bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hear me talkin' to ya: problems of jazz discourse
Authors: Johnson Bruce
Published: November 2008

This article is part of a larger attempt to map the movement of jazz within its cultural field, and as such is less concerned with its musicological properties than with the means of its production, consumption and the associated technology and rhetoric. It is the last of these that I am most interested in just here: the question of finding appropriate ways of talking about jazz. I want to suggest that certain kinds of commentary ostensibly dedicated to conferring artistic legitimacy on the music in effect reshape it so that it can be more easily fitted into a political economy.
Postcolonialism on the make: the music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn
Authors: Hisama Ellie M.
Published: November 2008

When we acknowledge that an idea, history or tradition is not ours, we distance ourselves from it. When we then proceed to use, incorporate or represent it, we arrogate the right to employ what we acknowledge as not ours. It is not something we dodespitethe foreignness of our subject; it is something we do because of our perception of it as other. The implicit hierarchical nature of otherness invites seemingly innocuous practices of representation that amount to (often unknowing) strategies of domination through appropriation. (Dominguez 1987, p. 132)
The ‘social history’ of popular music: a label without a cause?
Authors: Russell Dave
Published: November 2008

During the coffee break at a recent conference, I described myself to a new acquaintance as ‘a social historian of music’. He replied that he was glad to meet me as he now knew all four of us. The ‘club’, of course, has never been quite that exclusive, but the joke highlighted the essentially submerged and inchoate nature of work in this field. What follows is a decidedly personal article, designed not as a polished, final argument but as a review of some recent developments within the social history of popular music and as a stimulus to further work and argument. Aimed most particularly at those, whether they define themselves as musicologists or historians, taking relatively early steps into this field, it reflects the biases and preoccupations of a social historian with decidedly Anglo-centric interests and for whom history tends to ‘begin’ about 1750; I have a sense, however, that some of my comments may be relevant to the study both in and of other countries and of other historical periods. ‘Popular’ music is broadly defined here to accommodate both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘social’ usages of the term, but given my particular interests, and perhaps because of the methodological imperatives of social history, the latter application undoubtedly receives the closest attention.
Popular music analysis and musicology: bridging the gap
Authors: Middleton Richard
Published: November 2008

Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicology's deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.
Policing Bohemia, pinning up grunge: the music press and generic change in British pop and rock
Authors: Toynbee Jason
Published: November 2008

After a decade of relative stability a flurry of closures and launches has changed the face of the British popular music press (see Table 1). This article examines the new structure and its development in three interlocking areas: in music industry organisation, rock and pop genres, and the process of discursive formation in the press itself. On the first of these, I argue that the function of the music press as an ‘institutional regulator’ (Hirsch 1990, p. 132) of music industry output has been subverted, during the 1980s, by a fluctuating record market and the growth of music programming on television and radio. A uni-directional model of cultural production is now problematic. Media, including the press, may be sponsors or initiators of music texts rather than mere filters. Secondly the New Pop, and more recently rave, has threatened the straightforward alignment of taste and cultural capital which underpinned rock hegemony. In the patchwork world of contemporary youth music the para-pedagogic work of the rock press in both guiding and excluding communities of taste has an extra urgency. My third point concerns critical method. Just because the rock/pop field has become decentred, the drive to fix meaning tends to generate crisis as successive critical solutions break down, revealed as monstrously excessive, as ‘more than’ the music. Journalists usually anticipate failure. But this only serves to speed up change and the movement towards the next untenable position.
Rock nacional and dictatorship in Argentina
Authors: Vila Pablo
Published: November 2008

Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina witnessed the full development of a phenomenon which has come to be known as rock nacional (‘national rock’). At first sight it might appear no more than a matter of musical consumption, fashioning its participants simply as ‘artists’ on one side and ‘public’ on the other. But it has proved an original form within which the young create and inhabit a space of their own, relatively protected from the assaults of the military dictatorship (which had made them its principal victims), and has come to constitute, with the passing of the years, a counter-culture and a social movement.
The roles of revolutionary song – a Nicaraguan assessment
Authors: Pring-Mill Robert
Published: November 2008

The term ‘protest song’, which became so familiar in the context of the anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s, has been widely applied to the songs of socio-political commitment which have developed out of traditional folksong in most of the countries of Latin America over the past twenty years (see Pring-Mill 1983 and forthcoming). Yet it is misleading insofar as it might seem to imply that all such songs are ‘anti’ something: denouncing some negative abuse rather than promoting something positive to put in its place. A more helpful designation is that of ‘songs of hope and struggle’, enshrined in the titles of two Spanish American anthologies (C. W. 1967 and Gac Artigas 1973), which nicely stresses both their ‘combative’ and their ‘constructive’ aspects, while one of the best of their singers – the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti – describes his own songs as being ‘in some measure both de protesta and de propuesta’ (i.e. as much ‘proposing’ as they are ‘protesting’). The document with which this article is chiefly concerned uses the term ‘revolutionary song’, which clearly covers both those aspects, but such songs may be seen to perform a far more complex range of tasks than any of those labels might suggest, as soon as their functions are examined ‘on the ground’ within the immediate context of the predominantly oral cultures of Latin America to which they are addressed: cultures in which traditional folksong has retained its power and currency largely undiminished by the changes of the twentieth century, and in which the oral nature of song (with the message of its lyrics reinforced by music) helps it to gain a wider popular diffusion than the more ‘literary’ but unsung texts which make up the greater part of the genre of so-called ‘committed poetry’ (‘poesía de compromiso’) to which the lyrics of such songs clearly belong (see Pring-Mill 1978, 1979).
The walkman effect
Authors: Hosokawa Shuhei
Published: November 2008

The walkman – a cassette recorder for headphone listening. This gadget, originally invented and marketed by Sony in the spring of 1980 in Japan, and soon exported, has become known throughout the West, however awkward its Japanese-made English may sound. As its use has proliferated, so have the arguments about its effects. One example, a report in Nouvel Observateur, was cited by Philippe Sollers (Sollers 1981, p. 50). The interviewer, apparently, asks young people (eighteen to twenty-two years old) the following: whether men with the walkman are human or not; whether they are losing contact with reality; whether the relations between eyes and ears are changing radically; whether they are psychotic or schizophrenic; whether they are worried about the fate of humanity. One of the interviewees replies: your question is out-of-date. All of these problems of communication and incommunicability, according to him, belong to the sixties and the seventies. The eighties are not the same at all. They are the years of autonomy, of an intersection of singularities in the construction of discourses. Soon, he says, you will have every kind of film on video at home, every kind of classical music on only one tape. This is what gives me pleasure.
‘Maybellene’: meaning and the listening subject
Authors: Cubitt Sean
Published: November 2008

There appeared in the summer of 1982 a song written and performed by three German structuralists, a song characterised by the simplicity – to the point of banality – of its musical structure and instrumentation. Intended as a critical intervention in the production of ordinariness in popular music, ‘Da Da Da’ reached number one in the British charts, and Trio's appearance on the British TV show, Top of the Pops, was no more threatening than that of Captain Sensible or any other novelty act: welcome to the whacky world of deconstructive minimalism. Clearly the intended meanings of the song were not always the ones it evoked for the listener. Recordings have a way of taking on a life of their own in their meetings with the public; in Voloshinov's phrase, the production of meaning is intersubjective, involving artists, promotional campaigns, disc jockeys and the audience. This article addresses particularly the role of the listening subject in the construction of a song's meanings.
A typology of ‘hooks’ in popular records
Authors: Burns Gary
Published: November 2008

What is a ‘hook’?Delson's Dictionarydefines it as ‘[t]hat part of a song, sometimes the title or key lyric line, that keeps recurring’ (Hurst and Delson 1980, p. 58). According to songwriters Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, hooks are ‘the foundation of commercial songwriting, particularly hit-single writing’. Hooks may involve repetition of ‘one note or a series of notes … [or of] a lyric phrase, full lines or an entire verse’. The hook is ‘what you're selling’. Though a hook can be something as insubstantial as a ‘sound’ (such as da doo ron ron), ‘[i]deally [it] should contain one or more of the following: (a) a driving, danceable rhythm; (b) a melody that stays in people's minds; (c) a lyric that furthers the dramatic action, or defines a person or place’ (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1979, pp. 28, 29).
Melody: A Popular Perspective
Authors: Stefani Gino
Published: November 2008

Current musicology has not developed such a methodical or systematic knowledge of melody as it has of other aspects of music. Music schools have courses and examinations in harmony, counterpoint, musical forms, etc., but not in melody; in the same way, books dealing with melody are rare exceptions.
Genre, performance and ideology in the early songs of Irving Berlin
Authors: Hamm Charles
Published: November 2008

Irving Berlin's 200-odd songs written between 1907, the date of the first one, and late 1914, when his first complete show for the musical stage (Watch Your Step) opened at New York's Globe Theatre, are virtually identical to one another in their published piano/vocal format. Like other Tin Pan Alley songs of the early twentieth century, most of them consist of a brief piano introduction, a few bars of vamp, then several verses, each followed by a chorus. All are in major keys and most have a tempo marking of moderato. Piano introductions are drawn from either the first or last phrase of the chorus, the vamp anticipates the melodic beginning of the verse, and both verse and chorus are usually made up of four 4-bar phrases in C or four 8-bar phrases in other metres.
Caliban reheard: new voices on jazz and American consciousness
Authors: Peretti Burton W.
Published: November 2008

Wilfrid Mellers was one of the first scholars of American music to recognise that jazz was situated within many of the major contexts and controversies of American civilisation. InMusic in a New Found Land(1965) andCaliban Reborn(1967), he argued eloquently that jazz was the music which both expressed and challenged urban alienation from a distinctly African-American point of view.
Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: postmodern, pre-modern, and modern aesthetics in subcultural popular musics
Authors: Manuel Peter
Published: November 2008

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.
The record industry in Finland, 1945–1960
Authors: Gronow Pekka
Published: November 2008

As a child growing up in Finland in the 1950s, I heard all the popular songs of the day. We did not have a record player until 1957, and even then we never bought any pop records, as my father preferred classical music and I was getting interested in jazz. But the songs were all around us, and they still haunt me today. Many of them are now available on Compact Discs, and they are played regularly on the radio. Some of them are just Finnish language cover versions of records which were also popular in the USA and UK at the time, such as ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ or ‘Only Love Me’. Others are unmistakably Finnish, sentimental waltzes and tangos and rousing comic songs. Whatever, it is obvious that record companies created something that has become a permanent part of Finnish culture.
The future of rock: discourses that struggle to define a genre
Authors: Fornäs Johan
Published: November 2008

Time shifts increase our sensitivity to birth and death, to the rise and fall of cultural epochs, by drawing attention to all sorts of changes. When years, decades or centuries turn, there need not necessarily be any corresponding great shift in society and culture. What does ‘real’ history care about dates and years? But our way of measuring time produces a sort of numerical magic that sometimes makes us extra sensitive to collective cultural mobility. In aesthetical production and cultural debate, each time turn induces a wish to reflect upon where we stand and what is happening. This sharpened time consciousness may accelerate or consolidate certain changes, if sufficiently many and strong social forces engage in the reflection to transform prophecies into effective mechanisms of change, by the material power of self-definitions.
Perspectives in popular musicology: music, Lennox, and meaning in 1990s pop
Authors: Hawkins Stan
Published: November 2008

Scholars of popular music in the 1990s are increasingly aware that traditional musicology has failed to recognise commercial pop music as a legitimate academic area of study. Intransigence on the part of many Western music institutions towards recognising the field of popular music study is attributable to issues that have been heatedly debated and discussed in most disciplines of popular music study. Even withstanding the expansion of critical approaches in the 1970s, which paved the way forward to the emergence of new musicological discourses by the late 1980s, musicologists engaged in popular music research have continued to feel some sense of isolation from the mainstream for obvious reasons. The implications of consumerism, commercialism, trend and hype, with the vigorous endorsement of modernist ideologies, have repeatedly curtailed any serious opportunity for studying popular music in Western music institutions. To start accommodating this area of music within any musicological discourse, scholars active within the field of popular music have had to branch out into new interdisciplinary directions to locate and interpret the ideological strands of meaning that bind pop music to its political, cultural and social context. Musical codes and idiolects are in the first instance culturally derived, with communication processes constructing the cultural norms that determine our cognition and emotional responses to musical sound (Ruud 1986). Any proposal of popular music analysis therefore needs to seek the junctures at which a range of texts interlock with musicology. Similarly, the point at which consumer demand and musical authenticity fuse requires careful consideration; it is the commodification of pop music that continues to problematise the process of its aesthetic evaluation within our Western culture.
Musica mizrakhit, Israeli rock and national culture in Israel
Authors: Regev Motti
Published: November 2008

It has become an annual ritual on Israeli television that, near Independence Day, several intellectuals are gathered in the studio in order to discuss the question whether there is an authentic Israeli culture and what exactly is its nature. Soon enough, popular music turns up as a major subject. It seems that popular music has become one of the few areas in Israel in which a vivid scene of cultural activity takes place, without public funding, and which plays a role in shaping a sense of identity for various groups.
From Krauts with attitudes to Turks with attitudes: some aspects of hip-hop history in Germany
Authors: Elflein Dietmar
Published: November 2008

In an article discussing hip-hop in Germany, one would expect an outline of how hip-hop emerged in the two German states or an analysis of the differences and similarities of the hip-hop scene in the two parts of the country or a report on how this youth culture has been affected by the process of political unification. However, an immediate analysis of the situation shows that although the hip-hop scene was organised in similar ways in both German states, and had similar role models, all the better known acts came from the west.
Looking to the USA: the politics of male close-harmony song style in South Africa during the 1940s and 1950s
Authors: Ballantine Christopher
Published: November 2008

In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:

[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the table. Then they take out their guns and put these in front of them on the table, too. We are all supposed to look, and we can't help ourselves: We do. They are like actors, these gangsters, although they do not play. In South Africa, movies are taken very seriously, and there is a movie in the cinemas now in which Richard Widmark plays a hoodlum. They call him Styles, and he dresses up in a hat, a belted jacket, and those Florsheim shoes. The black gangsters go out and dress just like him. In the movie, Richard Widmark eats an apple after each of his crimes. So, all the African hoodlums have gone and gotten apples, too. I see them right there on the tables between the bottles and the guns. (Makeba 1988, p. 49)
The embodiment of salsa: musicians, instruments and the performance of a Latin style and identity
Authors: Román-Velázquez Patria
Published: November 2008

I have attempted to contribute to debates about the body and music through a discussion of how the performance of salsa constructs a particular sense of Latin identity through the bodies of musicians. The embodiment of salsa is proposed as a way of theorising about how body and music are articulated to communicate a particular Latin cultural identity. In considering the relationship between body and music, I have stressed the cultural construction of bodies in the sense in which bodies are not neutral biological essences.

Salsa clubs in London have provided a focus for studying the construction of Latin identities as embodied and communicated by performing salsa musicians and how this is informed by specific codes of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Throughout this essay I have argued that the embodiment of salsa develops through specific practices whereby instruments, performance techniques, vocal sounds, bodily movements and ways of dressing are encoded and experienced as part of a particular Latin identity.

I also explained how the existence of essentialist beliefs about a natural Latin body and musical abilities, although a constraint, were challenged by musicians who are making ‘Latin’ music. First, by the involvement of non-Latin musicians in playing salsa, whose practices challenged assumptions about a ‘natural’ relationship between bodies, places and music. Second, through the participation of Latin American musicians and the new styles developing from the interaction between musicians and from having to adapt to different local circumstances. Finally, I mentioned how technological devices, sometimes used to solve practical economic problems, were contributing to the re-making of a Latin music performance and identity in London. I also indicated how the use of both Spanish and English language and the involvement of women in salsa music making were also contributing to a type of salsa and Latin performance.

However, whilst musicians have been challenging the idea of essential links between ethnicity, bodies and instruments, the practices through which salsa is embodied have continued to present limitations and expectations for women according to their sexed bodies. Particular expectations about the practices of gender and sexuality became an issue for women in relation to body movements, the use of the voice and instrumental performance. In this paper, focusing on the performance and participation of musicians in the micro setting of a club, I have suggested that women's place in salsa clubs has to be negotiated in relation to what is expected from sexed bodies. This leads me to conclude that unequal relations of power are directly experienced and embodied through gender relations and practices of sexuality and in turn operate as a micro politics of the body.
An analysis of Neil Young's ‘Powderfinger’ based on Mark Johnson's image schemata
Authors: Echard William
Published: November 2008

The analysis presented in this paper is one result of my interest in embodiment, and its potential role in the semiotic analysis of popular music. In cultural studies and symbolic anthropology, theorists often read the body as a carrier of codes, a surface for the inscription and negotiation of meaning. In popular music studies, this viewpoint often appears in fairly simple ways, and it also sometimes appears in a more subtle fashion. Richard Middleton, for example, considers the body both as a code-bearing surface, and as the ground for musical feeling, exploring how embodied experiences generate and interact with other levels of code (Middleton 1990, 1993). Similar things are done by Frith (1996), Walser (1993), Brackett 1995), and others.
Adopting imports: new images and alliances in Brazilian popular music of the 1990s
Authors: Magaldi Cristina
Published: November 2008

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such assamba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock(a contraction of forró and rock),sertaneja-country, samba-rap, andpop-nejo(a contraction of pop andsertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.
Oklahoma!: ideology and politics in the vernacular tradition of the American musical
Authors: Filmer Paul , Rimmer Val , Walsh Dave
Published: November 2008

Musicals, like all popular texts and forms of art have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society they voice society's own sense of its life and values. They are properly analysed, therefore, in terms of what Geertz (1975) has termed the ‘thick description’ of culture, whereby their organisation, construction and meaning is treated in terms of how they are lodged in, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are a social expression and with which they are reflexively engaged.
Regulating Agents, Functional Interactions, and Stimulus-Reaction-Schemes: The Concept of “Organism” in the Organic System Theories of Stahl, Bordeu, and Barthez
Authors: Cheung Tobias
Published: November 2008

Argument

In this essay, I sketch a problem-based framework within which I locate the concept of “organism” in the system theories of Georg Ernst Stahl, Théophile Bordeu, and Paul-Joseph Barthez. Around 1700, Stahl coins the word “organism” for a certain concept of order. For him, the concept explains the form of order of living bodies that is categorically different from the order of other (dead) bodies or composites. At the end of the century, the “organism” as a specific form of order becomes a major topos in many discourses. I will not so much focus on experiments and objects as on basic problems that contribute to the general framework of the concept of organism as a key concept of the vitalist movement between 1700 and 1800. For this purpose, I will investigate the combination of three explanatory tools. These tools refer to regulating agents, functional interactions, and stimulus-reactions-schemes within individual organic systems of forces. They are related to various themes – especially to energy, sensibility, and sympathy. I will retrace some aspects of these relations.
Can Matter Mark the Hours? Eighteenth-Century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties
Authors: Kaitaro Timo
Published: November 2008

Argument

Eighteenth-century Montpellerian vitalism and contemporaneous French “vitalist” materialism, exemplified by the medical and biological materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot, differ in some essential aspects from some later forms of vitalism that tended to postulate immaterial vital principles or forces. This article examines the arguments defending the existence of vital properties in living organisms presented in the context of eighteenth-century French materialism. These arguments had recourse to technological metaphors and analogies, mainly clockworks, in order to claim that just as machines can have functional properties which its parts do not possess (e.g., showing time), so living organisms can, as material entities, also have organic or vital properties which its material parts do not possess. Such arguments, with the help of a healthy dose of epistemological scepticism, tend to strike a balance between two positions concerning the ontology of life which we now tend to label “vitalism” and “emergentism.” Although there is nothing inconsistent in viewing vital properties as emergent, some ambiguity results if one does not draw a clear distinction between properties and functions. The philosophical problems related to these ambiguities are revealed in Diderot's apparent hesitation concerning sentience as “a general property of matter or the product of organization.”
Montpellier Vitalism and the Emergence of Alienism in France (1750–1800): The Case of the Passions
Authors: Huneman Philippe
Published: November 2008

Argument

This paper considers how certain ideas elaborated by the Montpellier vitalists influenced the rise of French alienism, and how those ideas framed the changing view of passions during the eighteenth century. Various kinds of evidence attest that the passions progressively became the focus of medical attention, rather than a theme specific to moralists and philosophers. Vitalism conceived of organisms as animal economies understandable through the transformations of the various modes of their sensibility. This allowed some physicians to define a kind of anthropological program, which viewed human beings as a whole, with no distinction betweenle physiqueandle moral. The passions in this context became a specific alteration of the animal economy. Such an anthropological program was the framework within which Pinel understood the various classes of madness as disease – those troubles being general disturbances of the animal economy, which presupposed a knowledge of the latter, to be addressed and cured. In this view, and departing from the vitalist writers with regard to the specificity of mental illness as such, Pinel proposed another conception of the relations between passions and madness, and elaborated a general view of their status in etiology and therapeutics; those views were taken up and systematized by Esquirol, who finally defined a new kind of continuity between passion and madness, demonstrated by the idea that some kinds of madness that he called “monomania” had as a principle a “ruling passion” that the alienist, this novel medical specialist, had to unveil and address.
Introduction to the Symposium: What is (the) Mishnah?
Authors: Fraade Steven D.
Published: November 2008

The following four papers originated in a special session of the History and Literature of Early Rabbinic Judaism Section at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, November 19, 2006, in Washington, D.C. The panelists were asked to review and constructively critique one another's recent works on the Mishnah, with an eye toward setting each within the larger corpus of recent scholarship on the Mishnah and its broader literary and historical context while addressing how each contributes to the larger question, what is (the) Mishnah?
Between Philology and Foucault: New Syntheses in Contemporary Mishnah Studies
Authors: Simon-Shoshan Moshe
Published: November 2008

The work of many emerging young rabbinics scholars today, particularly that which is focused on the Mishnah, is animated by a desire to synthesize two distinct approaches to rabbinic texts. One is the traditional philological-historical approach, which traces its roots back to the EuropeanWissenschaft des Judentumstradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In its current form, traditional Talmud criticism is perhaps most associated in Israel with the work of J. N. Epstein, the founder of the Hebrew University Talmud Department and the “father of exact scientific Talmudic inquiry.” While most of Epstein's students proceeded to shape the study of rabbinic literature in the Israeli academy, Saul Lieberman, perhaps his most distinguished disciple, moved to America, where his presence dominated the study of rabbinic literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the postwar decades. Traditional Talmud criticism is characterized by a scrupulous attention to manuscripts and textual variants, a systematic use of the findings of Semitic and comparative linguistics, and the use of form and source criticism to determine the history and development of larger textual units.
The Nature and Purpose of Mishnaic Narrative: Recent Seminal Contributions
Authors: Walfish Avraham
Published: November 2008

In recent decades, talmudic studies, along with other disciplines devoted to the study of texts, have experienced numerous paradigm shifts regarding both methods and goals. The naive presupposition that a text provides reliable information about historically situated characters, whether those described in the text or those who authored the text, has been vigorously challenged on many counts and from many angles. Responses to the challenge have ranged from sophisticated attempts to recover hermeneutical stability, whether rooted in authorial intention, in textually grounded meaning, or in some form of dialogue between the reader and the author or text, to the panoply of deconstructive approaches and other forms of postmodern recontextualization.
Demographic determinants forCampylobacterinfection in England and Wales: implications for future epidemiological studies
Authors: GILLESPIE I. A. , O'BRIEN S. J. , PENMAN C. , TOMPKINS D. , COWDEN J. , HUMPHREY T. J.
Published: November 2008

Despite a significant public health burden the epidemiology of humanCampylobacterinfection remains blurred. The identification of demographic determinants forCampylobacterinfection is therefore essential for identifying potential areas for intervention. Demographic data from an active, population-based sentinel surveillance system forCampylobacterinfection (from 2000 until 2003,n=15 907) were compared with appropriate denominator data from the 2001 United Kingdom Census. Incidence was higher in males from birth until the late teens and in females from 20 to 36 years. Age- and gender-specific differences inCampylobacterincidence were observed in different ethnic and socioeconomic groups and hence are all major drivers forCampylobacterinfection. Epidemiological studies onCampylobacterinfection need to take these factors into consideration during design and analysis. The collation of detailed epidemiological data and its comparison with appropriate denominator data provides a valuable epidemiological tool for studying infection.
EDTA treatment diminishes the antibacterial and anti-adherence effect of calcium hydroxide on Enterococcus faecalis: an in vitro study
Authors: George S. , Kishen A.
Published: November 2008

This study sought to understand the cell surface characteristics, viability and biofilm-forming potential ofEnterococcus faecaliscells sequentially exposed to EDTA and calcium hydroxide, as in endodontic treatment. Bacterial cells exposed to EDTA and calcium hydroxide were assayed for cell viability, membrane integrity, cell surface hydrophobicity and surface charge, while alteration in the surface topography ofE. faecaliscells was examined using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The bacterial adherence potential to type I collagen was also examined to assess the biofilm-forming capacity ofE. faecaliscells exposed to EDTA and calcium hydroxide. It was found that calcium hydroxide treatment reduced the viability ofE. faecalis. However, prior exposure to EDTA significantly reduced the antibacterial effect of calcium hydroxide (P< 0.05). Calcium hydroxide treatment resulted in impaired cell wall morphology, observed as increased surface roughness and pore formation under AFM. However, these topographical changes induced by calcium hydroxide were significantly reduced in EDTA pretreated cells (P< 0.05). Calcium hydroxide treatment caused reduction in hydrophobicity and adherence ofE. faecalisto type I collagen. These effects due to calcium hydroxide were also significantly altered in EDTA-pretreated cells (P< 0.001). The findings from this study showed that the antibacterial and anti-adherence effect of calcium hydroxide was diminished by prior exposure ofE. faecaliscells to EDTA.
Simulated 21st century's increase in oceanic suboxia by CO2‐enhanced biotic carbon export
Authors: Oschlies Andreas , Schulz Kai G. , Riebesell Ulf , Schmittner Andreas
Published: November 2008

The primary impacts of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on marine biogeochemical cycles predicted so far include ocean acidification, global warming induced shifts in biogeographical provinces, and a possible negative feedback on atmospheric CO2 levels by CO2‐fertilized biological production. Here we report a new potentially significant impact on the oxygen‐minimum zones of the tropical oceans. Using a model of global climate, ocean circulation, and biogeochemical cycling, we extrapolate mesocosm‐derived experimental findings of a pCO2‐sensitive increase in biotic carbon‐to‐nitrogen drawdown to the global ocean. For a simulation run from the onset of the industrial revolution until A.D. 2100 under a “business‐as‐usual” scenario for anthropogenic CO2 emissions, our model predicts a negative feedback on atmospheric CO2 levels, which amounts to 34 Gt C by the end of this century. While this represents a small alteration of the anthropogenic perturbation of the carbon cycle, the model results reveal a dramatic 50% increase in the suboxic water volume by the end of this century in response to the respiration of excess organic carbon formed at higher CO2 levels. This is a significant expansion of the marine “dead zones” with severe implications not only for all higher life forms but also for oxygen‐sensitive nutrient recycling and, hence, for oceanic nutrient inventories.
The Regional Climate Change Hyper‐Matrix Framework
Authors: Giorgi Filippo , Diffenbaugh Noah S. , Gao Xue J. , Coppola Erika , Dash Sushil K. , Frumento Oscar , Rauscher Sara A. , Remedio Armelle , Sanda Ibrah Seidou , Steiner Allison , Sylla Bamba , Zakey Ashraf S.
Published: November 2008

The accurate assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on societies and ecosystems requires regional and local‐scale climate change information. This assessment is critical for the development of local, national, and international policies to mitigate and adapt to the threat of climate change. Characterizing uncertainties in regional climate change projections (RCCPs) is therefore crucial for making informed decisions based on quantitative risk analysis.

However, information about fine‐scale climate change and associated uncertainties is lacking due to the absence of a coordinating framework to improve the characterization of such uncertainties. Here we propose the inception of such a framework.
Groups Call for Better Protection From Climate Change and Severe Weather
Authors: Fellows Jack
Published: November 2008

With a newly elected U.S. president taking office in January, eight leading professional organizations in the field of weather and climate have called on the next administration and Congress to better protect the United States from severe weather and climate change. The groups' “transition document,” which was provided to John McCain and Barack Obama, includes five recommendations to reverse declining budgets and provide tools and information that local and regional decision makers need in trying to prepare for weather‐ and climate‐related impacts. The organizations also have been collecting from the community names that the next president should consider for key weather‐ and climate‐related leadership positions in his administration.
Explaining the patterns formed by ice floe interactions
Authors: Vella Dominic , Wettlaufer J. S.
Published: November 2008

We provide a quantitative explanation of the patterns commonly observed during the collision of two floating ice sheets (ice floes): simple rafting, finger rafting, or the formation of a pressure ridge. In particular, we analyze the equilibrium configurations of the ice in each of the two types of rafting and show that these are only possible if the ice thickness is below a threshold value that we determine in terms of the strength and elastic modulus of the ice. We construct a regime diagram to characterize the regions of thickness‐strength parameter space for which each type of deformation can occur. Using typical values for the strength of sea ice, we find that finger rafting can only occur in ice with thickness ≲8 cm, and simple rafting can typically only occur in ice with thickness ≲21 cm. These estimates are quantitatively consistent with most field observations reported in the literature. Finally, by quantifying two common complications that occur in reality, we are also able to account for some of the discrepancies between theory and observation that remain. We show that the presence of rubble may allow ice with a thickness of up to 1 m to perform simple rafting, but multiple rafting of thin sheets does not increase the maximum rafting thickness.
Validation of AERONET estimates of atmospheric solar fluxes and aerosol radiative forcing by ground‐based broadband measurements
Authors: García O. E. , Díaz A. M. , Expósito F. J. , Díaz J. P. , Dubovik O. , Dubuisson P. , Roger J.‐C. , Eck T. F. , Sinyuk A. , Derimian Y. , Dutton E. G. , Schafer J. S. , Holben B. N. , García C. A.
Published: November 2008

The AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) estimates of instantaneous solar broadband fluxes (F) at surface have been validated through comparison with ground‐based measurements of broadband fluxes at Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) and by the Baseline Surface Radiation (BSRN) and the Solar Radiation Networks (SolRad‐Net) during the period 1999–2005 and 1999–2006, respectively. The uncertainties in the calculated aerosol radiative forcing (ΔF) and radiative forcing efficiency (ΔFeff) at the bottom of the atmosphere were also assessed. The stations have been selected attempting to cover different aerosols influences and hence radiative properties: urban‐industrial, biomass burning, mineral dust, background continental, maritime aerosols and free troposphere. The AERONET solar downward fluxes at surface agree with ground‐based measurements in all situations, with a correlation higher than 99% whereas the relation of observed to modeled fluxes ranges from 0.98 to 1.02. Globally an overestimation of 9 ± 12 Wm−2 of solar measurements was found, whereas for MLO (clear atmosphere) the differences decrease noticeably up to 2 ± 10 Wm−2. The highest dispersion between AERONET estimates and measurements was observed in locations dominated by mineral dust and mixed aerosols types. In these locations, the F and ΔF uncertainties have shown a modest increase of the differences for high aerosol load, contrary to ΔFeff which are strongly affected by low aerosol load. Overall the discrepancies clustered within 9 ± 12 Wm−2 for ΔF and 28 ± 30 Wm−2 per unit of aerosol optical depth, τ, at 0.55 μm for ΔFeff, where the latter is given for τ(0.44 μm) ≥ 0.4. The error distributions have not shown any significant tendency with other aerosol radiative properties as well as size and shape particles.
Hot target on nociceptors: perspectives, caveats and unique features
Authors: Szolcsányi J
Published: November 2008

Identification of C‐polymodal nociceptors and the selective action of capsaicin on them by acting on a putative receptor, which has been cloned 11 years ago, initiated a burst of interest in pharmacology of nociceptors. Capsaicin receptor transient receptor potential vanilloid‐1 (TRPV1) being a noxious heat‐gated cation channel gated also by several exogenous and endogenous substances serves as a nocisensor to generate graded receptor potentials in these sense organs. Impressive data on pathways involved in sensitization/desensitization of the channel revealed in isolated cells should also validate at the level of nerve endings and lipid raft around TRPV1 could modify the channel gating. Capsaicin‐sensitive nociceptors subserve dual sensory‐efferent functions: tachykinins and calcitonin gene‐related peptide released from them elicit local tissue responses as neurogenic inflammation and release of somatostatin evokes systemic anti‐inflammatory and antihyperalgesic effects. TRPV1 gene‐deleted mice show subtle changes in physiological regulations, therefore TRPV1 is a promising but challenging target for drug research.

British Journal of Pharmacology (2008) 155, 1142–1144; doi:fn1; published online 10 November 2008
Diffusion of electron-hole pairs in disordered quantum wires
Authors: Moret N. , Oberli D. Y. , Dwir B. , Rudra A. , Kapon E.
Published: November 2008

The diffusivity of photogenerated electron-hole pairs in weakly disordered GaAs/AlGaAs V-groove quantum wires was measured using a photoluminescence (PL) time-of-flight technique. It is shown that the electron-hole pair diffusion is thermally activated above about 50 K. Exciton localization is observed in micro-PL (μPL) spectra at low temperature. A reduction in the Stokes shift is found to accompany the increase in the diffusion coefficient. Nevertheless, localization-related features in the μPL spectra disappear at intermediate temperatures, before measurable diffusion occurs.
A connected graph identity and convergence of cluster expansions
Authors: Faris William G.
Published: November 2008

Recently Fernández and Procacci found an estimate on the radius of convergence of the cluster expansion for a gas of particles on a discrete space. Their estimate is an improvement on previous results of Kotecký and Preiss and of Dobrushin. This note presents a connected graph identity and uses it to prove a version of their estimate that applies to considerably more general contexts, including that where the space is not discrete.
B site doping effect on depinning in Pb(Mn1/3Nb1/3Sb1/3)x(Zr0.825Ti0.175)1–xO3 ferroelectric ceramics
Authors: Zhang Haibo , Jiang Shenglin , Zeng Yike
Published: November 2008

The polarization-field hysteresis (P-E) loops of Pb(Mn1/3Nb1/3Sb1/3)x(Zr0.825Ti0.175)1–xO3(PMnNSZT) ferroelectric ceramics show pinched shapes instead of the normal squarelike P-E loops in the range of 0.02≤x≤0.1. The pinched loops are assumed to be the result of the pinning effect of the defect dipoles. The absence of the pinched shape P-E loops can be attributed to the depinning resulting from strong p-type conductivity in PMnNSZT ceramics with high doping concentration of x>0.1. The x-ray photoelectron spectrum and x-ray diffraction investigations indicate that the p-type conductivity of the grain boundaries results from the aggregation of excessive B-site doping.
Microstructure analysis of a SmCo/Fe exchange spring bilayer
Authors: Liu Yuzi , Wu Y. Q. , Kramer M. J. , Choi Y. , Jiang J. S. , Wang Z. L. , Liu J. P.
Published: November 2008

The microstructure of a magnetron sputtered Cr(20 nm)/Sm–Co(20 nm)/Fe(20 nm)/Cr(5 nm) exchange spring magnet was studied using an advanced analytical transmission electron microscopy to better understand the relationship between its chemistry and structure to enhance the energy product. It is shown that the Fe atoms diffuse into the well textured Sm–Co layer, causing a transition from the stoichiometric Sm2Co7 near the Sm–Co/Cr interface to a defected Sm(Co,Fe)5 in the Sm–Co–Fe intermixed area. The graded intermixed layer between Sm–Co and pure Fe gives rise to a compositionally enhanced energy product.