5,163 research outputs found
Buying In and Selling Out: African-American Ownership of Record Labels in the Twentieth Century
Throughout the twentieth century, African-American owned record labels seemingly served as embodiments of entrepreneurialism’s capacity to generate social uplift for the race as well as wealth. However, an examination of Black Swan Records, Motown, and Def Jam Records, demonstrates how this assertion is undermined by the actions of their owners. Harry Pace founded Black Swan Records in 1921 not only to showcase black artists, but also prove the African-American audience was capable of appreciating classical music and other high culture. However, faced with financial pressures, Pace expanded the genres recorded on Black Swan to include jazz and other genres deemed “low” culture, as well as released records by white artists under black names. Berry Gordy’s refusal to allow his Motown artists to take a public stance on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s came from his belief that their participation would be detrimental to the company’s profitability. Gordy’s belief in selling black respectability to the commercial mainstream formed the basis of much of his decisions in running Motown, and became its ultimate legacy. Although Russell Simmons sought to market black rebellion under the assumption white consumers would find it more authentic, his decisions made as owner of Def Jam was demonstrated how entrenched black music had become within mainstream culture. When artists went too far in their persona of rebellion, such as members of Public Enemy, Simmons was quick to cast them aside in order to preserve the label’s viability. The three owner’s actions to remain commercially successful despite seemingly in opposition to their stated cultural and racial goals demonstrate the priority of economic realities inherent in consumer culture taking precedence over idealistic efforts. In commodifying race, the resulting music was foremost a commercial product, and diminished its cultural value. This work challenges earlier studies of African-American popular music by arguing that the positive attributes of presenting black artists to a mainstream audience were weakened by the economic considerations of running a business and the demands of a consumer culture
Selling the ghetto: rap music and entrepreneurialism
By focusing on incidents during the careers of rap moguls Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, and Shawn Carter, it becomes evident rap music has become more conservative and affirmative of traditional American entrepreneurialism than believed by prior scholarship, which regarded rap music primarily as radical and counter-cultural black expression. For Russell Simmons and Run-DMC, the Madison Square Garden concert and its effect on the perception of a subsequent endorsement deal with Adidas demonstrate the emergence of rap music unto the mainstream consumer culture. Though the parties involved would later claim singularity in the event, the process was not just a spur of the moment occurrence, but the calculated effort of Russell Simmons to entice the shoemaker. Sean Combs’ attempt to rebrand himself from “Puff Daddy” to “P. Diddy” following the negative publicity from his weapons possession trial also exemplifies this principle. Combs underwent the maneuver in an attempt to rebuild his economic viability after much bad press. By changing his moniker, Combs sought to continue his high esteem within the white mainstream as a purveyor of the ghetto culture. Shawn Carter’s return to rap music following a well-publicized retirement and ascension to CEO of Def Jam Records highlights the continued merger between black expression and the market. Though Carter had become perceived as a businessman despite not legitimately engaging in such activities through his music and public persona, he left the corporate sphere, preferring the perception of moguldom to its actual practice. Based on these actions of these moguls, it is evident rap music is not inherently radical or counter-cultural, but instead represents the merger of traditional African-American expression with the entrepreneurial drive of the American Dream. This desire to gain wealth is not counter-cultural, but rather represents the emergence of African-American expression into a mainstream market
Improving the tensile strength of carbon nanotube spun yarns using a modified spinning process
A modified process for the dry spinning of carbon nanotube (CNT) yarn is reported. The approach gives an improved structure of CNT bundles in the web drawn from the CNT forest and in the yarn produced from the twisted web leading to improved mechanical properties of the yarn. The process enables many different mechanical and physical treatments to be applied to the individual stages of the pure CNT spinning system, and may allow potential for the development of complex spinning processes such as polymer–CNT-based composite yarns. The tensile strength and yarn/web structure of yarn spun using this approach have been investigated and evaluated using standard tensile testing methods along with scanning electron microscopy. The experimental results show that the tensile properties were significantly improved. The effect of heat treatments and other yarn constructions on the tensile properties are also reported
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A Language for Specifying Informational Graphics from First Principles
Informational visualization tools, such as commercial charting packages, provide a standard set of visualizations for tabular data, including bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts, and the like. For some combinations of data and task, these are suitable visualizations. For others, however, novel visualizations over multiple variables would be preferred but are unavailable in the fixed list of standard options. To allow for these cases, we introduce a declarative language for specifying visualizations on the basis of the first principles on which (a subset of) informational graphics are built. The functionality we aim to provide with this language is presented by way of example, from simple scatter plots to versions of two quite famous visualizations: Minard’s depiction of troop strength during Napoleon’s march on Moscow and a map of the early ARPAnet from the ancient history of the Internet. Benefits of our approach include flexibility and expressiveness for specifying a range of visualizations that cannot be rendered with standard commercial systems.Engineering and Applied Science
Iterative Quantum Algorithms for Maximum Independent Set: A Tale of Low-Depth Quantum Algorithms
Quantum algorithms have been widely studied in the context of combinatorial
optimization problems. While this endeavor can often analytically and
practically achieve quadratic speedups, theoretical and numeric studies remain
limited, especially compared to the study of classical algorithms. We propose
and study a new class of hybrid approaches to quantum optimization, termed
Iterative Quantum Algorithms, which in particular generalizes the Recursive
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm. This paradigm can incorporate hard
problem constraints, which we demonstrate by considering the Maximum
Independent Set (MIS) problem. We show that, for QAOA with depth , this
algorithm performs exactly the same operations and selections as the classical
greedy algorithm for MIS. We then turn to deeper circuits and other ways
to modify the quantum algorithm that can no longer be easily mimicked by
classical algorithms, and empirically confirm improved performance. Our work
demonstrates the practical importance of incorporating proven classical
techniques into more effective hybrid quantum-classical algorithms.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure
Conversion Of Kelp Debris And Fecal Material From The Mussel Aulacomya-Ater By Marine Microorganisms
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Associating transcription factors to single-cell trajectories with DREAMIT.
Inferring gene regulatory networks from single-cell RNA-sequencing trajectories has been an active area of research yet methods are still needed to identify regulators governing cell transitions. We developed DREAMIT (Dynamic Regulation of Expression Across Modules in Inferred Trajectories) to annotate transcription-factor activity along single-cell trajectory branches, using ensembles of relations to target genes. Using a benchmark representing several different tissues, as well as external validation with ATAC-Seq and Perturb-Seq data on hematopoietic cells, the method was found to have higher tissue-specific sensitivity and specificity over competing approaches
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