Electracy: the Internet as fifth estate

This account of an experimental approach to apparatus invention is offered as an introduction to apparatus study in general (grammatology), and electracy as the digital apparatus in particular. The approach is that of the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE), working through the EmerAgency, a virtual consultancy developed to translate Arts & Letters pedagogy into institutional consulting. The term 'electracy' (modeled on 'literacy,' a portmanteau of 'electricity' and Derrida's 'trace') was adopted to clarify that digital technologies are not reducible to a 'media literacy,' but include, besides technological innovations, inventions in the dimensions of institution formation and related skill sets, and identity behaviors individual and collective (ethics and politics). Current members of the FRE include Gregory Ulmer (University of Florida), John Craig Freeman (Emerson College), Barbara Jo Revelle (University of Florida), Jack Stenner (University of Florida), Jan Holmevik (Clemson University)

09/08/1947 Letter from the Maine Council of Churches

Letter from Marion L. Ulmer, Executive Secretary of the Maine Council of Churches, to Louis-Philippe Gagné. Notation on back of letter. Religious Education Week pamphlet included with item.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/fac-lpg-1947-07-09/1031/thumbnail.jp

A Tidal Flare Candidate in Abell 1795

As part of our ongoing archival X-ray survey of galaxy clusters for tidal flares, we present evidence of an X-ray transient source within 1 arcmin of the core of Abell 1795. The extreme variability (a factor of nearly 50), luminosity (> 2 x 10^42 erg s^{-1}), long duration (> 5 years) and supersoft X-ray spectrum (< 0.1 keV) are characteristic signatures of a stellar tidal disruption event according to theoretical predictions and to existing X-ray observations, implying a massive >~10^5 M_sun black hole at the centre of that galaxy. The large number of X-ray source counts (~700) and long temporal baseline (~12 years with Chandra and XMM-Newton) make this one of the best-sampled examples of any tidal flare candidate to date. The transient may be the same EUV source originally found contaminating the diffuse ICM observations of Bowyer et al. (1999), which would make it the only tidal flare candidate with reported EUV observations and implies an early source luminosity 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. If the host galaxy is a cluster member then it must be a dwarf galaxy, an order of magnitude less massive than the quiescent galaxy Henize 2-10 which hosts a massive black hole that is difficult to reconcile with its low mass. The unusual faintness of the host galaxy may be explained by tidal stripping in the cluster core.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS 2013 July 23. 27 pages, 10 figure

Gold Mining and Unequal Exchange in Western Amazonia: A Theoretical Photo Essay

I combine fieldwork photography and ethnographic documentation of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, to examine the localized material, social, environmental, and health outcomes of the global gold boom. This \u27theoretical photo essay’ examines how local and global forces coalesce around gold mining and influence peoples and environments in Western Amazonia. I use embodiment theory in anthropology, ecological economics, and theories of underdevelopment to understand local consequences of the global gold trade and to elucidate how opulence and the machinations of capital accumulation in economic centers of the world occur at the expense of human lives and environments in the hinterlands. Building on this analysis, I draw upon the Marxian concepts of mystification and fetishization to show how the rationale and language invoked in discourses about the gold boom in Madre de Dios work to obscure interconnections between the devastating local consequences of the global gold trade and the unequal economic global system of exchange that unevenly distributes profits and risks

Barthes\u27s Body of Knowledge

Roland Barthes invites a reading of his own texts in terms of the same methodologies he employs in his criticism. The «Biographeme»—those few details, preferences, inflections—which Barthes identified in his favorite authors, may be sought in Barthes as well. Barthes\u27s biographeme, for me, consists of a glutinous effect associated with the organs of the mouth and throat as presented in several images, some of which belong to his tutor texts (Poe and Réquichot). An analysis of this biographeme reveals Barthes\u27s strategy for disseminating the subject of knowledge—the author\u27s fantasmatic body—through the signifiers of writing, fusing the heterogeneous singularities of the knower and the object of study. The metaphorical discourse that results opposes normal academic preoccupations in favor of knowledge of/as desire. Knowledge itself in Barthes becomes a second order signifier caught up in a catachretic process for naming the real. Barthes\u27s procedure for exploring the real affectively, in terms of the body as it is defined in psychoanalysis, imposes on the reader a similar obligation to bring his or her own body into play in the learning experience. Barthes offers a model for a new genre of academic writing, combining science with autobiography, that has important implications for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences

Exhibit X: Hoopla Dreams

Reading for Pleasure (Essay Review

Embezzlement In The Library

This paper examines the unique aspects of fraudulent acts committed among non-profit organizations. By analyzing a specific non-profit fraud committed in a small East Texas town