“A Certain Stigma” of Educational Radio: Judith Waller and “Public Service” Broadcasting

This paper explores Judith Waller’s radio programming philosophy over her career that began in 1922 at WMAQ Chicago. In the 1940s, representing the interests of her employer NBC, Waller began to use the phrase “public service” as a way to break free of the “stigma” of educational radio. The concept of public service programming shifted during the 1930s and 1940s in the US, redefined and negotiated in response to assumptions about radio listeners, the financial motivations of commercial radio, and Federal Communications Commission rulings. This paper brings renewed attention to the past and present political economy of media in the US, providing a window into the historically complex relationship between commercial and noncommercial media that continues to this day

Defining a Medium: The Educational Aspirations for Early Radio

This essay examines the attempts by many writers to steer the burgeoning U.S. radio industry towards educational uses and programming in the 1920s. At the same time that commercial radio began to take shape, several competing and seemingly incompatible visions of the airwaves emerged—one of which privileged the use of radio for educational purposes. Using discourse from trade journals, general interest magazines, and newspapers, this article explores the calls for educational programming amid the rapidly expanding and consolidating commercial radio industry

Sound Recognition of Historical Visibility: The Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress: Introduction

This issue of Journal of Radio & Audio Media serves as a gesture toward increasing attention to many untold cultural sound histories. The “question” of radio preservation, we’re just coming to realize, closely equates to our responsibility to identify gaps within our historical record, as those gaps are delineated along race, class, orientation, and gendered lines. Sound preservation turns out to be one strategy for how to reconcile failures of recognition. It’s widely accepted that a historian must not project a different meaning upon historical materials than its author intended. Yet at the same time historians might now play the role of advocates, by increasing representation through digital preservation. Sound history is one of the last frontiers to build paths of visibility among scattered records. The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) of the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress represents one such project. National in scope but local in focus, the RPTF is currently in the process of constructing several interconnected initiatives that will culminate in a detailed mapping of the cultural history of radio, so as to reveal previously hidden experiences, events, and perspectives

Electromagnetic interference aspects of integrating a UHF/VHF receiver onboard Mariner 5

Electromagnetic interference assessment in integration of Mariner 5 UHF/VHF receive

Propagation of Errors for Matrix Inversion

A formula is given for the propagation of errors during matrix inversion. An explicit calculation for a 2 by 2 matrix using both the formula and a Monte Carlo calculation are compared. A prescription is given to determine when a matrix with uncertain elements is sufficiently nonsingular for the calculation of the covariances of the inverted matrix elements to be reliable.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, figure 4 contains two eps file

A Postapocalyptic Return to The Frontier: The Walking Dead As Post-Western

This article argues that The Walking Dead is a post-Western, a genre that extracts classical Hollywood Western themes and iconography, and resituates them in a dystopian, postapocalyptic setting. The program features characters forced to reconquer the frontier amid the disintegration of modern society, who must battle undead walkers and other human survivors. As a post-Western, the program inverts the ideological optimism of the classical Hollywood Western. In doing so, it highlights the linkages between the seemingly unconnected narrative universes of the Western and the postapocalyptic tale