1,453 research outputs found
Broadcasting and time
This thesis brings together work I have published in the last
five years in academic journals and edited book collections. All
the material presented in the thesis, much of it substantially rewritten,
will appear in the trilogy I have been working on since
my last published book, Radio, Television and Modern Life
(Blackwell 1996). The organising structure of the thesis and its
substantive concerns corresponds with that of the three books
that will come out of it. The form and content of the thesis, and
its relation to the books, is discussed in some detail in its
introduction. Its fundamental concern is with human time
which I have explored in all my writings since I began research
thirty years ago, with my late friend and colleague David
Cardiff, into the early history of the British Broadcasting
Corporation. The medium of radio is time. Historiography deals
with past time. The academic work of writing history on the
other, and the temporality of radio and television on the one
hand, are the first two themes of this thesis which shows that
the orders of time in which they work are divergent rather than
convergent. The third section of the thesis attempts their
reconciliation through the recovery of meaningful time
Music, radio and the record business in Zimbabwe today
Radio and the recording business have, since the beginning of the last century, had a profound impact upon existing musical life whenever and wherever they have decisively and irreversibly established themselves. Their arrival restructures and redefines the social relations of music in many aspects of its production, performance and reception. Radio and recording technologies have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of all those who one way or another try to make a living from music (composers, performers and - in Europe - publishers, for instance). Performance itself is transformed as new norms are set in place which call for new levels of technique and interpretation. Finally the conditions of musical reception are reconfigured and new `taste publics' emerge, potentially in conflict with each other, as musical life is totalised into a new and complex unity
New perspectives on self-linking
We initiate the study of classical knots through the homotopy class of the
n-th evaluation map of the knot, which is the induced map on the compactified
n-point configuration space. Sending a knot to its n-th evaluation map realizes
the space of knots as a subspace of what we call the n-th mapping space model
for knots. We compute the homotopy types of the first three mapping space
models, showing that the third model gives rise to an integer-valued invariant.
We realize this invariant in two ways, in terms of collinearities of three or
four points on the knot, and give some explicit computations. We show this
invariant coincides with the second coefficient of the Conway polynomial, thus
giving a new geometric definition of the simplest finite-type invariant.
Finally, using this geometric definition, we give some new applications of this
invariant relating to quadrisecants in the knot and to complexity of polygonal
and polynomial realizations of a knot.Comment: 26 pages, 17 figure
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