Drawing Table Research Articles

The unique preservation of Yves Saint Laurent’s birthplace: A singular cultural heritage in Oran

Abstract In 2020, the Affane Mohamed Foundation initiated the restoration of the Yves Saint Laurent house in Oran, Algeria, led by architect Youcef Fernane. The project aimed not only to restore the artist’s birthplace but also to showcase his first private theatre, sketches, drawing table, study, and personal bedroom. The house, built in 1925 in the Plateau Saint-Michel district (now Hai Sidi El Bachir), exemplifies neoclassical architecture with Art Deco influences. This project stands out as a unique initiative in Oran, where the preservation of public figures’ homes is rare, making it an exception in Algeria. The restoration, completed in 2022, has attracted significant attention, drawing visitors locally and internationally, particularly through social media, highlighting the cultural and historical value of the site. The research addresses visitor feedback, hypothesising variability in their testimonials, which serve as constructive criticism of this initial tourism initiative in Oran. The dual objectives are to illuminate the significance of the Yves Saint Laurent residence and to analyse visitor perceptions and attitudes towards this memorial site. Methodologically, the study is based on documentary research, including recent surveys and photographs from the Youcef Fernane design office and qualitative data from online questionnaires and visitor books. The results highlight the house’s importance as a cultural landmark but also reveal a lack of publicity, affecting its visibility. Conclusions suggest that the museum significantly enhances Oran’s cultural landscape, offering emotional and educational experiences. However, there is a need for better promotional efforts to increase its visibility and appeal to a broader audience, emphasising the importance of strategic marketing and visitor experience improvements for future projects.

INOVASI METODE PRODUKSI UNTUK OPTIMALISASI USAHA UKM BATIK BIRU LANCOR, KABUPATEN PROBOLINGGO

The existence of SMEs as a driving force for the economy is no longer in doubt, but there are still many obstacles that cannot be overcome. UKM Batik Biru Lancor is one of the SME that has the potential to develop but still faces problems in the areas of quality and production capacity that cannot yet meet market demand. This community service activity aims to provide solutions to partners in overcoming obstacles to developing their business. The method applied is by designing equipment in the form of a batik drawing table, using a gas batik stove and providing training to the SME. The results obtained by partners are an increase in employee skills and additional production support equipment so that the quality and quantity of production increases. In this way, community service activities as one of the obligations of the Tridharma of Higher Education have achieved the target of solving partners' problems in developing their business and making a greater contribution to the surrounding economy.

Effect of stochastic deformation on the vibration characteristics of a tube bundle in axial flow

Design evaluation of nuclear components using numerical methods has typically been focused on nominal geometries and conditions. In reality, the geometry of reactor components and operating conditions can differ from the design on the drawing table. Increasing understanding and safety of nuclear energy systems requires investigating these more realistic conditions as well. An example is the bow of fuel assemblies, a deformation that occurs after some residence time as a consequence of thermal and irradiation effects. A paradigm shift from purely deterministic simulations toward simulations involving stochastic processes can help to meet this demand.One of the aspects in the design assessment of nuclear reactors is flow-induced vibration (FIV). A lot of experimental effort has already been allocated to FIV phenomena in the past, and more recently also numerical approaches have been applied. However, it was not clear to what extent vibration characteristics would change for a geometry different from the design drawing. In this study the effect of a random bow deformation on the vibration behavior of a flexible tube in a rigid bundle is investigated using fluid–structure interaction simulations. As the (stressless) geometry presumably has a stochastic nature, the modal characteristics should be treated accordingly.For this uncertainty quantification of the modal characteristics, the generalized Polynomial Chaos method was applied. First, only the steady flow through the bundle was considered, without simulating the vibration. This sufficiently reduced the computational cost to apply the Monte Carlo method, which was used to validate the more efficient Polynomial Chaos method. This latter method was found adequate to predict the stochastic modal characteristics of the deformed, flexible tube.

Article: EU Air Transport and the EU’s Environmental Agenda Struggle: A Leap of Faith or Can a CBAM Level the Playing Field?

Air transport, like any sector, must become more sustainable to combat climate change and protect the environment. The EU’s Green Deal sets out an ambitious environmental agenda to reach a climate-neutral continent by 2050. The ‘Fit for 55’ (FF55) legislative package provides sectoral measures, including air transport, to reduce emissions by 55% in 2030. When the additional costs required to comply with these environmental measures lead to competitive distortion, airlines and airports established in the EU and bound by the EU’s environmental policy are poised to be negatively affected. More importantly, ticket price increases may lead to ‘carbon leakage’ practices, where the reduction in emissions in one country leads to a rise in another. To mitigate these effects, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is presented as a possible solution. Applying an economic measure designed for the trade in goods, such as a CBAM, to trade in air services is, however, not as simple as it may seem, and its application beyond EU borders is politically sensitive and questionable legally. While the design of a CBAM for aviation is currently on the drawing table, this article maps the different interests at stake and considers the measure in the context of different legal regimes. Sustainability, Environment, EU Green Deal, Fit for 55, Competition, Carbon leakage, Carbon taxation, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

Comics as enchantment: For the sake of affect and imagination

A lot is happening at the drawing table. Children are busy inventing stories, reassembling their thoughts, gleaning knowledge and making decisions. This article digs deep to see what is going on the children's art-making through drawing and reading comics. In an after-school drawing club the author reveals how children are transformed through comic book drawing, realising their body's potential to use images to tell a story. Drawing from imagination, memory and inventing brazen story lines, the body steps out of the present and moves into the future, into 'What's next? The ownership of the seriated drawn ideas leaps ahead, using all kinds of memory- what the child has seen, experiences, and can imagine as possibility. This all entails choosing which decisions make the most sense, delighting in affect. I call this entanglement with tools and memory to build a comic material aliveness. As children move through life, they have a faint sense that affects are there. The act of drawing – a physical engagement with materials stretches thinking and allows for deep immersion with affects which develop empathy and self-compassion.

Specifics in Children's Drawings with Autism

Background: The peculiarities of sensory perception and perception of one's own body in children with autism are the basis for understanding their cognitive and social development difficulties.
 Objective: The study aims to structure different categories of drawings of children with autism and compare them with the severity of autism measured by CARS2. Methods: 120 children aged 3 to 9 years were studied (X= 6.26, SD = 3.16). Drawings of autistic children. The children have a white sheet, pencils, a children's drawing table, and the experimenter asks them to draw a person. The children were studied with CARS. 2. Clinical method: includes observation, direct work with the child on each of the topics of the methodology used, interview with parents, diagnostic discussion with the clinical team. Psychodiagnostic method: includes an examination of children with mental developmental stairs, assessment of cognitive, communication, socioemotional and sensorimotor functions. CARS 2 Childhood Autism Rating Scale | Second Edition Statistical.
 Method: includes data processing using the SPSS programme. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, a frequency distribution of data are used for data analysis.
 Results: The results show eight main categories of drawings in autistic children: 1. circles, water; 2. patches of colour covering the human figure or representing a human figure without an external boundary; 3. figures and letters; 4. human figures fenced as a bubble, a human figure composed of parts of objects (the elements are not connected); 5. objects with geometric shapes (buildings, roads with markings, apartment blocks, strange shells; 6. road signs, logos.
 Conclusions: There is no statistical dependence between the severity of autistic symptomatology and the types of drawings. We can draw some conclusions about how a child with autism perceives his own body from the presented results. Because we see that in mild and moderate degrees of autism CARS 2, the whole variety of drawing categories was evaluated, while in severe and very severe degrees of expression of the disorder circles, colourful spots with vague boundaries predominate. Children with autism often identify with non-living objects, street signs, eccentric houses and towers.

Perancangan stasiun kerja instruktur laboratorium desain produk dan inovasi menggunakan metode ergonomic function deployment

The Product Design and Innovation Laboratory (Desprin), Faculty of Technology, Institute of Technology is a necessary facility in an effort to support the implementation of an educational process that implements a competency-based curriculum. This study aims to produce an ergonomic instructor workstation design in the laboratory by applying the Ergonomic Function Deployment (EFD), 12 ergonomic principles, and anthropometric data with the 5-95th percentile with selecting concepts from several concepts that have been designed. The final result of this research is a workstation design in the form of a drawing table, computer desk, and instructor chair designed using Solidworks 2018 software. The drawing table can be folded when not in use and attached to a computer table so that user movement is more effective and the selected chair is able to work synergistically with the two tables.

Friend or fiend? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of moral and relational orientation in authentic leadership

Authentic leadership has been developed with insufficient empirical challenge to its definitional components, and alternative conceptualizations have largely been ignored. The theory remains heavily criticized and its distinctiveness from other higher-purpose leadership theories remains in doubt, leading to a circular debate as to its usefulness in practice. In response to the call to return to the definitional drawing table, this article presents the findings of an interpretative phenomenological study that reimagines authentic leadership as a two-component moral and relational model that is closer to Heidegger’s notions of ‘being true’ and ‘care’. The study inductively explores how leaders themselves make sense of authenticity in practice, when it is enacted by their own leaders within the social exchange relationship. It richly describes how managers perceive and attribute authenticity to their leaders within the lived experience of contemporary work. The study also identifies that working for a leader who is perceived as authentic feels like a friendship and is beneficial to followers’ own psychological experience of work, facilitates their own authentic expression and is worthy of retention as a distinct leadership theory that explains how performance is enabled within proximal leader relationships.

What collaborative planning practices lack and the design cycle can offer: Back to the drawing table

This article critically discusses the premises underpinning the collaborative ideal, which has become central to Western spatial planning practices. With their emphasis on a structure which focuses on the problem, actors, deliberation, agreement and acceptability, collaborative processes produce conservative choices. However, this approach might not effectively address the big challenges confronting our metropolitan areas and regions today. Instead, the essence of choosing how to respond in the face of long-term challenges is a thorough analysis of the situation (beyond just the actors’ wishes), generation of a wide array of possible actions (more creative than mere compromises), and arriving at decisions which demonstrate vision and leadership. This resembles the design cycle, which we claim enriches the collaborative model. We propose principles for a more creative governance which suggest emphasizing the exploitation of an area’s full potential instead of solving its specific problems.

Adjustable Drawing Table and T-Square Rack with Lock

Adjustable Drawing Table and T-Square Rack with Lock

Oona by Kelly DiPucchio

Reviewed by: Oona by Kelly DiPucchio Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor DiPucchio, Kelly Oona; illus. by Raissa Figueroa. Tegen/HarperCollins, 2021 [32p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780062982247 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 3-6 yrs Oona the mermaid loves nothing more than to go hunting for ocean treasure with her pal, Otto the Otter, and she's had her eye on one elusive prize for a while: a beautiful golden crown that is unfortunately stuck deep in a rift. Despite her best strategizing, the crown remains beyond her reach, and eventually she gives up after her various plans with the squid, the lobster crate, and the crabs fail miserably. Oona is still sad ("She was missing her spark. And a mermaid without her spark is like a seagull without an appetite"), so back to the drawing table she goes and comes up with a foolproof plan involving a seashell, a sea turtle, and some pretty snazzy treasure hunting goggles she whips up—which, in the end, prove to be way better than the crown itself. Brown-skinned Oona is undeniably adorable, with a pudgy little belly and a beautifully coiffed Afro (that is roughly half her size), and her pal Otto is similarly charming, with chubby cheeks and mischievous expressions. Greens and blues make an appropriately aquatic palette, and smudgy, indistinct [End Page 167] lines enhance the underwater feel. The ending falls a bit flat, but the playful humor is, like Oona herself, "sweet … and a little bit salty," bringing together gentleness with just a dash of sass. Disney kids will recognize the book's many nods to The Little Mermaid and appreciate its attempts to diversify the underwater world. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Investigating the relationship between organizational communications and crisis management in Agricultural Jihad Organization of North Khorasan

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between organizational communications and crisis management in Agricultural Jihad Organization of North Khorasan. Methodology: The research method is descriptive-survey and correlational, which based on Taylor-Davis model, studied the relationship between the components of speed, accuracy, validity, comprehensiveness, completeness, feedback and communication channels with crisis management. The statistical population consists of the entire staff and experts in Agricultural Jihad Organization of North Khorasan and subsidiary towns which amounts to 760 people. Out of this number, 260 individuals were selected as sample, based on Morgan's table using simple random sampling. Data collection tool for the measurement of statistical population of the study includes 760 employees in Agricultural Jihad Organization of North Khorasan. Appropriate sample including 260 individuals was selected using Cochran formula and simple random sampling, and organizational communications and crisis management were investigated using a researcher-made questionnaire. Also, Cronbach's alpha with a correlation coefficient of 95% was applied. In order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics including statistical indices (drawing table of frequency, frequency percentage, graphs) and also inferential statistics (horizontal tables, Pearson correlation test and Friedman test) was used. Results: The results show that given the estimated level of significance which is 5%, the correlation concerning the relationship between organizational communications and crisis management in Agricultural Jihad Organization of North Khorasan is equal to 0.698. Consequently, there is a relationship between them. Conclusion: The results show that organizational communications play an important role in the effectiveness of crisis management.

Silos and First Movers in the Sharing Economy Debates

Over the past few years, a significant global debate has developed over the classification of workers in the sharing economy either as independent contractors or as employees. While Uber and Lyft have dominated the spotlight lately, the worker classification debates extend beyond ridesharing companies and affect workers across a variety of sectors. Classification of a worker as an employee, rather than an independent contractor, can carry a range of implications for worker treatment and protections under labor law, anti-discrimination law, tort law, and tax law, depending on the legal jurisdiction. The debates, at least in the United States, have been incomplete due to the failure of policy makers and advocates to consider the scope and interconnectedness of the worker classification issues across the full sweep of legal arenas. There is time, however, to remedy the incompleteness of these policy conversations before worker classification decisions ossify and path dependence takes hold. Two interacting forces create the most serious risk for inadequate policy formulation: (1) silos among legal experts, and (2) first-mover effects. Both of these factors, silo and first mover, emerge in sharing economy debates in the United States. Tax experts and other legal specialists operate in distinct silos leading to a misunderstanding by non-tax analysts of the tax ramifications of worker classification, and to an underappreciation on the part of tax experts of the potential influence of “modest” tax rule changes on worker classification generally. The risks of such misunderstandings can be amplified by first-mover efforts, such as: (1) platforms’ contractual designation of workers as independent contractors to bolster a claim of nonemployer/employee status; (2) platforms’ support for proposed tax legislation that would “clarify” the status of sharing workers as independent contractors for tax purposes if they satisfy a multiple-prong (relatively easy) safe harbor test; and (3) sharing economy worker litigation to secure employee status. This Article identifies the incompleteness in the worker classification debates and argues for the active formulation of policy through a process that looks beyond individual fields. A more complete conversation requires analytical engagement across multiple fields and recognition of the de facto power of reform in one arena to influence others. Moreover, it is by no means clear that just because tax might arrive at the legislative drawing table first (due to first mover effects), that it should drive or shape the broader worker classification debate.

Silos and First Movers in the Sharing Economy Debates

Abstract Over the past few years, a significant global debate has developed over the classification of workers in the sharing economy either as independent contractors or as employees. While Uber and Lyft have dominated the spotlight lately, the worker classification debates extend beyond ridesharing companies and affect workers across a variety of sectors. Classification of a worker as an employee, rather than an independent contractor, can carry a range of implications for worker treatment and protections under labor law, anti-discrimination law, tort law, and tax law, depending on the legal jurisdiction. The debates, at least in the United States, have been incomplete due to the failure of policy makers and advocates to consider the scope and interconnectedness of the worker classification issues across the full sweep of legal arenas. There is time, however, to remedy the incompleteness of these policy conversations before worker classification decisions ossify and path dependence takes hold. Two interacting forces create the most serious risk for inadequate policy formulation: (1) silos among legal experts, and (2) first-mover effects. Both of these factors, silo and first mover, emerge in sharing economy debates in the United States. Tax experts and other legal specialists operate in distinct silos leading to a misunderstanding by non-tax analysts of the tax ramifications of worker classification, and to an under appreciation on the part of tax experts of the potential influence of “modest” tax rule changes on worker classification generally. The risks of such misunderstandings can be amplified by first-mover efforts, such as: (1) platforms’ contractual designation of workers as independent contractors to bolster a claim of nonemployer/nonemployee status; (2) platforms’ support for proposed tax legislation that would “clarify” the status of sharing workers as independent contractors for tax purposes if they satisfy a multiple-prong (relatively easy) safe harbor test; and (3) sharing economy worker litigation to secure employee status. This Article identifies the incompleteness in the worker classification debates and argues for the active formulation of policy through a process that looks beyond individual fields. A more complete conversation requires analytical engagement across multiple fields and recognition of the de facto power of reform in one arena to influence others. Moreover, it is by no means clear that just because tax might arrive at the legislative drawing table first (due to first mover effects), that it should drive or shape the broader worker classification debate.

Analisa Proses Drawing Pada Pembentukan Asbak Dengan Kuping Berbentuk Alur

The design of the press tool is one of the practice courses that teach the skill in designing tool forming and cutting the product from the plate. The quality of the design is determined by the ability to apply the design procedure. Competence is widely applied in the design of drawing prints with a certain level of product complexity. Practice activity of designing drawing drawing of students of Engineering Design Program of Mechanical Polytechnic of State of Bangka Belitung done conventionally, where only using drawing table or computerized depiction software then printed on drawing paper. This results in frequent errors in student design drawings. To overcome these problems required drawing prints that can form a specific product such as ashtrays, with the aim of producing a construction drawing print that can be applied and utilized in the teaching of press tool design. The method of making this tool consists of data collection, concept making, tool design, machining & testing. Based on the results of trials that have been done, carried out on 10 blank by using a lubricant in the form of vegetable oil. Of the 10 experiments the formation showed that the central pool of ashtrays can be perfectly formed, while 4 pieces of the grooves on the ear of the ashtray have not been formed well where there are still folds or curves that are not regular.

Seeing in-photo: Non-photography as Positive Barbarism

Benjamin suggests that modern technologies bring about a poverty of conventional human experience, initiating a new barbarism by forcing thinkers to ‘start from scratch’ (1999b: 732). He observes that great creative spirits tend to ‘begin by clearing a tabula rasa’, by constructing ‘a drawing table’ (Ibid.). This article proposes that Francois Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy constitutes one such levelling of the grounds of thought—which resonates with Benjamin’s own ideas. Laruelle’s approach begins from a simple axiomatic ground, on which he builds a syntax for thought that allows for a new vision of emergent concepts. His posture indeed seems “barbaric” to some—Jacques Derrida once suggested that Laruelle was close to practicing a kind of “terror” over philosophy (Derrida & Laruelle, 2012). Yet this axiomatic flattening of the terrain of thought suspends the authority of logos (which can be related to the authority of experience as Erfahrung) to propose a more immanent experience of thinking (which can be linked to Erlebnisse), and can thus be seen as an example of the positive barbarism that Benjamin calls for. However, rather than building a drawing table, it is a new camera that Laruelle constructs (Laruelle, 2011; 2012). He thereby brings an imagistic media technology to the centre of his epistemological system. Accordingly, this essay explores Laruelle’s proposal to take photography as the model for a theoretical installation, in relation to Benjamin’s discussion of technological reproducibility in art. Benjamin suggests that the camera brings about a new mode of perception which ‘extracts sameness even from what is unique’ (2008: 24). Laruelle’s non-philosophical vision functions not to extract sameness, but rather to think according to the immanent identity of the concept. We thereby propose that his non-photographic posture be understood as a radicalisation of Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image”—‘that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (1999a: 462). Laruelle similarly characterises the non-photographic vision as a flash (2012), but rather than a temporal constellation, it is given as a transcendental superposition. Like Scheerbart’s glass buildings, the non-photographic lens reveals identity without reflection: it is ‘a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 734). This epistemological technology offers a new experience of the photo as an image of thought, at a time when the proliferation of image-based digital communication platforms are arguably instigating a new shift in human experience in general.

Analysis of facility needs level in architecture studio for students’ studio grades

Architects must be able to play an active role and contribute to the realization of a sustainable environment. Architectural education has inherited many education research used qualitative and quantitative methods. The data were gathered by conducting (a) observation,(b) interviews, (c) documentation, (d) literature study, and (e) Questionnaire. The gathered data were analyzed qualitatively to find out what equipment needed in the learning process in the Architecture Studio, USU. Questionnaires and Ms. Excel were used for the quantitative analysis. The tabulation of quantitative data would be correlated with the students’ studio grades. The result of the research showed that equipment with the highest level of needs was (1) drawing table, (2) Special room for each student, (3) Internet Network, (4) Air Conditioning, (5) Sufficient lighting.

Places From The Past Lost In New Towns: Hong Kong’s Old Villages

This article reports about what remains in New Towns from the site's former structures. We wanted to know whether NTs, despite being landmarks of modernistic drawing table cities, adopted pieces of their site’s history in their urban forms, in a growing awareness that historic structures add place distinctiveness. Our study was prompted by two observations. The first was that the perspective on historic structures in Western planning practices has changed dramatically over the last decades, from a preservationist perspective on conserving particular buildings, to a practice of including the history of places as an asset in urban design. Original canals, main roads, street patterns and small settlements may be adopted to give new neighbourhoods a sense of authenticity and allow them to tell the story of the site's past. The second observation was that Asia has witnessed the emergence of mega cities and New Towns for more than a decade, and will probably continue to do so. As their urban expansion will inevitably cover landscapes with a past, in terms of villages, infrastructures and communities, the question rises if and how these histories are included in the urban design of such expanding Asian cities. We chose to analyse how in Hong Kong, with a long tradition of developing a total of 9 New Towns so far, old structures have been included in NT design. Based on historic maps, NT Masterplans and site visits, we show that in most of HK's NTs, the villages and towns that were on these sites have been preserved. The extent to which they are an asset to the surrounding NT today is low and did not increase over time.

Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney

Reviewed by: Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney Anna Poletti (bio) Michael A. Chaney. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2017, 195 pp. ISBN 978-1496810250, $65.00. Many of us who study and teach life writing have found the rise of the memoir in comics form an exciting phenomenon to observe. Across literary and cultural studies, influential texts such as Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis have prompted a renewed interest in accounting for the unique power of autobiographical storytelling and presented scholars with the challenge of reckoning with a new textual form. Michael A. Chaney's Reading Lessons in Seeing sits at the intersection of a media-specific theory of comics and the study of [End Page 399] autobiography, arguing that reading autobiographical comics requires more—from critics, teachers, students, and readers—than a glancing familiarity with the complexities of life writing or the comics form. Chaney demonstrates that in reading autobiographical comics we learn to read anew. Chaney's central premise is that comics themselves teach us how to read them. These pedagogical moments are staged using a range of techniques Chaney elucidates across five chapters concerned with mirror scenes, the figure of the child, games and other non-narrative forms of play, extradiegetic panels that present the comic autobiographer at work, and the possibility of communitas that reckons with the history of racial violence. Reading Lessons in Seeing is full of careful, nuanced, and revelatory close readings that demonstrate how the combination of the comics form with autobiographical content generates an entirely distinct textual encounter. One of the strengths of this approach is that these chapters focus on moments of braiding between the diegetic and extradiegetic fields of the text in which the autobiographical acts as a punctum and as chimera. In my experience of teaching autobiographical comics, these are the moments to which the strongest and most engaged students are drawn when introduced to autobiographical comics in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Such students want to understand what is communicated by Art Speigelman's self-portrait where he sits at his drawing table wearing a mouse mask with the bodies of dead mice at his feet and a guard tower out his window. Chaney's work helps us read such moments, which are undeniably compelling yet difficult to describe. His book will be a valuable resource for teaching, and for supporting the independent research projects of undergraduate and graduate students. In these readings Chaney teaches us how to identify and consider the seemingly impossible balance comic autobiographers strike between artifice and truth. The grounding of the book in Chaney's own teaching reminds us of the importance of the classroom as a space for the scholar to think and learn alongside their students. In this work it leads to numerous clarifications of the complex work of form and genre, positing comics as, among other things, "a set of self-reflexive, visual statements uttering life and inner life in brazenly non-realistic tones" (25). In his close readings that support statements such as the one above, Chaney utilizes Gillian Whitlock's conceptualization of "autographics" and Hillary Chute's careful examination of women's comics in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. The scholarly originality comes from connecting these theories directly to psychoanalysis in order to argue for the formal specificity of comics. In his chapter on mirror scenes, framed perhaps unsurprisingly by Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "formal operations of the medium, as well as its formal unconscious" are considered to analyze "not just [End Page 400] the subjects talked about in graphic novels but the models of subjectivity that do the talking" (25). While the exploration of a text's unconscious may put off those readers who dismiss the utility of a psychoanalytic approach, Chaney convinced me of the generative possibilities for interpretation and reading such a frame can yield. For Chaney, the form of comics refers to "the method rather than the content of comics" (7)—and thus what the method displaces, as well as what it makes explicit, must be accounted for. Chaney's...

Developing Electronic Cooperation Tools: A Case From Norwegian Health Care

BackgroundMany countries aim to create electronic cooperational tools in health care, but the progress is rather slow.ObjectiveThe study aimed to uncover how the authoritys’ financing policies influence the development of electronic cooperational tools within public health care.MethodsAn interpretative approach was used in this study. We performed 30 semistructured interviews with vendors, policy makers, and public authorities. Additionally, we conducted an extensive documentation study and participated in 18 workshops concerning information and communication technology (ICT) in Norwegian health care.ResultsWe found that the interorganizational communication in sectors like health care, that have undergone an independent development of their internal information infrastructure would find it difficult to create electronic services that interconnect the organizations because such connections would affect all interconnected organizations within the heterogenic structure. The organizations would, to a large extent, depend on new functionality in existing information systems. Electronic patient records play a central role in all parts of the health care sector and therefore dependence is established to the information systems and theirs vendors. The Norwegian government authorities, which run more than 80% of the Norwegian health care, have not taken extraordinary steps to compensate for this dependency–the government's political philosophy is that each health care institution should pay for further electronic patient record development. However, cooperational tools are complex due to the number of players involved and the way they are intertwined with the overall workflow. The customers are not able to buy new functionalities on the drawing table, while the electronic patient record vendors are not willing to take the economic risk in developing cooperational tools. Thus, the market mechanisms in the domain are challenged. We also found that public projects that were only financed for the first steps of project management could partially explain why many initiatives did not get past the initial planning and specification stages, but were stopped before further development could be made. Vendors were often unwilling to provide further own contribution without guaranteed return.ConclusionsWe propose that the authorities take a coordinating role and provide financial help for development of electronic cooperational tools for health because the regular market mechanisms are insufficient to push these developments to the market. It is, however, critical that the role of users be considered, and for users to decide which developments should go forward.