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10.3390/h5030073
Peta Tait
Falkenhayner, N.
Surveillance and Social Memory: Remembering Princess Diana with CCTV
Nicole Falkenhayner
English Seminar, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Rempartstr. 15, Freiburg 79085, Germany
Humanities 2016, 5(3), 73; https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030073
Received: 30 May 2016 / Revised: 5 August 2016 / Accepted: 17 August 2016 / Published: 1 September 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Emotions and Affect in the Humanities, Creative Arts, and Performance)
Since the 1990s, surveillance camera images have experienced a function creep from their juridical uses into journalism and entertainment. In these contexts, the images have also become memory media. This article, for the first time, analyses CCTV images, meaning closed circuit surveillance camera images, as memory media and discusses the implications of our use of artefacts of control within a frame of mediated constructions of social memory. The article undertakes this work by analyzing remediations of the CCTV images of Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed in the Ritz Hotel in Paris on 30 August 1997 in television news and a documentary from 2007 and 2011, respectively. It is shown how social memory of Diana's death is a contested site, in which the images play a specific role.
Surveillance; images; social memory; social emotion; experientiality; narration; mediatisation; Princess Diana
On the morning of 1 September 1997, the world woke up to the news of the death of Princess Diana and her recent lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, in a car crash in Paris. The death of Princess Diana had an enormous impact on the civil and emotional culture of the UK, making it a stable part of British, but also global, social memory [1]. The CCTV images, meaning closed circuit surveillance camera images, that were made by surveillance cameras in the Ritz Hotel were affect-affording in the narrations of Diana's death. These qualitatively "poor" images take a prominent place in the medial archive with which this event is publicly remembered.
CCTV images are a neglected medium in the discussions on the changes of the shape and role of cultural archives, which are fundamentally connected with social sense-making. This is astonishing due to the concept of ongoing recording, and possible retrieval of every moment, that has so saturated ideas about the archive in the digital era [2]. As Jens Schröter has argued, video surveillance's technological set-up can be seen as prefiguration of the digital archive due to its "always on" quality that enables "dynamic media memories" [3,4].
My use of the concept of social memory is indebted to the tripartite division of collective memory as outlined most comprehensively in the work of Aleida Assmann, but does not neglect further developments [5,6]. Assmann uses an archival metaphor to differentiate between neuronal, social and cultural memory. Social memory, mostly carried by what Assmann calls "communicative media", is probably the most active site for memory work as a collective practice, because it is here that past experiences of groups, generations, or nations are retrieved from a collective archive into the light of journalistic, political or artistic appropriations that create discourses around which past, and whose past, is to be remembered. Communicative media are, thus, also a site of power struggles, where stakeholders pitch their respective versions of events.
In recent years, the tripartite division of memory in the form in which Assmann developed it has been challenged—most notably by Andrew Hoskins—due to the change of mediatised communication and, thus, the social sense-making processes under digitally networked, online, and real-time conditions [7]. The basic thrust of this criticism is that the carriers and the milieus of neuronal, social, and cultural memory—in keeping to Assmann's terminology—have become more dynamised than her archival model can suggest under the conditions in which personal experiences are today immediately shared on social media and entangled with the mediatisation of everyday life, that means, the way in which our everyday actions are often already instantly mediatised, and how information that we only receive in a mediatised manner shapes our everyday life. Previous models of collective remembering have been challenged by the observation of the continuing dissolution of the "broadcast age", meaning a time where few media channels provided the main information hubs, such as TV and radio did in the second-half of the twentieth century. Many events are important only for specific, but highly malleable groups that form and dissolve on online platforms, and these various groups might not be aware of one another and their respective interpretations. Additionally, as has been argued, authoritative interpretational frames of what events mean to the public are declining [8].
These criticisms are valid, but a reformed vision of collective memory processes, which enables a similarly structured and complex image of memory processes in the digital age than Assmann's work provided for the "broadcast" and previous ages, is in my view still pending, especially when we wish to regard contested discourses. For these reasons I retain the term "social memory": it is before events are given over to the still more stable faculties of "cultural memory" that their construction is "hot", in the sense of malleable and dynamically open to appropriations. The media event of Princess Diana's death is certainly a part of British, and global, social memory. The meaning of her death—and of the surveillance images that show her death—are still contested, as my examples will show. Journalism, as a prime "communicative medium" in Assmann's model, plays a most active role in the constructions of social memory. In an edited volume by Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, the editors stress the role of journalism not only as a news medium, but also as an important domain of the construction and maintenance of shared memory, pointing to
"[t]he longstanding and complicated role that journalism has played in keeping the past alive. From anniversary issues and media retrospectives to simple verbal and visual analogies connecting past and present, journalism incorporates an address to earlier times across the wide array of its conventions and practices".
([9], p. 1)
The editors argue that in the contemporary medial situation, which is characterised by increased remediation, re-appropriation, and an overlaying of media artefacts from past and present on new platforms, this role of journalism as a genre to reassess the past needs to be even more urgently investigated:
"In an era of increasingly blended performative domains, of recycled narratives, pictures and impulses that are no longer identifiably tethered to one point in time, of information that seems to come from nowhere, a recognition that journalism regularly and systematically looks backward is long overdue".
Accordingly, this article will investigate the role of CCTV images as memory media by regarding examples from television news and a quasi-documentary.
As is typical with icons of post-war culture and connected media events, the story of the death of Princess Diana is one of those public narratives that combine fact and speculation. In this sense, the accident death of Diana was not unlike the assassination of John F. Kennedy in its status as a culturally productive memory [10]. Due to this combination of the factual and the speculative, these stories are able to renew their cultural productivity. CCTV footage of Diana and her lover Dodi Al-Fayed recorded by surveillance cameras in the Ritz Hotel on the last day of their lives have become a building block of the productive renewal of the story of Diana's death throughout the last 15 years. The media figure Diana is one of collective fantasy of the later broadcast culture of the 20th century. The Ritz surveillance camera images of her and Dodi Al-Fayed turned into "visual obituaries" ([11], p. 314) in 1997. Broadcast media of the late 20th century used a medium that indexes her death, even though, and here the medial use of the CCTV images of Diana becomes unlike that of the death of JFK, her death is nowhere to be seen in these images. In this context, we will have to regard CCTV images as an unusual memory medium. The CCTV images that were remediated and loaded with cultural meaning in the last twenty years were images connected to deadly events in which the deaths themselves, however, remained invisible. Examples include images of the abduction of the toddler Jamie Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, or of Mohammad Atta in the security zone at Boston airport on 11 September 2001, as well as, of course, the images of Diana discussed here. These images belong to the genre of journalism imagery that Barbie Zelizer has called "about to die" images [12]. In her analysis of the importance of this genre of images for the ways in which journalism creates affect, Zelizer points to the ethical implications of showing an image of a person who is about to die, our conventions to use such images for news narration and impact creation pose important questions about what can be shown in public, how a public can become voyeuristic in regarding the images of atrocity, and what this means for the responsibilities of journalists, that might be circumvented by using "about to die" images. The "always-on" quality of CCTV makes it possible to create "about to" images from many instances in which no journalists were present, as, in the moment of recording, the event that will become memorable was not imminent or foreseeable. The surveillance camera image can be seen as an image form offering itself to "about to" narrations. In this way, CCTV experiences a function creep from its juridical uses to narrative and affecting social uses.
CCTV images are connected to ideas of social memory in two ways: firstly, they and their various remediations, as well as their being networked with other media, make CCTV images a part of the current set of hypermedia tools with which significance is bestowed, experience and memory are articulated and (re-)constructed [13]. One might object that in the current media economy it makes little sense to regard specific kinds of media in isolation. However, taking one very specific image-type as an entry point and regarding its specific interconnections with other medial genres can help us trace relations between media that develop in using them for the tasks of social sense-making.
The everyday situation in which we often do not know the source of the image material with which collective meaning is created on news and social network sites should not be reiterated by academics in a form-blindness. This could lead to black-boxing how specific epistemic logics and aesthetics are co-constitutive of cultural work and its productivity. "Hyperconnected" or not: we need to investigate which mediated material people connect in order to analyze how they are constructing social meaning in a social structure premised on surveillance and security. The specific kind of CCTV frame that becomes iconic despite not showing the relevant moment of the event itself might act as an especially potent "prosthesis" [14] or cue to social memory. As such, these images carry more than an evidential value: they appear as "legal ready-mades", as video artist Manu Luksch [15] has called them, and so they leave ample room for speculation, narrativation, and comment once they are taken out of the purely legalistic frame of surveillance as an ordering practice. In this way, the self-same images make various interpretations possible. They do so because they often foreshadow—rather than represent in any true mimetic relationship—the point of the surrounding narrative. This would mean that in some cases, the image that does not show what we want to remember might help us to experience a mediated memory better than an image that does show this event. Of course, there are also many CCTV images that show exactly the point of the surrounding story, but many of those that have become iconic are images of a "before" of events that offer themselves to narration in memory work.
I argue that the surveillance camera image is doubly potent: carrying the ideological weight of the episteme of surveillance and security, its images are able to be used as affect transmitters in cultural contexts. These contexts include their use in narrative media, where passionate experiences are afforded, reiterated, and act upon the recipient. This essay is divided into four parts: first, I will discuss the status of CCTV images as memory media that enable narration. After situating the CCTV images of Princess Diana in their historical context, I will then discuss the memory uses of the CCTV images of Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed in two cases of remediations from the 2000s. In conclusion, I will sum up my findings, asking how the use of surveillance camera footage in social memory points beyond the case of Diana in a present in which surveillance is normalized, and its artefacts are employed to form passionate social memories.
2. CCTV Images as Memory Media
The Narrative Potential of CCTV Images
Considering CCTV as memory medium has trajectories into two different, but related, research interests: in the realm of the study of memory, a heuristic division of visual memory and narrative memory in public formats [8] is problematized, in my view, by the actual multimodal aspect of memory narratives in mass media. The use of CCTV images is a specific case in which the entanglement between narrative and visual memory is especially pronounced, as I will show below. In the field of further investigating the cultural impact of the saturation of our contemporary life-worlds with surveillance technology, remembering with CCTV also points to an insidious normalization of surveillance and its artefacts as regular parts of our contemporary existence.
I will investigate the construction of memory with surveillance camera images from the following entry points: memory stories are narrations of the past for the needs of the present. The public use of CCTV images, especially when we negotiate the past with and around them, is a form of social communication. Most of the time, social communication in late-modern societies is already mediated. In recent writing, especially on the mediatisation of memory that stresses the importance of the nearly instant mediatisation of (personal) events, it has been stated that (1) also personal memory is immediately mediatized and networked, thereby taking on an implicit public availability; and (2) memory is increasingly susceptible to modification and change. For Andrew Hoskins, this fact calls for a general overhaul of how we understand memory in a manner that acknowledges "hyperconnectivity" and the externalization of personal experience [7,13,16]. Jill A. Edy [8], drawing on a broad overview of research has, likewise, argued that definitions of collective memory have become unstable in an age of selective and versatile media use, as a generalized idea of audience consent inferred by exposure to the same media stories and interpretation routines can no longer be assumed. I argue that stories about the past are circulated by remediations of images that act as immediate memory cues for at least the generations that were exposed to them in the broadcast age while the media event in question was current, but that their narrative interpretations have become more malleable. The impact of media events on generational memory has been discussed in an edited volume by Ingrid Volkmer, which discusses the national and global implications on the generational memory of large-impact media events, such as the death of Princess Diana [17].
To discuss which role CCTV images play in these mediatised memory assemblages, we have to first look at the basic features of this image form.
Going back to the fundamentals, CCTV images, as well as cinematic and video images, are a special kind of photography—and photography is a medium that has since its inception been positioned between science and art, and amongst the tools of scientific observation, policing, and subjectivation. Gleaned from ongoing video footage, the CCTV image is, therefore, unlike other kinds of photography and cinematography. It is more akin, it can be argued, to imaging processes and technologies that are used in medicine, mechanics, and the natural sciences: they are artefacts from a purely functional context. CCTV images exist only as a latent archive: the recordings have to be kept for a legally-prescribed time period, mostly in the range of thirty days, then they have to be deleted. The change from VHS storage to digital storage, however, means at least the technical possibility of keeping the liminal archive for much longer times, and the possibility of a much faster retrieval of specific images according to algorithmic markers, such as face or gait recognition. The movement towards the digital form of CCTV has meant not only a strong increase in the image quality, but also the possibility to more easily share and make use of the images, increasing their travelling potential outside of the policing and juridical realms. When CCTV images are entered into journalistic mediality, the images are usually directly provided by the police. These images, in the public, are foremost connected with a context of visually dramatic crime and deviance [18].
Historically, there has always been a friction between the different uses of mechanically, or electronically, created images. On the one hand, there were images made for observation, both scientific observation and as a tool for the scientization of social ordering practices. On the other hand, images were created for aesthetic and cultural reasons—as purveyors of beauty, vessels of memory, heroization, depictions of divinity, and so on. Images have a tendency not to stay in their assigned contexts, thus, mechanical images can acquire a surplus of cultural meaning. CCTV images are deeply connected with Richard Grusin's description of the cultural and political present as an episteme of surveillance and security, especially so since the events of 9/11. He called this contemporary situation an "age of premediation", which was well captured in the movie Minority Report (2001). As in this movie, in our contemporary late-modern societies the future is experienced as a potential threat, which must be contained by knowledge gathering [19]. Film scholar Winfried Pauleit described the surveillance camera image as a potent symbol for this social situation, which entails in its image-form a reference to a future that will be past when the image is seen [20]. Within the very form of the image, that points to a future past, we can perceive the connection to, on the one hand, cultural theoretical concepts of the age of premediation and risk management, as well as, on the other hand, a deeply productive entry point for the construction of narrative meaning.
When we talk about memory work, we will not stand long before we must also regard narration. As Annette Kuhn states:
"It is impossible to overstate the significance of narrative in cultural memory […] not just as the (continuously negotiated) contents of shared/collective memory-stories, but also of the activity of recounting or telling memory-stories, in both private and public contexts—in other words, of performances of memory."
Images play an important part in the performance of memory, and they also play an extremely important part in narrative memory. In a text on the modes of narrativity, narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan [22] focuses very much on reader construction as a driving force behind narrations, where, as Monika Fludernik has also discussed, narrativity appears as "not an intrinsic property of events [...], but a semantic network built around them by a reflecting consciousness" ([23], p. 376).
Following this notion of Ryan—that narrativity is basically an outcome of a networked cluster of meaning creation around an event, which induces not only temporality, but also other qualities, such as affect-transportation and point—then there is no reason why an image could not stand in for an event in narratives, as a typical media event—icon [24] and, thus, work as a node in this semantic network. This means that, even if the images are themselves not narrative, we create narratives with, and around, the images. I argue that this is the case in narrative constructions of social memory that use CCTV images—even though the images that evoke memory narratives might not even show what is to be remembered. Social memory also depends very much on the affects and emotions that it creates as much as performs. Seidler's study on remembering Diana [1] is an outstanding example for the tantamount role of emotions in the public sphere. It is narratives that are enabled by images as cues to memory that express this effect of simultaneous affect creation and performances of public emotion. Monika Fludernik's concept of experientiality—the possibility to share the experience of the narrating consciousness—as the basic definiens of (fictional) narration [23,25], can also be seen as a prerequisite for social memory—pointing towards the vital aspect of experience and affective investment for "successful", i.e., productive, social memory stories.1
It is in these kinds of narratives that the remediations of CCTV images become productive. In this context, I do not necessarily talk about full scale novels or dramas that evolve from the trigger of historic CCTV footage—though they exist. The narrative movements that use CCTV for their pragmatic functioning, for the evocation of affective social memory, can be very subtle and extremely brief. Sometimes, mere seconds of runtime embedded in a film and accompanied by the right music will point to a specific narrative of the past and its relevance for the present. In this essay, I will present two case studies of the memory work of the last images of Princess Diana: their remediation during news reporting of the 2007 Royal Inquest and the controversial documentary Unlawful Killing of 2011, respectively. First, however, we need to revisit the historical context of these surveillance camera images that became memory media.
3. Historical Context
The Cultural Work of the Last Images of Princess Diana
In the summer of 1997, Princess Diana had spent holidays on financier Mohammed Al-Fayed's boats in the Riviera, inducing photographers to capitalize on the display of her summer love with Al-Fayed's son, Dodi. The fully-mediated love story of Dodi and Diana was brought to a sudden halt by the car crash in the Paris Alma tunnel in the night of 31 August, leaving Dodi Al-Fayed and the driver dead on the scene, Princess Diana dying of her severe internal injuries in the early morning hours of 1 September, and her bodyguard heavily injured. Her death led to a public reaction in Britain that changed, as Seidler has argued, the culture of the display of public emotion in the UK [1]. This lasting importance of the death of Diana is also reflected by ongoing speculation surrounding the circumstances of her death, both in fictional and factual genres. To date, there are at least three novels that satirize, thread conspiracy ideas, or otherwise take their plot spins from the accident in the Alma tunnel and Diana's early death [26,27,28]. Mohammad Al-Fayed has not stopped fueling speculation that the accident might have been planned, leading to a Royal Inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi in 2007. In the year 2011, when Diana, had she lived, would have turned 50 years old, and the year of the marriage of her son William, the big-screen documentary Unlawful Killing, funded by Al-Fayed, was shown out of competition at the Cannes film festival.
As was to be expected from the last images of a persona who still holds sway over a part of the public psyche, the CCTV images were instant icons of the media event of Diana's death. In a sense, this surveillance footage has been elevated to blend with the conventions of highly professional and staged red carpet photography; they have become famous pictures of the woman who was mass media saturation, even though the CCTV images are, in contrast, aesthetically poor. This aesthetic poorness, however, added to the "auratic" quality of the images in the sense that they signaled "realness" and singularity. The moving last images of Diana—as a clip, as ongoing footage rather than as one iconic still—which were used during the Inquest, are not only geared at remembering Diana, but much more specifically, at finally clarifying the circumstances of her death. The way this death is judged is of importance for British identity and social memory. The question whether she died as a result of a tragic accident or was brought to her death splits the public into two epistemic communities who, with their answer, often also show either their allegiance to the Royal Family (it was an accident) or an implicit Republican impulse (she was killed, preferably by a plot planned by Prince Phillip and executed by MI6). In this context, the CCTV-images of Diana have changed their symbolic import: from signifying nothing but the shocking death of the icon they show when still alive, thus pointing to nothing but Diana, Diana, Diana—the fact that she has lived, the fact that she has died—they have, with the passing of time, turned to symbolize conspiracy—and, simultaneously, the legal fight against conspiracy rumours.
4.1. "A Familiar Smile": The Ritz Surveillance Camera Footage During the 2007 Inquest
During the Royal Inquest of 2007, the full length footage from the Ritz was published, changing the symbolic status of the very few images that had been released in 1997. In the most frequently remediated sequence, Diana and Dodi are seen entering the hotel at 4.35pm on 30 August 1997, walking across a lobby before getting into a mirrored lift, where the Princess looks up towards the camera with a "familiar smile" [29].
Images from the last day of Princess Diana taken by the Ritz security cameras (31 security cameras in and around the hotel) had leaked to the media soon after her death. Disseminated to the public—printed or screened—as mostly single images at first, they belong to the category of "visual obituaries", as Dietmar Kammerer calls the convention of using CCTV images as last images of event-related deaths. One series of stills became especially famous: Diana passing through the revolving doors entering the lobby, with Dodi shortly behind her. Kammerer sees Diana entering the "media necrocracy", the group of celebrities who have become symbolically immortal because their image never ages, via these images of her ([11], p. 312). Kammerer also observes how the contemporary serialized publication of the sequence of these images (first, Diana entering the lobby through the revolving door, then Dodi following her) in the German magazine Der Spiegel in an issue from 1997 does not only reconstruct Diana's last day up to the fatal accident. The way the images are reproduced create what he calls a "rudimentary narrative" ([11], p. 312). This also creates a dramatic effect—possibly also, one might add, as this is indeed a scene of entering, of an entry to a final scene—unbeknownst to the protagonists.
The more images and footage are released, the less do CCTV images of the last day of Diana fit the analytical frame of near auratic images set up by Kammerer, who concentrates in his discussion on the use of the images in the late 1990s. The ambivalence between stasis and dynamis stressed by Kammerer regarding the image sequence as it was reproduced in Der Spiegel ([11], p. 314) is resolved during the inquest by showing the footage as a produced video (albeit, with staggering movements as this is time-lag camera footage). The one hour sequence of Princess Diana's last day released as evidence during the inquest in October 2007, thus, ten years after the event, is a post-production in a double sense: it is post-produced from the large amount of footage the Ritz hotel possesses, and it is done so in a way that echoes the reports of Dodi's and Diana's last day that were long since available. This footage conveys nothing but a visual reiteration of these reports. Yet the comments that accompanied the footage's broadcast on SKY News on the evenings of 3 October and 4 October 2007 frame it as a glamour reportage: The reporter's commentary is focused on the "lush" environment inside the Ritz hotel as well as the "luxurious" imperial suite to which we see Diana and Dodi ascending on the footage from the camera inside the lift, and the commentary also offers several comments on what the Princess is wearing and how she is looking [29].2 The investigative footage, fodder for conspiracy theories over the span of ten years, here reveals the only meaning that images of Princess Diana can have, whether on grainy surveillance camera footage or on a high-resolution portrait shot: they are always, and inevitably, footage from the red carpet, celebrity pics. The reporting on Sky News was chosen for discussion here because it was the television program that showed the footage most comprehensively at the time in 2007, and it was the program that devoted most airtime to them. Also, it was the news story that received a high number of views on YouTube, where it was uploaded and shared. The remediation of the SKY News reporting on the CCTV footage on You Tube shows the gathering of meaning surrounding these images in an exemplary way.
The factual banality of these images, simultaneously bestowed with so much narrative meaning, echoes David Marriott's analysis of CCTV images as "empty signs" that he developed in connection with another set of "about-to-die" CCTV images in the British public, the images of Damilola Taylor from 2000, a boy who was stabbed to death in the London suburb of Peckham:
"Like a pure abstraction of the public sphere or an event without history, the CCTV image designates an excess of mimesis over that of narrative meaning […]. The entire three sequences [of video footage of Damilola shortly before him being stabbed, NF] are haunted by this symbolic distance between what appears and what remains ungraspable as resemblance: the death of a boy that cannot be seen and which, because of this, appears everywhere in these images, but without which these images remain an empty sign of that event, a semblance in which his death has vanished. […] Where do we see [the death of the boy]? At first sight it seems untraceable, impossible: the freedom to replay, freeze or enlarge the video image only realizes the following: These images are empty and inaccessible, they cannot act as witnesses to what we know (or imagine) as the death of this boy, a death which remains outside the time and processes of the televisual image."
([30], p. 321)
This observation of the paradoxical emptiness of images of moments before an event occurs, as they are simultaneously charged with narrative meaning, is illustrated by the fact that SKY News showed more CCTV footage on 4 October 2007, in which nothing but the empty service corridor behind the Imperial Suite was to be seen for nearly 40 s. In TV news temporality, 40 s are a long time for basically nothing to be shown, so the fact that this corridor footage was indeed given to the public's scrutiny had to be legitimized by the commentator:
Male Commentator: "Although these seem to be rather boring pictures, these are, in fact, historical. These are the very last pictures we will ever see of Princess Diana alive, and within 15 min of these pictures, Diana and Dodi Fayed will be dead […]. These are moving pictures, I think, although this is just an empty corridor here."
(0:00:24–47) [29].3
The loss of aura of these images, and journalistic ventures to act against this loss by reminding the viewer why she is supposed to give her attention to images of an empty hotel corridor, is also obvious from the advertising language that, to give a complementary example, The Daily Mail used in its reportage of the footage in 2007 [31]. It had to be stressed as early as in the title of the article, that these images were indeed "new and unseen" to a public to which no image of Diana can ever appear unseen, nor new. The "auratic" presence that the images seem to possess in the analysis of Kammerer referred to above lose their aspect of singularity in the ongoing footage. Rather, these images were moved back into the juridical idiom of a public coroner's inquest, and public reporting failed to bestow them with the cultural import that they had in 1997. The images, long since artefacts of media memory, are supposed to become again that for which they were made: legal evidence. This objective in combination with the attempts to historicize and glamourize the images again, as it occurred not only in SKY News but also in national newspapers such as The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, which were similar in their interpretation of the images, creates a friction as to where the cultural location of these images is actually to be found. They have become simultaneously artifacts of legal evidence—factual and objective—and the material of public remembering—affective and affecting.
4.2. Narrating A Befitting Death: Keith Allen's Unlawful Killing (2011)
As stated above, the CCTV images of Diana and Dodi are now signifying conspiracy stories, symbols for the affective certainty that the icon could not have died a banal death. The quasi-documentary film Unlawful Killing [32] was shown at Cannes film festival in 2011 and managed to cause a slight stir in the British public, which was at the time, as film-maker Keith Allen states in the entry narration to his movie, "demented by another Royal wedding", that of Diana's son William: itself a ceremonial media event that resonated with the remembering of Diana. Although the film was strategically launched and very expensive, it failed to secure a distributor either for the US or for the UK, where it's screening pended 87 changes to become legal in cinemas. After a struggle to find a distributor, the film was made available on DVD in early 2015, without aiming to show it in cinemas anymore. Allen's documentary, aiming for a controversial style in the vein of Michael Moore's films, was unsuccessful. Unlawful Killing not only has the problem that its dramaturgy lags and is confused. The supposed "inquest of the inquest" represents the Royal family and especially Prince Phillip as murderers. The movie has one aim: re-opening the questions that the inquest of 2007 had closed [33]. While the movie takes its title from the verdict of the inquest, it does not mention that the jury decided on 7 April 2008 that Diana and Dodi had been unlawfully killed due to grossly negligent driving by the chauffeur, Henri Paul, contributed to by the equally reckless driving of pursuing vehicles. Rather, the movie pretends that the perpetrators of an "unlawful killing" was still open to investigation and interpretation, here in the person of the—Al-Fayed financed—director Keith Allen.
The above mentioned released footage from the Paris Ritz security cameras plays a pivotal role in the movie. The known Paris Ritz footage is used for various reasons at different points of the narration, and for different aims, although it is the same set of images that is used repeatedly in the film to move the plot forward and illustrate the narration. It is divided into three distinct scenes: the first shows Diana and Dodi entering the Ritz through revolving doors on the evening of 31 August. A second scene shows them leaving the Imperial Suite towards the elevator. A third scene is compiled from the footage from the elevator. The last set of images post-produced into a scene shows the couple passing through a corridor towards the rear exit of the hotel that leads into the backstreet, where a Mercedes was parked in which the couple departed with Diana's bodyguard and the driver at around 00:20 h, on the journey which ended with the accident in the Alma tunnel. In addition to this footage of Di and Dodi, there is a set of footage of Henri Paul also entering the Ritz at around 22:00 h on 31 August through the revolving doors, walking around the hotel lobby around 22:20, and a set of images of Henri Paul standing outside the hotel in the backstreet where the Mercedes was parked, waving at someone on the opposite side of the street at around 00:15 on 1 September 1, just prior to the departure of the car with Diana and Dodi.
The film opens with a black screen on which a handwritten letter gradually appears, supposedly by Diana, in which she predicts—or fantasizes, according to epistemic community—her former husband plotting her death in a car crash made to look like an accident. This is followed by a fast cut of Diana and Dodi in the Ritz corridor and elevator, leaving for the fatal drive. These images, as they were also seen on TV, are now made affect-creating by the fast-forward mode in which they are shown, and by a soundtrack of pulsating indie-rock produced by Dave Stewart. In this way, the post-production use of the film Unlawful Killing gives a new meaning to those stale images that the commentators of SKY News could do little to make interesting. They are now weaved into the story that will culminate in the assertion that Prince Phillip ordered the death of Diana and Dodi. As a constitutive part of this narrative, the CCTV images now can regain their auratic quality: they are employed as a fully experiential medium that is supposed to induce a gut feeling in the viewers of Allen's movie that Dodi's and Diana's accident was indeed suspicious.
Allen uses this technique throughout the movie, weaving the self-same sets of CCTV footage into various interpretative and experiential frames: combined with newspaper images and red carpet footage of Diana, the images are used to narrate the love affair with Dodi and to generally represent the memory of Diana; they act as artefacts of mediatized mourning. Combined with photos of the blood samples and images of written documents in the case of the Henri Paul images, the images are used as a supposedly evidential medium once more. Allen's film creates different moods with the self-same set of images by adding different soundtracks, by editing and replaying them in fast-forward or slow-motion mode, and combining them with various other sorts of image material. Allen's film even shows that an empty screen can be made to narrate.
One recurrent ingredient of the conventionalized Diana conspiracy narrative is the missing footage from traffic video cameras along the route that could have been used to establish how fast the Mercedes had actually been going. It could have also established if it was followed or hindered by other vehicles—or it could even have captured the ominous bright flash that is repeatedly stated by conspiracy theorists as the reason for their belief that Diana's death was not a pure accident. A bright flash is supposedly a technique used by security services in order to blind drivers. The missing footage from the traffic cameras is therefore one of those double-bind tropes within the pragmatics of conspiracy stories: the fact that it should exist makes its non-existence suspicious, but its factual non-existence also enables conspiracy theorists to keep to their sinister versions of happenings, as David Cohen states in his non-fiction book on Diana, Death of A Goddess:
"It is true that no CCTV footage was ever produced or mentioned by the police. […]. Once the police said that the speed camera at the Alma was malfunctioning, the disinformation spread and was exaggerated in a way very familiar to those who study rumor. Soon the story spiraled into the 'fact' that all the cameras on the route were out of action that night."
Keith Allen's movie performs the story of the non-existent footage. The following is a transcript from the movie. On the left, you will find the run time, then, given in italics, the video proper, i.e., what you see during the given runtime, then Keith Allen's voiceover narration. I have not considered other soundtracks in this transcript.
1:04:54–1:04:59 empty video tape running on screen
Narrator: "what you are seeing is what the CCTV camera at the entry of the Alma tunnel was recording at the time of the crash."
Narrator: "nothing."
1:05:02–1:05:09 Alma tunnel entry, normal daytime traffic
Narrator: "because it was switched off, although it is usually switched on 24 hours a day."
01:05:10 image of the CCTV camera outside the tunnel
Narrator: "was that just another coincidence…"
01:05:12 poster of Di at Alma tunnel entry, handwritten on it: "ti amo sempre"
Narrator: "…or something more sinister?"
Again, "empty images" are used to narrate a story. The aim of the narrator's speech act is clearly to create doubt in the listener/viewer concerning the prevalent explanation that the non-production of CCTV footage of that night is a coincidence. The film narration expresses this through the second sentence that accompanies the images from normal traffic at the Alma: on that night when Diana died, the CCTV camera was not running, although it is "usually switched on 24 hours a day". The combination of this attempt to convince the viewer of the "fact" that the disabled camera is no mere coincidence is framed in a question. Thus, the illocutionary force of the utterance, the aim for the listener/viewer to provide her own answer to this given possibility, is especially obvious. What the viewer actually sees while she hears the commentary is pushing the emptiness of images that can be put to narrative used to an extreme: In the short time frame of only 16 s, we have three cuts. Of a sequence of 16 s, nearly half (seven seconds) are devoted to showing a reeling video tape.
A reeling video tape is not the same kind of blank screen that the computer age is used to. On a computer or a digital recording, a blank screen is blank, there is nothing but static blackness, even if the time is running. Instead, here we see a video tape running, which means that there is actually something moving on the screen. The empty screen actually does represent something: it has a temporal dimension, a memory dimension. It assumes that the factual reel of video from the CCTV camera at the Alma tunnel looked like this in 1997. That we are presented with a close-up of this camera in the next cut, supposedly doing its job in daytime traffic, seems like a validation of the factuality of the narration. This evocation of non-existing video footage to tell a story of conspiracy is also interesting for the implications it makes about visual surveillance: it is what is missing which is understood as problematic, therefore asking for comprehensive surveillance and policing in a context that could have brought clarity. In an underlying appraisal, surveillance is therefore perceived in a positive light—paradoxically, in a film that is marketing a conspiracy story.
The final cut presents us with a symbolically loaded image: a poster of Diana in a tiara, situated at the column that stands on the roof of the Alma tunnel entry, with the handwritten words "ti amo sempre". This image caters to the mournful tone the movie slips into, even when it is supposed to be "the inquest of the inquest", as the narrator announces at the beginning of the movie. However, where the short sequence does wish to bring about an argument (the CCTV was switched off, this was not a coincidence), it closes and centres on an image mourning Diana, who some people obviously still personally love. The poster shown is not withered but brand new, therefore testifying to the fact that the entry of the Alma tunnel is now a memory site. Like the TV footage discussed in the previous section, Keith Allen's film reveals the same friction that is created by the use of CCTV in the narrative: here, a friction between the investigative journalism the film supposedly performs and a media document of mourning, in the case of this film, probably less public mourning but the very personal one of the billionaire who financed the contentious film.
In this article that analyses the function creep of surveillance imagery's use as memory medium, I have first outlined relevant positions and developments in studies of social or collective media memory. I then discussed aspects of the surveillance camera image as a specific image-form that resonates strongly with our current culture of premediation and security. I have then discussed how the surveillance camera image that foreshadows the surrounding event might be especially productive in the constructions of affecting, experiential memory narratives. In the case study presented in this article, I have discussed the use of CCTV images of Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed on the last day of their lives as a memory medium, employed as remediations in both factual and quasi-documentary narratives.
From the commentating on the footage in a television news show, to a conspiracy-fueling, tendentious documentary, I have discussed the stylistic and rhetorical features of how these images are employed together with narratives to create different kinds of frames and interpretations of the memory of Princess Diana's death in multimodal television and film. We have followed the story of the images themselves, from an early remediation as stills in a German journal in 1997 as images for mourning an icon, to their re-narration during news footage on the Royal Inquest in 2007. Lastly, we have seen how they were productively used as images that can dramatically narrate one man's personal grief in the form of a narrative, supposedly documentary film, Unlawful Killing, which appears as a cinematic monument to Mohamad Al-Fayed's angry mourning.
The question remains: what is the specificity of the image-form of CCTV images in memory narrations? Is there an underlying difference between the use of these images in memory narrations and other kinds of images?
In a social situation in which we are flooded by images, CCTV constantly produces images that are rarely seen. There is a reversal between the ubiquity of my networked smartphone snaps and the ubiquity of ephemeral CCTV recordings. While all of my personal snapshots are increasingly available, CCTV recordings are not. In a public culture of instant availability, CCTV images are restricted. When they are released, they often do not show the happening that is accumulating meaning to become an event, as media event studies normally assume [24]. However, as the case studies have shown, they are able to accumulate narrative meaning as images of a premediation, of the before of an event, but does this create a difference between CCTV images and other kinds of images employed as memory media?
Whether CCTV images as memory media are indeed different from other kinds of images employed in constructions of social memory depends on a decision concerning the status of media difference per se, as Rey Chow and Julian Rohrhuber [35] have also discussed. Basically, the authors state, there are two possible entry points in this discussion: either we follow a narrow reading of Friedrich Kittler's stance [36], assuming that medial translation induces a total transformation without residue. Regarding our examples, this would mean that, once moved into another frame, CCTV images would stop being surveillance images and become indistinguishable from any other kind of image. A second, contrary entry point would follow Jacques Rancière [37], who has argued that a medium, in whatever way it is remediated, retains and quotes the milieu from which it stems ([35], pp. 50, 51). Rancière's understanding of media difference, and traces of original milieus, echoes the original definition of remediation by Bolter and Grusin [38]. In this view, the fact that we remember with surveillance artefacts is in itself meaningful for our contemporary imaginaries. Of course, this article has sided with the second stance, as it is the prerequisite to regard the role of a specific medial form in intermedial relations for the constructions of social memory. The blending of surveillance camera images into affecting memory narratives shows that surveillance technology has become a part of our cultural expressions. This observation points towards a scopic logic of contemporary constructions of visual and narrative memory echoing that of surveillance, which in turn highlights the normalization of surveillance artefacts in a media ecology in which cultural meaning is created. In my view, further discussion of what it means that we have started to remember, with all the affecting aspects of memory narrations, with surveillance artefacts needs to be discussed further in the context of changing definitions of social memory. In the case of the uses of Diana images, we can also observe the friction that CCTV images create in cultural work because of their double-valence as memory media and medium of surveillance, embedded in power structures. We will have to continue to ask what it means for cultural work when media of surveillance technology saturate the ways in which we construct social meaning and express social feeling. Remembering Diana with CCTV means to continue to situate her death in an uneasy conglomeration of legal procedure, conspiracy and grief—it also means that a scopic logic of surveillance is part of contemporary constructions of social emotions. Especially in our contemporary situation—where much of our collective or shared emotional life takes place on "hyperconnected" platforms, narratives with CCTV images help us keep in mind that these platforms are part of an episteme of surveillance and security. It is exactly in a situation where the source of information gets more and more black boxed due to information overload where stakeholders—journalists, analysts, and the public itself—have to pay attention to the kinds of media material that we surround ourselves with. CCTV images are an image form that has been forgotten in discussions on memory in the digital culture, possibly because they appear as arcane forerunners of smartphone footage, which is today often the first image material that appears in the case of an event. However, we should return to them because they can reveal how we remember, now digitally, events from a time when the "age of premediation" was first installing itself.
As any other public form, narratives with CCTV are not "innocent" of, and might partially reveal, underlying power structures. They are part of the creation multimodal discourse events. Using CCTV images for narrative purposes is a social creative process—an activity—by which we make cultural use of surveillance objects, so that they are part of how we, the contemporaries, are expressing ourselves and our becoming in the control societies. The images are part of our reality insofar as they are part of the ways in which we medially make sense of realities. What the case study discussed shows is how contested these realities can be—and how the self-same surveillance images can stay productive in the creation of cultural meaning as memory media.
This research is part of the project "CCTV beyond surveillance"/"Über die Überwachung Hinaus" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant number: FA 1253/1-1.
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1While Fludernik [23] argues that experientiality might be the basic definer for fictional narrative only, I propose that especially memory studies show the existence of factual narratives with very high levels of experientiality. However, there is an important difference between Fludernik's and my use of the terms "experiential" and "experientiality": While Fludernik means to denote ways in which we are made aware of narrators and actors feelings in narrative, I also wish to denote the many other ways in which a medial artefact can make the recipient react emotionally with a sense of experiencing to it. Therefore, in my use, experientiality is a reading effect rather than a property of the narrative text itself.
2Female commentator voice: "Diana in a light-coloured suit, Dodi Al-Fayed next to her, putting his arm around her, escorting her through" (0:01:04–07), "You can see Diana smiling there, just having arrived in Paris, looking up at the camera, though probably not realising it is there, looking very relaxed there with Dodi Al-Fayed, looking very happy" (0:01:31–38); SKY News 3 October 2007, Diana's last hours—YouTube, video 1 [29].
3Diana's last hours—YouTube, video 2 [29].
© 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Falkenhayner, N. Surveillance and Social Memory: Remembering Princess Diana with CCTV. Humanities 2016, 5, 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030073
Falkenhayner N. Surveillance and Social Memory: Remembering Princess Diana with CCTV. Humanities. 2016; 5(3):73. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030073
Falkenhayner, Nicole. 2016. "Surveillance and Social Memory: Remembering Princess Diana with CCTV" Humanities 5, no. 3: 73. https://doi.org/10.3390/h5030073
Humanities, EISSN 2076-0787, Published by MDPI


I bought a web site from godaddy and cant get rid of top advertisement, i purchased hosting with the?
Before I begin, I wanna ask: I bought a web site from godaddy and cant get rid of top advertisement, I purchased hosting with the?.
My next question is: I'm curious to know for those of you who have a talent for this, what % of your sales are generated from this angle. Especially in comparison to sending out emails.
Any tips also appreciated. Thanks!..
Your question was: I bought a web site from godaddy and cant get rid of top advertisement, I purchased hosting with the?.
I like chatting on the phone ... and just completed two sales to End users (both had the term "Career" in the respective HostGator names) via mainly phone contact and then follow up emails, IMHO. I struck out on a third, an .ORG, via the phone ... but I met a very sweet southern lady who said she "appreciated my thinking of them", however.
Research potential issues first, and then call (and continue to email market) to your End users, folks!.
Not everything is about money I guess.
Nice information Jeff, I've never tried to contact end users by phone, only by email and even advertising some names in a newspaper (with no success), I might try to contact by phone as well now..
Then If I were you I would give it a shot. As long as you are confident in your phone skills, give it a shot and good luck..
I think a phone call is very important in some situations as abcproduction stated very well.
...oops post removed, Sorry I misread the first post it's 2 am.
I can make a carefully thought out and well written letter, but when I talk on the phone, I can never be too ready.
When you call the end users, will they feel like they are receiving a phone call from another sales telemarketer?.
I received calls a few years back from domainers wanting me to purchase their name for $1,000 - $10,000.


And although Ronaldo and co couldn't find another way past David De Gea, this was still a solid masterclass from the Serie A leaders and a bit of a lesson for United.
Juventus were also in powerful form, both at home and abroad. This season they have recently set a club record of ten straight wins at the start of a season and are five points ahead in the Serie A race for the Scudetto. In the Champions League the Bianconeri have won both their group matches against Valencia and Young Boys.
Massimiliano Allergri's side certainly started this match like a side having a barnstorming opening to the campaign. Despite dropping their first league points in Italy last Saturday, in the home draw in Turin with Genoa, they were on it from the first whistle at Old Trafford.
When Ronaldo first returned to the stadium, with Real Madrid in March 2013, he scored the winner to ruin Sir Alex Ferguson's hopes of a grandstand finish in Europe. But before he settled down on that night, he was as nervous as a kitten and was overdoing the tricks in an effort to impress. This time around it was different. With a few Ballon d'Ors under his belt from the last five years, the now 33-year-old wasn't overawed as he began this game in Juventus colours.
Despite Ashley Young and Chris Smalling handing out early 'welcome back' messages, the Portuguese superstar soaked it up and was vitally instrumental in Juve taking a 17th-minute lead.
Ronaldo crossed from the right and when Smalling and Cuadrado challenged at the near post, the ball squirted loose for Paulo Dybala to snap up the gift of a straightforward finish.
It was a difficult opening for the home fans as the Italians forced the Reds on the back foot.
Only an early Young free-kick, met by a Paul Pogba header, interrupted the flow of black-and-white traffic heading constantly towards the Stretford End.
David De Gea kept the score down with a double save in the 38th minute. The Old Trafford crowd had recognised the trademark gunslinger stance as Ronaldo lined up a free kick and as his shot twisted and turned in the air, the United goalkeeper read it but the power forced him to parry. Blaise Matuidi, following up, sent in a rasping effort but the Spaniard had his number as well and pushed the ball away to safety.
United had become a second-half team in the last two matches and the stadium was hoping the Reds might be able to respond after the interval. Juventus had other ideas, though, and the break did nothing to quell their superiority.
Once again it was thanks to De Gea that the Italians were still in reach. The 'keeper got a touch on a typical Ronaldo thunderbolt after 52 minutes to stop the no.7 celebrating goal at Old Trafford again.
The Reds needed a spark and the fans needed something to get their teeth into to lift a side who were under the cosh. A spell of intensity from United raised the temperature but they still couldn't really trouble former Arsenal goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny and with experienced defensive warriors Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini in front of him, a breakthrough was proving extremely difficult.
Former Juventus star Pogba almost shook his old club when he let fly with a long-range shot that came back off the base of the post and struck Szczesny before going out for a corner in the 74th minute.
United were only briefly at full tilt, however, and Juve couldn't be breached with only a weak Anthony Martial low shot suggesting there might be a dramatic climax in the offing.
In the end Juventus proved just too strong and experienced on this stage for the Reds.
Subs not used: Romero, Bailly, Pereira, Fred, Herrera, Darmian, Chong.
Juventus: Szczesny, Cancelo (Costa 87), Bonucci, Chiellini (C), Alex Sandro, Bentancur, Pjanic, Matuidi, Cuadrado (Barzagli 81), Dybala (Bernardeschi 74), Ronaldo.
Subs not used: Perin, De Sciglio, Benatia, Kean.
Booked: United – Young. Juventus – Matuidi, Chiellini.


My name is Marti, and I am a storyteller. Each person, each family has a unique story, and through my lens I strive to tell yours. The way your newborn curls into your chest. The way your little one holds your fingers as they're learning to walk. The way you and your partner look into each other's eyes and smile at a joke only the two of you are privy to. The way your eyes light up when you watch your children playing. The way your children run to you when they're scared, or excited, or hurt. These are the little moments worth remembering, the little moments your children deserve to have physical reminders of. The moments you deserve to experience fully. Step out from behind your camera and let me do the documenting.
This is my goal every time I pick up my camera, whether I'm photographing my own family or yours: to capture beautiful moments, strong connections, captivating stories, and powerful emotions- the good and the bad.


text:
Dramatic Chandeliers Are the Highlight at These Top Restaurants
Architectural Digest |
Keith Flanagan |
Original Article: "Dramatic Chandeliers Are the Highlight at These Top Restaurants"
Saying the word chandelier in the same sentence as dinner service can have the mouthfeel of dust—old-fashioned and old French, it evokes white tablecloths and too many forks. But while brilliant menus will make your eyes widen, lighting designers might just make your jaw drop. Look up from your plate, and you might find that the restaurant's all-out, cutting-edge feature is hanging above your head. Whether it's a contemporary chandelier or a full-scale installation, these fixtures are so brilliant they're bound to steal the spotlight—here's just a taste.
Booth One, Chicago
Revitalizing Chicago's iconic Pump Room, where one particular booth has long been reserved only for legends—from the likes Frank Sinatra to Oprah—Booth One reopened late last year, and it's all the more luminous for everyday luminaries. While much has been restyled, a cosmic system of globes (spun from the mind of Ian Schrager during an earlier redesign) is still in its fixed orbit, casting ethereal light over all patrons (and not just the stars).
How To Try a Chicago Dog with Beaujolais for National Hot Dog Day
Say Oui to National Hot Dog Day! Today we celebrate the best hot dog variation in existence, Chicago…
In The Restaurants Our Chef's Predictions and Resolutions for 2018
Our chefs aren't psychic but they do have a finger on the pulse of what's on the horizon for the New…

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Class template for cache aligned memory usage in C++ (to provide the information you need to understand my question is a lot, however it is already compressed)
i try to implement a class template to allocate and access data cache aligned. This works very good, however trying to implement support for arrays is a problem.
Semantically the code shall provide this mapping in memory for a single element like this:
cache_aligned<element_type>* my_el =
          new(cache_line_size) cache_aligned<element_type>();
| element | buffer |

the access (so far) looks like this:
*my_el; // returns cache_aligned<element_type>
**my_el; //returns element_type
*my_el->member_of_element();

HOWEVER for an array, i'd like to have this:
 cache_aligned<element_type>* my_el_array =
         new(cache_line_size)  cache_aligned<element_type()[N];
 | element 0 | buffer | element 1 | buffer | ... | element (N-1) | buffer |

So far i have the following code
template <typename T>
class cache_aligned {
    private:
        T instance;
    public:
        cache_aligned()
        {}
        cache_aligned(const T& other)
        :instance(other.instance)
        {}
        static void* operator new (size_t size, uint c_line_size) {
             return c_a_malloc(size, c_line_size);
        }
        static void* operator new[] (size_t size, uint c_line_size) {
             int num_el = (size - sizeof(cache_aligned<T>*)
                              / sizeof(cache_aligned<T>);
             return c_a_array(sizeof(cache_aligned<T>), num_el, c_line_size);
        }
        static void operator delete (void* ptr) {
             free_c_a(ptr);
        }
        T* operator-> () {
             return &instance;
        }
        T& operator * () {
             return instance;
        }
};

the functions cache_aligned_malloc
void* c_a_array(uint size, ulong num_el, uint c_line_size) {
    void* mem = malloc((size + c_line_size) * num_el + sizeof(void*));
    void** ptr = (void**)((long)mem + sizeof(void*));
    ptr[-1] = mem;
    return ptr;
}

void free_c_a(void ptr) {
    free(((void**)ptr)[-1]);
}

The problem is here, the access to the data should work like this:
my_el_array[i]; // returns cache_aligned<element_type>
*(my_el_array[i]); // returns element_type
my_el_array[i]->member_of_element();

My ideas to solve it, are:
(1) something similar to this, to overload sizeof operator:
static size_t operator sizeof () {
   return sizeof(cache_aligned<T>) + c_line_size;
}

--> not possible since overloading sizeof operator is illegal
(2) something like this, to overload the operator [] for the pointer type:
static T& operator [] (uint index, cache_aligned<T>* ptr) {
    return ptr + ((sizeof(cache_aligned<T>) + c_line_size) * index);
}

--> not possible in C++, anyway
(3) totally trivial solution
template <typename T> cache_aligned {
    private:
          T instance;
          bool buffer[CACHE_LINE_SIZE];
          // CACHE_LINE_SIZE defined as macro
    public:
          // trivial operators and methods ;)
};

--> i don't know whether this is reliable, actually i'm using gcc-4.5.1 in linux ...
(4) Replacing T instance; by T* instance_ptr; in the class template and using the operator [] to calculate the position of the element, like this:
| pointer-to-instance | ----> | element 0 | buffer | ... | element (N-1) | buffer |
this is not the intended semantic, since the instance of the class template becomes the bottleneck when calculating the address of the elements.
Thanks for reading! I dont' know how to shorten the problem. It would be great, if you can help! Any work around would help a lot.
I know alignment is an extension in C++0x. However, in gcc it is not available yet.
Greetz, sema

A: When c_line_size is compile time integral constant then of course better pad the cache_aligned with char array depending on sizeof T.
You can also check if 2 T-s fit onto one cache line and lower the alignment requirement accordingly.
Do not expect miracles from such an optimization. I think 2 times better performance for some algorithms is the ceiling that you can squeeze out from avoiding cache line splits.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Top 10 Things To Do In Bhutan.
Of one just many amazing Dzong´s around Bhutan
Bhutan the tiny country Perched high in the eastern part of the Himalayas, it is the world's last remaining Buddhist Kingdom, where it´s landlocked between its vast neighbors China and India. Bhutan it´s the world¨s only carbon negative country in the world. Which is only one of many reasons why Bhutan it´s called the "last Shangri-La."
Bhutan offers an endless amount of adventures both in trekking in the Himalayas, some of the best-preserved temples and monasteries the world´s, most of them constructed traditionally completely without the use of any nails. In fact, Bhutan got some much to offer, but here are the top 10 Things To Do In Bhutan, if you're lucky to visit this fantastic country. Luckily still mostly untouched by tourism.
1. Be a stranger in a rural village.
Rural villages in Bhutan still continue to practice age-old customs and traditions and uphold traditional values more than the people in the urban towns. People in rural communities are incredibly kind and hospitable towards visitors.
A tiny rural village in Bhutan
You will not only get to interact with locals and listen to their stories but also indulge in their customs, food, games and farming activities. If you have the time, plan to spend a night.
2. Bow down to the magnificence of Punakha Dzong.
Of the many dzongs (fortresses) in Bhutan, Punakha Dzong is a must see. It is generally recognized as the most beautiful dzong in the country, with its ornate wood carvings and intricate paintings. In spring the lilac-colored jacaranda trees bring a lush sensuality to the dzong's characteristic towering whitewashed walls.
This Dzong was the second to be built in Bhutan, and it served as the capital and seat of government until the mid-1950s. All of Bhutan's kings have been crowned here. This dzong is still the winter residence of the Dratshang (official monk body).
The amazing Punakha Dzong is built without a single nail
Aside from its structural beauty, Punakha Dzong is also notable for containing the preserved remains of Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the unifier of Bhutan, as well as a sacred relic known as the Ranjung Karsapani.
This relic is a self-created image of Avalokiteswara that miraculously emerged from the vertebrae of Tsangpa Gyarey, the founder of the Drukpa School when he was cremated.
While you're in Punakha, another great site to visit is the Temple of Drukpa Kinley the Divine Madman, where you can receive blessings from a wooden phallus, famously known for helping couples without children conceive.
Punakha valley also boasts a pleasant climate with warm winters and hot summers, making it an ideal respite from the colder valleys of Bhutan.
3. Immerse yourself in the local festivity.
Tshechus are cultural festivals and grand events where entire communities come together to witness religious mask dances, receive blessings, and socialize.
People come dressed in their finest Bhutanese attire made of expensive hand-woven textiles with intricate designs to witness the mask dances and colorful traditional folk dances.
Local dancers at Thimphu Tshechu
You love taking pictures of people, Tshechus and other local festivals are the best time. Tshechus and local festivals happen throughout the year in different parts of the country. For a list of all festivals and other events in Bhutan, visit http://happyul.com/bhutan-festivals-and-events
4. Dance with Nomads at the highest settlement in Bhutan.
The Royal Highland Festival is a nomad festival which takes place at 3800 meters in Laya, the highest settlement in Bhutan. Driven by the underlying goal of making the Highlands a vibrant and thriving economy, the festival aims to promote the sustainable livelihood of the Highlanders, showcase the Highlanders' innovation, and exhibit the highlands as a pride of Bhutan.
The festival brings together highlanders from various parts of Bhutan to exchange values, knowledge, skills and best practices related to highlands and yak farming.
Traditional handcraft from the Layaps in Laya
The festival showcases yaks in traditional decorations, traditional poem recitations, horse races, local traditional crafts exhibitions, photo exhibitions, mastiff (dog) exhibitions, strongman contests, and cultural programs and dances. If you're feeling adventurous and provided you are fit; you should take this chance to participate in the Snowman Run, a 2-day marathon.
In Laya, you will also get the opportunity to interact and absorb the culture and customs of the Layaps. While you are at it, go take a hot dip in the Gasa Hot Spring. The medicinal properties of these hot springs have been used by the Bhutanese people for centuries to cure various ailments ranging from arthritis to body aches and even sinusitis.
5. Introduce yourself to the 13 traditional arts and crafts of Bhutan.
If you are somebody who is fascinated with arts and crafts, then the Institute of the traditional 13 arts and crafts in Thimphu is the place for you. This is the institute from where young Bhutanese acquire the skills that decorate Bhutan – building architecture, textiles, jewelry, and everything in between.
These arts and crafts have been practiced since the 15th century in Bhutan and were formally categorized into the 13 traditional groups towards the end of the 17th century. Passed down from generation to generation, studying these arts and crafts today involves an intensive 4-6 years of training at the Institute.
Traditional female Kiras in Bhutan
The great thing about visiting the National Institute of Zorgi Chusum (13 arts and crafts) is that you can walk in while the classroom is in session and not only spectate and take pictures of the students working on their art or craft, but even ask questions and interact with the students and teachers of the institute.
A little bit of cultural exchange in itself, and is that not one of the reasons we travel?
6. Throw insulting chants at an Archery tournament.
It may be the national sport, but archery is far more than just a sport in Bhutan. It is a mania. With men devoting vast resources of time, energy and money on it, the game has produced more than its fair share of "archery widows."
The traditional form of the game is played using bamboo bows and arrows as much as with the world's most expensive hunting archery equipment. The top archers command nationwide respect and adoration while key match-winning exploits become the stuff of legend.
A group of men is playing Archery the national sport of Bhutan wearing a Gho
Teams will often consult astrologers and shamans in hopes of securing a victory. Before a match begins, even the direction from which the teams approach the range is determined by such 'seers.' A great deal of the occult practices and secret rituals are almost necessary precursors to important matches.
You will get to see, however, that actual performance on the field is a more exact science of skill and poise. Yet the Bhutanese consider archery a test of manhood. It is standard practice for players to consume copious amounts of alcohol throughout a match, with lavish coaxing by opponents.
At the same time, opponents and their women cheerleaders will throw constant teases, taunts, and insults. Against this barrage of stimuli, a player is expected to keep his cool and shoot well.
In Bhutan, archery is truly much more than just a sport.
7. Hike the Jomolhari Laya Gasa Trek.
The Jomolhari Laya Gasa Trek is considered by trekking guides to be one of the most scenic treks in Bhutan, offering incredible views of some of the most pristine and unspoiled landscapes in Bhutan.
This fourteen-day, 217 km journey begins at Drukgyel in Paro and takes you through gorgeous alpine meadows, high mountain passes, and dense sub-tropical jungles before terminating in Damji in Tashithang, Gasa.
Gasa Dzong in Gasa, one of the hidden gems in Bhutan
Along the trail, you'll be able to spot indigenous animals such as blue sheep and Takins, the national animal of Bhutan. You'll travel through remote mountain villages inhabited by Layaps (people of Laya), who are a distinct segment of the Bhutanese society with unique culture, traditions, and appearance.
This is one of the more difficult treks offered in Bhutan due to the high altitudes and steep ascents and descents along the path. The best seasons to complete this challenge are in April-June and Mid-September to Mid-November. There are ways to shorten this trek if 14 days is a little too long for you.
Planning a trip to Bhutan? So can I highly recommend Breath Bhutan travel agency.
8. Party in Thimphu.
If you like to indulge in a little bit of local brew while traveling, you should experience in the weekend nightlife in Thimphu. Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, has several nightclubs, live music venues and many traditional dance venues called 'Drayangs.'
The Draying's are a uniquely Bhutanese experience – with girls dressed in Kiras (national dress) who will sing and dance to whatever song you request for.
Bhutanese whiskey is loved by every visitor, including the cheap but very popular Special Courier and Bhutan Highland whiskey by the Army Welfare Project. You can buy the Special Courier at US$ 5 dollars a bottle (750 ml) from a convenience/grocery store. Bars and clubs may add a premium on every shot you buy.
Mojo Park during a local concert. A great place to go partying in Bhutan
As for beer, there are many kinds to choose from. The most popular is Druk 11000 (strong beer) which is enjoyed by locals in every corner of Bhutan. You can also try out the craft beers from three microbreweries in Bhutan, which offer selections of Amber Ale, Stout, IPA, Red Rice Lager, and Wheat Beer.
9. Explore the less visited Eastern Bhutan.
As an incentive to open and improve tourism activities in Eastern Bhutan the Royal Government of Bhutan is offering a waiver on the Sustainable Development Fee of USD 65 per person per night halt in the following eastern districts of Lhuntse, Monggar, PemaGatshel, SamdrupJongkhar, Trashigang, and Trashi Yangtse.
In Tashigang you can find the remote nomad settlement of Merak and Sakteng. Merak-Sakteng stands out as a distinct attraction in Bhutan. Unlike anywhere else in the country, it offers the visitor the experience of a unique semi-nomadic lifestyle, culture and vernacular in one of the most scenic pastoral valleys in the protected area of the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary.
You can also choose to do the seven day Merak and Sakteng Trek, which is a moderate trek (between 1,500m and 4,100m) traversing through the semi-nomadic villages of Gengu (3400m), Merak (3500m), Sakteng (2800m), Thakthi (2200m), and Joenkhar (1700m).
If you are a textile freak, KhomaVillage in Lhuntse is the place where some of the most famous and expensive textiles are woven in silk and cotton. Khoma village is renowned for distinctive 'Kishuthara' weaving, and it is the primary income source of the villagers. Kishuthara is a silk weaving technique with intricate hand laced patterns.
It is the most expensive textile in Bhutan and highly sought after by collectors.
10. Tick the Tiger's Nest.
The Tiger's Nest or Taktshang is the most iconic travel attraction in Bhutan. A google search for 'Bhutan' may throw up more images of Taktshang than of anything else. The sight of the monastery, clinging precariously to a cliffside, after an hour and a half's worth of climbing is a truly awe-inspiring and wonderful sight.
The fantastic Tiger Nest Monastery in Bhutan
Many visitors are known to have broken down and cried at such a moment. Maybe it's to do with perceiving the fruit of one's hard labor of having crested the climb.
The monastery was first built in 1692 at a cave where Guru Rinpoche meditated in the 7th century A.D. Legend states that Guru Rinpoche flew to the site atop the back of a tigress and meditated in the cave for 3 years, 3 months, 3 days and 3 hours in order to subdue evil demons residing within it.
The cave is considered a sacred Buddhist site as many famous saints have traveled to meditate in it.
Taktsang Lhakhang is located approximately 10 km north of Paro town at an altitude of 3.120 m. In order to arrive at the temple, visitors must trek for around 40/50minites uphill through beautiful, shady pine forests.
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Bhutan the tiny country Perched high in the eastern part of the Himalayas, it is the world's last remaining Buddhist Kingdom, offers an endless amount of adventure and culture experiences. Here´s a complete guide to the top 10 Things To do in Bhutan. #Bhutan #asia #travel #traveltips #travelblogger #himalaya #adventure
Filed Under: Asia, Bhutan, Destinations Tagged With: Asia, backpacking, Bhutan, budget hiking, Travel, unesco, unusual places


Love and passion for food is what keeps me busy in my kitchen and that's the best part being a food blogger. We all experiment with food to certain extent and if that experiment turns out as a great recipe so it's worth sharing. I love the fact of assembling few ingredients together and turn that into a gorgeous recipe. Well, that's what the food is about, creativity, passion, memories and enjoy it in the end.
There was a time in my life when I had only ordered brownie in a coffee shop and just enjoyed the moment with brownie and my coffee.
Baking has always been my hidden passion, if you don't know much about me, my love for food started from baking. In my school days, I used to bake quite a lot at home and especially the cakes. Birthday cakes were just an excuse for me to bake and share the love with friends, family and teachers.
This time I have created a new recipe from the scratch and that is a healthy twist to the amazing brownie. Inspiration is derived from my Muffin (little one) who had asked me to bake cake for him for the first time and I couldn't disappoint him by saying NO. I had to come up with a healthy way to bake brownie and this was the first time he had ever tasted brownie. I usually don't give so much sugar to the kids and then adjust it here and there accordingly.
As you may have noticed that I have been creating a lot of food recipes and if you are following me on Instagram so it's very clear, not so much of baking. This time I didn't have that much flour to use in the recipe at home and since there was a strong urge to create a healthy version of brownie so I had used oats to make this recipe ( used organic ).
Avocado is another favourite ingredient that I use a lot at home and made avocado nice- cream few weeks ago. Avocado is a perfect replacement of butter and the brownie turned out so good that it was gone in 30 minutes. It was a healthy sweet delight for the kids.
Blitz rolled oats in the food processor to make flour.
Now into that add avocado, banana in the same blender, blitz for few seconds.
Add cocoa powder + salt + baking soda + now add eggs + vanilla pod/ essence + golden syrup + honey to the same.
Pour the batter on the lined baking sheet in a baking tray. Now add carrots, raisins and mix it gently and spread evenly. Top the batter with chopped almonds.
Bake for 25-30 minutes. Check after 25 minutes, if it's done, take it out and serve with sour cream.


text:
Sure Signs You've Already Had COVID, Says Dr. Fauci
Long COVID can be a fate worse than death, say some patients.
Coronavirus cases are going down but COVID-19 is still taking a hidden toll that won't be reflected by the number of deaths: It's a syndrome called Long COVID, or Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), a chronic illness that affects 10 to 30% of COVID sufferers, young and old. Even after a mild case of coronavirus, these "long haulers" have symptoms that may never go away naturally. And while researchers are working furiously on a cure, patients may never get back to 100% of their former selves. "When we urge people to get vaccinated, it's not just because COVID is a matter of life and death, although it is," says Dr. Leo Nissola, an immunologist, immunotherapy scientist and CBS News Medical Contributor. "It's also because there's this middle ground—a debilitating illness that affects young and old." At a press conference earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci listed the symptoms of PASC. Read on to hear about each one—and to ensure your health and the health of others, don't miss these Sure Signs You May Have Already Had COVID.
Dr. Fauci Warned of Extreme Fatigue
Dr. Fauci has said that PASC resembles chronic fatigue syndrome, aka CFS or myalgic encephalomyelitis. As you can guess from the name, the hallmark symptom is fatigue. This is not a general sleepiness, or the exhaustion you might feel after a long day on your feet (although you may feel exhausted). For many people, it's more like your energy is being drowned by a suppressive force inside of you. One patient compared PASC to a Dementor in Harry Potter. "What is worrisome about this fatigue is that, even if it goes away for a day or two, many Long Haulers see it return after they exert themselves in any way," says Dr. Nissola. "This 'post-exertional malaise' can come after they go for a walk—or, for some, if they try to do simple chores, like the dishes."
Dr. Fauci Warned of Muscle Aches
Dr. Fauci warned of "myalgia," aches and pains caused by the post-viral infection. These can appear transitory. One day you might have a pain in your chest that feels like a heart attack—but is actually an inflammation of your rib cage, perhaps—and the next horrible back pain; some patients have had consistent pain in places that were perfectly fine before they got COVID. "The virus disrupts a number of systems, from vascular to neurological," says Dr. Nissola. "These can cause pain anywhere."
RELATED: Sure Signs You May Have Dementia, According to Mayo Clinic
Dr. Fauci Warned of Temperature Dysregulation
Fauci has seen people with high fevers due to COVID—some fevers can last for months. "Your body may think it still has a virus even though the virus may have left," says Dr. Nissola. "Another theory is that there are still strands of COVID inside long haulers. In either case, your body is trying to regulate itself, and this can result in a fever or chills."
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Dr. Fauci Warned of Brain Fog
Because COVID can affect your neurological system, many long haulers have what Dr. Fauci calls "difficulty concentrating" and "brain fog." This can resemble dementia for some; an inability to remember things you had no trouble remembering before COVID, like simple words, or an inability to remember why you were working on a task. Some patients find themselves staring into space, because it's easier to do that than make decisions. "You may also get migraines," said Dr. Nissola. "Or anxiety and depression. COVID-19 is nefarious in how thoroughly it can disrupt your brain."
RELATED: Over 60? Experts Warn You Watch For These Health Issues
You May Have Many Other Symptoms
Other long haulers have described having tinnitus, nausea, fainting spells—you name it. "The scope of the seriousness of this infection is extraordinary—from people who get a stuffy nose and a little sore throat and ache, and they get better to people who spend 14 days with a sustained fever and come out wiped out with a postviral dystonia, to people who have serious lung involvement that either puts them in the hospital or creates intubation needs and intensive care…to people who die," said Dr. Fauci. "I mean, that range of severity is really in many respects unprecedented."
RELATED: Warning Signs You're Getting Cancer
What to Do if You Suffer From Long COVID
Don't be shy. If you don't feel quite right after experiencing COVID, or something that resembled COVID (even a mild case) contact a medical professional. While PASC was ill-defined at the beginning of the pandemic, it is becoming more well known. Although there is no codified treatment, your doctor will likely rule out other issues and then treat the symptoms, if not the syndrome itself. "We still have a lot to learn," said Dr. Nissola. "To long haulers out there, I'd say stay hopeful—and to anyone who remains unvaccinated, I'd say don't take your health for granted. Because COVID could take your health." And to get through this pandemic at your healthiest, don't miss these 35 Places You're Most Likely to Catch COVID.
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Clients often believe there is something inherently wrong with them, they are often surprised and relieved to learn their feelings of anxiety, depression, shame and worthlessness are not facts about them but originate from the unheard voice of an inner critic.
The inner critic develops early in life in an attempt to protect a young child from correction or rejection as a result of not being fully accepted as they are. The inner critics intention was to help the child become more acceptable in the existing social environment. Over time the effect of comments by an unknown inner critic become demoralizing and destructive.
Learning about the existence of the inner critic can help you become learn how the inner critic operates. Hypnotherapy allows your adult self to communicate directly with the inner critic and let it know how you like to hear comments and receive directions. You become more empowered and the critic can transform the formerly negative messages into positive encouragement and support.