Medium Regimes Research Articles

Pamphlets, Commodification, Media Market Regulation and Hegemony: A Transnational Inquiry into the Seventeenth-Century Print Industry in England, France, and the Netherlands

Pamphlet history provides early evidence of the mutually constitutive relation of media commodification and political hegemony in the development of parliamentarianism and capitalism. This article traces pamphlets’ history in England, France, and the Netherlands. Pamphlets were first developed as a medium for religious and political opposition but were soon recuperated by the ruling classes as a medium of propaganda. As the tensions between vested powers and opposition began to diminish, pamphlets evolved into a more informative and dialogical medium. The regulatory regime of the media, which was at first characterized by repressive censorship, gradually transformed into a market-regulated media regime. Seventeenth-century pamphlets may be considered the first extensively commoditized mass medium in media history.

Social media as a heteroglossic discursive space and Kenya's emergent alternative/citizen experiment

ABSTRACTOver the past decade, Kenya's media landscape has witnessed a wave of transformative and disruptive technologies in the form of Web 2.0 applications, accessible through computers and now increasingly through mobile phones. These developments have since incubated two new critical media regimes. First, the country has seen the emergence of a new community of communication practitioners. Second, a new web-enabled communication infrastructure has made possible the broadening of the public sphere, encouraging public participation in news, with non-traditional journalistic platforms becoming important sites for ‘alternative’ journalism. This article critically reflects on how social media platforms such as Twitter (read here as a heteroglossic text and space) enable and encourage public participation in wider national conversations. The article explores this through the work of key bloggers/activists and citizen journalists, reflecting on how they construct as well as enable new participatory forms of civic/political engagement through Twitter. While the platform seems to have created its own hierarchies, horizontal participation is still much greater than with mainstream media formats. The discussion demonstrates the growing institutionalisation of the online space as an important platform for popular expression in Kenya, if at the same time offering an indictment of mainstream media's regime of ‘closure’ to outsider voices.

New Feminist Approaches to the Study of Race and Sound

Gaye Theresa Johnson's Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012In 2003 trailblazers of feminist sound studies Frances Aparicio and Candida Jaquez astutely observed that, given overdetermined complexity of new global media regimes, critical attention to contemporary circulations of Latina/o popular musics throughout Americas would require no less than the transforming of traditional methodologies and theoretical frameworks that have defined music and music making primarily through discrete categories such as national identity and musical genre (2003, 9). Just over a decade later, a new generation of scholarship guided by this intellectual imperative has accomplished just that, deploying analytics of critical race, gender, and queer studies to remap contours, content, and conversations that have conventionally animated disciplines of popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and sound studies. Gaye Theresa Johnsons Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement in Los Angeles and Deborah R. Vargas's Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda offer noteworthy contributions to this emergent interdisciplinary ferment. Significantly, both authors complicate subject/object relationship that has traditionally structured ethnomusicological inquiry, turning our eyes and tuning our ears to how cultural workers have mobilized repertories of song, sound, rhythm, and performance to critique, negotiate, and subvert constraints of everyday life. Through use of archives, feminist of analyses, and innovative methodologies, Johnson and Vargas persuasively demonstrate that geographies of sound must be understood as terrains of material and ideological struggle upon which aggrieved communities disrupt dominant historical narratives, negotiate structural forces and institutions, and fashion alternative social worlds.At a moment when so-called black/brown divide prevails as a commonsense axiom within U.S. public discourse, Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity provides a timely intervention into antagonism-focused histories of relational racial formation. Johnsons richly researched historiography of Afro-Chicano cultural activism in post-World War II Los Angeles details parallel but not identical histories of labor exploitation, housing segregation, and cultural demonization that have politicized black and brown communities in urban Southern California (ix). Critical of media narratives and institutional records that depict African Americans and Chicanos as continually at odds, Johnson instead chronicles a neglected history of infrapolitics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color (xv). Combining methods and frames of ethnic and cultural studies, urban geography, and social movement history, Johnson deftly demonstrates how spatial proximity and cultural contact set stage for black and brown communities in urban Los Angeles to us[e] physical places they inhabited and discursive spaces they imagined to assert their common humanity and forge shared struggles grounded in mutuality and solidarity (x).Spaces of Conflict is theoretically anchored in convergence of two analytical repertoires: spatial and sonic. Johnson engages geographic most robustly in her ongoing discussion of dialectics of spatial mobility and spatial immobilization. She argues that dynamic structural forces that have shaped postwar Los Angeles-urban renewal, deindustrialization, erosion of welfare state, and resurgence of anti-immigrant revanchism-have consistently constrained physical, social, and economic mobility of city's poor communities of color. …

Spinning on a cleaner cycle: How media management became ‘respectable’ under the United Kingdom’s coalition government

Abstract The issue of media management or ‘spin’ came to dominate Tony Blair’s time in office, so much so that even his own press secretary, Alastair Campbell, came to concede that they had over-used it. When David Cameron came to power in 2010, although he has acknowledged that he learnt many political lessons from Tony Blair, he was keen to ensure that his government did not make the same mistakes in terms of the overuse of spin. In this article, based on interviews with key players, a comparison is made between the way the two prime ministers, and in particular their press secretaries, managed their media relations in their first year’s in office. This article, written by two who witnessed the first years of Blair and Cameron at first hand, characterizes the Blair media regime as practising ‘spin heavy’ and the Cameron regime, under Andy Coulson, as practising ‘spin lite’. It concludes that, both in terms of relations with the media and how that relationship played out vis-á-vis coverage, ‘spin lite’ was a more successful formulation.

Problem of light scattering in complex media

This work includes discussion about different types of interaction between electromagnetic radiation and various materials. Field reorganization in ordered media is considered, also impact of scatterers' size and distance between them on the scattering process is discussed. Phase diagram for scattering regimes in complex media is suggested.

Simplified numerical model for clarifying scaling behavior in the intermediate dispersion regime in homogeneous porous media

The dispersion of solute in porous media shows a non-linear increase in the transition from diffusion to advection dominated dispersion as the flow velocity is raised. In the past, the behavior in this intermediate regime has been explained with a variety of models. We present and use a simplified numerical model which does not contain any turbulence, Taylor dispersion, or fractality. With it, we show that the non-linearity in the intermediate regime nevertheless occurs. Furthermore, we show that the intermediate regime can be regarded as a phase transition between random, diffusive transport at low flow velocity and ordered transport controlled by the geometry of the pore space at high flow velocities. This phase transition explains the first-order behavior in the intermediate regime. A new quantifier, the ratio of the amount of solute in dominantly advective versus dominantly diffusive pore channels, plays the role of ‘order parameter’ of this phase transition. Taylor dispersion, often invoked to explain the supra-linear behavior of longitudinal dispersion in this regime, was found not to be of primary importance. The novel treatment of the intermediate regime paves the way for a more accurate description of dispersion as a function of flow velocity, spanning the whole range of Péclet numbers relevant to practical applications, such as ground water remediation.

Stationary and periodic regimes in relaxing media with fluctuations

In the article, the traveling wave solutions to a hydrodynamic model for relaxing media are considered. When fluctuations in the model are absent these solutions satisfy the planar dynamical system, which has been studied by means of the qualitative analysis methods. Now we are interested in the structure of the wave solutions, namely the stationary and periodic regimes, when the model parameters are disturbed by Gaussian noise. In this case, the characteristics of fixed points and limit cycles of the corresponding stochastic dynamical system are studied. In particular, we analyze the stability of the fixed point with the help of the top Lyapunov exponent and found out the displacement of the Andonov-Hopf bifurcation with respect to the noise intensity and the wave velocity. Stochastic limit cycles are studied by means of the sensitivity function determining the dispersion of trajectories in the vicinity of the deterministic limit cycle. This function is derived from the deterministic differential equation by the shooting method. It is shown that trajectories nearby the limit cycle undergo the most dispersion in the vicinity of the saddle fixed point.

Asylum seekers, citizenship and reality TV in the Netherlands: quizzing refugees in jeopardy

This article interrogates a Dutch jeopardy style TV show, Weg van Nederland, featuring young, well-educated asylum seekers about to be deported. The TV program, devised in collaboration with the advocacy group ‘Defense for Children,’ performed the paradoxes resulting from the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of asylum seekers. Yet, its strategy of inscribing the contestants into the space of citizenship by highlighting their ‘rootedness’ through the quiz format also lent support to the exclusivist, essentialist understanding of national belonging that is produced in contemporary Dutch citizenship and integration law. Moreover, the show's focus on successful, thoroughly integrated and career driven young adults, while pragmatic from the perspective of the show's (limited) political objectives, also reproduced the preferred template of neoliberal citizenship, which drives the European migration regime and its policy of selective in/exclusion. These contradictions expose the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of humanitarian appeals working within the contemporary media regime, including reality TV, which imposes its own generic terms (and ideological inflections) on the justice claims launched within its public arena.

Flow Regimes in Packed Beds of Spheres from Pre-Darcy to Turbulent

Characteristics of flow regimes in porous media, along the processes of energy dissipation in each regime, are critical for applications of such media. The current work presents new experimental data for water flow in packed steel spheres of 1- and 3-mm diameters. The porosity of the porous media was about 35 % for both cases. The extensive dataset covered a broad range of flow Reynolds number such that several important flow regimes were encountered, including the elusive pre-Darcy regime, which is rarely or never seen in porous-media literature and turbulent regime. When compared to previous information, the results of this study are seen to add to the divergence of available data on pressure drop in packed beds of spheres. The divergence was also present in the coefficients of Ergun equation and in the Kozeny–Carman constant. The porous media of the current work were seen to exhibit different values of permeability and Forchheimer coefficient in each flow regime. The current data correlated well using the friction factor based on the permeability (measured in the Darcy regime) and the Reynolds number based on the same length scale. An attempt was made to apply recent theoretical results regarding the applicability of the quadratic and cubic Forchheimer corrections in the strong and weak inertia regime.

Metal foam hydrodynamics: Flow regimes from pre-Darcy to turbulent

Metal foam is a relatively new class of porous media. The internal morphology of the foam is composed of connected cells each having many ligaments that form a web. In addition, metal foam has very high porosity (often greater than 90%) and a large surface area density. These properties are exploited in many applications, e.g., heat exchanger, reactors and filters. Flow regimes, and transition from one to another, are critical for understanding energy dissipation mechanisms for flow through the foam, and for heat transfer or reaction rates. While this topic is well studied in traditional porous media, e.g., packed beds, it is not well understood for foam-like porous media such as metal, graphite and polymeric foams. Pressure drop parameters such as permeability and form/inertial drag coefficients are very divergent for metal foam. The choice of an appropriate characteristic length for metal foam has also varied among researchers. In the current study a large set (88 points) of carefully-obtained experimental data for pressure drop of water flow in aluminium foam having 20 pores per inch and a porosity of 87.6% was collected. The range of flow Reynolds number covered all known flow regimes in porous media from pre-Darcy to turbulent. Flow regimes and transition between them were identified and compared to their counterparts in traditional porous media and to what is available for metal foam. The current data correlated very well using the friction factor based on the square root of permeability (measured in the Darcy regime) and the Reynolds number based on the same characteristic length. It is shown that the same foam exhibits different values of its permeability and Forchheimer coefficient in different flow regimes. The finding of this study can help in numerical and analytical work concerning flow and heat transfer in foam-like porous media.

Advection of an impurity in percolation media with a finite correlation length

The impurity transport regimes in percolation media with a finite correlation length, which are caused by advection and diffusion mechanisms, have been analyzed. It has been shown that the change in the transport characteristics of a medium from the self-similar type to the statistically homogeneous type occurs through two stages because of the structural features of percolation clusters (presence of a backbone and dead ends). As a result, new anomalous transport regimes appear in the system. The quasi-isotropic and moderately and strongly anisotropic media have been considered.

Ethical Implications of Information Dissemination on the New Media

The concept of new media poses from the start a problem of nomenclature, in what does it consist? Unlike the radio or Television where proximity of mater and form provides for an ease of classification, the new media consist rather of loosely related technologies in terms of form but strongly differentiated in terms of mater. The new media “are in fact a disparate set of communication technologies that share only certain features...they are very diverse and not easy to define.” The problem of nomenclature with regards to the new media underscores the problem of classification and control. From a comparative analysis of varied characters of the new medium that are classified under the new media, the paper xrays the problem of assurance of quality information with regards to the new media in a growing ambit of fragmentation and decimation of the audience, source, and recipient under the new media regime. In the perceived throes of the difficulty of assurance, the paper postulates and recommends a teaching and training of the modern generation of peoples towards a stronger ethical living as necessary salve to the perturbing problem of lack of control of the new media.

Carbon–nitrogen ratio and in vitro assimilate partitioning patterns in Cyrtanthus guthrieae L

In response to variations in nutritional composition of the growth medium, plants often adjust their metabolism and progressively alter their growth patterns. Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) constitute the major plant nutritional components influencing plant growth and development patterns. This study examined the growth dynamics and patterns of assimilate partitioning to primary and secondary metabolites in response to varying levels and combinations of C and N in the culture media of Cyrtanthus guthrieae. In vitro callus-derived C. guthrieae plantlets were cultured on solid Murashige and Skoog (MS) media with different concentrations and combinations of C and N. Relative growth rate (RGR) increased proportionally with an increase in C concentrations up to 88 mM sucrose (0.58 d−1) beyond which it was hardly influenced by further increases in C. Growth was also significantly favoured in media with high concentrations of N at all C concentrations tested. In C-limited media regimes with growth saturating N conditions, alkaloid accumulation became favoured while polyphenol content increased with an increase in C levels in the medium, a characteristic pattern that appeared to be less influenced by the amount of N. Of the primary metabolites, only proteins showed small significant variations across different media treatments, with starch and soluble sugars increasing proportionately with C levels. In the medium with a high sucrose concentration (175 mM), soluble sugars, amino acids and polyphenols increased markedly, possibly as an adaptive response to the reduced osmotic potential in the media and/or a storage mechanism for excess C and N reserves in the media. From a medicinal perspective, with regard to polyphenolic compounds in C. guthrieae, growth medium conditions that allow for high levels of C pools in the tissue would thus be favourable for the enhanced synthesis of this group of compounds. The medium conditions with 175 mM sucrose and 10.3 mM NH4NO3 gave the highest total polyphenols, flavonoids and proanthocyanidins with a moderate growth rate.

Crossover from quasi-static to dense flow regime in compressed frictional granular media

Being ubiquitous in a large variety of geomaterials, granular assemblies play a crucial role in the mechanical stability of engineering and geophysical structures. For these applications, an accurate knowledge of the processes at the origin of shear localization, i.e. faulting, in frictional granular assemblies submitted to compressive loading is needed. Here we tackle this problem by performing discrete-element numerical simulations. A thorough analysis of the evolution of multi-scale mechanical properties as approaching sample macroscopic instability is performed. Spatial correlations operating within the shear stress and strain fields are analyzed by means of a coarse-graining analysis. The divergence of correlation lengths is reported on both shear stress and strain fields as approaching the transition to sample instability. We thus show that the crossover from a quasi-static regime where the sample deforms infinitely slowly to a dense flow regime, where inertial forces play a significant role, can be interpreted as a critical phase transition. At this transition, no shear band of characteristic thickness can be defined.

Effect of measurement on the ballistic–diffusive transition in turbid media

The dependence of the transition between the ballistic and the diffusive regimes of turbid media on the experimental solid angle of the detection system is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. A simple model is developed which shows the significance of experimental conditions on the location of the ballistic-diffusive transition. It is demonstrated that decreasing the solid angle expands the ballistic regime; however, this benefit is bounded by the initial Gaussian beam diffraction. In addition, choosing the appropriate wavelength according to the model's principles provides another means of expanding the ballistic regime. Consequently, by optimizing the experimental conditions, it should be possible to extract the ballistic image of a tissue with a thickness of 1 cm.

Health wash in Helsinki

In June 2013 the 8th Global Conference on Health Promotion on Health in All Policies was held in Helsinki. The fourth plenary session featured speakers from the World Bank and World Economic Forum (WEF) and immediately reminded us of corporate ‘green wash’ whereby companies grossly exaggerate their environmental sustainability credentials to gain social credibility and consumer comfort. In Helsinki we witnessed a similar ‘health wash’, in which the private sector was portrayed as an essential and beneficent ‘partner’ in promoting health by providing its expertise and much needed resources. Jane-Llopis and Xydia-Charmanta (2013) (Director, WEF) reminded us that 44% of the world’s 100 top economies are corporations rather than countries, and argued that the private sector is flexible, innovative and more attentive to consumer convenience and satisfaction than the public sector. This portrayal of the private sector’s role in health promotion contrasted sharply with that of World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director General Dr Margaret Chan who, in her opening address, condemned the economic power and destructive health impact of large industries, including food, tobacco, soda and alcohol: ‘In the view of WHO, the formulation of health policies must be protected from distortion by commercial or vested interests’, whose tactics ‘include front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits, and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt’ (Chan, 2013). This theme echoed through the following five days. The Irish Minister for Children and Youth, Frances Fitzgerald, talked of the need to make the lobbying tactics of industry transparent and to ensure that health promotion advocates have the same access to politicians as industry representatives. Ilona Kickbusch spoke of the commercial determinants of health. The twitter wall at the conference was busily rinsing off this corporate ‘health wash’ with comments about the need to deal with industry’s adverse impacts. But the big question confronting the health promotion movement is how best to control corporate interests? The answer to this requires understanding why corporations have and maintain such power. Our global economic regime is structured to meet the needs of rich countries and transnational corporations. This is done through trade agreements that make the world safe for capitalism (Chang, 2008), taxation regimes that enable corporations to pay little tax (Tax Justice Network, 2013) and investment treaties that allow foreign companies to sue governments for new public health regulations that might put a dent in their profits (Khor, 2012). The fall of the Soviet Bloc has meant an ideological domination for capitalism that crowds out ideas for alternative economic regimes in dominant discourse and rich country media. Gramsci’s (1971) hegemonic capitalism has well and truly come to pass. It is this ideological climate that makes a ‘health wash’ so easy for industry to get away with. What reasonable person would oppose a public private partnership to provide more health services or gain more funds for a children’s hospital by having Ronald MacDonald Health Promotion International, Vol. 29 No. 1 doi:10.1093/heapro/dat054 # The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access published 8 August, 2013

Preliminary study on the effect of heated surfaces upon bloodstain pattern analysis.

Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) involves the interpretation of distinct blood patterns found at crime scenes following a violent act. In this paper, we explored for the first time the effects of surface temperatures upon blood impacting a horizontal surface (steel) with its implications in BPA explored. Specific surface temperatures were explored over the range 24-250°C which relate to the four major boiling regimes of liquid media; natural convection, nucleate boiling, transition boiling, and film boiling, where a series of blood drops tests were performed at varying impact velocities. Blood was found to separate into its components at temperatures of 50°C+, displayed as temperature induced blood rings, where a single secondary and a series of further inner rings are exhibited. This consequently led to the development of a new constant Cd heated expressing the decrease in spread factor (D(s)/D(o)) at the secondary ring.

After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. By Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 376p. $99.00 cloth, $32.99 paper.

After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. By Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 376p. $99.00 cloth, $32.99 paper.

Book Review: Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment

Book Review: Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, <i>After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment</i>

In Stationary Regime, Electron Transfer Rates in RTIL Media Are Diffusion Controlled: Experimental Evidence from Pulse Radiolysis Study

We report electron transfer (ET) process from the long-lived radical anions of pyrene and benzophenone to molecular acceptors, e.g., benzophenone and fluorenone, respectively, in two RTIL media, namely, [BMIM][PF6] and [BMIM][BF4], as well as a few other conventional organic solvents using the nanosecond pulse radiolysis technique. Decay of the donor radical anion and concomitant formation of the acceptor radical anion ensure a bimolecular ET process. The rate constants for the bimolecular ET process in both normal organic solvents and RTILs have been found to be nearly equal to diffusion controlled rate calculated for the corresponding solvent. For long-lived anions, having lifetimes longer than a few hundred nanoseconds, quenching occurs mainly in the stationary regime. In this regime, the ET rate is fully controlled by the rate of diffusion of the reactive species in those solvents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence of the diffusion controlled ET process occurring in the stationary regime in RTIL media.