New Media, Professional Sport and Political Economy

New media technologies are seen to be changing the production, delivery and consumption of professional sports and creating a new dynamic between sports fans, athletes, clubs, governing bodies and the mainstream media. However, as Bellamy and McChesney (2011) have pointed out, advances in digital technologies are taking place within social, political, and economic contexts that are strongly conditioning the course and shape of this communication revolution. This essay assesses the first wave of research on professional sport and new media technologies and concludes that early trends indicate the continuation of existing neoliberal capitalist tendencies within professional sport. Using the concept of political economy, the essay explores issues of ownership, structure, production and delivery of sport. Discussion focuses on the opportunities sports fans now have available to them and how sports organization and media corporations shifted from an initial position of uncertainty, that bordered on hostility, to one which has seen them embrace new media technologies as powerful marketing tools. The essay concludes by stating as fundamental the issues of ownership and control and advocates that greater cognizance be accorded to underlying economic structures and the enduring, all-pervasive power of neoliberal capitalism and its impact in professional sport

Jacqueline Fahey

Chez Jacqueline Fahey is a Grey Lynn bungalow. After walking past palmy luxuriance that could pass as a tropical setting for her 1998 novel, Cutting Loose, I'm soon in her front room, the wonders and delights of which would rival those of a Victorian parlour. There are additions since my last visit - beyond a 19205 screen is a vast mirror, its faux-baroque frame livened with cerulean blue from Fahey's brush. Significantly, it echoes the hue of the plastic flowers threaded through the chandelier

Blogging the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals

This study focuses on the use of new technologies by the sports-media complex, looking specifically at the 2006 FIFA World Cup Finals. Combining the world's single largest sports media event with one of the most current, complex forms of Web-based communication, this article explores extent to which football fans embedded in Germany used the Internet to blog their World Cup experiences. Various categories of blog sites were identified, including independent bloggers, bloggers using football-themed Web sites, and blogs hosted on corporate-sponsored platforms. The study shows that the anticipated "democratizing potential" of blogging was not evident during Germany 2006. Instead, blogging acted as a platform for corporations, which, employing professional journalists, told the fans' World Cup stories. © 2009 Human Kinetics, inc

Collusion and collision in ordinary life

Luke 16:1-1

An Assessment of Data Transfer Performance for Large-Scale Climate Data Analysis and Recommendations for the Data Infrastructure for CMIP6

We document the data transfer workflow, data transfer performance, and other aspects of staging approximately 56 terabytes of climate model output data from the distributed Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) archive to the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory required for tracking and characterizing extratropical storms, a phenomena of importance in the mid-latitudes. We present this analysis to illustrate the current challenges in assembling multi-model data sets at major computing facilities for large-scale studies of CMIP5 data. Because of the larger archive size of the upcoming CMIP6 phase of model intercomparison, we expect such data transfers to become of increasing importance, and perhaps of routine necessity. We find that data transfer rates using the ESGF are often slower than what is typically available to US residences and that there is significant room for improvement in the data transfer capabilities of the ESGF portal and data centers both in terms of workflow mechanics and in data transfer performance. We believe performance improvements of at least an order of magnitude are within technical reach using current best practices, as illustrated by the performance we achieved in transferring the complete raw data set between two high performance computing facilities. To achieve these performance improvements, we recommend: that current best practices (such as the Science DMZ model) be applied to the data servers and networks at ESGF data centers; that sufficient financial and human resources be devoted at the ESGF data centers for systems and network engineering tasks to support high performance data movement; and that performance metrics for data transfer between ESGF data centers and major computing facilities used for climate data analysis be established, regularly tested, and published

Evolution or Revolution? An Analysis of the Changing Faces of Development Education in the United Kingdom.

The following paper investigates whether and to what extent there may have been an ideological shift in the realisation of development education policy and practice over the past three decades. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, the paper provides a review of the literature in the field and investigates the extent to which the introduction of the Primary School Curriculum through the Education Reform Act (1988) may have had an effect on the teaching and learning of development issues within schools. Using a conceptual framework loosely based on the work of Andriotti (2008) which interrogates the narrative used in policy formation, the paper provides a comparative analysis of policy and curriculum documents. The overt and subliminal ideological perspectives adopted in these documents are interrogated to determine the relative positioning regarding how best development issues might be addressed. A critical analysis of findings is then used as the basis to determine whether there has been a de-radicalisation of the ways in which development education policy and content is addressed particularly in the contexts of formal education

A view of computer music from New Zealand: Auckland, Waikato and the Asia/Pacific connection

Dealing predominantly with ‘art music’ aspects of electroacoustic music practice, this paper looks at cultural, aesthetic, environmental and technical influences on current and emerging practices from the upper half of the North Island of New Zealand. It also discusses the influences of Asian and Pacific cultures on the idiom locally. Rather than dwell on the similarities with current international styles, the focus is largely on some of the differences