Bleeding Edge Research Articles

Ways of Depicting: The Presentation of One’s Self as a Brand

Ways of Depicting: The Presentation of One’s Self as a Brand

On the Bleeding Edge of Farming the City: An Ethnographic Study of Small-scale Commercial Urban Farming in Vancouver

In this study, we explore the emergence and early development of small-scale commercial urban farming in metropolitan Vancouver, British Columbia. Commercial urban farming represents a grassroots entrepreneurial activity, spearheaded by individuals and groups, who combine the practices of growing and direct marketing fresh food products, in urban spaces for urban consumers. Considered as part of the agricultural renaissance occurring in cities and an example of the incremental shift toward more place-based food systems, commercial urban farming transforms underutilized and unproductive land traditionally zoned for residential, commercial, or institutional use into intensive food-producing spaces.Those pioneering this activity reported many benefits, including high job satisfaction, increased health and wellness, and making positive contributions toward the environmental health of the planet. Despite these advantages, they also faced many challenges in moving this model forward, including a lack of land tenure, low financial return, and the challenge of earning a living solely from farming activities.We employed an ethnographic methodology to assess the practice, opportunities, challenges, and responses associated with this emergent model of urban food production and retailing. In capturing the lived experience of growers over a five-year period, we are also analyzing and understanding how and why the very first innovators trying to move this model forward in metropolitan Vancouver are negotiating and staking claim to new spaces in the city for intensive food production. We are also interested in why these early adopters were choosing to make their lives through pioneering small-scale commercial enterprises and systems, and creating and engaging in new forms of work connected with the local food economy.

Welcome to the Indexed World: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and the Things Search Engines Will Not Find

ABSTRACTGiven the state of contemporary American culture, it should come as no surprise that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (2013) revolves around technological change: all of the published responses to the novel refer to this phenomenon in some way. What these interpretations fail to appreciate, however, is that this novel is not just about media technology or even the Internet more specifically; it is about the effect of the search engine. To that end, this article uses a media-historical analysis to argue for the search engine as the prime motor spurring the reorganization of Pynchon’s technique and his take on popular culture in the novel.

Writing (at) the End: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

In work spanning six decades, Thomas Pynchon has depicted a plural world reduced to mechanization, automation, and control. In doing so he has done more than any American author to reveal to readers the posthuman future. This essay seeks Pynchon’s human(e) response to these eschatological forces. It does so by examining how Pynchon concludes his works. Referring to Peter Rabinowitz’s theory of endings, this essay argues that at the conclusion of his novels, Pynchon takes on a voice that speaks more urgently than the pluralism and polyphony that permeate his pages. This move from noise to clarity is a move from spiritualism to spirituality. Even though possibilities are diminishing, and the end seems near, there remains the opportunity for communion, shared vulnerability, family, and friendship. This essay focuses on how this move transpires in Bleeding Edge, a novel that presents, potentially, the culmination of historical-eschatological movements toward reduction and domination. But the novel concludes with an extended meditation on family love and female friendship, in a way that conveys Pynchon’s source of hope. Focusing on his endings reveals an enduring humanism at the core of Pynchon’s work that can fuel further study in the age of terror, surveillance, domination, and dehumanization.

Pynchon’s New Worlds

Introduction On the heels of Thomas Pynchon’s 80th birthday last May, the 2017 edition of International Pynchon Week, organized by Benedicte Chorier-Fryd (University of Poitiers) and Gilles Chamerois (University of Western Brittany), was a chance to take stock of a more than fifty-year literary career. With more papers investigating Pynchon’s later novels—Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013)—, the conference sought to map Pynchon’s “new worlds” as well as rei...

Nailing smoke

Curation at the bleeding edge of technology.

September 11 and the Question of Innocence in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Bleeding Edge

ABSTRACTThomas Pynchon’s politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels’ profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down. I argue that Against the Day’s (2007) various reflections on what it means to be “innocent”—politically, artistically, ethically—are central to an understanding of how Pynchon historicizes September 11 and terrorist violence. Shifting from the historical, allegorical mode of Against the Day to a relatively realistic representation of 9/11 and its aftermath in Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon searches for points of resistance in the flattened network of twenty-first-century global capital. In his rejection of both the techno-utopian faith in the Internet as an instrument of liberation and the possibilities of withdrawal in an age of pervasive surveillance, Pynchon instead turns to the next generation, finding perhaps the only hope for the future of progressive politics in the children themselves.

Meatspace is Cyberspace: The Pynchonian Posthuman in <i>Bleeding Edge</i>

This article examines Thomas Pynchon’s indirect critique of utopian posthumanism in Bleeding Edge by analyzing the deleterious effects that an emerging Internet culture has on the novel’s characters. By seeping into every aspect of their lives, embedding itself in their minds, and becoming a prosthetic consciousness, the Internet has transformed the characters into posthumans and altered their subject positions within a technological global capitalist culture. Contrasting the novel’s take on the posthuman with the posthuman theories of Donna Harraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Robert Pepperell, Rosi Braidotti, David Roden and Seb Franklin, I argue that, while the dominant utopian strain in posthuman theory imagines the advent of posthumanism as an opportunity for liberation from the sexism, racism, and colonial oppression that are enabled by the positing of the classical humanist subject, Pynchon demonstrates that because the Internet technology that brought about the posthuman condition is controlled by governments and corporations, it has become just one more lost chance at freedom that was converted into an instrument of increased control and surveillance. Reading Bleeding Edge against William Gibson’s prototypical posthuman novel Neuromancer, I also contend that while Gibson, despite challenging the ontological primacy of meatspace over cyberspace, keeps the two realms separate, Pynchon, who borrows Gibson’s terms, shows that cyberspace has already merged with meatspace. As a result, Maxine Tarnow, the protagonist of Bleeding Edge, has nowhere to run in her attempt to find a provisional refuge for herself and her family.

“A City of the Future”:Gravity’s Rainbowand the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair

Drawing on archival sources, I argue that the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair (also known as Century 21) was an important source for Thomas Pynchon’s surreal depictions of the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow. Accounts of the influence of Seattle on Pynchon have been limited to his work as a Boeing technical writer, and Century 21 goes unmentioned in work on the novel’s allusions by Steven Weisenburger and others. Pynchon responds throughout Gravity’s Rainbow to Century 21, particularly its Cold War views of space-age futurism and nuclear weapons. I draw new connections between the angel of Lübeck and John Glenn’s World’s Fair appearance; aspects of the Raketen-Stadt and the fair’s US Science Pavilion; and Pynchon’s many towers and elevators and that signature feature of Century 21, the Space Needle. The conclusion attends to the fair’s traces in Against the Day and Bleeding Edge, demonstrating Pynchon’s nearly career-long fascination with the event.

Capitalist Mysticism and the Historicizing of 9/11 in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

ABSTRACTThis article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013). It suggests that the concerns of postmodern writers and theorists came to dominate interpretations of 9/11 (practiced most successfully by Don DeLillo in Falling Man) and, in doing so, severed its connection to deeper historical trajectories. At the heart of the postmodernist fallacy is the same privileging of discourse over materiality typified by utopian conceptions of the Internet. In Bleeding Edge, this utopia takes the form of DeepArcher: a “Deep Web” paradise infiltrated by suspicious forces during the 9/11 attacks. The intermingling of espionage, the tech industry, and the response to 9/11 in Pynchon’s novel foregrounds the ambiguities of digital modernity in a way yet to be recognized by most writers and theorists of the contemporary.

Intratextuality, Trauma, and the Posthuman in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

ABSTRACTIn Bleeding Edge Pynchon uses again a female unconventional detective, as he did in The Crying of Lot 49, with the ultimate aim of evaluating the condition of America. However, whereas Oedipa had to deal with an understanding of American society in terms of science and religion, in Bleeding Edge Maxine is at pains to understand a society ruled by the new paradigms of posthumanity and trauma. By focusing on the binary life/death, the article evaluates Pynchon’s portrayal of current society as posthuman and disrupted by a new type of social stagnation related to the control of information flow, a situation that demands the role of an active protagonist, in line with later theories in the field of trauma studies. The textual analysis points to information, terrorism, and web addiction as the new dangers that Maxine has to cope with if she wants to pull society back to motion.

A Fog Computing based Smart Grid Cloud Data Security

Today's electricity grid is sprouting into the smart grid which should be dependable, supple, effcient, and supportable. To fulfill these necessities, the smart grid draws on a lot of center advances. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). These advances or progressions encourage simple also, quick aggregation of different information, e.g. fine-grained meter readings. Various security and protection concerns with respect to the accumulated information/data emerge or arise, since explorations has demonstrated that it is conceivable to reason and extract user behavior from smart meter readings. Thus, these meter readings are extremely touchy and require suitable assurance. Smart grid is bleeding edge power grid. It takes in communication framework/network with information system as one more savvy system for strong and safe base. Cloud computing has made and propelled over the earlier years transforming into a certified choice for Smart Grids system because of the flexibility, openness, interoperability execution and most basic its execution. Regardless of the way that smart grid using two way communication and cloud there are still some break provisions as for security which have to ponder on.

Negotiating the Paranoia Narrative: The Critical Reception ofBleeding Edge(2013) by Thomas Pynchon

Traditionally, narratology has studied the production and interpretation of narratives as a process of communication involving a sender, a message, and a receiver. This article argues that the complexity of narrative creation and understanding needs a wider perspective. Taking our cue from socionarratology (esp. Arthur W. Frank, more generally Pierre Bourdieu) and cultural narratology (esp. Ansgar Nünning, more generally Stephen Greenblatt), we suggest that the creation and interpretation of narratives be studied as a process of circulation (of cultural materials such as narrative templates) and negotiation (basically between narrative habitus and literary field). As an example we zoom in on the circulation and negotiation of paranoia narratives in the critical reception of Thomas Pynchon’s most recent novel Bleeding Edge. In the analysis of some 100 reviews we specify the process of circulation and negotiation as the prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration of prototypical paranoia narratives. The decisive steering factor (prefiguration) in the reviews turns out to be the authorial image; Pynchon’s configuration of the paranoia plot is typically approached from the gendered perspective of characterization; and the novel’s transformation (refiguration) is said to reside in Pynchon’s power to force us to reinterpret reality in the light of his own brand of paranoia narrative.

“I Just Look at Books”: Reading the Monetary Metareality of <i>Bleeding Edge</i>

The essay analyzes Bleeding Edg e for its pervasive representation of money, arguing that it operates as a metareality in the novel both on the levels of plot and style. Money is presented as a symbolic structure behind reality that is accessible to the initiated, the interpretation of which offers genuine insight about the world and its interrelations, in parallel to religious or scientific discourses. This does not simply mean that everything—politics, society, culture, technology, etc.—is ultimately determined by economic factors, but rather that money underlies the reality of these phenomena like a kind of source code, and that it is readable as such, for better or worse. In the novel, real and virtual money is heavily associated with moral values and their loss, although it is not at all only associated negatively with greed and the abuse of power. Money also harbors subversive potential in Bleeding Edge , as it can uncover corruption and fraud as much as other conspiratorial phenomena (especially in connection to 9/11). In particular, cash money can become an alternative medium of communication that combines the private and the public. Money does exhibit a tendency towards moral corruption in the novel, but at the same time it eludes any complete control and remains an economic as well as symbolic tool that can undermine the very capitalist system it seems to perpetuate.

Design and Realization of Pre-Amplifier and Filters for on-Board Radar System

Today's warfare situation incorporates a considerable measure of innovative weaponry and every nation is attempting to outmaneuver the other utilizing high engineering, henceforth it is of most extreme criticalness to be at the front line of the bleeding edge innovation and having the best weapons conceivable to secure the country. One of the innovations which give the one having it the high ground is Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR) engineering. Radar is an object recognition framework that uses electromagnetic waves to recognize the range, vehicles, climate developments and landscape. A radar framework incorporates a transmitter which radiates an arrangement of EM pulses. These pulses are transmitted in a directional pattern using a suitable high-gain antenna. The radar then uses a collector, normally joined with the same radio wire, to catch any returned pulses being reflected from items showing up in the reception apparatus' field of perspective. The transmitter, antenna and recipient are connected utilizing a circulator. This guarantees that all the transmitter power is sent to the radio wire whilst all the reflected power came back to the reception apparatus. The echo signal coming back to the receiver is a high recurrence signal in Ghz extent having low adequacy. The processing of this sort of signal is extremely troublesome and henceforth it needs to be down changed over into an Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal whose reach is in Mhz. This down transformation is carried out utilizing a super heterodyne receiver. Most radar receivers use megahertz Intermediate Frequency (IF) with a value around 30 and 75 megahertz. Ground based radar is utilized for missile tracking framework to get its range and angular position to block and destroy. Precision of these radars is not sufficient to hit and crush, so the rocket itself is provided with onboard radar to track the target, block it buzzing around and pulverize. Radar signal handling of onboard radar is carried out in both simple and advanced modes, The latter mode of signal preparing is much simple to actualize changes and up gradation. But the IF signal before digitization needs to be amplified to get enough signal strength and filtered to select the desired. This paper exhibits the design and realization of an amplifier and filters to process the received signal at IF level of a locally available radar framework. MULTISIM is utilized to confirm the channel qualities and intensification variable.

Seeing Things … Differently, or, Hallucinating the Postmodern

From thermodynamics and rocket technology to the deep web, Thomas Pynchon's novels and stories have often juxtaposed science and technology with unusual, not to say downright implausible happenings. This is perhaps the result of a fascination with contorting scientific knowledge into strange applications, whether as metaphors for social mores or to see how far its logics can be pushed toward the breaking point, but it is assuredly grounded in the relationship between the human and the technological and how American society deals with its contemporary technological environment. For example, Bleeding Edge explores the growth of the internet and the dot-com boom, Vineland focuses on television and film, and Gravity's Rainbow deals with the V2 rocket program. Obviously, such reductive statements omit the complexities of Pynchon's inclusions of and allusions to competing paradigms and conspiracy theories, but in each case what is foregrounded is how individuals understand and relate to the world. As such, it is possible to assert that Pynchon's fictions have always been involved in representing and articulating of mind. Such states might differ across his fictions in terms of their setting and context, but whether concerned with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (Against the Day), the 9/11 attacks (Bleeding Edge), California at various points (The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice), World War Two and its aftermath (V, Gravity's Rainbow), or even colonial America (Mason & Dixon), Pynchon's works are invariably concerned with seeing things differently than established histories might otherwise imply and, moreover, foregrounding the relativism and partiality of any individual perspective or overly simplified way of perceiving the world. His protagonists search for answers to make sense of their experiences as they are cast adrift from meaning; in the case of Slothrop from Gravity's Rainbow, he is literally lost as he disappears from the narrative part way through. Within this framework, a recurrent trope of Pynchon's fictions is negative psychological responses to the environment (paranoia, uncertainty, emotional and epistemological insecurity) as a result of a failure to reconcile individual experiences with something defined as normal or normative. Pynchon's characters neither grow nor find answers, but this is precisely the point: they accumulate data, clues, and/or experiences, but no single answer suffices to define everything, and no individual's answer corresponds to any other's. As a result of this, one of the disciplines/discourses most often referenced in his fictions is psychiatry, for even when not directly connected to the narrative arc, psychological and psychiatric terminology and characters are nonetheless present and serve to lead the reader to the perception that reality is contested, not a given, and that perception is not straightforwardly schematic. More specifically, this article examines the ways in which perceptions of hallucinations--as psychiatric symptoms--have been represented in Pynchon's works and, more importantly, how they have augmented and shifted the territory upon which distinctions between hallucination and reality are founded. Within his work is a suspicion of the modes of psychiatric classifications and an attendant concern with the problems of control in the creation of such classifications, and we see this as broadly emblematic of a particular perspective evident within postmodern literature and theory. In this interpretation, Jean-Francois Lyotard's much-vaunted incredulity toward metanarratives is foreshadowed within Pynchon's oeuvre as a suspicion towards those who would describe and define reality at the expense of other worldviews (xxiv). (1) After a brief examination of how theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard have represented postmodern society, this essay moves on to explore the problems of binary-based psychiatric definitions of hallucinations. …

Atypical Fibroxanthoma of Scalp: A Paradoxical Benign Tumour.

Atypical fibroxanthoma (AFX) is a recently described soft tissue tumour by World Health Organization as a benign tumour of uncertain differentiation, occurring on sun exposed skin in elderly individual [1]. The bizarreness as well as marked atypia seen in the cells raises a first impression of malignant tumour, whereas it is rarely so. It has a male predominance (70%) with an average age of presentation of 71.9 years, ranging from 29–91 years [2]. An 81-year-old male presented with hard nodular scalp swelling since 7 to 8 years with a rapid size increase since 3 months. On examination there was a nodulo-ulcerative lesion measuring 5cm x 3cm on scalp with bleeding edges. He did not have any other cutaneous lesion or lymphadenopathy. Excisional biopsy done outside was reported as sebaceous carcinoma. The patient was referred to our hospital for further management. On review of biopsy slides, the tumour cells were spindled, plump to epithelioid with marked pleomorphism, arranged in haphazard, vaguely fascicular or storiform patterns [Table/Fig-1a]. Tumour cells had hyperchromatic and multilobulated bizarre nuclei with scattered multinucleate tumour giant cells. Some cells of the lesion contained vacuolated and lipid-containing cytoplasm similar to xanthoma raising doubts of sebaceous carcinoma, as diagnosed outside [Table/Fig-1b]. On extensive IHC work up, the tumour cells were positive for Vimentin (Dako;V9) [Table/Fig-1c], CD68 (Leica;514H12), CD10 (Dako;56C6) [Table/Fig-1d] and negative for Cytokeratin (Biogenix;AE1+AE3) [Table/Fig-1e], EMA (Dako, E29), SMA (Dako;1A4), S 100 (Dako;IS504), Desmin (Dako;D33), Caldesmon (Dako; H-CD) and HMB 45 (Dako;HMB45) [Table/Fig-1f]. A final diagnosis of atypical fibroxanthoma was made. [Table/Fig-1]: Histopathological examination showing large bizarre cells with abundant foamy cytoplasm and atypical mitosis (HE b) 400x). Immunohistochemistry showing positivity for Vimentin (c), CD10 (d) and negativity for Cytokeratin (e), HMB45 ... Making a diagnosis of atypical fibroxanthoma is challenging and the diagnosis should be made by exclusion of other differential diagnoses after applying the stringent histological criteria and a broad panel of immunostains. Cutaneous carcinomas and melanoma must be ruled out by immunohistochemistry. Absent immunostaining for cytokeratins, S100 and HMB45 in AFX are helpful for excluding sebaceous carcinoma along with squamous cell carcinoma and malignant melanoma. Other differentials are malignant fibrohistiocytoma, atypical Fibrous Histiocytoma /dermatofibroma with monster Cells and pleomorphic fibroma [Table/Fig-2]. By definition, in AFX tumour cells lack expression of S100, cytokeratin, CD34, desmin and h-caldesmon. Previously our case was misdiagnosed as sebaceous carcinoma due to pleomorphism, abundant clear to foamy cytoplasm and bizarre pleomorphic nuclei. CD10 is a useful marker for AFX and is positive in 95%–100% cases of AFX [2]. A histiocytic marker CD 68 is positive in more than half of cases [3]. AFX shows a very good prognosis after surgical excision [4]. Reports of metastasis are very rare, and recurrence is uncommon [5]. Distinction from high grade sarcoma is crucial to prevent inappropriate aggressive therapy. [Table/Fig-2]: Differential diagnoses of atypical fibroxanthoma

A Note on Bleeding Edge’s “Unsheltered”

The Bleeding Edge excerpt provided in the Fall 2013 Penguin Press catalogue notes that “[u]nhoused people sleep in doorways,”but by the time the Advanced Reading Copy had reached reviewers, “unhoused” had been changed to “unsheltered” (2), an edit that remained in place, even after other changes to the text, a couple of months later when the book became available for general readers. . . . We might ask: what significance is there to the edit? And from whose perspective are we seeing Maxine’s neighborhood in the opening of the novel? . . . The edit actually distances the text from the only characters in the scene to whom we might attribute the perception of unsheltered people, Maxine and her children.

Technology and communication design

As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.

Online Advertising Intermediary

Applying bleeding edge courses of action in advertising is always a case on the table of decision makers. In online case, lack of a practice to place right advertisement in a right time for the right user has been counted as biggest challenage. On the other hand, “ad clutter”, the key criticism on online advertising; is about to put online advertisement's benefits away and annoying users more than before. Accordingly, this article aims at scrutinizing this critical problem by incorporating one of the next generation technologies, Lead Generation. This study introduces an e-business framework in advertisement intermediating in the form of a framework so that lets advertisers advertise in customized way. In this approach, the authors focused on displaying a personalized ad for each user by which marketers could redirect their visiting prospects into becoming their own consumers. At the end, the managerial implications are reported.