Hit Parade Research Articles

The Urbanization of the Billboard Top Album and Singles Charts: How SoundScan Changed the Game

IntroductionIt's been said anonymously, and repeated in many industry circles, music business is a game where you can't make a living, only a killing. The key is to try to have as many (successes) in a row as you can. Following that line of thinking, the reading, studying, and analyzing of Billboard magazine's weekly charts is a practice many music professionals engage in to make decisions on behalf of their companies, artists, clients, or associates in an attempt to create as many successive killings as possible. Every game has rules and regulations that have to be complied with in order for contestants to be successful. In addition to the rules, certain practices, procedures, and methods make the process of playing and chances of winning greater. Occasionally, certain rules, practices, and protocols undergo severe adjustments that may create controversy and redirect the course of the game. This article is written to both document and examine an adjustment in Billboard chart-ranking methodology that changed not only the genre make-up of the charts, but also influenced several elements of a burgeoning music industry during its peak period, the 1990s, and beyond.Billboard, the leading and sole surviving weekly music publication,1 has ranked music since 1942 under various designations including Race Records, Harlem Hit Parade, R&B, Soul, and music charts.2 In 1948, Billboard's chart manager, Jerry Wexler, coined the term Rhythm and Blues (R&B) to identify music that was marketed primarily to consumers and played on stations targeting listeners. Since that time, R&B music has had a significant impact on the popular music scene. Soultracks.com's Chris Rizak says:While its influence had been silently profound during most of the 20th century, in the 1960s music firmly established itself as the music of a nation. Motown called itself of Young America, and popular secular music derived from Gospel and Blues roots became the dominant creative and cultural driver-a role it would maintain for the next several decades.3Motown's promulgation of the Sound of Young America did accelerate the popularity of music among the general market audience. The influence of R&B/Soul music continues to this day with the recent rise of an Electronic Dance (EDM) genre that was born out of the musical stylings of the R&B/Disco music of the 1970s.Urban music initially was a term used to reference a musical genre of the 1980s and 90s defined by recordings by Rhythm and Blues or Soul artists with broad crossover appeal. contemporary began as an American format designed to appeal to advertisers who felt that black radio would not reach a wide enough audience.4 Rap/Hip-Hop music, also an urban art form, originated in the boroughs of New York City in the latter 1970s and 80s. As Rap/Hip-Hop music (an extension of R&B/Soul) grew during the last two decades of the twentieth century, the term Urban Music was employed to identify the aggregate genres.Billboard s change of methodology in determining Top Album and Hot 100 Singles chart rankings to include the use of actual point-of-sale information from SoundScan in 1991 led to a significant increase in the sales, amount, and frequency of music being programmed on Top 40 in the latter 90s and extending into the new millennium. It also gave rise to other significant changes in the music business in general that are worth noting.History of Billboard's Top Album and Singles ChartsOn March 24, 1956 Billboard inaugurated a weekly Best Selling Popular Albums chart in response to the explosion in sales of R&B influenced Rock & Roll music. Prior to that time, R&B music was relegated to only R&B charts that marginalized the significance of its actual market appeal. Ironically, the chart's first number-one album was Belafonte by Harry Belafonte. …

Big band jazz in black West Virginia, 1930-1942

Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942. By Christopher Wilkinson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 197pp (hardcover). Illustrations. ISBN 978-1-61703-168-7. $55 In 1934, Irving Mills blackballed Jimmie Lunceford from the major New York theatres, radio audiences, and hotel ballrooms that his orchestra had consistently played over the years. Lunceford left after becoming fed up with Mills' exploitation, but the timing, deep in the throes of the Great Depression, was far from perfect. He knew that he had to find the steadiest work possible for his band, and fast, so he hit the road, like so many other jazz musicians did in the 1930s, towards ... the coal camps of West Virginia. Christopher Wilkinson's wonderfully researched Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 yields a number of such revelatory anecdotes as he presents for us the vibrant dance culture of West Virginia during the long 1930s. African-American miners indeed created a remarkable and unique space in the hills of West Virginia, unlike anything witnessed during that time in the Jim Crow South, from where most of them had arrived. Railroad construction and the operation of high-quality bituminous coal mines in West Virginia required highly concentrated labor. African-American sharecroppers from the South were among the first to take advantage of this opportunity, particularly as welcomed members of the United Mine Workers Association; the work was extremely dangerous, but the financial incentive was hard to ignore, particularly after the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 virtually guaranteed the union members well-paying work for the remainder of that tumultuous decade. With disposable cash in hand, they often turned to dance band music. Wilkinson in fact documents 356 public dances held for African-Americans between 1930 and 1942 in the state. African-American southerners indeed had much reason to celebrate in West Virginia: there they wielded a politically influential right to vote, they succeeded in banning racist films such as Birth of a Nation from the state's theaters, secured an anti-lynching law, and, as Wilkinson demonstrates through the vivid remembrance of Lionel Hampton's trumpeter, Joe Wilder, enjoyed the dignify of integrated seating in train cars. One of Wilkinson's contributions lies in his ability to use a musical micro-history of West Virginia's coal camps in order to further disrupt the dichotomies that originally defined the work of many music scholars: those of rural versus urban entertainments, of hot versus sweet jazz adherents, and of the musical preferences of whites versus blacks and middle class versus working class audiences. From the days of medicine shows, West Virginians had become well versed in the cosmopolitan, commercial musics that emanated from New York and Chicago. Enhanced through the distribution of phonographs and the reach of radio deep into the hollers of the mountains, indeed the most well-known orchestras arrived behind a long line of local and territory, or regional, jazz and dance bands that had long played their hit parade renditions both to white and black audiences. Despite the equity gained by African-Americans in some of West Virginia's social and political arenas, their dances remained segregated. Wilkinson demonstrates through his examination of local newspapers how African-American jazz and dance orchestras began to create interesting fissures in the divide: when Don Redman performed at the Fairmont armory in 1934, the West Virginian reported that in addition to the biggest crowd of colored terpsichorean experts ever assembled at one time on the local floor . …

Criminology and Criminal Justice Hit Parade: Measuring Academic Productivity in the Discipline

Previous research assessing the productivity of criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) scholars has sought to determine the overall most productive scholars based on various measures (e.g. total articles published, total cites, and articles per year). While such lists may be important for those who rank high, they may be best used to establish benchmarks for the discipline. To date, research examining the stars in CCJ has focused on overall stars. The aim of the current research is to highlight the most productive scholars (in CCJ doctoral programs), but to do so based on academic rank. As such, our sample is more inclusive than others that have assessed highly productive scholars in the field. By disaggregating productivity measures by academic ranks, it is possible to determine rising stars in the discipline as well as top stars overall. Additionally, and we think more importantly, such rankings give insights into the state of the discipline.

Innovations and communication through innovative users: An exploratory mechanism of social networking website

The study focuses on which users to target and why and how to inspire their participation by applying combination of von Hippel's lead user and user innovation toolkits with Rogers’ innovation diffusion theories. After an investigation of a social networking website, this study finds that individuals with large number of hits are highly active users of new functions. Moreover, they are likely to use toolkits to customize their personal uses and respond to others’ problems. Therefore, they garner appreciation from others in return, achieve higher ranks in the top hit parade, and obtain better-expected benefits from the website's incentive compensation. This study also evaluates the toolkits’ efficacy in the Web 2.0 context and finds that they are not equivalents. This research offers insights useful for web service providers to target innovative users and create an environment using web toolkits to induce user-generated innovation and achieve better effect of innovation communication.

Editor's Message: Scholarly Journals and Data: A Case of Academic Celebrity?

Editor's Message:Scholarly Journals and Data: A Case of Academic Celebrity? Sheri Spaine Long, Editor Like our academic siblings in the sciences for decades, humanities scholars are paying more and more attention to hits, views, and citations. Are we becoming aspiring academic "rock stars" who want to be listed on the citation hit parade? Lately, for better or worse, scholar-teachers in languages, literatures, and linguistics are increasingly self-conscious of our quantitative as well as our qualitative profiles. Why? Digitization has made it easier than ever to track and count almost everything. Society is smitten with data reporting and tracking. Because sometimes all of this counting appears to be more of a sport than a reflection of the seriousness of purpose rooted in the humanities and social sciences, we might be inclined to say: Who cares about these data? However, increased accountability has motivated instructors, researchers, and administrators alike to seek more numerical documentation to justify our importance and productivity to various stakeholders such as deans, department heads, trustees, and so on. In a day in my life as Editor of Hispania, I am able to view in JSTOR some intriguing usage statistics about the journal. JSTOR is a nonprofit online system for archiving academic journals. One can view electronically the complete contents of all back issues of Hispania since 1917 up to three years short of the current volume. Since our affiliation with JSTOR in 2002, there have been more than 2.5 million views of Hispania articles online. The fact that users can view, search, and print back issues of Hispania articles has given unprecedented exposure to our content and produced some so-called academic celebrities due to frequent consultation. Beyond simple popularity, what can we learn by studying the data and examining these lists? How do we interpret this usage information? Is there a back story? How do titles and topics add to the discourse on literary canon formation and/or pedagogical trends? The top three most-viewed and most-downloaded Hispania articles that are listed on the next page rightly reflect our broad scope and the diverse interests of the AATSP membership. Before we proceed further, take a moment to review the Hispania mission statement printed below so that you will appreciate the broad sub-fields (italicized) in which we publish regularly. Then look at the lists of the most-viewed and most-downloaded articles that follow. Hispania, the official journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), invites the submission of original, unpublished manuscripts on language, linguistics, literature, literary criticism, film, culture, cultural studies, applied linguistics, and pedagogy having to do with Spanish and Portuguese. Throughout Hispania's history since its founding in 1917, it has published scholarly articles and reviews that are judged to be of interest to specialists in the discipline(s) as well as to a diverse readership of teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. All manuscripts submitted for publication should display thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the subject and field. Further considerations in the evaluation of manuscripts include their contribution to the advancement of knowledge, originality of method or focus, organization, and clarity of expression. Most Frequently Viewed Hispania Articles in JSTOR (To Date) 1. Poeta, Salvatore J. "Poetic and Social Patterns of Symmetry and Contrast in Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba." Hispania 82.4 (1999): 740-49. 2. Mujica, Barbara. "Teaching Literature: Canon, Controversy, and the Literary Anthology." Hispania 80.2 (1997): 203-15. 3. Ramírez, Arthur. "Juan Rulfo: Dialectics and the Despairing Optimist." Hispania 65.4 (1982): 580-85. [End Page vii] Most Frequently Downloaded Hispania Articles in JSTOR (To Date) 1. Poeta, Salvatore J. "Poetic and Social Patterns of Symmetry and Contrast in Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba." Hispania 82.4 (1999): 740-49. 2. Citron, James L. "Can Cross-Cultural Understanding Aid Second Language Acquisition? Toward a Theory of Ethno-Lingual Relativity." Hispania 78.1 (1995): 105-13. 3. Horwitz, Elaine K. "Some Language Acquisition Principles and Their Implications for Second Language Teaching." Hispania 69.3 (1986): 684-89. The JSTOR lists make us mindful of the second part of Hispania's full title—A journal devoted...

Landscape and Place in the Geographical Review

As part of the 2007 Wrigley-Fairchild award session during the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, former Geographical Review Editor Paul Starrs dramatically unveiled the most influential articles to have appeared in the journal (Starrs 2007) (Table I). Among them are true landmarks; and what caught my attention was the number that touched on the concepts of place and landscape. These topics have been a mainstay of twentieth-century geography and likewise prominent among the titles in the Geographical Review. I want to use Starrs's ten list to frame a brief discussion about the evolving approaches to the study of landscape and place in the Geographical Review. My comments touch on only a pair of research themes and a highly selective set of contributions to this journal; the larger body of articles that address landscape and place exemplifies much of what is good about the Geographical Review--namely, continuity and the journal's role as a forum for ongoing discussions about enduring geographical subjects. TABLE I--TOP TEN ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW AUTHOR TITLE YEAR OF VOLUME, PUBLICATION ISSUE, AND PAGE NUMBERS Yi-Fu Tuan Place: An 1975 65 (2): 151-165 Experiential Perspective Carl O. Sauer The Personality of 1941 31 (3): 353-364 Mexico Mark Jefferson The Law of the 1939 29 (2): 226-232 Primate City David Lowenthal Past Time, Present 1975 65 (1): 1-36 Place: Landscape and Memory Isaiah Bowman Scientific Study of 1926 16 (3): 647-653 Settlement Edward L. Ullman Amenities 1954 44 (1): 119-132 as a Factor in Regional Growth Larry R. Ford Continuity 1995 85 (3): 552-568 and Change in the American City Dan Stanislawski Spanish Town 1947 37 (1): 94-105 in the New World Wilbur Zelinsky The Hypothesis 1971 61 (2): 219-149 of the Mobility Transition Fred B. Kniffen Building in Wood in 1966 56 (1): 40-66 and Henry Glassie the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective Jean Gottmann Why the Skyscraper? 1966 56(2): 190-212 James J. Parsons A Geographer Looks 1986 76 (4): 371-389 at the San J oaquin Valley Source: Starrs 2007. Starrs's ranking of articles drew on a two-stage survey of selected journal readers: The first stage solicited personal lists of the most influential articles; the second allowed respondents to rank the top titles from the larger preliminary inventory. Methodology and specific rankings aside, Starrs captured an unquestionably prominent set. I touch on several articles from the list to showcase their position and influence in the ongoing discussions of landscape and place. Dan Stanislawski and Edward Price's inclusion in the Geographical Review hit parade denotes a powerful influence on the traditional approaches to landscape. Stanislawski's 1947 Early Spanish Town Planning is a prime example of work that influenced subsequent scholars and indeed provided a touchstone for numerous articles appearing here. It focused on the material etching of a street grid into the colonial soil of Latin America, using a diffusionist model. Another classic on town planning was Price's 1968 examination of the American courthouse square. …

'Chair Creaks, Though No One Sits there': Decomposition and Liquidity

How to describe and analyse a process from within, without self-aggrandisement, without exaggeration, yet engage a dispassionate listener? How to remember each small incident that influenced the outcome, and how to recall significant moments of revelation or realisation from the past, recent and distant, the pressure they may have exerted on the making of a single work? These are discursive notes, perhaps addressing the subject. The work may have begun in a room, though this seems unlikely. If it did begin in a room, then the room may have been quiet; if that were the case (which I'm inclined to accept for the sake of argument) then that quiet room was not just one room, because quiet rooms build up in your life: rooms within rooms within rooms, rooms in dreams, and now virtual myspace rooms and chat rooms. All these rooms were themselves enfolded within unfamiliar rooms that age barely remembers (or chooses to forget): those rooms of dread and pleasure, action and boredom, safety and danger. Their atmosphere accumulates, standing in relation to the feeling of being in rooms when something big was at stake: classroom, exam room, bedroom. 'Clocks spring to mind', I began to write (until realising that springing insinuates itself into the text as a pun, and puns are not my style, but clocks once defined the feeling of rooms): clocks ticking, measuring time, slowly, quietly, a presence, an interior atmosphere, dividing time with their chimes, then resuming their steady plod through ... what exactly? Each tick and tock seemed to freeze time, and if the clock stopped then the feeling of a room would change, dramatically. 'The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long,' wrote Virginia Woolf in Jacob's Room. Indoor silence once was occupied, regulated and even articulated by a clock; it was not silence at all, of course, but the tick and the tock were paroxysms around which silence seemed to gather, like vultures round a corpse, waiting for the ungiven signal for decomposition. Now we have digital clocks, small battery operated clocks with a tick so fugitive that only paranoid listening in the middle of the night can search it out, and the visual noise but apparent audio silence of numerical displays on TVs, ovens, microwaves, computers and phones--so quiet rooms and the people within them now float within a more continuous and subliminal form of air. All of these devices radiate electromagnetic emissions, so their silence is illusory. With the right equipment, they materialise, just like the things of the air thronging H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. There are other small sounds; maybe they form wisps into solids, glue pieces into forms, keep people sane, or shield them from loneliness and the void. Georges Perec wrote about the man who stared at nothing, his radio playing at such low volume that no one really knew if he could hear it, yet when Madame Nochere went to switch it off, he stopped her. He listened to the hit parade every night: that was his claim. When I was a teenager, I listened to the hit parade at low volume, night, bedclothes, sleeping parents ... also indulging in melancholy, as is standard, and it being the 1960s, there was plenty of material to feed both needs. Poignant in its description of fragility, vulnerability, isolation bordering on chronic withdrawal, one of Brian Wilson's most revealing ballads, 'In My Room', described the bedroom as a world, a friend, a confidant, a refuge, an ear, a place of listening in which other people were absent. The lyrics, written by Gary Usher, were prophetic, since they anticipated Brian's notorious withdrawal into pyjamas--a bed-bound descent into the maelstrom of high calorie food, TV and cocaine that began in summer 1973 and ended in late 1975. Mark Rothko, also famously troubled, wrote interesting things about air. 'Tactile space, or for the sake of simplicity, let us call it air, which exists between objects or shapes in the picture, is painted so that it gives the impression of a solid,' he wrote. …

Is your protein on the hit parade?

Is your protein on the hit parade?

Déjà vu in proteomics. A hit parade of repeatedly identified differentially expressed proteins

After reading many 2-DE-based articles featuring lists of the differentially expressed proteins, one starts experiencing a disturbing déjà vu. The same proteins seem to predominate regardless of the experiment, tissue or species. To quantify the occurrence of individual differentially expressed proteins in 2-DE experiment reports, we compiled the identities of differentially expressed proteins identified in human, mouse, and rat tissues published in three recent volumes of Proteomics and calculated the appearance of the most predominant proteins in the dataset. The most frequently identified protein is a highly abundant glycolytic enzyme enolase 1, differentially expressed in nearly every third experiment on both human and rodent tissues. Heat-shock protein 27 (HSP27) and heat-shock protein 60 (HSP60) were differentially expressed in about 30 percent of human and rodent samples, respectively. Considering protein families as units, keratins and peroxiredoxins are the most frequently identified molecules, with at least one member of the group being differentially expressed in about 40 percent of all experiments. We suggest that the frequent identification of these proteins must be considered in the interpretation of any 2-DE studies. We consider if these commonly observed changes represent common cellular stress responses or are a reflection of the technical limitations of 2-DE.

Telenovelas and the Israeli Television Market

Israel seems to import more telenovelas than any other country. VIVA, its telenovela cable channel, became instantly popular after its inauguration in early 2000. Its success surpassed the expectations of its owners, who launched the channel with ample evidence to support that they already counted on a solid demand for their product. VIVA competes, and often outranks, the top-rated national newscast in prime-time ratings. This channel established a weekly VIVA telenovela magazine. Its shows' musical themes rank high in the hit parade, driving the most popular singers and record labels to launch Hebrew versions of the songs. This article argues that telenovelas lead television entertainment in this country because of four primary factors: the centrality of cable to the television industry, the limited television programming before the 1990s, the cultural and political climate in which audiences watch telenovelas, and finally, the telenovela compatibility with Israel's narrative traditions, particularly its popular cinema.

Test Scores and Economic Growth

SOMEWHERE around 2000, I observed that, while people argued vehemently that good schools led to improved national economies, there wasn't much in the way of evidence for that contention. And there was certainly one glaring counterexample: Japan. Kids in Japan continued to ace tests, just as they had during Japan's boom years in the 1980s, but the country had been mired in recession or stagnation for a decade. (People now think that 2006 may have been the year that Japan finally started an expansion that will last for more than a quarter or two.) Out of curiosity, I correlated the ranking of countries on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) with the rankings for global competitiveness issued by the World Economic Forum. The resulting number for about 35 countries was quite small and became negative if I removed the bottom five nations, which were quite low on both rankings. Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen's article in the December Kappan observed that the goals for American education have seldom been cast in economic terms. Instead, right from the founding of the nation, they have more often been stated in terms of moral and civic outcomes. The dominance of an economic reference point is new. An aberration, Rothstein and Jacobsen called it. Moreover, the focus on the economy is new elsewhere as well. A Belgian critique of the Programme for International Student Assessment (for details on this critique, see the June 2005 Research column) implied that ranking education systems according to test scores was, well, dumb: Hit parades have been flourishing here for some years: the best schools, the world's best universities, the top-performing research centers, etc. Some 30 years ago this sort of ranking would have produced a smile as we were of the view that the broad and long-term effects of education cannot be reduced to a few trivial indicators and that every education system could be validly understood only by taking account of its history, its aims, and the complexity of its structures. Now, in too many places, people seem to think that a good education means only more math and science so students can compete for good jobs in the global economy. Yet there remains very little evidence of the impact of math and science achievement on the economic growth of nations. This makes the powerful rhetoric calling for ever more math and science somewhat hard to understand. On the day that I began to write this column, for instance, a program called Preparing U.S. Students for the Global Economy took place in Washington, D.C. It featured Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-Mich.), and various pundits from think tanks. A Dodd-Ehlers bill calling for the National Assessment Governing Board to establish national standards in mathematics and science has been introduced in Congress. From a different perspective, in the November 2006 issue of the American Journal of Education, Francisco Ramirez and John Meyer of Stanford University, Xiaowei Luo of the University of Illinois, and Evan Schofer of the University of Minnesota observe the disjuncture between strong rhetoric and weak impact: The dramatic portrait of achievement and development presupposes a world of enormous variation with respect to curriculum, teaching, and achievement. But cross-national investigations actually show considerably less variation with respect to curriculum, teaching, and achievement than expected in policy discourse.... So, from a research perspective, one should not expect robust achievement effects on economic growth. Or, as I have more crassly put it on occasion, education is critical, but among the developed nations differences in test scores are trivial. Ramirez and his colleagues go on to look for data that bear on the relationship between achievement and development. Their principal variables were changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 38 countries over two 20-year periods, 1970-90 and 1980-2000, and various international test comparisons up to the initial TIMSS in 1995. …

The Grand Ole Opry and Big Tobacco: Radio Scripts from the Files of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, 1948 to 1959

Historians rely on documents from the past that have been preserved in archives, museums, libraries, sometimes basements and attics. What gets saved and what gets tossed out is often a matter of luck or circumstance. One of the more interesting cases is the fate of the tobacco industry's internal documents. Long considered the most secretive of American industries, cigarette manufacturers zealously guarded access to their company files. Cigarette manufacturers would go so far as to ship overseas the results of their own internal research linking cigarettes with disease or transfer material to their legal counsel so that incriminating documents could be shielded from the prying eyes of government investigators and plaintiff's attorneys by attorney-client privilege. That has all changed. Millions of pages of industry documents are but a few clicks of a computer mouse away. Contained within the 1998 Tobacco Industry Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the major cigarette manufacturers and forty-six states, five territories, and the District of Columbia is a provision requiring each company to maintain an online archive of the documents released during litigation. Available through the web (see the gateway sites http://www.tobaccoarchives.com/, http://www. tobaccodocuments.org/, and http://galen.library.ucsf.edu/tobacco/) and containing millions of pages, these archives have been a rich source for scholars studying the cigarette industry's internal research, marketing practices, and massive public relations and lobbying efforts over the years. Public health scholars have made the most use of the industry archives, digging deep into the records to uncover the industry's scientific research on smoking and health, cigarette design, and extensive youth marketing activities. (1) Historians, however, have been slow to take advantage of these records, overlooking this important new source for the study of modern American popular culture and business history. Big tobacco embraced advertising like no other industry in American life, incorporating every new innovation in marketing, advertising, and hucksterism to persuade the nation that smoking was fun, relaxing, pleasurable, and, of course, harmless. While we tend to associate the American public's initial infatuation with the cigarette with Buck Duke and the development of the Bonsack cigarette rolling machine in the 1880s and 1890s, cigarettes actually occupied a distinctly minor and disreputable segment of the tobacco market until World War I. It wasn't until the 1920s that cigarettes emerged as the predominant form of tobacco use, surpassing chewing tobacco, pipes, and cigars. The jazz decade, with its patina of prosperity, saw Americans take to the cigarette in ever increasing numbers as tobacco manufacturers blanketed the nation with slogans such as Reach for a instead of a sweet and Gold, Not a cough in a carload. Emily Post told women that to be up-to-date they had to have cigarettes handy in the home: There is not a modern New York hostess, scarcely even an old-fashioned one, who does not have cigarettes passed after dinner, she explained to her readers, even as she appeared in advertisements for Old Gold cigarettes. Cigarette sales rose astronomically, pausing only briefly in the early years of the Depression. By the mid-1950s, 57 percent of men and 28 percent of women over the age of fifteen smoked regularly. Per capita consumption that year stood at 3,293 cigarettes for every man and woman over the age of fifteen. (2) Moving all those cigarettes out of the factory and into the lips of the American public took a sustained and heroic advertising effort. No marketing innovation was too novel for the industry. The American Tobacco Company pioneered the practice of skywriting, emblazoning Lucky in the heavens above New York, Atlanta, and other major American cities. The tobacco companies were pioneers in radio sponsorships, including Your Strike Hit Parade, Kay Kysers Kollege of Musical Knowledge, and the Grand Ole Opry, and in television sponsorships. …

Nonlinear shot noise, memory systems, and all-time hit parades

Consider the evolution of a memory system ‘fed’ by an external event-process. New memories are continuously recorded by the system. Simultaneously, the recollection of old memories continuously fades away. Thus, at a given time epoch the memory system ranks all past events according to present importance-magnitudes attributed to them. Illustratively, the memory system is an all-time hit parade run continuously in time. Motivated by a recently-introduced nonlinear shot noise system-model [I. Eliazar, J. Klafter, Physica A, in press (titled: non-linear shot noise: Lévy, Noah, & Joseph).], we explore a memory system-model in which: (i) the external events follow an arbitrary time-homogeneous Poisson point process; and (ii) the ‘fading’ of memories is governed by an arbitrary nonlinear differential-equation dynamics. A Poissonian analysis of the model is conducted, addressing questions such as: How do memories get constructed and degraded? How does the memory process evolve? What is its stationary structure? What is its correlation structure? In addition, a Poissonian eigenvalue problem, arising in this context, is studied.

Put Out over PISA

I HAVE BEEN dismayed at uncritical acceptance of international comparisons in this country. It seems to me that otherwise competent researchers and psychometricians abandon all critical faculties when dealing with data from International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievement -- TIMSS studies and PIRLS -- or Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) -- PISA. Technically put, they go gaga. Clearly, there is political pressure to accept these studies, but I also see them as a small growth industry on which a number of careers depend. Aside from my own analyses (Kappan, May 1998; Kappan, September 1998; and Educational Researcher, May 2000), I know of only three other pieces -- two by Jianjun Wang (Kappan, November 1996; and Kappan, September 1998) and one by Erling Boe and Sujie Shin (Kappan, May 2005) -- that take a more reasoned look at studies. I had to tone down Educational Researcher article to meet requirements of dullness police. Maybe I should move back to Europe, where there are much livelier and more skeptical discussions of these studies. To provide a peek about what's being said across pond, I've gone through my towering to-be-read pile and extracted commentary related to 2000 (Programme for International Student Assessment 2000), first of assessments. In conference notes, Emma Nardi of University of Rome wrote that one could not say much about from results because Italy is a country new to education, unlike France, where education has been a reality since French Revolution. We have not yet succeeded in overcoming fragmentation due to our belated unification declared in 1861. Nardi also noted that there were so few foreign students in Italian results that possibly sample was improperly drawn. The French, not doing as well on as they had in earlier international comparisons, generally slammed it as another manifestation of Yankee Imperialism, now referred to as model. That model includes imposition of national rankings and standardized tests. Marc Romainville of University of Namur, in French Belgium, penned a widely read critique in journal Nouvelle Revue. Romainville first called a projective test, similar to a Rorschach, in which everyone sees what their own idiosyncratic needs determine that they see. But, he continued, All this could be dismissed if dominant tone of media treatment were not working to harm already quite eroded public perception of teachers. The most disturbing, taking all things together, is that once again opprobrium has been heaped, indiscriminately, on thousands of teachers who, day in, day out, and in difficult circumstances, try to teach and hear it said, in response, that their teaching is 'ineffective and inequitable.' Romainville then takes to task very idea of producing a results league table (country-by-country rankings): Hit parades have been flourishing here for some years: best schools, world's best universities, top-performing research centers, etc. Some 30 years ago this sort of ranking would have produced a smile, as we were of view that broad and long-term effects of education cannot be reduced to a few trivial indicators and that every education system could be validly understood only by taking account of its history, its aims, and complexity of its structures. This craze for rankings derives, Romainville argues, from the increasing grip of Anglo-Saxon model. He continues, PISA avoids neither this ranking delusion nor domination of Anglo-Saxon model . . . actual development of tests was responsibility of an Anglo-Saxon consortium of Australian, Japanese, U.S., and Dutch organizations. Romainville conjectures that this consortium first prepared a master test in English, then translated it into French because OECD, sponsoring organization, is officially French-English bilingual. …

A Scientist and a Cartoonist: how Chuck came to be

IUBMB LifeVolume 57, Issue 4-5 p. 251-252 ArticleFree Access A Scientist and a Cartoonist: how Chuck came to be Pierre De Meyts, Pierre De Meyts Receptor Systems Biology Laboratory, Hagedorn Research Institute, Gentofte, DenmarkSearch for more papers by this author Pierre De Meyts, Pierre De Meyts Receptor Systems Biology Laboratory, Hagedorn Research Institute, Gentofte, DenmarkSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 January 2008 https://doi.org/10.1080/152165405000943134AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume57, Issue4-5April 2005Pages 251-252 RelatedInformation

La popularidad de las especies. Las diez principales

A measure of animal, plant and mineral species popularity can be easily obtained from the information available in the Science Citation Index. We used the title, abstract and keyword strategy in this index to find how many times the name of a species had been included in papers published since 1945 to the present. A good fitting of the variation of the number of citations with the rank was obtained with a linearizable and higher trascendental function y = a x–b e–cx. We also show the species «hit parade». The first ten species all have some anthropic character.

My Life in Science, Not the Restaurant Business

My Life in Science, Not the Restaurant Business

A Context for Understanding Inland Beatness and Bob Kaufman

It was a working class and lower middle class neighborhood/ghetto/'hood in a 1950s blue collar small city in Ohio where fluoridation was an issue and people wanted to live as if they were in a larger Winesburg. The city's gifts to the world were: the Wright brothers, Paul Laurence Dunbar, cash registers, self-starters for cars, Milt Canniff, Erma Bombeck, Jonathon Winters, Phil Donahue, the pop top can, The Ohio Players and Roger Troutman & Zap. There was a desire to escape the factory funk for as long as possible before sinking into it, Baptist/store front religion, the second shift, broadening hips, widening waists and Friday night binges. There was Duck & Frances, Rick & Marsha, Brooksand me, the baby of the group. We were all full of unease, boredom, a longing for something that meant more than the same 'ol-same 'ol that was a wide awake nightmare on streets without dreams heading for a highway to the dirt nap. There were also beatniks, beatitude and hipness, an alternative to the 1950s' stifling conventionality and the American habit of examining nothing significantly or deeply. They, we, had an attitude that was different and distant but longed for real hope and meaning that meant more than the sameness and automatic meek acceptance of rigid reality. Duck's old man turned me on to Bobby Blue Bland-much grittier and realistic than the stuff on Your Hit Parade and more meaningful than the radio's proto rock and soul or 45 rpm pop melodies. Duck listened to James Moody, A Night in Tunisia, to jazz that wasn't based on a show tune. We had hip within reach. We knew quite well what square and uncool were. And we had heard the names, knew the faces and phases (somewhat) of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Zen Buddhism. The mood and mode ran, in limited circles, until the early 1960s in Ohio, which seemed to always be behind the times and not hip to the haps. In addition to the Village Voice, which I'd started reading in high school, there was Ferlinghetti-a guy from Beachwood, Ohio for cryin' out loud!!-Norman Mailer, existentialism, folk music (the real and the commercial kind) as well as the jazz I was still pickin' up on (adding, among others, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderly and Coltrane to my ears). Along the way-which included media events like Little Rock, The March on Washington and reruns of Jack Ruby capping Lee Harvey Oswald-I had a growing awareness, but little real understanding, of Malcolm X, the real need for Civil Rights, movies with subtitles, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Klee, the Air Force, living in the South, marriage, Vietnam, my first child's birth, graduate school. My understanding of and

A cigarra e a formiga: por uma paisagem sonora da sociedade globalizada

Ha pouco mais de cem anos, a paisagem sonora urbana conhecia uma serie de sons bizarros que, desde entao, so se multiplicaram, a ponto de formar uma massa sonora de baixa definicao acustica ( lo-fi ). Trata-se do som continuo dos motores que, em ultima analise, transmitem mensagens repetitivas. De outra parte, a globalizacao deste final de seculo abocanha, a cada dia, um territorio espaco-cultural cada vez mais amplo. A musica- pelo menos a musica das midias- ja nasce cosmopolita , fazendo ressoar um mesmo repertorio em todos os restaurantes e aeroportos do mundo. Cria-se, assim, uma mesma trilha sonora para o grande formigueiro humano que habita o planeta. O presente trabalho pretende discutir, atraves do exemplo da musica, o papel da paisagem sonora atual, numa sociedade humana que adquire tracos de uma sociedade entomica.

Mercury: Top of the Hit Parade for Eight Years

ABSTRACTThe Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is the lead agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for providing support to the federal response to releases of hazardous substances in the environment. Since the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act was passed and amended, ATSDR has represented HHS on the National Response Team (NRT). The NRT role, and the subsequently established National Response System, are described in the National Contingency Plan for Oil and Hazardous Substances Releases (Title 40 Code of Federal Regulations, Section 300). As part of the National Response System, ATSDR can be called when a hazardous substance is released. Consistently, one of the most common substances ATSDR is called about is mercury, usually elemental mercury. This presentation will provide some background statistics on these calls and some general response options. Several specific cases that have occurred in the last few years will be reviewed. These reviews will deal less with remedial options than with describing common issues that arose, issues unique to the specific case, and the impact of that case on the community. A brief discussion of risk communication issues and ATSDR's response to those issues concludes the presentation.