Turntable Research Articles

Building as a Verb

This paper describes the approach of architecture/urbanism practice and research workshop “orizzontale”, based in Rome, Italy. The approach of the group is heuristic: it is to get involved, to put themselves on the line, to “play the game”. As a machine that absorbs and transforms every kind of things, orizzontale has a clear attitude for mutation over production. The act of building things is a primary tool the group uses to build communities, link them together and create confidence in the idea of a better society. Experimental does not mean “avant-garde” but rather “empirical, exploratory, in-progress”. The scientific attitude toward fact-finding and result-testing is an integral part of orizzontale approach, together with the artistic aspects of the work. Among the strategies adopted by the collective a special attention should be given to the attempts to translate in a spatial language the ideas, very literally. The results of this process can be called “spatial metaphors”, “discursive buildings” or “talking machines”. What orizzontale leaves behind is not necessarily a construction, but the process which is able to build up knowledge, consciousness, and trust.

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Playing a Quantum “Oldie” on a Turntable

Playing a Quantum “Oldie” on a Turntable

Fabrication of curved overhanging thin-walled structure with robotic wire and arc additive manufacturing (RWAAM)

PurposeRobotic wire and arc additive manufacturing (RWAAM) is becoming more and more popular for its capability of fabricating metallic parts with complicated structure. To unlock the potential of 6-DOF industrial robots and improve the power of additive manufacturing, this paper aims to present a method to fabricate curved overhanging thin-walled parts free from turn table and support structures.Design/methodology/approachFive groups of straight inclined thin-walled parts with different angles were fabricated with the torch aligned with the inclination angle using RWAAM, and the angle precision was verified by recording the growth of each layer in both horizontal and vertical directions; furthermore, the experimental phenomena was explained with the force model of the molten pool and the forming characteristics was investigated. Based on the results above, an algorithm for fabricating curved overhanging thin-walled part was presented and validated.FindingsThe force model and forming characteristics during the RWAAM process were investigated. Based on the result, the influence of the torch orientation on the weld pool flow was used to control the pool flow, then a practical algorithm for fabricating curved overhanging thin-walled part was proposed and validated.Originality/valueRegarding the fabrication of curved overhanging thin-walled parts, given the influences of the torch angles on the deposited morphology, porosity formation rate and weld pool flow, the flexibility of 6-DOF industrial robot was fully used to realize instant adjustment of the torch angle. In this paper, the deposition point and torch orientation of each layer of a robotic fabrication path was determined by the contour equation of the curve surface. By adjusting the torch angle, the pool flow was controlled and better forming quality was acquired.

EDITORIAL

It was as a boy of twelve or thirteen that I played the harpsichord for the first time. My early experiences of ensemble playing with the instrument took place with my contemporaries, but primarily with my Dutch teacher at secondary school and his wife, Mr and Mrs Meijer. Both were amateur recorder players, and as a young amateur harpsichordist I would accompany them. At first I would diligently play the realized basso-continuo parts, such as the ones often found in twentieth-century editions. Sometimes it was clear that one could make changes to what was in the realizations, informed by one's own insights, but my insights were not formed at that stage and I did not know where to begin. Very soon I found these realized parts boring. One day, while drinking a glass of wine (one of my first), Mr Meijer asked me, ‘Have you noticed that under the realized part, there are often figures noted down? Do you dare to play from them?’. After many wrong chords, but in the company of kind people who had also made mistakes themselves, I began to understand the system of figures a little. We played together every Saturday, and very soon I found it more pleasant to play without the chordal realizations. Then one fine Saturday afternoon, I sat down at the harpsichord to find that Mr or Mrs Meijer had taped over the right hand of the realized continuo part with an empty staff! There was no more escaping it now: I was dragged back to the bass line and the figures. After many further Saturday afternoon sessions, the results became more acceptable.

Aesthetics of 1950s and 1960s interiors presented in Polish comedy films from that period

This article is an attempt at outlining key aesthetic standards of interior design of the 1950s and 1960s on the basis of examples exhibited in the Polish and foreign romantic comedies of that time. Some distinguishing features of 1960s Polish aesthetics were the characteristic abstract language, organic form, asymmetry, diagonal lines, arrangements based on “A” and “X” letter outlines and lively colours. Furniture design used new materials mostly plywood and plastics such as polyvinyl chloride and epoxy resins. The 1960s, called “small stabilization” by design historians, were slightly different. Shops offered a variety of new products designed by Polish creators – such as furniture, home appliances, tools and machines. New Polish industrial design of 1960s is represented by the RAMONA and EWA radios and the BAMBINO record player, whereas sectional furniture – especially SYSTEM MK designed by Bogusława and Czesław Kowalski, better known as “the Kowalskis’ furniture” – became the icon of the decade. Polish and foreign romantic comedies from 1950s and 1960s are an excellent iconographic source of information on how interior design changed in the second half of the 20th century, and specifically on how living space was organized and adapted for private and public purposes. In Poland, attempts were made to use all the “design innovations” coming from the west, however, the immutably closed Polish borders prevented them from spreading freely. We had to use local designers. In the 2nd half of the twentieth century, a period which Prof Irena Huml called “the invasion of modernity” started. The doctrine of socialist realism was rejected and the focus was on modernity. Innovation became the most desirable feature of a work of art, and modernity the most important concept.

Grass-covered Chest

Grass-covered Chest Fleda Brown (bio) All that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. -Hermann Minkowski, Einstein's teacher The small chest used to be covered with a woven grass fabric, but by the time we got it, the cover was tattered beyond repair. We tore it off and even after the sanding, the grassy marks are still there, making a subtle design, a stubble design. There are small, squat legs and a hinge. Inside is where we keep some of the puzzles. The chest was Grandmother Brown's. I can almost see it in the old days, but I'm not sure where to place it in her house. I know where the piano was, in the dining room with the glittering beveled glass windows. I think the chest was beside that, but it's too small for what I have in mind, the piece of furniture with my brother's record player on it. He loved that record player. He would lean over it, drooling, and try to sing along. He had some words by then. I remember my mother carrying him as an infant up the stairs and in the door of our house on Garth Avenue. Oh, I don't remember [End Page 175] this. I have to have some place to start, in my head: the little chest that morphs into what must have been a larger one, and then before that, in some sort of sequence, a baby. Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress, "and a capricious one at that." ("Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.") I remember a small being, in blankets. Maybe Mark, maybe earlier, maybe my sister. Memory often doesn't know what to do with its own images. This was before any sense of trouble. I remember hearing "diarrhea," and what Dr. Dexheimer, the family physician, was doing, unsuccessfully, to stop it. I remember chatter and tension the way a child does, not comprehending much, but feeling. I was seven. Then the hush, the dissatisfaction with the doctor, the talk of what to do, or was that later? Of Mark's odd, convulsive movements. Or was that later? I remember staying with my other grandparents, Mother's parents, who lived next door, while Mother took him to St. Louis to the children's hospital. My father heading out on his brother's motor scooter for St. Louis, 125 miles on that tiny thing. My grandparents' controlled anger, their urging him to drive, to take their car, use their gas. This is how he was. Terrified of spending. I remember these things as large, upper forces, moving a bit like seagrass, pulling me this way and that. Memory is not a thing, of course. It's more like a superpower. It's Mnemosyne, the ancient Greek Titan, goddess of memory and remembrance and the inventor of language and words. How desperately she was needed before there was writing! How deftly the writing pulls at the threads, the weblike pattern of cells scattered throughout the brain that combine and reassemble impressions. The convergence of sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and thinking create what seemed to be real, what seems to be real. I think of "convergence," and just now Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain" comes to me, about the sinking of the Titanic when it hit an iceberg: [End Page 176] … the Spinner of the Years Said, "Now!" And each one hears,And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. My brain catches the word "convergence" and sees all that: Hardy's poem on the page, each stanza shaped like a small ocean liner, the conjured image from long ago when I first read it, combined with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet standing at the prow, falling in love, you know they are, you know that. Like the ship, this image is the "sign that they were bent / By paths coincident / On being anon twin halves of one august event." You know the poem. I know the...

Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann

Reviewed by: Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann Alex Sayf Cummings (bio) Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright. By Monika Dommann. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 262. Hardcover $41.95. "We historians always come to things late," Monika Dommann writes in an epigraph for the ages. It is the curious weakness of history as a discipline to pick up on new theories and methodologies only after they are no longer new. That can also be a strength when historians resist making hasty, monocausal conclusions, though as Dommann notes, even the best scholars can get carried away when interpreting the meaning and impact of new technologies, notably the Internet. A professor at the University of Zurich, Dommann has provided a sweeping account of shifting attitudes toward property rights and associated interest groups in Western Europe and the United States, primarily between 1850 and 1980. Her book offers a synthesis of the robust—and contentious—literature on copyright that has flourished since the 1990s. Authors and Apparatus is "a legal history of media as well as a media history of legal norms" (p. 7). Legal scholars and historians, Dommann points out, often differ in how they approach the law; the former often seek to find the continuity of law's evolution over time, whereas the latter are more open to interpreting legal change "as a caesura or epistemic break" (p. 17). Dommann deftly navigates the different disciplinary approaches of legal and social history, literary studies, and history of technology. Unlike some scholars in this field, she does not overemphasize the ideal of the romantic author in shaping copyright historically, instead giving due recognition to the law's frequent grounding in pragmatic, commercial concerns. The book's brisk chapters center largely on particular technologies or media, such as facsimile and microfilm (chapter two), the early "talking machines" (chapters three and four), and photocopying (chapter nine). Its discussion of the evolution of microfilm provides a particularly compelling and succinct addition to the history of information technology. At the same time, the book's grounding in the media studies literature is thin at times; for instance, its discussion of the changing cultural, political, and technological modalities of sound recording misses relevant work by historians such as Lisa Gitelman and David Suisman or the musicologist Joanna Demers. Further, the discussion of the "information explosion" in chapter nine might have been stronger if Dommann paused to consider what the concept of information meant in the rapidly changing scientific and political context of the early postwar era (p. 149). After all, the 1940s and 1950s saw advances in computing and new academic disciplines of information theory and cognitive science that reshaped how scientists, and eventually the broader public, understood human expression and communication. Americans and Europeans increasingly thought of all kinds of art, knowledge, and technology [End Page 1123] as merely various kinds of information, in ways that likely influenced how they understood conflicts over property rights in new domains (such as software or folklore) in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, Authors and Apparatus makes an intriguing argument about the sometimes-tense relationship between academic culture and copyright. Scholars of many stripes grew accustomed to receiving free copies of research in the 1950s and 1960s, as freewheeling use of the Xerox machine fueled the mechanisms of academic collaboration, exchange, and (crucially) reputation-building. In the process, scholars became increasingly alienated from commercial justifications for enforcing any scarcity of information—arguably setting the stage for the academic critique of copyright that burst onto the scene in the 1990s. The greatest strength of Authors and Apparatus is the capacious territory it covers, stretching across the Atlantic and encompassing everything from microfilm to magnetic tape to Google. The book offers an elegant entrée into the law of copyright and the history of media, particularly because of its transnational approach, as well as the historical distance made possible by Dommann's choice to close with the 1980s. Sometimes coming to things late can be a good thing. Alex Sayf Cummings Alex Sayf Cummings is associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta and an editor of the blog...

Print to Sound, Sound to Image --'Iron Man'- Lee Sang(李箱), and ‘the Phonograph Effects’

Print to Sound, Sound to Image --'Iron Man'- Lee Sang(李箱), and ‘the Phonograph Effects’

Wax Power

Wax Power Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) The advent of vinyl records was paved by a fifty-year journey that began with a stylus reading a groove on a wax cylinder. Thomas Edison's phonograph, which converts the wax cylinder's grooves into sound via a diaphragm, was developed in 1877. The first sound recording played back on the phonograph was Edison mouthing the words, "Mary had a little lamb." The first commercially available vinyl long-playing records were produced by RCA in 1931. But prior to 1958, there were no commercially available sound recordings in stereo. That would all change though when the record company, Audio Fidelity, previewed a "stereo" long-playing recording at the Times Auditorium in New York City on December 13, 1957. On one side of the LP was a stereo recording of the Dukes of Dixieland jazz band, and on the other, were railroad sound effects from steam and diesel locomotives. The initial print run was 500 records, and Audio Fidelity offered free copies through an advertisement in Billboard magazine to anyone in the music industry that asked for one. Then, on December 13, 1957, they introduced the first-ever commercial recordings in stereophonic two-channel sound—and by the end of 1958, stereo LPs would be commercially available by every major record label. In one sense, the story of sound recording begins with Edison's words, and moves through nearly one-hundred and fifty years of sound recording development from wax cylinders and vinyl records to compact discs and MP3s. The standard tale here is one of increasing levels of sound fidelity with events like the staging of stereophonic sound with railroad sound effects marking significant progress in sound fidelity. It is the story of a journey from the low fidelity of the gramophone to the high fidelity of the compact disc. However, in another, more philosophical sense, the invention and development of the phonograph marks a very late stage in the development of sound recording—a journey that dates back to a power first attributed only to the gods. What brings together both the story of the early stages of sound recording and the story of its later stages is the general idea that power comes through the ability to control sound in society. My term for this form of power is "wax power." _______ The ancient gods were said to have three essential powers: making war, causing famine, and recording sound. This might seem like an odd triumvirate of powers, particularly the latter power, but imagine a world where there is no means to store information other than memory. The sounds that we make to each other in discourse, and those that we hear in the world around us, can only be repeated and passed along to others through acts of memory. It is somewhat fitting then that when the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, discussed memory in his philosophical dialogue Theaetetus, he asked us to imagine it in one sense as a "block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder in some, softer in others, and sometimes just the right consistency." "Let us call it," says Plato, the gift of the Muses' mother, Memory, and say that whenever we wish to remember something we see or hear or conceive in our own minds, we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know. Though the imprinting of perceptions or ideas on wax here has more in common with block printing than a stylus making sound impressions on soft wax, the notion that this act might be regarded as "the gift" of a god to humankind assumes that the actual power of total memory is one held by the gods—and not humankind. Plato also says that Homer too struggles to explain human memory, and "hints at the mind...

Listening Beyond the Visible

Listening Beyond the Visible Pamela Jordan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Muyu-Uray Amphitheaters, nested and terraced landform carvings by the Incas in the Peruvian mountains (from Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects, 7; image courtesy of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania Library) [End Page 118] Presented with the preceding image, and the observation that the acoustics within the large structures are "superb," what would you conclude about the original use of the depicted site? Bernard Rudofsky launched his 1964 Architecture without Architects with the image above (taken from a plane by archaeologists in 1931) and a brief description of the Incan archaeological site. He recounted five separate cavities in the mountains of Peru, sculpted through evident terracing where the acoustics were "superb." Combined with the architectural tectonic forms that resemble a Greek amphitheater, he concluded that the structures were ancient amphitheaters for crowds of sixty thousand or more.1 Subsequent research at the site has challenged this conclusion, finding possible material evidence of either sophisticated agricultural or ceremonial purposes for the terraces, but so far no acoustic study has been conducted at the site to link acoustics to the landforms as the Incas designed them.2 Significantly for the discussion that follows, the simple presence of extraordinary or unexpected acoustic properties does not necessarily demonstrate one kind of architectural intent or operation in the past. "Good" acoustics with clear sight lines does not necessitate a theater. Sound can be a strong signaler and can equally be a powerful research tool, but sonic analysis in historic space is not a yes or no endeavor. Rudofsky's conclusion does not cite consultations with indigenous knowledge keepers or local practices; instead, he seems to have reverted to familiar visual cues from Western references (i.e., the Greek amphitheater) in order to place the acoustic pattern he perceived at Muyu-Uray (known today as Moray). The presence of noteworthy sonic effect should be researched with a nuanced understanding of the technics of acoustics combined with physical and cultural evidence. Perhaps the need for such a specialized knowledge base precludes many in the conservation fields from directly tackling sound in historic spaces. It is usually a matter left to specialists: acoustic or sound engineers, acousticians, city planners with noise maps, or archivists and media studies scholars examining past sound recordings. Moreover, there can be a tendency to think of the past as silent, both metaphorically and literally. Sonic effect appears temporary, captured only in recordings since Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's invention of the "phonautograph" in 1860 and Thomas Edison's phonograph in 1877. But the work presented in this issue—of Sabine von Fischer; Florence Feiereisen and Erin Sassin; Miriam Kolar et al.; Zorana Đorđević, Dragan Novković, and Filip Pantelić; Mark A. Pottinger; and Jun Zheng—joins that of a diverse group of scholars and practitioners at work today who contend that a perceived silence of the past is misunderstood—historic [End Page 119] places still sound, or can still be sounded, be they intentionally resonant interiors or spaces associated with sonic attributes over time. A few adjacent fields that have much to offer, including a sample of studies pertaining to built heritage, are sensory studies and affect theory,3 sound and media studies,4 sensory archaeology,5 what can be termed critical listening in architectural contexts,6 tourism studies,7 audible history,8 technical acoustics and psychoacoustics,9 and sensory history.10 Heritage researchers do well to consider these fields as coconspirators in situating sonic experience within specific architectural heritage contexts. This issue of Change Over Time seeks to continue the bridge building between such fields and, in presenting the varied connections between heritage and sound, empower conservation practitioners to address such issues in their own projects directly. Sounding Architecture Through Time Turning toward built heritage conservation, a familiar research tactic in the field is to outline the history of the site in question. Sonic architecture is equally subject to such scrutiny, with acoustic roots and manifestations possibly extending quite far into the past. Rudofsky himself was likely aware that formalized considerations of sound can be traced through Western built tradition to...

First Polarimetric Investigation of Malaria Mosquitoes as Lidar Targets

In this paper, we use a novel spectral polarimetric optical tomographic imaging goniometer to investigate the scattering properties of Anopheles malaria mosquitoes to aid in their detection and identification in entomological lidar applications. Mosquitoes were mounted on a turn table, on which they were illuminated from different angles with linearly polarized near-infrared light and rotated. Thus, aspect-dependent optical cross sections were retrieved in backscatter and extinction mode. The backscattering and extinction properties of male and female mosquitoes were further condensed into a pair of parameters. We investigate the wings and bodies of mosquitoes together and independently, and conclude that the wings of mosquitoes strongly scatter copolarized light and that the degree of linear polarization of light scattered by insect bodies is independent of the aspect. In lidar measurements, light scattered by insect wings can be separated from light scattered by insect bodies due to the oscillatory wing beats. Therefore, obtaining the scattering properties of bodies and wings independently is of particular interest. Finally, we conclude that 808 nm light is well suited for detecting specular reflexes produced by Anopheles wings, which has large implications for the design of entomological lidar instruments used to study malaria mosquitoes.

Homage or Biting Lines: Critically Discussing Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright in the 21st Century through Hip-Hop

The inherent traits of digital media have challenged traditional understandings of artistic authorship and creativity. This division in understanding can clearly be observed in the popular culture context of hip-hop music. Hip-hop initially began with analog technologies such as vinyl record players, then transitioned to predominately digital mediums. This changeover in artistic mediums has been well documented by opposing viewpoints from hip-hop artists, consumers, record companies, and lawyers. By focusing on hip-hop for critical discussion on artistic authorship and creativity, art students can engage in discussion reflecting on their own artistic and online practices, and how these behaviors are legally supported or suppressed by copyright law.

Asking After You

Asking After You Damian Caudill (bio) Predictable as blocking the driveway with your truckso I can't leave, or will have to trundle through the yard. Damn daffodils. Damn lilac. What kept us running:the yellow-bellied yield in me or those gentle nights when you could still be tugged into sleep—simple syrupof cum in moonlight, resignation to the crater of our sink. Daniel, this could never work, not in this first lifetimestuck between the medicine cabinet and back to bed until afternoon rots, tequila-blonde at our window.How blown to bits we always were. Remember timber wolves in the road on the drive to Tacoma? Remember duis?Was that '08 or '09? Your birthday or mine? I only remember the wall-mounted telephone in our bathroom, the little balconywhere I'd sit and watch your friends, the cops, console you. Daniel, it's been morning all day here and the birdsstill call me by my old name. It's no wonder they miss you, summer nights we woke them with our first song: Chuck Berryon the record player in the kitchen, our good days the best argument against sleep. Us, they're saying to me now—we we we. [End Page 106] Damian Caudill Damian Caudill is pursuing his PhD at Florida State University. His work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and Best New Poets 2015. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Sound in silence: design and listening cultures in the Woodberry Poetry Room

This article examines the ways in which architecture and design forged a place for sound reproduction technologies inside the silent sanctuary of the modern library. During the first half of the twentieth century, recorded theatrical plays, interviews and readings entered the collections of public and private libraries, forcing universities to reckon with acoustic modalities of knowledge production and circulation. Focussing on the Woodberry Poetry Room, a small room designed by Aino and Alvar Aalto inside Harvard University’s Lamont Library, the article discusses how the two architects and designers addressed the acoustic challenge that record players presented to spaces of learning.Although an oddity in Aino and Alvar Aalto’s oeuvre, the Poetry Room holds a central position in the history of acoustic modernisms in architecture. Inside the room the two architects articulated their modernist critique of functionalism and technology, reclaiming listening spaces as the subject matter of design. In transforming each record player into a listening station in the middle of the room, their design turned the gramophone into a pillar of modern poetry. This interior marked a new sonic sensibility in architectural practices and discourses, indicative of the place that sound reproduction technologies, such as gramophones and record players, held in modern architecture as iconic objects of modernity and mass culture. The interior was also the meeting point for a new generation of poets, who gathered around those record players, plugged in, and listened together, yet alone, to the voices of modern poetries. In the 1960s, these same poets took over the New York scene, forcefully transforming the live performance of poetry. The article argues that architecture ultimately shaped the social space of reading and listening to poetry, and thus played an important role in producing new encounters between objects and human subjects, readers and sound reproduction technologies.

Music and Brain Development.

When I was young, I remember my parents used to play the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" in the morning on the old record player. My mother helped hire the first band director at my middle school, and my father played opera in the car on my way to elementary school. I dabbled with different instruments, and played trumpet (cornet actually), flute, piccolo, oboe, English horn, and Ukulele. I also sang in several choirs and still sing today. What did all this musical influence do to my developing brain? This article reviews some of the existing evidence about music and brain development, to make a case for exposing children to music at an early age and supporting school music programs. [Pediatr Ann. 2018;47(8):e306-e308.].

Blurred Lines: The Use of Diegetic and Nondiegetic Sound in Atonement (2007)

Abstract This paper will focus on Atonement and how the sound world is so inexplicably linked to our interpretation of events. In particular, I will investigate how the typewriter acts as a pivot between diegetic sound and nondiegetic music. What becomes clear in Atonement is that the typewriter sound is indicative of an imagination running wild. It is initially connected to Briony in the opening scene, but it is also used when Robbie types his explicit letter to Cecilia, Briony’s older sister. To aid his writing, Robbie puts Puccini’s “O Soave Fanciulla” on the record player, but as he pours his desire onto the page, the sound of the typewriter and the record blur the lines between diegetic and nondiegetic sound, thereby calling into question what Robbie can and cannot hear. This is not the only occurrence of this technique, and just as the typewriter acts to blur the lines between diegetic sound and nondiegetic music, so too does the film blur the lines between reality and fiction.

Rigid tip improves atomic force microscopy

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) can get chemists pretty close to actually seeing the atoms and bonds of molecules. The technique produces images a bit like a record player generates sound. An atomic-scale needle at the end of a cantilevered arm scans across a sample, moving up and down according to the shape and electronic properties of the surface. Measuring and recording that deflection produces a three-dimensional representation of the molecules within the sample. Minimizing interactions between the needle and the sample can lead to sharper images. In 2009, IBM researchers proposed using a carbon monoxide tip to significantly improve AFM resolution. The drawback is that atoms on a sample’s surface can tug on the CO dangling from the end of a metal needle, making bonds look longer than they actually are or creating artifacts that look like bonds between atoms. Now, researchers have swapped this flexible CO tip for a

Prediction of browse nutritive attributes in a Pinus radiata D. Don silvopastoral system based on visible-near infrared spectroscopy

Browse is an important source of food for rustic livestock, particularly when herbaceous forage is scarce. The Atlantic Basque Country (Northern Spain) forest landscape is dominated by Pinus radiata D. Don plantations where Rubus sp. and Ulex gallii are understorey dominant species. Knowledge of the nutritive value of these species is needed in the context of silvopastoralism, primarily because do not always meet livestock requirements. The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of Visible-Near Infrared Spectroscopy to determine the quality attributes of Rubus sp. and U. gallii, using a Sample Turn Table probe to acquire spectra on non-dried samples. VIS–NIRS calibrations were developed for dry matter (DM), crude protein (CP), crude fibre (CF), neutral detergent fibre (NDF), acid detergent fibre (ADF) and ashes. Spectra were pre-treated and Partial Least Squares Regression models were constructed. Calibration models were accurate for most of the considered variables, both for Rubus sp. (DM: Rc2 = 0.95, RPD = 2.53; CP: Rc2 = 0.90, RPD = 2.39; CF: Rc2 = 0.86, RPD = 2.30; NDF: Rc2 = 0.93, RPD = 2.80; ADF: Rc2 = 0.95, RPD = 3.12; Ashes: Rc2 = 0.91, RPD = 2.15) and for U. gallii (DM: Rc2 = 0.98, RPD = 3.67; CP: Rc2 = 0.94, RPD = 1.84; CF: Rc2 = 0.98, RPD = 4.74; NDF: Rc2 = 0.94, RPD = 3.91; ADF: Rc2 = 0.98, RPD = 3.62; Ashes: Rc2 = 0.82, RPD = 1.65). In general, ADF and DM were the most accurately predictable variables and ash content, the least predictable one. The results showed VIS–NIRS potential for the rapid and accurate prediction of quality attributes in non-dried samples and proved as a useful tool for making decisions in silvopastoral systems.

Ghosts in the Phonograph: Tracking Black Canadian Postbody Poetics

Sound technologies enact cultural interventions and enable radical experiments of identity through the practice of stripping away, spinning, and splicing sounds — especially the sound of the human voice. This paper reads Black Canadian spoken word and turntable poetry for the symbolic use of sound technologies and other sonic schemas, focusing on Wayde Compton’s “The Reinventing Wheel” (2004) and Tanya Evanson’s “The African All Of It” (2013). In both of these works there is an emphasis upon the role of the body (and postbody) in the production of sound. I present both the spectral figure and sound recording technologies as postbody projections, and read the work of Compton and Evanson for transmissions that cross spatial, temporal, and body boundaries.The paper engages with posthumanist thought and the work of musicologist R. Murray Schafer to advance that sound technologies forge portals through time and space, as the dub plate reincarnates Compton’s disembodied, pre-recorded voice. Compton’s ghosts are quasi-material, zombies dancing in cargo holds — a reference to the Middle Passage — enacting a kinetic impulse capable of “moving the text” (103); Evanson’s acoustic experimentations with antiphony stress the kinetic and the sensory, and debinarize the relationship between speaker and audience. Finally, I argue that the ghostly emanation of postbody sounds from the turntable challenges culturally constructed binaries and forges a blended space for the celebration of plural, hybrid, and mobile identity formations, demolishing paradigms that work to enclose and encode Black Canada.