text:
Chris Stapleton’s CMA Sweep

November 7, 2015

Chris Stapleton and wife, Morgane Stapleton, at CMA Awards 2015

The most astute readers of this blog will remember that I recognized Chris Stapleton in a post back in June: “The Latest in Alt-Country.” Therein, I said that his debut album, Traveller, will be on the year-end best album lists, “I guarantee it.” To be honest, I couldn’t guarantee it; I was just being hopeful and buoyed by the critical acclaim. But, now, Traveller is the #1 album this week across all markets, and it is currently sold-out on Amazon if you want a physical copy. Forbes is reporting that the album jumped by 6,000%! What happened?

The CMA’s happened. But before I continue talking about the CMA’s, you need to watch this performance at the Grand Ole Opry from a couple years ago:

That is Stapleton singing the Waylon Jennings’ classic, “Amanda.”

Now that you have been properly introduced to Chris Stapleton, let’s continue…

The Country Music Association Awards is the longest-running and most prestigious awards show for country music. In the greatest of ironies, the current chairman of the CMA is Gary Overton, who was head of Sony Nashville at the time when he was widely quoted and scolded for saying, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Tell that to Chris Stapleton. Or Aaron Watson. Or Jason Isbell. Or Blackberry Smoke. They all had #1 country albums this year without any radio support. The times they are a-changin.

I was pleasantly surprised when it was announced that Stapleton received three nominations: Best New Artist of the Year, Best Album of the Year, and Best Male Vocalist of the Year. I was pleased, but we have seen these gestures in the recent past. I am not aware of anyone seriously predicting that Stapleton would win any of his categories, with the slight possibility for album of the year. But it happened. First, best new artist. Second, best album. Third, best male vocalist.

When the hat trick was announced, I jumped off of my couch. I watched the whole thing live. I couldn’t believe it. Stapleton was clearly overwhelmed in the third acceptance speech. The widely-read SCM blog wrote:

What Chris Stapleton did was unprecedented, and historic. There have been plenty of 3-award sweeps in the history of the CMA’s, but never by such an underdog, and an unknown. …When Stapleton was accepting the Male Vocalist of the Year award, you could tell he was taking in what he knew might be the greatest moment of his life, and he promised he would take the honors very seriously.

The Chris Stapleton sweep was not the only thing that made the headlines. A few weeks ago, the CMA announced that Stapleton would be performing live at the awards show, alongside Justin Timberlake, for two full songs! The presence of Timberlake next to Stapleton is actually not surprising. They are friends, and the Memphis-born Timberlake gave his Kentucky friend a huge boost in December of last year by tweeting:

REAL music fans already know. So, mainstream:

Remember that name… –jt

When the CMA gave Stapleton a performance slot in the show, he called Timberlake and asked if he would join him. He agreed, and the result is already being described as one of the great moments in the entire 49-year history of the CMA’s. While there were a few other good performances on Wednesday night’s broadcast (and some truly awful performances), the duo of Stapleton and Timberlake stole the show. It made everyone else look like amateurs. They started with “Tennessee Whiskey,” the third track from Stapleton’s album:

Most of the material on Traveller is original, but “Tennessee Whiskey” was originally recorded by country legends, David Allan Coe and George Jones, in 1981 and 1983 respectively. After performing “Tennessee Whiskey,” they transitioned to Timberlake’s “Drink You Away”:

Like I said, there was nothing else that could compare to these two performances. However, I did enjoy Kacey Musgrave’s “Dime Store Cowgirl,” Eric Church’s “Mr. Misunderstood,” and Reba McEntire’s set with Brooks & Dunn. There were a couple other highlights as well. Dierks Bentley was joined by violinist Lindsey Stirling to perform “Riser,” which is a song that I blogged about in July. Maddie & Tae, considering their age, did a good job with “Girl in a Country Song.” Also, it was a big night for Little Big Town with three wins.

But it was Chris Stapleton’s night. He dominated, and the Luke Bryan win for Entertainer of the Year was merely an afterthought. You can see the commentary from The New YorkerThe Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, and ABC News. Does this mean that country music has found its savior? Probably not. I do not expect a massive reversal on country radio any time soon. But these things can happen piecemeal. Stapleton is an interesting character. His own music follows the high standards of the 70’s outlaw era which he loves, but he has been writing hit songs for some of Nashville’s biggest names. He is not a “purist.” He is willing to write or co-write pop-country singles, and this is partly why he is so well-known to those in Nashville.

This was a good week for country music. It was a good week for music lovers everywhere. The cynic can find ample room to make criticisms, but this is a time to celebrate. Congratulations to Chris and Morgane Stapleton and to Dave Cobb, the legendary Nashville-based producer of Traveller. The Georgia native, Dave Cobb, is someone you should know. He has produced for Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s son), and Whiskey Myers, among many others. That’s impressive.

Chris Stapleton with wife and Dave Cobb

Morgane Stapleton, Chris Stapleton, and Dave Cobb at CMA Awards 2015

Image: Chris Stapleton and wife, Morgane Stapleton, at CMA Awards 2015 – Taylor Hill, Getty Images (source)

5 Responses to “Chris Stapleton’s CMA Sweep”

  1. Joel said

    I listened to it on to Spotify after reading this, and to be honest I was a bit disappointed. The voice, the lyrics, and the arrangements and instrumentation are all good – but none of these things are exceptional. It’s solid enough, but doesn’t really stand out to me. The album also is just too long. I generally thought his voice fit better when he goes all out than in the ballads.

    But then, I’m not as big a country fan as you are. Anyway, it’s still much better than pop country and I’m glad he won over Kenny Chesney or whoever is big these days.

    • I’m glad you checked it out. I would encourage you to give it another few listens. I come at the album with 70’s country in mind, which is my favorite era for country, and Stapleton is superb. I have most of Waylon Jennings’ albums from the 70’s, and Stapleton’s album could easily fit in that catalog — and that’s setting the bar about as high as it gets. He’s able to find the right groove for this type of country, especially on songs like “Nobody to Blame” and “Traveller.”

      • Joel said

        Maybe I’ll give it another try.

        I guess maybe it’s just my tastes. The country I like most tends to be the kind with rich arrangements and mixing with other genres, while still staying authentic. It’s one of the reasons I love Emmylou Harris (own nine of her albums and counting). Stapleton is pretty straightforward.

      • Kevin Davis said

        That makes sense. I appreciate Emmylou Harris as well, but that’s not what Stapleton is going after. I do think there is some excellent texture and instrumentation on the album — once again, “Nobody to Blame” comes to mind.

        You would probably like Waylon’s early outlaw albums, like Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean (1973). That’s my favorite Waylon album, and it is richly textured in a way that you would appreciate. This culminates two years later in his masterpiece, Dreaming My Dreams, which is probably his most praised album.

        I see Stapleton and Cobb as following Waylon’s more stripped down and subdued subsequent albums, like Are You Ready for the Country?.

  2. […] are ten videos below. I did not include Chris Stapleton’s CMA performance because I already blogged about it and provided the videos there. This was the year of Chris Stapleton and nobody saw it coming. For […]

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Type: response

text:
| Cart The Career Test Store

Job Description and Jobs

Job Description:

  • 1) Installs blocks and guy lines for high lead, slack line, or similar log yarding system: Cuts notch around anchor stumps specified by HOOK TENDER, using chain saw and ax.

  • 2) Wraps cable around stump and secures it in position with spikes and U-bolts.

  • 3) Installs block, pulls winch cable through block, and secures cable to yarding blocks and guy lines.

  • 4) Signals winch operator to haul yarding blocks and guy lines to anchor stumps, and secures them to anchor stumps.

  • 5) Splices cable to make rigging parts or repair broken or worn cable, using marlin spikes, vise, hammer, and wire cutters.

  • 6) Dismantles yarding system and loads rigging onto trucks for removal to new yarding site.

  • 7) May install yarding cables, choker cables, cable swivels, carriages, and related rigging.

  • 8) May rig and erect wooden spars.

  • 9) May climb wooden spars, using climbing spurs and safety rope, to install or repair rigging.

  • 10) May lead activities of crew and be designated Head Rigger.

Is being a "RIGGER" your very best career choice?

Our Career Interest Test will show you which careers match your interests.

Our Free Personality Test will show you which careers match your personality and why.

Click here for "RIGGER" Jobs

End Of Job Description for: "RIGGER"
DOT:   921.664-014

Job Number: 11584

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-167-34.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-17
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Change firmwares while keeping root, backup/restore even over ADB and Wi-Fi
500 Firepaper
Live wallpaper and daydream displaying the latest and greatest imagery from 500px.com, highly configurable
DSLR Controller
Control your Canon EOS DSLR from your phone !
A Game Of Threes
Addictive game - free!

Downloads served:

SuperSU: 71 383 613

This file: 359 108

Support my efforts, get SuperSU Pro !

Follow @ChainfireXDA

Follow me on Google+

Want to keep root next time you upgrade firmware? Try FlashFire!


WARC-Truncated: length

text:
Download Casino Games in Anglin, Washington

Microgaming, the key online gambling application service, offers two options. One could be the standard selection where the reels come to relaxation one at any given time beginning the primary reel and closing together with the fifth reel. This speed allows participants to find out if they are thanks for a massive pay-out and experience the suspense. Will the last reel create a jackpot payout? One other selection could be the Rapid Rewrite selection that can be empowered through the Options menus. Here too the reels cease one at any given time inside the identical sequence but at almost breakneck velocity, download casino games in Washington.

Sign up our mailing list to get latest casinos bonuses and promotions! Free spins and no-deposit signup bonuses for our subscribers!

Download Casino Games in Anglin, WA

Microgaming may be the additional primary online-casino software provider to provide a carnival-themed slot sport. The position sport is Carnaval, following a latin-based transliteration. The colorings are vibrant and stunning and the symbols have now been constructed plainly. The jackpot payment of 5,000 money emerges from the Carnaval Logo symbol. The Samba lady with her feathered head dress must feature as a symbol. Each march is accompanied by a jester or clown and then the clown is used as a symbol. Another thematic symbols will be the ring and the trumpet. The high value card symbols may also be grandly constructed. The Outrageous Logo may be the outrageous symbol and the Scatter Logo may be the spread image. The sound in Carnaval has-been properly used-to generate the merry surroundings. Because the reels spin drum-beat music is competed and the profitable permutations are accompanied by trumpet songs. Carnaval can be a relatively old position game and doesn`t get characteristics like free revolves or reward activities but their absence isn`t sensed, Download Casino Games in Anglin.

LuckyRedCasino usa flagLucky Red Casino $4000 Play now !
HighNoonCasino usa flagHigh Noon Casino $2000 Play now !
AllStarSlots usa flagAll Star Slots $4000 Play now !
Lincoln Casino usa flagLincoln Casino $5000 Play now !
ClubWorldCasino usa flagClub World Casinos $777 Play now !
AladdinsGoldCasino usa flagAladdin’s Gold $10000 Play now !
Buzzluck usa flagBuzzluck $868 Play now !
club-euro-casino-review usa flagClub Euro Casino $777 Play now !
LibertySlotsCasino usa flagLiberty Slots $777 Play now !
Manhattan Slots usa flagManhattan Slots $747 Play now !

ZIP codes near Anglin

98201, 99163, 98382, 98587, 99324, 98631, 99160, 98546, 98817, 99146, 98632, 98935, 99138, 98012, 97882, 98314, 99157, 98148, 98394, 98595

Cities near Anglin

Download Casino Games
Rating of Download Casino Games
4.67 stars - based on 44 reviews
Anglin WashingtonUSA


text:
UFT88 read at Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Universite Catholique de Louvain was founded in 1834, the first university in Louvain was founded in 1425. It is described by its French name because there is also a Flemish medium Catholic University of Louvain. UCL is ranked 40 in the world by Times, 79 by QS, 93 by Shanghai and 432 by webometrics, with its emphasis on web presence. UCL has over 35,000 students and is a distinguished Catholic University. The consultation of UFT88 was by the Neural Network Group of the Elena Project. UFT88 is a classic paper that corrected the second Bianchi identity of 1902 for torsion. It was published by Horst Eckardt and myself in 2007, and has been consulted order of ten thousand times without objection (in about two hundred and fifty leading universities in the past three years alone). This includes Oxbridge, the Ivy league and so on. It should be read with UFT99, UFT109, UFT255, and achieves its final form in UFT313, the Jacobi Cartan Evans (JCE) Identity which replaces the second Bianchi identity of 1902. UFT313 is the first paper of 58 papers and books to date of ECE2 theory. They are all read every day (early morning filtered stats) in the world’s best universities. UCL is a high ranking research university, one of the oldest in northern Europe.

%d bloggers like this:


text:
The class between Old and New China reaches another dramatic pitch as yet another bold interception occurs in broad daylight by Chinese animal liberators — a tactic that activists in the US and other nations would do well to emulate!

Starving, exhausted and crammed into tiny cages, they were just hours away from being killed for restaurants.

These shocking pictures were taken after more than 1,500 dogs were found piled one on top of another inside a truck bound for the slaughterhouse.

Manyof them would not even have survived the 22-hour journey.

The dogs which were being taken to a chain of restaurants in south-west ChinaRescue workers lift the cages from the truck which was stopped at a toll by highway police

Animal welfare volunteers and police in Chongqing, south-west China, discovered the malnourished and dehydrated animals loaded inside cages so small they couldn’t stand up.

Theytook them to a nearby farm where they were given food, water and emergency medical treatment, but many were too frail to survive.

Xiao Lu, of the Chongqing Animal Protection Association, said: ‘When [the dogs] saw us they were groaning, but some were so exhausted and dying that they didn’t even have the strength to make a sound.

‘The dog peddler said his truck was only loaded with 700 dogs, but there are at least 1,500.’

The truck full of caged dogs was heading for dog meat restaurants

Many of the dogs were dead or dying, having been deprived of food and water

The harrowing photographs of the suffering animals were posted on the internet by the blogger who was behind the rescue operation.

After spotting the truck carrying the animals, he posted a plea on the web, begging for help in saving the dogs’ lives.

It was answered by animal welfare volunteers, and with the assistance of the police, they intercepted the vehicle at a toll gate. Many of the dogs, which were being taken to Guangdong province, in the far south of the country, were saved.

Eating dog meat in China dates back thousands of years. It is also consumed in countries including Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam, but is illegal in most Western countries.

Restaurants serving dog are common in many Chinese cities, but particularly in Guangdong province, where some locals think it has medicinal properties.

Despite proposals to ban the consumption of dog last year, and growing international opposition to the practice, the meat has continued to be sold.

Alan Knight, chief executive of International Animal Rescue, said: ‘The transport is disgusting. They cram them into small wire cages, with no food or water, and take them across the country and kill them in inhumane ways.

‘This is happening every day. The whole concept of ethics is different to ours and it will be difficult to change, but local animal welfare groups are starting

See video link at the bottom of this page:


text:
Why Don’t You Come On Back To The War?

My friend goes to a leaving party in a bar in a trendy part of the city. It is for an academic he knows at a big university. Many of her colleagues are there, including a woman who works in admin, in the department of the academic who is leaving. She is there with her boyfriend. They are dressed in hipster retro-rocker style fashion, with tattoos and 1950s rock’n’roll clothes.

The boyfriend, who works for a major international company, begins to explain how he hates diversity workplace policies and that ‘a lot of people are getting really angry about it’. He says he has a ‘yellow boss’. My friend walks away. The evening continues. An hour passes and more booze is consumed.

The admin staff member and her boyfriend then corner my friend and start asking him about his politics. They ask him why, if he is so into LGBT politics, he doesn’t like President Trump who has enshrined LGBT rights in law. They keep pushing. They ask for my friend’s views about the ‘oppression of women in the Middle East’. They bring up the Rotherham sexual exploitation scandals. They carry on pushing.

The entire conversation is a string of extreme right-wing talking points and English Defence League tropes. Exasperated with my friend’s unwillingness to engage, the hipster retro-rocker boyfriend finally asks my friend to define his politics. My friend answers, ‘I’m a communist’. The boyfriend becomes enraged and starts to jab his finger at him, saying, ‘You’re fucking shit you are! You deserve to get battered!’ and ‘I should batter you right now…’ He storms out of the bar, and his girlfriend says to my friend ‘he is right, you are scum…’

Stunned, my friend stands there before leaving the bar, loudly calling out ‘He’s a fascist! This guy is a fascist!’

OK, it was a boozy university party, not a scientific study. But the divide between back room and academic staff has always been pronounced in universities and many middle class academics seem blind to the full extent of the populist rightwing turn.

The social world inside these liberal pockets is hypersensitive to anything that might be interpreted as a slur against difference, at the same time as it is almost completely desensitised to class. Not only this, but the quality of discourse that many working class people find perfectly acceptable, with all of its frankness and factory floor language, is not just frowned upon, but policed in the middle class liberal atmosphere of the university. There are serious consequences for those detected, and ultimately ejection from the rarefied atmosphere, unless behaviour is modified.

Habermas’s ‘communicative competence’, the idea that ‘communicative situations’ can be created where all have an equal say in a public sphere, has become grimly relevant again.

Habermas explained how the Public Sphere emerged through the late 17th and 18th century and then on into the cultural explosions of the 19th century, where it was finally eaten away by capital and privatisation. But Habermas’s communicative competence, if it ever worked as a theory, has historically buckled. Communicative competence always arrived on the odourless breeze of neo-Kantianism. Habermas’s work in many ways tallies with the whole Euro-project that is now collapsing, its idealistic desire and its terrible failings.

The idea that ‘communicative situations’ can be created where all have equal say, equal access to cultural capital and vocabulary, is what universities strive to put in place. But wishing it into being is a naive hope.

However, there is much to say on the current ‘communicative situations’ to be found all around us in universities. I’m getting a strong sense that the more right wing opinions are becoming emboldened and getting out there, in the public sphere.

In the spirit of a more materialist philosophy, and against the neo-Kantianism of Habermas, I want to begin again with those actually existing historical examples. Here then, are some more recent scenes from university life.

I go to an event in a trendy part of the city. I see someone I know and she greets me with a kiss on both cheeks, saying, ‘I have to greet people Euro-style now’. ‘Virtue-signalling’, saying or signifying something ‘right on’, became a handy term for the right to hit liberals with recently. After Brexit, virtue-signalling is taking on new forms, and here is one of them.

Later, I’m in a discussion group at an evening class. The topic is immigration and one of the attendees says ‘why would you let the enemy in? The muslims?’ Later on, an academic colleague describes how in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes comments on the Austro-Hungarian state he grew up in, claiming that it was intolerably diverse. The connection between this and the comment made in the discussion group arrives as a physical, adrenal spike. I shiver.

For some reason, at this point I remember how I took one of my research informants to an academic event, a working class guy. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans. Some people stared. My informant started to feel out of his depth. He seemed to be visually shrinking in front of me. He couldn’t concentrate on our conversation and started drinking faster. Eventually, he said, ‘this isn’t my kind of place’ and left.

Days roll on with unremarkable banality, in the fog of my own interior monologue. Then suddenly I’m talking with academic colleagues and one starts to rail against ‘toxic masculinity’. This discussion then turns into a narrative of disgust over how males are reacting to their disempowerment.

The negative afterimage to virtue-signalling can be found in this kind of dialogue: Although the university will swarm around particular kinds of behaviour and condemn it as offensive, that same behaviour can be found in this kind of ‘back room’ situation, which the sociologist Erving Goffman described; ties loosened, speaking freely to friends in the university café.

Only this ‘speaking freely’ is directed precisely at those the university would clamp down on for speaking freely like this, were they doing so audibly in the university space. The grubby, classed subject with their potentially racist opinions, Reddit account and coarse manners.

The hypocrisy here is deep. They may never directly say that those people are inferior, but the dialogues themselves say it clearly enough. ‘New men’ who ‘get feminism’ being withering about those who don’t still sounds toxic to me whether you call it masculine or not. At the same time universities preen and posture over their supposed openness and tolerance, completely blind to the presence of fascist staff members.

To be clear, I engaged in this conversation as actively as everyone else. I am not free from contradiction, only for me, the contradiction is precisely where philosophy begins, not where it ends.

But we have to pause and consider what else is at play here. The post-industrial classes, astray, in post-industrial zones, are the collateral victims of the movements of capital. So when somebody asks them to ‘get with the programme’, what is also being asked of them?

Can I please be present when the people asking them to get with the new social programme find themselves redundant and behind the curve, precisely at a time in their life when they least need that?

Because that’s what we are dealing with here: There is an implicit but omnipresent assumption that people bring themselves ‘up to scratch’ in terms of their cultural capital and behaviour in order to sell their labour by the hour in a marketplace. If it isn’t up to scratch they don’t go to market and are sneered at by those who do. Or rather, ‘they’ get a very particular set of marketplaces for their caste. Universities, with their increasing focus on ’employability’, are training people to leave their caste. The unspoken corollary is that this redundant caste must wither and die as all that is solid evaporates and god help it if it tries to enter the university on its own terms.

‘Professionalism’ is a big problem here. It is not a neutral category, a stable place of correct discourse. It is a petty bourgeois mode of communication. Respect and respectfulness are not neutral universal categories either. They are produced by the middle classes, as is professionalism. To ask one to not live in one’s symptoms was what modernity was all about, and that is still with us: Those who differed from the produced norm were not just sidelined by the Nazi or Stalinist regime.

Of course, that is a very extreme parallel to make. Universities have a deep phobia of morality, preferring a discourse around ‘ethics’. But in ethical departmental meetings this is boiled down to a tick sheet list of oaths that look like morals. The way the liberal mode of communication operates within university spaces is a de facto morality.

I encountered this in relation to my first ethnographic work, Small Towns, Austere Times, when lecturing to Anthropologists who talk the good talk about multiple voices and modes of ethnography, but then clamp down on the classed subject siding with his own tribe as unethical. When their ethics and my ethics clash, and they point the finger at my ethics, they make a moral, not an ethical judgement. Mark Fisher described this ‘grim’ situation:

‘…where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate…’

Ethos, ethnography, ethics: Ethos is the spirit of culture or geist; ethnography is a writing (graph) of that spirit of culture; but ethics is still defined as a morality, pretty much everywhere except in university culture. The way ‘ethics’ is written into university culture is as something that is neither moral nor amoral. It is portrayed as flexible, open and inclusive, and yet still acts as a stable floor to meaning.

I thought universities were supposed to be really open and tolerant places, but actually, some of them must be counted among the most draconian places I have ever worked. I thought universities had an atmosphere where all felt able to speak. But here, staff are scared that people might have opinions about their opinions, therefore they don’t give their opinions. Nobody needs to discipline precarious temporary staff: The outspoken ones are simply not re-hired. It is a system that empowers the mediocre and creates an atmosphere of paranoia and unfreedom.

The way to begin to fight it is to write articles like this one: But the way to properly deal with it is to say all this inside these so-called public institutions; but to do so is to head for the door marked ‘Exit’.

It might be tempting to think that this rhetoric of ‘ethics not morals’ and talk of ‘flexible subjectivities’ floats over the awful scenes I have described without touching them, that it is just ineffective fluff. But it is worse than that, the ethical rhetoric and post-hippy culture creates the spaces for the situations I describe.

I have seen how a philosophy of ‘we’re all a bit loose here, everything is a bit radical and non-conformist’ has bred real abuse. But I have also seen how some of the greatest testifiers to that philosophy have been the most prohibitive, bullying and abusive. I have seen this both as a member of staff and as a paid worker for a trade union.

One last scene in the university: I send a polite message to a line manager about pay and copy colleagues and union officials in. I am then reprimanded by the union branch and a colleague for it; it isn’t just that the contradictions are unspeakable in universities, some basic forms of speaking at all are deemed completely outré.

At another institution, I watched how the union branch aided a ‘restructure’ by a group of bullies. When asked if they were complicit with the process, they stated that they ‘had no evidence’ that this was going on, despite informal conversations to the contrary.

‘What are they going to do?’ I asked the branch secretary, ‘write it down for you?’ ‘That they are taking over a fragile department and culling whoever they can to then replace them with their friends?’ He didn’t reply.

It was a voluntary, unpaid hand-holding exercise by union reps, in a feral department takeover situation, later claimed as a triumph, because there were ‘no compulsory redundancies’ (just horrible, passive-aggressive coercion into ‘voluntary severance’).

At this point I can only conclude that I am totally convinced by Henri Lefebvre’s statement in his work on The State that the aims of the modern trade union and state capitalism are exactly the same. Union ‘process’ cannot touch the seething underbelly of social life and so is itself structured by the default neoliberal processes of the contemporary university: It is gagged and shackled precisely by its mode of communication; it thinks it has chosen this mode, but it never paused to make a decision in the first place.

The problem isn’t that the union is too radical, but that it isn’t radical at all: It is a structural, voluntary adjunct of the university; not an opponent of its current state of being.

‘Ah, but how come the “university” wants to get rid of the union then?’ you may reply. Well, they want to get rid of you too, at the same time as you are a structural part of the university, along with all the other staff and features of working life that stand in the way of increased profit, for instance pay over the summer months. There is no contradiction here.

To return to Habermas, in order to unseat him, we now have a bipolar communicative sphere: On one unlit side we have seething, faceless agonism; on the other, stifled, silenced ‘professionalism’ with a human face, hiding its pain in the bright glare. But these things are not neatly separable. Our situation is that of maggots in the communal rice store: The good and bad are not easy to separate and we are all affected. You only have to sniff round the edges, where talk is looser, or booze is flowing, to see the contradictions and hypocrisies.

There is little point clinging to Habermas’s hopes for the public sphere. But that public sphere needs to be radically refigured and this is precisely where it gets difficult.

There’s a lot of heated discussion around safe spaces for students in universities at the moment. Safe speaking spaces are all very well, but they are pointless if they simply remain pockets of discourse where the converted are preached to. They need to spread out into the places where they are most unwelcome. To do that, hard words are required. But hard words, at the moment, are abolished in official spaces, only to flood back pathologically through faceless internet forums.

One can see it in the university admin employee with far right opinions who has to deal with all kinds of diversity policy on a day-to-day basis: Clearly her daily activities and her political opinions do not match; recourse to internet forums is inevitable.

There is a detectable opening up of racist discourse, and that is horrifying, but as soon as we enter into the touchy, liberal discursive space of the university on its own terms we have lost. Not only do we collude with the prevailing direction, we enable it. This is exactly Habermas’s space of communicative equality. Habermas hoped for the European project to expand, and to America, which is bleakly, drainingly ironic: Now we have ‘post-truth’, the maggots and rice are one.

Last week I walked into the building I was due to teach in to find The Army, having set up their stall, collegially talking to students with the aim of recruiting them. Safe spaces? I felt like reporting this as part of my responsibility to The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015, or my ‘Prevent Duty’.

Discussions around safe spaces of discourse for students, in terms of whether or not to bring in controversial speakers, seem to be projected from a completely different world to the one I inhabit. It might be tempting to say that the distance between the safe and unsafe space of discourse is the distance between the academic office and the pub, or the student seminar and the halls of residence.

But it isn’t, as the speakable and unspeakable are still going on in inside the university, both in terms of stifled opinions and as evidenced by recent horrible scandals. It isn’t that the policing is too weak, it’s that the attempt is even made. Something completely different needs to happen, even though direct intervention from Mars tomorrow morning is more likely.

The excessive hand wringing over communication in the university is not only functionally dishonest, probably at a completely unconscious level, it is ineffective on its own terms. But what it really is, underneath what it professes to be, is a structural scene of communicational competence which ensures that everyone speaks in their mode. The middle class mode of professionalism and respectfulness that functionally outlaws the real ‘criticality’ that now needs to take place.

Asking for a miraculous return to pragmatics and ‘intelligent populism’ when the ground lies like this is naive. Asking for utopia is never going to work. It is mere dreaming. One begins in the shattered present and then negates and negates: This is not the best strategy; it is the only strategy ever possible. Agonism, sadly, is the only way forward.

And we must negate, and we must firmly grip the fascism that is re-emerging, emboldened and out there, and deal with it: I am not claiming that being ostentatiously free to say whatever you please equates with either progress or freedom; but the liberal left are simply not learning from what has just happened. The institutions, universities particularly, are often slow to catch up. But if they do not change things will only get worse. You cannot handle what is happening by being nice, friendly, or more liberal. You cannot deal with it actively by continuing to live in your comfortable amnesiac bubbles.

There is a fence. On one side we find the ‘mwah mwah’ of the newly imposed habit of a Europhile greeting, signifying disappointment at the decision to leave the EU. On the other side we have commie bashing thuggery: Plus ça change and all change, at the same time. New borders are drawn up through public virtue-signalling, as fascists become publicly emboldened. At the same time, the two ‘sides’ intermingle but rarely encounter each other.

The rise of everyday fascism must be countered wherever it is found. But the liberals have to accept that the storm and stress they are struggling to understand on the other side of this new fence was partly produced by the sealed world they live in.

The rightwing need to accept that their ways come out of a patriarchal, brutal culture of imperial domination, and I count myself among those who emerge from it. I still inhabit some of the symptoms of that emergence: Rebirthing slime that attracts disgust and sometimes anger; I have not taken psychoanalysis to make the full accredited journey to the ‘other side’ of middle class life, thankfully.

I inhabit my own symptoms. But heaven forbid I bring those symptoms into the university on their own terms, with their classed, oppositional spirits.

But the idea that I or ‘they’ simply ‘get with the programme’ is disgusting: Firstly because middle class liberals assume that it is their programme in the first place, and that the othered must come into that space, and it is a space, as Henri Lefebvre figured it. Secondly, they assume that the tools of remaking the classed subject are simply to hand to be used, but are being ignored, they are not. You don’t know about what you don’t know. You don’t miss what isn’t there to see, precisely because it’s absent. Thirdly, there is the naturalised demand that ‘they’, the othered, shift to match the culture of those making the implicit demands.

There is a developmental totalitarianism to all of this, and it matches the vertical class model: That the middle classes are more civilised, that you move up the ladder, or you take routes out. To suggest that they need to come down the ladder and take a journey inward is to be faced with the sheer incomprehension of those who unconsciously inhabit their elevated cultural caste as a naturalised state of being.

That incomprehension and your state of being are one, just as it is in the working classes. Yet the working classes are being asked to continually emerge from their incomprehension into the light of the middle classes.

After the crash of 2008 there was no revolution. After 2015 and 2016 there was no rush to recalibrate the disciplines inside the academy in relation to what happened outside its walls. This is telling. The assumption here is that all is well inside the academy and outside there are toxic subjectivities to be found. These are possibly to be researched, as ‘subjects’, to be travelled to and returned from, as one might travel to New Guinea before coming back with intellectual capital.

‘It’ is not neatly outside the university. Communication in our various public spheres is not about competence, it never was. At the first most basic level it is about who is in those public sphere institutions and who is outside (and if you have a smart mouth you will be out, not in).

At the second level it is about who has been pre-loaded with all the signifiers of upper middle class life and political rhetoric. It is about whose communication is deemed stylistically unspeakable, and whose is to be applauded. Orwell explained that the middle classes communicate like bats, via high-pitched shrieks at a frequency nobody else can pick up.

This lack of a level playing field is precisely why we should unsentimentally say goodbye to Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, but oddly, in order to go through some sort of horrible agonistic processes in order to try to bring it about at a future time. If that can be pulled off, the process is going to be messy. I doubt it can be achieved. But the sheer hypocrisy of the university needs to be faced. We have to fully wake up to the lack of permeability many of our institutions suffer from, not just universities, which has led to this situation in the first place.

I would love to believe in Mark Fisher’s brilliant essay Exiting the Vampire Castle, but I don’t. The diagnosis is precise and correct, but there is no way to clear the bourgeois subjectivity out of the way without insulting it. It shapes the discourse. It is the discourse of right and the supposedly oppositional unions inhabit it too. At the same time, the far right are going public. They are largely doing so outside the space of the university, even if it is detectable on the campus fringes.

Exiting the Vampire Castle suggests that we can walk out of the evil lair of the evil one. The way ‘ethics’ is written into university culture, as something neither moral nor amoral, flexible, open and inclusive, and yet still a form of control, means that Merlin’s Misty Cave of Magical Mirrors is a better metaphor for what we are in.

We, all of us, are not cleanly separated from the bad object. Our lives are not like a computer game where the hero flees Dracula. We are enmeshed in the mirror, our identities morphing into those of Merlin. Look into the Merlin myths (for there are many) he was not a Gandalf-like figure, he was closer to Loki, the trickster-hero rooted in Icelandic mythology.

This is Merlin’s Misty Cave of Magical Mirrors, and the middle class liberals are absolutely tripping in it. I want to ask all the liberal middle classes who are already beginning to disagree with the points I am making here, do you have ‘clean’ and non-violent dreams?

Like prohibition, this unconscious gagging of the stigmatically classed subject just creates even worse ghettoes, where the bile flows all the more thickly. Internal bleeding that will lead to a deeper social malaise. As we can see the bile is only handled in a slightly different way by the middle classes.

Welcome then, to anger. It has been burning underground for decades, precisely because of you, now what are you going to do about it? You cannot get around it, sneak under or over it, this is a return to Agonism, ‘let’s all get nervous’.

You can see the nervous incomprehension all around. ‘How did we not see 2016 coming?’ Well, some of us did. After the smelling salts have been taken, the middle classes then offer themselves as the solution to the problem, blind to their role in the problem itself. This might take the form of making some gallery work or creating a research strand about ‘it’, the problem, ‘out there’.

Can some of you at least wake up to the fact that you can no longer, like neoliberalism, offer the cause of a problem as the solution to that problem?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Loughborough University
Leicestershire, UK
LE11 3TU
+44 (0)1509 263171
Loughborough University

Loughborough University Institutional Repository

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/8878

Title: Introducing speckle noise maps for laser vibrometry
Authors: Martin, Peter
Rothberg, Steve
Keywords: Laser vibrometry
Speckle noise
Speckle pattern
Vibration measurement
Issue Date: 2009
Publisher: © Elsevier
Citation: MARTIN, P. and ROTHBERG, S., 2009. Introducing speckle noise maps for laser vibrometry. Optics and Lasers in Engineering, 47, (3-4), pp. 431-442.
Abstract: When coherent light scatters from a surface, which is rough on the scale of the wavelength of the light, a speckle pattern is produced. The Laser Vibrometer measures target vibration velocity in the direction of the incident laser beam and typically samples a region of a speckle pattern on its photodetector. Target motions can cause the speckle pattern to change on the photodetector surface, particularly when target motions are non-normal to the direction of the laser beam. This speckle motion modulates the Doppler signal and adds noise to the demodulated output signal. Periodic target motions can cause the speckle noise to become pseudo-random and produce harmonic peaks, with the same fundamental frequency as the genuine target vibrations, which can be indistinguishable from the genuine target vibrations. Typical speckle noise levels are generally considered to be low-level, but they have not so far been adequately quantified. This paper reports preliminary results quantifying speckle noise levels using controlled experimental configurations incorporating periodic in-plane and tilt target motions. Working with commercial Laser Vibrometers, various target surface finishes and treatments are considered and speckle noise maps are produced for each configuration. For a tilting surface, speckle noise has been quantified at approximately 1 μm s−1/deg s−1 while, for surfaces with in-plane motion, the sensitivity to speckle noise has been estimated pessimistically at 0.1% of the in-plane velocity. Ultimately, these speckle noise maps will form a valuable practical resource for the Laser Vibrometer user.
Description: This article was published in the journal, Optics and Lasers in Engineering [© Elsevier] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.optlaseng.2008.06.010
Version: Accepted for publication
DOI: 10.1016/j.optlaseng.2008.06.010
URI: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/8878
Publisher Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.optlaseng.2008.06.010
ISSN: 0143-8166
Appears in Collections:Published Articles (Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering)

Files associated with this item:

File Description SizeFormat
Introducing_speckle_noise_maps_for_Laser_Vibrometry[1].pdf1.06 MBAdobe PDFView/Open

SFX Query

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.


text:
Over a million developers have joined DZone.

Top 10 Open Source Projects for .NET Developers

DZone's Guide to

Top 10 Open Source Projects for .NET Developers

· Web Dev Zone
Free Resource

Learn how to build modern digital experience apps with Crafter CMS. Download this eBook now. Brought to you in partnership with Crafter Software

There are many useful, practically essential, open source solutions available to .NET developers. This is a list of the ones that have been the most useful in my experience. Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment with your own suggestions.

  1. NHibernate - NHibernate is a mature, open source object-relational mapper for the .NET framework. It's actively developed, fully featured and used in thousands of successful projects. http://nhforge.org/Default.aspx
  2. NUnit - NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages. Initially ported from  JUnit, the current production release, version 2.4, is the fifth major release of this xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages. http://www.nunit.org/index.php
  3. jQuery - jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. http://jquery.com/
  4. Rhino.Mocks - A dynamic mock object framework for the .Net platform. It's purpose is to ease testing by allowing the developer to create mock implementations of custom objects and verify the interactions using unit testing. http://ayende.com/projects/rhino-mocks.aspx
  5. MVC Contrib - This is the contrib project for the ASP.NET MVC framework. This project adds additional functionality on top of the MVC Framework. These enhancements can increase your productivity using the MVC Framework. It is written in C#. Founded by Eric Hexter and Jeffrey Palermo. http://www.codeplex.com/MVCContrib
  6. CruiseControl.NET - CruiseControl.NET is an Automated Continuous Integration server, implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework. http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Welcome+to+CruiseControl.NET
  7. S#arp Architecture - Pronounced "Sharp Architecture," this is a solid architectural foundation for rapidly building maintainable web applications leveraging the ASP.NET MVC framework with NHibernate. The primary advantage to be sought in using any architectural framework is to decrease the code one has to write while increasing the quality of the end product. A framework should enable developers to spend little time on infrastructure details while allowing them to focus their attentions on the domain and user experience. http://code.google.com/p/sharp-architecture/
  8. Spark View Engine - Spark is a view engine for Asp.Net Mvc and Castle Project MonoRail frameworks. The idea is to allow the html to dominate the flow and the code to fit seamlessly. http://sparkviewengine.com/
  9. TortoiseSVN -  A Subversion client, implemented as a windows shell extension. TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. TortoiseSVN is free to use. You don't need to get a loan or pay a full years salary to use it.  http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
  10. Castle Windsor - Castle Project offers two Inversion of Control Containers. The MicroKernel and the Windsor Container. Castle Windsor aggregates the MicroKernel  and exposes a powerful configuration support. It is suitable for common enterprise application needs. It is able to register facilities and components based on the configuration and adds support for interceptors. http://www.castleproject.org/container/index.html

Crafter is a modern CMS platform for building modern websites and content-rich digital experiences. Download this eBook now. Brought to you in partnership with Crafter Software.

dotnet ,open source ,.net & windows ,top 10

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Dev Resources & Solutions Straight to Your Inbox

Thanks for subscribing!

Awesome! Check your inbox to verify your email so you can start receiving the latest in tech news and resources.

{{ parent.title || parent.header.title}}

{{ parent.tldr }}

{{ parent.urlSource.name }}


text:
You can't be too careful, by H. G. Wells

Chapter 6

Advertised to Death

EDWARD ALBERT’S mother died when he was thirteen. The elderly doctor who attended her last illness certified that she died of “bronchitis.” It was a prevalent custom in those days to certify for bronchitis and probe no deeper into the matter. Doctors are a mentally overworked race, and in this matter of diagnosis they have their own epidemic and epidemic disorders. As a matter of fact she died, as a great number of people died in those days, of a surfeit of patent medicine advertisements.

Because in that golden age of freedom, security and opportunity in which our story opens, people enjoyed, among other enviable liberties, great liberty of salesmanship, and a number of enterprising business men, realising that a vast majority o their fellow-creatures suffered from internal pains and discomforts due to the consumption of well-advertised but unwholesome foods, to the unhygienic quality of their housing and employment, and to the survival at a low level of existence of multitudes of individuals who would have been far better dead, devoted themselves to their exploitation. This great uneasy majority constituted from the point of view of salesmanship a mass of consumers to be catered for with a view to profit, and to that these entrepreneurs vying with one another, set themselves with great energy.

The medical profession in those days worked almost, entirely for private gain and protected its privileges upon trade union principles; it combined very low standards of education and qualification, with a creditable insistence upon the honour and privilege of the individual practitioner. Doctors were disposed to’ stand by one another under criticism, in a post mortem or anything of that sort, when definitely unprofessional conduct did not.appear. Their methods of diagnosis were old — fashioned; good diagnosis was a matter of aptitude rather than training, and generally they preferred to diagnose a definite disease and bring it out fairly and squarely and cure it or kill, than tackle all those various and ill-defined states of malaise that would not yield to such forthright treatment. They waved these aside as fancifulness. Consequently there was a considerable irritation between doctors and patients; the doctor and his antiquated and incomprehensible prescriptions, his authoritative manners and his failure to enlist the intelligence of his patient such as it was, in the process of recovery, was distrusted even more than he deserved; and the way lay wide open for salesmanship, to flout his claim to be the sole dealer in the health of the community.

So in spite of him there had grown up a steadily expanding business of pills, aperients, tonics, sustaining foods, cures for every sort of twinge and pain, stimulants, purifiers. These new salesmen began perhaps crudely, but they steadily improved in their methods and reached an ever-widening clientele. Their advertisements became a more and more important item in newspaper finance. From early appeals to people who already had pains, their more and more competent methods instructed people how, when and where to have pains. The medical profession attempted warnings, published analyses of popular remedies, explained their ineffectiveness and their harmfulness, and so forth, but this now gigantic system of human enterprise had achieved the control of all the media of news distribution, and the doctors were quite unable to get their protests over to the public at large. Their pamphlets vanished from the bookstalls and got no “Press.” They said things to their patients, but they found their patients incredulous in the face of an enormous volume of skilled assertion.

This book is no picture of the Edwardian–Georgian age, but these simple circumstances have to be stated here if the reader, in this new and vivid world of adventure and disaster in which we live today, is to understand the way in which Mrs Richard Tewler did herself to death.

The newspapers began to look for Mrs Tewler in real earnest in the benign reign of King Edward the Seventh. Then it was that “Constant Reader”, in anticipation of Professor Crew, changed sex. In the old days when Richard was alive, Mrs Tewler hardly ever glanced at the paper. She took no interest in Politics or what men had considered to be news, and it was only when she discovered the existence of “Aunt Jane” and “Dorothy Wisdom” through such publications as the Mothers’ Vade-mecum, that she spread out her reading to the new daily Press, so different from the grey uneventful expanses of the old.

She began to read first about bargains and cosmetics, because, although no decent Christian woman paints her face or does anything of that sort, it might be possible to learn something about one’s appearance that did not involve that. Naturally her attention flowed over to the more intimate discussions beside them.

There was “that tired feeling.” She had it. But she did not realise what it meant for her until the salesmen told her. It meant the onset of anaemia and then pernicious anaemia. For that a certain blood mixture was admirable. She stocked that and forgot to note its effect because next she was being made conscious of a whole series of neuralgic pains.

They flitted about, pursued by nervous panaceas, and got to her head. There always had been times when she had had headaches, but never the. splitting headaches she realised after she had seen a picture of a mighty fist hammering nails into a head. It was liver pills she needed for that, and they were added to her medical menu.

Effervescent salts promised and failed to restore her to a giddy cheerfulness, because now she lay awake all night suffering from night starvation. That too could be met. Uric acid also got loose in her system and clamoured for further remedies. Her washstand carried an ever-increasing array of bottles, capsules, pills and powders.

Still the salesmen pursued her. It dawned upon her that she had sinus trouble and incipient arthritis, cancer in several places and osteomyelitis. She did all that could be done to anticipate and defeat these evils. She did not tell her doctor about the cancer, because the salesman assured her that would bring upon her the crowning horror of an operation. She could not face that. No operation. No!

She felt under-nourished, and, instead of taking wholesome food, she consumed a cup of feeble tea with a meaty flavour, that the salesmen assured her with vivid illustrations, had the strength of a whole ox in it. Never a newspaper dared to denounce this murderous lie. She swallowed the stuff, felt satisfied for half an hour or so, and then faded again. She picked herself up with a viciously drugged red wine because its salesmen assured her that all its profits went to the promotion of Christian Missions throughout the world.

Its advertisements were endorsed with signatures of venal divines of every persuasion. All religious organisations, as Shaw has been reminding us in his Major Barbara film, need funds, and all organisations that need funds can be bought A.M.D.G., and so ultimately the Lord’s work was done on the craving stomach and suffering frame of Mrs Tewler. Poor Mother Eve, from first to last thou and all thy seed have been the victims of the Salesman! For so it was we lost our paradise, when the first salesman sold thee his fruit and lingerie. He proffered his free sample, he guaranteed satisaction. And until selling shall cease from the earth —. . . .

She stood in her bedroom wearily taking her doses, hoping she had not forgotten anything, and listening to her ever more sinister internal noises. Then she would feel herself all over for growths and tumours. Often she felt quite hard ones.

She told everybody she could all about her sufferings, and Mr Myame called her “Our Dear Martyred Sister.” And he told her, all this will be returned to you a thousandfold, which possibly was not exactly what he intended to say. Some of the other members of the inner circle were fairly good at affliction, but none could produce anything to equal hers either in depth or variety. Mrs Humbelay one day described an artificial hernia to her, and remarked that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and Mrs Tewler said, “If it comes to that, my dear, I think I would rather die. . . . ”

But hernia she was mercifully spared. It did not come to that. The salesmen could make nothing out of artificial hernias.

She clang so desperately to life; because where would her Only One be without her? And it is to be noted that very little of this remedial struggle of hers extended to him. But that was because she was able to observe her own terrible symptoms, while, after one single experience with some tonic drops, nothing would induce Edward Albert to admit he had any symptoms at all. His demonstration of his extreme vitality on a later occasion included an attempt to stand on his head which was only partially successful and led to the breaking of a plate.

“You cannot be too careful”— she coughed from her chair — she was developing her pleurisy that day. “Doing that might lead to a rush of blood to the head and apoplexy. Promise me, whatever happens, you will never attempt that again.”

She had a spasm of pain. “He’s not much use, darling, but do you know I feel so queer that I think I ought to see Dr Gabbidash. If you’ll go round for him. He might at least give me a morphia injection.”

The good doctor did, and in the course of a week assisted her departure from this vale of trial and error in a soundly professional manner. For she really had pleurisy. She had brought herself down to a vulnerability that gave any old germs a fair chance with her. Their blitzkrieg was swift and successful.

During her final phase of medicated malaise Mrs Tewler made several wills, couched for the most part in a richly pious phraseology. The valid instrument left a number of trifling souvenirs to various friends, including a marked Bible and a silver-framed photograph for her dear friend Mrs Humbelay, and named Mr Myame as sole executor, trustee and guardian for her son until the dear child was twenty-one, exhorting the young man to trust and obey his guardian as a Father and more than a Father, a Guide and a Wise Dear Friend.

Edward Albert listened to these dispositions without an excessive display of emotion.

He looked at the lawyer and he looked at Mr Myame, He sat on the edge of his chair meagre and wary.

“I suppose it ‘ad to be,” he said with resignation, He sucked his teeth for a moment.

“Who was that Mr Whittaker who sent that great wreath?” he asked. “What sort of relation is he to me?”

Neither of them could tell him.

Then he reflected, “I didn’t know Mother was nearly so bad as she was. No. . . . I suppose it ‘ad to be. . . . That was — it was”— gulp —“a lovely wreath anyhow, She would have liked. . . . ”

And suddenly his white little face crumpled up and he was weeping.

“You have lost the Noblest and the very best of Mothers,” said Mr Myame. “That Sainted Brave Woman. . . . ”

Edward Albert had acquired a habit of never listening to what Mr Myame might be saying. He wiped his miserable sniffing face with the back of a dirty little hand. He was only beginning to realise what all this meant to him. Day or night she would never be there any more. Never. He wouldn’t go home to her presently and tell her things to his credit, true or false according to circumstances, and bask in the love she bore him. She wouldn’t be there. She wasn’t there. She’d gone!

Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 12:02


text:
How to Clear Snow & Ice Without Harming the Environment

enviro girlLet’s talk about clearing snow first–when Enviro-Girl lived in town, she marveled at the gigantic snow blowers her neighbors employed to clear 20-40 feet of sidewalk and a short driveway to the street. Shoveling is fantastic exercise–guaranteeing sweat and increased heart rate within ten minutes–and it’s the friendliest way to move the snow aside.  (Take a moment to appreciate the irony of someone using a snowblower to clear their driveway before they drive to the gym to exercise…doesn’t make much sense, does it?)  The trick to making shoveling a reasonable task is using the correct tool–a shovel appropriate for your build and height–and attacking the snow in manageable bits.  If 6 or more inches are expected to fall, it’s smartest to shovel two to three times so you’re only clearing a few inches at a time.  This helps your back and makes the whole job easier.  If you can’t do this, only clear what’s necessary in the first round and clear the rest later.  A 2-foot wide path is adequate for mail carriers and pedestrians, and you might consider only clearing a path to one entrance of your house and let the other access point alone.

If you’re inclined to remove snow using industrial-strength machinery like Enviro-Girl’s husband, remember that bigger isn’t always better.  A plow attached to an ATV uses less fuel and makes less noise than his 6.5 hp snow blowing machine.  (Enviro-Girl thinks her hubby is overcompensating every time he buys equipment with engines…you should see his chainsaw.)  An electric snowblower (Toro makes one that runs about $299) uses less energy, makes less noise, and gives off  no emissions in stark contrast to its gas-powered counterparts–so if you must blow snow, electric is definitely the way to go.  Enviro Girl would argue that MOST of the time, a shovel and broom are sufficient tools for clearing away snow.

snowBut snow’s only part of the problem in the winter.  Ice simply must be dealt with and there are a couple of methods–first, you can chip it away, potentially damaging your concrete/black top beneath.  Second, you can employ other substances to gain traction on the ice until it melts naturally–sand, cat litter, bird seed, ashes and fertilizer are good choices.  These things won’t melt your ice, but they’ll help you travel over it safely until the sunshine does it’s part.  (Enviro-Girl is going to try used coffee grounds next time–but she has a strict rule about no shoes or boots in the house!)  A third option is melting the ice.  Some places install heated walkways and driveways–radiant heat systems that run hot water pipes below the brick or concrete.  These still use a lot of energy.

Unfortunately, most people turn to salt the second they spot ice on the road or sidewalk.  Rock salt melts ice and is fairly inexpensive, but it’s really tough on plant life and when it drains away through storm sewers it can mess up ecosystems, killing fish, plant life and other creatures.  Also, salt doesn’t disappear in the soil, it remains there, making the soil less productive for growing anything.  If you have invested in your garden and yard, the last thing you want to do is dump salt on it.  Road salt also leeches into drinking water supplies and harms pets.  Salt is also corrosive on cars, skin, and road surfaces. Recent research suggests using Calcium Chloride to be the safest alternative for melting ice–you can read more of Iowa State University’s report here.   The problem is, it’s three times as costly as rock salt and can still cause skin irritation.

This particular winter has created a shortage of road salt in many parts of America and many municipalities are turning to other beet juice, brine, molasses and a volcanic rock to clear ice from roads.  These alternatives are safer than salt, and hopefully this winter’s shortage and the sheer expense of road salt will encourage more road crews to consider different solutions.

At the end of all her research, Enviro-Girl plans to use sand to gain traction on the ice, chip away at it with her handy chipping tool (a great work out!) and pray for warmer temps soon.  She’s also writing to her county representatives to applaud their liberal use of sand instead of salt to manage roadways this winter.

One  more thing Enviro-Girl learned about this topic:  if you let an ice storm fall on a cleared driveway, you have a skating rink that is impossible to clear.  If you let an ice storm fall on a snowy driveway, you can shovel it off pretty easily.  In this case, a little laziness paid off.

2 thoughts on “How to Clear Snow & Ice Without Harming the Environment

  1. All true! I don’t fuss with my husband’s snowblower because I’ve been physically unable to shovel for a few years. He’s very good about only using it when he feels he “must”, so I’ll let that one go. Litter is my go-to for traction, and salt is a last resort. I do laugh (silently) at the neighbor men when they seem to compete to clear more and more sidewalk.

  2. I’m lucky to have teenage sons when it comes to shoveling the driveway. I actually enjoy doing it myself when not dealing with a physical ailment. When we get more than a few inches overnight, , the neighbor across the street has a large snowblower which she can no longer handle; in exchange for my husband clearing off her driveway and front walk, he borrows it to do ours as well.
    Most of our larger tools are electric — I love having a quiet lawnmower!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Fitzgerald is making the rounds

Champaign (Ill.) Centennial junior quarterback recruit Jimmy Fitzgerald (6-foot-2, 213 pounds) made a weekend visit to Notre Dame. Fitzgerald talks about his visit and more in this latest recruitin...

Premium Content

Subscribe today to read the full article and get everything Rivals has to offer.

  • Member-only message boards
  • Exclusive highlights and recruiting interviews
  • Exclusive coverage of Rivals Camp Series
  • Breaking recruiting news


text:
CASE Tools

CASE stands for Computer Aided Software Engineering is the scientific application of a set of tools and methods to a software system which is meant to result in high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software products. It also refers to methods for the development of information systems together with automated tools that can be used in the software development process.

CASE tools are a class of software that automate many of the activities involved in various life cycle phases.The main purpose of using a CASE tool is to produce error-free, easy to maintain program code. It also allows users to develop software systems more quickly than would be possible without the use of such a tool.Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools offer many benefits for developers building large-scale systems. As spiraling user requirements continue to drive system complexity to new levels, CASE tools enable software engineers to abstract away from the entanglement of source code, to a level where architecture and design become more apparent and easier to understand and modify. The larger a project, the more important it is to use a CASE tool in software development.

As developers interact with portions of a system designed by their colleagues, they must quickly seek a subset of classes and methods and assimilate an understanding of how to interface with them. In a similar sense, management must be able, in a timely fashion and from a high level, to look at a representation of a design and understand what’s going on. For these reasons, CASE tools coupled with methodologies give us a way of representing systems too complex to comprehend in their underlying source code or schema-based form.

A CASE tool often allows developers to program visually as well as use Object Oriented Programming (OOP) methods. A Unified Markup Language (UML) design tool is an example of a CASE tool. System design documents and program code may be generated by the tool as part of the visual design, thus reducing development time and increasing accuracy of the documents and code.

Why use CASE tools?
CASE tools offer:

  • Savings in resources required for software development – with less
  • Quicker development phase (i.e. shorter time to market)
  • Reduction of generation of defects
  • Easier identification of defects during development
  • Savings in maintenance resources required
  • Greater standardization of software systems and therefore increased reuse possibilities
  • Reduction of effort needed on development

Benefits of CASE Tools :

• Increase the speed

CASE tools provide automation and reduce the time to complete the jobs, especially jobs that involve drawing and related specifications.

• Improve Accuracy
CASE tools can provide ongoing debugging and error checking which is critical in eliminating the early damage, which plays an important role in determining the modern software. If the correction is performed in the early stages, such as the design stage, it will save time and effort. When the system grew, the system will be more difficult to modify. Searching the error becomes more difficult.

• Reducing Maintenance Time
CASE provides a tool for re-enginering important because it makes the process efficient, saving time and cost by finding the old parts of the system that can be reused.

• Better documentation
Many tools have revisions for comments and notes on system development and maintenance.

• Programming by Non-Programmers
With the development of object-oriented technology and client server, programming can also be done by people who do not have a programming background. Important to understand the logic of the program and have the ability to analyze organizational program used in building good software. By using lower case tool, it is possible to develop software from the initial design and analysis phase.

• Intangible Benefit
CASE Tool can be used to engage users, so we get a good reception to the new system.

The major benefits of using CASE tools include the following:

  • Improved productivity
  • Better documentation
  • Improved accuracy
  • Intangible benefits
  • Improved quality
  • Reduced lifetime maintenance
  • Opportunity to non-programmers
  • Reduced cost of software
  • Produce high-quality and consistent documents
  • Impact on the style of a working of company
  • Reduce the drudgery in a software engineer’s work
  • Increase speed of processing
  • Easy to program software
  • Improved coordination among staff members who are working on a large software project
  • An increase in project control through better planning, monitoring, and communication

CASE Tool’s Classification:

a. Upper CASE Tools/Front-end CASE Tools. These CASE tools are designed to support the analysis and design phases of the SDLC. all analysis, design, and specification tools are front-end tools. These tools also include computer-aided diagramming tools oriented towards a particular programming design methodology, and more recently including object-oriented design.
The general types of upper CASE tools are listed below:
– Diagramming tools: Diagramming tools enable system process, data, and control structures to be represented graphically. They strongly support analysis and documentation of application requirements.
– Form and report generator tools: They support the creation of system forms and reports in order to show how systems will “look and feel” to users.
– Analysis tools: Analysis tools enable automatic checking for incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect specifications in diagrams, forms, and reports.
b. Lower CASE or Back-end tools. These CASE tools are designed to support the implementation and maintenance phases of the SDLC. All generator, translation, and testing tools are back-end tools.
The general types of lower CASE tools are:
– Code Generators: Code generators automate the preparation of computer software. Code generation is not yet perfect. thus, the best generator will produce approximately 75% of the source code for an application. Hand-coding is still necessary.
c. Cross life-cycle CASE or Integrated Tools. These CASE tools are used to support activities that occur across multiple phases of the SDLC. While such tools include both front-end and back-end capabilities, they also facilitate design, management, and maintenance of code. In addition, they provide an efficient environment for the creation, storage, manipulation, and documentation of systems.
d. Reverse-engineering Tools. These tools build bridges from lower CASE tools to upper CASE tools. They help in the process of analyzing existing applications and perform and database code to create higher level representations of the code.

Sample for Visual Case Tool Software

Sample for Visual Case Tool Software

Characteristics of CASE Tools:
All CASE tools have the following characteristics:

  • a graphic interface to draw diagrams, charts, models (uppercase, middlecase, lowercase)
  • an information repository, a data dictionary for efficient information-management selection, usage, application, and storage.
  • common user interface for integration of multiple tools used in various phases.
  • automatic code generators.
  • automatic testing tools.

List of CASE tools:

No. Application CASE tool Purpose of Tool
1. Planning Excel spreadsheet, Ms Project, PERT/CPM Network, Estimation tools Functional Application: Planning, scheduling, control
2. Editing Diagram editors, Text editors, Word processors Speed and Efficiency
3. Testing Test-data generators, File comparators Speed and Efficiency
4. Prototyping High-level modeling language, User-interface generators Confirmation and certification of RDD and SRS
5. Documentation Report generators, Publishing imaging, PPT presentation Faster structural documentation with quality of presentation
6. Programming and Language-processing integration Program generators, Code generators, Compilers, Intepreters interface, connectivity Programming of high quality with no errors, system integration
7. Templates Guided systematic development
8. Re-engineering tools Cross-reference systems, program re-structuring systems Reverse-engineering to find structure, design, and design information
9. Program analysis tools Cross-reference generators Static analyzers, dynamic analyzers analyzes risks, functions, features

Disadvantages of CASE tools:
1. Purchasing of CASE tools is Not an Easy Task. The cost of CASE tools is very high. For this reason small software development firms do not invest in CASE tools.
2. Learning Curve. In general, programmer productivity may fall in the initial phase of implementation as users need time to learn this technology.
3. Tool Mix. It is important to make proper selection of CASE tools to get maximum benefits from the tools, as the wrong selection may lead to the wrong results.

About iamsolusi

just ordinary people

Posted on February 28, 2012, in Software Development and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this:


text:
Arne Duncan’s Nose

Arne Duncan had a few self-deprecating zings before releasing the finalized version of the National Education Technology Plan 2010, the first plan since the 2004 plan. “I first want to apologize for my broken nose,” said Duncan, speaking to the State Educational Technology Director’s Association (SETDA). “Karen [Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education] and I were meeting about two weeks ago. I said, ‘Karen, I just don’t think technology’s very important as we move forward’. It was like, ‘Bam!’ and here we are [laughter]. No. No, I uh… [more laughter] uh… that’s a joke! [even more laughter] Alright, I hurt it playing basketball and it wasn’t the President, so… that was the other question I was asked. But, I’m thrilled to be here today…”

The plan sets goals to achieve by 2015, laying out how technology can transform student learning. The plan, “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology”—seeks to change five areas of education with technology: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure and productivity. Instead of an add-on or an enriching supplement, this plan considers technology to play a core role in accomplishing the Administration’s goals for education. Indeed, Duncan had no quarrel with Cator when it came to ensuring technology was a centerpiece to the Administration’s reform efforts.

Led by the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, the plan’s development involved the most rigorous and inclusive process ever undertaken for a national education technology plan. Leveraging input from hundreds of educators and experts with an open comment window and technical working groups over the course of nearly a year, the plan’s development process underscored the increased role technology is playing in education reform. So, here’s the plan. What do you think?

This entry was posted in trends. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Interview | Moving From NCLB to No Child Held Back

No Child Held Back is a consortium of parents, teachers, school administrators, learning experts, citizens, business leaders, education publishers, and technology providers who are dedicated to transforming education. Their vision is the creation of an effective, flexible, student-centered education system that helps all students achieve their full academic and personal potential. The group was founded by NaMaYa Inc., a leading online learning platform as a service provider. Yovel Badash, founder of NaMaYa, was a technology leader in several tech companies and for the past four years his focus has been almost exclusively on the challenges facing the education market. After reading this in-depth interview with Yovel about their goals, purposes and why this approach is vital for every educator to understand, learn more and join the conversation at

Victor: Why is it called No Child Held Back?

Yovel: It is my personal belief that no children anywhere in the world should be held back from reaching their full potential. We should not accept the fact that in the 21st century—with all the technology and resources available—that most children are actually held back from achieving their true potential. NCHB is our vision.  It is the reason we are in business.

The idea of No Child Held Back underscores the difference between our vision of student-centered education and optimal personal achievement for all children and the punitive, testing-focused No Child Left Behind legislation designed to limit the number of failing students. The growing, broad-based criticism of this law and its effects on education underscore the need for significant education reform in the US.

We believe that every child wants to learn and use their natural curiosity to learn new things. The main issue is that the education systems around the world are designed in a very specific way that is not aligned with the NCHB approach. The problem is not teachers or schools—it is the approach. We hope to change that.

Victor: Can you elaborate on some of the perspectives in this approach?

Yovel: Well, it is hard to encapsulate so many items in one short summary. The main perspective is that transforming the goal of the education system from uniformity to no child held back fundamentally changes everything else, too. Every part of the system is affected: the role of the teacher, the purpose of tests, the connection between schools and communities, the way we teach—and even what we teach.

We believe that you can only reach true academic and overall excellence when you focus on ensuring that every child reaches his or her maximum potential—when you don’t hold any child back.  There is a lot of data out there. It’s time for new technologies and teaching approaches to come to the forefront and make a difference.

We are not interested in debating esoteric theories or future innovations. We are taking a very pragmatic approach in order to effect real-world change today. We are developing a very detailed step-by-step technology adoption/development approach to enable schools and districts to adopt the No Child Held Back framework now—in time to help the current generation of students.

Visit our website and take a look at our white paper at for a more complete treatment of these perspectives.

In addition, we have created a short online course titled: No Child Held Back: Putting a New Face on 21st Century Reform. This course is offered free-of-charge and we would like to encourage those interested in education at all levels to register and enroll in this course taking the first step to realizing a world where no child is held back.

Victor: What is new and unique about this new approach?

Yovel: The focus changes completely. No Child Held Back is not about assessing cohorts of children as a single entity based on age. It is about evaluating each child individually. Where does he excel? What drives her to succeed? Then, a skilled teacher can adjust the yearly curriculum and assess progress specifically for each student. Students can speed through the units they understand easily, spend a little more time on the ones that challenge them.

Each student is a unique individual. They all have unique strengths, interests and preferred learning modalities. Each body of knowledge could be taught in many different ways. No Child Held Back is designed to accommodate these individual variations and use them to help all students learn more and at a faster overall pace than traditional approaches that treat everyone the same way and offer only one way to master a body of knowledge.

The novelty of the NCHB approach is that we want to turn that around. And I honestly think we can because all of the relevant technology and research exists. Now it is a question of creating the right momentum and environment to get this reform process started.

Victor: How does this compare to other education reform initiatives out there?

Yovel: There are many initiatives around the country—and the world, for that matter—that are making a difference. We would rather not compare the different education reforms out there, but actually unite them. Under one theme and one conversation, we can all benefit from productive education reform initiatives. Our approach is that we should not try to do it one by one, but join forces as a group. We welcome anyone to join our steering committee or just be an active member of our community. We hope that through the NCHB consortium, more of what works will surface and get implemented.

It is clear that there is no single approach or technology or company that can fit the needs of every school in every country around the world. An open, flexible and adaptive approach is key because the world is evolving fast and what’s true today won’t be true tomorrow. Just a few years ago—no one imagined the iPad or the smart-phone revolution. As we implement new education practices, new studies and feedback about the new programs will guide us to create future innovations that no one can foresee now.

Victor: What is the end goal of this concept?

Yovel: The true end goal is to help create a world where every child everywhere in the world can get the best education available anywhere. We can create a world where it really does not matter where you were born or who were your parents—only your given and developed talents and knowledge would limit you from reaching your dreams.

In the short term, we would like to ignite a conversation around the world that includes everyone who cares about education and its future. We are creating a platform for education reform conversation and knowledge that drives change one school, teacher and student at a time.

As I mentioned, we developed an introductory course and are actively working on a comprehensive education reform course that would enable anyone around the world to execute on their reform approach and be a positive force within their local environment.

We have the ideas, the execution plan and the passion to make this happen. Now all we need is a few hundred other people, crazy like us, to help get this to the next level.

Victor: What can people do if they want to get involved?

Yovel: That really depends on who they are. Teachers and other educators who want to help drive reform at their school can find resources to help on Parents and students can join to help influence our approach and short term priorities. Businesses and other individuals can use our platform to drive change and share their perspectives on the reforms needed in education. Technology providers can join our consortium and bring their success stories to the front of the stage.

In general, everyone who cares about education can join the movement. Contact us at and we will guide you to the right place

Victor: Who is your target market with this new framework?

Yovel: Initially, we would like to focus on educators and education reform leaders. We would like to support the grass-roots movement that is growing and moving toward these kinds of reforms. It would be ideal if we could get some government education leaders to participate and help us share this approach within their local areas.

Eventually, we would like to include anyone who thinks the education system could/should improve and want to take action to do something about it. Action is the key word. The education technology and reform market has far too much talk and theories and far too little action.

We want to understand that this is not a short journey. There are no quick fixes or Band-aids to solve the complex problems we face. The journey is worth the effort because the future of our children depends on the actions we take today.

Victor: What is the feedback you are already getting from the market?

Yovel: The feedback we are getting is overwhelming. We have shared this approach with dozens of educators and business leaders and so far the feedback ranges from fairly optimistic to very excited.

It seems like the education reform conversation needs a fresh, new approach. The market seems to be tired of rehashing the same old ideas. Most of the people who have read our white paper/manifesto tell us that it addresses most of the major elements they struggle with and that our approach has the most promise of actually changing something.

But we don’t pretend to know everything. It is really important to include multiple viewpoints—even criticisms—in the debate if we are collectively to find real, long-lasting solutions to our complex education problems. The bottom line is simple: how can we find solutions to ensure no child will be held back?

Whether it’s legislation, technology development and adoption, or research and methodologies—we need to get going and start thinking in new ways. We need to inspire and excite teachers, educators, students and parents. We need to get the local populations and business community involved with our schools. There are so many amazing opportunities for improvement that we simply cannot ignore what these changes would mean for our future—locally and globally.

Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place to live in; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” We might not be able to stop evil, but we can certainly work together to stamp out ignorance and intellectual mediocrity.

Victor: What are your plans for the future around this?

Yovel: We believe that with the right ecosystem of partners and committed people joining forces in schools, districts and communities around the country, we could revolutionize the education system in the United States and allow it to take a leadership role in global education. But we have to start somewhere so our short-term goal is to raise awareness and engage as many people as possible in a national conversation about student-centered learning and education transformation.

We have a pretty clear plan for making this happen, but are maintaining the flexibility to adjust accordingly as other companies and organizations join the consortium. I urge everyone who believes that our education system needs reform to join the conversation. Indifference and cynicism are the movement’s greatest enemies. Transforming No Child Held Back from a vision to reality will require the dedication, determination and perspiration of many thousands of teachers, administrators, parents, business leaders and citizens throughout the country.

Victor: Anything else you would like to point out?

Yovel: Perhaps just two main take-aways:

1) The No Child Held Back approach is the right overarching approach for education reform. It has the right elements and the potential to revolutionize our education system to help students at every level truly achieve education excellence.

2) Now is the time! We already have what we need to make this vision a reality. It is time to stop debating about reform and start to make this happen. I think we would be surprised as to how much progress we can make if we just allow ourselves to be inspired and dream.

Victor Rivero tells the story of 21st-century education transformation. He is the editor-in-chief of EdTech Digest, a magazine about education transformed through technology. He has written white papers, articles and features for schools, nonprofits and companies in the education marketplace. Write to:

This entry was posted in interviews, trends and tagged , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Interview | Moving From NCLB to No Child Held Back

  1. Pingback: No Child Held Back « A citizen’s blog about Champaign Unit 4

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Logo

You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s


text:
Find out more

Letters of the alphabet – advice for parents

Add to My Folder

This resource has not been rated yet. (Write a review)

Click to download

A theme based on the ‘alphabet’ can be used to develop an extensive range of exciting play and craft activities across the curriculum at home. Help your child to learn the alphabet with these quick and easy activities.

Viewing PDF files

Our downloadable resource sheets are in PDF format. To view these you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the latest version from Adobe


text:
MJ’s Dream Lives On & MJ Studies Today

July, as expected, is shaping up to be a joyful month.

The Journal of Michael Jackson Academic Studiespublished the first part of our four documentary interview episodes with yours truly, Elizabeth Amisu, discussing my academic book, The Dangerous Philosophies of Michael Jackson: His Music, His Persona, and His Artistic Afterlife.

In these episodes I explain my journey in Michaeling, my fan experience, how the book started, where my inspiration came from, my process behind writing and all of the 21 chapters. These episodes will be rolled out over the next few weeks up until the book’s release.

My column, MJ Studies Today is now live for July and it is all about the movement of ideas in Michael Jackson Studies, and something which I call the quest for infinity, a concept that goes beyond the ideas, behind the man and behind the mirror.

It’s all for love,

Eliza x

%d bloggers like this: