Black Space Research Articles

“The White Space”

Since the end of the Civil Rights Movement, large numbers of black people have made their way into settings previously occupied only by whites, though their reception has been mixed. Overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, restaurants, and other public spaces remain. Blacks perceive such settings as “the white space,” which they often consider to be informally “off limits” for people like them. Meanwhile, despite the growth of an enormous black middle class, many whites assume that the natural black space is that destitute and fearsome locality so commonly featured in the public media, including popular books, music and videos, and the TV news—the iconic ghetto. White people typically avoid black space, but black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.

Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America by Quincy T. Mills

Reviewed by: Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America by Quincy T. Mills N. D. B. Connolly Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0-8112-4541-7, $34.95 (cloth). In Cutting Along the Color Line, Quincy Mills offers an unprecedented assessment of the complexities of black barbers and barbershops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Across six chapters, Mills looks at how barbering shaped black and white experiences of chattel slavery, how it bounded the possibilities of black self-determination after Emancipation, and how it affected the development of public and black counterpublic spaces during and after formal racial segregation. Mills’s account strikes a difficult balance, being rich in empirical evidence and bursting with novel ideas. Readers will encounter more than one and a half centuries of history in this book, but it won’t take nearly that long for them to appreciate that something as apparently simple as a haircut was no simple matter at all. Like many business history books, Cutting Along the Color Line principally explores the relationship between capitalism and politics. Although readers may, at times, question the relevance of certain details (such as how many barbers held local and national elected office under Reconstruction), the book remains driven in large part by several broad and important questions: How does business affect the public? How does barbers’ relative autonomy contribute to the “production of authority” among black people (p. 10)? How do barbershops inhabit the border between public and private space as men set about the business of “grooming race” (p. 9)? The book’s big questions give it a wide applicability to a variety of debates. Readers will notice that barbershops, as institutions, and their clienteles change considerably over time. Initially, the most prominent black barbers and their shops served to preserve racial traditions of white supremacy and black deference. At the very same time, though, nineteenth-century shops helped cultivate ever-emergent notions of black respectability and economic autonomy that eventually proved indispensible to the development of barbershops in the twentieth century that catered to an almost exclusively black clientele. In charting the evolution of black business as part of the broader evolution of black political space, Cutting Along the Color Line inspires readers to reconsider the centrality of a service profession long thought marginal to the American economy and to American politics. Critical to Mills’s contribution is an exploration of what the cultural critic Eric Sundquist called “shaving time.” Shaving time, for much of the nineteenth century, represented a time when black barbers—with their razors at the necks of white customers—exercised the restraint that [End Page 487] ultimately came to define what it meant to be black and middle-class under slavery and Jim Crow. Shaving time also served as the time when African Americans, as customers, allowed themselves certain leisure experiences, when they celebrated themselves as being more than slaves, more than workers. Shaving time, in essence, challenged (and continues to challenge) the banal and harsh uniformity of racial discrimination and violence. It was, in effect, the time during which American public culture flowered from the meeting place of political ideals and the profit motive. Mills’s working use of capitalism forces readers to reconsider certain assumptions. “Historians,” he writes, “must move beyond the blacks-made-money-too thesis in order to fully explore the challenges and tensions that capitalism played in visions of individual and racial progress” (p. 4). What Mills is after, it seems, is a fundamental rethinking of black business and the presumed separation of market decisions from political speech in public. In fact, students looking to affirm their lamentations about “neoliberalism” or “market fundamentalism” in the late twentieth century will find no ally here, because, for Mills, there is no public sphere that exists independent of the market economy. Indeed, in light of his evidence, it is hard to suggest that there actually ever was. Black barbers, like so many political actors, are constantly torn between pursuing self-interest and trying to advance more collective, political solutions to the...

Black Holes and White Space: Ellipsis and Pause in Steve McQueen's Hunger

Director Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger employs strategies of narrative fracture in its account of the 1981 Northern Irish hunger strikes. Through the formal devices of ellipsis and descriptive pause, the film creates space for viewer reflection on, and immersion in, the emotions associated with trauma and loss. Looking at these formal devices as emotion cues, and considering the film as a case study in the cognitive study of film, this article offers an 'emotional reading' of Hunger.

Black sonic space and the stereophonic poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time

In the liner notes for Amiri Baraka’s 1972 album It’s Nation Time (Motown-Black Forum), Baraka asserts, ‘This recording is an institution.’ Recording on the heels of the 1970 Congress of African People , Baraka felt that the establishment of a pan-African nation was paramount, but where ought such a nation to be established? Could a recording be an institution? What does a nation sound like? The album, which received a limited release under Motown’s progressive Black Forum label, mixes poetry with free jazz, African drumming, and R&B – melding together the popular with avant-garde and traditional forms of black music. In doing so, It’s Nation Time attempts to re-inflect black life with a proud African ancestry and spirituality. In this article, I explore how Baraka uses the format of the stereo LP to push beyond the constrictions of place and history in order to produce a new, contingent black sonic space. The acoustic spaces Baraka inhabits are projective, hyperbolic, and imagined, and reflect a development in the studio stereo recording that took place around this time as engineers discovered that sonic spaces could not only be reproduced but manipulated and produced. As I show, It’s Nation Time strives toward a theory of sonic space that might redefine the parameters of a national space and create a new conception of blackness.

Disruptive Voices: The Minor Characters of Musical Narrative

Arthur Phillips's 2009 novel, The Song Is You, begins with the following passage:Billie counted offf the tune and started the pre-refrain verse, with only the piano accompanying . . . and the soldier hoped that Holiday, having sensed that was diffferent from all the others, was perhaps granting him more than she allowed lesser supplicants. . . . In the lyrics, she was waiting by the water, longing for her lover's ship to return. She was singing the music had ached to hear, was singing it to him as if he, soon to head offf by sea to war, was that lover for whom she pined, and this thought vibrated in him like a recently arrived arrow. . . . The applause ebbed away, into foam and then nothing. The tone arm bobbed over the deep black space as it skated toward the label with the two blackbirds perched on telephone lines that become a musical stafff. The whispering ended, the tone arm flew home, the LP stopped turning, and wept like a child. (1)This kind of experience, in which listeners feel themselves either to be spoken to or speaking through popular songs, seems to be a common one. It is itself the subject of quite a few pop songs, perhaps most famously Roberta Flack's 1973 Killing Me Softly with His Song. In the lines he sang as if knew me in all my dark despair and felt found my letters and read each one out loud, the narrator describes sensations first of being spoken to and then being spoken for. In the present work, I explore one axis of musical detail by which such listener experiences are informed and facilitated.I's and EarsI should begin with the observation-made by many others before me-that popular songs are full of unassigned (or at least ambiguous) pronouns: I's, you's, he's, she's, we's, they's, and it's. (Not to mention the indeterminate deictics here, now, then, there).1 Tim Murphey and Simon Frith are among the scholars of popular music who have discussed the ways in which this indeterminacy makes possible a range of narrative identifications for listeners. In some cases and for some listeners, this absence of proper names for people or places can generate a sort of pronominal vertigo, described by Gerard Genette (234) as a sense of disorientation resulting from the copresence of competing interpretations of indeterminate pronouns.One example of this in the pop music world is the 2000 hit Hanging by a Moment, by the Christian rock band Lifehouse. Like many others, the song is addressed in second person to an unnamed you. Fans of the band have vigorously debated the identity of that you, with as many listeners contending that the song is about a romantic partner as those who hear the song as about having a personal relationship-of a diffferent kind, presumably-with Jesus Christ. The following are exemplary quotes, from fans writing openly on an unoffficial blog.2 On one side of the debate, a self-identified longtime listener writes:If you're familiar with Christianity, this song is chalk [sic] full of religious subtleties.I don't even have the time or inclination to list them all. -alexfromfresnoOn the other hand, just as many listeners hear the song as a love ballad. Another poster writes (somewhat puzzlingly, given his screen name):My wife and I love this song. I'm always hanging by a moment with her.-thelonelyheart55Fans seem to feel strongly either way, and the debate occasionally becomes heated. Interestingly, partisans on both sides describe transportative or interpellative listening experiences that seem to take them away or to speak to their own most meaningful relationships, whether earthly or spiritual. This suggests that the song's unattached you can be experienced in a variety of ways, independently of stable identification with a particular subject.Likewise, and more to the point for my purposes, popular song lyrics including unassigned or indeterminate I's can be understood, sometimes simultaneously, in multiple or even conflicting ways. …

Det svenska kolonialprojektets komplexa rum: om slaveri under svensk flagg i slutet av 1700-talets karibiska och atlantiska värld

The Complex Space of the Swedish Colonial Project: Slavery under the SwedishFlag in the Late Eighteenth-Century Caribbean and Atlantic WorldWhen Sweden took over Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean in 1784, the island was inhabited by French colonists and their slaves. As the island was too small and barren for large-scale plantations, the Swedish authorities decided to declare it a free-port, outlined the site for a new town, and issued an invitation to traders and merchants of any nationality to settle on the island. Within the space of a few years, a Swedish cosmopolitan town, Gustavia, was in place beside La Campagne, the French-dominated countryside. This essay takes a critical look at the first twenty years of the Swedish era on the island. A special focus is placed on the question of slavery and the coloured division of space on the island. Similar to all other late eighteenth-century Caribbean slave societies, the Swedish island simultaneously contained a hegemonic white space and a dominated and controlled black space. It was a multiracial and multi-ethnic society inhabited by white naturalized citizens and burghers, visiting white foreign merchants and émigrées, second-class semi-citizens comprised of freed slaves and gens de couleur, and African and Creole slaves. While the first two groups enjoyed certain rights, the lives of the latter two groups were controlled and regulated by slave laws and other legal restrictions.

Calibration Sets for Multiprimary Displays: Representation, Visualization, and Applications

In this paper, we consider idealized additive multiprimary displays and provide: (a) a complete mathematical characterization for the calibration set, i.e., the set of control values that produce a given color, (b) a subspace decomposition of the device control space that decomposes the control signals into constrained and unconstrained dimensions, and (c) a method for visualizing and analyzing alternative calibration strategies via the representation and the subspace decomposition. Specifically, we demonstrate that the calibration set for a given color is a convex polytope in the device control space whose vertices correspond to alternative tessellations of the gamut in a previously proposed representation. For a K primary display, we decompose the K dimensional control space into a 3 dimensional control visual subspace (CVS) that is completely determined by the desired color and a (K–3) dimensional control black space (CBS) that contains the alternative calibrations within its linear varieties, i.e., affine translations. We use these results for ready visualization and analysis of these sets and of alternative calibration strategies for multiprimary displays. For display technologies such as OLED, where power is switched at the individual pixel level, our methodology reduces the minimum and maximum power calibration strategies to linear programs on polytopes, which are wellstudied and allow corresponding calibrations to be immediately determined as appropriate vertices of the polytopes for calibration sets. The visualizations confirm the intuition that these calibration strategies are not necessarily well-behaved in the presence of device variability we highlight how alternative strategies can be formulated within the proposed framework.

On the Self-Evidence of Blackness: An Interview with Charl Landvreugd

On the Self-Evidence of Blackness: An Interview with Charl Landvreugd

Finding planets and life among the stars: For the first time in history, mankind has the tools to look for other planets and whether these might host life.

Are we alone in the universe? How can we find out? What would happen if we made contact with extraterrestrial life forms, intelligent or otherwise? These questions have fascinated humans ever since we understood that there is a universe beyond our pale blue dot. As the British physicist and author Arthur C Clarke put it: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally frightening”. > Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally frightening Speculation about the existence and nature of extraterrestrial life—and how humans might find and interact with it—has gone on for several millennia, but we live in the first age where the tools are available to collect, analyze and understand the potential evidence. The fundamental question “Are we alone?” drives the field of astrobiology, whose researchers tackle everything from microbes that thrive in extreme environments, to the origin of Earth's moon and oceans, to the potential for ecosystems under the icy surfaces of Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa. Momentum is also gathering for the search for habitable Earth‐like worlds orbiting other stars. However, the detection of “exo‐Earths”, and the discovery of any life signs thereupon, is one of the most technically and scientifically challenging feats ever attempted by astronomers. The journey begins with an understanding of our own home. To the Apollo astronauts, the Earth looked like a shiny glass marble suspended above a moonscape of gray and black. In December 1972, the Apollo 17 crew captured on film a view of Earth that can only be seen from a spaceship aligned between the Earth and the sun: in its fully illuminated glory, suspended in endless black space (Fig 1). This so‐called Blue Marble image went on to become one …

Capitalizing on crisis: venture philanthropy’s colonial project to remake urban education

This article focuses on the increased power of venture philanthropy to shape education in urban communities of color in the USA. The author situates venture philanthropy’s expanded influence in urban school districts in the nexus of urban disinvestment, neoliberal governance, wealth concentration, and economic crisis. The author argues that billionaire philanthropists are using the fiscal crisis of the state to shape education policy and governance, operating as part of the ‘shadow state’. Capitalizing on austerity politics and their philanthropies’ embeddedness in the state and advocacy organizations, venture capitalists deploy their enormous wealth and political influence to restructure urban school districts that predominantly serve low-income African American, Latino, and other students of color. The goal of their neoliberal agenda is to restructure education to serve economic competitiveness and to open up the public education sector to capital accumulation. The fusion of the state and capital, through the interrelation of venture philanthropy and government at all scales, to impose policies of disenfranchisement, public school closings, privatization, and appropriation of Black urban space, constitutes a new colonialism. The article illustrates this dynamic through case studies of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

‘Race’, politics and local football – continuity and change in the life of a British African-Caribbean local football club

This paper focuses on the role of a local sports club in shaping the lives of British African-Caribbean males in one British city over a 40-year period. The paper describes how the ‘Meadebrook Cavaliers’ has transitioned from its origins as an East Midlands parks-based football team in 1970 to a successful senior-level local football club by the early 1980s, before finally achieving a further social and financial organizational complexity in its charitable status, attained in 2009. Attention is paid specifically to the social formation of this largely masculine ‘black’ sport space over time and on how, and in what ways, these developments in local sport in one club in one British city are also intimately connected to wider social, economic and political developments in the UK. In doing so, the paper demonstrates, both theoretically and empirically, how the emergence of ‘black’ local football resonates with social change around ‘race’ politics in Britain during the period 1970–2010. By the same token, this mainly black male sporting space continues to reflect and influence change in the wider political, social and sporting terrains within which the club has been located – and within the dynamic black African-Caribbean communities which constitute it.

Sensitivity comparison of searches for binary black hole coalescences with ground-based gravitational-wave detectors

Searches for gravitational-wave transients from binary black hole coalescences typically rely on one of two approaches: matched filtering with templates and morphology-independent excess power searches. Multiple algorithmic implementations in the analysis of data from the first generation of ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers have used different strategies for the suppression of non-Gaussian noise transients and have targeted different regions of the binary black hole parameter space. In this paper we compare the sensitivity of three such algorithms: matched filtering with full coalescence templates, matched filtering with ringdown templates, and a morphology-independent excess power search. The comparison is performed at a fixed false alarm rate and relies on Monte Carlo simulations of binary black hole coalescences for spinning, nonprecessing systems with a total mass of $25--350\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{M}}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, which covers a portion of the parameter space of stellar mass and intermediate mass black hole binaries. We find that in the mass range of $25--100\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{M}}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, the sensitive distance of the search, marginalized over source parameters, is the best with matched filtering to full waveform templates, which is within 10% of the next most sensitive search of morphology-independent excess power algorithm, at a false alarm rate of 3 events/year. In the mass range of $100--350\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{M}}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, the same comparison favors the morphology-independent excess power search within 20% of matched filtering with ringdown templates. The dependence on mass and spin is also explored.

Development of low-temperature performance specifications for asphalt mixtures using the bending beam rheometer

Thermal cracking due to stress at low temperature is a major factor in roadway degradation. The purpose of this study was to measure low-temperature response of asphalt mixtures from field cores, assess the practicality of using the bending beam rheometer (BBR) to test field mixtures, compare test results to observed field performance, determine whether a specification value can be obtained to evaluate low-temperature pavement performance, and determine if samples constructed in the laboratory using the same mix design reflect field performance. In this study, the BBR was used to test multiple field and laboratory asphalt mixtures. Field samples were obtained from cores located in the Salt Lake Valley in Utah. The response of field cores showed that although the same binder grade is used in the region, the resulting mixtures have significant differences in creep moduli and m-values. This indicates that binder testing alone might not be enough to control the material's creep modulus. The combination of BBR test results and field surveys indicates that both creep modulus and m-value play a significant role in low-temperature performance of asphalt pavements. Pavements with high creep moduli and low m-values are more susceptible to low-temperature thermal distress. From field observations, the field performance of each section was known; by plotting the test results of the field samples on a Black Space diagram, it can be observed that a thermal stress failure envelope might exist. However, more research will be necessary to further define a specific value for this specification.

Towards a viscoelastic mechanical characterization of asphalt materials by ultrasonic measurements

This study focuses on the use of P-wave propagation measurements in order to evaluate the complex modulus, more specifically for the reversible and dissipated parts of asphalt materials. Both the wave velocity and attenuation factor have been measured by means of an ultrasonic transmission test, at frequencies between 200 and 300 kHz and temperatures ranging from −20 to 40 °C. Based on this wave velocity and attenuation factor, the high-frequency complex modulus and its components are computed by considering a 2D propagation of waves in an isotropic viscoelastic medium. Results are plotted with respect to the master curve, Cole–Cole and Black spaces. The ultrasonic test results agree with results obtained by complex modulus test and then fitted by the 2S2P1D rheological model. This paper shows in Cole–Cole space that ultrasonic data can facilitate the determination of important rheological parameters as one of the two parabolic dashpots (k) and the glassy modulus E0. The phase angle, which is also a key viscoelastic identification parameter, can be determined at high frequency in a Black space representation.

Atherosclerosis imaging using 3D black blood TSE SPACEvs2D TSE

To compare 3D Black Blood turbo spin echo (TSE) sampling perfection with application-optimized contrast using different flip angle evolution (SPACE) vs 2D TSE in evaluating atherosclerotic plaques in multiple vascular territories. The carotid, aortic, and femoral arterial walls of 16 patients at risk for cardiovascular or atherosclerotic disease were studied using both 3D black blood magnetic resonance imaging SPACE and conventional 2D multi-contrast TSE sequences using a consolidated imaging approach in the same imaging session. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed on the images. Agreement of morphometric measurements between the two imaging sequences was assessed using a two-sample t-test, calculation of the intra-class correlation coefficient and by the method of linear regression and Bland-Altman analyses. No statistically significant qualitative differences were found between the 3D SPACE and 2D TSE techniques for images of the carotids and aorta. For images of the femoral arteries, however, there were statistically significant differences in all four qualitative scores between the two techniques. Using the current approach, 3D SPACE is suboptimal for femoral imaging. However, this may be due to coils not being optimized for femoral imaging. Quantitatively, in our study, higher mean total vessel area measurements for the 3D SPACE technique across all three vascular beds were observed. No significant differences in lumen area for both the right and left carotids were observed between the two techniques. Overall, a significant-correlation existed between measures obtained between the two approaches. Qualitative and quantitative measurements between 3D SPACE and 2D TSE techniques are comparable. 3D-SPACE may be a feasible approach in the evaluation of cardiovascular patients.

Lope and Tirso Translated to the Boards of Bath’s Ustinov Studio

Lope and Tirso Translated to the Boards of Bath’s Ustinov Studio Susan L. Fischer Presented by the Ustinov Studio, the Theatre Royal Bath, the Arcola Theatre, and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, England. Curated by Laurence Boswell. Set and Costumes designed by Mark Bailey. Lighting designed by Ben Ormerod. Sound designed and composed by Jon Nicholls. Choreography and Movement directed by Lucy Cullingford. Fights directed by Terry King. Punishment without Revenge [El castigo sin venganza] by Lope de Vega. 26 September-21 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by Meredith Oakes. Directed by Laurence Boswell. With Chris Andrew Mellon (Ricardo/Rutillio), Jim Bywater (Febo), William Hoyland (Duke), Hedydd Dylan (Cintia), Nick Barber (Federico), Simon Scardifield (Batin), Frances McNamee (Cassandra), Annie Hemingway (Lucrecia), Doug Rao (Carlos, Marquis of Mantua), Katie Lightfoot (Aurora). A Lady of Little Sense [La dama boba] by Lope de Vega. 12 September-21 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by David Johnston. Directed by Laurence Boswell. With Simon Scardifield (Liseo), Chris Andrew Mellon (Turin/Duardo), Doug Rao (Leandro/Feniso/Pedro), William Hoyland (Otavio), Jim Bywater (Miseno/Rufino/Dance Master), Katie Lightfoot (Nise), Annie Hemingway (Celia), Frances McNamee (Finea), Hedydd Dylan (Clara), Nick Barber (Laurencio). Don Gil of the Green Breeches [Don Gil de las calzas verdes] by Tirso de Molina. 19 September-20 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by Sean O’Brien. Directed by Mehmet Ergen. With Hedydd Dylan (Donna Juana), Doug Rao (Don Martin), Katie Lightfoot (Donna Ines), William Hoyland (Don Pedro), Annie Hemingway (Donna Clara), Simon Scardifield (Don Juan), Chris Andrew Mellon (Quintana), Jim Bywater (Caramanchel/Don Diego), Nick Barber (Ossorio/Bailiff), Frances McNamee (Celia/Valdiviesa/Aguilara). How different can Spanish theatre be, I thought as we set out for this, part of the Spanish Golden Age Season [End Page 229] playing at the Theatre Royal’s smaller sister. […] How naive of me, for it turns out that just as world music takes the notes and instruments you are familiar with and creates something you’ve never heard before, so this magnificent production gives you a completely different view of drama. (Alison Phillips) Thus spake one critic of Laurence Boswell’s production of Punishment without Revenge in Meredith Oakes’s “pithy and pointed new translation” (Taylor), which stayed rather close to the original. It is not surprising that connoisseurs and devotees of Shakespeare, or of classical French theatre, might have perceived Spanish Golden Age plays to be “different,” not least because Punishment qua tragedy is built around the “inhumanity of the code’s inexorable laws and the vicious lengths to which people will go in order, technically, to save face” in comparison with “the easy-going, pragmatic manner of Falstaff (‘What is honour? A word’)” (Taylor); and because “Federico’s anecdotal manservant brightly demonstrates that Lope’s tragedy has a lighter side you certainly don’t find in Racine” (Billington, “Punishment”). If Michael Billington was “inevitably reminded of Euripides’s Hippolytus and Racine’s Phèdre,” he also thought that, “in its moral intricacy, Lope’s play is the equal of its twin rivals—and indeed, in some ways, far better.” Critics also perceived affinities between A Lady of Little Sense and a professed Shakespearean counterpart: “[W]hile it festively celebrates love and marriage, it leaves a faintly acrid aftertaste. I was often reminded of The Taming of the Shrew” (Billington, “Lady”). And Mehmet Ergen’s production of Don Gil of the Green Breeches in the translation of poet Sean O’Brien, which sounded not only “authentic and accurate” but also “notably well-phrased” (Coveney), evoked “a distinct mirroring of some of the style of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, if not the poetry or the darker side of the Bard” (Mottram). Boswell and team were to be applauded for having striven “to test [the] patriotic complacency al máximo” of die-hard bardologists (Cavendish). Punishment without Revenge (1631) Boswell’s production had the feel of Velázquez in its black box space of polished glass trimmed in gold, where doors turned around to create physical space. A silver throne and luxurious costumes embellished the simple and spare set. In a preshow whose music had an aura of flamenco (characteristic of English productions of...

Papillary regeneration: anatomical aspects and treatment approaches

This paper aims to report a literature review on the anatomy and morphology of the interproximal papilla and present the options of both surgical and nonsurgical treatment for the recovery of interdental papilla. Literature review: The loss of the interdental papilla because of the interproximal bone loss accounts for aesthetic, phonetic and functional problems of patients with periodontal disease. The interproximal tissue reconstruction has been reported in literature through both surgical procedures with the use of subepithelial connective tissue graft, restorative and orthodontic treatment. Conclusion: The etiology of gingival black space is multifactorial, therefore, it is important to diagnose properly the etiological factor to establish an appropriate treatment planing. However, the treatment approaches are not predictable and further studies are necessary to recommend the clinical practices available to date.

Computationally Efficient Globally Linearizing Control of a CSTR using Nonlinear Black Box Models

The main objective of this work is to develop computationally efficient Global linearization based control (GLC) schemes, which are suitable for control of nonlinear processes with fast dynamics. Models used for the controller synthesis are discrete time block oriented nonlinear black box state space models identi=ed directly from the input-output perturbation data. The chosen model structures facilitate construction of closed form solutions to the unconstrained GLC formulations. The efficacy of the proposed control formulations is evaluated by conducting simulation studies on a benchmark continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR) system which exhibits input multiplicity behavior. Analysis of the simulation results reveals that the proposed GLC formulations are able to achieve a signi=cant reduction in the average computation time without compromising on the closed loop performance.

Parameter estimation for compact binary coalescence signals with the first generation gravitational-wave detector network

Compact binary systems with neutron stars or black holes are one of the most promising sources for ground-based gravitational wave detectors. Gravitational radiation encodes rich information about source physics; thus parameter estimation and model selection are crucial analysis steps for any detection candidate events. Detailed models of the anticipated waveforms enable inference on several parameters, such as component masses, spins, sky location and distance that are essential for new astrophysical studies of these sources. However, accurate measurements of these parameters and discrimination of models describing the underlying physics are complicated by artifacts in the data, uncertainties in the waveform models and in the calibration of the detectors. Here we report such measurements on a selection of simulated signals added either in hardware or software to the data collected by the two LIGO instruments and the Virgo detector during their most recent joint science run, including a "blind injection" where the signal was not initially revealed to the collaboration. We exemplify the ability to extract information about the source physics on signals that cover the neutron star and black hole parameter space over the individual mass range 1 Msun - 25 Msun and the full range of spin parameters. The cases reported in this study provide a snap-shot of the status of parameter estimation in preparation for the operation of advanced detectors.

The Dark by Lemony Snicket (review)

Reviewed by: The Dark by Lemony Snicket Jeannette Hulick, Reviewer Snicket, Lemony The Dark; illus. by Jon Klassen. Little, 2013 40p ISBN 978-0-316-18748-0 $16.99 R* 5–7 yrs The dark that fills the shadowy corners and the pitch-black basement of Laszlo’s old creaky house pays a visit to the boy in his bedroom one night. A nervous Laszlo asks what the dark wants, and it replies, “I want to show you something.” Laszlo checks the closet and behind the shower curtain, but it’s the basement where the dark wants him to go. Summoning his courage, Laszlo descends the stairs as the dark beckons him to come closer to a chest of drawers, where the boy finds a stash of glowing light bulbs the same size as the burnt-out one in his nightlight. Laszlo thanks the dark and returns to bed, visiting the basement next morning to say “Hi” to the dark; while the dark doesn’t answer, the still-open bottom drawer looks like [End Page 483] a smile, and the dark “never bothered him again.” This is an offbeat—and spookily atmospheric—approach to fear of the dark, with a creative story and high-impact artwork The limited perspective of Laszlo’s flashlight beam, shrouded around the edges in opaque blackness, allows for a pleasantly creepy build-up of suspense that is then cheerily deflated by the surprise benevolence of the dark. Klassen’s slightly retro gouache and digital art in attractive, muted tones is a perfect match for the text, with the diminutive Laszlo, clad in blue footie pajamas, a fine foil for all the matte black space lurking in doorways and behind curtains; sharp-eyed viewers will note the absence of Laszlo’s ever-present flashlight at book’s end, once he’s made peace with the dark. Kids comfortable with delicious shivers will find this an enjoyable thrill. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois