradients of habitat permanence and predation—where ephemeral systems are physiologically harsh because of drying stress, but inhabitants are less likely to be under the intense predation pressure of more permanent waterbodies. However, in tidal freshwaters, these two stressors are compounding, and the trade-offs associated with them are decoupled. 2. We investigated benthic community structure in a tidal freshwater habitat. These communities experience a suite of conditions atypical for a freshwater habitat: twice-daily drying; and high predation pressure by mobile fishes. We compared benthic communities at three tidal heights (low, mid, high) and contrasted these with nearby non-tidal freshwaters that varied in their hydrology (permanent, temporary). 3. We found that communities were more strongly differentiated in tidal freshwater habitats than between permanent and temporary inland freshwaters, which was surprising given the high interconnectedness and condensed longitudinal scale of tidal habitats. The differentiation of communities in tidal habitats was probably driven by the combined gradients of desiccation risk at low tide and intense predation by fish at high tide—a combination of pressures that are novel for the evolutionary history of the regional freshwater invertebrate fauna. 4. Our study provides evidence that environmental gradients can produce stronger patterns of community zonation than would be predicted for habitats that are spatially contiguous and have little or no dispersal limitation. These results give insight into how communities might respond if drivers of community structure are altered or reorganised from their regional or evolutionary norms

Contour extracting networks in early extrastriate cortex

Neurons in the visual cortex process a local region of visual space, but in order to adequately analyze natural images, neurons need to interact. The notion of an ?association field? proposes that neurons interact to extract extended contours. Here, we identify the site and properties of contour integration mechanisms. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and population receptive field (pRF) analyses. We devised pRF mapping stimuli consisting of contours. We isolated the contribution of contour integration mechanisms to the pRF by manipulating the contour content. This stimulus manipulation led to systematic changes in pRF size. Whereas a bank of Gabor filters quantitatively explains pRF size changes in V1, only V2/V3 pRF sizes match the predictions of the association field. pRF size changes in later visual field maps, hV4, LO-1, and LO-2 do not follow either prediction and are probably driven by distinct classical receptive field properties or other extraclassical integration mechanisms. These pRF changes do not follow conventional fMRI signal strength measures. Therefore, analyses of pRF changes provide a novel computational neuroimaging approach to investigating neural interactions. We interpreted these results as evidence for neural interactions along co-oriented, cocircular receptive fields in the early extrastriate visual cortex (V2/V3), consistent with the notion of a contour association field

Formalizing Size-Optimal Sorting Networks: Extracting a Certified Proof Checker

Since the proof of the four color theorem in 1976, computer-generated proofs have become a reality in mathematics and computer science. During the last decade, we have seen formal proofs using verified proof assistants being used to verify the validity of such proofs. In this paper, we describe a formalized theory of size-optimal sorting networks. From this formalization we extract a certified checker that successfully verifies computer-generated proofs of optimality on up to 8 inputs. The checker relies on an untrusted oracle to shortcut the search for witnesses on more than 1.6 million NP-complete subproblems.Comment: IMADA-preprint-c