The South West region of Western Australia offers a range of industrial land suitable for both heavy and light industry.
The Preston Industrial Park contains about 3,000 hectares that will become available for light and specialised industry.
Industrial estates at Kemerton, north of Bunbury, and Shotts, near Collie, provide 2,100 and 235 hectares of land respectively for heavy industry.
The South West Development Commission is an excellent first point of contact for any company considering doing business in the region and can assist in locating suitable land.
Your site for strategic and heavy industry in the South West region.
The Kemerton Strategic industrial Area is located 17 kilometres from the port city of Bunbury in the South West region of Western Australia.
It is an important strategic industrial estate for the region, with links to the Bunbury port, and is well serviced by existing power, water, gas and road infrastructure.
Operations based at Kemerton range from silicon production to silica sand production and a peaking power plant. A lithium processing plant is the latest venture to establish in the industrial area, with works underway.
Visit the Landcorp website for more information on the Kemerton Industrial Park.
The proposed Shotts Industrial Park, in the coal-rich Collie area, will be key to accommodating future industries.
Since the Shotts Industrial Park business case was endorsed by State Cabinet in early 2009, a number of companies have shown interest in setting up operations at the 235ha park, including a urea plant.
Located in close proximity to the Collie coalfields, the site is serviced by power, rail and roads and located in close proximity to the Collie coalfields.
The South West Development Commission is part of the steering committee for the industrial park and will continue to work towards advancing the proposal.
The South West Development Commission is developing the Preston Enterprise Park (Northern Precint) to accommodate future South West business and industry.
Picton Enterprise Park is located on the South Western Highway, approximately 10 kilometres from the Bunbury CBD.
The Enterprise Park is home to a range of industries operating in the sectors of manufacturing and fabrication, fuel storage and distribution, and waste recycling.
The South West Development Commission has undertaken feasibility work for the next stage of the Picton Enterprise Park.


It instantly reduces the signs of fatigue with a combination of powerful ingredients (including antioxidants, peptides and caffeine) for revived, fresher-looking eyes.
Application: With the ring finger, use a half pump to apply morning and night, gently patting around eyes. Avoid contact with inside of eyes. Can also be used at any time throughout the day or over eye makeup for an extra pick-me-up.
Ingredients: Cyclopentasiloxane, Phenyl Trimethicone, Butylene Glycol, Glycerin, Cetyl Alcohol, Glyceryl Stearate SE, Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea) Butter, Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil, Steareth-20, N-Hydroxysuccinimide, Chrysin, Palmitoyl Oligopeptide, Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide, Lycium Barbarum Fruit Extract, Algae Extract, Niacinamide, Fraxinus Excelsior Bark Extract, Silanetriol, Potassium Citrate, Silica, Dimethicone, Hyaluronic Acid, Menthyl Lactate, Caffeine, Chamomilla Recutita (Matricaria) Extract, Cucumis Sativus (Cucumber) Fruit Extract, Allantoin, Tocopheryl Acetate, Retinyl Palmitate, Caprylyl Glycol. May Contain: Mica (CI 77019), Titanium Dioxide (CI 77891).


Music brings back so many brilliant memories.
I bought the new Michael Bublé Christmas record yesterday and I love it.
No one ever outgrows Alvin & the Chipmunks. I have two CDs with these little adorable rodents singing their lungs out. The otter of 45s is so retro. I recall how funny it was to explain to our kiddos how the old vinyls are like a CD, but not. We have a bunch of these in storage at my in-laws. It would be such fun to get those out one day soon. Thanks for the memories!
Oh man I remember how much I wanted a radio and cassettes! Gosh those were the days huh.
Cassettes were always in my stocking. I believe I had this one too!!
Love your pick this week!
What a wonderful memory to share with us, thank you. Music has a way of bringing back all sorts of memories like no other thing can.
I just love the Chipmunk's Christmas song and could listen to it hundreds of times during the holiday.
My husband loved the Chipmunks and I guess he drove his family nuts listening to them AND of course he played the Christmas songs over and over and now he has passed that on to his children!
Oh, I am not ready either, I know how you feel!
I miss those days. I always found them in my stocking. I love the Chipmunks.
I guess the first time I heard Alvin was on TV, but I do remember the old 8 tracks & believe it or not I still see them all the time up at Goodwill can you believe it? Does anyone still have an 8 track that works? Sheesh!! Thanks for playing along - see you next time.


Lavish Witch Body Lotion – The Spunky Cauldron, Inc.
It puts the lotion on the skin with minimal ingredients. Never tested on animal. No hidden ingredients.
Directions: Apply to body as needed.
Ingredients: water, coconut oil, sunflower seed oil, cetaryl alcohol, coco-glucoside, shea butter, xanthum gum, apricot kernel oil, phenoxyethanol, aloe vera juice powder, citric acid, tocopherol, lactic acid, benzoic acid, dehydroacetic acid, and essential oils of lemongrass, grapefruit, and rosalina.
Caution: Don't put this in your eyes, nose, or any other orifice. Keep out of reach of children.


What do people think of KidLitVic?
"I'm so excited to share my very first picture book...I was offered this job as a direct result of showing my illustration portfolio at KidLitVic last year. I had shown my folio at KLV in 2016 but had no bites from publishers. So in 2017, armed with tips on what to show from the 2016 conference (I needed more characters, animals and humans, more movement and poses etc., the usual suspects), I tried again and this time a big bite! My first ever picture book project. It's been a mixture of joy, excitement, anxiety — a HUGE learning experience.


Central High School student Mohammed Jafree Khan has received the Gates Millennium Scholarship for 2016 in acknowledgement of his exemplary leadership, community service and academic achievements. Of more than 53,000 applicants from around the country, Mohammed is among only 1,000 Gates Millennium Scholars.
This competitive and prestigious awards program provides its select pool of scholars with funds to attend any United States located, accredited college or university. It is a renewable scholarship with amounts determined annually, and further opportunities to obtain additional GMS funding for graduate studies in specified fields. The program also offers resources, services and events to support its scholars in their college and professional endeavors.
The Gates Millennium Scholars Program, established in 1999, was initially funded by a $1 billion grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Mohammed was nominated by Central High School teacher Lissette Elezi and recommended by counselor Amy LaPersonerie.


text:
Q: Custom thumbnail pager affects all sliders on page - Bx-Slider v4 I recently built a site that calls the bx-slider multiple times on a div by class name. Using the normal pager works fine, but I get an error when using a custom pager with thumbnails. It seems that navigating the slider with the "pagerCustom" option turned on will affect all sliders on the page.
Here's a reduced test case for you to look at: http://codepen.io/DavidVII/full/jhoIc
Click on the thumbnails and see how both sliders change.
If you'd like to fork my CodePen, check out this link here: http://codepen.io/DavidVII/pen/jhoIc
I made a new issue on the plugins github page, but I thought I'd post here since I've always had luck on stackoverflow.

A: It is because you've initialized both the sliders with a single class. It should be done with two separate classes, like .bxslider1 and .bxslider2

A: Here is my actual answer for anyone who happens to come across this. Codepen example here.
Here's the JS needed to make this work:
var sliderSets = $('.sliderWrap');

function initSliders(targetSlider, targetPager) {
  $(targetSlider).bxSlider({
    pagerCustom: targetPager
  });
}

$(sliderSets).each(function() {
  var targetSlider = "#" + $(this).children('.bxslider').attr('id');
  var targetPager = "#" + $(this).children('.bx-pager').attr('id');

  initSliders(targetSlider, targetPager);
});

I'm essentially looping through all elements with my target CSS class and calling the .bxSlider method on it.
Please note that this code is from 2 years ago so the BxSlider code might have changed. I'm answering this since I never posted the actual answer when I came up with this solution 2 years ago.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area
Localization and Functional Characterization of an Occipital Visual Word form Sensitive Area
Bo Zhang, Sheng He & Xuchu Weng
Visual and linguistic semantic representations are aligned at the border of human visual cortex
Sara F. Popham, Alexander G. Huth, … Jack L. Gallant
The dynamics of reading complex words: evidence from steady-state visual evoked potentials
Elisabeth Beyersmann, Veronica Montani, … Ivilin Peev Stoianov
Distinct neural sources underlying visual word form processing as revealed by steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP)
Fang Wang, Blair Kaneshiro, … Bruce D. McCandliss
Spatiotemporal dynamics of orthographic and lexical processing in the ventral visual pathway
Oscar Woolnough, Cristian Donos, … Nitin Tandon
Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex
Micha Heilbron, David Richter, … Floris P. de Lange
Words affect visual perception by activating object shape representations
Samuel Noorman, David A. Neville & Irina Simanova
Visual word form processing deficits driven by severity of reading impairments in children with developmental dyslexia
S. Brem, U. Maurer, … D. Brandeis
A model-guided dissociation between subcortical and cortical contributions to word recognition
Mario Braun, Martin Kronbichler, … Arthur M. Jacobs
Xiaosha Wang1,2,3 na1,
Yangwen Xu2,3 na1,
Yuwei Wang4,5,
Yi Zeng4,5,
Jiacai Zhang1,
Zhenhua Ling6 &
Yanchao Bi2,3
Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 3047 (2018) Cite this article
Access to semantic information of visual word forms is a key component of reading comprehension. In this study, we examined the involvement of the visual word form area (VWFA) in this process by investigating whether and how the activity patterns of the VWFA are influenced by semantic information during semantic tasks. We asked participants to perform two semantic tasks - taxonomic or thematic categorization - on visual words while obtaining the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses to each word. Representational similarity analysis with four types of semantic relations (taxonomic, thematic, subjective semantic rating and word2vec) revealed that neural activity patterns of the VWFA were associated with taxonomic information only in the taxonomic task, with thematic information only in the thematic task and with the composite semantic information measured by word2vec in both semantic tasks. Furthermore, the semantic information in the VWFA cannot be explained by confounding factors including orthographic, low-level visual and phonological information. These findings provide positive evidence for the presence of both orthographic and task-relevant semantic information in the VWFA and have significant implications for the neurobiological basis of reading.
The left posterior occipitotemporal sulcus is a key region in the neural circuitry of reading. It is consistently activated by visual words across various writing systems1,2, adapts to repeated presentation of words3,4,5 and captures orthographic similarity among words6,7,8. Its sensitivity to visual words develops with reading acquisition9,10 and decreases upon damage11,12. All these lines of evidence indicate the involvement of this region in orthographic representation and justify its name as the "visual word form area" (VWFA)13.
A central goal of reading is mapping word forms onto word meanings for comprehension14. Because of its structural and functional connections with higher-order language regions9,15,16, the VWFA is commonly assumed to play an essential role in such mapping17,18. The exact mechanism of the form-meaning mapping and whether the VWFA activity is modulated by word semantic properties remain inconclusive. Significant semantic priming effects were found in this region in a visual lexical decision task19, but not in a similar paradigm with a semantic oddball detection task3 or a naming task4. The effects that semantically related word pairs showed more similar activity patterns than semantically unrelated ones in the VWFA were found to be marginally significant in one recent study7, but not in an earlier study20.
One possible explanation for these inconsistent findings of semantic effects in the VWFA might be related to the multidimensional organization of the semantic space21,22,23. Previous studies examined semantic effects by contrasting conditions of strong and weak semantical relatedness, with relatedness quantified from subjective association strength3 or computational linguistics7. Nevertheless, concepts can be related to each other in very different ways. For example, taxonomic and thematic relations are two dissociable types of relations in the semantic system24, with the former based on shared features (e.g. teacher-doctor) and the latter on frequent co-occurrence in events (e.g. teacher-classroom). A single dimension of semantic relatedness may entangle various relations and dilute semantic effects to be observed.
In this study, to examine whether and how the VWFA activity is influenced by semantic processing in reading comprehension, we tested multiple types of semantic relations in the VWFA in tasks requiring explicit semantic access. Specifically, we asked participants to perform taxonomic or thematic categorization tasks on the 45 words that fell into nine conditions arising from the combinations of three taxonomic categories (people, manmade objects, and locations) and three thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports), while obtaining the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI responses to each word. We constructed semantic representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) based on four types of semantic relations: taxonomic, thematic, subjective semantic rating and word2vec25 (a computational linguistic measure based on word co-occurrence patterns in a large language corpus) (Figure 1, top panel). Taxonomic and thematic RDMs targeted at specific dimensions of the semantic space by indicating whether the two words belonged to the same taxonomic or thematic category. The subjectively rated semantic distance and word2vec RDMs measured composite semantic relationships, which may integrate multiple dimensions of relatedness. The representational similarity analysis (RSA) approach26 was adopted to evaluate the representational content of the VWFA by correlating the semantic RDMs with the neural RDMs derived from the word-word correlation distance embedded in neural patterns in each task. Orthographic, low-level visual and phonological RDMs were constructed and controlled for in further analyses to rule out the possibility that any semantic effects may be driven by these non-semantic information types in this region.
Theoretical/behavioral representational dissimilarity matrices. The binary taxonomic and thematic RDMs illustrated the membership of each word in three taxonomic categories (people, objects, and locations) and three thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports). The subjective semantic rating RDM was based on explicit ratings of semantic distance. The word2vec RDM was calculated as the cosine distance of vector representations of words learned in a skip-gram model. The logographeme, pixelwise and phonological RDMs were constructed by one minus the proportion of shared logographemes, overlapping pixels for visual words in a pictorial format and shared sub-syllabic units and tones, respectively, for a given word pair. The co-occurrence RDM was constructed based on the summed counts of co-occurrence within a window of five words for a given word pair in a language corpus.
Relationships among the theoretical/behavioral RDMs
Figure 1 illustrates eight theoretical/behavioral RDMs constructed by the pairwise relations of the 45 words, including four semantic RDMs (top panel, see Introduction) and four non-semantic RDMs (bottom panel, see Methods). The logographeme, pixelwise and phonological RDMs characterized word-word dissimilarity in orthographical, low-level visual and phonological information, respectively. The co-occurrence RDM measured how likely the two words would appear together in a 5-word window in texts, which might reflect the co-occurrence statistics in the visual field.
The Spearman correlation coefficients among these RDMs are shown in Table 1. Among the four semantic RDMs, the taxonomic and thematic RDMs were not correlated due to careful selection of stimuli. The two composite semantic RDMs (subjective rating and word2vec) were significantly correlated with each other (r = 0.441, P < 10−10) and differed in how they related to the taxonomic and thematic RDMs. The subjectively rated semantic distance was strongly correlated with the thematic RDM (r = 0.798, P < 10−10), not with the taxonomic RDM (r = 0.017, P = 0.584), whereas the word2vec distance showed significant correlations with both taxonomic and thematic RDMs (rs > 0.422, Ps < 10−10). For the relations between semantic and non-semantic RDMs, all the semantic RDMs were significantly correlated with the co-occurrence RDM (rs > 0.189, Ps < 10−8), implying that visual co-occurrence may be a confounding variable in any observed semantic effects. The word2vec distance was also significantly correlated with the logographeme and pixelwise RDMs (Ps < 10−4), which is consistent with the notion that this algorithm captures multiple dimensions of similarity25. The significant correlation between taxonomic and logographeme RDMs (r = 0.107, P = 0.0007) is likely to be due to the fact that the majority of Chinese characters are so-called composite characters, containing a semantic radical and a phonological radical. Characters belonging to the same taxonomic category sometimes share the same semantic radical. For instance, many animal words in Chinese share the semantic logographeme " ", e.g. " "(cat), " "(dog), " " (wolf), " " (fox)). The correlations between pixelwise and co-occurrence (r = 0.166, P < 10−6), pixelwise and phonological (r = −0.105, P = 0.0009) RDMs are less straightforward to interpret and might be epiphenomenal in Chinese written language given the prevalence of orthographic neighbors/homophones of Chinese characters.
Table 1 Spearman correlation coefficients among theoretical/behavioral representational dissimilarity matrices.
Behavioral results in the fMRI experiment
In the scanner, participants were presented with the 45 words that fell into nine conditions arising from the combinations of three taxonomic categories (people, manmade objects, and locations) and three thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports), with five words per condition (see Supplementary Table S1). In different runs, they were asked to categorize each word either by taxonomic or thematic memberships. They performed the two tasks with equally high accuracy (taxonomic task, mean = 96%, standard deviation (SD) = 3%; thematic task, mean = 96%, SD = 3%; task difference, paired t18 = 0.28, P = 0.78) and with comparable reaction times (taxonomic task, mean = 1513.50 ms, SD = 415.33 ms; thematic task, mean = 1497.03 ms, SD = 437.34 ms; task difference, paired t18 = 0.46, P = 0.65).
Orthographic representation in the VWFA
We defined the VWFA in both anatomical and functional ways. To verify orthographic representation in the anatomically defined VWFA and to functionally localize voxels sensitive to orthography, we examined the correspondence between the logographeme RDM and the neural RDMs based on the overall functional data (i.e. the collapsed dataset of the taxonomic and thematic tasks, see Methods).
Anatomically defined VWFA
The anatomical mask was defined as a box covering the left posterior occipitotemporal sulcus with cerebellum voxels excluded (Figure 2A)27. One-sample t tests (one-tailed) revealed significantly positive correlation for logographeme information in this region of interest (group-averaged Fisher-z-transformed Spearman r (mean r) = 0.025; t18 = 3.112, P = 0.003), but not for pixelwise, co-occurrence, or phonological information (Ps > 0.41; Figure 2B, left panel). Comparing correlation coefficients of logographeme information with each of these control variables revealed significant differences between logographeme and pixelwise information (paired t18 = 3.380, P = 0.003), between logographeme and co-occurrence information (paired t18 = 4.024, P < 0.001). The difference between logographeme and phonological information showed a nonsignificant trend toward significance (paired t18 = 1.788, P = 0.091).
Orthographic and semantic information in the VWFA. (A) Anatomical and group-level functional VWFA localization. The anatomical mask was a box covering the left posterior occipitotemporal sulcus27; the group-level functional VWFA was localized using a whole-brain searchlight RSA with the logographeme RDM (cluster-level FWE corrected P < 0.05, peak MNI coordinates xyz: −48, −64, −16). The two masks showed certain overlap. (B) Orthographic representation in the VWFA. (C) Specific and composite semantic information in the VWFA. The bars report the averaged Fisher-z-transformed Spearman correlation between individual subject's neural RDMs in each VWFA mask and the theoretical/behavioral RDMs. Error bar: ±standard error. **P < 0.01, one-sample t tests against zero (one-tailed); #P < 0.05, ##P < 0.01, paired t tests (two-tailed).
Functionally defined VWFA
For the functional VWFA localization, a whole-brain searchlight RSA with the logographeme RDM (cluster-level FWE corrected P < 0.05, voxelwise Z > 3.09) revealed one single cluster in the left posterior occipitotemporal cortex (peak MNI coordinates xyz = −46, −64, −18; for the other two significant regions see Table 2), which partially overlapped with the anatomically defined VWFA (Figure 2A). We then identified functional VWFA in individual subjects using the same way (see Methods) and examined its encoding of pixelwise, co-occurrence and phonological information (Figure 2B, right panel). One-sample t tests (one-tailed) revealed that none of the three types of information was significantly associated with the neural activity patterns of the functional VWFA (Ps > 0.30).
Table 2 Brain regions whose activity patterns encoded logographeme information of Chinese words in a whole-brain searchlight analysis (cluster-level FWE corrected P < 0.05 with voxelwise Z > 3.09).
Task modulation effects
We investigated whether semantic demands could modulate the orthographic representation in the VWFA by comparing the correlations of the logographeme and neural RDMs between the two tasks. We first looked at logographeme representation in the VWFA in each task and found that while the neural activity patterns of the functional VWFA significantly associated with orthographic information in both tasks (taxonomic task: mean r = 0.030, t18 = 6.014, P < 0.001; thematic task: mean r = 0.030, t18 = 5.130, P < 0.001), the anatomically defined VWFA showed weaker representations (taxonomic task: mean r = 0.008, t18 = 1.463, P = 0.080; thematic task: mean r = 0.009, t18 = 1.028, P = 0.159), possibly due to the imprecise localization of orthography-sensitive voxels in individuals. Nevertheless, in both VWFA masks, paired t tests comparing logographeme information between the two tasks revealed no significant differences (Ps > 0.922), indicating task-independent orthographic representation in this region.
Semantic information in the VWFA
We then examined how various types of semantic information were encoded in the VWFA in each task and how they were modulated by task demands (Figure 2C).
Taxonomic information
In the taxonomic task, the taxonomic RDM showed significantly positive correlation with the neural RDM in the VWFA regardless of the mask definition (anatomical mask: mean r = 0.029, t18 = 4.166, P < 0.001; functional mask: mean r = 0.030, t18 = 3.890, P = 0.001). In the thematic task, the taxonomic information was not associated with the activity patterns of the VWFA in either mask (Ps > 0.115). Significant task differences were found in both the anatomical (paired t18 = 2.302, P = 0.033) and functional (paired t18 = 2.790, P = 0.012) VWFA masks.
Thematic information
In the taxonomic task, the thematic RDM was not correlated with the neural RDM of the VWFA in either mask (Ps > 0.338). In the thematic task, the thematic information showed significantly positive correlation with the neural RDM in the VWFA (anatomical mask: mean r = 0.022, t18 = 3.773, P < 0.001; functional mask: mean r = 0.023, t18 = 3.242, P = 0.005). Significant task differences were found in both the anatomical (paired t18 = 3.261, P = 0.004) and functional (paired t18 = 3.051, P = 0.007) VWFA masks.
Subjective semantic rating
In the taxonomic task, the subjectively rated semantic RDM was not associated with the neural RDM of either the anatomical or functional VWFA masks (Ps > 0.737). In the thematic task, the presence of this information in the VWFA approached significance (anatomical mask: mean r = 0.012, t18 = 1.468, P = 0.080; functional mask: mean r = 0.015, t18 = 1.645, P = 0.059). Direct comparison between the two tasks did not reveal significant differences (Ps > 0.154).
Word2vec
The word2vec RDM was significantly associated with the neural RDM of the VWFA in both the taxonomic task (anatomical mask: mean r = 0.029, t18 = 3.541, P = 0.001; functional mask: mean r = 0.034, t18 = 3.701, P < 0.001) and the thematic task (anatomical mask: mean r = 0.040, t18 = 4.731, P < 0.001; functional mask: mean r = 0.044, t18 = 5.591, P < 0.001). No significant task differences were observed (Ps > 0.311).
Semantic information encoded in the VWFA: Controlling for non-semantic confounding variables
To test whether semantic information can explain the variance of the neural activity patterns in the VWFA over and above non-semantic factors, we computed partial correlations between the neural and semantic RDMs, controlling for the logographeme, pixelwise, co-occurrence and phonological RDMs. As shown in Table 3, task-relevant semantic information and word2vec distance remained significant in these partial correlation analyses. The subjectively rated semantic distance was (marginally) significant in the thematic task when the co-occurrence RDM was included as a nuisance variable. Linear regression analyses were then carried out to examine the unique contribution of orthography and semantic information to the neural RDM of the functionally defined VWFA (the anatomically defined VWFA was not analyzed here due to the insignificant orthographic representation in each task). Taking the group-averaged neural RDM as the dependent variable and the logographeme, taxonomic and thematic RDMs as the independent variables, we found that in the taxonomic task the logographeme (β = 0.126, P = 0.003) and taxonomic (β = 0.105, P = 0.008) information were significant predictors of the neural RDM, whereas in the thematic task the logographeme (β = 0.135, P = 0.001) and thematic (β = 0.086, P = 0.028) information were significant predictors. These results suggest the joint presence of orthographic and task-relevant semantic information in the VWFA in semantic tasks.
Table 3 Group-averaged Fisher-z-transformed Spearman correlation coefficients for semantic information in the VWFA, controlling for non-semantic confounding variables.
The aim of this study was to investigate whether the VWFA activity encodes semantic information in explicit semantic tasks. Using RSA, we computed the correlations between RDMs derived from neural activity patterns in the VWFA with various types of semantic RDMs in two semantic categorization tasks–taxonomic and thematic categorization. We found that the VWFA activity patterns were modulated by the semantic tasks, with words' neural RDMs showing significant association with semantic dimensions that were relevant for the specific task being performed. That is, words that are taxonomically related (e.g. teacher-doctor) had more similar VWFA activity patterns under the taxonomic categorization task (people, objects, or locations) and those that are thematically related (e.g. teacher-classroom) had more similar VWFA activity patterns under the thematic categorization task (school, medicine, or sports). The composite semantic similarity measure derived from the advanced natural language processing algorithm (i.e., word2vec) together with big-data language corpora showed significant effects in both semantic categorization tasks, so did the orthographic similarity (the logographeme RDM). These findings provide positive evidence that both orthographic and semantic information was encoded in the VWFA during semantic processing and that the semantic effect dimensions change with task goals.
We first verified that the activity pattern in the left posterior occipitotemporal cortex is sensitive to the orthographic similarity of Chinese words. By constructing an orthographic RDM based on the overlap of logographemes–the basic functional unit in Chinese characters28–between words, we found that the logographeme RDM showed significantly positive correlations with the neural RDM in the pre-defined anatomical mask and localized a cluster in the same region in the whole-brain searchlight analysis. Together with previous findings of orthographic representations in this region using RSA6,7,8, this line of evidence echoes neuroimaging studies with conventional univariate approaches3,5,19 and lesion studies11 in supporting the central role of the VWFA in the orthographic representation. Orthographic computation appears to be an inherent property of the VWFA, because of either its sensitivity to specialized orthographic inputs17,29 and/or synthesis of bottom-up inputs and top-down predictions18 and is thus robust regardless of tasks.
The effects of semantics in the VWFA are more complex. We did find positive semantic effects, but the effects varied by the type of semantic dimensions. For specific dimensions including thematic and taxonomic relations, the organization was tuned according to that particular dimension being judged. For subjectively rated semantic similarity measure, we did not see any significant effects, except for a trend in the thematic categorization task. For the semantic similarity derived from large-scale text using statistical learning models (word2vec), the effects were present in both semantic tasks. Worth noting is that semantic effects in the VWFA cannot be explained by the orthographic, low-level visual, first-order co-occurrence and phonological effects. Among these variables that were excluded from explaining the semantic effects, the first-order co-occurrence RDM is of particular interest. This model can be considered as an extended version of orthographic representation by characterizing how likely two word forms would co-occur in a local visual context (five words) during natural reading. Semantically related words (in both specific and composite semantic RDMs) tend to visually co-occur (Table 1), raising the possibility that semantic effects could be ascribed to visual co-occurrence in reading. Nevertheless, RSA results showed that words with greater first-order co-occurrences did not evoke more similar activation patterns in the VWFA (Figure 2B) and, more importantly, semantic effects remained significant when the first-order co-occurrence measure was controlled for. That is, the semantic effects in the VWFA we observed are not explained by these non-semantic properties we tested.
Why are there task-sensitive dimension-specific semantic effects in the VWFA and why are the word2vec effects present in both tasks? One possibility is that the VWFA contains neuronal populations sensitive to both taxonomic and thematic organizations. Attention boosts task-relevant information and/or tune down task-irrelevant information so that only task-relevant information is observed in the VWFA activity30. Such semantic information, even if present, seems to be subtle or redundantly coded in other regions, as lesion/disruption to the VWFA had minimal influence on object recognition and language comprehension abilities12. Another scenario consistent with the broader empirical findings is that the VWFA itself does not store semantic information, but inherits activation patterns in the higher-order semantic regions via top-down feedback. In semantic judgment tasks, when a reader sees the word "teacher", the visual input activates its orthographic representation (likely to be in the VWFA) and then the corresponding word meaning representation (stored somewhere else in the semantic neural system). The semantic representations that are related to the target meaning (e.g. "doctor" or "classroom") along various dimensions are also activated through spreading of activation due to overlapping features or associations. The types of neighboring meanings receiving more activation are dependent on the task at hand – when the judgment is about taxonomic classes, the taxonomic neighbors are more strongly activated; when the judgment is about thematic relations, the thematic neighbors are more strongly activated. Such activated semantic neighboring representations in turn feeds back to their own orthographic representations in the VWFA, resulting in more similar VWFA activity patterns for items sharing that semantic dimension. Such feedback does not seem simply epiphenomenal, but may contribute to orthographic identification31 and overall task performance. Given the distributed neural basis of semantic memory23,32, future studies are warranted to uncover the specific mechanisms of modulation between semantic regions and the VWFA using approaches that are optimized to study task-specific functional connectivity patterns.
Our study highlights the importance of taking the multidimensional and dynamic nature of semantic information into account when investigating the neural correlates of semantic processing. Previous studies that used subjective semantic relatedness have reported null results for semantic effects in the VWFA3,4. Our rating results showed that the subjectively rated semantic RDM tended to be more similar to the thematic RDM than the taxonomic RDM, indicating that in our free rating context, the group-level subjectively perceived semantic distance is biased towards thematic relations. This is consistent with a similar preference for thematic thinking in the matching or free association tasks and accords with the impact of thematic relations on word similarity judgment33. Thus, the semantic effects based on such measures may not be detectable in semantic tasks that do not rely on such dimension, e.g., detecting certain taxonomic categories3. In comparison, the word2vec distance was found to correlate with both the taxonomic and thematic RDMs, indicating that this composite semantic space is a multidimensional one that captures both taxonomic and thematic relations, thus explaining the results that the word2vec RDM correlated with the VWFA neural activity in both tasks. This is consistent with the marginally significant effect of the LSA distance–another composite measure containing both types of relations34,35. The significant effects of word2vec in our study may be because word2vec captures richer semantic information than LSA25.
The significant semantic effects observed here, in comparison to previous studies, are also likely to be driven by the explicit semantic tasks we used. For tasks where (deep) semantic processing was not necessary such as lexical decision, semantic effects tended not to be consistent in the VWFA3,4,7. To our knowledge, there was only one study reporting both orthographic and semantic effects in the primed lexical decision task in the posterior fusiform gyrus19. In that study, the target word was presented 1300 ms, a period long enough for participants to explicitly associate it with the visible prime (presented for 150 ms). This is in contrast with other priming studies using very short stimulus representation time that emphasizes bottom-up input properties (e.g. 300 ms3,4). Therefore, it seems that explicit and detailed semantic processing, as well as the consistency between semantic contents and task demands, would be required for robust semantic effects in the VWFA.
To conclude, by including multiple types of semantic distance measures and different task demands, we demonstrate that in explicit semantic tasks the activity patterns of the VWFA also contain task-relevant semantic information of written words in addition to orthographic information. Future studies are warranted to examine how semantic processing in the VWFA interacts with orthographic representations to support fluent reading.
Twenty young healthy adults recruited from Peking University participated in this study (10 males; aged 18–27 years). They were all right handed, native Chinese speakers, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The study was approved by the Human Subject Review Committee at Peking University. All the experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. One participant was excluded from data analysis due to recoding errors of button press.
Stimuli and fMRI procedure
The stimuli set contained 45 Chinese words (see Supplementary Table S1) that belonged to nine conditions arising from the combinations of 3 taxonomic categories (people, manmade objects, and locations) and 3 thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports), with five exemplar words per condition. Three out of five words were bisyllabic (two characters) and the other two trisyllabic (three characters). Before scanning, participants were shown pictures of the intended meaning of each word to reduce word meaning ambiguity when words are presented alone.
The condition-rich rapid event-related design was adopted for the fMRI scan26, with each word as an experimental condition. Lasting 260 s, each run started and ended with a 10 s blank screen and included 45 word trials, with each word presented exactly once. Each word trial started with a fixation cross on the center of a gray background for 500 ms, followed by the word (Song bold font, 36 point in font size) for 500 ms and a blank screen with varying lengths between 3 and 13 s. The duration of the blank screen as well as the stimulus sequence (organized as nine conditions) were determined using the optseq 2 optimization algorithm36. Five words within each condition were randomly presented and run orders were further randomized across participants. There were 10 runs in total.
Two semantic categorization tasks were adopted. In half of the runs, a taxonomic judgment task was performed, in which participants were asked to categorize each word into three taxonomic categories (people, objects, and locations) by pressing three buttons with their right middle finger, right index finger and left index finger, respectively. In the other half of the runs, participants performed a thematic judgment task in which they categorized words into three thematic categories (school, medicine, and sports) using the same fingers and buttons in the taxonomic task. The run order of taxonomic and thematic tasks was randomized across participants.
fMRI acquisition and preprocessing
The fMRI results were reanalyses of data that were collected for another study investigating the neural basis of semantic relations. The acquisition and preprocessing procedures are as follows. Whole-brain imaging was performed on a 3 T Siemens MRI Scanner (MAGNETOM Prisma) at the Center for MRI Research, Peking University. Functional images were acquired using the multi-band echo-planar sequence [repetition time (TR) = 2000 ms, echo time (TE) = 30 ms, flip angle (FA) = 90°, matrix size = 112 × 112, 64 axial slices, voxel size = 2 × 2 × 2.2 mm, multi-band factor = 2]. High-resolution three-dimensional T1-weighted images were acquired using the magnetization-prepared rapid gradient-echo sequence (TR = 2530 ms, TE = 2.98 ms, inversion time = 1100 ms, FA = 7°, matrix size = 448 × 512, 192 sagittal slices, voxel size = 0.5 × 0.5 × 1 mm).
The images were preprocessed using SPM12 (Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging, http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/spm12/). For each participant data, after discarding the first five volumes of each run, functional images were corrected for slice timing and head motion. The resulting un-smoothed and un-normalized images were entered into the general linear model (GLM) for further analysis. The structure image was co-registered to the mean functional images and segmented into different tissues. The deformation fields for spatial normalization of native space to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) space and reverse normalization were also obtained in this step.
fMRI data analysis
The whole-brain activation maps for each word in individual subjects were obtained via GLM in the first-level analysis. Two GLMs were built, differing on whether to include task-specific regressors for each word. The first GLM included 45 regressors for each run, one for each word and and the second GLM included 90 regressors, two for each word with one for the taxonomic task and the other for the thematic task. Trial-level differences in reaction time (RT) were controlled for by convolving each trial with a boxcar equal to the length of its reaction time37. Six head motion parameters and a global mean predictor for each run were also included in GLMs. A high-pass filter cut-off was set at 128 s. The subsequent word versus baseline contrast produced a whole-brain t map for each word and for each word under each task, which was used for the following activation pattern analyses.
Representational similarity analysis
RSA is a widely used approach to characterize the correspondence between brain activity patterns and theoretical/behavioral measurement38. This method consists of constructing representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) for both measures and calculating the correlation between them. An RDM is a symmetric n × n matrix, where n is the number of experimental conditions (n = 45 in this study) and the off-diagonal values indicate the dissimilarity (or distance) for each pair of conditions in a certain aspect.
Theoretical/behavioral RDMs
Four semantic RDMs were constructed to investigate the potential semantic information embedded in the activity patterns of the VWFA. The taxonomic RDM was a binary RDM, assigning 0 to word pairs that belong to the same taxonomic category (e.g. teacher-doctor, chalk-bandage, classroom-hospital) and 1 to the remaining cells. The thematic RDM was also a binary RDM, assigning 0 to word pairs that belong to the same thematic category (e.g. teacher-student, teacher-chalk, teacher-classroom) and 1 to the remaining cells. The subjectively rated semantic RDM was based on pairwise ratings of semantic distance. Eighteen healthy college students (nine females, mean age = 23.5 years, range = 18–27 years) were recruited to rate how close two words were in meaning using a 7-point Likert scale (7 for the closest). Ratings for a total of 990 word pairs (pairwise combination of the 45 words) were collected and the RDM was computed as seven minus the averaged rating scores of 18 participants for each word pair, which resulted in a symmetric 45 × 45 matrix. The word2vec RDM was based on continuous vector representations of words generated by the skip-gram architecture25. For the Baidu encyclopedia corpus containing approximately one billion word tokens, a vocabulary of the most frequent 249,222 words was first obtained through the Stanford parser. The word2vec tool was then used to train vector representations of words (https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/) with the following parameters: window size = 5, sub-sampling rate = 10−4, negative sample number = 5, learning rate = 0.025, dimension number = 300. The word distance was measured as one minus the cosine angle between feature vectors of each word.
To validate that the VWFA activity patterns are sensitive to orthographic information, we constructed a logographeme RDM to characterize orthographic dissimilarity between words. The logographeme has been proposed to be the basic unit of Chinese characters28,39. The logographeme RDM was measured by one minus the proportion of shared logographemes between two words regardless of position. For instance, the word " " (campus) is composed of seven logographemes (" ); the word " "(tampon) is composed of five logographemes (" "). They shared one logographeme (" ") and therefore the dissimilarity is 1-(1/12) = 0.917. Three control RDMs were constructed. The visual pixelwise RDM measured the pixelwise overlap of the binary silhouette images of word pairs7,38. The co-occurrence RDM measured how likely the two words would appear together in a 5-word window in texts and was based on summed counts of co-occurrence frequency for each word pair within five words in the Chinese Web 5-gram Corpus (https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2010T06), which contains about 883 billion word tokens extracted from Chinese Web pages. The co-occurrence counts were log-transformed using ln (f + 40), where f is the raw summed counts and 40 is the lowest n-gram counts kept in the database, and then reversed to construct the co-occurrence RDM. The phonological RDM was calculated as one minus the proportion of shared sub-syllabic (initials or finals) units and tones regardless of position.
VWFA localization
The VWFA was defined in both anatomical and functional ways. An a priori anatomical mask covering the posterior occipitotemporal sulcus was adopted27. This mask ranged from −54 < x < −30, −70 < y < −45 and −30 < z < −4 in the MNI space and voxels in the cerebellum according to the automated anatomical labeling template were excluded40. This mask was reverse-normalized into each subject's native space for further analysis.
To localize functional VWFA, a whole-brain searchlight RSA41 was first performed to identify brain regions sensitive to logographeme information. For each voxel in native space, we built a spherical region of interest (ROI, radius 6 mm) centering on the voxel, extracted t values in this ROI to each of the 45 words and calculated one minus Spearman rank correlations of all word pairs within this ROI to construct a neural RDM. The relationship between the neural RDM and the logographeme RDM was then assessed using partial Spearman correlation with the visual pixelwise RDM being controlled for (to ensure that orthographic representation was not contaminated by low-level visual similarity), which produced a correlation coefficient for this voxel. Moving the searchlight center throughout the cortex, we obtained a whole-brain r-map in the native space. Note that the searchlight analysis was restricted to the voxels with a probability higher than 1/3 in the native gray matter image generated from the segmentation step. For a group-level random-effects analysis, the r maps in the native space were Fisher-z-transformed, normalized to the MNI space using the forward deformation field and spatially smoothed using a 6 mm full-width at half maximum Gaussian kernel. The permutation-based statistical non-parametric mapping (SnPM; http://go.warwick.ac.uk/tenichols/snpm) was used (no variance smoothing, 10,000 permutations) to test for significance of positive correlations between the neural and logographeme RDMs across participants. Clusters surviving the cluster-level FWE correction at P < 0.05 with a voxelwise threshold of Z > 3.09 were reported. A single cluster was found in the left posterior occipitotemporal cortex, partially overlapping with the anatomical mask of the VWFA and was defined as the group-level functional VWFA (see Figure 2A and results).
For each subject, we then identified the voxels in the anatomical mask of the VWFA whose neural RDMs showed a significantly positive correlation with the logographeme RDM in the above-mentioned searchlight analysis (one-tailed P < 0.05, uncorrected; mean number of voxels across participants, 108, range: 10–302 voxels). These voxels together with their adjacent voxels within a 6-mm-radius sphere were considered as individual subjects' functional VWFA (mean number of voxels: 1362, range: 349–2590 voxels).
RSA procedures for the VWFA
For both anatomical and functional VWFA masks, we calculated the neural RDMs as one minus Spearman's rank correlation between each pair of words. To validate that the activation patterns of the VWFA showed some specificity of orthographic information, we first calculated the Spearman correlation between the neural RDM and the logographeme, visual pixelwise, co-occurrence and phonological RDMs for each ROI (Note that the logographeme effect of the functional ROI was shown for illustration purposes). We then investigated the semantic information in the VWFA in detail. Specifically, the neural RDMs for each task were compared with four semantic RDMs using the Spearman rank correlation. Partial correlations were also performed to control for logographeme, visual pixelwise, co-occurrence and phonological RDMs. The resulting correlation coefficients were Fisher-z-transformed and statistically inferred across participants. One-sample t tests were used to test whether the correlation was significantly greater than zero. Paired t tests were used to compare different information types and the same information type in different tasks.
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding authors on reasonable request.
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We thank Weiwei Men and Jia-Hong Gao for technical support and Xiaoying Wang for helpful discussion. This project is funded by the National Basic Research Program of China Program (2013CB837300 and 2014CB846100), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31521063, 31700943, 61375116 and 91520202), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2017M610791), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK2350000001; 2017XTCX04), Beijing Brain Project (Z16110100020000, Z161100000216124, Z161100000216125), the Interdiscipline Research Funds of Beijing Normal University (Y.B.), National Program for Special Support of Top-notch Young Professionals (Y.B.) and Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (BJAICFE2016IR-003).
Xiaosha Wang and Yangwen Xu contributed equally to the work.
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
Xiaosha Wang & Jiacai Zhang
National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
Xiaosha Wang, Yangwen Xu & Yanchao Bi
Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Imaging and Connectomics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China
Research Center for Brain-inspired Intelligence & National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China
Yuwei Wang & Yi Zeng
Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China
National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China
Zhenhua Ling
Xiaosha Wang
Yangwen Xu
Yuwei Wang
Yi Zeng
Jiacai Zhang
Yanchao Bi
Y.B., X.W. and Y.X. designed research; Y.X. collected data; X.W., Z.L., Y.W., Y.Z. and J.Z. analyzed data; Y.B. and X.W. wrote the paper.
Correspondence to Jiacai Zhang or Zhenhua Ling.
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Wang, X., Xu, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Representational similarity analysis reveals task-dependent semantic influence of the visual word form area. Sci Rep 8, 3047 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21062-0
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Royal Navy Case Study
We have been the lead digital Agency for the Royal Navy for over three years having recently renewed the contract through a competitive pitch process. The Royal Navy's digital presence needs to do a lot for a lot of people. Overall the brief is to make sure the general public knows what they do and why they're important. Digitally, this means everything from communicating its purpose and role, recruiting the future of the Royal Navy, influencing opinion leaders and politicians, supporting service people and their families, and being the definitive source of Royal Navy news. All in one online destination.
To truly understand the Royal Navy's digital challenges we have been involved in all parts of their story, even spending a week at sea aboard HMS Sutherland to gain invaluable first-hand experience of Navy life. This allowed us to get to the heart of what drives people to join, redirecting the efforts of the news and video teams toward a more storytelling approach, and harnessing audience advocacy to create social awareness of what the Navy does.
A content-first, mobile-optimised website launched in May 2015, and we're continually optimising the digital recruitment journey. Digital is now the key recruitment and communications channel for The Royal Navy. e3's optimisation and continued improvement of the website has driven up year-on-year engagement and interaction. This is where we are since launch:
The efficiency rate of converting unique site visitors to finished applications has improved by over 200%
74% increase in average duration for mobile users, from 1m 55s to 3m 20s
641% increase in traffic to core functions pages (1,787 page views to 13,243)
15 awards including, the DADIs, BIMAs, Digital Impact Awards, Sitecore best Public sector and UKUX Awards.
Voted in the top 3 most engaging and impactful careers website by the Times Top 100 Graduate recruitment awards
Scotland promises ambitious investment in broadband
£40 million to reduce NHS staff login times
Digital revolution urged for in the property sector
Virtual patients arrive at Norfolk & Norwich
Better protection from hostile cyber attacks for businesses
Technical advances in the Crown Commercial Service
How open is the cloud?
Content Design Q&A
eGovernment in H2020: Digital, open and collaborative government
Green ICT matters?
Derby City Council Achieve 75% Reduction in Data Centre Costs with Nutanix and IT Orchestration by CDW™
A combination of pressures prompted Derby City Council to review its on-premise data centre strategy in 2015.
Appian
Local Government Cuts - A Savings Solution?
Streamlined social care for Edinburgh City Council
Edinburgh City Council has streamlined social care with the implementation of prepaid cards to supply funds for adult and children's social care
Why smart cities require WAN data acceleration
London's tech - the rise of the smart borough
User-driven processes for digital integration
Tweets by @govtechnology
Defence Business
Government Technology is published by PSi Ltd


text:
Pictograph: Foot
Meanings: Gather, Walk
Sound: G
The earliest known pictograph for this letter is and is a picture of a foot. The Modern Hebrew name for this letter is gimel," an adopted root. The original name to this letter is most likely gam, the parent root of gimel. This letter is the origin of the Arabic letter Geem and the Greek gamma supporting the theory that the original name for the letter did not include the "L."
The word gam means to gather together as a group of animals gathering at the water hole to drink. The pictographic script for the word gam is . The is the foot representing "walk" and the is "water" (See the letter mem). When combined these letters mean "walk to the water."
The letter has the meanings of walk, carry or gather. The sound associated with this letter is a "g" as in "go."
The Early Semitic became in the Middle Semitic script. This letter further developed to in the Late Semitic script. The Late Semitic script further developed into the Modern Hebrew ג).
The Middle Semitic script became the Greek Γ (a reversal of the letter due to direction of writing) as well as the Roman C and G. The Late Semitic became the number 3.


GOLFER Bubba Watson is enjoying getting a bird's eye of the golf course with his new jetpack.
THE award-winning Galgorm Resort & Spa in Ballymena will be the venue for the 21st National Golf Tourism Conference and 2018 Gala Irish Golf Awards next month.
THE Royal County Down golf course has been voted the world's greatest by a leading golf publication.
TOURISM NI has launched a new international amateur golf tournament as part of a strategy that aims to make golf tourism worth £50 million to the Northern Ireland economy by 2020.


Special in Her :-Leather outfits, Ever changing hairstyles, Bright red hair (brown - dark), Silky tone of voice, Bajan accent, hazel eyes and Rihanna is a pisces and has a slim body. Rihanna dated Chris Brown and amongst other famous relationships was Omarion Grandberry.
We love a girl with a voluptuous body, and Rihanna's dance skills demonstrate how flexible and limber she can be. We could describe her hotness all day, or you could Google her music video for "Rehab," featuring Justin Timberlake, and watch her roll around the hood of a red convertible in a green bikini and get an idea for yourself. She has magnificent features and classical beauty. She Said, " That was a moment for me because I used to be in that position. I would see a star and just beg for their autograph. And then for people to be asking me, I felt honored., on being mobbed by her fans.


Still looking for an internship? Come out to the Cisco Infosession where company reps will speak about the company as well as hold a Personal Branding Workshop! They are currently hiring for the following open positions, but are also collecting resumes for the following positions in preparation for the next hiring season!


Fusce mattis leo purus, nec porttitor diam eleifend non. Vestibulum sit amet efficitur enim, quis posuere odio. Etiam non lacus tincidunt, finibus sem maximus, egestas metus. Aenean ac pharetra ipsum.
A catalog, as you are well aware of, is a way to get your products or services in front of your target audience. It ensures that you are able to let those who may be in need of your products or services know that you provide them. Therefore, your catalog needs to be representative of the quality of your products and services. As such, you need to make sure that you choose a printing company that will be able to provide you with an end product that you are proud to distribute.
Before you go with a catalog printing company you should ask to see a sample of their work. When you look at the sample you need to ensure that it is representative of the way you envisioned your catalog. Would you open it to see what was inside if you were a consumer? Is the color nicely done? Are the pictures cleared? These are the things that you need to consider before you allow the catalog to go to the press. So, make sure to ask for those samples and really feel comfortable with the ability of the printer before printing begins.


text:
Tag Archives: japan
"Thought I belonged to a different tribe." Madonna's "Rebel Heart"
It's rather remarkable to me that in however many years I've been writing this blog Madonna hasn't been my subject matter once.
She and her music and her hijinks have been a constant in my life since my awkwardly painful junior high years.
I've voraciously consumed every album, video, single, remix, film (heaven help me), interview, performance, and gossipy tidbit in her storied career.
I've ridden the crest of every ill-spirited media wave announcing her imminent cultural demise, her death spiral into irrelevancy, or her controversy-fueled self-immolation.
And, yet, to paraphrase a classic Sondheim tune, popularized by the late, great Elaine Stritch, she's still here.
Speaking of Sondheim, it was the bizarre confluence of that Broadway vet's musical output and the white-hot light of Madonna at the peak of her fame in the summer of 1990, working on the Disney-produced, Warren Beatty-directed comic book film Dick Tracy, that cemented my love for the self-professed "Material Girl."
To be honest, her first two albums Madonna and Like a Virgin set my teeth on edge in their moment (possibly because they were the dog-eared soundtrack for every snooty-pants kid at Memorial Park, a "magnet school" for gifted … and rich … kids, a place where the wheels temporarily fell off my self-esteem wagon). True Blue (her third offering, not counting soundtracks and remix compilations) was a slight improvement (we also moved to another town!), perhaps due to the influence of equally combustible but super-talented Sean Penn in her artistic and personal life. With Like a Prayer, she started to pique my interest as Madonna really began to mine the formula of agnosticism, social critique, semi-feminist moxie, and soaring dance-pop melodies that ignited my nascent musical imagination.
But it was the Dick Tracy pseudo-soundtrack I'm Breathless, a forgotten corner of Madonna's discography (save for its inescapable throbbing uber-hit "Vogue"), that made me a fan for life. I was in Japan for a summer study abroad program sponsored by the U.S. Senate/Japanese government, back when Japan was, well, China to us, threatened as we were by their economic might. The powers-that-be threw a bunch of high school kids on a plane, and, voila, world peace?
I didn't have a lot of spending money, no internet (obviously) nor smart phones (more obviously), so the touchstone that eased any homesick heartache was an I'm Breathless cassette tape I bought from a Japanese street vendor (I think it was legal) with all the lyrics written in kanji. (In fact, I remain a little foggy on the actual words to "Hanky Panky" to this day). I burned through two Walkmen and a host of AA batteries listening to that album, never skipping a track, but absorbing it all straight through over and over.
After that, Madonna could do no wrong (by me). My self-important, superficially-socially-conscious college days were spent torturing my roommates with repeated listens to Erotica and Bedtime Stories (the campy/naughty "I'm not your b*tch; don't hang your sh*t on me" era – take that, smart aleck-y David Letterman), and graduate school saw Madge and me mellow a bit as she took on show tunes in the Golden Globe-winning Evita and some mystical new mommy spiritual techno hoo-ha in Ray of Light.
She (and the world) discovered Sacha Baron Cohen and the acid rock/hip hop joys of ten gallon cowboy hats with Music ("Don't Tell Me" remains a musical/videographic highlight), and, as the 20th Century devolved in the post 9/11 chaos of the "aughts," Madonna sported a beret and sang political rants about … pilates (?) in American Life, donned a purple/pink leotard for some Confessions on the Dance Floor, suckered us in with some poptacular Hard Candy, and left me woozy from too much MDNA.
Which brings us to the latest offering from our imperious Queen of Pop: Rebel Heart. Much has been made of the disastrous (or canny?) PR debacle leading up to her 13th (!) studio album's release (she doesn't count I'm Breathless in that tally for some reason – BIG mistake. HUGE.). There were numerous leaks of tracks in various degrees of completion; Madonna got a little zany with the Instagram; she had a wardrobe malfunction (no, Ms. Jackson, not that kind) that involved a ridiculously long cape and an even ridiculously longer flight of stairs; and so on. Yet, here we are at the finish line, with a more-or-less completed album, filled to the brim (19 tracks on the deluxe edition and 25 on the super-deluxe!) with potential hits (and misses).
By the way, let's not forget Madge invented strategic "wardrobe malfunction," in a now iconic performance from the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, when she lost a shoe or something and, consequently, started writhing around on the stage in a white wedding dress while warbling "Like a Virgin."
So, with this exhaustively self-indulgent preamble ended, how is the Rebel Heart album? It's good, and it may even be classic, but like all Madonna albums, it is wildly uneven with some spectacularly transporting hooks and melodies, a healthy dose of sass, and some head smackingly cringe-worthy lyrics. What many critics now hail as a masterpiece (Erotica) was in its day (1992!) similarly received – an overlong mish-mash of dance, pop, balladry that ran the gamut from sincerely poignant to sincerely filthy to sincerely odd. Rebel Heart feels like a bookend to that now legendary compilation.
Rebel Heart's strongest moments (consistent with Madonna's track record) marry heartache, petulance, and swirling disco, from the soaring, gospel-tinged first single "Living for Love" to upcoming single "Ghosttown," a crunchy, ominous, totally dance-able ode to isolation/devotion. The album's sillier moments work for me as well, including the anti-misogyny, reggae-lite screed "Unapologetic B*tch" to the similarly titled yet totally antithetical party anthem "B*tch, I'm Madonna" (with a great guest rhyme from most-likely-to-inherit-the-crown Nicki Minaj).
Madonna crashes the gates again of her own sexual minstrelsy with a clutch of tracks that veer from the obscene to the perverse ("Body Shop," "Holy Water," "Best Night," and the funniest of the bunch "S.E.X."). At first listen to these, I wanted to jump out of my skin as there is minimal effort for metaphor but maximal effort for shock and awe. Yet, as I gave them a second listen (still not liking them much), I realized that Madonna's tongue was firmly in cheek (sounds kinda like one of her lyrics, actually), so these four may grow on me … like a fungus.
Gone are any aspirations to play in the bass-thumping pop sandbox of the Lady Gagas or Katy Perrys of the world (though I think those critiques have been greatly overstated) as Madonna happily reintroduces ballads to her repertoire, standouts being the shimmering "Messiah" (where religion becomes a clever proxy for humanistic self-actualization), caustic "HeartBreakCity" (I do love when Madonna gives two-timing, preening dudes a dressing down), and the capstone strum-and-drang of title track "Rebel Heart."
It is this last number (inexplicably only available on the deluxe edition) that makes the entire nearly 90 minute running time worth the journey. With this ditty, Madonna offers arguably her most revelatory (and witty) lyrics – Madonna the songwriter is often overshadowed by Madonna the showman, but this track wraps the thesis of Rebel Heart (the album) with a heart-rending bow:
I lived my life like a masochist
Hearing my father say: "Told you so, told you so"
"Why can't you be like the other girls?"
I said: "Oh no, that's not me and I don't think that it'll ever be"
Thought I belonged to a different tribe
Never satisfied, satisfied
Tried to fit in but it wasn't me,
I said: "Oh no, I want more, that's not what I'm looking for"
And you've succeeded, Ms. Ciccone. Keep up the fine work, Madonna – looking forward to keeping you as the primary soundtrack to my ever-evolving life …
Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.
My mom Susie Duncan Sexton's Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.
Posted By: Roy Sexton (Reel Roy Reviews)	Category: (Dark) Slice-of-Life, Americana, Music Review, Must See, Pop!	Tags: american life, bedtime stories, best night, bitch I'm madonna, body shop, broadway, comic book, confessions on a dance floor, david letterman, dick lugar, dick tracy, don't tell me, elaine stritch, erotica, evita, ghosttown, golden globe, hanky panky, hard candy, heartbreakcity, holy water, human nature, I'm breathless, instagram, janet jackson, japan, katy perry, keep it together, lady gaga, like a prayer, like a virgin, living for love, madonna, madonna review, material girl, mdna, memorial park, messiah, music, music review, nicki minaj, ray of light, rebel heart, rebel heart review, reel roy reviews, roy sexton, s.e.x., sacha baron cohen, sean penn, sooner or later, stephen sondheim, true blue, unapologetic bitch, us senate, walkman, warren beatty
"The error in man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around." Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla, Warner Brothers' reboot of the classic Japanese movie monster, is exhausting. Don't get me wrong. I was highly entertained, even entranced, but I also feel like I was just hit over the head by a 2X4 for the last two hours.
Like the similar postmodern reinvention in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (or even, for that matter, this spring's Noah), Godzilla, directed with a surprisingly sure hand by relative newcomer Gareth Edwards, is positioned as pointed popcorn allegory for how abysmally we humans treat this planet and the ungodly vengeance Mother Nature should unleash on us self-important ants.
In all fairness, Toho Studios' original Godzilla series took its cues from a mid-century world traumatized by the threat of nuclear Armageddon (as evidenced by the real-life bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima), so Edwards is just following that argument to its logical post-9/11, post-global warming, post-Inconvenient Truth conclusion.
The 2014 edition (let's all just agree to forget the inane Jurassic Park-meets-Independence Day debacle that was 1998's Matthew Broderick-starring effort) is a tension-filled marvel. Edwards wisely gives us plenty of footage of the titular "monster" and his battles with the Mothra-esque MUTO creatures, but he keeps the shots murky and smoke-filled, the pacing methodically coiled, and the shocks Hitchockian in their "did I see that or didn't I?" simplicity. Alexandre Desplat's score is brain-thumpingly martial.
The narrative is straight-up Saturday afternoon matinee with a healthily cynical gloss of 21st century ecological nightmare. The first half of the movie is all set up as we are introduced to a scientist (a hammy Bryan Cranston saddled with an epically bad hairpiece … guess the budget got eaten up by CGI) who loses his wife (Juliette Binoche) in a tragic nuclear power plant accident that may or may not be giant-lizard-related. Flash-forward 15 years, and Cranston's now-adult son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, all grown up from his Kick-Ass years and looking like a steroidal Joaquin Phoenix) has tired of his papa's conspiratorial theories as to what really offed mama.
There's a gibberish-spewing Japanese scientist (an awfully wooden Ken Watanabe) and a gibberish-spewing British scientist (the always crackerjack Sally Hawkins) and an authoritatively gibberish-spewing American general (the genius David Strathairn who could make tax code seem fascinating).
At one point in the film, Watanabe says to Strathairn: "The error in man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around." (I loved that!)
I kept expecting Kevin McCarthy or Gene Barry to show up wearing fedoras covering up their sweaty brows as they rattled through unnecessarily expository dialogue (see: 1953's War of the Worlds or 1954's Invasion of the Body Snatchers… but preferably if you are 10 years old and it's 1982 and there is nothing else on television).
Of course, Taylor-Johnson has chosen a military career, much to the chagrin of his academic dad. He is returning from service in some unidentified locale, eager to reignite all-American family time with his perpetually anxious wife (Elizabeth Olsen, spinning gold out of a thankless role) and his toddler son. As mayhem ensues and the various screaming creatures destroy Honolulu … and Las Vegas … and San Francisco … somehow Taylor-Johnson's character managers to be in every setting, save the day, and find another means of transport to get him closer to home. Ah, Hollywood logic.
But, here's the thing … it all works, pretty marvelously. There are no winky-nudge-nudge sexist/racist/xenophobic Michael Bay-style jokes/asides/quips and the carnage (while PG-13 friendly) is believable and haunting (and any movie that blows up Las Vegas is ok in my book). The pacing is ominous and steady and relentless, and, without being a shrill polemic, the film reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that how we treat (or mis-treat) this planet has dire consequences for us all …
In this case, primordial creatures who've lived in the earth's core for eons until the lure of radioactive weapons and waste draw them out will obliterate us all in some kind of H.P. Lovecraft/Ray Bradbury fever dream … but, hey, I said it was an allegory!
Posted By: Roy Sexton (Reel Roy Reviews)	Category: (Dark) Slice-of-Life, Action, Film Review, Must See, Pop!, Sci Fi	Tags: 9/11, aaron taylor-johnson, al gore, alexandre desplat, armageddon, bryan cranston, david strathairn, elizabeth olsen, gareth edwards, gene barry, global warming, godzilla, h.p. lovecraft, hairpiece, hiroshima, hitchock, honolulu, inconvenient truth, independence day, invasion of the body snatchers, japan, japanese, joaquin phoenix, juliette binoche, jurassic park, ken watanabe, kevin mccarthy, kick-ass, las vegas, matthew broderick, michael bay, mothra, muto, nagasaki, noah, nuclear war, pg-13, ray bradbury, reel roy reviews, rise of the planet of the apes, roy sexton, sally hawkins, san francisco, steroid, toho studios, war of the worlds
Quick Cut: "Praise of shadows and darkness" – Complicite's production Shun-kin
[Image Source: ums.org]
Director Simon McBurney in his director's note for his Complicite theatre company's production Shun-kin uses the phrase "praise of shadows and darkness." He speaks of a time and a culture where beauty could be found in the concealed and in the unknown. The production is currently running through Saturday at Ann Arbor's Power Center, presented by the University Musical Society (UMS) – ticket info and times can be found here.
In all transparency, this isn't a review but more a shameless plug for Michiganders to go check out this remarkable performance that beautifully blends the theatrical and the cinematic. McBurney, clearly a student of Peter Brook (The Empty Space), fuses puppetry, sound sculpture, rear projection, a fourth (and possibly fifth!) wall smashed to bits, stylized movement to create a breathtaking stage allegory of age, gender, class tensions.
The show, based on a text by Junichiro Tanizaki, details an "almost-folk-tale" of the symbiotic relationship between a blind young woman and her devoted caretaker and of the tragic push-pull of a relationship that was both doomed and inevitably perfect from the start.
Thanks to Ken Fischer of UMS for including me in the opening night festivities, and, as a result, inspiring one of the few "high art" entries anyone is likely to see on this blog! I don't want to spoil the surprises for you, so please check out this show. I've never experienced a performance that marries the visceral drama of a rock concert with the quiet, restrained soulfulness of haiku. This one does. Go see it. As UMS' tagline reads, "Be Present."
P.S. Enjoy fellow transplanted Ann Arbor-ite Nan Bauer's take on the show here. A quote: "Throughout the performance, I had the feeling that it could suddenly make sense in an instant. It did, at the very end, a marvelous bit of drama that can only be achieved on a stage with a live audience." Great piece!
Posted By: Roy Sexton (Reel Roy Reviews)	Category: (Dark) Slice-of-Life, Must See, Theatre Review, Thriller	Tags: a fifth wall smashed to bits, ann arbor, complicite, empty space, japan, Junichiro Tanizaki, ken fischer, michigan, nan bauer, nanarama, peter brook, power center, puppetry, rear projection, roy sexton, sex pistols, shun-kin, Simon McBurney, sound sculpture, ums, university musical society
Narrative of isolation and persecution: The Wolverine
People may have forgotten, but, for better or worse, this current cinematic superhero love affair began its decade-plus-long courtship with a little movie directed by Bryan Singer in 2000 … X-Men.
That movie introduced the world to a new kind of comic book film that made superheroes seem just like us but with just a few extra gifts (e.g. flight, claws, invisibility, flame-throwing…you know…the usual stuff). These imminently identifiable characters exuded angst and anxiety about trying to fit in, in spite of or perhaps in reaction to humanity's general aversion to if not outright loathing of difference and of talent.
The movie also introduced many of us to a gifted Aussie named Hugh Jackman, whose truly exceptional musical theatre skills and talk show host charm somehow translated brilliantly to a scruffy, violent, pissed off, immortal Canadian named Logan, nicknamed "The Wolverine."
Some might argue that it was Jackman's likeability as the be-clawed mutant anti-hero that propelled the X-Men film series to global dominance. I would agree. And miraculously Jackman's sparkling career has defied being derailed subsequently by some colossal missteps – both within that franchise as well as some other choices, namely X-Men: Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Australia, and … Kate & Leopold.
Now, coming off his Oscar-nominated triumph in last year's Les Miserables (he should have won!), Jackman reunites with director James Mangold (Kate & Leopold's helmer, plus 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line, among others) to return to his career-launching role in this summer's The Wolverine.
So how is it? Quite good actually. Blessedly, like earlier films set in the X-Men universe, there is a focus on the narrative of isolation and persecution (as opposed to selling as many action figures as possible at Wal-Mart). Jackman's inherent kindness always underlies/accentuates the deep-seated sadness and disappointment that Logan/Wolverine carries from his nearly 200 years viewing man's inhumanity to man. It makes for a compelling characterization.
The film picks up where X-Men: Last Stand left off, with Logan living in isolation in the Yukon after having murdered true love Jean Grey to save the planet from her out-of-control telekinesis. (Just typing that sentence explains pretty much everything that was wrong with that prior film.)
I have to admit I gave a little cheer when Logan, in the film's opening sequence, attacks a group of beer-sozzled, stupidly-entitled redneck hunters who have slaughtered his sole companion in the wilderness: a beautiful, (though clearly CGI) lumbering bear.
From there, the film then whizzes to Tokyo where Logan reconnects with a former mentor whose life he saved in the bombing of Nagasaki in WWII. As Chris Claremont/Frank Miller realized thirty plus years ago with their seminal Wolverine comic book miniseries, rigid/gracious/mannered Japan makes a marvelous setting to explore the anarchic/raging/righteously indignant traits of this character.
There is nothing terribly groundbreaking about the movie other than this: it is quiet and it is character-driven. Even though it is yet another big, overdone, popcorn-spewing comic book adaptation, there is a lot of deep-feeling dialogue and introspection. Good for Mangold. The movie works hard (sometimes too hard) to dissect how cruel we can be to each other and how a little kindness here or there can make all the difference in one person's life.
There are some mistakes. The green-haired Viper villain (villainess? is that word even used any more?) should have been sent packing to some other (dumber) movie. And I certainly could have done without the clanging/clunky finale where Logan nonsensically gets his claws chopped off by a gleaming Transformer-esque Silver Samurai (sad misuse of that character) and then fights … and fights … and fights.
Regardless, 75% of the film is atmospheric and engaging and fun … and, hopefully, will give Jackman's career a five year boost so he can do another musical or two … before he has to step into his mutant boots again.
P.S. For my Ann Arbor friends, we had dinner at a new place around the corner from The Rave Theater (or whatever it's called these days). The restaurant is Elevation Burger, and, for us vegetarians, they offer not one but two different kinds of handmade veggie burgers, both of which are excellent. We chatted with franchise owner-manager Mike Tayter for a bit, and the sensibility of the restaurant is very caring and conscientious and earth-friendly. I'm not a "foodie" in any sense (in fact, I hate that cloying expression) but I did want to pass along the recommendation.
Posted By: Roy Sexton (Reel Roy Reviews)	Category: Action, Australians, Comic Books, Film Review, Must See, Pop!, Sci Fi	Tags: 3:10 to yuma, ann arbor, australia, bryan singer, chris claremont, elevation burger, frank miller, hugh jackman, james mangold, japan, jean grey, kate and leopold, les miserables, marvel comics, mike tayter, nagasaki, oscar, roy sexton, silver samurai, the rave, the wolverine, tokyo, transformer, vegetarian, veggie burger, viper, wal-mart, walk the line, x-men, x-men last stand
Fair and fizzy assessment of a coquette-in-candyland: Katy Perry's Part of Me
[Image source: Amazon]
Throw in one part Madonna's "Truth of Dare" and one part Miley Cyrus' "Hannah Montana: Best of Both Worlds" and one part Zooey Deschanel's "New Girl," add a pinch of the original "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and a smidge of Tim Burton's unfortunate 3D fantasia "Alice in Wonderland," stir, bake accompanied by an infectious pop soundtrack…and voila…you have Katy Perry's new concert documentary "Part of Me."
We all more or less already knew Katy was an intensely likable personality with a knack for marrying catchy melody and zany "coquette-in-Candyland" visuals, but we probably didn't realize how deep-feeling she could be or how sad and challenged her life had been. Yes, the film, like "Truth or Dare" before it, is a calculated play to humanize (and expand the brand of) its central pop heroine. Unlike that film, there is an authenticity to Perry (benefiting no doubt from 20+ years of us all living out loud, online, and through the self-aware guise of reality TV) that Madonna couldn't/can't effect.
Your heart genuinely breaks for Perry when the de facto villain of the piece Russell Brand (standing in for Warren Beatty from the Madonna film) ends their marriage. (One of her handlers remarks at one point, "Katy keeps leaving the tour to go see him…when is he going to ever travel to her?") You also wonder how overbearing her fundamentalist religious upbringing must have been when you meet her traveling minister mom and dad who resemble even scarier versions of Sharon Osbourne and Swifty Lazar. Finally you leave the theatre with an uplift when Katy "conquers" all to sing triumphant versions of her hits "Firework" and "California Gurls." (Oh-kay, that last bit may be a bit overstated since she is dressed like a giant peppermint at the time.)
The film is a lot of fun, and, yes, a bit contrived…and completely unnecessary to view in up-charged 3D. (2D will do just fine, thank you very much.) All in all, though, it is a fair and fizzy assessment of a pop star on the ascent, one of the few for whom you genuinely wish a happy and successful life. Just be prepared (with earplugs) for the shrieks that may emanate from some of your fellow audience members (the 12 and under crowd) when Justin Bieber makes the requisite appearance onscreen. Ugh.
Posted By: Roy Sexton (Reel Roy Reviews)	Category: Americana, Film Review, Home Viewing, Music Review, Musical, Pop!	Tags: 2D, 3D, alice in wonderland, best of both worlds, california gurls, candyland, concert, firework, fundamentalist, hannah montana, japan, justin bieber, katy perry, madonna, mtv, new girl, paramount, part of me, pentecostal, peppermint, reality tv, reelroyreviews, roy sexton, russell brand, sharon osbourne, swifty lazar, tim burton, truth or dare, warren beatty, willy wonka and the chocolate factory, zooey deschanel