The morality of the social in critical accounts of popular music

Talk about music, broadly understood, is commonly conducted and regarded as a neutral or transparent window on its topic. However, both vernacular and formal-analytic scholarly accounts constitute music as morally significant, and in doing so, articulate particular narratives of the social. One such contextual frame of reference for talking about music is presented and described here as \u27art vs. commerce\u27. A close analysis is conducted of a sentence in a recent academic paper (with attention to its conceptual buttressing in antecedent texts), and of the opening of a research interview with a musician, so as to show how contemporary articulations of this framework operate, and to demonstrate that vernacular and sociological forms of such thinking are contiguous, and can be taken as analytical objects in their own right. The intellectual and cultural mechanics of this moral work conducted by the articulation of art vs. commerce are highlighted and evaluated. The argument is not that such forms of talk or writing about music are to be \u27cleared out of the way\u27 so that music can finally be attended to, but rather that these forms of talk serve to constitute the fields of meaning within which music is understood

Transgressive music subcultures in online environments: visibility, exposure and literacy

Music is often taken as a barometer of social relations, usually in somewhat contradictory ways. Across different social and cultural contexts, music is alternately permitted, and not permitted, to not \u27mean\u27 what it \u27says\u27 - often on the basis of whose sensibilities are offended. In some instances what appear to be its literal meanings will be bracketed, in others, it will be interpreted as \u27directly\u27 as possible. This is particularly concerning with any genre of music that seems to contain or express what might be considered violent speech, of which there are a significant number. A critical aspect of the cycle of moral panic, however is the extent to which music and the meanings it seems to embody are available to wide audiences, in terms of both accessibility, and the cultural literacies which facilitate a grasp of how those meanings might best be understood. In this context, the increasingly ubiquitous use of digital technologies has significant implications for a wide variety of music subcultures, which have conventionally been relatively \u27niche\u27 or \u27underground\u27. While debates about the digitisation of music have generally oriented to the implications of digital distribution for notions of copyright and ownership, this research addresses how the culture of visibility and exposure that is online distribution (via direct download blogs, file-sharing platforms, music recommendation platforms and so on) can render hitherto obscure music subcultures problematic, or generate problems for them. Using case studies of death metal and power electronics, both genres which, in deeply distinct ways, are invested in exploring transgressive representations, this paper explores how digital distribution within these subcultures exposes their music and its accompanying material to interpretations which are sharply discrepant with those of the communities concerned, and which in the current Australian policy framework, render those communities not only difficult to research, but conceivably criminal

Lead Poisoning Awareness Final Report for Scott County Health Department

The following study looks to address the public knowledge of lead poisoning and more specifically how knowledgeable members of Scott County are of the issue. We were approached by Scott County Health Department to assist them in developing an idea on how to increase the perceived importance and knowledge of child lead poisoning for the average Scott County resident. We conducted research to determine why a large percentage of the population in Scott County doesn’t know about the dangers of lead poisoning. Some of our hypotheses were low awareness, lack of education on the subject, and differing opinions among age groups. We conducted both primary and secondary research for this report. Our secondary data consisted of a big data analysis where we looked at both YouTube comments and Twitter hashtags. Through the YouTube comments we found that their was an oddly large focus on politics opposed to the issue of lead poisoning while there was little to no sentiment from the overall public. With the Twitter comments we found very minimal coverage on the issue within Scott County, with most of the conversation about lead poisoning only revolving around that of the Flint Water Crisis. Our primary research consisted of a ZIP code analysis, an interview with a pediatrician, and a survey released to the public designed to gauge their overall awareness, attitudes, and intentions on the issue of child lead poisoning

Ethics Are Admin: Australian Human Research Ethics Review Forms as (Un)Ethical Actors

In Australian universities, social research projects secure institutional approval as ethical through research ethics committees, and are defined and communicated to these committees through standardized local application forms. In organizational terms, ethics are instituted first as an administrative ritual anterior to research, and routinely elided as such. The documentation constituting this ritual thus bears scrutiny, in terms of what it says and what it does, and in turn, what it requires applicants to say and do. Such scrutiny is a means of fleshing out the standard critique of prospective ethics review from social media researchers: that the opportunity for a proper conversation about research ethics in the community of researchers is supplanted by an administrative exercise in box ticking. This paper discusses these ethics application forms, attending specifically to the ethical consequences of the stance they require the applicant to take with respect to prospective research participants, and the implications of their formulation of research as a process of data extraction

The development of insights on priority audiences and awareness messages for child lead poisoning

This report looks at Scott County in Davenport Iowa and the issue of childhood lead poisoning that is becoming a growing issue. Through means of big data analysis, zip code analysis, survey collection and analysis data has been collected to determine the reasons for low awareness. Procedures and solutions are presented to help raise awareness, attitude. and intention towards to problem

The Development of Insights on Priority Audiences and Awareness Messages for Child Lead Poisoning

The purpose of this project is to assist the Scott County Health department (SCHD) in gaining further insights into public opinion regarding child lead poisoning by investigating the public knowledge of lead poisoning and more specifically how knowledgeable members of Scott County are of the issue. To assist the SCHD to develop a marketing campaign regarding how to increase the perceived importance and knowledge of child lead poisoning for the average Scott County resident, we conducted research to explore why a large percentage of the population in Scott County doesn’t know about the dangers of lead poisoning. Some of our hypotheses were low awareness, lack of education on the subject, and differing opinions among age groups. We conducted both primary and secondary research for this report. Our secondary data consisted of a big data analysis where we looked at both YouTube comments and Twitter hashtags. Through the YouTube comments we found that there was an oddly large focus on politics opposed to the issue of lead poisoning while there was little or no sentiment from the overall public. The examined Twitter comments suggested that there was very minimal coverage on the issue within Scott County, while most of the conversation about lead poisoning only revolved around that of the Flint Water Crisis. Our primary research consisted of a ZIP code analysis, an interview with a pediatrician, and a survey released to the public designed to gauge their overall awareness, attitudes, and intentions on the issue of child lead poisoning

The effects of adult guidance and peer discussion on the development of children's representations: evidence from the training of pedestrian skills

It was hypothesised that practical training is effective in improving children's pedestrian skills because adult scaffolding and peer discussion during training specifically promote E3 level representation (linguistically-encoded, experientially-grounded, generalisable knowledge), as defined by Karmiloff-Smith's (1992) representational redescription (RR) model. Two studies were conducted to examine in detail the impact of this social input, in the context of simulation-based training in roadside search skills. Five- to eight-year-olds were pre-tested on ability to detect relevant road crossing features. They then participated in four training sessions designed to promote attunement to these, under peer discussion condition vs adult guidance conditions (Study 1), and adult-child vs adult-group conditions (Study 2). Performance at post-test was compared to that of controls who underwent no training. Study 1 found that children in the adult guidance condition improved significantly more than those in the peer discussion or control conditions, and this improvement was directly attributable to appropriation of E3 level representations from adult dialogue. Study 2 found that progress was greater still when adult scaffolding was supplemented by peer discussion, with E3 level representation attributable to children's exploration of conflicting ideas. The implications of these findings for the RR model and for practical road safety education are discussed

DOES RESISTED SPRINT TRAINING ACUTELY ENHANCE SPRINT MECHANICS?

Resistance sprint training with sledges and harnesses is often used by athletes to induce an acute enhancement in performance during recovery. Such enhancements are similar to post-activation potentiation (PAP) effects found in complex training. The methods used to detect PAP are variable across studies. The aim of this study was to compare the results of the typical error method of analysis with conventional repeated measures ANOVA on data obtained from a resisted sprint training. The results showed that the ANOVA method found many significant differences between pre-test and post-test means but the typical error method showed relatively few incidences of fatigue-potentiation patterns across any subjects. This suggests that the ANOVA may be an inappropriate analysis technique for examining fatigue potentiation effects

Automated Mobile System for Accurate Outdoor Tree Crop Enumeration Using an Uncalibrated Camera.

This paper demonstrates an automated computer vision system for outdoor tree crop enumeration in a seedling nursery. The complete system incorporates both hardware components (including an embedded microcontroller, an odometry encoder, and an uncalibrated digital color camera) and software algorithms (including microcontroller algorithms and the proposed algorithm for tree crop enumeration) required to obtain robust performance in a natural outdoor environment. The enumeration system uses a three-step image analysis process based upon: (1) an orthographic plant projection method integrating a perspective transform with automatic parameter estimation; (2) a plant counting method based on projection histograms; and (3) a double-counting avoidance method based on a homography transform. Experimental results demonstrate the ability to count large numbers of plants automatically with no human effort. Results show that, for tree seedlings having a height up to 40 cm and a within-row tree spacing of approximately 10 cm, the algorithms successfully estimated the number of plants with an average accuracy of 95.2% for trees within a single image and 98% for counting of the whole plant population in a large sequence of images

EURL ECVAM strategy to avoid and reduce animal use in genotoxicity testing

The assessment of genotoxicity represents an important component of the safety assessment of all types of substances. Although several in vitro tests are available at different stages of development and acceptance, they cannot at present be considered to fully replace animal tests needed to evaluate the safety of substances. Based on an analysis of regulatory requirements for this endpoint within different pieces of EU legislation, EURL ECVAM proposes a pragmatic approach to improve the traditional genotoxicity testing paradigm that offers solutions in both the short- and medium-term and that draws on the considerable experience of 40 years of regulatory toxicology testing in this area. EURL ECVAM considers that efforts should be directed towards the overall improvement of the current testing strategy for better hazard and risk assessment approaches, which either avoids or minimises the use of animals, whilst satisfying regulatory information requirements, irrespective of regulatory context. Several opportunities for the improvement of the testing strategy have been identified which aim to i) enhance the performance of the in vitro testing battery so that fewer in vivo follow-up tests are necessary and ii) guide more intelligent in vivo follow-up testing to reduce unnecessary use of animals. The implementation of this strategic plan will rely on the cooperation of EURL ECVAM with other existing initiatives and the coordinated contribution from various stakeholders.JRC.I.5-Systems Toxicolog