bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Investigating the Truths: Inquiries, Conspiracies and Implied Performances in the Public Record
Authors: White Graham
Published: November 2024

The focus in courtrooms or tribunal chambers on live witness evidence-giving is examined in literature dealing with the residue of legal encounters as a space of potential instability for the process of establishing narrative authority (Auslander 1999; Lynch and Bogen 1996; TDR 2008). These accounts focus on the self-conscious ‘play’ of witness performance — self-presentation, demeanour and verbal and physical fluency as the site of a particular, intractable form of challenge to attempts to construct a definitive legal record. In this essay I will examine some instances in which historically prominent legal proceedings have proved fertile ground for challenges to official narratives through the tendentious reconstruction of such witness performance as implied by the written record. This kind of reconstruction is a common feature of a body of conspiracy theories which read ‘against the grain’ of official narratives.
Deconstruction and the possibility of justice : critical and cultural difference
Authors: Threadgold T.
Published: November 2024

Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice has a place in the chain of readings/rewritings (in Dworkin's sense) that constitute the field of recent and emerging Australian work in Law and Literature and Critical Legal Studies. At the same time it is a book that is marked by an extraordinary difference to the Australian work. Perhaps in this case differance (in Derrida's sense) would be the better term since there is within the chapters of the book a constant deferral of the business of deconstruction in favour of the assertion of the possibility of justice in abstract theoretical terms. The theme of the difference of deconstruction in the United States context is one that is constantly reiterated in the book from the moment of Derrida's reference to the development of critical legal studies and deconstruction "in such an interesting way in this country" (p.9) in the first chapter in the book, through Samuel Weber's reference to Derrida's statement that the United States is "that historical space" which is "the most sensitive, receptive or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstruction" (p.232), to Hillis Miller's comment on the conflation in critical legal studies of "reader-response theory" with "deconstruction" (something that is evident in Fred Dallmayr's chapter in the book) and his statement that "Deconstruction in America" is not the same thing as deconstruction elsewhere (p.306).
I panicked and hit him with a brick
Authors: Kiley D.
Published: November 2024

CAPITAL Q 26 Nov 1993 Iss 64, p.5 A NSW Supreme Court jury has acquitted a 22-year-old man of brutally murdering a 46-year-old gay man, despite hearing evidence that he admitted he had "rolled a fag" to friends. Christopher Paul McKinnon, who pleaded not guilty, was acquitted at the Darlinghurst courts on Tuesday of assaulting and ramming Maurice McCarty's head against the wall of his Newtown home on 7 April 1991. A postmortem examination revealed he had died of severe head injuries.
You've been watching LA Law again : Janus
Authors: Morrow J.
Published: November 2024

The producer of the new ABC series Janus, Bill Hughes, explained in a recent interview with the Sydney Morning Herald what he saw as the ingredient that distinguished Janus from its rivals: 'We're a character-driven drama, as opposed to a plot-driven drama'.
Suburban Interventions, A Question of Property, and Assigned Value (title)
Authors: Muñoz-Sarmiento S.
Published: November 2024

Suburban Interventions, A Question of Property, and Assigned Value (title) originated in West Texas in 2000, and since then these projects have been installed or taken place in diverse locations throughout the United States: from Los Angeles, California to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and from El Paso, Texas to Cambridge, Massachusetts. These three art projects incorporate and juxtapose the disciplines of sculpture and architecture with the Western legal discourses of property, First Amendment, and intellectual property law. In particular, these projects invoke, and thus critique, the assumed universality and normativity of Western jurisprudence.
‘Do you understand how much I have transgressed here?’: interrogating dynamics and consequences of noticing in the post-colonial legal self
Authors: Janusiene Aiste
Published: November 2024

This paper explores conditions of noticing through reflective analysis of emerging awareness in the postcolonial legal self. By unpacking Lithuanian judges’ involvement with popular culture, I explore how theatrical jurisprudence as performed through judges contributes to the transformation of understanding about the judicial role both for judges and the researcher. Since 1990 when Lithuania started a transition from a totalitarian system to democracy, the role of a judge is undergoing substantial change. In the reflexive analysis of data collected from interviews and focus group discussions with Lithuanian judges, I interweave post-colonial theories insights with theatrical jurisprudence to take implications of post-colonial legal identity seriously.
In this paper, I clarify how awareness of a body (trans)forms an understanding of the judicial role and the consequences of body negation. I explore the inability to notice the law’s effects and consequences of judges whom I identified as body ignorant. Also, while emerging awareness of a body for judges acts transformative, I argue that embrace of a body is insufficient to foster the ability to notice injustice in the conditions created on the tension between the fiction and reality. I am indebted to theatrical jurisprudence (Leiboff, 2019) for being able to register a sacrifice of a courageous Lithuanian judge who through his transgressions created conditions for noticing injustice of instrumental law and algorithmic judging.
In the context of transition from dogma to practice, responses to Judge Brook’s theatrical challenges animate not just post-Soviet legality but also a wider shift towards the digital legalities.
The Ethos of the Historian: The Minutes of Evidence Project, and Lives Lived with Law on the Ground
Authors: Evans Julie
Published: November 2024

I sit writing this from Lewes, a town that nestles by the chalky edge of the Downs in Southeast England. I have come here to spend some sabbatical leave at the University of Sussex, with colleagues and friends, historians like me. We have been working together for several years on a project called Minutes of Evidence, in which we have tried to make sense of the myriad ways in which settler colonialism operated, as a matter of law and administration, across the British Empire and within individual colonies, and to consider its impacts on everyday lives and questions of justice, past and present.
Regulating 'Mobility' and Masculinity through Institutions in Colonial Victoria, 1870s-1890s
Authors: Coleborne Catharine
Published: November 2024

David Rollison shows us that ‘mobility’ and ‘settlement’ operated in a dynamic and dialectical relationship in the past. Mobility, he argues, was a force for social change. Social institutions in early modern England, such as families, the Law, and the Church, were not immobile in the face of new populations. Travellers, sojourners, internal migrants and strangers moved through ‘settled’ spaces and featured in everyday life. ‘Thus movement,’ Rollison shows, ‘was literally the necessary condition of the abiding, settled, “structure”’ (Rollison 1999: 10).
Excerpt from Punishment: An Index
Authors: Hu Tung-Hui
Published: November 2024

In 1591, after the apparent murder of 9-year-old Tsarevitch Dimitry, a church bell in Uglich tolled angrily, inciting a riot among the Tsarevitch’s supporters. Regent Boris Gudonov silenced the insolent bell by putting it on trial. Found guilty of treason, the bell received the following sentence: flogging by 120 lashes; a notch broken in its ear; the clapper torn out; a lifetime of exile. Oddly, it was not the only bell to be so punished. In Florence, a century earlier, a bell named “la Piagnona,” the weeper, was flogged for religious extremism and exiled for 50 years; in La Rochelle, a Protestant bell was whipped, buried— whether dead or alive is unclear—and then reborn with the aid of a Catholic midwife.
The Paper Shredder: Trails of Law
Authors: Constable Marianne
Published: November 2024

If the modern office produces and is managed through written documents or files, as Max Weber famously argued in his work on bureaucracy, then so too does the office – and increasingly the private citizen – destroy them. Enter the lowly paper shredder, a machine that proliferates waste and serves as the repository of carefully guarded secrets and confidential records, even as it is designed to eliminate the dregs of bureaucratic culture. Until recently, in the United States as elsewhere, paper was the medium of official state law. The 20th-century rise of the paper shredder and its paper trail, as we shall see, thus reveals the material, cultural and economic entanglement of written law with destruction and consumption, security, and privacy, not only in the U.S., it turns out, but worldwide. The trail leads from formal recognition of the paper shredder in a 1909 U.S. patent to its actual manufacture and development as a business machine in Germany twenty-five or so years later, from the shredder’s role in defining political moments to its appearance in cartoons that confuse it with fax machines or legal counsel, and from regulations governing the disposition of records to industrywide ‘certificates of destruction’ that ensure against the dangers of snoopy dumpster divers.
Sacrifice, Piss Christ, and Liberal Excess
Authors: Casey D.
Published: November 2024

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ has been at the centre of one controversy or another for a decade. Much of the debate has focused on questions of tolerance and pluralism. The claim that Piss Christ is offensive to Christians seems to suggest, incorrectly I believe, that Piss Christ has neither place nor precedent within the Christian tradition. To the extent that Piss Christ questions the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, it enacts what it represents. It threatens the identity of conservative Christians who respond by seeking to exclude it from the public realm. I consider that what is at stake is not merely the question of tolerance within a pluralist society but also that of tolerance within a pluralist Church. To whom do religious symbols belong and who has the authority to prescribe the manner in which they are used? It will be my argument in this article that Piss Christ, regardless of authorial intention, is a profoundly religious work that speaks to the very heart of Christianity. Consequently, after ten years, Piss Christ is still worthy of consideration.
Discovering a Judicial Story
Authors: LaRue L. H.
Published: November 2024

We all know that stories create culture and that law creates culture; it may well follow (this is only a probabilistic judgment) that the stories that one finds in judicial opinions might be especially powerful in creating culture. There are two problems with the thesis that judicial storytelling can be powerful. The first problem is that ordinary citizens do not read these stories and could only hear about them through the mediation of television and the newspapers. This objection is factually correct; judicial opinions do not speak directly to the average citizen. However, the objection errs in supposing that the indirect is less powerful than the direct. In family life, the indirect influence of parental example is more important than the direct influence of parental instruction. So also in school, the direct instruction about proper conduct is far less important than the indirect absorption of the unspoken mores. Why could not the same be true for judicial opinions?
Lies on the Lips: Dying Declarations, Western Legal Bias, and Unreliability as Reported Speech
Authors: Liang B. A. , Liang A. C.
Published: November 2024

When one party is killed by another, there are often no witnesses to the murder other than the killer and the victim who is now absent. In some circumstances, the victim has enough life left to utter some final words to an individual who happens to be in the vicinity of the crime. Usually these statements, known in legal terms as dying declarations, relate to the circumstances of the victim's death, including the identity of the perpetrator. If the crime is investigated by law enforcement authorities, the final words of the victim can be reported by the individual who received this last utterance. If the matter goes to trial, this report may be heard in a courtroom by judge and jury who will decide the fate of the accused, which may include loss of liberty or even death.
‘Listening intently’ to LGBTQI Lives: diplomatic narratives of listening and hearing in LGBTQI rights.
Authors: Lalor Kay
Published: November 2024

This paper examines how public diplomatic practices of listening operate within unequal and often chaotic transnational spaces. In analysing transnational listening, the paper distinguishes between interpersonal and state based listening and argues that states – as polyvocal, multiscalar assemblages - listen differently to individuals. In particular, while interpersonal listening retains the possibility of openness, uncertainty and being moved unexpectedly by what is heard, state based listening is focused much more closely upon listening as a device of organisation and control.
To explore the operation of state based listening, the paper undertakes a case study of US public diplomatic promises to ‘listen’ to LGBTQI rights activists between 2011 and 2016. It explores why listening was such an important tool in the US’s diplomatic arsenal during this period and the importance of claims to ‘listen’ in countering accusations of cultural or economic imperialism. The paper then proposes a typology of how the US used listening to further its strategic goals. In exploring the parameters of this typology, the paper concludes that by taking seriously the challenge to ‘listen intently’ we can begin to re-think the spatial, temporal and legal framings that limit the possibility of being heard.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship grant ECF-2015-612. I am grateful to James Parker, Mark James, Dominic Medway, members of the Sylvia Pankhurst Gender and Diversity Research Centre and the participants in the MMU Writing Retreat 2018, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Earwitnessing the Queer Acoustics of Public Space: Law, Sex and Nature in Ultra-red’s Second Nature
Authors: Jackson David C
Published: November 2024

This paper examines queer sex and public space usage in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park through a series of recordings produced by the sound collective Ultra-red. Ultra-red have been using sound as a mode of political analysis since 1994 when they were founded by two AIDS activists in Los Angeles. This paper works in particular with two records released by Ultra-red in the late 1990s: an EP Ode to Johnny Rio (1998) and album Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral (1999), which are often referred to collectively as the Second Nature. For the Second Nature project, they draw their sound material from the public and private soundscapes of everyday queer life and cruising in Griffith Park. Ultra-red’s compositions rely on looping, fragmentation, and a radical approach to cutting audio. This disrupts both the musicality and linearity we might expect from recordings that present themselves almost as documentaries that pits queer behaviors, bodies, and identities against the suburban conceits of those who call for laws that curb the behavior in the park through policing, entrapment, barring traffic, and issuing tickets to gay men for loitering and sexual behavior.
Acoustic injustice: The experience of listening to indistinct covert recordings presented as evidence in court
Authors: Fraser Helen , Loakes Debbie
Published: November 2024

Audio recorded by hidden listening devices can provide powerful evidence in criminal trials. Unfortunately these covert recordings are often indistinct, to the extent the court needs a transcript to understand the content. Australian law allows police to provide transcripts as ‘ad hoc experts’. Legal procedures incorporate safeguards intended to ensure the transcripts are not misleading. The problem is that these safeguards have been shown to be ineffective, with multiple examples of inaccurate transcripts being provided to ‘assist’ the jury in determining what is said and who is saying it. The present paper explains the problem, provides an accessible overview of the nature of speech and how speech perception works, and outlines the solution proposed by the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence to the ‘acoustic injustice’ embodied in current legal procedures.
Towards Acoustic Justice
Authors: LaBelle Brandon
Published: November 2024

The essay poses acoustics as a critical and creative framework, one that gives entry onto the issues of cultural situatedness and social recognition. In particular, acoustics is underscored not only as a property of architectural space, or as a knowledge within the field of physics, but equally as a social and political question. In what ways do acoustic norms shape the experiences and capacities of listening and attunement within certain environments? Acoustics is highlighted as a performative arena, giving way to specific understandings of relationality and struggles over recognition. This leads to investigating how acoustics functions as the basis for a range of practices that, following Sara Ahmed, undertake the work of social, cultural, and bodily reorientation. Acoustic practices of rhythm and echo, noise and vibration, for example, are highlighted as operative within social movement action as well as informal daily encounters. This critical view allows for articulating an acoustic justice model, capturing sound and listening as important capacities and paths for working at social equality.
Law as Minor Jurisprudence: Is it a Mistake?
Authors: Painter Genevieve Renard
Published: November 2024

What is law as minor jurisprudence? Existing scholarship around the concept of minor jurisprudence associates it with processes that start something, found something, or stand outside something and, further, with processes that conceal or erase. To seek to clarify the meaning and effect of the phrase ‘“law as” … minor jurisprudence’, I consider cases of mistake that, as legal speech acts, transform a state of affairs. In Part I, I use JL Austin’s theory about speech acts to analyse how speech can be mistaken and how such mistakes may transform states of affairs, using cases of encounters between Indigenous, settler, and international legal orders. In Part II, I survey the debut of the Trump administration as a possible site of minor jurisprudence. Informed by this study of mistakes that help make minor jurisprudence, my investigation suggests that: 1) minor jurisprudence requires major jurisprudence to be cognizable; 2) little intrinsic to the concept of minor jurisprudence offers normative guidance; and 3) the idea of law as minor jurisprudence may be a mistake. If ‘law as’ is understood as a practice of legal knowledge, what matters is the process of drawing the line between major and minor, not the minor itself.
Toxic Tort and the Articulation of Environmental Risk
Authors: Goodie J.
Published: November 2024

Ten women who work in ABC television news studios and offices in Toowong Brisbane Australia, have developed invasive breast cancer within a relatively short period of time, one of the first diagnoses being in 2002 (Swan 2007). The unhappy coincidence of ten women in the same workplace developing breast cancer is disturbingly insidious. Initial investigations were not able to identify a cause or explanation. A subsequent, very thorough inquiry led by Professor Bruce Armstrong has not been able to identify the specific cause of the breast cancer either, but it has found that the Brisbane ABC studios present an unequivocal risk to health. The incidence of breast cancer in women working at the studios was not considered random or coincidental, it was found to be ten times the expected rate (Armstrong 2006). The studios have now been abandoned, and all ten cases of breast cancer have been designated a rare ‘cancer cluster’ (Swan 2007).
Stories of Jack: Myth, media and the law
Authors: O’Donnell M.
Published: November 2024

‘Jihad Jack’ Thomas was arrested in Pakistan in January 2003 under suspicion of being an al-Qaeda supporter or operative. Thomas’s guilt or innocence has been disputed ever since as police, politicians, the courts, the media and the public have grappled with who Jack Thomas is, what he believes and what he has or has not done in the name of those beliefs.
Rewriting the event of murder: Provocation, automatism and the law’s use of a narrative of insult
Authors: Tyson D.
Published: November 2024

Affectively speaking, I think that words can be much more harmful than actions. There’s a sting in words which no action can replicate (Cummins J Leonboyer Nov 1999: 1168). The opening quote to this article reflects a legal moment in which there is a movement or passage from the dead body to the legal text. The above statement was made by Cummins J during legal argument in the absence of the jury in Leonboyer, a case I observed. Counsel for the defence had asked his Honour to make a ruling that the partial defence of provocation be left for the jury on the ground that words allegedly spoken by the deceased caused the defendant, her fiancé, to feel insulted and lose all self-control. While under the influence of that loss of self-control, he inflicted at least 24 stab wounds to her head, back, groin and shoulder thereby causing her death. The words allegedly spoken by the deceased were that she had been ‘fucking’ another man, which she followed with a taunt, in Spanish, about the defendant’s sexual prowess (‘he did it better than you did’).
The trouble with the double; Expressions of disquiet in and around Law and Literature
Authors: Aristodemou M.
Published: November 2024

Talking, participating, engaging in the field of law and literature is an activity that causes me a lot of pleasure, indeed too much, even too painful a pleasure that easily tips over into, in one of the words in my title, disquiet, fear and anxiety. It is this anxiety, this extreme, perhaps, as I suggest later, ‘illegal’, jouissance provoked by the encounter between law and literature that I want to explore. So another title for this paper could be ‘The Anxiety of the Double: Expressions of Anxiety’ (as I read Pessoa’s term ‘disquiet’) in law and literature.
Colonialist and Decolonial Metaphors
Authors: Veracini Lorenzo
Published: November 2024

This paper argues that metaphors and colonial phenomena are related. It focuses in particular on the implications of metaphor for the study of colonialism and for the struggle against it. The aim is to harness metaphor’s power for decolonial rather than colonial uses.
‘Pathology without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness and Metaphors of Disease
Authors: Sorentino Sara-Maria
Published: November 2024

In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing race from the conditions of its emergence: the violent global abstractive forces of slavery that experimentally deployed blackness as disease, infection, virus, risk, and contaminant in the first instance. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of ‘fungibility’ and Sylvia Wynter’s reading of ‘bios’, I propose an alternative to de-pathologizing. If race does not precede its cohabitation with slavery’s herculean experiment in human sorting, then a more explanatory starting point might be forged by diagnosing the circular causal mechanisms by which blackness causes its own pathology. I close with a call to explore ways the disease metaphor has been activated for black revolutionary struggle—how slavery’s biological experiment in controlling human reproduction (life, death, and sexuality) is always also turned against its founding violence as an emancipatory biological weapon.
Unfinished business. Bruce Kercher, An unruly child: a history of law in Australia
Authors: Frazer A.
Published: November 2024

Until quite recently legal history, as practised and taught in Australian law schools has remained fixated on a narrow range of 'lawyers' law'. Legal history sought the legitimating foundations of the current legal system and profession, concentrating on constitutional issues dealing with the establishment of the higher courts and legislatures, or on the reception of English legal doctrines in Australia. The focus and assumptions of such accounts were decidedly Whiggish. The story of law in Australia was one of progress and reason, as manifested in the transplantation of British institutions and English common law. The professionalisation and modernisation of law which accompanied the wholesale importation of English reforms, were assumed to lead more or less inevitably to our current system of justice. This perspective has been challenged in recent years by scholars influenced by social history and cultural studies, and more interested in tracing the distinctiveness of Australian law as well as its social impact. Significantly, most of the reassessment has come from outside the law schools, from historians interested in law not as an object in itself, but as one of many sites of cultural conflict and social change.
Koori Court Victoria: Magistrates Court (Koori Court) Act 2002
Authors: Auty K. , Briggs D.
Published: November 2024

This paper has grown out of the practice of the Shepparton Koori Court in Victoria (Australia). It reflects the views of two ‘insiders’ to the process — the first sitting magistrate and the first enabling Aboriginal Justice Officer. We do not pretend that our views of the court’s operations in its first 18 months are anything other than our own unabridged social and cultural constructions of what we have seen and heard in the court as hearings and procedure have evolved. This is not a paper replete with data and external evaluation. We have not collected statistics on our court. We present our thoughts on what we have observed. We do not present an analytical paper and we have not explored theoretical underpinnings about the place of Indigenous people in the imposed legal system. This paper is essentially descriptive. We believe this is the place to start — describing the changes in the culture of the court and the jurisprudence of the post-colonial state. In our view it is only after we start this conversation, in this way, that we can start to understand how much work we still have to do. We believe that in engaging insiders and outsiders in the sort of description which follows we can start to unpack our complex exclusiveness with its insistent inclusiveness. Aboriginal people are statistically more likely to come before a court than non-Aboriginal people, yet they are invariably outsiders to the process. We think our paper starts to uncover reasons why this is so and how we can, in practice, remedy this situation.
‘We know what it is when you do not ask us’: the unchallengeable nation
Authors: Fitzpatrick P.
Published: November 2024

With alarming alacrity, Professor Dauvergne spotted that one of my published pieces had already used the title of this article (cf Fitzpatrick 1995). That title is taken from Bagehot’s saying of nation: ‘We know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot very quickly explain or define it’ (Bagehot nd: 20–1). The first excuse for recycling this title is that it is strikingly suited to the concern of this issue of Law Text Culture with challenging nation. Bluntly, my argument will be that we find it difficult to challenge nation because we cannot say what it is so as to identify it explicitly and thence confront it. A little more exactly, we are unable to do this from within the uniform plane of modernity since nation occupies a sacral dimension of being which the modern cannot integrate. Giving effect to that dimension may enable us to challenge modernist conceptions of nation, however. The other excuse for titular repetition refines that challenge. It stems not so much from wanting to reverse the more usual academic practice — offering here the same title but a different paper instead of much the same paper with a different title — as from wanting to intimate a continuance, a sustaining of nation despite, and because of, its elusiveness, and from wanting to show how, in terms of that very sustaining, nation is challenged intrinsically. This is where law, inevitably, will come in.
INTRIGUE: MURDER IN THE LUCKY HOLIDAY HOTEL – a Chinese House of Cards meets Agatha Christie.
Authors: Ambrose Drew
Published: November 2024

Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel is a podcast that is Agatha Christie meets House of Cards with an Oriental twist. It tells the story of the downfall of Bo Xilai, a once powerful and charismatic politician, who could have eclipsed current President Xi Jingping as a future leader of China if the cards fell his way. Despite the challenges of reporting in China, BBC China Editor Carrie Gracie is able to explain with clarity the tale of money, sex and power than unravelled Bo Xilai.
Gracie guides us through her five-part series with clear knowledge of her beat of 25 years. She is upfront about the many restrictions and hardships involved in reporting on an important tale from one of the world’s most repressive superpowers. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, Gracie is a charismatic, jovial presenter, who delivers the story with zest. This podcast is very different listening to the straight-laced reportage from the BBC’s network of correspondents around the world. Considered in a broader journalist context, Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel offers foreign correspondents based in bureaus around the world a blueprint for what is possible in terms of creative podcasting. It’s refreshing to see a foreign correspondent dive deep and explain an important chapter of Chinese politics with simplicity and flair.
“Qualia”: the subjective qualities of sound as experience of the self
Authors: Ribeiro Rodrigues Vanessa
Published: November 2024

How do we construct the perception of the world and Others through sounds? How are we able to express the myriad of feelings inside ourselves into an intelligible structure in order to be understood? What is the amount of interference in the way we express those [translated] feelings? These are some of the subtle questions raised by “Qualia”, a five-episode radio feature by Spanish artist and performer Charo Calvo, aired in 2016 by ABC Radio National’s Soundproof show in Australia.
The name “Qualia” evokes the philosophical theory of an internal and subjective component of sense and mental perceptions, which are considered incommunicable. Calvo´s feature is somehow an endeavour to materialise it through sound. It is an experimental-storytelling-audio-performance that links the plasticity of the vibrations of sound, emotions, identities, by sharing the experiences of four migrant women, living in Belgium, who are also artists, plus Charo Calvo herself. It is a patchwork that intricately weaves sound as an experience of translating the inner world we experience. The author sculpts sound based in transformative moments of qualia for those five women, based on oral storytelling (“she says”). As they speak several languages, according to their backgrounds (French, Hebrew, Italian, Turkish, English), translation is being made by other two women. Moreover, the audio script is also translated into English, and the author of this essay is a Portuguese woman, a fact that amplifies the “interferences” as the qualia of “noise”. Therefore, this is a personal reflexive exercise on Charo Calvo’s radio feature. It is an extraordinary piece of audio art but it requires high audio literacy, as it demands of audiences the mature exercise of listening more than once in order to understand. So it might not be engaging the first time, but it indeed disturbs us, inviting us to dive into the subjective qualities of ourselves.
A Responsible Parrhesia? A Review of The Price of Secrecy
Authors: Tafakori Sara
Published: November 2024

The Price of Secrecy immerses the listener in stories of individual trauma, of child abuse and rape, yet also draws lessons from them of wider social significance. It includes moments of narrative catharsis, interspersed with repeated reminders that the stories are unfinished and open-ended—that the solutions lie out there, in social action, rather than in the stories themselves. The series also gestures towards structural critique, especially of ‘the legal constraints’ it identifies, yet it places greater importance on changing the wider culture through challenging the culture of secrecy and shame around victims’ stories of rape and abuse. This centrally means engaging with ‘family constraints’ in the shape of ‘family honour’. Yet it is also families who are presented as being able to ‘find the best resolution or action plan’, ideally with the aid of ‘someone like a therapist in a position of authority’. ‘Responsible listening’ in this context, does not invite the kind of frank and fearless truth-telling, or parrhesia that aims at tearing down hierarchical power relations. On the one hand, the podcast series deliberately invokes the authority of psychiatrists and therapists as sources of prestigious ‘modern’ medical and therapeutic knowledge—inevitably associated with the West—as a way of countering the defensiveness engendered by patriarchal honour codes. On the other hand, the series also shows how the key protagonists in its stories—mainly women—can both challenge and draw on the intimate resources of knowledge and support that family structures can afford, and that neither secrecy, nor a ‘will-to-truth’ that ignores social and cultural context, is productive for the victims.
Consent: Objectivity and the Aesthetics of Re-enactment in Locative Audio Journalism about a Sexual Assault Trial
Authors: St Clair Jeanti
Published: November 2024

Consent – walk the walk, a geo-locative audio documentary walk in St. John’s, Canada, explores a 2017 sexual assault trial that led to days of protests in the Newfoundland city: an on-duty police officer is charged with sexually assaulting an intoxicated woman he drove home from the town’s nightclub precinct. Producers Chris Brookes and Emily Deming’s work of ‘landscape journalism’ was designed to highlight the tension between popular and legal understandings of the term ‘consent’ in sexual assaults. While the audio walk is a compelling place-based listening experience, Consent raises issues around the impact of dramatised re-enactment in the documentary field, and the role that sound design treatment can play, in affective influence over the audience’s response. To protect the identity of the assault victim, the producers were not permitted to use the court audio recordings, so they employed actors to perform the court transcripts. While the original trial acquitted the police officer, the Supreme Court of Canada in 2019 has ordered a re-trial on the grounds the trial judge erred in directing the jury. This article explores the design choices and the aesthetic, ethical and legal challenges faced by the audio walk’s producers in applying journalistic concepts of objectivity and balance.
Radio Drama Takeover 3: Vampirella
Authors: Best Emily
Published: November 2024

Angela Carter wrote Vampirella, her first of five works for radio, in 1976. The play serves as a sequel to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) where the vampire’s final descendent is a countess trapped in a castle, whose mythology is pitted against the rational thought of the early twentieth century. Gothic horror (and also much of Carter’s work) is often concerned with the violation and deconstruction of bodies. In this essay I explore how Carter uses the radio’s existing deconstruction of bodies to evoke something surprisingly visceral.
Goodbye to All This: The Ordinary Rhythm of Loss
Authors: Euritt Alyn
Published: November 2024

Sophie Townsend’s Goodbye to All This from BBC World Service is an audio documentary about Townsend’s experience of losing her husband, Russell, to cancer. Beginning with Russell’s diagnosis in the first episode, listeners follow Townsend through his treatment and death, then through the years as she adapts to life without him. The carefully constructed series focuses on Townsend’s personal narrative while situating her within her community. At the same time, the memoir’s precise storytelling and gentle, rhythmic sound design give structure to the podcast’s poignant expression of loss.
Evaluation of antioxidant activity of 1,2,4-triazole derivatives in the initiation of free radical processes
Authors: Bilai I. M. , Dariy V. I. , Khilkovets A. V. , Bilai A. I. , Duiun I. F.
Published: November 2024

The activation of lipid free radical oxidation is a key stage in the development of many diseases and can lead to the emergence of related complications. To identify new synthetic compounds with antioxidant properties, it is necessary to conduct studies on various models of experimental free radical oxidation of biomolecules. Literature sources indicate that among the derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole, there is a significant number that possess high antioxidant activity.
The aim of the study to assess the antioxidant properties of newly synthesized S-derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole through the inhibition of reactive oxygen species accumulation in the superoxide dismutase system.
Materials and methods. To achieve this goal, we used one of the methods for assessing antioxidant activity by initiating free radical processes in vitro, specifically by inhibiting the accumulation of reactive oxygen species.
Results. Twenty-three S-derivatives of 5-(thiophene-3-ylmethyl)-4-R-1,2,4-triazole-3-thiols were investigated. The most effective compound was sodium 2-((4-phenyl-5-thiophene-3-ylmethyl)-1,2,4-triazole-3-yl)thio)acetate, which exceeded the activity of both reference drugs. Following in activity was compound 22, 1-phenyl-2-((4-phenyl-5-(thiophene-3-ylmethyl)-4H-1,2,4-triazole-3-yl)thio)ethanol, which demonstrated an effect similar to that of emoxipine, while compound 7, 1-(3-fluorophenyl)-2-((5-thiophene-3-ylmethyl)-4H-1,2,4-triazole-3-yl)thio)ethanone, was slightly less active.
Conclusions. It was established that among the new S-derivatives of 1,2,4-triazole, some exhibit significant antioxidant effects that are comparable to or exceed the efficacy of reference drugs.
Towards Resource Efficiency: Practical Insights into Large-Scale Spark Workloads at ByteDance
Authors: Wu Yixin , Huang Xiuqi , Wei Zhongjia , Cheng Hang , Xin Chaohui , Chen Zuzhi , Chen Binbin , Wu Yufei , Wang Hao , Zhang Tieying , Shi Rui , Gao Xiaofeng , Liang Yuming , Zhao Pengwei , Chen Guihai
Published: November 2024

At ByteDance, where we execute over a million Spark jobs and handle 500PB of shuffled data daily, ensuring resource efficiency is paramount for cost savings. However, achieving optimization of resource efficiency in large-scale production environments poses significant challenges. Drawing from our practical experiences, we have identified three key issues critical to addressing resource efficiency in real-world production settings: 1 slow I/Os leading to excessive CPU and memory idleness, 2 coarse-grained resource control causing wastage, and 3 sub-optimal job configurations resulting in low utilization. To tackle these issues, we propose a resource efficiency governance framework for Spark workloads. Specifically, 1 we devise the multi-mechanism shuffle services, including Enhanced External Shuffle Service (ESS) and Cloud Shuffle Service (CSS), where CSS employs a push-based approach to enhance I/O efficiency through sequential reading. 2 We modify the Spark configuration parameter protocol, allowing for fine-grained resource control by introducing several new parameters such as milliCores and memoryBurst, as well as supporting operators with additional spill modes. 3 We design a two-stage configuration autotuning method, comprising rule-based and algorithm-based tuning, providing more reliable Spark configuration optimizations. By deploying these techniques on millions of Spark jobs in production over the last two years, we have achieved over 22% CPU utilization increase, 5% memory utilization increase, and 10% shuffle block time ratio decrease, effectively saving millions of CPU cores and petabytes of memory daily.
An Examination of CXL Memory Use Cases for In-Memory Database Management Systems Using SAP HANA
Authors: Ahn Minseon , Willhalm Thomas , May Norman , Lee Donghun , Desai Suprasad Mutalik , Booss Daniel , Kim Jungmin , Singh Navneet , Ritter Daniel , Rebholz Oliver
Published: November 2024

CXL-based disaggregated memory systems offer options to expand the memory beyond the limits of a single server via cache-coherent memory expansion cards or memory pools. Especially, In-Memory Database Management Systems (IMDBMSs) can benefit from alleviating two critical constraints: (1) limited memory capacity in a server and (2) long restart time during failover to reload data to memory. However, the usage and effectiveness of CXL memory in enterprise-scale IMDBMSs has yet to be validated.

In this work---for the first time---we investigate dynamic memory expansion employing commercial CXL memory devices for IMDBMSs. Our detailed performance analysis reveals that the performance impact of higher latency and lower memory bandwidth impact depends on the memory access patterns of data structures (cf. (1)). Additionally, we present the feasibility of CXL shared memory between servers to improve restart times during failover (cf. (2)).

Our evaluation shows the effectiveness of CXL memory integrated into the SAP HANA Cloud IMDBMS. OLTP workloads have a negligible performance degradation while OLAP workloads have a wide range of performance degradation. CXL shared memory shows a 40% reduction of the restart time for TPC-H SF10 and 84% potential reduction for TPC-H SF100.
Db2une: Tuning Under Pressure via Deep Learning
Authors: Bianchi Alexander , Chai Andrew , Corvinelli Vincent , Godfrey Parke , Szlichta Jarek , Zuzarte Calisto
Published: November 2024

Modern database systems including IBM Db2 have numerous parameters, "knobs," that require precise configuration to achieve optimal workload performance. Even for experts, manually "tuning" these knobs is a challenging process. We present Db2une, an automatic query-aware tuning system that leverages
deep learning
to maximize performance while minimizing resource usage. Via a specialized transformer-based query-embedding pipeline we name QBERT, Db2une generates context-aware representations of query workloads to feed as input to a stability-oriented, on-policy deep reinforcement learning model. In Db2une, we introduce a multi-phased, database meta-data driven training approach---which incorporates cost estimates, interpolation of these costs, and database statistics---to efficiently discover optimal tuning configurations without the need to execute queries. Thus, our model can scale to very large workloads, for which executing queries would be prohibitively expensive. Through experimental evaluation, we demonstrate Db2une's efficiency and effectiveness over a variety of workloads. We compare it against the state-of-the-art query-aware tuning systems and show that the system provides recommendations that surpass those of IBM experts.
AutoTQA: Towards Autonomous Tabular Question Answering through Multi-Agent Large Language Models
Authors: Zhu Jun-Peng , Cai Peng , Xu Kai , Li Li , Sun Yishen , Zhou Shuai , Su Haihuang , Tang Liu , Liu Qi
Published: November 2024

With the growing significance of data analysis, several studies aim to provide precise answers to users' natural language questions from tables, a task referred to as tabular question answering (TQA). The state-of-the-art TQA approaches are limited to handling only single-table questions. However, real-world TQA problems are inherently complex and frequently involve multiple tables, which poses challenges in directly extending single-table TQA designs to handle multiple tables, primarily due to the limited extensibility of the majority of single-table TQA methods.

This paper proposes AutoTQA, a novel
Auto
nomous
T
abular
Q
uestion
A
nswering framework that employs multi-agent large language models (LLMs) across multiple tables from various systems (e.g., TiDB, BigQuery). AutoTQA comprises five agents: the
User
, responsible for receiving the user's natural language inquiry; the
Planner
, tasked with creating an execution plan for the user's inquiry; the
Engineer
, responsible for executing the plan step-by-step; the
Executor
, provides various execution environments (e.g., text-to-SQL) to fulfill specific tasks assigned by the
Engineer
; and the
Critic
, responsible for judging whether to complete the user's natural language inquiry and identifying gaps between the current results and initial tasks. To facilitate the interaction between different agents, we have also devised agent scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, we have developed LinguFlow, an open-source, low-code visual programming tool, to quickly build and debug LLM-based applications, and to accelerate the creation of various external tools and execution environments. We also implemented a series of data connectors, which allows AutoTQA to access various tables from multiple systems. Extensive experiments show that AutoTQA delivers outstanding performance on four representative datasets.
Adaptive and Robust Query Execution for Lakehouses at Scale
Authors: Xue Maryann , Bu Yingyi , Somani Abhishek , Fan Wenchen , Liu Ziqi , Chen Steven , van Hovell Herman , Samwel Bart , Mokhtar Mostafa , Korlapati RK , Lam Andy , Ma Yunxiao , Ercegovac Vuk , Li Jiexing , Behm Alexander , Li Yuanjian , Li Xiao , Krishnamurthy Sriram , Shukla Amit , Petropoulos Michalis , Paranjpye Sameer , Xin Reynold , Zaharia Matei
Published: November 2024

Many organizations have embraced the "Lakehouse" data management paradigm, which involves constructing structured data warehouses on top of open, unstructured data lakes. This approach stands in stark contrast to traditional, closed, relational databases and introduces challenges for performance and stability of distributed query processors. Firstly, in large-scale, open Lakehouses with uncurated data, high ingestion rates, external tables, or deeply nested schemas, it is often costly or wasteful to maintain perfect and up-to-date table and column statistics. Secondly, inherently imperfect cardinality estimates with conjunctive predicates, joins and user-defined functions can lead to bad query plans. Thirdly, for the sheer magnitude of data involved, strictly relying on static query plan decisions can result in performance and stability issues such as excessive data movement, substantial disk spillage, or high memory pressure. To address these challenges, this paper presents our design, implementation, evaluation and practice of the Adaptive Query Execution (AQE) framework, which exploits natural execution pipeline breakers in query plans to collect accurate statistics and re-optimize them at runtime for both performance and robustness. In the TPC-DS benchmark, the technique demonstrates up to 25× per query speedup. At Databricks, AQE has been successfully deployed in production for multiple years. It powers billions of queries and ETL jobs to process exabytes of data per day, through key enterprise products such as Databricks Runtime, Databricks SQL, and Delta Live Tables.