The Heaven of Train Travel

Residential power lines are one of the most attractive communication media for home networking, since every room in a house has multiple power outlets. In general, in-home power line networks have various network components which are not related to communications. The power line network includes many electrical appliances without communication facilities, switches, and so on. These components will cause electrical unbalance of the power line network and increase radiated emissions. We investigate that each power line network component has an impact on the electrical unbalance and the radiated emissions quantitatively by an experiment. As the result, we show that the radiated emissions and the electrical unbalance of the network vary significantly as the wired network components. Furthermore, our result indicates that the radiated emission is especially large in the case where the network contains a fluorescent light or a single-pole switch.

Taking a Joke Seriously:Mickey Mouse and William Kentridge1 Nienke Boer Transformation, metamorphosis is of course the bread and butter of animation in the studio. Something difficult to do… on the stage, to turn a cat into a telephone, gets called together by the cloth, the paper, the charcoal, the eraser. —William Kentridge, "Drawing Lesson 5: In Praise of Mistranslation." The film opens in what appears to be the control room of a large organization: computers line the left wall, and, on a large clock, moving hands illustrate the passage of time. The scene shifts abruptly to a man in a pinstriped business suit, standing in what seems to be a bedroom (wood flooring, a fireplace, a small rug and the end of a single bed), reading a letter, which moves slightly as he holds it. Then, the third scene: a difficult-to-identify structure next to the side of a road—gleaming tracks on the road suggest that it could be a tram station, but the position of the windows also hint at the security booth of a gated community or large business. A bird flies over from the top left corner of the screen, leaving a smudged trail behind it, and the scene changes again, to a close-up of the top of [End Page 1146] a power line, where a bird (the same one?) appears at the top left corner and flies across the screen, still trailing black smudges. Finally, the scene shifts again and a black cat walks across the screen from left to right. As the cat walks along a white wall, letters spelling out the word "Stereoscope" appear one by one on the wall behind it. This is the "cold open" of William Kentridge's eighth Drawing for Projection, Stereoscope (1999). All of this is drawn in charcoal and animated by a kind of stop-motion animation, where small changes are made to a base drawing in between sequential shots of it. Thus "each sequence as opposed to each frame of the film is a single drawing" (Kentridge, "'Fortuna'" 64). The charcoal leaves smudged traces behind when it is erased, resulting in, for example, the trail behind the bird as it flies across the sky. Kentridge uses this technique, which he calls "stone age film-making" ("'Fortuna'" 61), to produce a drawn and animated world peopled by three main characters—the man in the pinstripe suit, Soho Eckstein, his wife, Mrs. Eckstein, and Felix Teitlebaum, an artist who pursues Mrs. Eckstein—along with an accompanying cast of, among others, miners, doctors, police agents, a land surveyor called Nandi, a living statue, and an omnipresent black cat. I've described this opening sequence in such great detail because it includes many of the stylistic features that I'll discuss in this paper: the imitation of filmic conventions (the moving hands on the clock indicating the accelerated passage of time); the use of visual cues to create meaning (we know Soho is reading the letter because it moves slightly in his hand); the creation of continuity between shots (the bird flying from left to right, linking two sequential drawings, suggests that these scenes are temporally and geographically adjacent); the mixing of realistic and impossible effects (the outsize cat patrolling a suburban wall and producing the word "Stereoscope" behind it). In my attempt to address the question of why Kentridge, in this particular section of his substantial body of work (which includes everything from constructing large mechanically-operated music instruments to directing and co-designing the Metropolitan Opera's 2010 production of Shostakovich's The Nose), chooses to engage with animation, I examine how he uses both the technological apparatus and techniques of this medium, and what they allow him to do. In this brief introduction I begin to suggest some answers, but a fuller explanation will require me to delve back into the history of the medium itself. Rosalind Krauss, in her article "'The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection" (originally published in 2000), has written very insightfully on Kentridge's technique of "stone-age film-making." To [End Page 1147] Krauss, "the medium is the memory" (19), and thus, in order to study...

16 - Electroceramics for Fuel Cells, Batteries and Sensors

In this paper, a new distributive control system for indoor fluorescent lighting based on LonWorks technology is presented. The system features the following elements: microprocessor-controlled fluorescent lamp electronic ballast, communication system using the power line as communication media, and control software for Windows 95 environment. The electronic ballast has been especially designed to be operated under the proposed distributive control system. Thus, it features high-input power factor, high-frequency lamp supply, lamp power regulation against line voltage variations, dimming capability, and lamp failure detection. With this scheme, a low-cost distributive control system for lighting applications has been achieved, allowing energy and maintenance savings and increase in the reliability of the fluorescent lighting systems.

Radio frequency (RF) energy reflected from active power line ballast driven fluorescent tubes are known to be modulated at twice the line frequency. When the lamps are driven by electronic ballasts, it is found that the reflected (backscattered) RF wave is amplitude modulated with sidebands located at multiples of electronic ballast frequency components, extending to hundreds of kilohertz with significant power levels spread within this range. Detailed analysis of the measured sidebands spectrum indicated that the sidebands themselves are modulated at multiples of twice the power line frequency. Fluorescent lamps driven by different types of electronic ballasts operating at different unsynchronized frequencies exhibited different power levels. Consequently in an environment with abundance of active fluorescent lamps, the reflected RF signals can significantly affect the reception of modulated backscattered transponder RFID signals at UHF and higher bands.

For most of us, life is spent in one vast electromagnetic field. In the office we sit in front of computer terminals, at home, in front of the television. We cook our meals in microwave ovens, trim our hedges with electric shears, illuminate our houses, workplaces, and streets with incandescent and fluorescent lighting. And until only recently, the potential hazards imposed by life in the shadows of high-voltage power lines have hardly been considered. First published in 1973, Power Over People was the first book to address the frightening potential side effects of our dependence on electrical energy. Now brought up to date with a new introduction, and including an epilogue that offers the most current studies and findings available today, this classic book is more timely than ever. Louise Young here lays bare the short-sighted, materialistic policies of the electric power industry, showing how power and the conglomerates that produce it have clearly won out over rights and safety concerns of people. She provides disturbing documentary evidence that demonstrates how long-term exposure to radiation from power lines can cause brain cancer, childhood leukemia, as well as damage to the nervous system. Through the course of the book we come to understand that what is often blindly accepted as progress can mean the inexorable advance of environmental destruction and the withering-rather than enhancing-of the quality of life in America. Based on a case-study of a small, rural community in Ohio, Young shows in compelling fashion what happens when a grass-roots group of concerned citizens resists the construction of the world's largest electrical transmission towers, literally in their own backyards. Her story of their ultimate failure becomes a stinging indictment of indifferent government agencies and the lax laws that fail to protect the environment. Lively, readable, and, at times, even shocking, this is a book for environmentally-minded and safety-conscious readers of the 1990s. Its wealth of information, its incisive analysis, and its bold confrontation of facts we can no longer afford to ignore make Power Over People a book everyone should read and reflect upon.

The Footprints of Electrocardiographic Interference: Fact or Artefact

For most of us, life is spent in one vast electromagnetic field. In the office we sit in front of computer terminals, at home, in front of the television. We cook our meals in microwave ovens, trim our hedges with electric shears, illuminate our houses, workplaces, and streets with incandescent and fluorescent lighting. And until only recently, the potential hazards imposed by life in the shadows of high-voltage power lines have hardly been considered. First published in 1973, Power Over People was the first book to address the frightening potential side effects of our dependence on electrical energy. Now brought up to date with a new introduction, and including an epilogue that offers the most current studies and findings available today, this classic book is more timely than ever. Louise Young here lays bare the short-sighted, materialistic policies of the electric power industry, showing how power and the conglomerates that produce it have clearly won out over rights and safety concerns of people. She provides disturbing documentary evidence that demonstrates how long-term exposure to radiation from power lines can cause brain cancer, childhood leukemia, as well as damage to the nervous system. Through the course of the book we come to understand that what is often blindly accepted as “progress” can mean the inexorable advance of environmental destruction and the withering—rather than enhancing—of the quality of life in America. Based on a case-study of a small, rural community in Ohio, Young shows in compelling fashion what happens when a grass-roots group of concerned citizens resists the construction of the world's largest electrical transmission towers, literally in their own backyards. Her story of their ultimate failure becomes a stinging indictment of indifferent government agencies and the lax laws that fail to protect the environment. Lively, readable, and, at times, even shocking, this is a book for environmentally-minded and safety-conscious readers of the 1990s. Its wealth of information, its incisive analysis, and its bold confrontation of facts we can no longer afford to ignore make Power Over People a book everyone should read and reflect upon.

Human intracranial microwire recordings have typically had poor signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), often below 10 dB. The physiological signal source is a fixed-amplitude one; thus, SNR must be improved by reducing either noise or interference. An understanding of the interference sources, how they are coupled to the recording system, and their relative magnitudes is needed to improve SNR. We measured potentially interfering sources in a controlled laboratory model of microwire recordings. Specifically considered were interference from power lines, fluorescent lights, radio transmitters, and other nearby electrical devices. In the presence of typical mismatches in impedance (100 kohm) and loop area (30 cm2), the greatest sources of interference are capacitive coupling to power lines (11.4 microV(rms)), capacitive coupling to fluorescent lights (9.7 microV(rms)), and nonpower line capacitive interference (8.6 microV(rms)). The model and techniques employed here to study human microwire recordings may also be applied to other neurophysiological recordings.

In this paper a new distributive control system for indoor fluorescent lighting based on LonWorks technology is presented. The system features the following elements: microprocessor-controlled fluorescent lamp electronic ballast, communication system using the power line as communication media and control software for Windows 95 environment. With this structure a low cost distributive control system for lighting applications has been achieved, allowing energy and maintenance saving and reliability increase of the fluorescent lighting systems.

An Uncertain Sound Nell Boeschenstein (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 178] You know, the Bible says there, “For [if] a trumpet give a uncertain sound, how would you prepare yourself for battle?” There’s a battle a’coming. And it says make a joyful noise unto the Lord, and that’s all I’m trying to do, make a joyful noise to the King of all kings. —Frank Newsome The light was as bright as winter against the white walls. The pew cushions didn’t match. An industrial blue carpet covered the floors, and a promotional calendar from the Haysi Funeral Home on the wall by the door to the sanctuary announced the month: March. Frank and Geraldine headed [End Page 179] for the far wall, where the large window behind the pulpit let in the pallid sun. On either side of the casement, the frozen faces of men and women gazed out from framed photographs. Some were smiling and posing, some were merely acknowledging the fact that they were being photographed. “Let’s see,” Frank said. “That one, two of them right there is alive yet, and these here deacons, they alive.” He turned and, indicating to the other side of the window, said, “And most of them over here is dead.” He moved closer to those photographs, and Geraldine followed. “That’s a picture of Jonah Sprints,” said Geraldine, indicating a photograph of a smiling man in red suspenders. “And this my mom and daddy, that one on the right top there,” Frank said pointing to a photo of a couple posed for their portrait against a gray studio background. He paused. “They’re both deceased and gone.” “And then the second one over the middle one’s my mom and dad,” said Geraldine, pointing to a photograph of a couple sitting on a couch, their arms around each other. She moved on to the next picture. “This one’s dead,” she said. “My brother Clancy there,” said Frank, pointing to another man in another photograph. “He lived right near me. He died with cancer.” “This one’s dead,” said Geraldine, picking up steam as she proceeded not to name the dead so much as to identify their state. “This one’s dead. This one’s dead. Both of these is dead.” “Yeah,” said Frank. These photographs are the most significant decorative elements in the sanctuary of the Little David Baptist Church, where Frank Newsome preaches and Geraldine keeps the books in order. They’ve been married fifty-four years. My friend Kelley Libby and I, both of us writers and reporters, were visiting from our homes in Charlottesville, a five-and-a-half-hour drive northwest, and a world away, from Haysi. We were working on a project about Frank and, knowing that the Little David would be central to any such endeavor, had asked for a private tour. Frank continued on to the pulpit, where he took out his copy of the Little David songbook and began flipping through. The selections are identified by opening lines—“Beset with snares on every hand,” “To heaven I lift my waiting eyes,” “How sweet and awful is the place.” After thumbing the pages for a few minutes, Frank settled on a hymn. He looked to Geraldine as if for permission. “Sing a verse of a song?” he asked her, meaning, could he sing a verse? Frank had been in and out of the hospital all winter: Geraldine was worried about the rattle in his lungs. “If you want to, honey,” she said, unwilling to fight him on it. He puffed up his chest. His eyes fixed like magnets on some point in the middle distance. The pews sat in quiet attention as he began to sing—in a voice that seemed to have access all at once to the back of his throat, his gut, some time long past, some place long gone, some point in his cortex where all his [End Page 180] conviction was held. The sound was loud and remote and strange. And now our meeting is overBrother’n we must partAnd if I never more see youI...

The study allows us to present the historical conditions for the emergence and development of enterprises of a rigid technological structure in the context of the socio-political processes of the post-war era in Ukraine, as well as to identify the potential opportunities for their modernization in modern conditions. A special place in the historical and architectural study of the formation of enterprises with a strict technological regime and a pronounced large-scale engineering infrastructure is occupied by metallurgical, petrochemical, coke-chemical, as well as heat and hydropower enterprises, and the like. It should be determined that today they for the most part do not meet the environmental requirements, run counter to the idea of consistency in the urban planning environment and generally need comprehensive modernization. The architecture of industrial enterprises was formed on the basis of typology, unification and modular coordination, as well as the open placement of a powerful engineering infrastructure, which ultimately formed a new aesthetics of industrial culture. Cooling towers, gas holders, chimneys, overhead pipelines, distribution blocks and power lines became the embodiment of the iconic system of aesthetics of the industrial period, an integral part of the image of an industrial enterprise and the industrial landscape of the then cities. In the aesthetics of the modern, we see that the romanticization of production in the 20th century (before the war and post-war times), which was reflected in the artistic images of painting, cinema and, thanks to the poeticization and heroization of the images of the working profession, a talented artistic interpretation of the production environment, and contributed to the formation of a positive attitude towards the new industrial aesthetics.

from The Devil in Silver Victor LaValle Click for larger view View full resolution Victor LaValle Photograph by Emily Raboteau [End Page 936] Skinny Ray arrived in handcuffs. Escorted by two of the cops who'd caught him. Marched inside, straight to intake, where he got interviewed for about half an hour. But Skinny Ray didn't have any answers to give. Wouldn't even say his real name. They found it on the i.d. in his wallet. He had a thick file. It only took a few clicks on a computer to discover how he'd been since adolescence: a pain in the ass, to put it mildly. After the intake meeting he was led down a long yellow corridor. Yellow because the fluorescent ceiling lights turned the linoleum floors and cheap wall paint the color of a plucked chicken. And not that free range business. The police brought him to a room halfway down this hallway and threw him on one of the two beds inside. Then the cops took off his handcuffs. Then the cops left. The room's door remained open, but Skinny Ray wasn't free. He knew where he was. Knew where they were taking him when they'd picked him up. Not this exact location, but the type of place. Not jail. Someplace worse. At least as far as Skinny Ray was concerned. And now he lay on the mattress in the airless room and he knew where he was but refused to really see it. Kind of like when you catch your ex at a party and suddenly you go blind, looking everywhere else just to deny your lying eyes. Skinny Ray stood up and fixed his clothes. His shirt had come untucked and his shoe laces untied, but he hadn't asked the cops if he could straighten up before they pulled him in. Imagine that. They would've shot him in the leg just for being stupid. He touched his face, checking for bruises, but the police hadn't roughed him up at all. He kind of wished they had. It would've been more dramatic. A good story for any women he might meet in here. Yes, even five minutes after getting locked up Skinny Ray had ladies on his mind. The room had three large windows in a row against one wall. The bed they'd thrown him on sat directly underneath. Right outside the window were well-maintained grounds. Fresh-mowed lawn and a line of trees that swayed peaceably. It was almost picturesque. If not for the twelve foot fence on the other side of the trees. The one with short, sharp barbs along the top. Yeah, Skinny Ray knew exactly where he'd landed. He walked out the room. Time to meet the natives. The hallway, still yellow, sallow, stayed empty. He walked toward the sounds of activity. Passing doors to more rooms along the way, most of them shut. Walked with both hands in the pockets of his slacks, his head cocked back. Kind of a swagger. But a real swagger starts from the inside, of course. Skinny Ray's, right now, was more of a pantomime. Act confident. Act like you're happy to be here. Fool the world. Fool yourself. He reached the end of the hallway and now the sounds increased by a hundred. He heard a television blaring gunshots and car crashes from somewhere down another hallway. Members of the staff sat behind a large L-shaped desk, talking with each other like co-workers everywhere tend to do. Absently, half-friendly, passing time. One of the [End Page 937] staff, a man wearing a white shirt, stood up and leaned over the L-shaped station. He didn't look at Skinny Ray, but down that other hallway, where the television continued to broadcast some killer sounds. "You all turn that down!" he shouted. "You hear me? You hear me!" If the sound reduced at all, Skinny Ray couldn't tell. He kind of wanted to see the man run down that hallway. The battle might be even more entertaining than whatever the folks down there were actually watching...

Architecture in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century followed much the same pattern as elsewhere in the British Isles moving, broadly, from historic styles around the turn of the century, through a phase of Arts and Crafts activity for a decade or so, until settling down to a concentrated period of interest in Neo-Georgian styling in the 1920s and '30s. This inter-war era included, however, some examples of Modernism, primarily of an ornamented Art Deco type but occasionally of a more plain variety which ranged between Functionalism and the International Style. Examples of this type of modern architecture – characterised by flat roofs, white walls, large horizontal windows and a general avoidance of ornamentation – formed only a comparatively small part of the overall output of the period in Northern Ireland, and, for most architects who were involved, their contribution amounted to little more than a building or two; such was the prevailing tradition-bound architectural mood of the time.One architect in Northern Ireland, however, demonstrated a commitment to the Modern Movement that appears to have been greater than most. That was Philip Bell, whose name has been mentioned from time to time by various commentators, whether as a designer of Modernist houses or as the architect of one other particularly well-known building of the 1930s in Northern Ireland, the Strangford Lough Yacht Club House, which was an accomplished and stylish enough building to have been featured in the English architectural press at the time.

The Vatican Rag Lisa Erb Stewart (bio) Recently I attended an Episcopal service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It was the Monday-noon Eucharist. With a few other tourists I sat in the richly decorated pews closest to the high altar and gazed beyond its brocade to the enormous gilt altarpiece, whose excesses eventually became too much for my eyes. The priest approached a woman seated nearby who was already praying, and asked her to remove her hat. Then the service began. I was made dizzy by the presence of the sculpted crucifixion, but then recovered in the quiet breathing of the Virgin off to the side, clothed in that mineral blue. The heavy pews forced gravity upon my heart, and the rose windows steadied the kaleidoscopic reeling in my brain. The service was very similar to the Catholic Mass: the same words and soft rhythms, the wafer, and then the wine. After the final benediction, when the priest came over to greet the five or six of us who had attended the service, I expressed my pleasure at the similarity—having never attended an Episcopal service before. “Yes,” the priest replied crisply, obviously delighted with my Catholic openness. “Catholic and Episcopal faiths are exactly the same. The only difference is the location of authority.” But it seemed to me there was a second difference; I searched my catechism for the rub. “And transubstantiation?” I asked. The priest laughed and gestured toward the altar. “Wasn’t it as real for you today as it always is?” Then, turning serious and even a little angry, he looked directly into my eyes. “We don’t talk that way about God,” he lectured. “That was a fourteenth-century issue. Romans today don’t think they’re eating a corpse.” He smiled. “Only a silly Roman would ask a question like yours.” My conversion to Catholicism occurred gradually over a twenty-year period—the result of Catholic schooling coupled with my struggle, as a poet, to understand language and its relation to the world. The revelation art offers and religion celebrates is the indivisibility of spirit and matter: the world is one body. To recognize this fully is to transubstantiate. Tom Lehrer, the musical comedian of the 1960s whose recordings I [End Page 37] memorized as a child, performed a number called “The Vatican Rag.” The refrain went, “Two, four, six, eight / Time to transubstantiate!” But transubstantiation, the task of artists and mystics as well as silly Romans, requires the best of our intelligence, which is faith. Simone Weil wrote that faith is the intelligence in love, and indeed, it is through love that the fallacy of separation breaks down. One gift that the intelligence in love offers is metaphor. Because it reveals connectedness, metaphor is the beginning of the experience of transubstantiation. It is the opposite of symbol, which, in creating an equation, differentiates and therefore fragments. In tending my small garden plot, I have learned that one metaphor expands into another: despair and hope in the weeds, the potato that multiplies underground. These metaphors astonish my heart by divulging to it its own secrets. Metaphor, like the universe, continually nudges its boundaries outward, making infinity more infinite, making God more God. In some art, transubstantiation is as much the subject as the activity. The sculptor Tony Cragg uses tiny fragments of plastic rubbish to erect larger-than-life mosaics that suggest whole, unbroken objects. One of my favorite works is Green, Yellow, Red, Orange, and Blue Bottles, which, on a white wall, has the effect of five large stained-glass windows. Most impressive is the twelve-foot-high laundry-detergent bottle, glowing in the Virgin’s blue. Writers know that words and their objects were once the same, and we long for that. Cragg’s work has taught me something about my own task as a writer: to sort through the fragments of symbolic language and reconstitute them. His work is both joyful and tragic because it points to wholeness and brokenness, the sacred and profane. It is in the reconciling of wholeness with brokenness that metaphor occurs, and with it, faith is possible. The National Cathedral was built...