Quick Glance Research Articles

Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns by John M. Harris

Reviewed by: Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns by John M. Harris Jack Patrick Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns. By John M. Harris. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. 237 pp. Paper $20.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-343-1.) From a quick glance at the title, readers might assume that this book is merely [End Page 124] a nostalgic look at a successful season that serves to reacquaint Cleveland Browns fans with their proud past. In Redemption in ’64: The Champion Cleveland Browns, John M. Harris offers that and so much more. Harris provides insight into the formation of football’s dominant franchise in the decade following World War II, suggests reasons for its decline by the early 1960s, and explains the unlikely series of events that propelled the Browns back to the top of the football world. Having lost an NFL team when the Rams relocated to Los Angeles following the 1945 season, Cleveland was awarded a franchise for 1946 in the newly formed All-American Football Conference. In the most interesting section of this book, Harris describes how Paul Brown forged the franchise that bore his name. Already a legend from his success as coach at a Massillon, Ohio, high school and at Ohio State University, Brown built his squad primarily with Ohio and midwestern players. He assembled a coaching staff of men he had previously known in Ohio or at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center outside Chicago, where Brown had served as the football coach during the war. An accomplished organizer and innovator, Brown led the team to heights unprecedented in professional football over the next decade: four titles in the All-American Conference followed by three additional championships in the NFL, after the Browns were absorbed into the established league in 1950. Brown treated his players as a disciplined workforce who were expected to follow his instructions without complaint. Accordingly, he called all the plays during a game and ignored any input from the players. He also expected conformity off the field and released players who did not follow his rigid rules. The first generation of Browns players, nearly all war veterans, had accepted that restrictive work environment. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fresh generation of players rebelled at Brown’s restrictions. Compounding the discontent was the failure to capture a conference championship after 1957 and the players’ feeling that Brown’s football schemes had become obsolete, predictable, and easily countered by their opponents. In 1961, a New York advertising executive, Arthur Modell, purchased the Browns and began a strained relationship with the legendary founder. Paul Brown disliked Modell’s appearances at practices and his tendency to associate with the players. Modell was sympathetic to the complaints of disgruntled Browns players, including star running back Jim Brown. After a frustrating 1962 season, Modell fired Paul Brown and replaced him with Blanton Collier. Harris portrays Collier as the driving force that orchestrated a renaissance for the troubled franchise. Collier had been Paul Brown’s key assistant from [End Page 125] the formation of the Browns until the conclusion of the 1954 season, when he had left to become the head coach at the University of Kentucky. He returned to the Browns as an assistant in 1962. During his first season as head coach in 1963, he quickly earned the respect of his players. He incorporated their suggestions into the game plans. He changed the offensive blocking schemes to conform to the talents of Jim Brown. Most significantly, he made Frank Ryan the starting quarterback. A journeyman who combined an NFL career with his pursuit of a doctorate in mathematics from Rice University, Ryan—under Collier’s stewardship—developed into a capable passer and gave the team a viable aerial attack to combine with Jim Brown’s rushing expertise. On December 27, 1964, a cold, windy day in the old stadium along the Lake Erie shore, the Browns defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, 27–0, to earn their first league championship in nine years. Harris suggests that the championship season of 1964 provided “redemption” for four members of the Browns organization. Modell was vindicated for his controversial...

Disinterested Love: Ethics and Aesthetics in Karl Philipp Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten"

Disinterested Love:Ethics and Aesthetics in Karl Philipp Moritz's "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" Mattias Pirholt Aesthetic autonomy remains one of the most persuasive and prolific ideas in the reception of German neoclassicism. A quick glance at the vast amount of research on the subject reveals that it is, in fact, one of the defining traits, or perhaps the defining trait, of this particular movement in the history of art and literature. General surveys of the period, often also referred to as Weimar classicism or the Age of Goethe,1 as well as "close readings" of works by individual writers, such as Goethe, Schiller, and Humboldt,2 single out aesthetic autonomy as the "Kernstück der Weimarer Klassik" (core of Weimar classicism).3 Wilhelm Voßkamp claims that "kein anderes Konzept wird heute als so epochenspezifisch für die Weimarer Klassik angesehen als das der ästhetischen Autonomie" (no other concept is perceived as more characteristic for the epoch of Weimar classicism than aesthetic autonomy).4 Gerhard Sauder goes further and names autonomy as the "Norm der Weimarer Klassik" (the norm of Weimar classicism).5 And that is just scratching the surface. While many of the most notorious themes of the so-called "Klassik-Legende," a phrase coined by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand in their influential 1971 anthology,6 have not stood the test of time, aesthetic autonomy remains a persuasive and attractive idea to many a scholar. As a result, in a recent attempt to once again settle the score with this oppressive legend, Klaus L. Berghahn defines aesthetic autonomy as the very foundation of classical-Romantic aesthetics.7 A key figure in the history of aesthetic autonomy is Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793), who, though sometimes overlooked,8 was a prime mover of Weimar classicism.9 His essay "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten" (1785) is the first of many texts that posterity has declared to be the origin of modern aesthetic autonomy—his crowning achievement being the 1788 booklet Über die bildenden Nachahmung des Schönen, which [End Page 63] Goethe quoted enthusiastically.10 Thus, the essay supposedly paved the way for Immanuel Kant's subsequent transcendentalization of aesthetics and the Romantics' liberation of art and of the artist. "This essay," Paul Guyer claims, "can be regarded as a true ancestor of the later conception of the autonomy of art."11 Dorothea von Mücke argues that "Moritz attributes to the aesthetic object a privileged status within the order of representations in terms of its intransitivity or autonomy," that is, as a "necessary illusion" that "reorganizes man's faculties."12 More recently, Elliott Schreiber has widened the scope of the argument significantly, stating that "Moritz's concept of the inner purposiveness of the artwork provides a model for understanding the autonomy of modern value spheres in general" which include institutions of art, mythology, education, and politics, among other things.13 However, as Thomas P. Saine already noted in the early seventies, critics have been too focused on Moritz's conception of beauty as something complete in itself, a tendency that brings his aesthetics "zu sehr in die Nähe einer Theorie des 'l'art pour l'art'" (too close to the theory of "l'art pour l'art").14 In his writings, especially in "Über den Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten," I argue that Moritz expresses a reluctance to dissociate the work of art from its extra-aesthetic context—or, in short, from life. As the following pages will show, Moritz's analysis of the self-contained and complete work of art and man's disinterested attitude toward it point to a profound interdependence between subject and object, an interdependence that is essentially ethical. Moritz's emphasis on the interdependence between art and life, which reintegrates the world of art with ethics, essentially "heteronomizes" the foundation of aesthetics. As a result, the rise of German neoclassicism in the 1780s and 1790s should be construed not as an attempt to articulate a theory of the autonomous, self-sufficient, and independent...

A Brief Highlight of the Regulatory Framework for Engaging in Business in the Energy Sector in Nigeria

The Energy sector is a very complex and multi-faceted sector in Nigeria’s economy. Ever since the discovery of oil in commercial quantity in Nigeria, oil has accounted for a large chunk of Nigeria’s revenue, thus, implying that the country is a very fertile ground for big companies hoping to invest and expand their petroleum business. However, the country’s energy sector, in a whole, comprising oil and gas and electricity is quite developed, even if not at the desired level. This paper therefore seeks to provide a quick highlight of the regulatory framework for engaging in business in the energy sector in Nigeria. The paper seeks to provide a quick glance at what the law says in order to help an investor determine whether it is worthwhile coming to invest in Nigeria’s energy industry as well as provide a ground for further academic research on the deficiencies of the current regulatory system.

Decision Tree-Based Data Mining and Rule Induction for Identifying High Quality Groundwater Zones to Water Supply Management: a Novel Hybrid Use of Data Mining and GIS

Groundwater is an important source to supply drinking water demands in both arid and semi-arid regions. Nevertheless, locating high quality drinking water is a major challenge in such areas. Against this background, this study proceeds to utilize and compare five decision tree-based data mining algorithms including Ordinary Decision Tree (ODT), Random Forest (RF), Random Tree (RT), Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), and Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) for rule induction in order to identify high quality groundwater zones for drinking purposes. The proposed methodology works by initially extracting key relevant variables affecting water quality (electrical conductivity, pH, hardness and chloride) out of a total of eight existing parameters, and using them as inputs for the rule induction process. The algorithms were evaluated with reference to both continuous and discrete datasets. The findings were speculative of the superiority, performance-wise, of rule induction using the continuous dataset as opposed to the discrete dataset. Based on validation results, in continuous dataset, RF and ODT showed higher and RT showed acceptable performance. The groundwater quality maps were generated by combining the effective parameters distribution maps using inducted rules from RF, ODT, and RT, in GIS environment. A quick glance at the generated maps reveals a drop in the quality of groundwater from south to north as well as from east to west in the study area. The RF showed the highest performance (accuracy of 97.10%) among its counterparts; and so the generated map based on rules inducted from RF is more reliable. The RF and ODT methods are more suitable in the case of continuous dataset and can be applied for rule induction to determine water quality with higher accuracy compared to other tested algorithms.

Introduction: Revisiting Solitudes - Between and Beyond

This special issue of Etudes Canadiennes/ Canadian Studies has decided to revisit the concept of solitudes by exploring the social, linguistic and cultural interactions between the original inhabitants, the Indigenous peoples of Canada, and what has come to be called the “founding races”, as well as the more recent allophone communities, by considering the way they depict one another (or not) in fiction, song, and the visual arts. A quick glance at some of the national ethnic celebrations tha...

Reliability of NAND Flash Arrays: A Review of What the 2-D–to–3-D Transition Meant

This paper reviews what changed in the reliability of NAND Flash memory arrays after the paradigm shift in technology evolution determined by the transition from 2-D to 3-D integration schemes. Starting from a quick glance at the fundamentals of raw array reliability, the reasons for its worsening with the evolution of 2-D technologies will be discussed, focusing on the physical phenomena which contributed more to that outcome. By exploring the dependence of the magnitude of these phenomena on cell and array parameters, the abrupt improvements achieved from the 3-D transition in terms of raw array reliability will then be explained, highlighting also that these improvements were turned into new opportunities for the technology. Finally, the physical issues specific to 3-D arrays will be addressed, providing a glimpse of the challenges that the NAND Flash technology will have to face from the standpoint of array reliability in the near future.

A quick glance at selected topics in this issue

“A quick glance at selected topics in this issue” aims to highlight contents of the Journal and provide a quick review to the readers.

Lean Practices in SMEs towards Improvement in Production Performance: A Research

Practicing Lean manufacturing in organizations of any type brings various advantages for example, reduced waste, improved operating efficiency, desired performance evaluation etc. Meanwhile, implementing the Lean strategies is a stimulating task. In literature, numerous frameworks and policies are developed and proposed, suitable for a specific organization and for any kind of SMEs, still the implementation exercise remains burdensome. SMEs are nowadays in the zone of highly practiced Lean implementation as they form one of topmost strength of economies. Here, in this article an effort is made to gather and highlight the recent Lean practices adopted/developed with several modifications to suit the working environment in SMEs. For a quick glance at the Lean methods proposed in different production/manufacturing industries even with some amount of success, information is provided in Tabular form. One highlighting outcome from this review is that, currently, in developing countries implementing Lean methods in SMEs is a biggest opportunity while in underdeveloped countries, the adaptation is very rarely reported. Use of machine learning techniques like artificial neural networks has just begun in this field of interest, hence exploring at a larger scale is required. Simulation methods are a few to name and its practice may or may not be worth requiring different levels of strain

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for August 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for August 2019.

A quick glance at selected topics in this issue

“A quick glance at selected topics in this issue” aims to highlight contents of the Journal and provide a quick review to the readers.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for May 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for May 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for April 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for April 2019.

Party democracy and its enemies: Italy, 1945–1992

The gap between the narratives of democracy and the practices of power has been a significant source of delegitimation for the post-1945 Italian political system. The system was unable to achieve a solid and principled legitimation by meeting the requirements of a widely accepted and historically rooted notion of democracy, and had to resort to a fragile de facto legitimacy based on the absence of more desirable alternatives. This can partly account for the collapse of the Republican political system in 1992/1993 and the political instability of Italy in the last quarter century. The first section of the article presents the three most relevant narratives of democracy of the Republic’s early years: liberal, progressive, and participatory democracy. The second section argues that in the early 1960s, when the political system finally reached a reasonable level of stability, it was as an ‘Italian-style’ party democracy that did not fully meet the criteria of any of the three original narratives, which were in fact used to delegitimise it. By the late 1970s, all could see how dysfunctional party democracy was, and criticising it became a discursive resource that no political force could refrain from exploiting—including those who were in government. The third section considers how those critiques were inspired, yet again, by variations of the three original narratives. The epilogue throws a quick glance at the post-1994 period.

Lavoro, diritto, diritti: itinerari a confronto

Moving from the miscellaneous volume Le liberta del lavoro (ed. by Laura Cerasi), the first part of the essay seeks to analyze the different contributions in a legal-historical perspective. The second part consists in a quick glance at the treatment of labour problems under Fascism and in the Constitution of 1948.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for March 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for March 2019.

A quick glance at selected topics in this issue

“A quick glance at selected topics in this issue” aims to highlight contents of the Journal and provide a quick review to the readers.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for February 2019.

A quick glance at noteworthy articles for February 2019.

Raconter l’Oulipo (1960–2000): histoire et sociologie d’un groupe. Par Camille Bloomfield

Camille Bloomfield’s ambitious study aims to ‘observer l’Oulipo pour ce qu’il est, c’est-à-dire un phénomène littéraire installé dans le champ, à la réception inégale mais à la diffusion indéniable’ (p. 12). A quick glance at Virginie Tahar’s extensive ‘Bibliographie critique sur l’Oulipo’ (in Formules, 16, 2012, pp. 343–415) suffices to reveal the hubris of this gesture, as Bloomfield is certainly not the first scholar to analyse the Oulipo or its history. However, as Bloomfield’s study approaches the group from more than a purely literary standpoint, she paints a more nuanced picture in this amusing, engaging, and informative read. The Introduction is a dazzling display of erudition from a scholar who has spent the past decade immersed in archives, interviewing members of the group, forming her own OuXPo, and participating in almost every major event in Oulipian scholarship and public life. For instance, her assessment of the nature of the Oulipo archives as the result of an intentional, strategic act in self-definition is particularly keen. Chapter 1 lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of the book, distinguishing between terms such as ‘avant-garde’, ‘movement’, ‘school’, and ‘group’ to situate the Oulipo amid other literary collectives. Chapters 2 to 4 are of a different nature, tracing the history of the Oulipo from the period leading to its founding (1950–60) to its first decade (1960–70), and then its subsequent expansion (1970–92). The epilogue defines the Oulipo as a ‘groupe-monde’, arguing that it constitutes a cultural phenomenon that has surpassed national borders. The main problem I anticipate with the reception of this volume is that, much like the Oulipo itself, it is written to appeal to a group of scholars who are already well acquainted with the group and its unconventional culture. This manifests itself most clearly in the analysis of the group’s role in the curation of its own public image, which Bloomfield admits poses a great challenge for her study: ‘Le problème est que cela a conduit à instaurer des réflexes critiques peu distanciés’ (p. 13). While Bloomfield is conscious of a lack of critical distance, she rhetorically falls prey to it herself at times, for instance in Chapter 2 when she expounds upon the self-proclaimed metaphor of Oulipians as characters in an unfinished novel by Raymond Queneau, concluding that ‘[c]es personnages sont leur double littéraire, leur création collective la plus aboutie, la plus réussie peut-être. La fiction est ainsi réintroduite là où on l’attend le moins, c’est-à-dire dans les interstices de l’histoire’ (p. 77). Luckily, this rhetorical slippage is kept in check for the majority of the study, as the structure of Bloomfield’s project serves to relegate the group’s ‘discours officiel’ to three ‘intermèdes’. Given the breadth of Bloomfield’s project, its interdisciplinary critical perspective, and its multifaceted conclusions, it should be considered one of the most important studies on the group to date.

Making a glance an action: Doctors' quick looks at their desk-top computer screens

This paper investigates the communicative potential of quick glances at objects in a very particular setting, namely when doctors turn their head briefly to look at their desk-top computer screen while they interact with patients during general practice consultations. The study proposes that these glances often are demonstrably produced to be more than means to acquire information; they are communicative actions that indexically enact a reference to (content on) the computer in support of something the doctor says or does - at the moment or subsequently. In particular, the paper identifies three different kinds of glances: silent glances, glances produced alongside talk, and glances produced in conjunction with pointing gestures and talk. Each type may be produced as a communicative action in its own way. The paper also illustrates how doctors' glances at their computer screens are produced as intrinsic parts of recurrent consultation activities such as test result deliveries, history-takings, and treatment recommendations etc. Overall, the study offers knowledge about the distribution, coordination and organization of glances, and about how doctors use their computers during consultations.

The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Reviewed by: The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer Carolyn Higbie Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 265. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-062631-0. Rosenmeyer focuses on the statue in Egyptian Thebes identified as the colossus of Memnon and surveys ancient visitors' reactions to it, in particular the call that it often made to its mother Eos (Dawn) in the morning. Her book falls into three sections. Chapters 1-3 give background, and discuss the identities of the visitors and inscriptions that they leave on the colossus. Chapters 4-5 focus on two subsets of the inscriptions: those that reflect the Homeric Memnon and those linked to Sappho. In chapter 6 reactions of German and English Romantic poets to Memnon and to the statue known as Ozymandias are surveyed. The book concludes with three appendices: diagrams of the inscriptions on the colossus; the text and translation of the inscriptions; and an index of the relevant names. Bibliography and an index follow. Chapter 1 opens with Richard Pococke's description of the two colossi at Thebes, then quotes the earliest and latest datable ancient inscriptions on Memnon—by Servius Clemens, who wrote in Latin c. 20 ce, and Falernus, who composed elegiac couplets in Greek c. 205 ce. Within this 200-year span, 108 inscriptions recorded visits of over 90 visitors—centurions, prefects, strategoi; prefects' wives, women in Hadrian's circle (including his wife); sophists and poets. The nature of these visits to the colossus is the subject of chapter 2, in which Rosenmeyer joins the debate about travel to sanctuaries in the Roman empire: was it primarily religious, for sightseeing, or scholarly? After she summarizes the scholarship, she examines the language that the inscribers use to record their reactions to hearing Memnon's cry. She concludes that their motivations [End Page 113] are "mixed: those of both a tourist and a worshipper, both an intellectual curiosity-seeker and someone eager to hear the voice of the divine" (75). Chapter 3 studies two rhetorical devices found in the inscriptions: apostrophe and prosopopeia. Both reflect visitors' desire to present their experience of hearing the noise made by the colossus as a conversation. Sometimes they hear Memnon's cry to his mother, then they address the statue. Sometimes they tell Memnon that they have come to hear him call to Eos, although it has required repeated visits. In chapter 4 Rosenmeyer summarizes much of the recent interest in the afterlife of the Troy tale and shows how many of these inscriptions fit the patterns that others have recently analyzed. Although visitors to the colossus accepted the identification as Memnon, they don't seem to have done anything new in their poetry—they use Homeric language, sometimes compose in dactylic hexameter, and demonstrate their knowledge of Memnon's fate. Chapter 5, on poetesses, particularly Balbilla, and their poems that reflect Sappho, has a similar starting point, Greek and Roman interest in an earlier poet. Because there has been much less work done on ancient fascination with Sappho, Rosenmeyer has more of her own to contribute. She distinguishes between responses to Sappho as a poetess and Sappho as a lesbian, and after examining what could be identified as archaizing and/or Aeolic about Balbilla's verses, concludes that the latter wishes to be regarded as a poet in the tradition of Sappho. Chapter 6 begins with the silencing of Memnon, then examines a selection of Romantic poetry devoted to the colossus, linked to the classical inscriptions through their use of prosopopeia. Rosenmeyer describes the rediscovery of the statue and provides glimpses of western European reactions of poets who did not—unlike their ancient counterparts—visit Thebes: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Klingemann, Mayrhofer. Shelley's Ozymandias concludes the modern survey. Rosenmeyer shows us another manifestation of ancient fascination with the Homeric past and demonstrates how broadly across society and time that interest spread. Her quick glance at the nineteenth century reveals more recent uses of the Homeric world. I would have enjoyed more discussion about the seemingly unquestioned...