bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘More popular than Jesus’: the Beatles and the religious far right
Authors: Sullivan Mark
Published: November 2008

Probably the most famous photograph of the entire anti-rock movement features record burnings held in August 1966. A crowd of elementary school-age children and a clean-cut disc jockey stand before a bonfire; one grinning boy presents a copy ofMeet the Beatlesto the camera prior to tossing it on the flames. This particular bonfire was organised by radio staion WAYX in Waycross, Georgia, but it was only one of many in response to comments made by John Lennon.
Amin-e Diwaneh: the musician as madman
Authors: Baily John
Published: November 2008

While engaged in research on the long-necked lute called Herati dutār in 1974, I was frequently told about a virtuoso dutāri (dutār player) who had died a few years earlier after a fight with a gang of ‘thugs’ in the city of Kandahar. His name was Amin-e Diwaneh. The Persian word diwāneh means ‘crazy’, and was applied to people who (in terms of Western psychiatry) might be classed as ‘insane’, though the cause of insanity was usually attributed to spirit possession. Diwāneh was also a description for individuals who were particularly erratic in their behaviour, and was often used affectionately. Amin the dutāri was such a person.
Ghazals to Bhangra in Great Britain
Authors: Banerji Sabita
Published: November 2008

The cultural identity of the Indian subcontinent has survived countless onslaughts and displacements often by simply absorbing and Indianising alien elements. The many hybrids in lifestyle, language, food and religion spawned of Britain and India's long, love-hate relationship are a testament to this. And now the process is repeating itself in the new generation of South Asians born and educated in Britain. It is a unique generation, its acceptance or rejection of and by white British society will probably set the pattern for generations to come, and the musical fusion which voices their cultural duality tends towards mutual acceptance.
Have I the right? Legitimacy, authenticity and community in folk's politics
Authors: Redhead Steve , Street John
Published: November 2008

In the last few years, in Britain, one of pop's cycles has turned again and folk has come back into fashion. It can be seen in the success of the Pogues, in the reformation of Fairport Convention, in the revamping of the magazine Folk Roots, in the content of Andy Kershaw's Radio One show, and perhaps most dramatically in the celebration of ‘world music’. The revival of folk entails more than a revival of old names and sounds, it also contains a redefinition of the idea of ‘folk’ itself. This shift takes its clearest form in Folk Roots where the editor, Ian Anderson, displays equal enthusiasm for examples of almost every musical genre, from country to pop to ‘world music’ to traditional folk to soul to ‘roots rock’ (Ry Cooder, The Bhundu Boys, Kathryn Tickell, Paul Simon and the Voix Bulgares are all included). Folk no longer means ‘beards and Fair Isle jumpers’; it includes punk-influenced groups like the Mekons who see folk as an approach in which ‘the ineptitude of the playing becomes stylised and eventually becomes part of the music’ (Hurst 1986, p. 17). The musical eclecticism is linked by an underlying theory of the way good music is identified.
A diachronic study of change in juju music
Authors: Alaja-Browne Afolabi
Published: November 2008

Juju music, popular in Nigeria, first emerged in the island city of Lagos during the third decade of this century. Since its beginning, however, the music has undergone changes in both concept and practice as might be expected of any dynamic musical style. These changes have arisen not only through cultural contact and creative musical innovations, but also through the musical consequences of social, political, economic and other changes in contemporary Nigerian society and culture. This article seeks to identify and evaluate the change in juju music from two vantage points: (1) that of style which identifies it and provides a foundation against which continuity or stability through time can be measured; and (2) that of innovation whose creation and diffusion are examined diachronically against the contexts of society and culture.
Strategies for reconstructing the popular past
Authors: Thornton Sarah
Published: November 2008

One of the things that distinguishes music from other forms of popular culture is that its consumption is accompanied by so much comment. Neither TV nor film, for instance, has accrued the volume, diversity or specialisation of the books and magazines devoted to music and read by people without a professional investment. This literature poses particular problems for historians of rock'n'roll, rock and pop. What are its main methods of ordering the popular past? Which musics and events does it privilege? How should scholars read the music press as sources? How can the pop histories contained in New Musical Express, Billboard or The Face be interpreted for histories of pop? This article is derived from work-in-progress concerning the history of discotheques and club cultures from the late 1950s until the present day. As such, it offers no tidy solutions or complete narratives, but rehearses a few dilemmas relevant to writing about popular culture.
Radio broadcasting in Canada: the case of ‘transformat’ music
Authors: Grenier Line
Published: November 2008

What do Michel Rivard's ‘Un trou dans les nuages’ and Marjo's ‘Les chats sauvages’ have in common? Both songs were released in 1987 by two well-known French-speaking Québécois artists; they sold over 500,000 copies each and remained on the Top-Ten chart of Radio-Activité for over seventy weeks. These songs were played repeatedly on AM and FM radio stations in Quebec. However, unlike most other hits, Rivard's middle of the road (MOR) ballad was even heard on dance-music radios and Marjo's slow-beat rock appeared on the regular playlist of stations devoted primarily to easy-listening music! In fact, these songs are two examples of ‘transformat’ radio music, that is songs that get airplay on various stations which according to their respective operating license, should specialise in different musical genres and display contrasting programming styles. Using examples drawn from an exploratory study of radio music in private (commercial) FM stations in the Eastern Townships (Québec), this article will address some of the issues raised by transformat music. After a brief analytical portrait of Canada's radio policies and format regulations, I shall examine contrasting explanations of this phenomenon which focus on genre/style, state policy and business/industry. In the closing section, I shall present outlines of an alternative approach which rests upon the acknowledgement of the specific contribution of radio to the social production of popular music and addresses transformats as the outcome of creative repetition broadcasting devices.
Reading the charts – making sense with the hit parade
Authors: Parker Martin
Published: November 2008

One of the formations which helps to shape the meaning of modern pop music is the charts. In theory, the charts define the most popular of popular musics, the goal, the pinnacle of success. Both professionals and audience dedicate large amounts of time and money to producing and consuming this series of comparative market histories produced at rapid and regular intervals. Technology is bent to the service of the research in order that the figures be produced more quickly and with the appearance of accuracy. But why should we be interested in the Top 40 itself rather than its music? Writers on pop have provided us with some detailed descriptions of the charts (Frith 1978; Harker 1980; Wallis and Malm 1984; Street 1986), but few have noted that this level of consumer obsession with sales figures is almost unique to the record industry. Consumers of other commodities do not usually consult a specialist book or magazine in order to discover the past sales history of their favourite brand, nor do they listen to particular radio stations in order to ascertain the best selling product of the week. Why then should the sales results of EMI, Polygram, WEA and others be of interest to their consumers when the same data about multi-national corporations in other market sectors are primarily of interest to market insiders and analysts? An important caveat needs to be added in that popular music is now not the only type of cultural production that foregrounds sales figures. More recently popular literature (the ‘Bestsellers List’), video and films have all begun to use this format but in none of these cases is the chart as central as it is with pop music.
Can you feel it? DJs and House Music culture in the UK
Authors: Langlois Tony
Published: November 2008

I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.
‘I Want Your Hands On Me’: building equivalences through rap music
Authors: Irving Katrina
Published: November 2008

In attempting to evaluate the subversive potential of popular culture generally, and rock music specifically, much recent Marxist theory has been caught in a dichotomy. At one pole has been a structuralist view of the subject as always already constructed (Althusser 1971): a notion leading to an analysis of popular culture as – yet another – agency of co-optation. At the opposite pole has been a view of popular culture as a set of subcultures, capable of expressing resistance to the dominant culture. Here, the subject is seen as pre-existing its construction through various modes of representation. Both sides of the dichotomy have therefore been implicated in a kind of holism that proves debilitating to cultural criticism: the one sees the (co-opted) subject as a coherent, albeit coherently written support for the system which has constructed it; the other sees the subject as a unitary resisting agent, unified through its class constitution and expressing its resistance in and through subcultural forms.
Chicha in the shanty towns of Arequipa, Peru
Authors: Bullen Margaret
Published: November 2008

Chicha, a fermented maize beer, traditional in the Andes and brewed by Andean migrants in the shanty towns of Peru's cities, has given its name to a musical movement, which first emerged in the migrant squatter settlements of Lima in the 1960s. By the mid-1980s chicha was the most well-known and wide-spread form of urban popular music in Peru (Romero 1990; Rowe & Schelling 1991, pp. 121–2), widely played, sung and danced in impromptu chichodromos, set up in walled-in vacant lots or back yards.
The problems of the text in nueva cancíon
Authors: Manns Patricio
Published: November 2008

Patricio Manns (b. 1937) is a Chilean singer, songwriter, writer, poet, novelist and journalist. He was one of the group of singers who came together in the Peña de los Parra, the club founded by Angel and Isabel Parra in Santiago in 1965 which became the crucible where neo-folklore metamorphised into nueva cancíon (‘New Song’). Manns' relationship with nueva cancíon has been a fundamental, although at times an ambivalent one. Unlike many of the other musicians he has constantly involved himself in non-musical and political activity. Recently he has been the European spokesperson for the Chilean resistance movement, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, which claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt in October 1986 on President Pinochet.
Listening behaviour and musical preference in the age of ‘transmitted music’
Authors: Rösing Helmut
Published: November 2008

The significance of the mass media in everyday musical life can scarcely be exaggerated. Music is nowadays, to a large degree, heard in technologically communicated form, i.e. as ‘transmitted music’ (Übertragungsmusik), not live (see especially Silbermann 1954, Eberhard 1962, Jungk 1971, Goslich 1971, Bornoff 1972, Blaukopf, Goslich and Scheib 1973, Schmidt 1975, Rösing 1978a, Brinkmann 1980, Hosokawa 1981). It can be assumed that young people and adults in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) consume, on average, a good three hours' worth of music a day, on radio, cassette recorder, television or records. The fact that music, by means of the technological transmission-chain, is available at all times and can be replayed at will, independent of the here-and-now of live performance, has far-reaching consequences for the listening behaviour, listening expectations, musical preferences and musical understanding of every individual. Two of these aspects, listening behaviour and musical preferences, will be examined in detail in what follows.
Another boring day in paradise: rock and roll and the empowerment of everyday life
Authors: Grossberg Lawrence
Published: November 2008

About five years ago, I began to teach courses on the cultural history of rock and roll. My approach was simple: I would try to describe the texts, interpreting the significance produced by the unique synthesis of musical texture and lyrical content. Then I would suggest correspondences to the situation of its audiences which were mediated through the institutional practices of production and consumption. The music obliquely represented and responded to the structure of experience of at least certain portions of its youth audience. As I sought more adequate readings, the correspondences became increasingly refracted; the music had to be located in an overdetermined context: class, race, subcultures, gender, as well as age, exerted unequal pressures on and were represented in rock and roll. Nevertheless, my students – as well as the rock and roll fan in me – were noticeably dissatisfied. While they often assented to my readings, it was clear that my readings failed to capture something important, something which was intimately connected to rock and roll's power as well as to its cultural politics.
Listening to Peter Gabriel's ‘I Have the Touch’
Authors: Fiori Umberto
Published: November 2008

The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music's potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.
How autonomous is relative: popular music, the social formation and cultural struggle
Authors: Garofalo Reebee
Published: November 2008

Writing about popular music in 1977 from what I would describe as a ‘classical’ Marxist perspective, Steve Chapple and I proclaimed unequivocally that:

The position of the music as an increasingly important cultural commodity within a consumer economy weakened any of the explicit anti-materialist content of the music.… Musicians and the creative personnel within the industry were integrated into an entertainment business now firmly part of the American corporate structure. (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, p. 300)

In 1981, four short years later, British sociologist and music critic Simon Frith described the structure and functioning of the music industry in much the same terms that Chappie and I had put forth, but his analysis shifted the emphasis considerably. Declared Frith:

Cultural commodities may support the contemporary power of capital, but they have their civilising moments, and even as the most effortless background music, rock is a source of vigour and exhilaration and of good feelings that are as necessary for the next morning's political struggle as for the next day's work. My argument is that rock fun is as much a quality of the music's use as of its form. (Frith 1981, pp. 264–5)

Attempting to avoid what he saw as an economically reductive position, Frith de-emphasised the role of monopoly corporations in controlling the marketplace and shaping popular culture. In the tradition of ‘cultural’ Marxism, he focused instead, and somewhat optimistically, on the power of the consumer to reappropriate the music in unintended ways, to ‘resignify’ its meaning, if you will.
The jazz essays of Theodor Adorno: some thoughts on jazz reception in Weimar Germany
Authors: Robinson J. Bradford
Published: November 2008

Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain ‘some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz’ (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismissed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or – in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p. 132) – a ‘gloss onThe Authoritarian Personality’. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of hisGesammelte Schriftenhe clearly distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mátyás Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author, why should we bother to study them at all?
From Catfish Row to Granby Street: contesting meaning in Porgy and Bess
Authors: Horn David
Published: November 2008

For reasons which would themselves be worthy of an article, the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by popular music scholarship. This has often puzzled me, since such factors as the musical theatre's ambiguous position in the high/low culture debate, its close relationship with film (film musicals were for a time a favoured subject – with film theorists), its persistent playing with the links between song and drama, the sociality of its performance conventions, the durability of the amateur performance tradition, to name but a few, together suggest a promising vein of study. Musical theatre songs have been the subject of intermittent scholarly investigation, mostly from a perspective derived from classical musicology. Wilfrid Mellers, characteristically, sought meaning through musicology (he speaks of Cole Porter's chromatics as telling us ‘regretfully, that we are kidding ourselves’ (in love) and of the ‘queasy honesty’ of ‘Anything Goes’), but found too many musicals tend to ‘create an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions’ and never get beyond that point. (Mellers 1964, pp. 384, 385).
Kiwi rock: popular music and cultural identity in New Zealand
Authors: Shuker Roy , Pickering Michael
Published: November 2008

The New Zealand popular music scene has seen a series of high points in recent years. Published in 1989 were John Dix's labour of love, Stranded in Paradise, a comprehensive history of New Zealand rock'n'roll; an influential report by the Trade Development Board, supportive of the local industry; and the proceedings of a well-supported Music New Zealand Convention held in 1987 (Baysting 1989). In the late 1980s, local bands featured strongly on the charts, with Dave Dobbyn (‘Slice of Heaven’, 1986), Tex Pistol (‘The Game of Love’, 1987) and the Holiday Makers (‘Sweet Lovers’, 1988) all having number one singles. Internationally, Shona Laing (‘Glad I'm Not A Kennedy’, 1987) and Crowded House (‘Don't Dream It's Over’, 1986) broke into the American market, while in Australia many New Zealand performers gathered critical accolades and commercial success.
‘Gently Tender’: the Incredible String Band's early albums
Authors: Ford Charles
Published: November 2008

The monstrous machinations of the reissue CD market are reorganising our relations with ourselves, with our own and other peoples' pasts. This, in conjunction with the fact that baby-boomers have grown up, that pop music is no longer simply youth music, means that yesterday's and tomorrow's songs are not necessarily heard in that order, and that styles no longer grow and change in a linear fashion. In the simple act of repetition, thousands of albums, which, like Haydn's symphonies, were never intended for anything more than local consumption, are being underlined as worthy of recall, blessed with the glamorous radiance of digital sound. Musical nostalgia is highly seductive, but whilst it has resulted in considerable beauty and vigour in the hands of both Elgar and Stravinsky, it sounds predatory in the context of all those sixties music advertisements. More seriously – ‘lest we forget’ – political nostalgia, in the form of the search for the lost German Spirit, eventually proved genocidal. So, at a more personal level, I should be cautious about celebrating such a relic from my own past within the candy-coloured world of hippy psychedelia as the Incredible String Band.
The so-called ‘flattened seventh’ in rock
Authors: Moore Allan
Published: November 2008

This article began, quite simply, as the presentation of a stage in the mapping-out of those harmonic practices which serve to distinguish rock and closely cognate styles (hereafter simply ‘rock’) from those of common-practice tonality on one hand, and jazz on another. It soon became apparent, however, that such a task necessitated some detailed consideration of the means by which the conclusions might be presented and, therefore, some careful consideration of analytic method. To my knowledge, there is as yet very little concern for theorising analytic method in rock music and, therefore, what follows may act as a tentative opening of a difficult debate. The issue at present is, simply, whether or not Schenkerian theory can be adequately applied to this music. My conclusion is that as yet it cannot, and I shall present my findings in that light, but the reasons for my position must, I think, be spelt out. Thereafter, my specific concern will be to investigate varieties of the use of the diatonic ‘flattened seventh’ in rock, which I shall do by focusing in turn on three issues, investigating them through the analysis of particular examples rather than through any larger generalisations.
The ‘East is red’ goes pop: commodification, hybridity and nationalism in Chinese popular song and its televisual performance
Authors: Lee Gregory
Published: November 2008

In 1989 the Western media left its consumers with the romantic impression that it was merely the students who were demonstrating for ‘democracy’, as if emulating the student demonstrations of twenty years before in Europe and America. But there were workers involved too, who had illegally organised unofficial labour unions, and beyond concerns about democratic rights, there was the impetus of a socio-economic crisis. Most of those killed by the tanks in Tiananmen were workers, not students. People from all walks of life had marched and demonstrated throughout China from Canton ti Lhasa. Nine months before the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989, reversals in official economic policy put a halt to investment and constructions, and the problem of unemployment of rural migrants who had come to the towns was exacerbated. This migration was illegal but had been tolerated since labour was needed for construction. In 1989 anywhere between 60 to 100 million unemployed and homeless people were moving around the country en masse. At one time 250,000 were camped at Canton railway station.
Into the ‘Jungle’
Authors: Noys Benjamin
Published: November 2008

Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of ‘Jungle’, and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of description. It is this musical form which is analysed here as part of the evolution of modern dance music. Too often subcultural study has tended to give the impression that music is one element of a subcultural style and that it is style that drives the subculture. Instead, it is argued that music drives subcultural style, and that the evolution of Hardcore Dance serves as an especially salient example because it is a musical form which persistently resists reduction to typical codes for understanding music, both academic and those in the public sphere.
Video in the machine: the incorporation of music video into the recording industry
Authors: Banks Jack
Published: November 2008

Music video has become an increasingly integral component of the music recording business over the past three decades. Major US record companies with international divisions have made music clips since the 1970s to promote their acts in the UK and continental Europe where television shows were a more important form of promotion for recording artists. However, record labels did not make a full commitment to music clips until after the premiere of MTV in August 1981 as a 24-hour US cable programme service presenting an endless stream of music videos. As MTV's popularity blossomed in the early 1980s, music video revitalised a troubled record industry suffering a prolonged recession by prompting renewed consumer interest in pop music and successfully developing several new recording acts like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George with provocative visual images.
Whatever happened to …: the decline and renaissance of rock in the former GDR
Authors: Maas Georg , Reszel Hartmut
Published: November 2008

Since autumn 1989 when the ‘peaceful revolution’ in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) made Die Mauer (The Wall) fall, Germany has gone through a transformation process incomparable in world history. To understand how popular music has changed during this period it is necessary, first, to describe the situation in the former GDR before examining the personal views of two famous exponents of rock music in East Germany, Tony Krahl (leader of the band City) and the vocal group Die Prinzen, from Leipzig.
The new German folk-like song and its hidden political messages
Authors: von Schoenebeck Mechthild
Published: November 2008

The events of 1989 mark a turning-point in German history. Among the other far-reaching economic and social consequences of German reunification, the German market for audio-visual media expanded considerably.
Introduction: Vitalism without Metaphysics? Medical Vitalism in the Enlightenment
Authors: Wolfe Charles T.
Published: November 2008

Despite the renewed attention paid in recent years to the doctrine or doctrines associated with the Faculty of Medicine of the Université de Montpellier in the second half of the eighteenth century, and known as “vitalism” – chiefly Roselyne Rey's 1987thèse d'État, which only appeared in print in 2000, and works by François Duchesneau, Elizabeth Williams, Timo Kaitaro, and Dominique Boury, some of whom have contributed to this volume – the existence of a specifically medical vitalism in the eighteenth century still continues to pose a problem. Commentators speaking in rather monolithic terms continue to describe vitalism in terms entirely derived from late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century “neo-vitalism,” that is, in the language of vital force, of supplemental, extra-causal agents powering the living body. Philosophers of biology and, more surprisingly, historians of ideas tend to sound like the very confident Francis Crick, speaking like a prophet from a mountaintop to the entire scientific community: “To those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” (Crick 1966, 99). In less prophetic, but still very polarizing tones, a recent review discussion on biological development promotes “organicism” as a scientifically viable view – one which the authors of the review quickly distinguish from the more metaphysically laden “vitalism,” according to which (they write), “living matter is ontologically greater than the sum of its parts because of some life force (‘entelechy,’ ‘élan vital,’ ‘vis essentialis,’ etc.)” (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, 1).
What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability
Authors: Giglioni Guido
Published: November 2008

Argument

This article investigates the reasons behind the disappearance of Francis Glisson's theory of irritability during the eighteenth century. At a time when natural investigations were becoming increasingly polarized between mind and matter in the attempt to save both man's consciousness and the inert nature of theres extensa, Glisson's notion of a natural perception embedded in matter did not satisfy the new science's basic injunction not to superimpose perceptions and appetites on nature. Knowledgeofnature could not be based on knowledgewithinnature, i.e., on the very knowledge that nature has of itself; or – to look at the same question from the point of view of the human mind – man's consciousness could not be seen as participating in forms of natural selfhood. Albrecht Haller played a key role in this story. Through his experiments, Haller thought he had conclusively demonstrated that the response given by nature when irritated did not betray any natural perceptivity, any inner life, anysentiment interiéur. In doing so, he provided a less bewildering theory of irritability for the rising communities of experimental physiology.
Form – A Matter of Generation: The Relation of Generation, Form, and Function in the Epigenetic Theory of Caspar F. Wolff
Authors: Witt Elke
Published: November 2008

Argument

The question, how organisms obtain their specific complex and functional forms, was widely discussed during the eighteenth century. The theory of preformation, which was the dominant theory of generation, was challenged by different alternative epigenetic theories. By the end of the century it was the vitalist approach most famously advocated by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that prevailed. Yet the alternative theory of generation brought forward by Caspar Friedrich Wolff was an important contribution to the treatment of this question. He turned his attention from the properties of matter and the forces acting on it towards the level of the processes of generation in order to explain the constitution of organismic forms. By regarding organic structures and forms to be the result of the lawfulness of ongoing processes, he opened up the possibility of a functional but non-teleological explanation of generation, and thereby provided an important complement to materialist and vitalist approaches.
Orality, Narrative, Rhetoric: New Directions in Mishnah Research
Authors: Rosen-Zvi Ishay
Published: November 2008

The appearance in recent years of an impressive series of books, articles, and mainly dissertations on various aspects of the Mishnah collectively signifies something greater than the sum of its parts. These works herald the emergence of a new wave of Mishnah research. While differing significantly in their themes and methods, all the works discussed here share some basic methodological assumptions that are not shared by more “traditional” studies. Among these are a holistic attitude to the Mishnah as a composition; interest in questions of variegation of genre and style (narratives, rituals, lists, etc.); sensitivity to literary devices and techniques; and the use of new interpretive paradigms from rhetoric, cultural, and performative studies.
What is (the) Mishnah? Concluding Observations
Authors: Hayes Christine
Published: November 2008

If the scholarly works discussed here are any indication, as I believe they are, the study of the Mishnah is alive and well. Yet a question immediately suggests itself: Do the works under consideration here together constitute a new approach to the Mishnah and thus inaugurate a new era in mishnaic studies?
Melancholy Jouissance and the Study of Kabbalah: A Review Essay of Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau
Authors: Wasserstrom Steven M.
Published: November 2008

These “kabbalistic musings on time, truth, and death” originated as the Taubman Lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. Wolfson summarizes them in his preface to Alef, Mem, Tau (henceforth AMT): “The goal of my lectures was to illumine the nexus of time, truth, and death elicited from the symbolic imaginary of the Jewish esoteric tradition known by both practitioners and scholars as kabbalah” (xi). Without attempting further to isolate an “argument,” I can, at least, sketch for the potential reader some salient characteristics of these lectures.
Estimating wetland biodiversity values: a choice modelling application in Vietnam's Mekong River Delta
Authors: DO THANG NAM , BENNETT JEFF
Published: November 2008

A lack of information on environmental protection values, especially non-market values, has contributed to wetland degradation in the Mekong River Delta. To fill this information gap, this study uses choice modelling to estimate the biodiversity protection values of Tram Chim National Park, a typical wetland ecosystem of the Delta. The estimated net social benefit of a proposed protection program ranges from USD0.52 million to USD1.84 million. This suggests that the program's implementation would improve social welfare. Some choice modelling issues, including the use of focus groups, aspects of questionnaire designs, and different survey modes, are discussed in the context of a developing country application.
Priorities for Future Research on Planetary Dunes Planetary Dunes: Workshop: A Record of Climate Change; Alamogordo, New Mexico, 28 April to 2 May 2008
Authors: Titus Timothy N. , Lancaster Nick , Hayward Rose , Fenton Lori , Bourke Mary
Published: November 2008

Landforms and deposits created by the dynamic interactions between granular material and airflow (eolian processes) occur on several planetary bodies, including Earth, Mars, Titan, and Venus. To address many of the outstanding questions within planetary dune research, a workshop was organized by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Planetary Science Institute, the Desert Research Institute, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and was sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The workshop brought together researchers from diverse backgrounds, ranging from image analysis and modeling to terrestrial analog studies. The group of approximately 45 international researchers had intense discussions in an attempt to identify the most promising approaches to understanding planetary dune systems.
Wintertime ocean conditions over the southern Weddell Sea continental shelf, Antarctica
Authors: Nicholls Keith W. , Boehme Lars , Biuw Martin , Fedak Michael A.
Published: November 2008

During the austral winter of 2007 a Weddell Seal tagged with a miniaturized conductivity‐temperature‐depth (CTD) instrument travelled over the central southern Weddell Sea continental shelf. The instrument yielded 750 CTD profiles, 250 of them to the sea floor. The data show a full depth flow of water onto the shelf via a sill at the shelf break (74°S 44°W). The warmth from the core of the flow was able to maintain the surface mixed layer above the freezing point, resulting in a band of reduced ice‐production. An estimate of the on‐shelf flux suggests that this flow accounts for most of the estimated 3 Sv of water draining from the southern Weddell Sea continental shelf.
Climatological circulation in Lake Michigan
Authors: Beletsky Dmitry , Schwab David
Published: November 2008

Maps of climatological circulation in Lake Michigan are presented for the first time. They are based on ten years continuous modeling of lake hydrodynamics from 1998–2007 using observed meteorological data as the forcing function. Model results show a remarkably stable large‐scale cyclonic circulation pattern during both stratified and unstratified conditions. Lake‐averaged mean current speed is about 2 cm/s, but currents can reach 10 cm/s in some locations. The model results are confirmed by long‐term current observations.
Seasonal persistence of northern low‐ and middle‐latitude anomalies of ozone and other trace gases in the upper stratosphere
Authors: Tegtmeier S. , Fioletov V. E. , Shepherd T. G.
Published: November 2008

Analysis of observed ozone profiles in Northern Hemisphere low and middle latitudes reveals the seasonal persistence of ozone anomalies in both the lower and upper stratosphere. Principal component analysis is used to detect that above 16 hPa the persistence is strongest in the latitude band 15–45°N, while below 16 hPa the strongest persistence is found over 45–60°N. In both cases, ozone anomalies persist through the entire year from November to October. The persistence of ozone anomalies in the lower stratosphere is presumably related to the wintertime ozone buildup with subsequent photochemical relaxation through summer, as previously found for total ozone. The persistence in the upper stratosphere is more surprising, given the short lifetime of Ox at these altitudes. It is hypothesized that this “seasonal memory” in the upper stratospheric ozone anomalies arises from the seasonal persistence of transport‐induced wintertime NOy anomalies, which then perturb the ozone chemistry throughout the rest of the year. This hypothesis is confirmed by analysis of observations of NO2, NOx, and various long‐lived trace gases in the upper stratosphere, which are found to exhibit the same seasonal persistence. Previous studies have attributed much of the year‐to‐year variability in wintertime extratropical upper stratospheric ozone to the Quasi‐Biennial Oscillation (QBO) through transport‐induced NOy (and hence NO2) anomalies but have not identified any statistical connection between the QBO and summertime ozone variability. Our results imply that through this “seasonal memory,” the QBO has an asynchronous effect on ozone in the low to midlatitude upper stratosphere during summer and early autumn.
Surface energy balance in the ablation zone of Midtdalsbreen, a glacier in southern Norway: Interannual variability and the effect of clouds
Authors: Giesen R. H. , van den Broeke M. R. , Oerlemans J. , Andreassen L. M.
Published: November 2008

We present a record of almost six years of data (2000–2006) from an automatic weather station (AWS) in the ablation zone of Midtdalsbreen, a glacier in southern Norway. Measured incoming longwave radiation is used to estimate cloudiness, revealing that high cloud fractions occur almost 50% of the time in all seasons. Measured wind speeds and humidity are higher for cloudy conditions, especially in winter. Net solar radiation dominates the surface energy balance in summer, contributing on average 75% of the melt energy. The turbulent fluxes supply 35% of the melt energy while net longwave radiation and the subsurface heat flux are energy sinks of 8% and 2%, respectively. Although the melt rate is generally larger under clear skies, almost 60% of the melt occurs under cloudy skies, a consequence of the prevailing cloudy conditions. Interannual variability in the total melt is found to be equally determined by variations in the date of ice reappearance and differences in the meteorological conditions during melt. Comparing the results for Midtdalsbreen with measurements from an AWS on Morteratschgletscher, Switzerland reveals that the larger ice ablation on Morteratschgletscher primarily results from an earlier start of the melt season and larger net solar radiation. The energy balance model used in this study is found to be more sensitive to changes in the stability correction than to an order‐of‐magnitude change in the roughness length for momentum.
Diurnal variability of the tropical tropopause: Significance of VHF radar measurements
Authors: Das Siddarth Shankar , Jain A. R. , Kumar Karanam Kishore , Narayana Rao D.
Published: November 2008

VHF radars have been used for the detection of atmospheric stable layers such as the tropopause for quite sometime. This opened up a possibility of using VHF radars to study the short period variability of the tropopause with a better time and height resolution as compared to conventional radiosonde measurements. In the present study, a method to determine the tropopause height using VHF radar located at Gadanki (13.5°N, 79.2°E) is discussed and the results are compared with the simultaneous balloon observations. Comparison of radar measurements of cold‐point tropopause height (CPT) with simultaneous balloon ascents on 58 occasions has shown a very good agreement with a correlation coefficient of 0.85. The data collected during four different campaigns, which were carried out by employing radar and radiosonde/GPS sonde observations to study the different aspects of lower atmospheric dynamics, are used for this purpose. The radar measurements are then extensively used to study the diurnal variation of tropopause height for the first time over this latitude. The results showed that the tropopause does respond to the diurnal oscillations, which are consistent with the earlier radar studies reported from other geographical locations. During one of the campaigns, the tropopause height has also exhibited the semidiurnal oscillation, which is first of its kind. The diurnal observations clearly demonstrated the usefulness of the radar‐detected tropopause. Further, the oscillations in the tropopause height showed a phase delay of ∼1 h and 4–6 h with zonal and meridional wind tidal oscillations, respectively. The observed diurnal/semidiurnal oscillations in the tropopause height are interpreted as tidal manifestations. However, the diurnal variation of convective activity, which also contributes to the diurnal variation of tropopause height, is also accounted. The significance of the present study lies in showing the response of tropopause height to the propagating tides, which can provide some new insights in stratosphere‐troposphere exchange processes.
On the blow-up phenomena of the periodic Dullin–Gottwald–Holm equation
Authors: Zhang Shuanghu , Yin Zhaoyang
Published: November 2008

We first present several new blow-up results for the periodic Dullin–Gottwald–Holm equation by using some new Sobolev inequalities. We then investigate the blow-up rate for all nonglobal solutions and determine the blow-up set of blowing-up solutions to the equation for a large class of initial data. We finally address the lower semicontinuity of the existence time of solutions with smooth initial data.
Interfacial reaction of atomic-layer-deposited HfO2 film as a function of the surface state of an n-GaAs (100) substrate
Authors: Kim C. Y. , Cho S. W. , Cho M.-H. , Chung K. B. , An C.-H. , Kim H. , Lee H. J. , Ko D.-H.
Published: November 2008

The characteristics of interfacial reactions and the valence band offset of HfO2 films grown on GaAs by atomic layer deposition were investigated by combining high-resolution x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and high-resolution electron transmission microscopy. The interfacial characteristics are significantly dependent on the surface state of the GaAs substrate. Polycrystalline HfO2 film on a clean GaAs surface was changed to a well-ordered crystalline film as the annealing temperature increased, and a clean interface with no interfacial layer formed at temperatures above 600°C. The valence band offset of the film grown on the oxidized GaAs surface gradually increased with the stoichiometric change in the interfacial layer.
Influence of base pressure and atmospheric contaminants on a-Si:H solar cell properties
Authors: Woerdenweber J. , Merdzhanova T. , Schmitz R. , Mück A. , Zastrow U. , Niessen L. , Gordijn A. , Carius R. , Beyer W. , Stiebig H. , Rau U.
Published: November 2008

The influence of atmospheric contaminants oxygen and nitrogen on the performance of thin-film hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells grown by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition at 13.56 MHz was systematically investigated. The question is addressed as to what degree of high base pressures (up to 10−4 Torr) are compatible with the preparation of good quality amorphous silicon based solar cells. The data show that for the intrinsic a-Si:H absorber layer exists critical oxygen and nitrogen contamination levels (about 2×1019 atoms/cm3 and 4×1018 atoms/cm3, respectively). These levels define the minimum impurity concentration that causes a deterioration in solar cell performance. This critical concentration is found to depend little on the applied deposition regime. By enhancing, for example, the flow of process gases, a higher base pressure (and leak rate) can be tolerated before reaching the critical contamination level. The electrical properties of the corresponding films show that increasing oxygen and nitrogen contamination results in an increase in dark conductivity and photoconductivity, while activation energy and photosensitivity are decreased. These effects are attributed to nitrogen and oxygen induced donor states, which cause a shift of the Fermi level toward the conduction band and presumably deteriorate the built-in electric field in the solar cells. Higher doping efficiencies are observed for nitrogen compared to oxygen. Alloying effects (formation of SiOx) are observed for oxygen contaminations above 1020 atoms/cm3, leading to an increase in the band gap.
Effect of high strain rates on peak stress in a Zr-based bulk metallic glass
Authors: Sunny George , Yuan Fuping , Prakash Vikas , Lewandowski John
Published: November 2008

The mechanical behavior of Zr41.25Ti13.75Cu12.5Ni10Be22.5 (LM-1) has been extensively characterized under quasistatic loading conditions; however, its mechanical behavior under dynamic loading conditions is currently not well understood. A Split–Hopkinson pressure bar (SHPB) and a single-stage gas gun are employed to characterize the mechanical behavior of LM-1 in the strain-rate regime of 102–105/s. The SHPB experiments are conducted with a tapered insert design to mitigate the effects of stress concentrations and preferential failure at the specimen-insert interface. The higher strain-rate plate-impact compression-and-shear experiments are conducted by impacting a thick tungsten carbide (WC) flyer plate with a sandwich sample comprising a thin bulk metallic glass specimen between two thicker WC target plates. Specimens employed in the SHPB experiments failed in the gage-section at a peak stress of approximately 1.8 GPa. Specimens in the high strain-rate plate-impact experiments exhibited a flow stress in shear of approximately 0.9 GPa, regardless of the shear strain-rate. The flow stress under the plate-impact conditions was converted to an equivalent flow stress under uniaxial compression by assuming a von Mises–like material behavior and accounting for the plane strain conditions. The results of these experiments, when compared to the previous work conducted at quasistatic loading rates, indicate that the peak stress of LM-1 is essentially strain rate independent over the strain-rate range up to 105/s.