Vernacular museum: communal bonding and ritual memory transfer among displaced communities

Eclectically curated and largely ignored by the mainstream museum sector, vernacular museums sit at the interstices between the nostalgic and the future-oriented, the private and the public, the personal and the communal. Eluding the danger of becoming trivialised or commercialised, they serve as powerful conduits of memory, which strengthen communal bonds in the face of the ‘flattening’ effects of globalisation. The museum this paper deals with, a vernacular museum in Vanjärvi in southern Finland, differs from the dominant type of the house museum, which celebrates masculinity and social elites. Rather, it aligns itself with the small amateur museums of everyday life called by Angela Jannelli Wild Museums (2012), by analogy with Lévi-Strauss’ concept of ‘pensée sauvage’. The paper argues that, despite the present-day flurry of technologies of remembering and lavishly funded memory institutions, there is no doubt that the seemingly ‘ephemeral’ institutions such as the vernacular museum, dependent so much on performance, oral storytelling, living bodies and intimate interaction, nevertheless play an important role in maintaining and invigorating memory communities

Finding new biotechnological solutions - Advancing microalgal wastewater treatment with beneficial bacteria

Microalgal wastewater treatment systems may solve several problems with traditional systems. They can cope with high nutrient loads, do not require a supplementary oxygen input, and contribute to a circular economy. However, there are still challenges presented when upscaling these systems. Certain bacterial strains can promote microalgal growth due to the mutualistic symbioticrelationships formed between these microbes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyse microalgal microbiomes that have been cultivated using wastewater and identify potentially beneficial bacteria within these microbiomes with the aim to make microalgal wastewater treatment systems viable at large scales. DNA extraction, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, and co-cultivation experiments were conducted to analyse the biodiversity of the Tetradesmus obliquus microbiome when cultivated on agricultural digestate, identify possible beneficial bacterial strains for use withinT. obliquus wastewater treatment systems, and investigate the impact of specific bacterial strains onT. obliquus growth. The T. obliquus microbiomes cultivated on digestate had significantly different bacterial community compositions with lower species diversity and evenness compared to the T. obliquus microbiomes cultivated using a control medium. A bacterial strain belonging to the Pseudomonadaceae family was found in great abundance within the digestate-treated microbiomes and appeared to rapidly grow in abundance within this environment after the first day of cultivation. Co-cultivation analysis found that an isolate identified as Psuedomonas laurentiana, which shared significant sequence similarity to the bacterial strain belonging to the Pseudomonadaceae family, significantly increased T. obliquus growth. The isolate identified as P. laurentiana may therefore be suitable for use within and advance T. obliquus wastewater treatment systems. Further co-cultivation studies should be conducted within digestate and other wastewater environments at larger scales to determine if the consortia of T. obliquus and P. laurentiana are effective when trying to upscale T. obliquus wastewater treatment systems and make them more efficient

The taste for the particular: A logic of discernment in an age of omnivorousness

This article provides an analysis of two leading specialist wine magazines, Decanter and Wine Spectator, and the codification and legitimation of a ‘taste for the particular.’ Such media of connoisseurship are key institutions of evaluation and legitimation in an age of omnivorousness, but are often overlooked in research that foregrounds the agency of tasters and neglects the conventionalization of tasting norms and devices. The wine field has undergone a process of democratization typical of omnivorousness more broadly: former elite/low boundaries (operationalized in the paper through the Old/New World dichotomy) are ignored, and a discerning attitude is encouraged for wines from a diversity of regions. Drawing on the magazines’ audience profile and market position data, and a content analysis of advertising and editorial content from 2008 and 2010, I examine the differences in the use of four legitimation frames (transparency, heritage, genuineness and external validation) for the provenance elements of Old and New World wines. The analysis suggests that the Old World—typically French—notion of terroir, on which the traditional Old/New World boundary rested, has been democratized through the particularities of provenance. Yet, the analysis also reveals continuing differences between the two categories (including greater emphasis on the heritage and external validation of Old World context of production, and on the transparency and genuineness of New World producers), and the preservation of established hierarchies of taste through the application of terroir to New World wines, which retain the Old World and France as their master referent

Rising From the Rubble: Creating the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lecture in Judaic Studies… Dr. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies, NYU and Program Director, Core Exhibition, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1298/thumbnail.jp

Dependable keyed data entry for interactive systems

Keyed data entry is fundamental and ubiquitous, occurring when filling data fields in web forms, entering burglar alarm pass-codes, using calculators, entering drug delivery rates in infusion pumps, making cash withdrawals from cash machines, setting destinations for GPS navigation, to name but a few of its applications. Unfortunately data entry is often implemented poorly. We introduce divergence, a loss of predictability in a user interface, and show that it is in general unavoidable in data entry, and therefore a systematic approach is called for. This paper presents one such an approach. Many inter-related ideas ``fall into place''---e.g., autocompletion, prompting, automatic color coding---through the approach. The approach contrasts with conventional systems that are generally inconsistent and unhelpful to users, particularly after errors