Finding Freire: Punk, praxis and the quest for spirituality in Krishnacore

Building upon earlier research, this paper unpacks the complex relationship between punk and Krishna Consciousness, in this instance through the lens of Paulo Freire’s notion of praxis. Here, the intersection between punk, the Hare Krishna movement and the corresponding relationship between auto-didacticism and spirituality are examined as a means of interrogating subcultural participation and the hegemonic dominance of the anti-religious sentiment within punk. Freire’s approach is examined within the context of this relationship, specifically regarding the inquisi-tiveness of the individual as they begin the process of engaging with Krishna Consciousness and spirituality, especially from the standpoint of punk. The importance here lies in the learning pro-cess being in a state of flux, where the continual re-creation of knowledge and inquiry becomes a means of consolidating the dialectical relationship between the self and the world around it. Here, punk becomes a valuable space in which to discover new ideas, a means of developing an aesthetic and subcultural/religious/spiritual membership within a framework of auto-didacticism; of illu-minating the dialectical, hermeneutic relationship between consciousness and the world around us, central to Freire’s concept of praxis

Cardiovascular Effects of Vibration Semiannual Report, 1 Aug. 1965 - 28 Feb. 1966

Vibration induced cardiovascular changes in anesthetized dog

Combining vocal tract length normalization with hierarchial linear transformations

Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) as a rapid adaptation technique for statistical parametric speech synthesis. VTLN produces speech with naturalness preferable to that of MLLR-based adaptation techniques, being much closer in quality to that generated by the original av-erage voice model. However with only a single parameter, VTLN captures very few speaker specific characteristics when compared to linear transform based adaptation techniques. This paper pro-poses that the merits of VTLN can be combined with those of linear transform based adaptation in a hierarchial Bayesian frame-work, where VTLN is used as the prior information. A novel tech-nique for propagating the gender information from the VTLN prior through constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regres-sion (CSMAPLR) adaptation is presented. Experiments show that the resulting transformation has improved speech quality with better naturalness, intelligibility and improved speaker similarity. Index Terms — Statistical parametric speech synthesis, hidden Markov models, speaker adaptation, vocal tract length normaliza-tion, constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression 1

Beyond the Aberrant City: Towards a Critical Ethnography of Naples

Nessun abstrac

L’eterno abietto: le classi popolari napoletane nelle rappresentazioni del Partito Comunista Italiano

This article examines the complex albeit rarely studied relationship between the PCI/PDS and the so-called ‘popular classes’ in Naples from the end of the Second World War to 1998. Despite the fact that the party after 1958 consistently received more votes in Naples than in Milan or Rome, the popular classes would always represent a dilemma for the Neapolitan institutional Left and its way of thinking about the city. On the one hand, the mobilization of the ‘lumpen’ city was considered a crucial goal for a communist politics, on the other, the ‘pre-political’ forms of life of the city’s subaltern classes were seen to pose an obstacle to such a project. Through an analysis of the writings of local party leaders and the communist daily press, the article illustrates how the relationship between the Left and the popular classes was reconfigured over time: from the aim of building class consciousness among the ‘lumpenproletariat’ to the goal, during the 1990s, of inculcating ‘civic consciousness’ among the Neapolitan people

'Is it a queer book?' : re-reading the 1950s homosexual novel

This chapter examines the proliferation of the ‘homosexual novel’ in Britain in the 1950s. This mode of fiction has broadly been understood to have served first and foremost as a vehicle for arguments for the decriminalization of homosexual relations. I show that these books demand closer attention as their alignment with reformist logic is far from unambiguous. Indeed, I demonstrate how the decade’s homosexual novels variously sustain, evade and problematise the prevailing liberal discourse on homosexuality; I contend that they cannot therefore be recruited straightforwardly to a progressivist history of sexuality. Novels by authors such as Martyn Goff, Rodney Garland and Mary Renault are ambivalent about the principal paradigm for appraising homosexuality in the post-war period, the social problem. Meanwhile, the investment in comedic modes of authors such as Angus Wilson, Michael Nelson and Brigid Brophy helped to shape visions of homosexual life that differed from those produced by mainstream reformist agendas. Further, I argue that all of these works of fiction show a deep investment in pleasure – including pleasures that derive from disreputable narrative modes – which undermines appeals to the respectable, restrained homosexual subject that were central to reformist discourse

Gay and lesbian subcultures from Stonewall to 'Angels in America'

This chapter’s title would appear to provide an inauspicious frame for a discussion of the relationship between gay and lesbian writing and postmodernism. On the one hand, it projects a linear history which imagines sexual minorities advancing from marginalization and oppression and towards mainstream recognition and success. On the other, it seems to go nowhere at all, suggesting that gay and lesbian culture is coterminous with New York City. The account that follows then promises to be one that denies difference and ignores discontinuity – not exactly moves ordinarily associated with postmodern narrative and politics. But while the Stonewall riots of 1969 have commonly been understood as a historical watershed, indeed, the moment at which sexual minorities in the West began to take control of their own history, they are also frequently invoked precisely to express concerns about the way other configurations of same-sex intimacy – in particular, those of earlier times and of places outside of the American metropolis – have been occulted by this master narrative. And then Tony Kushner’s celebrated epic play Angels in America (1990, 1992) is not meant to mark some terminal point at which gay cultural production has become part of the establishment firmament or has developed fully fledged postmodern credentials. Rather, the play typifies the way gay and lesbian writing from this period elaborates multiple histories, competing ideological paradigms and interactions across non-contiguous spaces, even while remaining committed to a clear sense of futurity and a politics rooted in a specific community. Indeed, the similarities between the gay liberation movement, which arose immediately after the Stonewall riots, and Angels – both for instance articulate the situated knowledge of sexual dissidents, while simultaneously offering up millenarian visions to the world – indicate how this chapter is little concerned to chart the progress of a putatively postmodern mode of gay and lesbian writing. Instead, it examines a range of material by British and American authors in order to highlight the close affinities yet frequently ambivalent involvement between gay and lesbian culture and postmodernism. Most of the works discussed below – novels, biography, poetry, as well as Kushner’s play – revel in the pleasures of postmodern textual manoeuvres, and recognize their utility: their potential for subversion, and their capacity to foreground contingency, diversity and dissonance. These impulses sometimes coincide with, but often run counter to, other needs – to account for embodiment, in particular the embodiment of sexual desire, and to claim a cultural inheritance and articulate a coherent collective identity which might provide the basis for solidarity and political action

Investigation into the protection of microgrids using adaptive relays

Due to a proliferation of renewable power sources and a rise in distributed generators, the transmission network is now able to split into smaller isolated sections. These sections are often referred to as microgrids as they function similar to larger networks with power production being sufficient to power the loads. Microgrids are hampered by the lack of fault current being sufficiently high to operate traditional overcurrent protection. The lack of fault current has resulted in a need to find newer methods to provide fault protection. One such method is the use of modern relays that allow for the trip settings to be changed as the network itself changes. Relays that allow for this adaption are known as adaptive relays and provide a method to deal with the lower fault current when the microgrid is isolated from the main network by reducing their pickup current as appropriate. The effectiveness of adaptive relays has been investigated by the use of DIgSILENT PowerFactory simulation software to model two differing networks under varying conditions. The networks chosen to be simulated, consist of a test network used in previous research and a modelling of a physical network on Hailuoto Island. The networks were simulated with the faults falling into one of the following four categories: 1. Faults occurring on the external grid 2. Faults occurring on the feeder connecting the external grid to the microgrid 3. Faults occurring on the feeders inside the microgrid 4. Faults occurring on the loads and connections inside the microgrid The adaptive relays were found to operate correctly having discrimination between relays, once the pickup currents were calculated correctly. Each microgrid requires that a microprocessor, being informed of the status of the grid and output of each power source, calculate the pickup currents for each relay, and notify the relay of its new pickup current. The microprocessor’s calculations were simulated in MathWorks MATLAB via a script which allows calculation of the current seen by a relay as the sum of the rated output from each distributed generator. Then multiplied by the status of the generator and its percentage contribution. This formula is an adaption from previous work by (Oudalov and Fidigatti n.d.). The current calculated by the MATLAB script is found when compared to the PowerFactory simulations as having a difference of less than 2.8 per cent and 8 per cent on the test network and Hailuoto Island respectively. Providing proof that not only does the MATLAB script and its associated formula work, so do adaptive relays for protecting microgrids