Opposite Meanings Research Articles

Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War

This article tells a three-layered story. First, it reexamines the impact of French geographer Yves Lacoste's 1972 exposé on the American bombing of the Red River Delta of North Vietnam on opposition to the Vietnam War and how it was implicated in wider political debate about what Hannah Arendt saw as systemic “lying in politics.” In various reports and newspaper articles Lacoste deployed the tools of classical geography—firsthand observation, mapping, and the integrated analysis of physical and human factors—to disclose connections among law, war, and environment (or what he termed “geographical warfare”) that had a troubling political significance. Second, we explore how Lacoste's exposé was bound up with the theme of “tropicality” (the West's construction of “the tropics” as its environmental other), chiefly through his recourse to Gourou's (1936) study of the delta. Lacoste showed how exotic imagery of the tropics has served as a means of opposition and critique as well as a mode of othering and Western dominance. Third, Lacoste's critical engagement with Gourou points to the ambivalent critical impact that the Vietnam War had on Francophone and Anglophone geography during the 1970s and 1980s, yet also how interest in the idea of tropicality developed in French geography twenty years before the better known Anglophone critical literature on the subject emerged.

Semantic Priming of Attention Focus: Evidence for Short- and Long-Term Effects

Research on subliminal priming documents that our brain can understand words, interpret facial expressions and decode symbols even without realizing them consciously. Thus, words presented for merely a few ms can shorten the response times to semantically related target words, if compared to words with opposite meaning (e.g., Klauer & Musch, 2003). While most previous semantic priming studies used semantic prime-target pairs of affective valence, the present study explored for the first time semantic priming effects for prime-target pairs characterizing an attentional focus. In Experiment 1, a subliminally presented prime word was followed by an above-threshold target word such that both words denoted a broad attention focus, both denoted a narrow focus, or one word denoted a broad and the other a narrow focus. Subjects had to judge the focus of the target words, and we found their response times to be shorter when the prime-target pairs were semantically congruent rather than incongruent. In Experiment 2, a block of subliminally presented prime words, all denoting a broad or all a narrow focus of attention, was followed by a block of subliminally presented target words denoting a broad or a narrow focus in a mixed sequence. Subjects had to judge the position of each prime or target, and we found their target response times to be shorter when the target was semantically congruent rather than incongruent with the preceding prime block. We concluded that semantic priming is effective, that it works for primes denoting the attention focus, and that it persists for more than just a fraction of a second.

The Identity Joke: Race, Rap, Performance in CB4

Since their birth in the 1970s, hip-hop music and culture have repeatedly been framed as black cultural forms that give youth a voice in American society to speak the truth of their lived experience and feelings of political anger. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner are representative of this approach. They note:Rap is thus at once a formidable form of musical expression, a subcultural means of opposition, a cultural idiom of counterhegemonic anger and rebellion, and an indicator that existing societies are structured according to a system of differences between dominant and subordinate classes, groups, races, and genders. . . . Rap can force white audiences to reflect on their own racial construction, on the ways that whites oppress blacks, on the ways that their own subject positions are constructed in opposition to an Other who is often presented in a negative light. Rap is thus a significant part of the postmodern adventure that forces an increasingly multicultural and multiracial society to become aware of its differences and to learn to live with otherness and dissimilarity.1Though optimistic, this assessment of hip hop as a political art form that questions whiteness as a political identity is a fair assessment, in spite of its totalization of rap as a singular style/genre. Many black fans and critics often disparage nonblack fans, largely whites from non-urban environments for misappropriating their form of urban culture, a debate that has roots in rock n' roll, jazz, and even the minstrelsy. Although black fans and critics may have a point in their critique of white performativity of black cultural performance, what they may not analytically see is the meaning that various groups attach to a set of social practices or cultural inventions. Rather than seeing this form is mere racial imitation or racial fakery those whites are in fact positioning themselves in the world through their performances of certain genres of rap. The point is no one is truly a racial insider, especially in the tradition of performance. The dichotomy of insider and outsider makes little sense. Performance of any form of entertaining style is open to multiple meanings and interpretations. In short, racial identity is never fully transparent to anyone in American culture.Hip hop is so thoroughly associated with blackness (even though Latino/as were equally important to the genesis of hip hop) that to separate the two is tantamount to genocide for the most committed fans and critics since African Americans dominate the form in the music industry. Most popular musical genres have a philosophy that shapes their aesthetics (e.g., how fans dress, behave, and discuss the idiom). These are its rules of identity and determine the fan's level of commitment to the musical. To propose hip-hop fans are following the rules of a musical culture rather than a race is an incendiary claim in the United States. Black American fans might especially fear white economic exploitation and the deracination of their cultural contributions. This is due in large part to a long history musical and economic exploitation and the mainstream, commercial musical industry that sold rap in record numbers as solely a hardcore and gangsta genre. The commercial music industry not only sold rap in this form, it also portrayed blackness in as monoracial, exclusionary urban identity.2All entertainers engage the role of storytelling in creating their stage persona. However, in this article I'm interested in the question of racial identity as a social construction and performed fiction. In much of commercial hip hop, blackness is often staged as one uniformed cultural expression of masculine prowess and violence, even when an artist tries to avoid being singularly categorized. In defending hip hop against the charges of being violent and misogynist, many critics, musicians and fans blame this state of affairs on the recording industry. In Byron Hurt's 2006 documentary film Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes on representations of manhood in rap, this argument is one of the guiding themes. …

퍼지 유사관계를 이용한 다차원 특징들의 가중치 결정과 감성기반 음악검색

음원이 디지털화 되면서 쉽게 음악을 구매하고 들을 수 있게 되었다. 하지만 많은 음악 중에서 음악가, 장르, 제목, 앨범 타이틀 등 전통적인 음악 정보를 이용하여 사용자들이 자신의 취향에 맞는 음악을 찾는 데는 여전히 어려움이 있다. 이러한 어려움을 해소하기 위해 내용기반 음악검색과 감성기반 음악검색 방법 등이 제안되고 개발되고 있다. 본 논문에서는 이러한 어려움을 해소하기 위한 감성기반 음악 검색방법에서 다차원 벡터형태의 MPEG-7 저수준 오디오 서술자들의 감성기반 검색에서의 중요도를 결정하기 위한 새로운 방법을 제안하였다. 제안된 방법에서는 상호간에 대립되는 감성을 대표되는 음악들의 유사성을 다차원 서술자 관점에서 측정하고 이 유사관계를 러프 근사화와 군집 내/군집 간의 유사성 비율을 이용하여 서술자의 중요성을 결정한다. 중요성을 바탕으로 결정된 가중치는 여러 개의 오디오 서술자들의 유사성을 총체화하는데 이용되며 이를 활용하여 감성기반 음악검색을 수행한다. 제안된 방법은 내용기반 음악 검색을 기반으로 한 감성기반 음악검색 구조에서 실험한 결과 평균 검색 개수측면에서 기존의 휴리스틱 방법보다 좋은 검색 결과를 나타내었다. Being digitalized, the music can be easily purchased and delivered to the users. However, there is still some difficulty to find the music which fits to someone's taste using traditional music information search based on musician, genre, tittle, album title and so on. In order to reduce the difficulty, the contents-based or the emotion-based music retrieval has been proposed and developed. In this paper, we propose new method to determine the importance of MPEG-7 low-level audio descriptors which are multi-dimensional vectors for the emotion-based music retrieval. We measured the mutual similarities of musics which represent a pair of emotions expressed by opposite meaning in terms of each multi-dimensional descriptor. Then rough approximation, and inter- and intra similarity ratio from the similarity relation are used for determining the importance of a descriptor, respectively. The set of weights based on the importance decides the aggregated similarity measure, by which emotion-based music retrieval can be achieved. The proposed method shows better result than previous method in terms of the average number of satisfactory musics in the experiment emotion-based retrieval based on content-based search.

Genitive vs. dative: the case of protivu in the history of Russian

This article addresses the change in the grammatical case used with the adverbial preposition protivu. The usage of protivu was more frequent and its meaning more polysemantic in Old East Slavic than it is in Russian today. The transition of protivu from an adverb to a preposition resulted in the shift in its meaning from more concrete to more abstract: from the spatial meaning ‘towards’ to the meaning of opposition ‘against’. The change in cases used with protivu from the original dative to the genitive also occurred in the process of grammaticalization. The explanation for this development is offered in terms of Talmy’s theory of conceptual structuring. From a schematic system representing motion and relating one entity to another in space as Figure and Ground, constructions with protivu shifted to a system of force dynamics relating two force-exerting entities as Agonist and Antagonist. The confluence of processes taking place in the overall declensional system of Old East Slavic, such as the loss of the dative of destination, as well as the rise of the genitive-accusative and of the genitive of possession created favourable conditions for the change. The dative is shown to fit the directional usage of protivu while the genitive suits its new oppositional sense.

A Critical Analysis of Chinese Courtroom Discourse

This thesis analyzes the formal features of Chinese courtroom discourse and their interaction with the ideologies of, and power relations between, the subjects in the courtroom. Based on Fairclough’s (1992, 1995?2001) three-dimensional approach to discourse and Liao’s (2003) schema of the court trial1, the author developed a three-dimensional framework of Chinese courtroom discourse and employed it to analyze the audio recording transcripts of eight court trials (four criminal, three civil, and one administrative), which amount to more than 200,000 words. The first dimension, ‘discourse as text’ describes features and underlying meanings of the following aspects: classification, transitivity, modality and interactional control. The key findings arising from the analyses were: 
 1) In the courtroom, due to different purposes and ideologies of the subjects, words and expressions with different and even opposite meanings are used to describe or refer to same things or incidents. 
 2) Material and verbal processes (see Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 179-252) appear by far most frequently, while the number of existential processes is the smallest.
 3) Generally speaking, markers of modality used by the judges help to clarify rights and duties and realize the functions of regulation, permission, authorization and prohibition, while those employed by other subjects have a negative effect on the reliability of their statements and the accuracy of meanings they want to express. 
 4) Courtroom interaction is generally controlled by the powerful (judges in all trials, judges and public prosecutors in criminal ones). Occasionally, the non-powerful (plaintiffs, defendants, appellants, appellees, witnesses, etc.) attempt to challenge the authority of the powerful. In such cases, the powerful will seek to reassert their control in various ways. 
 The second dimension, ‘discursive practice’ interprets courtroom discourse in relation to its production, distribution, and consumption (i.e., how it is interpreted and responded) through the analysis of force, coherence and intertextuality. Under the rubric of force, “speech acts” and “politeness” were analyzed. Among Searle’s (1965) five-part classification of speech acts, representative and directive speech acts are most frequently used. With regard to politeness, generally speaking, less politeness strategies are adopted by the subjects in the courtroom than in daily conversations (cf.Yang 2007). The more powerful a subject is, the more “impolite” s/he tends to be, that is, s/he tends to do more FTAs (Face-Threatening Acts) (see Brown & Levinson 1987: 60). As the most powerful subjects in the courtroom, judges do FTAs most frequently. The second aspect is coherence. The analysis of two cases shows that courtroom discourse is coherent semantically, topically, and contextually. Following Xin (2000, 2005), “intertextuality” was classified into two types: specific and generic. When analyzing the former the following findings emerged:
 1) Among the three ways of showing news source: specific and exact news source, implicit news source, and seemingly real news source (Xin 2000: 167-69, Xin 2005: 111-12), only the first two are used by the subjects in the court trials, while the third is not found. 
 2) Among the four major modes of speech reporting: Direct Reporting (DR), Indirect Reporting (IR), Free Indirect Reporting (FIR), and Narrative Report of Speech Act (NRSA) (Fairclough 2003: 49), only DR, IR, NRSA appear in the eight cases.
 It should be pointed out that the choice of ways of showing news source and modes of speech reporting is in accordance with the purposes and interests of the subjects in the courtroom. The analysis of generic intertextuality shows that courtroom discourse, especially the sub-genre of “evidence-producing”, contains not only a mixture of different genres but also of different modes, which may be the result of the judicial reform being carried out in China (Liao 2003: 2) and a manifestation of the trend of ‘conversationalization’ (Fairclough 1992: 204) in contemporary society. 
 The third dimension, “social practice” explains the ideologies of, and power relations between, the subjects in the courtroom as reflected by their discourses. The ideologies of the subjects have two major tendencies: convergence and conflict. Convergence mainly exists between judges and public prosecutors because both are the embodiment of certain institutions: judges embody the court (the judicial organ), while public prosecutors embody the procuratorate (the organ for legal supervision). Another tendency is the conflict of ideologies. The major conflicts are those between public prosecutors and defendants in criminal trials, and those between opposing parties (plaintiffs and defendants, appellants and appellees, etc.) in civil and administrative ones. Generally speaking, opposing parties in the courtroom tend to have different ideologies due to their differing purposes and interests. In the courtroom, power relations have the following three main characteristics: 
 1) Power relations of the subjects in the courtroom are hierarchical and asymmetrical. 
 2) Power relations are largely determined by the institutional nature of the court. 
 3) Power relations are reflected by, and in turn affect, the linguistic features used by subjects during discourse.

Totality and Infinity, Alterity, and Relation: From Levinas to Glissant

Totality and Infinity, the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité du tout-monde, Poétique IV, Glissant attempts one more time to clarify the sense in which the reader will have to understand his use of the word “totality,” thinking, and rightfully so, that this word might lead to some confusion: “To write is to say the world. The world as totality, which is so dangerously close to the totalitarian.” Of course, here, it will be necessary to try to ascertain whether or not Levinas’s totality and Glissant’s can peacefully coexist, or, rather, whether this word might, in Glissant, have opposite meanings. Where the second word is concerned, “infinity,” any reader of Glissant will know that he locates its source in those societies he calls atavistic, which are grounded in foundational texts that are the bearers of stories of filiation, of legitimacy, societies whose arrogance and whose errors the author never ceases to decry and whose decomposition, in the very times in which we live, he never ceases to announce (even as Glissant recognizes that there was a time when atavistic cultures undoubtedly must have experienced their own period of creolization, and that, conversely, composite cultures undoubtedly often tend to become atavistic). On this level, “totality” and “infinity,” for him, seem to belong to the same world. Thus, and still in Traité du tout-monde , he proposes that "Hebraism, Christianity, Islam are grounded in the same spirituality of the One and to the same belief in a revealed Truth… The thought of the One that has done so much to magnify, as well as to denature. How can one consent to this thought, which transfigures while neither offending nor de-routing the Diverse?" Moreover, it would be interesting, I think, to know how Levinas might react to these words of Glissant’s: “Totality is not that which has often been called the universal. It is the finite and realized quantity of the infinite detail of the real.” This word, “infinite,” is decidedly dangerous: what is an “infinite detail?” Does this word, “infinite,” not always lead to the unknown, to the non-totalizable, to what Levinas would call an “enigma,” to what Glissant would call an “opacity?”

Cause v. consequence‐based regulation: Basel III v. the Eurocodes

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to compare two opposite approaches chosen to regulate an industry.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is based on studying the two selected regulation systems, Basel III and the Eurocodes and identifies how the one system regulates financial institutions and the other one civil engineering design.FindingsThe paper shows that the financial regulation uses a cause‐based approach to regulation, in which the causes of a crisis are found and controlled. The Eurocodes in civil engineering make no specific attempt to understand the specific causes of a failure; however, they provide a framework, which transfers full responsibility onto the designer if the designer decides not to adhere to a set of codes of practice. It is the trade‐off between less regulation and increased responsibility.Originality/valueThe paper presents a new way of understanding the impact and use of regulation by comparing it to a system which has the same purpose but uses opposite means. It shows how financial regulation in reality has limitations which are its inherent weakness.

Unconscious transfer of meaning to brands

We examine semantic conditioning in a consumer context. We subliminally paired neutral ideographs with attributes. In experiment 1, the ideographs served as primes during a lexical decision task and slowed down response times to target words with the opposite semantic meaning. In experiment 2, the ideographs served as brand names of beverages, and attitudinal responses to them were less favorable when the associated attributes were incongruent with existing schemas. These results showed that semantic conditioning (1) can occur unconsciously, (2) can have significant and meaningful consequences for brand evaluation, and (3) influences subsequent attitudinal responses via conceptual disfluency processes.

質問間距離を用いた質問間の関係性の把握および回答矛盾度の算出に関する研究

Companies often carry out questionnaire(s) in order to design marketing strategies or to grasp the trends. Recently, Web questionnaire survey becomes popular with the spread of the Internet in order for companies to reduce cost and to get a lot of questionnaire data. However, in the Web questionnaire survey, some respondents do not answer the questions seriously, because it is not done face-to-face and is done just for giveaway basically. The authors have tried to quantify the conflict of response based on the contradiction by the pair(s) of questions with counter meaning. One of the most important matters in the quantification of the conflict of response is the selection of the pair(s) of opposing questions, which are actually regarded as opposite meanings by respondents. This paper defines the distance between questions which shows the similarity of questions for respondents and proposes a method to derive pair(s) of opposing questions based on the distance between questions. This paper applies the proposed method to an actual questionnaire data and shows more appropriate opposing questions for respondents can be extracted than the prepared pairs of opposing questions.

Political opposition and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa

This special issue takes a closer look at the role and meaning of political opposition for the development of democracy across sub-Saharan Africa. Why is it that room for political opposition in most cases is severely limited? Under what circumstances has the political opposition been able to establish itself in a legitimate role in African politics? To answer these questions this special issue focuses on the institutional settings, the nature and dynamics within and between the political parties, and the relationship between the citizens and the political parties. It is found that regional devolution and federalist structures are areas where the political opposition can find room to organize and gain local power, as a supplement to influence at the central level. Important factors behind support for the opposition are a realistic appreciation of the level of democracy, dissatisfaction with corruption and pro-democratic values. Generally, however, opposition parties are lacking in organization and in institutionalization, as well as in their ability to find support in civil society and at promoting the issues that voters find most important. Overall, strong executive powers, unchecked by democratic institutions, in combination with deferential values and fear of conflict, undermine legitimate opposition activity.

Autoritat, opinió i mobilització a l’Oriola del Trienni: una aproximació als significats del liberalisme

Los enfoques sociales muestran que los analisis teoricos de los discursos y practicas politicos son inadecuados. Se necesita, por tanto, comprender social y culturalmente las formas en que se adoptaban y se llevaban a la practica los conceptos y actitudes politicas. Este trabajo estudia los tensos enfrentamientos que tuvieron lugar en Orihuela, en el sur del Pais Valenciano, durante el Trienio constitucional de 1820 a 1823, cuando fue sustituido el obispo antiliberal. Esta situacion condujo a una division de la opinion publica, en la que surgieron dos significados contrapuestos de «el pueblo soberano» y «la ley y las normas». El consiguiente giro antiliberal debe entenderse en el contexto de las redes sociales que formaban los liberales en la ciudad.

Opposition in discourse: the construction of oppositional meaning

1. What are opposites? 2. Textual construction of opposition 3. Textual/meaningful effects of textual opposition 4. The role of opposition-construction in discourse meanings 5. The significance of opposition in language and society Bibliography Index.

Stones (papers, humans)

The making and self-making of political subjects is a process that presupposes an engagement with both intellectual and tactile materials. One of these intellectual materials is ideology, which stains tactile objects, such as stones and paper, with the heft of its own meanings. Competing ideologies strive to control the meanings of objects. Such has been the case for stones as observed in their use at the concentration camps of the Greek Civil War period, or the camps in Tito's Yugoslavia, or conversely, by the high school students during the December 2008 Events in Athens. Where sovereign power recruits objects and materials as parts of its apparatus, resistance movements appropriate these same objects as means of opposition.

The Meaning Extension of Xiang and Its Polysemy Network

Based on the idea that cognitive processes play an important role in linguistic analysis, this paper focuses on two main issues. The first issue is concerned with the nature of the intertwined relations of the various meanings of the Chinese polysemous word xiang and how these different meanings are extended from the original meaning found in ancient Chinese texts. The relations between these meanings can be accounted for in terms of five cognitive processes: generalization, extendability across motive states, profile, metaphor, and change in the position of the perspective point, all of which constitute links within the semantic network of xiang. The second issue is concerned with why xiang has two opposite meanings, i.e., goal marker and source marker. It is proposed that the two opposite meanings result from a change in the position of the perspective point in a given schema. That is, by changing the perspective point from that of the starting point of the movement of the Figure to the endpoint of the movement, the Figure, which moves from the starting point to the endpoint, is changed from being seen as leaving the observer to being seen as getting closer to the observer.

What Comes to Mind When You Hear the Words ‘Nuclear Waste Repository’? A Study of 10,000 Images

Attempts by the federal government and the nuclear industry to develop sites for disposal of high-level and low-level radioactive wastes have been stymied by public and political opposition. The record of strenuous protest against nuclear waste repositories, as well as the findings of numerous public opinion surveys, make it clear that public opposition is widespread and deeply felt. It is also clear that there is an immense gap between the perceptions of the pubic and the views of technical experts and nuclear-industry officials. Given the seriousness of nuclear waste as a public issue, it is surprising that there have been only a few attempts to understand the deeper meaning of nuclear fears and opposition to nuclear waste disposal sites, and to provide some insight into the nature and pervasiveness of people's concerns. One step toward a deeper understanding would be to define the origins of these concerns, the emotions and images that underlie them, and their tractability or stability over time. In the present study, the authors recorded 10,000 word-association images from more than 3,300 respondents to four surveys during the period between April, 1988 and January 1, 1990. Each of the 10,000 images was assigned to one of thirteenmore » general or superordinate categories, which expressed the dominant theme of the response. All but one superordinate categories contained subordinate categories. All in all there were 92 distinct categories. The two dominant superordinate categories, (1) negative consequences and (2) negative concepts accounted for more than 56% of the total number of images. Many of the smaller categories and subcategories were also quite negative in tone. The five leading subordinate categories, dangerous toxic, death sickness, environmental damage, bad, and scary, accounted for more than 42% of the total number of images. 27 refs., 6 tabs.« less

Der finstere Tag Jahwes. Zum kultischen Hintergrund von Am 5,18-20

The core of Am 5,18–20 goes back to an oral prophecy of doom announced during the final period of the kingdom of Israel. Its motifs are related to the New Year's festival during which Yahweh's triumph over chaotic powers was celebrated. Parallels both inside and outside of the Old Testament indicate that the phrase ›day of Yahweh‹ denoted a festival day; the motif of darkness points to the tradition of theophany with its Sitz im Leben in the cult. The complete darkness however is sign of a cosmic catastrophe; it shows that the divine battle has been given the opposite meaning: Yahweh himself is destroying the order of the world.

Poem in a Rearview Mirror

116 MICHAEL KELLEHER POEM IN A REARVIEW MIRROR I’m dreaming of urban renewal right now: Entropy, abandoned homes, insurance Scams, the Bronx is burning. When I recall The past I’m actually in the past. My mind Is blank. And then it was December. We Were visiting my mother at Christmas. I had nothing to read. Time, etc. I had plenty to write about in my Black marbled notebook. It was a nice day. I wanted to go back to see if there was Something there for me still. I didn’t find What I was looking for. I bought a book To learn the alphabet. For instance: “A” Is for “Agamemnon.” I find myself Wishing for retribution. On a bench In Central Park, the old guard seems to be Getting phased out, and I am now too sleepy 117 To type out the fragments. The story opens In a frigid field, the limits of which Signal a beginning or an end. A young Lover talking to himself about love. They have a word for that. Anyhow, My markings seem to indicate that I Have read this passage before. Can you tell I was educated by Jesuits? Wild profusions of scrawl take over the page. Beginning at the outer edge, at just The point at which it rubs against the world, The yellowing works its way inward, forming An aura around the words, which will themselves Succumb to this ineluctable discoloration . One day the edges will crack And the pages will biodegrade. The book Will be no more. O Rose, thou art Sick. Once I tried to write a poem by writing The opposite meaning of every line From another poem. It didn’t really work. At the time I had almost no money 118 And borrowed all of my books. Our first night We ate dinner at a little bistro. Seven feet of snow fell on the city. It very nearly drowned her quiet voice. I sometimes wonder if I’ve actually done The things I think I’ve done, known the people I think I’ve known, lived in the places I think I’ve lived, or if I’ve made it up In order to please myself (and others). We were living in our last house, the one We sold that year, if memory serves, sitting Outside on the porch, watching the children Attack each other with chestnuts, so it Must have been in early fall. We talked About the various cities in which We’d lived: New York, Vienna, Buffalo, Silverthorne, Washington, Los Angeles, Quito, and the minor vicissitudes Of living in the desert among an Unfamiliar set of desert creatures. The outcome, of course, was foretold. 119 The light from the lamp and the light from the flash Canceled one another out. I let The camera wander down to her hands, which Gestured in ways that seemed to contradict The things she said. There is, in essence, No past. What we call “past” is still extant, Lost among the amassing details of time. I was catching a nap in the lounge when I was awakened by a rumbling. In the center of the room, on top of The desk, there sat a box of candy squares. I chose a chocolate wrapped in golden foil, And I ate it, and it was delicious. I savored each bite, but then I thought I should not have eaten that one. It was The only one, and now it’s gone. Indeed, The ephemerality of thought serves Often as a kind of double for the Ephemerality of life. Now I’m Feeling sort of sad, as if I could repent Of something I have or have yet to do. ...

Class and gender as a laughing matter? The case of Roseanne

AbstractThe aim of this study is to investigate the role of humor in challenging hegemonic discourses on social class and gender, as they are reproduced in the popular sitcom format. Mindful of sitcoms' entrenched role in the audience's commodification process, the study explores whether a form of critical humor on social class and gender can emerge in the TV palimpsest. For this purpose, the study will look specifically at the sitcom Roseanne and at the public persona of Roseanne Barr. The study adopts a “multiperspectival approach” that considers all three elements of production, text and reception. First, Roseanne will be historically contextualized to understand the contradictions with which working-class representations are fraught. Secondly, a textual analysis will be performed to assess the extent to which class and gender are used as sources of humor and for which functions; finally, metatexts and viewers' responses will be analyzed considering the tensions between hegemonic and oppositional meanings attached to the sitcom. The case study of Roseanne will show that, in spite of obvious containment strategies—often through the secondary plotline and the metatexts, the sitcom provided its audience with critical humor to challenge hegemonic representations of class and gender.

On the Use of Anti-Word Models for Audio Music Annotation and Retrieval

Query-by-semantic-description (QBSD) is a natural way for searching/annotating music in a large database. To improve QBSD, we propose the use of anti-words for each annotation word based on the concept of supervised multiclass labeling (SML). More specifically, words that are highly associated with the opposite semantic meaning of a word constitute its anti-word set. By modeling both a word and its anti-word set, our annotation system can achieve 31.1% of equal mean per-word precision and recall, while the original SML model achieves 27.8%. Moreover, by constructing the models of the anti-word explicitly, the performance is also significantly improved for the retrieval system, especially when the query keyword is the antonym of an existing annotation word.