Pre-existing Message Research Articles

Capturing the Zeitgeist: Preserving American Music and Culture in the Mashups of DJ Earworm

AbstractThe discussion of narrative in mashups typically involves how a preexisting message is reinterpreted by the incorporation of new musical material. However, many scholars note how DJ Earworm's technique of creating new lyrics through the combination of samples from up to fifty different tracks conveys an original message that is distinct from its borrowed sources. In his various interviews, DJ Earworm elaborates that his mashups are original compositions that act as musical time capsules that capture the zeitgeist of the age. Nevertheless, DJ Earworm only provides brief commentary on the meaning of his mashups and there is no close examination of these narratives in the literature. This raises the question: To what degree do DJ Earworm's mashups reflect cultural issues in American society? By merging Zbikowski's concept of conceptual integration with Almén's theory of musical narrative, this paper will demonstrate how DJ Earworm's mashups show a consistent pattern of having complex narratives with cultural messages that resonate with contemporary issues in American society, including fossil fuel dependence, income inequality, and political and racial division.

Figuring out justice in dark times: on law, history, and the visual

ABSTRACT What happens when we approach certain objects heuristically as images? How is one to orient oneself through such images? Might those images challenge our existing knowledge of the history of modernisation and written rationalisation of law after the Middle Ages? In this essay, I begin with certain early modern European artworks - paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings - as well as some other less obvious objects - a striking black background in the portrait of a little-known physician, a compelling account of a nocturnal attempt to figure out justice at critical times, the gripping intensity permeating Dürer's allegories of justice, and so on - and investigate the force those objects may have as images. Overall, the intention is to go beyond treating such objects as impassive historical evidence of the particular effort to conceive law intellectually or, alternatively, as codes for certain preexisting messages to be subsequently decoded. On approaching them differently, we may discover that such objects can sometimes resist our analyses or interpretations forcing us to engage with them in unexpected ways.

Consent Searches for Electronic Text Communications: Escaping the Zero-Sum Trap

In R. v. Marakah, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada decided that senders of electronic text communications maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy over their messages even after they are copied to recipients’ devices. The dissenters argued, in contrast, that any such expectation is objectively unreasonable given senders’ inability to control the messages after delivery. The Supreme Court did not settle the question, however, of whether this expectation can be defeated by a recipient’s voluntary decision to allow police to search his or her own device. Indeed, each side intimated that such a consent would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.This article argues, nonetheless, that courts can and should use consent doctrine to avoid the “zero-sum” model of section 8 adjudication that characterizes the majority and dissenting reasons in Marakah. Properly interpreted, that doctrine preserves Marakah’s core holding — that senders do not reasonably expect unfettered state access to their received text communications — while also giving effect to recipients’ autonomous decisions to assist police.However, as with oral communications, a recipient’s consent to disclose a sender’s text communications to police should only defeat the sender’s expectation of privacy over preexisting messages. Contrary to several lower court decisions, this article argues that the acquisition of future, incoming communications from recipients’ devices (with or without consent) invades senders’ reasonable expectations of privacy under section 8 of the Charter and constitutes an “interception” requiring judicial authorization under section 184.2 of the Criminal Code.

Shallow Inclusion (or Integration) and Deep Exclusion: En-Dis-Abling Identities through Government Webpages in Hong Kong

This article is primarily concerned with how government webpages in Hong Kong claiming to embrace social inclusion and provide services and support for persons with disabilities construct issues relating to disability. These texts are not read in isolation. Instead, they are considered in conjunction with discourse produced in several United Nations documents, especially the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Hong Kong is a signatory. These documents appear to both proffer and retract social inclusion in ways that complicate, if not undermine entirely, their purportedly inclusionary intentions. This article also reflects upon commentary produced by university students at a public university in Hong Kong responding to government discourse. Such focus upon ‘non-disabled’ readers reveals how texts do more than merely mediate pre-existing messages. Instead, they constitute a “social location and organizer for the accomplishment of meaning”, thereby counting as “a form of social action” (Titchkosky, 2007, p. 27). Through the texts they conspire to make about disability, authors and readers become complicit in the production, maintenance, and reinforcement of non-disabled (or abled)/disabled identities and dis/ableist ideology in ways that implicate the entire population in exclusionary processes.

Predictors and Effects of Anti-Obesity Message Fatigue: A Thought-Listing Analysis

ABSTRACTThe prevalence of messages advocating weight management has likely resulted in considerable anti-obesity message fatigue but the phenomenon remains understudied. This study examined two aspects of antiobesity message fatigue: (1) effects of preexisting anti-obesity message fatigue on cognitive processing of an incoming anti-obesity message and (2) predictors and effects of message fatigue responses expressed after exposure to the message. Results from a two-wave online experiment involving overweight and obese adults in the U.S. (N = 251) showed that preexisting message fatigue (in wave 1) positively predicted counterarguments, while negatively predicting message-consistent and issue-relevant thoughts expressed after exposure to an anti-obesity message (in wave 2). Moreover, the experimental findings show that physical health frames generated greater message fatigue responses than mental health frames. Message fatigue responses, in turn, predicted more unfavorable attitude toward message recommendations, completely mediating the effects of physical health frames on attitude. Women and older participants were more likely to express anti-obesity message fatigue responses than their counterparts. These findings underscore the need to recognize message fatigue as a significant barrier to communicating health.

Using the Theory of Planned Behavior to Guide Focus Group Development of Messages Aimed at Increasing Compliance With a Tobacco-Free Policy.

This study details the persuasive message development for a theory-based campaign designed to increase compliance with a university's tobacco-free policy. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) guided message design and evaluation for focus group-tested messages that were adapted to the context of complying with a tobacco-free policy. The study was conducted at a university located in the tobacco belt. Undergraduate focus group participants (n = 65) were mostly male (69%), white (82%), and freshman (62%) who smoked at least 1 cigarette in the last 30 days; on-campus smoking percentages were never/rare (60%), occasionally (23%), and often/frequently (16%). Data analysis used a theoretical thematic approach to identify how the TPB constructs related to perceptions of message effectiveness. Participants responded favorably to attitudinal strategies about health, respect, and university figures; they rejected approaches they considered juvenile and offensive. They also discussed the impact of noncompliance and avoiding overgeneralized statements for addressing subjective norms, suggesting shortening text, adjusting picture location, and emphasizing the importance of compliance to increase perceptions of behavioral control. Applying theory to preexisting messages is challenging. The design approach in this study is an evidence-based strategy that can be used as a universal process for message adaptation. Results offer health promotion suggestions for designing messages aimed at improving undergraduate smokers' willingness to comply with tobacco-free campus policies.

Admission Control Approaches in the IMS Presence Service

In this research, we propose a weighted class based queuing (WCBQ) mechanism to provide class differentiation and to reduce the load for the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) presence server (PS). The tasks of admission controller for the PS are demonstrated. Analysis and simulation models are developed to quantify the performance of WCBQ scheme. An optimized dropping time frame has been developed based on which some of the preexisting messages are dropped from the PS-buffer. Cost functions are developed and simulation comparison has been performed with FCFS (First Come First Served) scheme. The results show that the PS benefits significantly from the proposed queuing and dropping algorithm (WCBQ) during heavy traffic. Keywords—Admission control, presence, queuing.

Stabilization of protein synthesis in thermotolerant cells during heat shock. Association of heat shock protein-72 with ribosomal subunits of polysomes.

Thermotolerance is defined as the capacity of cells, following a cycle of stress and recovery, to survive a second stress which would otherwise be lethal. Whereas this is a well-documented phenomenon, the mechanisms underlying this protective event remain to be elucidated. Protection of protein synthesis appears to be one of the components in the induction of thermotolerance termed "translational thermotolerance." In the present study we show that translational thermotolerance is not the result of an increase in the concentration of cellular transcripts or the stabilization of preexisting messages, nor the preservation of the rate of amino acid uptake, synthesis of aminoacyl-tRNA, or protection from degradation of newly synthesized polypeptides. These results suggest that translational thermotolerance is the consequence of stabilization of translational initiation and/or polypeptide chain elongation during heat shock. We found that heat shock protein (hsp)-72, the major inducible form of the hsp-70 family of heat shock proteins, is associated with ribosomal subunits in polysomes of thermotolerant cells during heat shock. We hypothesize that such interaction is responsible for rescuing translational initiation and/or polypeptide chain elongation in thermotolerant cells during a subsequent stress. It is possible that hsp-72 on the ribosome is "waiting" for the nascent polypeptide to emerge from the ribosome. Such interaction may maintain the growing polypeptide in solution during stress, allowing elongation to continue, and maintaining a constant rate of translation during the stress.

Regulation of gene expression during aerobic germination of Mucor racemosus sporangiospores.

The pool of mRNA stored in dormant sporangiospores of Mucor racemosus and expressed during early germination in air has been investigated. Total RNA was extracted from dormant and germinating spores and translated in a cell-free rabbit reticulocyte system containing L-[35S]methionine. Isotopically labelled in vitro translation products were analysed by PAGE and autoradiography and were compared with labelled proteins synthesized in vivo at the same stages of development. This comparison revealed several significant findings about the fates of individual mRNA populations as templates in translation: (i) a pool of mRNA, presumably represented entirely or in part by a recoverable polyadenylated RNA fraction, can be extracted from dormant spores in a translatable form; (ii) most of the differential gene expression displayed at the level of protein synthesis during germination results from concomitant changes in functional mRNA levels; (iii) some of the stored mRNA species may be activated and others inactivated by post-transcriptional processing mechanisms; and (iv) a small population of gene products may be regulated at the level of selective translation of pre-existing messages.

Regulation of protein synthesis during heat shock.

When the cells or tissues of most eukaryotes are exposed to elevated temperatures, they respond with the vigorous induction of a small number of ‘heat shock’ proteins (hsps). I report here investigations on the responses of two very different organisms, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Although both organisms achieve a very rapid shift in protein synthesis, they do so in very different ways. In Drosophila, heat shock induces a mechanism of translational control which both promotes the translation of hs mRNAs and specifically represses the translation of pre-existing mRNAs. Yeast cells, in contrast, do not possess a special mechanism to sequester pre-existing messages from translation. Instead, most of these messages simply disappear rapidly from the cell, while those that are retained continue to be translated.

Mechanisms of regulating tubulin synthesis in cultured mammalian cells

Colchicine and nocadazole both depolymerize microtubules in cultured fibroblasts and lead to a rapid inhibition of tubulin synthesis. The level of translatable tubulin mRNA is greatly reduced in drug-treated cells as demonstrated by translation in a reticulocyte-derived in vitro protein synthesizing system. A model of tubulin synthesis regulation is proposed in which the elevated level of unpolymerized tubulin in drug-treated cells inhibits the formation of new tubulin mRNA and the preexisting message decays rapidly. In agreement with this model, tubulin message is found to be short-lived and has an approximately 2 hr half-life in cells treated with actinomycin D. Another prediction of the proposed model is that destabilization of microtubules without a concomitant increase in free tubulin will not inhibit tubulin synthesis. Vinblastine also disrupts microtubules but leads to the aggregation of tubulin into large paracrystals with an apparent decrease in the concentration of free tubulin. This drug does not inhibit tubulin production but rather leads to a measurable enhancement of tubulin synthesis.