BBC Experiments in local radio broadcasting 1961-62

In the early 1960s, the BBC was given the opportunity to demonstrate that it had the skills and resources to create localized broadcasting, by organizing a series of experimental stations across the UK. Although the output was not heard publicly, the results were played to the Pilkington Committee on Broadcasting, who were deliberating about the future direction of radio and television. Using archival research, featuring contemporary BBC documents, this paper argues that these experimental stations helped senior managers at the BBC to harness technological innovation with changing attitudes in society and culture, thus enabling them to formulate a strategy that put the BBC in the leading position to launch local radio a few years later in 1967

Physical wrapping of reduced graphene oxide sheets by polyethylene wax and its modification on the mechanical properties of polyethylene

A facile method to encapsulate the reduced graphene oxide (RGO) sheets physically with polyethylene (PE) wax was developed. The graphene oxide sheets were first wrapped with polyethylene wax, and reduced by hydrazine hydrate. The structure of the wrapped RGO was confirmed by means of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Raman spectroscopy. The PE wax-wrapped RGO sheets were melt blended with PE to prepare PE/RGO nanocomposites. Transmission electron microscopy and XRD studies showed that this method could provide uniform dispersion of RGO sheets in the PE matrix. Scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy indicated that there was a strong interfacial interaction between the PE wax-wrapped RGO sheets and PE matrix. Addition of 1 wt % RGO sheets in PE matrix led to a 48% increment in the yield stress and 118% increment in the Young's modulus, respectively. However, the elongation at break decreased with increasing RGO sheets loading content

Zing: Exploiting program structure for model checking concurrent software

Abstract. Model checking is a technique for finding bugs in systems by systematically exploring their state spaces. We wish to extract sound models from concurrent programs automatically and check the behaviors of these models systematically. The zing project is an effort to build a flexible infrastructure to represent and model check abstractions of large concurrent software. To support automatic extraction of models from programs written in common programming languages, zing’s modeling language supports three facilities present in modern programming languages: (1) procedure calls with a call-stack, (2) objects with dynamic allocation, and (3) processes with dynamic creation, using both shared memory and message passing for communication. We believe that these three facilities capture the essence of model checking modern concurrent software. Building a scalable model-checker for such an expressive modeling language is a huge challenge. zing’s modular architecture provides a clear separation between the expressive semantics of the modeling language, and a simple view of zing programs as labeled transition systems. This separation has allowed us to decouple the design of efficient model checking algorithms from the complexity of supporting rich constructs in the modeling language. zing’s model checking algorithms have been designed to exploit existing structural abstractions in concurrent programs such as processes and procedure calls. We present two such novel techniques in the paper: (1) compositional checking of zing models for message-passing programs using a conformance theory inspired by work in the process algebra community, and (2) a new summarization algorithm, which enables zing to reuse work at procedure boundaries by extending interprocedural dataflow analysis algorithms from the compiler community to analyze concurrent programs.

“We Are a Musical Nation”: Under Milk Wood and the BBC Third Programme

This essay examines Dylan Thomas’s 1954 play Under Milk Wood in the context of the BBC Third Programme, the “high culture” station founded in the hopes that difficult art might improve public sentiment and intellectual health. Through the artworks themselves and through its flexible scheduling and strategic use of dead air, the Third Programme promoted “alert and perceptive listening,” a niche for aesthetic reflection independent of the marketplace, building on the cultural evangelism of the BBC’s founding Director General, John Reith. Thomas’s play ironizes these aims, using the sonic textures of language, the temporal structures of ritual, and a deconstructed anthropological gaze to supplant the Third Programme’s Arnoldian ideal of rational disinterestedness. Depicting an isolated Welsh village, Under Milk Wood implicitly critiques the horrors of war while declining to endorse the BBC’s sanctimonious promises of cultural uplift; rather, it produces an ironic, negative image of fascism’s self-defeating obsessions with civic uniformity and public health. Though Under Milk Wood promotes aesthetic reflection and aural empathy – akin to what Kate Lacey has referred to as “listening out” – Thomas reimagines these public values, not in the sense promoted by Matthew Arnold or Reith but in relation to the erotic, embodied rhythms of language and ritual. Under Milk Wood “remakes” time, in an ironic reflection of the Third Programme’s flexible scheduling, unsettling the condescension implicit in the play’s own radiophonic framing voices and demonstrating how broadcast media participate in the ritual construction of time’s passage