Mnemonic Form Research Articles

Об общих графических закономерностях восприятия живописи и балета: мнемоническая форма танца [On some graphic regularities of perception in painting and dance: Mnemonic form of dance

On some graphic regularities of perception in painting and dance: Mnemonic form of dance. The present article handles some problems of the mechanisms of visual perception in painting and classical ballet. It proceeds from the assumption that the interaction between those arts is based on the similarity of their formal languages. The main attention focuses on the questions of how and why does the classical ballet use the code of painting? The interaction between pictorial art and ballet occurs through the theatre, which is considered to be a picture coming alive in European tradition. This principle is taken here as a main method of analysis of ballet art and it is used in two ways. The first handles a problem of composition of a ballet as a theatrical performance. The second analyses the movement itself — the language of the choreography as such. The last part of the article contains the answer to the question — why does the ballet need such aspects of pictorial code as frontal composition of a picture coming alive, memory photo, multiplication of the similar images and repeating movements. Dance is dynamic, picture is stable. To represent a movement, the painting uses the rhythm and visual repeating of lines and contours. It helps to construct an illusion of motion and brings the temporal aspect into a static piece of art. Whereas different stops, poses and fixations in ballet help it to visualize the movement, to capture the space. This is one of the ways for ballet to leave its trace in space as much as in the memory of the spectators, to become fixed in space, to prevent the dispersion of dance in the thin air and to surmount in such a way the ephemera characteristic of it.

Minority Oral Tradition in China

Non-textual, performative oral traditions oustrip written texts in terms of kinesics, expression, intonation, situation, and so forth, all of which dimensions convey metaphors that contain a wealth of intuition. It takes a special form of mnemonics, integrated into the narrator’s performances, to strengthen, re-present, and reconstruct local memories. Oral history relies on performativity for inheritance and representation, and the performance of oral history is the transformation of three-dimensional social memory. Such a medium has no gender bias; both men and women can perform and listen to it. Oral history rejects linguistic hegemony and can be performed in various languages, with its audience coming from either the noblity or the “untouchables.” In a “digitalized” or “digitalizing” world, oral traditions provide us with strong moral support via the sense or experience of bodily presence that we start to enjoy with our parents the moment we are born into the world. Oral traditions are one of the major sources for identity formation, giving group members moral comfort and a feeling of unity. No complete, healthy personality can be cultivated for a man or a woman in a society if he or she is denied access to oral traditions while such traditions are available. More plurality and diversity are allowed for oral traditions than for digital technology. Such differences are especially meaningful for a nationbuilding China that embraces more and more homogeneity and tolerates less and less heterogeneity in terms of culture and language. In addition, oral traditions can overstep the boundary between “idealism” and “materialism” by incorporation of both: corporeal skill and mental wisdom are always integrated into habitus or “doxa,” as Bourdieu would put it. 1

Creating the Moral Body: Missionaries and the Technology of Power in Early Papua New Guinea

British missionaries went to Papua New Guinea in order to create new moral body: Christian character that would fit into Great Britain's colonial world. Education by missionaries became, in an interpretation paralleling the theories of Michel Foucault, of power for imposing particular forms of social discipline upon individuals so that they might want to become part of the institutional relationships that favored Christianity and colonialism at the expense of local forms of life. These of power were established during the early stages of missionary education. (Missionaries, of power, the moral body, colonialism, Papua New Guinea) ********** In 1871, the British missionaries A. W. Murray and Samuel MacFarlane, along with eight native teachers, sailed from the Loyalty Islands and opened new Pacific mission field in New Guinea. Undertaken by the London Missionary Society, the goal of this mission was, according to the Reverend Murray, the overthrow of the reign of darkness throughout New Guinea and the almost numberless islands that skirt its shores, and the establishment in its room of the kingdom of light and (Murray and MacFarlane 1871:32). The features of this kingdom were defined by the missionaries of the L.M.S. in the field, in co-operation with their directors in London. The establishment of the L.M.S. in the area that became known as Papua (and eventually as region in the country of Papua New Guinea) is an excellent example of the beginning of what Foucault (1979, 1980, 1984; Dandeker 1990) refers to as disciplinary society; i.e., the imposition of discipline over individuals soon becomes part of the continual recreation of institutionalizing social bodies or technologies of Featherstone and Turner (1995:2) have noted that one of the most prevalent contemporary styles of analysis concerning the involves considering it as metaphor for the construction of desired social discourse. In other words, the becomes an iconic location for of power. They also state the need to develop a strong sense of the history of the body (Featherstone and Turner 1995:8). I disagree and suggest instead that we need to start writing histories of the body; descriptions of the diverse contexts in which bodies came to be used as metaphorical locations for social projections under unique though comparable historical, social, and cultural conditions. This essay is concerned with the protocolonial situation that Jean and John Comaroff (1992:70), following Pierre Bourdieu, refer to as re-membering of the body. In such contexts, attempts to remake habit tend to treat the as `memory' in which are lodged, in mnemonic form, the organizing principles of an embracing context. Scrambling this code (that is, erasing the messages carried in banal physical practice) is prerequisite for retraining the memory, either to deschool the deviant or to shape new subjects, as the bearers of new worlds (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:70). Taussig (1992:84), like the Comaroffs (1991:62), points out that colonization tends to bring with it pressures for new kind of person; one that will be amenable to the modernizing forms of discipline required for life within very different social milieu than the kind that previously existed. At its core was the modernist self: the familiar figure of the right-bearing, responsible, `free' individual whose very condition of possibility was the nation-state itself (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:365). Pressures for the creation of modern self were neither one sided nor limited to situations of colonization; they were exerted against both peasants and the newly emerging working class in Europe (Frykman and Lofgren 1987) and rebounded from these colonial and noncolonial others to affect the consciousness of the European middle classes themselves. That is, the European middle classes were fashioning their conceptions of modern life at home at the same time as they were trying to create it elsewhere (Frykman and Lofgren 1987; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997). …

Vectors of Witchcraft: Object Transactions and the Materialization of Memory in Niger

Among Mawri communities of southern Niger, deaths are occasionally blamed on bloodsucking spirits whose deadly appetite is unleashed by human greed Identifying the agency behind the crime involves focusing on certain objects the circulation of which once wove link between victims and culprits. This article examines how gift-giving figures in local experiences of time and remembrance and discusses the mnemonic functions some objects come to have in the course of social practices involving witchcraft and its inscription as memory. [Niger, witchcraft, memory, gift-giving, object transactions] Intrduction: Objects, Tune and Memory Although the capacity of objects to bind people together has long been noted (Mauss 1954), more recent studies have built on Mauss' insight to focus on the various ways in which objects serve to create or emphasize continuities and discontinuities (Battaglia 1992; Munn 1986). Much attention has thus been paid to cloth, the very structure of which already evokes notions of connectedness and tying (Schneider and Weiner 1989). Describing how, in sixteenth century India, robes worn by the king could transmit his authority, Cohn notes that clothes are a medium through which substances can be transferred (1989: 312). Focusing on the relation between objects and memory, some studies (Feeley-Harnik 1989; Darish 1989) have highlighted the capacity of things to mediate between the dead and the living, and the past and the present, while others (Weiss 1996) have drawn attention to the ways in which remembering and forgetting are dynamically interrelated in the uses clothing are sometimes put to. If cloth can be said to absorb time, as Weiner (1989: 62) puts it, we must nevertheless not lose sight of the fact that even if absorbency is in itself an intrinsic quality of textiles, the capacity of clothing-and other objects-to transcend-or to stresstime, death, and the succession of generations only derives from how these things are used, manipulated, and circulated (Appadurai 1986). The ability of objects to serve as mnemonic forms is not inherently vested in these objects but rather emerges in the context of their engagement in human transactions and relations. Among Mawri communities of southern Niger, where people continuously and repeatedly engage in gift exchange of all kinds to create and secure social ties, the act of giving often serves to inscribe continuities, establish social connections, reciprocate prior contribution, or simply make concrete friendship or good-will. The incessant exchange of kola nuts in greeting procedures, the sprinkling of coins onto the sweaty foreheads of dancers during public celebrations, the food contributions brought to spirit possession rituals, the gifts of soap and perfume received by new mothers at their infants' naming ceremonies all exemplify the deeply rooted transactionalism of Mawri society. While cloth once figured prominently in marriage ceremonies-to reassert symbolically the creation of marital ties between the newlyweds-and other transactions, cash has now become the preferred means of strengthening bonds and generating social capital. Whether one is attending the installment of village chief or simply visiting sick friend, these occasions inevitably call for gifts of money. Currency may be progressively displacing goods in kind as the standard gift, but some objects nonetheless remain an important medium for weaving the intricate fabric of social relations. For instance, no wedding transactions are complete without the complex exchange and distribution of ka,van daki (things for the room; wedding gifts) that celebrate bride's worthiness, her social ties to women's networks, and her productive ability to generate dowry-since the bride has usually worked throughout her childhood to help generate the income that would purchase some of the furniture, pots, and hand-woven blankets that will fill her new home. …

George Herbert's Holy "Altar," Name and Thing

George Herbert's Holy "Altar," Name and Thing by Kathleen Lynch The first poem we encounter in George Herbert's "The Church," "The Altar," compels and rewards our visual attention with a graphically coherent shape. The verbal properties of "The Altar" amplify the visual register of wholeness. The lines are replete with biblical phraseology. The changes in the typographical shape of the poem are marked by rhyming couplets, with the shaft of the altar composed of four, or precisely half, of the couplets. The typographical adjustments further correspond directly to the manipulation of the number of metrical feet in each line. For its contemporary readers, the very orthography would have carried traces of the divine Word.1 The poem is a carefully wrought sample of what John Hollander calls Herbert's characteristic pursuit of "an authenticity of form."2 As such, it is a self-reflexive instance of the genre of technopaegnia — the epitome of utpicturapoesis — in which the represented object directly addresses its reader. The poem may speak, but the authenticity of its visual structure has been discounted recently. The lack of the kind of critical acclaim accorded "Easter-wings" is not simply a dismissal of the "trick" from which the tradition of technopaegnia takes its name. Rather, readers have been reluctant to engage with the instrumentally mnemonic form of the piece. For while the shape is completely recognizable within the bounds of the genre, it is unrecognizable as a representation of the proper place for sacramental worship in a reformed church. The poem assumes the shape of a classical or stone altar only to redefine or mark the transformation of Christian modes of worship, it is argued.3 Or perhaps the poem is acknowledged to be a typological fulfillment of ancient models, but still denied representational validity.4 In any event, we are reminded the verbal and visual congruence is not what it appears to be. The altar on the page is not broken. How can it then represent the heart, which most assuredly is?5 While the discordance between the opening words of the poem and its visual impact on the page is striking, there are nevertheless a variety of ways in which the altar may be seen to be broken, 42Kathleen Lynch beginning with the interruption of the iambic rhythm at "Made" in the second line. But whether broken or whole, or perhaps both broken and whole, "The Altar" marks the great metaphoric gaps which inescapably divide a word from referents as various as a generic tradition, the object of representation, and the matter of sacramental presence. Not coincidentally, the separate identities of "Name and Thing" were emphasized by Bishop John Williams in the title of his The Holy Table, Name and Thing (1637). The relationship between the two was the core issue of what came to be known as the Altar controversy, which raged in 1636 and 1637 around the vortex of the bishop's by then decade-old ruling that an altar was more properly called a table. In June or July, 1627, Williams was appealed to as Bishop of Lincoln to mediate a disagreement in his diocese between the pastor and parishioners of Grantham about the placement and naming of an altar. Williams retreated to his study and wrote out an opinion overnight as contending parties waited. His decision to call it a table is appropriate for the memorial sacrament celebrated in the Church of England. But the ruling is also born of Williams' vulnerable position at the end of James's reign and his reading of the prevailing political winds in the wake of Richard Montagu's embroilment in controversy over ceremony.6 Court politics determinedthe referential relationship of word and thing for Bishop Williams, keeping him safely within the still dominant party in 1627, but marking him as a target for the ascendant party in 1637. Relations between names and things as they are driven by political winds remain the crux of the availability of "The Altar" to multiple interpretations. An examination of several layers of those relations constitutes the business of this paper. First, I posit that "The Altar" functions as an emblematic title page for "The Church." Therefore, I...

Implementation of Task Coordinate Servoing System

This short paper describes the outline of a servo system for manipulators, recently developed at the Electrotechnical Laboratory. The servo system is implemented on a high speed micro-computer and capable of performing dynamics calculation and coordinate transformation of the manipulator in a cycle time for the servo (2.5 mili sec.) .Computation algorithms are formalized in vector form, and directly coded into programs, using vector macro language. The programs are expanded into assembly mnemonic form by macro processor. The mnemonic programs are converted into machine code by a cross assembler which runs on a host computer (VAX 11/780) . Then the machine code prograhi is downline loaded onto the realtime micro-computer (MIPROC-16) .In this servo system, controlled variables are arbitrarily chosen, and mode of control for each variable is also arbitrary. We can select the most suitable coordinate frame in order to do a task. For each motion component with respect to the coordinate frame, position, velocity, acceleration, force or compliance can be controlled. Using the servo system, sophisticated tasks such as parts mating or tool handling will be easily performed.

A simple approximation of the error function

A very simple approximation formula of the error function, with sufficient accuracy for engineering calculations, is proposed in this investigation. The presented form is compared with some of the less sophisticated approximations available in the literature. Aspects such as mnemonic form, computation time, accuracy and ease of inversion are considered.

A program to evaluate general and conditional agreement among categorical assignments of many raters

A variety of statistical procedures have been proposed for assessing degree and significance of agreement between raters in assignments of objects or subjects to nominal scales. Foremost among available techniques is the coefficient devised by Cohen (1960) and later refined by Light (1971). This statistic essentially represents normalized proportion of interrater agreement in excess of that expected on basis of chance or random assignments. In recent years, a number of useful programs have been developed for computer applications of K (Antonak, 1977; Berk & Campbell, 1976; Cicchetti, Lee, Fontana, & Dowds, 1978). However, such applications of coefficient are bound by two important constraints.. First, use of K is appropriate only when testing agreement between two raters: It is not appropriate for answering questions about conjoint agreement among many raters. For this reason, Light (1971) developed an extension of earlier statistic, known as m , which is coefficient of multiple. observer agreement. The second constraint to uses of K is found in assumption underlying both Cohen's (1960) original statistic and Light's (1971) later extension that respective pairs or sets of raters assigning various objects to categories will remain identical across all cases. In applied research settings, it is frequently circumstance that neither assumption holds because more than two independent raters may be involved in categorical assignment of each case, and sets of raters may vary as a function of time or convenience (as, e.g., when subjects in different levels of a treatment or educational program must be observed and rated in different settings on repeated occasions). Fleiss (1971) developed formulas that revise and extend K for use in situations where number of observers may be greater than two and where there is no assumption that sets of raters will remain constant t~roughout all cases. The resulting statistic may be Viewed as general or overall coefficient of agreement of many raters across all nominal categories. Fleiss also provided formulas to measure response agreement among many raters on each specific nominal category considered. This conditional coefficient is designedto test probability that randomly chosen raters assign any randomly selected object or subject to identical category. Such a conditional coefficient may be applied to evaluate integrity or viability of any given categorical value or classification. The program described in this paper calculates both general and conditional coefficients and tests statistical significance of agreement among many raters assigning objects to nominal scales based upon Fleiss's (1971) computational formulas. Input. Each analysis requires two control cards and a data card deck as follows: (1) a title card, (2) a problem card to specify number of cases being categorized, number of categories, and number of raters, and (3) a set of case cards, one card per case, specifying number of raters choosing each category. . Output. The information provided for each analysis Includes (1) an alphanumeric job title, (2) general percentage of agreement among raters before chance agreement is excluded, (3) value of general coefficient of agreement, (4) estimated variance and standard error for general coefficient, (5) ~alue of unit normal deviate and level of significance tor general coefficient, (6) conditional percentages of agreement among raters for each category prior to exclusion of chance, (7) values of conditional coefficients for each category, (8) variances and standard errors for each conditional coefficient and (9) unit normal deviates and significance levels for each conditional coefficient. Computer and Language. Written in FORTRAN IV program is compatible with machines in IBM 360 seri~s: Variables are in mnemonic form according to Fleiss s (1971) computational formulas. Input editing and output specifications are provided for user's syn tactical errors. Restrictions. Currently, program will permit up to 1,000 cases to be assigned by 100 or fewer raters to a maximum of 25 categories. Availability. A source listing, user's manual, and test input and output data may be obtained at no cost by writing to Paul A. McDermott, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education CI 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104:

A Methodologic Framework to Study Nurse-Patient Communication

Communicative interaction patterns among nurses and patients in a complex hospital setting were examined, using the methodologic framework, synchronology. Extensive videotaped time-series data of patient-health care personnel interactions, involving four patients admitted for elective surgery, were collected approximately 16 hours a day from admission to discharge and computerized in both mnemonic word form and numeric files. These interactional data were instrumental in the methodologic development. Communicative interaction is conceptualized as a dynamic, ongoing behavior process which can be studied by identifying the observed effects of presenting behaviors on the participants. The process is complex, contex-related, and multivariate in nature. Synchronology provides a structure for in-context description and analysis of the complex verbal and nonverbal interaction patterns, preservation of multivariate data, and identification of key concepts in human interaction which are of use in education, practice, and research.

Training to improve salesmen's performance

Traditional sales training has concentrated primarily on the sales interview and has given salesmen a series of behavioural guidelines to use in that situation. Sometimes these have been in the form of such mnemonics as AIDA — Attention, Interest, Desire, Action; sometimes as in the rather better Rank ‘Customer and You’ films they have consisted of a series of relatively simple rules of thumb. Another approach has worked through giving the salesman some idea of the customers' motivation. Our approach to salesmen training has started at a different point — the motivation of the salesman himself. Professor David McClelland of Havard has over the past 30 years or so been researching the relationship between the level of achievement, affiliation and power motivation, on the one hand and the level of success in various occupations on the other. He found that salesmen, like entrepreneurs, they work on their own to a marked degree and have the opportunity to get quick feedback on results of their work — they either make a sale or fail to do so — are successful if they have a high level of achievement motivation. He also managed to isolate the strategies and behavioural characteristics of people with such a high level. Finally he proved that the level of achievement motivation can be developed by training.