Butterflies, Busy Weekends, and Chicken Salad: Genetic Criticism and the Output of @Pentametron

Textual analysis places great emphasis on determining the development and direction of authorial intention to illuminate a text’s layers of meaning. How, though, is one to determine the development of authorial intention in a text that appears to remove the traditional human author? This paper explores issues of authorship presented to genetic criticism (critique génétique) by algorithmically-produced texts – that is, texts produced through programmed logic in a computer rather than through direct human agency – such as those of the Twitter bot Pentametron (twitter.com/pentametron). This paper considers the perceived importance of authorship and human agency in the creation of a text. Algorithmic texts challenge contemporary notions of textual creation and development, in turn posing challenges to genetic criticism that are similar to those posed by cut-up texts in other media. This paper argues that Pentametron’s rather nonsensical algorithmic output stresses the reader’s responsibility for meaning-making, and suggests that such algorithmic texts are not so much final texts to be subjected to genetic critique themselves, but are more aptly considered to be forms of avant-texte. These avant-textes serve as inspiration for human-computer symbioses, for re-creations wherein readers make sense out of the seemingly senseless

Dehydrated pork studies : removal of glucose by yeast fermentation

This bulletin reports research undertaken in cooperation with the Quarter-master Food and Container Institute for the Armed Forces, and has been assigned number 571 in the series of papers approved for publication...--P. [2].Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (page 12)

Comparative methods of cleaning meat cutting tables

Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (page 8)

Leadership and Culture

This study is about the phenomenon of leadership. Existing studies of leadership have failed to address the complex, multidisciplinary, processual, and collective nature of leadership. Attempts to appear scientific have focused on the forms of leadership rather than its universal processes. Following an analysis of existing theories of leadership viewed from disciplinary frames, the purpose of this study is to propose a new theory of leadership constructed within a cultural frame. The nature of leadership can be understood best when it is defined as a cultural expression containing complex sets of interdependent variables. Insofar as the study presents a cultural theory of leadership, it is informed by anthropology and includes ethnographies as case studies on leadership, including the works of Barth, Leach, Bailey, and Kracke. Inasmuch as the case studies serve to instantiate the proposed theory and the study is founded on the possibility of comparison, integration, and generalization, the research methodology utilized is that of grounded theory as outlined by Glaser and Strauss (1967). The critical properties of both culture and leadership are identified, revealing an isomorphic congruence between the properties of both categories. A comparative analysis between the properties of culture and leadership reveals the coterminous relationship between the two, suggesting leadership is a cultural expression. Among the conclusions drawn are the following: (a) the nature of leadership is linked to the nature of culture; (b) leadership is essentially a cultural expression; (c) the universal dimension of leadership can only be defined in terms of process; and (d) leadership can only be studied as a multidisciplinary phenomenon

Microflora of prepackaged luncheon meats

Digitized 2007 AES.Includes bibliographical references (page 20)

Chatting with the dead: the hermeneutics of thanabots

In 2021, the San Francisco Chronicle released a feature article about a man who chose to resurrect his deceased fiancée by training a chatbot system built on OpenAI’s GPT language models on her old digital messages. He then had emotional conversations with this chatbot, which appeared to accurately mimic the deceased’s writing style. This case study raises questions about the communicative influences of thanabots: chatbots trained on data of the dead. While thanabots are clearly not living conversational partners, the rhetoric, everyday experiences, and emotions associated with these system have very real implications for living users. This paper applies a lifeworld perspective to consider the hermeneutics of thanabots. It shows that thanabots exist in a long lineage of efforts to communicate with the dead, but acknowledges that thanatechnologies must be more thoroughly studied for better understanding of what it means to die in a digital age

The Lovelace Effect: Perceptions of Creativity in Machines

This article proposes the notion of the ‘Lovelace Effect’ as an analytical tool to identify situations in which the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users as original and creative. It contrasts the Lovelace Effect with the more commonly known ‘Lovelace objection’, which claims that computers cannot originate or create anything, but only do what their programmers instruct them to do. By analysing the case study of AICAN – an AI art-generating system – we argue for the need for approaches in computational creativity to shift focus from what computers are able to do in ontological terms to the perceptions of human users who enter into interactions with them. The case study illuminates how the Lovelace effect can be facilitated through technical but also through representational means, such as the situations and cultural contexts in which users are invited to interact with the AI