Mercy Mercy Me (the Media Ecology): Technology, Agency, and Cleavage of the Musical Text

This thesis explores changes that occurred in popular music during the 1960s and early 1970s through case studies involving three significant albums released in 1971 and 1972: Marvin Gaye\u27s What\u27s Going On, Sly and the Family Stone\u27s There\u27s a Riot Goin\u27 On, and Stevie Wonder\u27s Talking Book. These albums deserve attention particularly because, as this thesis argues, existing research on the cultural significance of popular music has focused largely on the periods before or after the 1970s and research on music-making technologies has focused largely on white artists or groups from the late 1960s. Addressing this blind spot, the thesis seeks to illuminate this time period and its place as a significant bridge to the digital era that followed. Moreover, by employing media ecology and practice theory as a framework, the thesis argues that these albums exemplify a cleavage of the recorded musical text from live performance, akin to that of the written text from oral-styled manuscripts to closed literary works. Drawing upon the tradition of the history and phenomenology of recorded sound, this thesis therefore aims to contribute to media ecological understandings of how human agency, industry structures, and technological affordances worked together to redefine the structures and the relationships with which they were associated

Developing Walvis Bay Port into a logistics gateway for southern Africa: Issues, challenges and the potential implications for Namibia’s future

Many developing countries wish to become the ‘gateway’ to a region or part of a continent.One strategy involves encouraging logistics cluster development. These hubs support global supply chains and may enable the economic growth of the host country through the resulting trade, as well as providing direct and indirect employment opportunities during the build and subsequent operation of the hub. Namibia intends to develop the Port of Walvis Bay to be come the preferred gateway to southern Africa and the Southern African Development Community region. This article builds on research on Caribbean cluster potential and Namibian logistics to identify the potential benefits and impact on development, as well as the drawbacks and risks of such a strategy

Disaster warning system: Satellite feasibility and comparison with terrestrial systems. Volume 1: Executive summary

The Disaster Warning System (DWS) is a conceptual system which will provide the National Weather Service (NWS) with communication services in the 1980s to help minimize losses caused by natural disasters. The object of this study is a comparative analysis between a terrestrial DWS and a satellite DWS. Baseline systems satisfying the NOAA requirements were synthesized in sufficient detail so that a comparison could be made in terms of performance and cost. The cost of both baseline systems is dominated by the disaster warning and spotter reporting functions. An effort was undertaken to reduce system cost through lower-capacity alternative systems generated by modifying the baseline systems. By reducing the number of required channels and modifying the spotter reporting techniques, alternative satellite systems were synthesized. A terrestrial alternative with the coverage reduced to an estimated 95 percent of the population was considered

Disaster warning system: Satellite feasibility and comparison with terrestrial systems. Volume 2: Final report

For abstract, see Vol. 1

Overcoming the false-minima problem in direct methods: Structure determination of the packaging enzyme P4 from bacteriophage φ13

The problems encountered during the phasing and structure determination of the packaging enzyme P4 from bacteriophage φ13 using the anomalous signal from selenium in a single-wavelength anomalous dispersion experiment (SAD) are described. The oligomeric state of P4 in the virus is a hexamer (with sixfold rotational symmetry) and it crystallizes in space group C2, with four hexamers in the crystallographic asymmetric unit. Current state-of-the-art ab initio phasing software yielded solutions consisting of 96 atoms arranged as sixfold symmetric clusters of Se atoms. However, although these solutions showed high correlation coefficients indicative that the substructure had been solved, the resulting phases produced uninterpretable electron-density maps. Only after further analysis were correct solutions found (also of 96 atoms), leading to the eventual identification of the positions of 120 Se atoms. Here, it is demonstrated how the difficulties in finding a correct phase solution arise from an intricate false-minima problem. © 2005 International Union of Crystallography - all rights reserved

Galaxy Zoo: Multimergers and the Millennium Simulation

We present a catalogue of 39 multiple mergers, found using the mergers catalogue of the Galaxy Zoo project for z <0.1, and compare them to corresponding semi-analytical galaxies from the Millennium Simulation. We estimate the (volume-limited) multimerger fraction of the local Universe using our sample and find it to be at least 2 orders of magnitude less than binary mergers - in good agreement with the simulations (especially the Munich group). We then investigate the properties of galaxies in binary mergers and multimergers (morphologies, colours, stellar masses and environment) and compare these results with those predicted by the semi-analytical galaxies. We find that multimergers favour galaxies with properties typical of elliptical morphologies and that this is in qualitative agreement with the models. Studies of multimergers thus provide an independent (and largely corroborating) test of the Millennium semi-analytical models.Peer reviewe

Helping Deluxe Beds to sleep easy : a case study of agile project management

This case study describes the embedding of the Scrum project management framework as an innovation and operational improvement tool within a manufacturing Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) in the UK. The teaching notes inform 1) other UK manufacturing SMEs with novice teams, and 2) students at undergraduate and postgraduate level exploring innovation and operations management/improvement. The case advances our understanding of how small family-run manufacturing businesses can use contemporary frameworks such as Scrum to improve business operations and innovation. Deluxe Beds Ltd is a family SME manufacturing beds and mattresses with a technically novice workforce mainly with no formal educational background

Speech audiometry test with picture-related sentence lists in Modern Greek for partially hearing children

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop Greek Sentence Based Speech Audiometry Test in quiet test for Hearing Impaired (HI) children (G-SEBSAT). Methods: Seventy-six children were recruited following approval by the local ethics committee and after obtaining informed consent from their parents. The collection of vocabulary was based on showing pictures selected from popular reading materials in Greek to hearing impaired HI children. A grammatical content analysis was carried out to determine the average syntactic and morphological structures of the sentences used by the HI children. Ten picture related sentence lists were developed based on the vocabulary and the grammatical analysis, and recorded by a male native speaker of standard Modern Greek. These were presented to both normal hearing (NH) and HI children, and the average speech response threshold (SRT) as well as the slope of the SRT curve at the SRT level of 50% correct responses (S50) were recorded in both groups. Sentence lists were validated with respect to the variability of their difficulty within each group, as well the test-retest variability of the respective SRT scores. Results: The average speech response threshold (SRT) across all lists for HI children was 65.27 dB and the slope of the SRT curve at the SRT level of 50% correct responses was 3.11%/dB. The corresponding results across all lists for NH children were 17.66 dB and 9.7%/dB, respectively. The SRT of HI children were strongly positively correlated, in a statistically significant manner with the PTA in both the test and the retest sessions (test: r=0.750, P < 0.0005; retest: r=0.753, P < 0.0005). The Spearman correlation of the rankings of SRT values and the slope values was 0.998 and 0.997 respectively for the HI and 0.939 and 0.88, for the NH group, indicating very low variability across the test and retest sessions. In addition, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the average SRT in NH children and the SRT residuals in the HI group indicated that the different sentences were of the same difficulty within each group. ((F(9,81)=0.401, p=0.930 and (F(9,93)=2.241, p=0.025 respectively). Conclusions: A validated sentence based speech audiometry test was created in Greek for the first time. SRT and S50 values for both NH and HI children are comparable to similar tests developed in other languages

How to Undertake a Clinically Relevant Systematic Review in a Rapidly Evolving Field: Magnetic Resonance Angiography

Objectives: The aim was to determine which generations of the evolving technology of magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) are currently of clinical relevance in two clinical applications. Our purpose was to plan a systematic review that would be valuable both to purchasers driven by cost-effectiveness and to practicing clinicians. Methods: Information was gathered from a search of major bibliographic databases, from a short questionnaire sent to 500 U.K. vascular radiologists and vascular surgeons, and from local clinical The authors thank A. Jackson and all those who completed a questionnaire. This work was carried out with the financial support of the Secretary of State for Health under the NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme, project 97/13/04. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Secretary of State for Health. In part, this work was undertaken by the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which received funding from the NHS Executive. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS Executive.experts. We asked which of the MRA techniques were currently used and, assuming availability, what would be their technique of choice. Results: There were 206 published articles that satisfied preliminary inclusion criteria: 69 discussed 2D time of flight (TOF); 47, 3D TOF; and 38, contrast-enhanced techniques. There were 162 questionnaires returned (60 radiologists, 102 surgeons). Of the total respondents, 77/162 (48%) used MRA in the assessment of carotid artery stenosis; 47/77 (61%) used 2D TOF; 32/77 (42%), 3D TOF; and 26/77 (34%), contrast-enhanced techniques. Thirty-five of 162 (22%) respondents used MRA in the assessment of peripheral vascular disease (PVD); 15/35 (43%) used 2D TOF, 4/35 (11%) used 3D TOF, and 22/35 (63%) used contrast-enhanced techniques. For those wishing to use MRA, contrast-enhanced techniques were the method of choice. Conclusions: The TOF methods that represent earlier generations of the technology remain clinically relevant, and will therefore be included in our systematic review. To ensure complete and relevant coverage in reviews of other evolving technologies, it would be advisable to obtain data for guidance in a similar way