Pelosi earned the support of sophomore Democrats Stephanie Murphy, Darren Soto and Val Demings, as well as veteran South Florida Reps. Ted Deutch, Lois Frankel, Alcee Hastings, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson and newcomers Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala.
Murphy and Soto, who both represent Central Florida, initially resisted Pelosi's bid for speaker, but they reached an agreement to support her after negotiations.
Of the 430 votes cast, Pelosi received 220 votes. Fifteen Democrats did not vote for Pelosi. No Republicans supported Pelosi.
Wilson, D-Miami-Gardens, cast the decisive 218th vote that delivered the speaker's gavel to Pelosi.
Other Democratic Florida members of Congress supporting Pelosi included Kathy Castor, Charlie Crist, and Al Lawson.
Pelosi — who served as speaker from 2007-2011 — has promised to serve only four years in the leadership post.


I was born in Hastings in 1941 and I'm still here. My aim is to capture as many of the wonders this fantastic planet has to offer, whether it be with a camera, paint brush or pastel.
All images on this website are copyrighted, and must not be used without permission (see 'other info' section).


text:
Philippines struggles with mountains of dead fish
Posted Mon 30 May 2011 at 5:11am Monday 30 May 2011 at 5:11am Mon 30 May 2011 at 5:11am
More than 750 tonnes of fish have died since Friday (Noel Celis: AFP)
abc.net.au/news/philippines-struggles-with-mountains-of-dead-fish/2737620
Several lakeside towns in the Philippines are struggling to cope with mountains of rotting fish that were killed by a sudden drop in water temperatures at the weekend.
The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources says more than 750 tonnes of fish have died since Friday in Taal Lake near Manila, hitting several towns whose economies are heavily reliant on the fishing industry.
Scientists say the onset of the rainy season led to a sharp drop in water temperatures that depleted oxygen levels in the lake.
Most of those killed were milk fish and tilapia being commercially bred in cages along the lake's shores.
"There are just so many dead fish," said Zenaida Mendoza, mayor of Talisay, one of the worst affected towns.
"Fishermen are hauling them manually using their boats and bringing them ashore. But the rotting smell is overpowering and could pose a health risk."
Ms Mendoza says sanitation and health officials are working flat out to dispose of the dead fish, although many remain exposed to the open air due to a lack of suitable sites to bury the hundreds of tonnes of carcasses.
Volcanologists say the incident is not related to recent activity of Taal Volcano, which lies in the middle of the lake and has been rumbling for over a month.
- AFP
Posted 30 May 2011 30 May 2011 Mon 30 May 2011 at 5:11am
13m ago 13 minutes ago Sat 28 Jan 2023 at 6:00pm

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
// Copyright (c) Microsoft.  All Rights Reserved.  Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.  See License.txt in the project root for license information.

using System.Composition;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.LanguageServer.Protocol;

namespace Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.LanguageServer.Handler
{
    [Shared]
    [ExportLspMethod(Methods.TextDocumentRangeFormattingName)]
    internal class FormatDocumentRangeHandler : FormatDocumentHandlerBase, IRequestHandler<DocumentRangeFormattingParams, TextEdit[]>
    {
        public async Task<TextEdit[]> HandleRequestAsync(Solution solution, DocumentRangeFormattingParams request, ClientCapabilities clientCapabilities,
            CancellationToken cancellationToken, bool keepThreadContext = false)
        {
            return await GetTextEdits(solution, request.TextDocument.Uri, keepThreadContext, cancellationToken, range: request.Range).ConfigureAwait(keepThreadContext);
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Piatt County is located in central Illinois. The County Seat is Monticello and the largest city is Monticello. The Official Web Site is located at http://www.piattcounty.org/. The 2014 population estimate is 16,431 and the 2010 census population was 16,727. The land area is 439.20 square miles and there are 38.1 persons per square mile.
97.7% of the population is White, 0.5% is Black or African American, 1.1% is Hispanic or Latino, 0.4% is Asian, 0.2% is American Indian or Alaska Native, 0% is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 1.1% is two or more races. 92.7% have a high school degree or higher, and 26.5% have a Bachelor degree or higher.
The median home value is $120,800, there are 6,546 households, an average of 2.52 persons per household. The per capita income is $31,190, the median household income is $63,027, and 6.2% of the persons in Piatt County are considered below poverty level.
The total number of firms, at last estimate, was 1,407. Retail sales (in $1000) were $118,815, and sales per capita were $7,220.
Find county government information from Piatt County. Includes contacts, services, elected officials, departments, calendars, public hearings, and much more.
Provided by: Piatt County Circuit Clerk's Office. Search this Judici service for court records by name or case number.
123 NORTH MAIN STREET, PIATT, ATWOOD, IL, 61913.
349 SOUTH MACON STREET, PIATT, BEMENT, IL, 61813.
100 SOUTH MADISON STREET, PIATT, CERRO GORDO, IL, 61818.
330 NORTH ELDON STREET, PIATT, CISCO, IL, 61830.
220 NORTH HIGHWAY AVENUE, PIATT, DELAND, IL, 61839.
116 EAST OLIVER STREET, PIATT, MANSFIELD, IL, 61854.
201 NORTH STATE STREET, PIATT, MONTICELLO, IL, 61856.


text:
BEGIN_INANITY_GRAPHICS

#if defined(___INANITY_PLATFORM_XBOX)
Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Dx11SwapChainPresenter(ptr<Dx11Device> device, ptr<Platform::CoreWindow> window, ComPointer<IDXGISwapChain1> swapChain)
#else
Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Dx11SwapChainPresenter(ptr<Dx11Device> device, ptr<Platform::Win32Window> window, ComPointer<IDXGISwapChain> swapChain)
#endif
: Dx11Presenter(device), window(window), swapChain(swapChain), currentMode(0), swapInterval(1)
{
	window->SetPresenter(this);

#if defined(___INANITY_PLATFORM_XBOX)
	DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_DESC1 desc;
	if(FAILED(swapChain->GetDesc1(&desc)))
		THROW("Can't get swap chain desc");
	width = desc.Width;
	height = desc.Height;
#else
	width = window->GetClientWidth();
	height = window->GetClientHeight();
#endif
}

Dx11SwapChainPresenter::~Dx11SwapChainPresenter()
{
	window->SetPresenter(nullptr);

	// switch off fullscreeness before destroying
	if(currentMode)
		swapChain->SetFullscreenState(FALSE, NULL);
}

ptr<Dx11RenderBuffer> Dx11SwapChainPresenter::GetBackBuffer()
{
	if(!backBuffer)
	{
		ComPointer<ID3D11Texture2D> backBufferTexture;
		if(FAILED(swapChain->GetBuffer(0, __uuidof(ID3D11Texture2D), (void**)&backBufferTexture)))
			THROW("Can't get back buffer texture");

		ID3D11Device* deviceInterface = device->GetDeviceInterface();

		ComPointer<ID3D11RenderTargetView> renderTarget;
		if(FAILED(deviceInterface->CreateRenderTargetView(backBufferTexture, 0, &renderTarget)))
			THROW("Can't create back buffer render target view");
		backBuffer = NEW(Dx11RenderBuffer(renderTarget));
	}
	return backBuffer;
}

int Dx11SwapChainPresenter::GetWidth() const
{
	return width;
}

int Dx11SwapChainPresenter::GetHeight() const
{
	return height;
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::SetMode(ptr<MonitorMode> abstractMode)
{
#if !defined(___INANITY_PLATFORM_XBOX)
	try
	{
		ptr<DxgiMonitorMode> mode = abstractMode.DynamicCast<DxgiMonitorMode>();
		if(!mode && abstractMode)
			THROW("Only DXGI monitor mode allowed");

		// В MSDN рекомендуется сначала изменять размер, а потом переключать полноэкранность.

		// изменить режим
		DXGI_MODE_DESC modeDesc = Dx11System::GetModeDesc(mode, width, height);
		if(FAILED(swapChain->ResizeTarget(&modeDesc)))
			THROW("Can't resize target");
		// если полноэкранность изменилась, изменить её
		if(!currentMode != !mode)
		{
			if(FAILED(swapChain->SetFullscreenState(!!mode, NULL)))
				THROW("Can't set fullscreen state");

			// if it becomes fullscreen, change buffers size
			if(mode)
				Resize(mode->GetWidth(), mode->GetHeight());
		}

		//запомнить новый режим
		currentMode = mode;
	}
	catch(Exception* exception)
	{
		THROW_SECONDARY("Can't set mode", exception);
	}
#endif
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::SetSwapInterval(int swapInterval)
{
	this->swapInterval = swapInterval;
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Present()
{
	if(FAILED(swapChain->Present(swapInterval, 0)))
		THROW("Can't present");
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Resize(int width, int height)
{
	// drop reference to back buffer
	backBuffer = 0;
	// remember new size
	this->width = width;
	this->height = height;
	// resize buffers
	if(FAILED(swapChain->ResizeBuffers(2, width, height, Dx11System::GetModeDesc(currentMode, width, height).Format, DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_FLAG_ALLOW_MODE_SWITCH)))
		THROW("Can't resize buffers");
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Suspend()
{
#if defined(___INANITY_PLATFORM_XBOX)
	ComPointer<ID3D11DeviceContextX> deviceContextX;
	if(SUCCEEDED(device->GetDeviceContextInterface()->QueryInterface(__uuidof(ID3D11DeviceContextX), (void**)&deviceContextX)))
		deviceContextX->Suspend(0);
#endif
}

void Dx11SwapChainPresenter::Resume()
{
#if defined(___INANITY_PLATFORM_XBOX)
	ComPointer<ID3D11DeviceContextX> deviceContextX;
	if(SUCCEEDED(device->GetDeviceContextInterface()->QueryInterface(__uuidof(ID3D11DeviceContextX), (void**)&deviceContextX)))
		deviceContextX->Resume();
#endif
}

END_INANITY_GRAPHICS


text:
Chris Delmas/ AFP via Getty Images
Tech Founder Born In USSR Warns About Facebook's Metaverse, Compares It To Soviet-Style Propaganda
By Jack Davis, The Western Journal January 16, 2022
VIDEO: Dana White Shuts Down Angry Journalist Who Yelled 'Are You A Doctor' After UFC President Praised Ivermectin
By Gabriel Keane January 16, 2022
VIRGINIA: Glenn Youngkin Orders Investigation Into Loudoun County Schools Over 'Gender-Fluid' Bathroom Rapes
By Frankie Stockes January 16, 2022
PA GOP Co-Chair Dick Stewart Blocked Teddy Daniels from Speaking at Candidate Event
By Cullen McCue January 16, 2022
NEA Urged Social Media Companies To Remove Anti-CRT 'Propaganda', Called Concerned Parents 'Radicalized'
BREAKING: Al-Qaeda Terrorist's Brother Allegedly Takes Hostages at Texas Synagogue, Demands Her Release
Deep State News Politics The Swamp
ALERT: Chinese Military Sends Troops To Canada, PLA Training With CAF, Documents Show
By Andrew White December 9, 2020 at 10:36pm
The Canadian government released documents confirming that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has been actively working with the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA). This comes 19 months after Rebel News inquired about reports which indicated that Canada sent a delegation to China for the 75th anniversary of the PLA Navy in 2019.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not only sent troops to China, but actively encouraged PLA and CAF military coordination on Canadian soil, even after the Chinese detainment of Canadian citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig in 2018.
Trudeau invited the PLA to conduct "cold weather training" exercises at CFB Petawawa in Ontario alongside the CAF, along with other concerning revelations found in documents obtained by Rebel News.
In one instance, Canada had plans to train Chinese commanders at the Canadian Forces College in Ontario, as well as other military installations in Canada. Those participating in the training exercises included 1-2 star Chinese generals, as well as a larger force of Chinese soldiers. The purpose was to teach Chinese forces cold weather exercises and other Canadian military tactics.
The CAF planned to cancel the event with the PLA due to the recent detainment of the "Michaels," which prompted Trudeau to instruct the CAF to not cancel engagements with PLA forces without permission, giving many reason to believe that the Trudeau government is reluctant to displease the Chinese. Despite the recent detainment of the two Canadian citizens, the Trudeau government continued to urge that the CAF maintain good relations with the Chinese military.
It was discovered that China uses Twitter to find users who access "harmful information on illegal websites," as the documents detail how the Deputy Programming Director of the Suzhou City TV Broadcasting Organization was fired for violating "political rules."
The documents state: "It is unclear whether this signals a new trend in monitoring Party cadres online behaviour, or is a one-off event, but it fits into the broader trend of increased monitoring of Twitter by authorities inside the Great Firewall. BEIJING-GR will continue to monitor."
Furthermore, it was revealed that Canada had withheld information about Chinese human rights abuses. An NGO known as Human Rights Watch alleged that China was using a "smartphone app" to track Muslims in the Xinjiang Province, as part of a campaign of illegal mass surveillance and arbitrary detention." The newly released documents revealed that the Canadian Embassy had actually "seen this app in use at police checkpoints in Xinjiang."
Internal memos found in the documents show that China demanded that democratic nations refrain from referencing human rights, regarding trade deals. Additionally, the Chinese are practicing "muli-bilateralism" in an attempt to colonize the globe, according to their "Belt and Road" initiative (BRI).
"This describes the hub-and-spoke model which China negotiates bilaterally with a host of partners under a largely symbolic umbrella organization. This model can also be seen in the 16+1 mechanism and the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), among other examples. China emphasized the openness, transparency and inclusivity of the BRI at this year's forum, but it evidently intends to remain firmly at the wheel."
Mike Pompeo Claims Xi Jinping Is Holding 'Over A Million Americans In Concentration Camps' In Strange Interview
In a speech at Georgia Tech on December 9, 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said "the Chinese Communist Party wants what we have and they will do whatever they must do to take it and get it" and that China aims to "build a high-tech, repressive state like the world has never seen."
"General Secretary Xi Jinping has made clear his intentions. You only have to listen to what he says. He says he wants total control at home and to make China the number one power abroad, and he's well on his way to working on that project. He's building up the People's Liberation Army. He's manipulating international organizations for Beijing's benefit, and he's engaging, as we have seen in TV only just these last two days, he's engaging in a vast influence campaign all across the world. And that may, for some of you sitting at home today, seem like a long ways away, very ambitious touch for Xi Jinping to make, but I must say he has his eye on each and every one of us," said Pompeo.
Read the Canadian government documents released by Rebel News for yourself here.
Canada, China, Justin Trudeau
Andrew White is a Northern Virginia native. His work here at National File has been previously featured on Alex Jones' Infowars and Revolver News. White is a constitutionalist Patriot, who focuses on social issues, election integrity, globalism, US politics, as well as general corporate and government corruption.
Experts Accuse Govt Of 'Manipulating' Vaccine Data, Claim Up To 300,000 Deaths Caused By Injections
Trump Rallies Around Supreme Court Vax Mandate Shutdown Despite Strongly Advocating Injections
VIDEO: Biden Struggles To Form Sentences, Incoherently Rambles, Mutters Non-English Through Latest Covid Announcement
EU REGULATORS: COVID Boosters 'Could Adversely Affect,' 'Eventually Weaken The Immune System'
TUCKER: It's Clear The Justice Department Played Role In 1/6, Committee Denial Is 'Bizarre'
A tech CEO says technical wizards preaching about the metaverse reminds him of Soviet leaders preaching about communism.
By Jack Davis, The Western Journal January 16, 2022 Comment Comment Share MoreShare
UFC President Dana White calmly rebuked an angry journalist who started shouting, "Are you a doctor!" when White called out politicalbias regarding the use of monocolonal antibodies and ivermectin. Asked […]
By Gabriel Keane January 16, 2022 Comment Comment Share MoreShare
Upon taking office as Virginia's 74th Governor on Saturday, Republican Glenn Youngkin ordered an investigation into Loudoun County's disgraced public school system, where at least three girls were allegedly raped […]
By Frankie Stockes January 16, 2022 Comment Comment Share MoreShare
America First candidate Teddy Daniels was not allowed to speak at the Pennsylvania GOP Committee Central Caucus despite having a time slot booked, central caucus co-chair Richard Stewart confirmed to […]
By Cullen McCue January 16, 2022 Comment Comment Share MoreShare
In October, the National Education Association (NEA) sent a letter to social media giants urging them to take action against "propaganda" about critical race theory which they claim had stoked […]
The brother of an al-Qaeda terrorist has reportedly stormed a Dallas synagogue and taken hostages while demanding his sibling's release.
Laura Loomer / YouTube
Four Years Later, Republicans Pay the Price for Ignoring the Deplatforming of Laura Loomer
Those who watched the ban of Laura Loomer play out were unsurprised when the same happened to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Vaccine Safety Research Foundation Founder and Executive Director Steve Kirsch estimates that a staggering 150-300 thousand deaths in the U.S. have been caused by the COVID-19 vaccine injections.
270 Doctors Sign Letter Demanding Spotify Censor Joe Rogan For 'COVID Missinformation'
More than 200 doctors and scientists have signed a petition demanding Spotify to take action against "COVID misinformation" on its platform. The petition directly mentions its most popular podcast, the […]
VIRGINIA: Gender-Fluid School Bathroom Rapist Takes Third Victim, Court Proceedings Allege
New revelations from court proceedings in the Loudoun County, Virginia school bathroom rape case show that the convicted rapist, a biological male who claimed to be gender-fluid and donned a […]


text:
AARP AARP States Pennsylvania
Register to Vote by April 16
By TheAARPBulletin, APR 1, 2018
AARP Pennsylvania is urging state residents to register to vote by April 16. That's the deadline to register to vote in the May 15 primary elections.
Ray's Round Up: 2016 Elections Preview – Pennsylvania House of Representatives
By Leah Garloff, OCT 26, 2016
Who would have known that the numbers 203, 105, 98, and 12 would play such an important role in the Pennsylvania elections this year? Of course 203 has an important role every two years – but there are 203 seats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives up for election on November 8. However, only 105 of those races have two major party candidates on the ballot for State Representative, while 98 of them have one candidate on the ballot or have a major party candidate facing only a third-party candidate. Lastly, there are only 12 days until Election Day on November 8, so if you aren't a "Numbers Person" now is the time to change your mind!
Ray's Round Up: 2015 in Pennsylvania – Well, it was different…
By Jacklyn Isasi, DEC 30, 2015
The story of public policy in Pennsylvania in 2015 began with new occupants of three of the most important positions in the Commonwealth's political structure – Governor Tom Wolf, Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, and House Majority Leader Dave Reed. They took on the leading roles in the on-again, off-again state budget drama that played out over the course of the year, beginning with the Governor's budget address in March.
Ray's Round Up: How Do PA Elections Impact State-of-Play?
By Jacklyn Isasi, NOV 6, 2015
Tuesday, November 3rd was election day and the business of state government slowed this week while the results are analyzed. Let's join the crowd.
Search AARP Pennsylvania
Emails from AARP Pennsylvania


(One of, or five of) Danny Boyle's Secrets at the 2012 Nondon Opening Ceremony, which was Spectacular for Kaidie the Spectator and Near-Spectre. With these rings of fire, the 2012 Nondon Olympics opens, and Kaidie runs towards her dead-line.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 28th, 2012 at 08:09	and is filed under NONDON A-Z, THE LAST (FINAL) 60 DAYS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


Residents around DFW gathered at Dealey Plaza in Downtown Dallas to honor those lost in acts of terrorism. The recent attacks in Paris motivated the event coordinators to plan a vigil and shared their thoughts on the grassy knoll along with guest speakers of different religions. Organizers also coordinated the event in hopes of shedding light on the importance of combating xenophobia in the area. Attendees were of all different backgrounds and beliefs, bringing signs displaying messages advocating peace. Those who attended were also involved in the Muslim Student Association at the University of North Texas. Students can show support for our own MSA here at UTA as well.


text:
Russia Sees More Than 9,000 New Cases in A Day
Women wearing face masks to protect against coronavirus walk down the street in St. Petersburg, Russia, Monday, Sept. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)
MOSCOW — The coronavirus outbreak in Russia continues its rapid growth, with the government reporting over 9,000 new confirmed cases on Friday but the Kremlin saying a second lockdown is not being discussed.
The 9,412 new cases reported on Friday bring the country's total to over 1.19 million and mark the highest surge since late May. Russia currently has the fourth largest caseload in the world and has so far reported over 21,000 deaths.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday another lockdown is currently not being discussed in the government.
At the same time in Moscow, which has been reporting over 2,000 new cases a day since Monday, officials have recommended the elderly self-isolate at home and have extended upcoming school holidays by a week.
On Thursday, Moscow's mayor also ordered employers to have 30% of their staff work from home. "I hope that this measure will be enough to curb the rise of infections, and we won't have to make more difficult decisions," Sergei Sobyanin wrote in his blog.


The entry 'Emanuel Rossetti' was posted on April 20th, 2012 at 10:32 pm	and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.


text:
Q: Embedding google maps I am trying to embed google maps for the first time within a site, but I can't get it to show. Can anyone see a fault in the code. Thank you;
$(document).ready(function(){
function initMap() {
var location = {lat: 51.594808, lng: 0.084447};
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"),{
zoom: 4,
center: location
});
var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: location,
map: map
});
}
async defer src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js…"
});

A: <script src="https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?region=SA&v=3.exp">
</script>
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){

initMap();
});

function initMap() {
var location = {lat: 51.594808, lng: 0.084447};
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"),{
zoom: 4,
center: location
});
var marker = new google.maps.Marker({
position: location,
map: map
});
}
</script>

A: This is how you do it:

document.write("<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3105.150381930865!2d-77.03872384899427!3d38.89767627947038!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x89b7b7bcdecbb1df%3A0x715969d86d0b76bf!2sThe%20White%20House!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1614558773335!5m2!1sen!2sus" width="600" height="450" style="border:0;" allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy"></iframe>")

This embeds the white house.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Did you know that ginger is native to India and China? It can be used fresh, dried and powdered, or as a juice or oil. Also, although it's known as a spice, it's actually an herb.
Ginger has a ton of positive health effects. Some people believe it can help cure diabetes, colds, sore throat, nausea and headaches. Learn more about these benefits and more here.
Fresh ginger can be stored for several weeks in refrigerator. Dried and powdered ginger can be stored in your pantry in an airtight container. Ginger root can actually be planted and does very well stored that way.
Don't freeze ginger root, it can turn soggy. Also, avoid storing ginger in paper bags. It lessens its lifespan and can cause premature mold.
Do you have creative ways that you can cook with Ginger?


Traditionally Barley flour was widely used for Malting and brewing, and used less widely in the baking of bannocks, griddle breads, and sometimes mixed with Rye to make a Maslin loaf. Barley flour can typically be used in crepes or in normal baking where you can replace up to 50% of the wheat flour with barley. Barley contains a lower level of gluten than wheat, and as a result Barley flour doughs will not rise in the same way as Wheat doughs. It is excellent for thickening stews and soups. Interestingly it is thought that barley is the foundation of our measurement system - 3 grains laid end to end forming the Anglo Saxon "ynce" later the inch, and that weight of a barley grain became the metric "gram".


text:
A. SCOTT EMMONS WATER RECLAMATION FACILITY
RIBBON CUTTING CEREMONY
EVENT: Ribbon Cutting Ceremony at A. Scott Emmons Water Reclamation Facility
LOCATION: Social Circle, Newton County, GA
PARTICIPANTS: GWES, Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority, and Reeves Young
On Thursday, May 19th, 2022, the Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority's A. Scott Emmons Water Reclamation Facility ribbon cutting ceremony took place with over one hundred people in attendance. GWES was the Engineer of Record for the Construction Manager at Risk delivery project. The 1.25 million gallons per day (MGD) facility will initially serve the Stanton Springs Industrial Park. Its' design is inclusive of Aqua Aerobics' Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) process, disk filters, UV disinfection, and rotary press solids handling. The facility will have the ability to expand up to 3.75 MGD. This is one of the premier projects defining GWES' ability to provide engineering excellence and superior customer service to our clients. We want to thank NCWSA for the opportunity to serve their customers and community. Truly, it is our honor.
SPEECH: Burke Murph, Managing Principal of GWES and Engineer of Record, gave the following speech at the Newton County Water & Sewerage Authority's A. Scott Emmons Water Reclamation Facility ribbon cutting ceremony…
S incerity. GWES has worked for the NCWSA since 2015. Personally, I've worked for Mike and his staff since 2008. We are forever grateful to be a part of this amazing project. The ASEWRF project resonates vision, engineering, and construction excellence. The development of NCWSA's vision was established in 2006 when this land was purchased unknowingly to serve billion-dollar industries. The vision was not only to serve these industries with water and wastewater infrastructure, but to build an environmental compass defining the principals of water quality and conservation.
C ommunication. It is the foundation of this success story. It led to the culmination of engineering and construction collaboration. The success of this project was derived from the continuation of communication between organizations. Between March of 2019 and 2022, the team worked together daily to overcome challenges, identify solutions, and yield productivity.
O rganization. This project thrived as a result of organization. Organization starts at the top and trickles down to those tasked every day to make paper become reality. Many men and women supported this project through daily oversight and professional insight. NCWSA is one of the strongest organizations we've had the privilege to work for.
T reatment. Treatment goes beyond the context of wastewater. I'd like to reference the Golden Rule, to treat others as you would like to be treated, and it was exhibited throughout this project. The people associated with this project have a deep respect for the functions of each other. Relationships were forged. Solutions were found. Challenges were overcome. We were all working for a common goal. It is a testament to the organizations involved during these uncertain times that this project was delivered on schedule and within budget.
T hanks. I would like to thank the NCWSA Board for their support of Mike and his staff. I would like to thank Mike, Wayne, and the rest of NCWSA staff for their support. I would like to thank Clark Nexsen and Pi-Tech for their assistance in the design of this facility. I would like to thank Reeves Young for their commitment to the successful delivery of this amazing project. I would like to thank Matt Taylor, Casey Piper, Michael Griffore, and the GWES staff for their hard work to ensure success on this project. Finally, I give my praise to God for the opportunity to be here with you all today.
Share GWES News
New Office Location in Brunswick, GA Little League Sponsorships


text:
Smoke Fairies Release Surprise Single
LMNR
'No Matter How This Goes, Just Make Sure That You're Kind' 'Elevator' Reaches #1 On UK Singles And Vinyl Chart New Virtual Gig Announced For Friday April 17th
New Album: Darkness Brings The Wonders Home Out Now
April 15th, 2020 New York NY/London, UK: Smoke Fairies have surprised fans by releasing an exclusive and unheard new track 'No Matter How This Goes, Just Make Sure That You're Kind.' Recorded with producer Phil Ek in Seattle last year for their recent critically acclaimed Darkness Brings The Wonders Home album, the track was initially held back. However, the band, Jessica Davies & Katherine Blamire, feel the song to be so pertinent to the current world health crisis they wanted to share its message of love. The track is out today via all digital platforms: https://youtu.be/OCh_wT1Llkw
Jessica explains "There was something about this track that was more extreme and it wasn't fitting the mood of the album for some reason. This song was written with a strong sense of foreboding. We know we were not alone in feeling that something big was creeping up on us all, something that would require strength, bravery and kindness. It now seems this track makes sense and we wanted to share it because no matter how this situation goes we are certain that if we just feed it love, good will conquer."
Smoke Fairies have certainly been keeping busy, this week they sit at # 1 in both the physical and vinyl Official UK Singles Charts with 'Elevator' a Limited-Edition 7" picture disc. This follows the album hitting #1 in the Rock Album Charts at the start of February. Forced to abandon live plans to celebrate the release of "Elevator" by playing a series of intimate in-store shows and signings the band moved their single launch on-line and managed to raise money for the Red Cross in the process.
Building on that success Smoke Fairies have announced a second online show, for this Friday April 17th via their Facebook channel and will be donating any donations for that performance to The RSPCA conscious of the dip in donations to some charities at the current time. The band play via www.facebook.com/smokefairies at 8pm UK/3pm EST.
Be sure to catch Smoke Fairies' Smoke Signals podcast, featuring Jessica and Katherine's charming and drily funny reminiscences about their early days getting started in music, Stream the podcasts here: https://smarturl.it/smokesignalspodcast
Looking to later in the year the band have announced further tour UK tour dates following on from their sold-out UK shows in February, starting in Tunbridge Wells on 30th of September 2020 and followed by another London show for October, tickets on sale now.
Smoke Fairies tour dates:
Sept 30 – Forum, Tunbridge Wells
Oct 01 – Lafayette, London
Oct 02 – Castle & Falcon, Birmingham
Oct 03 – Think Talk, Newcastle
Oct 05 – King Tuts, Glasgow
Oct 06 – Deaf Institute, Manchester
Oct 07 – Joiners, Southampton
To order a copy of Darkness Brings the Wonders Home, or to purchase tickets for the tour visit: www.smokefairies.com.
Darkness Brings the Wonders Home, Smoke Fairies' widely acclaimed first album in four years and the first to come out on the band's own label, Year Seven Records, was released January 31st and has seen some remarkable chart positions for a band operating as a fully independent venture (#1 UK album in Rock and a #6 on the Independent Album Charts). The set was recorded with producer Phil Ek (The Black Angels, Fleet Foxes, The Shins) over the course of a rigorous month-long session in Seattle. Smoke Fairies (aka Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire) drew their inspiration for the album from mysteries both real and imagined: sea monsters, flocks of crows taking flight in extravagant formation, and strange creatures dwelling in the mud near their new South London abode. "Times of darkness are when people are often the most imaginative," says Jessica in reflecting on the album's title. "It helps you to see all the wonders of the world you hadn't noticed before – the things you've been blind to because you've been on autopilot for so long."
Smoke Fairies were the first UK act to release a single on Jack White's label Third Man Records and was produced by White who also played guitar and drums. Other notable recordings include a cover of Neil Young's 'Alabama' from his Harvest LP which appeared on a special Mojo album to mark the approaching fortieth anniversary of the album. Jessica and Katherine also contributed vocals to the track 'Valentina', a tribute to Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space on The Race For Space, the second album by Public Service Broadcasting. The band has toured this side of the Atlantic with Laura Marling, Rasputina, and most recently Blitzen Trapper and Dawes. The ladies plan to play stateside again with shows to be announced at a later date.
Drop us a line at [email protected] with your live music news and show reviews.
Katherine Blamire
Smoke Fairies
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Edward Shatverov Shares Insights On How To Conquer Amazon's FBA
Shazir Mucklai - Imperium Group
Benzinga December 30, 2019
While this has been a buzzword for decades, the next wave of personalization will do a much better job of predicting needs. Each individual will get a different experience based on geography, searching history, past behavior, etc. When you walk into a store, a salesperson can intuit a lot about you.
The future of e-commerce will use technology to do the same thing ... smarter technology that provides a better experience. For example, many search functions on retail sites are terrible. If you put in "shirt dress," the search function will read dress shirt the same as shirt dress. Yet a salesperson would know the difference. We have technology that can tell the difference and this will only continue to get better.
Would it surprise you to learn that online sales for the USA in 2018 amounted to less than 15% of all retail in total? Well, ecommerce only represented 14.3% of total retail sales in 2018, according to Internet Retailer's analysis. Consumers spent $517.36 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2018. Total US retail sales, not including the sale of items not normally bought online like fuel, automobiles and food at restaurants, hit $3.628 trillion last year. Global retail sales are projected to be around $28 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020.
So, the good news is that we have a long way to go before retail as we know it is dead. It's also comforting to know for entrepreneurs the world over, that there are quite a few more opportunities to be had in the online commerce space.
Recently, Imperium PR's CEO Shazir Mucklai, had the opportunity to have a discussion with Edward Shatverov and hear his story. Shatverov is an American E-Commerce entrepreneur and Real Estate Investor who has already become a millionaire by the ripe age of 18 years old. When he was 15, Shatverov wanted to do something different. While all his peers were arguing over who had the best Yeezy shoe models and fidget spinners, Edward had something else on his mind. He wanted to leave a legacy.
While in high school, Shatverov chose to skip out on after school sports and video game sessions with friends to do something else: master the online world of e-commerce. Rather than spending hours playing Fortnite, he obsessed over marketing tactics like Facebook and Instagram ads, Email marketing, and sales funnels. Shatverov studied tirelessly past midnight most nights, mastering E-Commerce marketing.
Shatverov believes that one of the keys to success in the E-Commerce marketing world is to find mentors. Early on, he realized that if he would be successful in the online world, he would have to learn from those who were already doing it. He says, "It's astonishing how life treats you when you surround yourself with the right people."
Essentially, the unlimited choice afforded by online stores means that niches that aren't massively popular can still be successful. For example, online shoppers were posed a simple question: what percentage of the top 100,000 books on Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) sell at least once a month? Most replied with an average estimate of 20%. They could not have been more wrong. Fully 99% of the top 100,000 books sell in some volume; there's someone, somewhere who reads the random titles. Ecommerce entrepreneurs still have tremendous opportunities to target and leverage significant niches via a specific focus.
By age 18, Shatverov had reached his goal. He had accumulated millions of dollars in revenue, making him one of the youngest self-made millionaires in the world. Shatverov started from the ground up and now owns an e-commerce marketing empire including several online businesses.
Now that Shatverov's reached success in the e-commerce marketing space, he has his eyes set on a new goal: Helping others achieve the same success he did through mastering lucrative e-commerce marketing techniques. His vision is to assist others in achieving financial freedom, regardless of their age.
Shatverov will also be releasing an online course platform in the future to train young entrepreneurs to master financial freedom through e-commerce marketing. The platform will include a series of marketing courses with a goal to teach new or struggling marketers through different courses, digital tools, and other resources.
Shatverov's not shying away from the camera either. Some teaching platforms don't allow access to the mentor but Shatverov wants to do things differently. He says, "the number of entrepreneurs who get into the digital world and end up getting their hands burnt is increasing." That's why he will occasionally provide students the option to have one-on-one sessions with him, giving them full access to his knowledge base.
When asked what one tip would be to give others in the online business world, Shatverov replied, "...they should use their resources to the fullest extent. Nowadays we have social media and it's there for a reason."
He went on to mention that Facebook and Instagram are resources that can be used to grow your business. Shatverov has grown his Instagram profile to over 150k followers, and it's not because he was posting random selfies. Early on, Edward Shatverov saw the e-commerce marketing opportunity and decided to capture it.
Now, fast-forward a few years, and he runs a 7-figure e-commerce marketing empire, but he wants others to know that it's possible for them too. Shatverov says, "Life is amazing, isn't it? It's crazy because if 5 years ago someone told me I'd be a millionaire, I wouldn't believe them."
Regarding his success, he goes on to say, "Anything is possible if you set your mind to it. Dedication and motivation plays a big factor. If I can do it, all of you can as well. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay
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Tea Burners Monument
Greenwich, New Jersey
Erected in 1908, the Tea Burners Monument marks the spot where New Jersey committed me-too tea vandalism against the British. It happened on the night of December 22, 1774 -- about a year after the Boston Tea Party -- when a group of New Jersey revolutionaries dressed as Indians boarded a British brig bound for Philadelphia, hauled its shipment of tea into the backwater village of Greenwich, and burned it.
That's the most popular version of the story, anyway. Other, less romantic versions say that the patriots weren't dressed as Indians; or that the tea was already in town, being stored, when it was simply hauled out and burned; or that most of the tea wasn't burned at all -- it was sold for a profit, perhaps even back to the British. Some historians also doubt that many of the names on the monument actually participated in the event.
But everyone agrees that at least some tea was burned, and that was enough for New Jersey. 7,000 people reportedly attended the unveiling of the monument, although it is almost forgotten now.
1027 Ye Greate St., Greenwich, NJ
From Bridgeton drive southwest on Greenwich Rd/Bridgeton Rd for six miles. At the T intersection, turn left onto Ye Greate St. Drive one block. You'll see the monument on the right.
Nearby Offbeat Places
Flying Saucer - Futuro House, Greenwich, NJ - 1 mi.
Carpet Viking Statue, Deerfield, NJ - 11 mi.
Large Rocking Chair, Woodstown, NJ - 18 mi.
In the region:
Milk Bottle Water Tower, Philadelphia, PA - 42 mi.
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Listening is a vital part of everyday life and children develop listening skills from birth. Listening is not the same as hearing. Listening skills involve a child's ability to attend to and process information that they hear. These skills are integral components of a child's speech language and social development and have a large impact on their academic development as well.
From as early as three months of age, infants can discriminate between speech and non-speech sounds. They are startled by loud sounds and quieten or become excited in response to novel sounds. Infants at this age are able to recognise a primary caregiver's voice and smile or quieten when spoken to. They will also decreases or increases sucking behaviour in response to sounds in their environment.
Children at this stage will move their eyes in direction of sounds and can discriminate between friendly and angry voices. They react to changes in tone of voice and attend to music and toys that make sounds. They will also listen to a speaker and watches a speaker's face when being spoken to.
Between the age of six and twelve months children will respond to sound from a source that isn't visible to them. Children will respond physically to music and will stop an activity when their name is called out. They can recognize words for common items they use in everyday life such as ball or milk and pay particular attention to new words that they have not heard before. At this age, children begin to respond to simple requests, such as "Sit here".
Children at this stage, children are able to follows one-step directions with cues and gestures such as pointing. They can understand simple questions, such as "Where's Daddy?" and point to named pictures in a book. Children at this age are able to follow directions to find two familiar objects as well as sit and listen to simple stories.
Children between two and three years respond to commands involving body parts, such as "Show me your foot" and follow two-step directions, such as "Get your cup and bring it to me". They can follow directions that include action with adverb or action with adjective, such as "Walk slowly" or "Give me the red ball". They can also demonstrate an understanding of several action words by selecting the appropriate picture to match a spoken verb. Children in this age range should also recognise family members' names or titles such as baby or grandpa.
By three to four years of age, a child should be able to attend to their own name being called from another room. They can understand simple wh- questions and most simple questions regarding their activities and environment. Their listening skills have significantly improved to a point where they begin to learn from listening.
At four to five years children can attend to a short story and answers simple questions about it. They hears and understands most of what is said at home and in school and can repeat four digits when they are given slowly. Children at this stage will readily follows simple commands involving remote objects.
At this stage, children are able to repeat sentences up to nine words in length and readily follow three-step directions. They can respond correctly to most sentence types however they may still get confused at times by more complex sentences such as 'why' and 'how' questions.
This article was written by our Speech Pathologist Ashleigh Fattah who is a Speech Pathology Australia member. If you need to arrange speech therapy for a child with speech and language delay, make an appointment. We'll provide you with simple and effective therapy targeted to your concerns. Contact us today.
Click here for more information about childhood development.


You can expect a lot from the 2019 CADILLAC ESCALADE ESV. With fewer than 15,000 miles on the odometer, this 4 door sport utility vehicle prioritizes comfort, safety and convenience. Under the hood you'll find an 8 cylinder engine with more than 400 horsepower, providing a spirited, yet composed ride and drive. Four wheel drive allows you to go places you've only imagined. Top features include power front seats, front and rear reading lights, 1-touch window functionality, a blind spot monitoring system, front bucket seats, lane departure warning, power windows, and remote keyless entry. Power adjustable pedals allow the driver to optimize his or her driving position, enhancing visibility, comfort and safety. Rear passengers enjoy the seat heating functionality, keeping them warm during the winter months. For drivers who enjoy the natural environment, a power moon roof allows an infusion of fresh air. State-of-the-art amenities such as memory seats and adjustable pedals yield a more personal driving experience. You and your passengers will enjoy the stereo system, which includes a CD player with MP3 capability, rear mounted audio controls, steering wheel mounted audio controls, and 16 speakers, providing excellent sound throughout the cabin. Passenger security is always assured thanks to various safety features, such as: head curtain airbags, front side impact airbags, traction control, brake assist, a security system, onStar, and 4 wheel disc brakes with ABS. With electronic stability control supplementing mechanical systems, you'll maintain precise command of the roadway. It also arrives with a Carfax history report, indicating just one previous owner. We pride ourselves in the quality that we offer on all of our vehicles. Please don't hesitate to give us a call.


← ASUS eee PC desktop. Wow, looks very cool.
Hey, I'll be in two of the top ten over the next week! Hong Kong and Shanghai. Cool.
This entry was posted in Beijing, Hong Kong, hotels, shanghai and tagged Hong Kong, shanghai. Bookmark the permalink.
Seems to me that when I was in Shanghai, there was a daily transient population of 7 million people.
When it comes to mass amounts of people, in China a new sense of scale is necessary.


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«Педагогика» — советское специализированное издательство.

Описание
Основано в 1945 году как издательство Академии педагогических наук (АПН) РСФСР.

В 1963—1969 входило в состав издательства «Просвещение».

С 1969 — издательство «Педагогика» Академии педагогических наук СССР и Госкомиздата СССР. В системе Госкомиздата СССР в 1980-х годах издательство «Педагогика» входило в главную редакцию общественно-политической литературы. Находилось по адресу 107066, Москва, Лефортовский переулок, 8. В 1979—1990 годах показатели издательской деятельности издательства были следующие:

Выпускало труды научно-исследовательских институтов АПН СССР, произведения крупнейших представителей отечественной и зарубежной педагогики, научно-популярную литературу для учителей и родителей, «Детскую энциклопедию» (и библиотечку Детской энциклопедии «Учёные — школьнику») и серию тематических «Энциклопедических словарей» для школьников.

.

Примечания

Литература

Ссылки
 Издательство «Педагогика» на сайте «Живая библиотека»

 Издательство «Педагогика» на сайте «Издательство Педагогика, Москва»

Издательства, основанные в 1945 году
Издательства СССР
Издатели научной литературы

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Clicknoise
Musings about music, technology, mobility, and culture, by Jean Hebert.
Category: PhD studies
PhD complete
Today, an eleven year journey as a PhD student comes to a hard-won, satisfying, successful end. My dissertation (entitled "The Critical Construction of Geolocational Life") has been submitted to the SFU Library Thesis office, revisions completed and approved. I can breathe – and blog – again.
Author JeanPosted on April 30, 2018 Categories critical constructivism, ethnography, mobile, PhD studies, phenomenology, privacy, technology, theory, Uncategorized2 Comments on PhD complete
Etymology is Everything
culture: the capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially
This traditional definition of "culture" – not the only currently operative one, but one still prevalent in much discourse on practices in everyday life – is obviously problematic where the inclusion of nonhuman subjects (and human subjects incapable of sending messages or indicating their understanding of them) is presumed, or even merely contemplated. If one cannot signify, one might argue, one therefore cannot be included in culture. For some this seems to merit exclusion from human moral consideration as well (given that ethical systems cannot exist without culture existing first). This is can be dismissed easily as an unsustainable position on simple pragmatic grounds, because many human cultures recognize the intrinsic value of non-signifying human subjects (people who are in various stages of conscious awareness, for instance), and thus to exclude nonhuman subjects for this reason is nothing more than speciesism.
But the definition still captivates many, due to its symbolicocentric mystique. I think I found a way out of this constraining, inconsistent, and morally unsatisfying definition of culture, and it involves thinking about culture and communication as being necessarily bound up with dense, cohabitational spaces – communes, farms, and cities. To get there (as if by magic!), it helps to examine the etymology of the word "culture". Culture, as students of communication, anthropology, and cultural studies know well, has many competing definitions in both everyday and academic discourse. These have a history – from Matthew Arnold, to Franz Boas, to Raymond Williams, to Clifford Geertz and beyond. Consider, from the Online Etymology Dictionary:
culture (n.) mid-15c., "the tilling of land," from Middle French culture and directly from Latin cultura "a cultivating, agriculture," figuratively "care, culture, an honoring," from past participle stem of colere "tend, guard, cultivate, till" (see colony). The figurative sense of "cultivation through education" is first attested c.1500. Meaning "the intellectual side of civilization" is from 1805; that of "collective customs and achievements of a people" is from 1867.
Here's how I interpret this complex term: with agri-culture comes sedentarism and a being-together-in-the-world and cooperation with strangers – the genesis of city life. A "cultivated" mind is essentially urban (or at least agricultural); modeling itself on the "care" of the land required to ensure survival, we came to understand how to care for our fellow urban residents – both human and nonhuman – whether or not we had a window into their inner mental lives. Contemporary urban life enables access to intellectual life, "worldliness", and an ethic of care.
There are already tremendous discourses on the inclusion of Artificially Intelligent subjects in our moral community, and some of these are premised on the problem that we cannot know when robots are really sentient or autonomous. With nonhuman animals, however, we are already there in terms of knowing about their sentience.
Culture also includes these unwitting (some, like crows, are perhaps a bit more "witting" than unwitting) nonhuman participants (companion animals, animals used as resources, and urban wildlife, possibly conceived of as NPCs, or "non-player characters", in RPG parlance – not that this is ideal). Urban systems are full of nonhuman participants. Any moral system we develop in this proximal, settled, grain-eating milieu must include them (animals).
To my mind, the challenge this presents for cultural studies, communication, and anthropology is this: how do we revise our working definition of "culture" so that non-signifying participants (otherwise sentient) are afforded ethical consideration and inclusion? I propose that if we revisit the history of the word "culture", we might see a clear way forward. That is to say: culture=cultivation/(plant)agriculture/dense urban cohabitation/ethic of care.
Also, consider this: Cadmus decided where to build Thebes by following a cow until it lay down in exhaustion. Cadmus also (mythically, of course) was credited with introducing the portable alphabet to Greece. So cities, writing, and nonhuman animals share a place in very old thinking about language, communication, and settlement. It is the animal who writes the city, asks us to settle down, and implores us to find a way to keep consistent records.
Is this making sense yet?
Author JeanPosted on September 20, 2014 September 20, 2014 Categories Actor network theory, animals, cities, culture & society, futurism, nonhuman animals, PhD studies, theoryLeave a comment on Etymology is Everything
Recruiting Android users for mobile app research, March 31-April 14
I'm looking for study participants (Metro Vancouver area only) for empirical research I'm doing about mobile apps and location awareness. And, you can win an iPod Touch if you participate.
What will participants do? They will beta test a sustainability challenge application for two weeks (March 31-April 14), comment about the experience, and complete two online surveys (one at the start, and one at the end). Some participants will use the Facebook version of the app, while some will use an Android version they will install to their Android smartphone. Android users will also agree to have their location tracked for the two week period (Android users' personal location data are not exposed to Facebook nor made public. Location data are anonymized for the purposes of analysis and any future publication of the research). All data is stored on Canadian servers.
All participants must have a Facebook account (we use it to authenticate users in both versions of the app). None of your data in the app is shared with Facebook – you have the choice to have all of your participation in the app viewable by "Only Me".
I need to recruit Facebook and Android users in roughly equal numbers. After 50 Facebook users have signed up, I will only be recruiting Android users, until their number also reaches 50. Then I will open the study up to more Facebook users.
Those who complete the full cycle of required app testing and complete two online surveys get entered into a draw for an iPod Touch. There will also be runner-up prizes of lesser value.
This study is part of the empirical research I'm doing for my PhD dissertation. It's also part of a multi-university project called Greenest City Conversations.
If you are interested in participating, please email me (jeanhebert at sfu dot ca) with the following information:
(1) "Mobile GCCP app" should appear in the subject line;
(2) your name;
(3) the email address you use for Facebook; and
(4) whether you have an Android device (by indicating this you put yourself in the Android group).
Once you've indicated your interest, I'll add you to my list of potential participants and send you more detailed information about what the study involves. Once I've reached a critical mass of potential participants (I expect sometime early next week), I'll send you all a link to the informed consent and entrance survey (which must be completed by March 31st, and must be done before you can install the app).
Thanks for your attention!
Author JeanPosted on March 16, 2012 January 4, 2016 Categories cities, mobile, PhD studies2 Comments on Recruiting Android users for mobile app research, March 31-April 14
ubitasking. Taylorism. The horror…
Visualization of over 16,000 Mechanical Turk workers in the United States. Click on the image for the original (much bigger).
I'm always trying to think of silly new buzzwords ("ubitasking"), and I'm also always trying to avoid the hackneyed ones ("crowdsourcing"). Mechanical Turk (ach! 41% of it is SPAM) -type platforms are brushing up against place-sensitive applications, and the results are intriguing, particularly in the coordination of humanitarian aid. In one case, Crowdflower participated in Haitian earthquake relief efforts, in conjunction with the well-known Ushahidi platform and a 'Turk-like 'form called Samasource. This is interesting (and relevant to my research) for two reasons:
Firstly, the work sourced through Samasource involved translation of text messages so that aid workers could read them and respond – which is an important general consideration when envisioning the localization of any ICTs to particular cities (and neighborhoods within cities). Vancouver is made up of a number of linguistic communities; reaching out broadly to ensure they are all included requires an awareness of such tactics and a readiness to deploy them in the rollout of any mobile application(s). So, for instance – should the design team prescribe something with a similar "task orientation" (like ubitasking notifications to the City about sick trees or potholes) – translation services can be similarly sourced and organized here. The elderly Korean woman who has a community garden plot next to ours (who is constantly giving us gardening advice, in Korean, as she speaks no English whatsoever) inspires me to demand a community babelfish…
Secondly, and troublingly, all this "task orientation" (should be "tsk. orientation…") smacks of Taylorism writ even more granular than ever before. If you doubt me, just read Crowdflower's FAQ page for things such as "By saving the correct answers to a small set of Units prior to running a job, we track the quality of a worker's performance and reject a worker once his or her accuracy drops below a defined threshold. When no Gold Units are inserted, the quality of work plummets…". Yep, that's your name alright, Taylorism. Routinizing work; building human powered Difference Engines; monitoring space and time with cool algorithms. Not your Lefebvre's city. More like yr Le Corbusier's…
I'm not dis(mis)sing Crowdflower, though, as they clearly have a charitable and progressive ethos going on, by all accounts. Just picking on the FAQ language, noting the exacting character of software, and pointing out where I've seen it all before.
So yes, pluses and minuses so far in the prelims, as expected. I'm looking at a few more technical options, and I'm prescribing nothing.
Image credit: sethoscope (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sethoscope/5410862747/) (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Author JeanPosted on June 23, 2011 January 3, 2016 Categories cities, culture & society, ethnography, GPS, LBS, mobile, Mobile Muse, PhD studies, ubicomp, workLeave a comment on ubitasking. Taylorism. The horror…
Participatory Mobile Urban Experience Planning
… or, Streethacking with Ubiquitous Media, if you prefer. This is the thing toward which I'm now turning most of my academic affections and attention. Reading Henri Lefebvre, Matt Hern, Paul Dourish, and many others has led me to this increasingly (and appropriately) crowded (for instance, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for some rough coordinates…) space of inquiry. My research has been months in the planning phases, and has been a labour of love (among other things… a different story, for a different blog, with different privacy settings…). Now, however, begins the process of scheduling, recruiting, fine-tune budgeting, and nailing down the specific questions for the inquiry. There's much to be queried about the topic. Oh, the topic?
I'm doing this research as part of something called the Greenest City Conversations Project, a collaborative effort of a number of researchers at UBC and SFU, based at UBC's Centre for Sustainability. My research (on mobile and ubiquitous computing, the urban environment, and sustainability issues in Vancouver) involves a participatory design exercise, in which the team will be doing something of a 'needs assessment' and 'visioning exercise' for what the mobile/ubicomp sphere can do to improve or better facilitate public awareness, dialogue and participation in sustainability issues. Then, we'll turn to designing an application (or a 'connective tissue' piece between existing platforms and/or applications) in conjunction with student interns and/or a local technology company. That's the lightning pitch.
As the research proceeds, I will be providing regular updates on this, my longest-serving blogbot (since 2006 now! pat on the head there, little noseclicker, aw… we've been through so much!…). While much of my data will be sealed off from public scrutiny due to the exigencies of ethical codes safeguarding personal information of human research subjects, I will be posting what I can when I can, as a way of documenting my path toward completing it. Likely, this project will unfold over 6-8 months, culminating in a dissertation and public launch of … something … whatever the designers recommend, and whatever the developers can fashion.
Author JeanPosted on June 9, 2011 Categories cities, culture & society, Mobile Muse, PhD studies, sustainability, ubicomp1 Comment on Participatory Mobile Urban Experience Planning
This blog is going to get more frequent updating in short order – more time on my hands in the coming months. Expect some dissertation-related posts as I crystallize my proposal. It's coming together. It's mobiles. Cities. Ubi-comp. And, I think, postphenomenology.
Author JeanPosted on March 6, 2011 January 4, 2016 Categories PhD studiesLeave a comment on update
and now on to something else
I just formally completed my comprehensive exams. The oral defense was held today, I passed, and now I'm officially ABD (all but dissertation). This is the other side I said I'd see you on.
I think the defining harrowing thing about comprehensive/qualifying exams is that they come to us (1) without precedent (most of us who do a dissertation have already done a Master's thesis, and gone through the same process of defending it – but when in our education do we go through a 6 day writing blitz, on subject areas we largely define ourselves, with little in the way of explicit expectations?), and (2) with seemingly infinite expectation (the feeling that no matter what one writes it can never be good enough, thorough enough, broad enough, or deep enough).
So now, I'm on to things with more manageable processes and outcomes.
I believe a glass (bottle[cask]) of wine is in order.
Author JeanPosted on May 12, 2010 Categories comprehensive exams, PhD studiesLeave a comment on and now on to something else
Les Comps
Ta-da. I've finally submitted the field definitions for my Comprehensive exams. Here they are. Comments welcome; it helps. I'm writing the Philosophy of Technology exam in October, and the Theorizing Participatory Media exams in December February 2010, during the Olympics.
1. A History of the Philosophy of Science and Technology
Western philosophical perspectives about technology have been constructed in various ways representing a number of historically contingent ontological orientations: utopianism and its opposite, instrumentalism and its heirs, Marxism, critical theory, social constructivism, poststructural approaches and actor network theory. The prevalence of one or another approach or orientation toward science and technology as a sociological or philosophical subject of inquiry is dialectically related to its historical and social context – that is, it is both produced by it and works to reproduce it. Further, our very demarcation of the distinctive territories of science and technology is an historical artefact warranting a thorough exploration, too. In this comprehensive examination I will explore the contours of this history of thinking about science and technology.
Philosophical thinking about science outgrew its origins in philosophy around several problems, which have heavily influenced its development, largely by preventing it from developing (Ihde 1993): the conventional bias toward "pure" thought in philosophy as against materialistic concerns, the view of modernity (and its technology) as superior to its predecessors, and the wide supposition that technology is a subset of or is a consequence of science.
Subsequent philosophical developments distorted and perturbed this original Enlightenment-era position of technology as related to science. While Marxism and its discontents provided much of the groundwork for 19th and 20th century technological utopianism, a Philosophy of Technology per se doesn't emerge until later phenomenological studies approached the subject (from Husserl through Heidegger). In tandem with the development of technology with massive destructive potential (the Nazi regime, nuclear technology, biological engineering and so forth), the historical character of much early 20th century thinking about technology is fearful and dystopic (Ellul, Heidegger, Adorno). Alternative readings that come up later in the century are utopian and instrumental (Habermas), while yet other readings of this era bear both the hallmark of an activist tradition and the seeds of later constructivist approaches (Marcuse).
Science and Technology Studies grew into its own with the development of the sociology of scientific knowledge school (SSK, as exemplified in the works of Bloor and Kuhn) in the 1960s and 70s. This school emphasized philosophical attention to the historical contingency of science and knowledge. A few of this school's leading thinkers (notably Bloor) worked at expanding the contingencies recognized by the SSK school into a broader critique – what is now referred to as the "Strong Programme" in the sociology of science. The primary contribution of the Strong Programme was perhaps the notion of symmetry, the use of which demonstrated a longstanding bias in historical studies of science that distinguished between proven and failed scientific knowledge. This critical turn legitimized the study of scientific practice as contingent on social organization and culture, paving the way for the wider critique provided by social constructivism.
The SCOT approach (Social Construction of Technology) was advanced by writers such as Bijker, Hughes and Pinch. Here the principles developed by the SSK school were systematically applied to empirical studies of technological innovation, with analyses of the social relations constituted in designs for bicycles (Pinch & Bijker 1984), electric cars (Callon 1987), and door grooms (Latour 1992). An important argument raised by this school of thought is that values and ideology are designed/embedded into technology, such as how bridges can be designed to racially discriminate and segregate (Winner). SCOT theorists expose how the design of objects and techniques that affect our lives – everything from viruses to airplanes to ship's masts – is ideological.
Actor-Network theory emerges as a counterargument to SCOT. Advanced by Bruno Latour, John Law and others, ANT antagonizes the strong constructivist argument by constructing one in which artifacts and networks are equally constitutive of social relations as are humans. In this view, being in the world (and being technology in the world, specifically) is an emergent property of networked agents of all kinds. As a matter of course, facts and artifacts, according to Actor Network theorists, are indistinguishable. Moreover, networks and actors are perceived only relatively (via the technique of punctualisation). ANT is a richly-conceived methodological alternative to social constructivism in technology studies, which helps to de-center SCOT's earlier decentering (of fact, and of value) further.
More recent approaches to the question of technology have attempted to balance social constructivism against human agency, such as Feenberg's (1999, 2002) critical constructivism, as well as works by philosophers such as Radder (1996) that point out some of ANT's unhelpful normative assumptions and other problems. Critical constructivism, in particular, draws from earlier sociological critiques to help re-center and politicize the analysis of technology into more of an actionable theory. Contemporary with yet divergent from this critical effort to recenter the politics of technology, posthumanist approaches provide an interesting departure. Posthumanism repositions the human subject as a strictly technical one (Stiegler), often via a rubric that describes us as inherently cybernetic beings (Haraway). Both of these theoretical approaches (critical constructivism and posthumanism) resonate back onto philosophical precedent, however – particularly to phenomenology and the idea of technology as a dialectical process.
The major philosophical debates within this field of inquiry (as I have described it) center around definitions of technology, the relative weight of agency and structure in technical ongoings, transcendence and immanence of artifacts and actors, the historical and ontological priority of science as against that of technology, the degree to which politics can be designed into technology, and, importantly, divergent overall definitions of the role of technology in society, which bring with them radically incompatible assumptions about human social behaviour, and the question of human identity as defined in relation to technology. This comprehensive exam aims to address each of these debates in turn.
Pre-modern Roots: Instrumentalism and Enlightenment
Bacon, F. (1620) The New Organon or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (Book I). In Anderson, F.H. (Ed.) The New Organon and Related Writings (1960). New York: The Liberal Arts Press, pp.33-120.
Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Chapter 5: Classifying I: What the Historians Say, and Chapter 10: The Human Sciences I: The Three Faces of Knowledge). Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Ed. R.D. Laing. New York: Pantheon, pp. 124-145 & 344-387.
Dialectical Materialism and Technology: The Legacy of Marx
Marx, K (1887) Capital, Volume I: The Process of the Production of Captial. Trans. S. Moore & E. Aveling. Ed. F. Engels. Moscow: Progress Publshers. Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1999. (Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry). Retrieved on 9 November 2009 from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm .
Lukacs, G. (1966). Technology and social relations. New Left Review 1(39): 27-34. Retrieved on 9 November 2009 from http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=873 .
Phenomenology (and post-)
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans. 1st ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Ihde, Don (1990) Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ihde, Don (1983). Existential Technics. New York: SUNY Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2005) What things do : Philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. Trans. Robert P. Crease. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School and After
Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002
Habermas, J. (1971). Technology and Science as "Ideology" (Trans. J. J. Shapiro). In J. Habermas (Ed.), Toward a Rational Society; Student Protest, Science, and Politics (pp. 81-122, 142 of 132): Beacon Press.
Marcuse, H.(1964) One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon
Dystopianism
Ellul, J (1967) The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf/Vintage.
Leiss, W. (1990). Under technology's thumb. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Philosophy of Science Turns Sociological
Borgmann, A. (1984) Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. Chicago : University of Chicago Press
Fleck, L. (1979) The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Eds. T.J. Trenn and R.K. Merton.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kuhn, T.S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merton, R. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure New York: Free Press.
Social Constructivism
Brey, P. (1997) Social Constructivism for Philosophers of Technology: A Shopper's Guide. Society for Philosophy and Technology 2(3-4):56-79.
Callon, M. (1987). Society in the making: The study of technology as a tool for sociological analysis. In W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, & T. Pinch, (Eds.) The social construction of technological systems. London; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hughes, T.P. The evolution of large technological systems. In W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, & T. Pinch, (Eds.) The social construction of technological systems. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London and Beverly Hills: Sage.
Pinch, T. and Bijker, W.E. (1987). The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, & T. Pinch, (Eds.) The social construction of technological systems. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Oudshoorn, N. a. Pinch., T., Eds. (2003) How users matter : the co-construction of users and technologies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Winner, L. (1993). Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology. Science, Technology, & Human Values 18(3): 366-378.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, Mass. :: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1992). Where are the Missing Masses, Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts. In W. Bijker & J. E. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (pp. 225-259). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. E. (1986). Power, action and belief : a new sociology of knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Law, J.E. and Hassard, J. (1999) Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Law, J.E. and Bijker, W. (Eds.) (1994) Shaping Technology / Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Inside Technology). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Critical Constructivism (and other critiques of ANT)
Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning technology. London ; New York: Routledge.
Feenberg, A. (2002). Transforming technology : a critical theory revisited. Oxford ; New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
Radder, H (1996) In and about the world: philosophical studies of science and technology. New York: SUNY Press.
Posthumanist Approaches
Haraway, D. (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, pp.149-181.
Hayles, K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U. Chicago Press.
Simondon, G. (2007) "Technical Individualization," in Joke Brouwer & Arjen Mulder (eds.), Interact or Die! Rotterdam: NAi.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time. Trans. R. Beardsworth & G. Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
2. Theorizing Participatory Media, Culture and Art
This comprehensive will broadly engage critical theories of art in society, cultural/creative industries, theories of taste, reception, and cycles of production, and art and technology in an historical account of the theory of participation in the arts and media, political economy of art and culture, and theories of power and structure that create the conditions for and modalities of participation in art and cultural practice. Recognizing inevitable problematics embedded in the words of the title of this comprehensive area – "participatory" "media", "culture" and "art" – this comprehensive constitutes a bridge between contemporary popular discourses about participatory media (as it is enframed in literature on digital media) with a number of disparate theories about art, political economy of media, and cultural studies. Contemporary conceptions of "participation", and "media, culture and art" in an era of digital reproduction demand this historical and theoretical grounding.
I begin this history with Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1960), an imaginative recasting of art as transcendent and world-shaping. In developing his philosophy of Being (Dasein) around interpretation, perception, and remakings of the World (using ancient monumental art and painting as his examples), Heidegger invokes artistic activities to illustrate the phenomenological character of our experience of the World. Artmaking, through Heidegger's lens, can be applied or generalized to the nature of being in the world more generally. Heidegger's phenomenological vision of being-in-the-world (of which art is one vivid example) is a foundational orientation to contemporary Western conceptions of the special position of art as a mode of creating the world. And while it is true that the transcendent attribution to art pre-dates Heidegger by centuries, I contend that it is his situation of the importance of art in a phenomenological framework that has afforded the survivability of the notion of a privileged place for art-in-society, throughout poststructural and postmodernist paradigm shifts.
Theodor Adorno's work on aesthetics (particularly, Aesthetic Theory, 1997) offers a comprehensive, dialectical, and materialist basis upon which to refute Heidegger's phenomenologically-informed view. Adorno's view – attached as it is to a more radical philosophical programme – also marks an historic break with prevailing aesthetic theories stemming from idealism (Hegel and Kant). While aesthetics is not the particular subject of this history, Adorno's dialectic between autonomous and socially engaged art practices sets the stage for later Western art discourses as well as those of the sociology of art. It is also notable that Adorno's writing on art utilizes very narrow definitions for art as compared to the work of other scholars in this area. Walter Benjamin (1986), by comparison, entertains a more inclusive definition of art practice, and in so doing opens the way to a reconsideration or inversion of Adorno's dialectic. As with Adorno's thesis, Benjamin's vision of the dialectic between aura and democratic art persists in more recent discourses.
Many twentieth century sociological accounts of art practice and art communities, such as Becker's Art Worlds (1982), take a more neutral stance about the role of aesthetics, foregrounding instead the structure of communities of practice and their audiences and the economic dimensions of creative work. This approach, which has influenced anthropologists and ethnomusicologists alike has broadly informed methodology in the study of communities of practice. At the same time, theorists such as Bourdieu (1984) have brought a similar orientation to the study of consumption and taste communities. In centering their analyses on the socioeconomic indicators of audience preferences, scholars in this school have (though not without justified criticism – see Zangwill 2002) reaffirmed the the value of relativistic approaches to art without appeal to aesthetic study per se. This body of sociology further reinforces an unresolved schism between aesthetics and the study of artists' practice.
Cultural studies – particularly UK cultural studies – attempts to remedy this through its focus on meaning and symbolism in the circulation of art and cultural produce as texts. As evinced in the works of Hebdige (1979) and others, this thread of research, heavily informed by semiotics, extends and blends the study of aesthetic form with that of social behaviour, particularly as social performance embodies or enacts gestures of ethnic, gender and socioeconomic relevance.
The "cultural industries approach" to this field, an ongoing provocation by Miege (1989), Garnham (2000), and Hesmondhalgh (2006a, 2009), marks a turn in media studies to deliberately, and in many cases quantitatively answer questions about power and structure in the economics of culture while affording more agency to participants of creative spheres than past theorists were willing to do (e.g, Adorno). Something of an uneasy complement to Bourdieu's analysis of taste, in this school of inquiry the focus shifts to forces of production and public policy in creative spheres. The cultural industries approach has been widely influential, drawing in attention from not only cultural economics (Throsby 1994), but also Marxian occupations studies (Menger 1999) and actor-network theory (Hennion 2007).
Much more recently, a resurgence of interest in the economics of creativity has occurred, one which has tried to unseat political economic assumptions about what counts as creative, and comes to very different conclusions about the role of creative occupations in the wider economic system. This "creative industries" critique describes creativity as a force of social action that percolates through a wide range of occupations not normally associated with arts and cultural activities (Potts & Cunningham 2008). Analyses of this species tend to view "creative professionals" as trailblazers that lead economic and social progress. The creative industries critique also provides counterpoint to the statism associated with policymaking inspired by the cultural industries approach (Hesmondhalgh 2009), promoting instead forms of self-organization among creative communities.
While the creative industries approach has met a resounding chorus of critics (Garnham 2005; Miller 2009, to name two), a related body of literature on digital media practice and creativity is also relevant for the present discussion. These authors work to decenter the locus of our notion of creativity in their examinations of the dynamics of fan communities and creative practice in digitally mediated spaces (Jenkins 2004). While these views would underpin the contested claims of the creative industries approach, they constitute yet useful hypotheses that draw attention to the legacy of cultural studies, bringing analysis of symbolism and the circulation of texts back into the debates. A further resonance with the history of criticism I have here outlined is the interest in "world-making" as described by some of this field's proponents (Jenkins et al 2003), which revives Heidegger's invocation of creating of the "world" (in terms of establishing world as an intermediary between sense and perception) as the objective of art. Some critics of these perspectives have attempted to critique the celebration of digital participatory media from a more emphatically critical cultural studies-influenced position. Bolter and Grusin (1999) do this by framing digital media as part of a double logic of remediation, bridging Douglas Kellner's critical approach to media studies to the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.
Consideration of this body of works also demands a critical look at one of the fundamental assumptions made about "participation" in art – the theorizing of "participatory" itself. There is a long history to the exploration of the question about what participatory art means, from Breton's writings about Surrealism, through Artaud's reversals of audience-performer dynamics, public Situationist happenings and other public forms of contemporary art. This history of thinking about participation in art is often ignored in contemporary discourses about digital media. Some argue, for instance, that digital media use can and should transform our very notions of aesthetics. Bourriaud's (2002) relational aesthetics is one such theory. Here the value of works – the locus of their "aesthetic" analysis – inheres in their sociability, and neither in their formal or affective dimensions, nor in their content. The question turns from "what does the work express or embody?" to "what does the work do?". While this is a provocative line of questioning, it betrays an ignorance of theoretical precedent, as recounted by Bishop (2006). Bishop goes on to call for more precise definitions to distinguish the authentically participatory from the merely interactive, making the claim that the former requires a degree of sociality. Still others (Beech 2008) claim that this reasoning does not go far enough – that mere participation is not enough, and that attention and political engagement are never assured (though are too often presupposed) in "participative" acts of art.
Heidegger: Phenomenological Aesthetics
Heidegger, M. (1993) The Origin of the Work of Art. In Basic Writings. 2nd ed., ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins.
Frankfurt School and Critical Theory Perspectives
Adorno, T. W. (1981). Prisms (1st MIT Press ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Adorno, T. W. (1938), "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening", The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Blackwell, pp. 280
Adorno, T. W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory. (Orig. published 1970, Eds. Adorno, G. & Tiedemann, R. Trans. Hullot-Kentor, R.). U Minn. Press: Minneapolis.
Attali, J. (1985). Noise : the political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Benjamin, W. (1986). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illluminations. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Witkin, R. W. (2002) Adorno on Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Highbrow/Lowbrow Critiques
DiMaggio, P. (1991) The extension of the high culture model to theater, the Opera, and the Dance, 1900-1940. In Lamont, M. and Fournier, M, (eds.) Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequalities. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, pp. 21-57.
Levine, L. W. (1988) Highbrow, Lowbrow. The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.
Sociologies of Practice and Taste
Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2006b). Bourdieu, the media and cultural production. Media, Culture & Society 28(2): 211-231.
DeNora, T. (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zangwill, N. (2002) Against the Sociology of Art. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32:206-218.
Zolberg, V. (1990) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. London: Cambridge.
Grace, H. (2003). 'What's the use?' cultural studies and the religion of the useful. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17(4): 397-409.
Hartley, J. (2003). A Short History of Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture : the meaning of style. London: Methuen.
The Cultural Industries Approach
Couldry, N. (2004). Actor Network Theory and Media: Do They Connect and on What Terms? In A. Hepp (Ed.), Cultures of Connectivity.
Garnham, N. (2000) Emancipation, the Media, and Modernity: Arguments about the Media and Social Theory. Oxford: Oxford U Press.
Hennion, A. (2007) Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology. Cultural Sociology 1: 97.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2006a) The Cultural Industries, 2d ed. London: Sage.
Miege, B. (1989) The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New York: International General.
Menger, P. (1999) Artistic Labour Markets and Careers. Annual Review of Sociology 25: 541-74.
Throsby, D. (1994) The Production and Consumption of the Arts: A View of Cultural Economics. Journal of Economic Literature XXXII:1-29.
Towse, R. (2003). A handbook of cultural economics. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
The Creative Industries Model
Cunningham, S. (2004). The creative industries after cultural policy. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1):105-115.
Deuze, M. (2006). Collaboration, participation and the media. New Media & Society 8(4):691-698.
Garnham, N. (2005) From cultural to creative industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11(1): 15-29.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009). Cultural and Creative Industries. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis. Eds Bennett, T and Frow, J. London: Sage.
Miller, T. (2009). From creative to cultural industires. Cultural Studies 23(1): 88-99.
Potts, J., & Cunningham, S. (2008). Four models of the creative industries. International Journal of Cultural Policy 14(3): 233-247.
Fan Communities, Creativity and Digital Culture
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks : how social production transforms markets and freedom: Hartford:Yale U Pr.
Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Jenkins, H. (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1), 33-43.
Jenkins, H., Seawell, B., & Thorburn, D. (2003). Democracy and new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Theorizing Participation
Beech, D. (2008) "Include me out! Dave Beech on participation in art". Art Monthly 315:1-4.
Bishop, C. (2006) Participation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel.
Author JeanPosted on September 22, 2009 Categories art, comprehensive exams, creative industries, critical constructivism, culture industries, PhD studies, political economy, SCOT, sociology of art, STS, technology, theoryLeave a comment on Les Comps
MUSE3 BCNET presentation
I had the opportunity last week to present my ongoing research into user-centered technology design (which is what is evolving out of my ethnographic research in the lives of mobile handset users) as part of a panel all about Mobile Muse (where I'm the Program Manager, for those who aren't aware of this).
A webcast of the proceedings is available here. Here are slides for the full presentation, and here (more for my own concept archiving sanity than for anything else, really) are my slides extracted from that set.
Some of the same ideas from prior talks I've given about the mobile divide are revisited here, but in the context of a more proactive problem orientation. Here I'm asking: how is technology developed in ways that are directly informed and influenced by the communities of users most affected by them, and how is this tech disseminated in ways that are socially beneficial?.
MUSE3 is an excellent opportunity, I'm finding, for looking at the processes of intermediation that go on in the building of new things. At the intersection of network engineers, open source and other sorts of coders, mobile handset companies, government agencies, artist-run centres and a cavalcade of people and organizations with an interest in the potential of mobile technology, many complex interactions are going on that contribute, bit by bit, to whatever technological assemblage is going to emerge. Fascinating stuff, really. Here's hoping my notes are as meticulous as they need to be…
Author JeanPosted on April 28, 2008 Categories Actor network theory, conferences, critical constructivism, ethnography, mobile, Mobile Muse, PhD studies, SCOT, STS, workTags BCNET, Mobile Muse, muse3Leave a comment on MUSE3 BCNET presentation
The PhD – the comprehensive exams
So I'm diving straight into my comprehensives now. I'm building lists and checking them twice (and more). While building these reading lists is in many ways a very personal journey, I've decided to blog about the process so that I might get feedback from unexpected locales, harnessing the "wisdom of crowds" (while simultaneously, in both comp areas, critiquing how such "wisdom" is in fact problematic). I also hope that documenting the process can help others through it. I won't be posting my full notes (who'd read them?), but I will share my definitional essays, my questions and answers, and an account of process along the way. I've written up preliminary préces of my two exam areas below.
Area 1. Science and Technology Studies. This will involve SCOT, ANT and other critical theories, but it will also dovetail through Philosophy of Technology (I'm thinking Heidegger through Marcuse and Feenberg, and also including Ellul and others, perhaps a few off the beaten track – we'll see). I want to ask questions through this literature about the relationship of technology, power and social organization/social change. There are also some intriguing connections with Area 2 (below) via Hennion/Latour (their work on culture industries), and, according to one of my advisors, Habermas' Public Sphere as well as Lazarsfeld.
Area 2. Culture Industries/Sociology of (The) Art(s). Starting with Hesmondhalgh's (2002) synthesis of political economy of media studies with cultural studies and other approaches to the sociology of art, I plan to broaden this area out to include American and Continental approaches to the study of cultural/creative industries. This will likely include a range of approaches, including Bourdieu (various), Becker (various), and DeNora's more recent work, but this area is still under development. There are important connections to literature on occupations (Balfe, Latouche) organizational studies (Throsby, Sacco, Menger), and of course The Frankfurts. Essentially, as I told one of my advisors this morning, I want to survey the body of work that theorizes culture industries, without limiting myself to a particular tradition (as approaches vary broadly). Keep in mind that I wish to keep this area current, as well, and as such I will need to make room for Eglash's (and others') work on appropriation, as well as Jenkins' (and others') work on fan culture. Sprawling enough? It makes sense to me.
My advisors, colleagues and friends (as well as the "social web" hoi polloi) can feel free to jump in any time. Like you have any time.
Author JeanPosted on December 18, 2007 Categories 4s, Actor network theory, appropriation, art, blogs, comprehensive exams, creative industries, critical constructivism, culture & society, culture industries, fandom, internet, online communities, open source, PhD studies, political economy, SCOT, social bookmarking, social networks, social web, sociology of art, STS, taste, technology, theory, wikia2 Comments on The PhD – the comprehensive exams
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