Public access television has been one of the most interesting and controversial developments in the intersection between media and democracy within the past several decades. Beginning in the 1970s, cable systems began to offer access channels to the public, so that groups and individuals could make programs for other individuals in their own communities. Access systems began to proliferate and access programming has been cablecast regularly in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Madison, Urbana, Austin, (...) and perhaps as many as 4,000 other towns or regions (Linder.. (shrink)

Since 2009, the Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK has produced a number of slow TV shows. Some of the programmes have had a surprisingly big success in terms of public engagement and audience share even though the majority of the audience was from the oldest age groups. These programmes are not only slow, lasting a long time and lacking dramatic development and progress, they also engage in a particular, traditional version of national identity. The current article argues that, through slow (...) TV, the Norwegian public service broadcaster has found a new way to reflect a particular version of Norwegian identity and to tap into the central values of Norwegian culture. Taken together, the shows cover all regions of the country—the coastal areas as well the inlands and mountains. In terms of representation, the programmes highlight nature and traditional Norwegian values such as closeness to nature, rural life, and “friluftsliv” (living the outdoor life). Urban areas and the non-white population are conspicuously absent. (shrink)

The medical drama and its central character, the doctor-hero have been a mainstay of popular television. House M.D. offers a new (and problematic) iteration of the doctor-hero. House eschews the generic conventions of the “television doctor” by being neither the idealized television doctor of the past, nor the more recent competent but often fallible physicians in entertainment texts. Instead, his character is a fragmented text which privileges the biomedical over the personal or emotional with the ultimate goal (...) of scientifically uncovering and resolving instances of disease. This article examines the implicit and explicit messages in House M.D. and critically analyzes both the show and its lead character in relation to the traditional medical drama genre that highlights the “doctor-hero” as the central character. While at first House seems to completely violate narrative and generic norms, ultimately the program provides a new form that reinforces the presence of the doctor-hero, but highlights House’s character as the central figure who is personally and interpersonally problematic but biomedically effective. (shrink)

Fiction television series are one of the few cultural expressions in which men’s infertility experiences are represented. Through a content analysis of twenty fiction series, this article describes and analyzes such representations. By drawing on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity and Ricoeur’s understanding of paradoxical power structuring, four character types of infertile men are identified: (1) the virile in/fertile man, (2) the secretly non-/vasectomized man, (3) the intellectual eunuch, (4) the enslaving post-apocalyptic man. While these various dramatis persona outline (...) different ways of how infertile men relate to normative hegemonic masculinity, they all represent infertile men as diverging from shared masculine norms. This non-normativity initially excludes many represented men from hegemonic positions. Eventually, however, these men generally aspire to and succeed in reaffirming their hegemonic masculinity through coercive force towards women and other men, through instigating the precondition for any power structure – the shared will to live together as a community –, and/or by seeking and finding explicit recognition for their normativity and dominance. At the end of this paper, I will reflect on the potential harmful effect of these outlined representations of infertile men and make a plea for diversifying representations of infertile men in our culture. (shrink)

Amid the action of the 2013 Super Bowl aired the usual array of high-priced advertisements. Most ads were original. Some were unusual. One regional ad, however, seemed distantly familiar. The 30-second commercial promoted the NJOY King electronic cigarette1 to at least 10 million viewers in several major markets. It featured an attractive male model taking a drag from what looks like a cigarette. He then slowly blows smoke to the tune of Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time.” Of course, (...) the “smoke” does not come from burning tobacco. Rather, it is the water vapor produced by an e-cigarette as part of its nicotine delivery process. This, however, was not evident from the imagery. For those watching the broadcast, including thousands of minors, NJOY’s advertisement depicted what tobacco companies have not portrayed on television for decades: a person engaged in smoking behavior. (shrink)

Based on cloud computing and statistics theory, this paper proposes a reasonable analysis method for big data of film and television. The method selects Hadoop open source cloud platform as the basis, combines the MapReduce distributed programming model and HDFS distributed file storage system and other key cloud computing technologies. In order to cope with different data processing needs of film and television industry, association analysis, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and K-mean + association analysis algorithm training model were (...) applied to model, process, and analyze the full data of film and TV series. According to the film type, producer, production region, investment, box office, audience rating, network score, audience group, and other factors, the film and television data in recent years are analyzed and studied. Based on the study of the impact of each attribute of film and television drama on film box office and TV audience rating, it is committed to the prediction of film and television industry and constantly verifies and improves the algorithm model. (shrink)

The present article is on the linguistic characteristics of a corpus of letters sent to the television broadcast Buona Domenica, transmitted between 1980 and 1995 by RTL Luxembourg. This corpus contains 600 letters sent to the editorial staff by Italians or other nationalities interested in the Italian language and culture, residing in Luxembourg or in the neighbouring countries: Belgium, France and Germany (the Great Region). The vivacity and spontaneity of theses letters presents us a period of time that precedes (...) the globalization of the mass media and is not so far from our present time. Each letter chosen for this article highlights especially the relationship that bound emigrants to the autochthonous language and to the memory of their mother tongue, almost always a dialect. (shrink)

The present article is on the linguistic characteristics of a corpus of letters sent to the television broadcast Buona Domenica, transmitted between 1980 and 1995 by RTL Luxembourg. This corpus contains 600 letters sent to the editorial staff by Italians or other nationalities interested in the Italian language and culture, residing in Luxembourg or in the neighbouring countries: Belgium, France and Germany. The vivacity and spontaneity of theses letters presents us a period of time that precedes the globalization of (...) the mass media and is not so far from our present time. Each letter chosen for this article highlights especially the relationship that bound emigrants to the autochthonous language and to the memory of their mother tongue, almost always a dialect. (shrink)

Television pictures of starvation and depredation are not the only way that famine and political instability in the horn of Africa have affected the United States. Many people from that region of the world are seeking political or economic refuge here, and they are exposing us to a culture that is in some ways — most notably, in the practice of female circumcision – so radically different from the prevailing American cultures that we have been stunned. They are also (...) forcing hospital ethics committees to face issues that cannot be resolved by the facile application of the settled principles that have guided those institutions for the past several years. Autonomy and multiculturalism, long the foundations of most ethics committee decision making, have started to give way to a list of formally articulated rights and wrongs – perhaps to a restatement and adoption of rules said to be based in natural law. Female circumcision, argues one newspaper letter writer, “is just a sickening display of male power disguised as legitimate dogma. (shrink)

Regional media have numerous functions towards the local community. It is owing to them that the inhabitants of a given area acquire knowledge about current events from all areas of life in the regional dimension. Sport is a special sphere – information about competitions at the regional level appears only in local media. The article analyses the contents of two Lodz-based media – namely printed press and television – in terms of the presence of information about (...) local sports competitions. (shrink)

Originally premiering in 1963, the BBC television series Doctor Who has long been criticized for essentializing colonial scenarios and failing to address issues of race and post-colonial realities. As a white male with the privilege to explore time and space, the titular Doctor stands in contrast to his human companion Martha Jones, a Black woman who represents the first and only main character in the show to be a medical professional of color. The relationship between the Doctor and Martha (...) inherently demands an exploration of the meaning of doctorhood. In studying the ways in which these characters embody the idea of “doctor,” we examine how race structures their approach to medicine, heroism, and colonialism. Whereas the Doctor personifies the figure of colonizer and post-colonial white savior, Martha emerges as a radical figure whose doctorhood potentially challenges and dismantles the colonial history of medicine. Through Afrofuturist and Afrosurrealist lenses, Martha represents a potentially subversive figure who offers a visionary medicine rooted in social justice. (shrink)

Over the last three years I have been fortunate to teach an unusual class, one that provides an academic background in ethical and social and political theory using the medium of comedy. I have taught the class at two schools, a private liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania and a public regional state university in southern Georgia. While the schools vary widely in a number of ways, there are characteristics that the students share: the school in Pennsylvania had a (...) large population of students raised in a middle class industrial context, and the school in Georgia had a majority of students from middle-to-lower class agricultural backgrounds. Because of recent collapses in the economy of the tool and dye industry in the Great Lakes region, and the ongoing concerns for development in rural and urban areas of the southeastern United States, both groups of students were in similarly dire economic and working conditions. All faced the distinct possibility that they would not do as well in life as their parents. Most of the students grew up with television and film and had a love of comedy when they arrived at college. -/- Entertainment and mass media contributed to the students' mindset and the lens through which they viewed and interpreted their lived experience. Comedic mass media in the form of television sitcoms and films were common choices for inexpensive entertainment, in their childhood, in their past, in their homes, and now in their college dorms and apartments. In asking students to connect their own history with cultural trends depicted in comedy in film and television, even through the history of television, gave the students a familiar venue to critically consider their own intellectual growth and development and that of American society as a whole. -/- Many of them were familiar with the internet, and enjoyed the internet as a source of information about celebrities as well as the history and episodes of their favorite television shows and films. Students are rediscovering and discovering television programs that their professors may have watched as children, with the availability of a wide range of comedy television programs available on cable, especially TVLand, Comedy Central and Nick-at-Night. -/- In this article I will elaborate on the value of comedy as a teaching tool for philosophers and professors. I will provide a number of examples, showing how comedy can provide fertile examples of ethical theory at work, and I will show how comedy can be used to clarify cultural norms and values. Finally, I will discuss the political activism and student empowerment involved in teaching Philosophy, Comedy and Film in southern Georgia. (shrink)

Durante las últimas décadas, la vinculación entre las imágenes y la seguridad pública se profundizó en dimensiones impensadas. Las políticas de seguridad incorporaron sistemáticamente circuitos cerrados de televisión (CCTV) para monitoreo del espacio público entre sus tecnologías para el control social y la prevención situacional del delito. Producto de la expansión de la video-vigilancia, comenzó a crecer notablemente el interés académico por la temática, sobre todo en Europa y América del Norte. América Latina, por su parte, se ha incorporado a (...) estos debates más recientemente. El artículo propone un recorrido por los trabajos que han analizado el uso de cámaras de seguridad desde distintas perspectivas teóricas y metodológicas. Esta reconstrucción del estado del arte se organiza a partir de los aspectos de la video-vigilancia que han sido privilegiados: el diálogo teórico con nociones como el control social, el panoptismo y las biopolíticas; la efectividad en la reducción del delito; el rol en la delimitación de las ciudades y clasificación social; el marco normativo y el conflicto con ciertos derechos individuales. El objetivo es reponer los debates que surgen al interior de este eje temático y dar cuenta de algunas cuestiones aún escasamente abordadas en el ámbito de la investigación regional. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Organ Transplant AllocationPat Milmoe McCarrick (bio)The introduction of the antibiotic, cyclosporin, which enhances the success rate of transplantation surgery, has resulted in the steady growth of organ transplantation since the mid-1980s. This growth increasingly focuses ethical interest on both the procurement and the allocation of human organs. Not everyone who might benefit from organ transplants can receive them since the number of patients in need of organs far exceeds (...) the number of organs available. Each year the waiting list for transplants increases by 20 percent, but the number of donated organs has remained stable for the past five years (Lawry 1994).Organ transplantation surgery performed on rock stars, sports heroes, politicians, and television celebrities brings questions about the fair allocation of scarce resources to the attention of everyone. Abigail Trafford, editor of Washington Post Health, wonders whether "new livers for hard livers" can be deserved when not enough organs are available for everyone who needs them. Writing about the dilemma of just allocation of organs, she calls famous recipients "poster patients" or "health care celebrities of medical catastrophe" (Trafford 1994). Personal responsibility—the viewpoint that "medical treatment should not be an entitlement program for profligate living"—is an emerging moral consideration according to Trafford. Deciding whose standards and values should apply to the allocation of organs raises many questions. Popular arguments for keeping the current criteria for allocation include: these patients are sick and therefore should be treated, regardless of the cause of their illness; former substance abusers should be able to benefit from their present abstention; physicians should treat anyone who is ill; and although many human illnesses may be caused by individual behavior, such behavior is not always used as a reason to deny care (Trafford 1995).Prior to 1984, when the government established regulations governing organ transplantation, organs routinely were given to the patients of the surgeons who excised them (Prottas 1994). In an effort to achieve a more equitable method of distribution, Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (Pub. [End Page 365] L. No. 98-507, amended by Pub. L. No. 100607 and Pub. L. No. 101-616), which established a national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) to improve the effectiveness of organ procurement, organ distribution, and transplant activities. The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) received the federal government contract to be the OPTN.UNOS and its 66 regional organ procurement organizations (OPOs) around the nation have carried out the mandate since 1986. It requires hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid funds and perform transplants to belong to the network and to allocate organs according to network policies. UNOS maintains the national computer registry to match donor organs with individual recipients. In distributing organs, UNOS is required by law to use a fair and equitable system based on accepted medical criteria. UNOS regularly reevaluates its policies to ensure that organ donation and recipient selection meet criteria of efficiency and equity (UNOS Update 11 (8), 1995).At the end of June 1995, 278 transplant centers were in operation in the United States: almost all of them (247 centers) transplanted kidneys; 167 did hearts; 119, pancreases; 114, livers; 93, heart-lung; 88, lungs; 26, intestines; and only 19 centers performed pancreas islet cell transplants (UNOS Update 11 (8): 28, 1995). The number of patients waiting for organ transplants in July 1995 totalled 41,075: 29,274 were waiting for a kidney transplant; 4,937, liver; 3,298, heart; 1,816, lung; 1,223 kidney-pancreas; 240, pancreas; and 211, heart-lung (UNOS Update 11 (8): 40-41, 1995).OPOs are located in different geographic areas across the country, each with different organ needs, lengths of waiting lists, or with lists in areas with large older populations making it more difficult to find suitable donors. Black recipients often wait longer due to complex reasons including sensitization or rarer blood and antigen types (UNOS 11 (8): 31-32, 1995). When an organ becomes available, the OPO involved identifies a potential recipient from the UNOS list and offers it to the patient's surgeon. If no match can be made locally, the organ is next offered within a UNOS region, and finally, to... (shrink)

This essay articulates one way to conduct a cultural intervention from the Asia/Pacific region that recognizes the cultural governance of “Other” traffics. I investigate the discursive framework of Charlie Chan and Hawai'i detective fiction to inform the ways in which nation-states police cultural difference and enact geo-cultural homogeneity. I contend that Charlie Chan acts as a narrative of containment by inscribing and transcribing those spaces, times and bodies that would otherwise disrupt the national field of America. In particular, the imaginative (...) geography of Charlie Chan not only affirms the tropical paradise coding of Hawai'i, it attempts to provide disciplinary insights from the perspective of a “native informant”; the figure of Charlie Chan translates and forecloses the discordant rhythms of minority and “native” communities in ways that enable the production of popular television shows such as Hawaii Five-O, Magnum P.I. and Baywatch Hawaii. However,despite this national deployment of Charlie Chan, I want to suggest that Charlie Chan can also be read as a tactic of geopolitical resistance. His figure can assume a parodic and critical stance in the form of a native mis-informant, and by so doing, his character insecures dark bodies, times, spaces of the Orient and the Oceanic. (shrink)

This paper describes some components of a working system which drives a vehicle through cluttered real world environments under computer control, guided by images perceived through an onboard television camera. The emphasis is on reliable and fast low level visual techniques which determine the existence and location of objects in the world, but do not identify them. They include an interest operator for choosing distinctive regions in images, a correlator for finding matching regions in similar images, a geometric camera (...) solver which determines camera displacement and distance to objects from motion stereo information and an automatic distortion corrector which compensates for camera imperfections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 201 Ileana Nachescu Censoring Anglogynophobia: Reconsidering the Disappearance of the National Alliance of Black Feminists Black women’s activism in the 1970s has often been located in the fissures between the civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement, and Black nationalism—a form of “interstitial feminism,” in the words of Kimberly Springer.1 Providing crucial interventions to disrupt male supremacy and sexism (...) within Black organizations as well as racism and homophobia within feminist organizations, Black feminist politics modeled a “vanguard center” whose liberation signaled the liberation of all.2 The Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” (1977), which has become a classic in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies curricula, encapsulates the power of this transformative image. The Combahee River Collective was not the only Black feminist group active in the second half of the 1970s, of course. The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), founded in 1969, had a vibrant presence on both the East Coast and the West Coast throughout this decade. The National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), active between 1973 and 1975, mobilized Black women around the country and gave the impetus for the formation of several local chapters. After NBFO ended, the 1. Kimberly Springer, “The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 156. 2. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 91. 202 Ileana Nachescu National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) became perhaps the bestknown Black women’s organization at the time due to appearances on national television, articles and essays published in multiple Black and feminist venues, and its attempt to build a national organization. In October 1977, NABF’s national conference, “A Meeting of the Minds,” attracted more than two hundred African American women to Chicago for two days in order to discuss their experiences, listen to speakers, and develop an agenda to address the most pressing issues of the day. To this day, the long list of resolutions passed at this conference constitutes the most comprehensive set of political, economic, and cultural demands collectively devised by African American women. Yet, more than four decades later, NABF has disappeared from public consciousness, remembered only by a small group of feminist historians. The erasure of NABF from women’s history and Black history is a puzzle—in part because the organization excelled at the kinds of activities that leave visible traces. In an interview with Kimberly Springer, Combahee River Collective founder Barbara Smith noted that “People who write get far more visibility than those who don’t.”3 But NABF Executive Director Brenda Eichelberger published many essays in regional and national periodicals documenting diverse initiatives by Black feminists in the 1970s. Furthermore, unlike many feminist organizations that did not record their operations or whose records have been lost, NABF intentionally gathered and preserved rich archival materials.4 Using materials from the National Alliance of Black Feminists archives, I suggest that NABF defies many received views about Black feminist activism, and this defiance makes attention to NABF all the more vital to the history of US feminism. By examining NABF’s original theorization of “Anglogynophobia,” Black women’s distrust of and animosity toward white women, I advance a much darker explanation for the 3. Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 75. 4. For this article, I have conducted research at the following archival sites: Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Chicago Public Library; Brenda Eichelberger / National Alliance of Black Feminists Papers, 1974–1997, Chicago History Museum Research Center; and National Black Feminist Organization collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. Ileana Nachescu 203 disappearance of NABF from feminist histories—one linked to the politics of erasure. There is clear evidence that NABF’s efforts to reveal Black women’s perceptions of persistent racism and white supremacy within the feminist movement was censored, as the series of articles titled “Anglogynophobia!” was canceled prior to completion by... (shrink)

The article represents a first approach of the campaign in the frenchspeakingradio and television. A thorough study will be done later. The topics examined here are: the impact of the campaign on the people; the organization of the campaign in the radio and television and the presentation of the different broadcastings in the national and the regional campaign; the topics of the campaign through the political platforms, the debates between several parties and the questions asked by the (...) audience; the personalities and «stars» during the campaign ; the audience and the campaign on RTL and in the press. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

Analysing some of the key discourses of ‘globalization’ and their relationship to global/local processes of gender, the article makes a distinction between the ‘global’ and ‘globalization’, such that the latter is seen as only one dimension of the ‘global’. Globalization is understood as comprising complex and contradictory phenomena with diverse and differential impact across distinct categories of people, localities, regions and hemispheres. Hence, the notion of being straightforwardly ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization is problematized. The essay explores media response to a (...) major global event — the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September — in terms of the ‘agenda setting’ role of the US's ‘mainstream’ national television news coverage in the aftermath of the first two weeks. A subsequent peace rally, the ‘International Day Against War and Racism’, held in Washington DC, is analysed as the site for the emergence of a new oppositional political subject in the current context. The article underscores the importance of addressing ‘intersectionality’ to a critical imagination. (shrink)

This paper focuses on representations by and deployments of the four Palestinian women who during the first four months of 2002 killed themselves in organized attacks against Israeli military personnel or civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Israel. The paper addresses the manner in which these militant women produced and situated themselves as gendered-political subjects, and argues that their self-representations and acts were deployed by individuals and groups in the region to reflect and articulate other gendered–political subjectivities that at (...) times undermined or rearticulated patriarchal religio-nationalist understandings of gender and women in relation to corporeality, authenticity, and community. The data analysed include photographs, narrative representations in television and newspaper media, the messages the women left behind, and secondary sources. (shrink)

Ethical objections to the use of mass media and the internet help explain why the Plain People of North America avoid new communication technologies. Each subgroup of plain folk-including Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren adopt differing amounts of new technology, and the use variesfrom region to region or even,from community to community. Old media such as the radio and telephone and newer media such as television and the internet introduce diferent and unwelcome moral values into plain communities, although the telephone (...) is often a borderline case. The ethical systems of the Old Order groups provide a unique and pragmatic critique of the widespread acceptance of mass media and the internet in the larger social world. (shrink)

The Gods of our Ancient World are migrating toward the South. Pushed back by supermarkets, television shows and the rights of man divorced from himself, they have ended up taking refuge in the last Christian region that faces Islam: in Andalusia that is one of their last lands of asylum. They have left traces of their passage in our museums upon which we construct pyramids in order to feign our veneration for them. Now and then they accompany the silence (...) of a symphony to the rhythm of the high priest's baton. However, in the South they are alive. Accommodating themselves to the din of household appliances and of tourism, they appear sometimes in all the splendor of the Midi during the passage of the virgins of peace and bleeding christs. But most frequently they hide in the midst of the Andulusian festival, under the flanks of the fighting bulls or in taverns that are filled with raucous songs. Be it that they intrude upon a play in order to transform it into a ritual; be it that they honor art and sensuality in their celebrations — they choose for their appearances the blurred boundary between the world of the sacred and of the profane. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 30 features lectures given in 2010 at Princeton University; Yale University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; Stanford University; Clare Hall, Cambridge University; Harvard University; and Brasenose (...) College, Oxford University. CONTRIBUTORS: Bruce Ackerman, “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic” Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale and the author of fifteen books that have had a broad influence in political philosophy, constitutional law, and public policy. John Adams, “Doctor Atomic and His Gadgets” John Adams is a musician, composer, writer, and conductor whose work stands out for its depth of expression, its sonic brilliance, and the profoundly humanist nature of its themes. Isabel Allende, “In the Hearts of Women” Isabel Allende is a social activist and feminist whose novels and memoirs have established her as one of the most res-pected writers of our time. Abdullahi An-Nacim, “Transcending Imperialism: Human Values and Global Citizenship” Abdullahi Ahmed An-Nacim is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School and an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights in cross-­cultural perspectives. Mark Danner, “Torture and the Forever War” Mark Danner is a writer, journalist, and professor who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international conflict. Sir Christopher Frayling, “Art and Religion in the Modern West: Some Perspectives” Sir Christopher Frayling is a historian, critic, and an award-winning broadcaster on British network radio and television. He has written seventeen books on the arts and popular culture. Jonathan Lear, “Becoming Human Does Not Come That Easily” Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and the Depart-ment of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His research and writings focus on philosophical conceptions of the human psyche. Ahmed Rashid, “Afghanistan” and “Pakistan” Ahmed Rashid is a reporter from Pakistan whose unique knowledge of this complex region allows him a panoramic vision and nuanced perspective that no Western writer can emulate. (shrink)

The influence of celebrities in the 21st century extends far beyond the traditional domain of the entertainment sector of society. During the recent Palestinian presidential elections, the Hollywood actor Richard Gere broadcast a televised message to voters in the region and stated, “Hi, I’m Richard Gere, and I’m speaking for the entire world”. Celebrities in the 21st century have expanded from simple product endorsements to global political and international diplomacy. The celebrities industry is undergoing, “mission creep”, or the expansion of (...) an enterprise beyond its original goals (Hyde, 2009 ). The global internet is one of the major drivers of this phenomenon. The contribution of this paper is to analyse this global phenomenon and the potential implications for business ethics research. (shrink)

One of the largely untapped potentials of Sausserian semiotics is the ability it provides to examine shifts in the cultural meanings attached to objects and ideasacross time. To explore this potentiality, we trace the intertextual evolution of one of the most enduring mythic figures, the vampire. Our analysis begins with ancient texts and moves forward in time to contemporary cinematic and televised depictions of the vampire. We document the deployment of the vampire as a vehicle carrying oppositional meanings as it (...) moves through various eras. For example, vampires may connote both racism and racial resistance, homophobia and gay acceptance, women’s subjugation and women’s empowerment. By using the vampire to mediate contested, liminal regions of cultural discourse, storytellers have constructed increasingly complex and multivocal portraits of this figure. At present, vampire narratives have come to resemble an alternative universe of human morality and behavior, complete with family structures, emotional depth, and interpersonal conflicts. (shrink)

Belgium, and Europe in general, has seen a strong increase in the number of refugees arriving over the past three years. At the same time we also note an increasing polarization of Belgian public opinion on this subject. Among the main actors to shape this public opinion are news media, as they contribute to or combat stereotyping of (sub)groups in the population. The purpose of the current study is to analyze to which extent media consumption and trust have an impact (...) on public opinion on two minority groups – immigrants and refugees – in a representative sample of the Belgian adult population (n = 1500). We gathered data on Belgian news media consumption and trust, and attitudes on immigrants and refugees through an online questionnaire. The results indicate that Belgian adults hold more positive attitudes on immigrants than on refugees. The reading of quality online newspapers as well as high levels of trust in television and radio are correlated with a positive attitude towards both groups, whereas the consumption of commercial television and popular newspapers go along with a negative attitude. Fear of terrorism (negative relation) and a negative evaluation of media coverage of refugees (positive relation) also have a sizeable influence. In terms of regional differences within Belgium, we find that citizens in the Brussels Capital Region hold more positive attitudes towards both groups than those in Flanders and Wallonia. (shrink)

Many people gain much of their awareness of medicine and medical techniques from television. A regional survey in 1995, for example, indicated that local people primarily gained their understanding of postmortem examinations from television.1 The popularity of factual series based in hospitals and documentaries following an individual’s battle against illness illustrates the appeal of medicine as entertainment. But public knowledge does not come just from such serious portrayals. In the UK, fictional dramas and soap operas are increasingly (...) seen as a useful tool for raising public awareness of the human dilemmas involved—for example in coping with infertility or requests for euthanasia. Programme makers frequently turn to medical advisors to ensure that the scope and limitations of medicine are accurately reflected. Such collaboration between health and media professionals is generally perceived as positive. The medical dilemmas of fictional characters can contribute to better public understanding of conditions such as HIV. Ethical problems can arise, however, when real rather than fictitious cases are presented as entertainment and where some of those involved cannot consent. In June 2002, for example, the British Medical Association (BMA) complained about a sensationalist television chat show’s call for volunteers to undergo paternity testing as part of the entertainment. For one of the programmes in the series, Trisha Exposes Britain’s Biggest Love Rats (ITV, 17 Jun 2002) men who doubted their paternity of a young child were invited to air their concerns in front of an audience, with a paternity test being carried out either to confirm or deny their suspicion. Such use of genetic technology for entertainment is far from the responsible attitude espoused by the BMA and the Human Genetics Commission (HGC). Official guidance in the UK emphasises that paternity testing should only be carried out after careful consideration of the significance and possible irrevocable …. (shrink)

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the webs of social relations that embed schools in neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions. Utilizing a variety of (...) narratives and analytical styles, this volume: * explores how curriculum innovations are simultaneously made possible by and undermined by school district politics, neighborhood histories, and the spatial and temporal organizations of teachers' and parents' lives; * situates the educational discourse of administrators and teachers in the changing economic and political climates of the city; * analyzes the motivations behind an effort by school and business proponents to refashion classrooms within the school into business enterprises, and of children's efforts to make sense of the scheme; * examines the role of the school as a neighborhood institution, situating it at the intersections of city planners' efforts to regulate city space and children's efforts to carve out live spaces through out-of-school routines; * contemplates the meaning of school as a site for bodily experience, and looks at how patterns of space and control in the school shaped children's bodies, and at how they continued to use body-based languages to construct maturity, gender, and race; and * investigates the school as a space for the deployment of symbolic resources where children learned and constructed identities through their engagements with television, comic books, movies, and sports. _Tangled Up In School_ raises questions about how we draw the boundaries of the school, about how schools fit into the lives of children and cities, and about what we mean when we talk about "school.". (shrink)

When the world as we know it crumbles to pieces, who does the future belong to? For the survivalist subculture, the answer is typically quite clear—the future belongs to the properly prepared, self-sufficient and autonomous men, who will outlive the majority of humankind in the upcoming global pandemonium. Once considered a fringe movement, survivalist ideas, imagery, and discourse now permeate Anglo-American popular culture and have increasingly made their way into other cultural regions as well. In recent years, there have been (...) numerous doomsday reality programs and shows about extreme survival trials on television. In their unique ways, programs such as Doomsday Preppers, Man vs. Wild, and Survivor have all... (shrink)

Image restoration is a research hotspot in computer vision and computer graphics. It uses the effective information in the image to fill in the information of the designated damaged area. This has high application value in environmental design, film and television special effects production, old photo restoration, and removal of text or obstacles in images. In traditional sparse representation image restoration algorithms, the size of dictionary atoms is often fixed. When repairing the texture area, the dictionary atom will be (...) too large to cause blurring. When repairing a smooth area, the dictionary atom is too small to cause the extension of the area, which affects the image repair effect. In this paper, the structural sparsity of the block to be repaired is used to adjust the repair priority. By analyzing the structure information of the repair block located in different regions such as texture, edge, and smoothing, the size of the dictionary atom is adaptively determined. This paper proposes a color image restoration method that adaptively determines the size of dictionary atoms and discusses a model based on the partial differential equation restoration method. Through simulation experiments combined with subjective and objective standards, the repair results are evaluated and analyzed. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively overcome the shortcomings of blurred details and region extension in fixed dictionary restoration, and the restoration effect has been significantly improved. Compared with the results of several other classic algorithms, it shows the effectiveness of the algorithm in this paper. (shrink)

This article explores the discursive behaviour of professional male team sports players in post-match interviews from a social identity construction perspective. Drawing on a data set of 160 televised post-match interviews from two different team sports and two different regions of the world, this article identifies stances players orient to when presenting themselves in these media interviews. A supplementary data set of ethnographic semi-structured interviews with professional team sports players is also used to develop insider perspectives on the discursive behaviour (...) of professional team sports players when speaking to the media. What is argued is that the acts and stances employed by team sports players can be interpreted as indexing a media self, or media identity, one that professional team sports players construct in order to strategically negotiate a public version of self that presents them positively to their audience and maintains their relationships with other members of their team. (shrink)

With the spread of new media, traditional media, such as TV faced a problem: how to attract and retain the audience and how to offer something new, that competitors do not have. And for a long time now even well-known and influential mass media have been using interactive content. The statement is that interactive content just for fun is no longer perceived. Interactive content includes quizzes, puzzles, crosswords, various polls, games, tests, quests, memories, interactive graphics, flash games, etc. Interactive elements (...) in the media are used both separately and as a part of journalistic material. For the research of using interactive content in media, we examined the official sites of 30 channels in Ukraine, which belong to DTV and are translated for each region. In general, we have revealed 593 elements of interactive content on the sites of TV media. In the article, there were examined the kinds, types, themes, and amount of interactive content on each site of Ukrainian TV channels. It is investigated that such content can help to stay in touch with the audience and to popularize content that is broadcasted on the TV channel. Interactive media content has several obvious benefits, including the influx of new readers and, consequently, the growth of unique visitors, the growing number of people who talk about your media on social media and in real life, and the opportunity to draw attention to your television projects. (shrink)

Landscape and brandingexplores the way landscape is conceptualised, conceived, represented and designed by professionals in a brand-driven age. Landscape - incorporating tangible physical space as well as intangible concepts, narratives, images, and experiences of place - is constructed by a number of creative industries. This book tests the hypothesis that place branding, a powerful marketing and management practice, increasingly blurs the distinction between the promotionof landscape and its production in design terms. Place branding involves the strategic and systematic composition of (...) single-minded, experiential and market-friendly place identities which are consistently communicated across various media, including physical space. How does this implicate or transform notions of place, nature, landscape experience, and the qualitative value of landscape itself? How does this affect the role of landscape architecture? To answer these questions, place branding theory and practice is critically examined alongside an in depth case study of one specific landscape - the Blue Mountains (Australia). Projects undertaken between 1995 and 2015, including a branding strategy for the region, media campaigns, television, cinema, and several landscape architectural works in the public and private domain are comparatively analysed, focusing on the discourse, conventions and values informing their production, and the landscape narratives they convey. (shrink)

China is a country that has undertaken a great transformation since the late 1970' s, and among these changes, has seen a massive growth in the advertising industry with the influx of foreign advertisers, and the development of regional and global media, such as satellite television and the Internet. This has resulted in the Chinese people of all ages having a greater opportunity of exposure to different types of advertising, including the advertising of potentially controversial products, which could (...) clash with traditional Chinese values. Using a stakeholder theory approach, this study analyzes the responses of 630 Chinese respondents to discover who is offended by controversial advertisements and determine ways potentially offensive advertising messages can be reduced, thereby assisting marketers in being more socially responsible in their advertising messages. (shrink)

Including the substantial Introduction by Richard Eldridge, this volume consists of nine previously unpublished essays each of which focuses upon a single region of Cavell’s work. While the scope of the issues considered in the volume can be only incompletely indicated by listing the regions addressed, they include: ethics, philosophy of action, the normativity of language, aesthetics and modernism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, film, television, and opera, and the relation of Cavell’s work to German philosophy and Romanticism. The volume also (...) contains a useful index, and a brief annotated bibliography of works by and about Cavell. (shrink)

Recently, we proposed a fundamental subdivision of the human cortex into two complementary networks—an “extrinsic” one which deals with the external environment, and an “intrinsic” one which largely overlaps with the “default mode” system, and deals with internally oriented and endogenous mental processes. Here we tested this hypothesis by contrasting decision making under external and internally-derived conditions. Subjects were presented with an external cue, and were required to either follow an external instruction or to ignore it and follow a voluntary (...) decision process . Our results show that a well defined component of the intrinsic system—the right inferior parietal cortex—was preferentially activated during the “free-will” condition. Importantly, this activity was significantly higher than the base-line resting state. The results support a self-related role for the intrinsic system and provide clear evidence for both hemispheric and regional specialization in the human intrinsic system. (shrink)