text:
Music Biz Headlines
Music Biz Headlines, March 10, 2022
Hill Kourkoutis Facebook photo
Mar 09, 2022 by Kerry Doole Comments
Why Hill Kourkoutis and her historic Juno nomination represent a shift in the male-dominated music industry
In the early 20th century, recording engineers all wore lab coats. And while they no longer don the white garb, the uniformity remains. When the 2022 Juno Award nominations were announced last week, the press release revealed a bit of history in the making: Hill Kourkoutis, in the running for engineer of the year. Kourkoutis, based in Barrie, is the first female to ever make the short list for the award. – Brad Wheeler, Globe and Mail
Newfoundland-Ukrainian band pushes back against Russian narratives with album launch, packed shows
Ukrainian-Canadian 'speed-folk' band the Kubasonics feels Newfoundland and Labrador understands his band. The group launched a new album in St. John's as Russian forces continued their violent invasion of Ukraine. – CP
Alberta Ballet's Jean Grand-Maître says bye with Phi, a ballet danced to Bowie
There is a line in Alberta that runs from Joni Mitchell to David Bowie. It is the creation of Jean Grand-Maître, who is retiring this spring as artistic director of Alberta Ballet. Since arriving from his native Quebec he's brought international attention to the company with ballets danced to the music of Mitchell, Elton John, Sarah McLachlan, k.d. lang, The Tragically Hip, and Gordon Lightfoot. This week, he will premiere another portrait ballet: Phi, danced to songs by David Bowie. – Marsha Lederman, Globe and Mail
On Our Radar: Orville Peck calls the sprawling "Daytona Sand" his favourite video to date
If you're going to make a statement, it might as well be so difficult to believe that there's no way it's anything but true. Orville Peck has just done precisely that with the video for "Daytona Sand", off his upcoming sophomore album Bronco. – Mike Usinger, Georgia Straight
Arkells convince prof to reschedule exam so Hamilton student can attend show
'Having the lead singer write a message is a nice touch': Prof. – Jon Wells, Hamilton Spectator
Toronto multi-instrumentalist Luna Li finds 'Duality' balancing rock, classical and pop on debut album
What Luna Li said was originally slated to be a "fun, simple, minimal indie record" became a mix of sounds that perfectly balance each other. – Demar Grant, Toronto Star
Toronto's Phoenix Concert Theatre announces vaccination policy
Ontario has lifted mandatory vaccine requirements for indoor settings — but businesses may still choose to require vaccine passports, which some spaces are doing. Now, Toronto's Phoenix has announced its own vaccine policy. In an Instagram post, the venue announced that it would be following the wishes of the artist and/or promoter. In other words, if a band playing the Phoenix wants to ensure that everyone in the room is vaccinated, they can do that. – Alex Hudson, Exclaim
Walker Hayes joins Shania in Boots and Hearts lineup
Twain will feature the first all-Canadian, all-female stage. – Jane Stevenson, Toronto Sun
Save the date: Shambhala Music Festival returning to Salmo for 2022
The giant EDM event of the B.C. summer is back. – Stuart Derdeyn, Vancouver Sun
Alessia Cara to perform at Heritage Classic
Grammy-winning singer Alessia Cara will perform between periods Sunday during the outdoor NHL Heritage Classic at Tim Hortons Field in Hamilton between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Buffalo Sabres. – Graham Rockingham, Spectator
With $15BN in revenue, 2021 was the US record industry's biggest ever year (kind of)
The US recorded music industry generated USD $14.99 billion in 2021 – its biggest annual tally in history. That stat, revealed today by MBW, comes from RIAA year-end data, and was up by a whopping 23% (or by $2.85 billion) on the equivalent figure from 2020 ($12.14bn). In fact, you'd need to go all the way back to 1999 – over two decades ago – to find the previous peak year for the US industry, when it generated $14.6 billion. – Tim Ingham, MBW
Universal Music Group suspends all Russian operations
Universal Music Group, the world's largest rightsholder, has suspended all operations in Russia and has closed its offices in the country. The move, announced March 8, comes as Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues. Over the past two weeks, over 200 multi-national companies have boycotted the Russian market in protest of its military action. Some of those firms include Mastercard, Visa, Apple, Ikea and Samsung. – Murray Stassen, MBW
TikTok just launched its own music distribution platform
TikTok is officially a music distributor now. The ByteDance-owned viral video app has just launched its own promotion and music distribution platform, called SoundOn. It is already Live in the UK, US, Brazil and Indonesia, and it lets artists upload their music directly to TikTok and RESSO. It can also distribute their music to other platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and Instagram. MBW
Even without AWAL, Kobalt Music Group is a comfortably profitable business
Without the banner areas of its company – namely AWAL and Kobalt Neighbouring Rights, both sold to Sony ten months ago in a $430M deal – just how big a business is the newly-slimmed-down Kobalt in 2022? The answer may surprise you. It expects to generate somewhere close to USD $625M in gross collections in its current financial year, to the end of June 2022, with around a tenth of that figure, $65M, in EBITDA profit. – Tim Ingham, MBW
Kobalt just raised $550m in debt to buy music catalog rights
Kobalt is going to continue to buy heritage copyrights amid the current music catalog gold-rush, it's been revealed. Only this time, it's not using other outside investor money – it's using its own, including a hunk of debt. According to Bloomberg, Kobalt Music Group has successfully raised $550M in debt financing from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and HPS Investment Partners. Kobalt intends to use the funds to build out its owned catalog of music rights. – MBW
Glass Animals: UK band's hit Heat Waves sets new record to top US chart
Glass Animals have gone to number one in the US with their sleeper hit Heat Waves, setting a new record for the longest time to reach the top. The Oxford indie group's song spent 59 weeks on its slow ascent to the summit of the Billboard Hot 100. The previous record was held by Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You, on 35 weeks. – BBC News
Under attack, Ukraine's musicians become war reporters and military fundraisers
"I'm a well-known person in this part of the world and I'm trying to use this [position] and do whatever I can," he says. – Mark Savage, BBC
Ed Sheeran denies 'borrowing' music from other artists
The 'Bad Habits' hitmaker took to the stand at the High Court in London on Monday as part of a copyright claim over his 2017 hit 'Shape of You'. Ed is in a dispute with musicians Sami Chokri – a grime artist - and Ross O'Donoghue, who allege that the track infringes "particular lines and phrases" from their song 'Oh Why', which was released in 2015. – Bang Showbiz
Recording Academy unveils exclusive NFT deal, offers free drop with a hidden prize
The Recording Academy is celebrating its upcoming Grammy Awards with the launch of an exclusive NFT collection. Fans can get a free NFT as part of the deal, one of which has a "Golden Ticket" prize that grants the bearer an all-inclusive trip to the 64th awards April 3 in Las Vegas. – Deadline
13 bands with no original members
As you'll see in the following list of bands with no original members, not everybody can be U2 and keep the same lineup. Some have experienced so much change over the years that they share no connection at all with their co-founding lineup. Examplis in our list include Blood Sweat and Tears, Renaissance, Ratt, The Little River Band, and Blackfoot. – Ultimate Classic Rock.
The ultimate guide to 2022 music festivals
Music festivals are back, baby, and we're rounding up everything you need to know. – Sadie Bell, Thrillist
Madonna bootcamp: singing, acting and 11-hour dance sessions – is anyone tough enough to take on the material girl?
Contenders in the running to play the star in a new biopic are facing gruelling training to land the part. – The Guardian
Madrid's Opera House cancels Russia's Bolshoi ballet show after Ukraine invasion
Madrid's Teatro Real has cancelled performances of the prestigious Bolshoi Ballet scheduled in May because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the "painful humanitarian emergency" it has caused. – Reuters
Kanye is running on empty
Anger is the root of Donda 2, but the record doesn't try to frame the experience in a manner that makes it accessible to non-billionaires. – Craig Jenkins Vulture
Dua Lipa faces second copyright lawsuit over hit song Levitating
Songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer claim opening melody is a 'duplicate' of their songs Wiggle and Giggle All Night and Don Diablo. – Laura Snapes, The Guardian
Pitchfork Music Festival 2022 Lineup and Dates Announced
Tickets on sale March 11 for Chicago fest taking place July 15-17, headlined by The National, Mitski, and The Roots. – Pitchfork
Liam Gallagher responds to Dave Grohl saying he's "one of the last remaining rock stars"
"He's correct, the rest of them are useless." – Elizabeth Aubrey, NME
'Clapton turned incredibly pale when Jimi began to play': Brian Auger, the Swinging 60s' pop Zelig
The keys wizard played with Rod Stewart and turned down Hendrix but has never enjoyed the renown of his peers. At 82, on the cusp of a new reissue collection, his passion is undimmed. – Garth Cartwright, The Guardian
Who's the face of Harry Styles' new beauty brand? Mick Fleetwood, obviously.
Styles enlisted the 74-year-old Fleetwood Mac drummer — his musical hero and confidant — to represent Pleasing, which Styles launched late last year. Among the looks: The British rocker is captured sporting a lavender, zebra-print suit accompanied by a purple top hat and wearing Pleasing nail polish. – LA Times
Our fave songs from February releases
Every month, our team compiles a list of our favorite songs from the month's new releases. February saw highlights from Spotlight artist Erin Rae, as well as selections from albums we loved including Steve Poltz's Stardust and Satellites, Hurray for the Riff Raff's Life on Earth, and so much more. – No Depression
Morgan Wallen wins album of the year at ACM Awards
Wallen took home the prize on Monday night for "Dangerous: The Double Album," a year after he was removed from the ACMs ballot after he was caught on camera using a racial slur. –LA Times
For young female pop stars, dropping choice F-bombs in songs proves to be liberating and profitable
From Gayle to Olivia to Demi to Taylor, the Spotify charts are filled with young women gleefully deploying expletives with a newly found freedom. – LA Times
the Kubasonics
Alessia Cara
Lennie Levine's LL Artists Partners With The Orchard
MRC Data Market Watch Facts & Figures: March 3rd, 2022
Other articles published this day
Slaight Foundation Donates $1M To TO Arts Foundation
Media Beat, March 31, 2022
Richard Flohil's 90 All-Purpose Phrases To Get You Through The Day
Careers: March 31, 2022
Grae: Boxes


text:
// Build for breeze.js.samples

// include gulp
var gulp = require('gulp');

var fs   = require('fs');
var path = require('path');
var glob = require('glob');
var async = require('async');
var del = require('del');
var eventStream = require('event-stream');

var gutil = require('gulp-util');
var filter = require('gulp-filter');
var flatten = require('gulp-flatten');
var rename  = require('gulp-rename');
var zip = require('gulp-zip');

// -----------------------------

var _tempDir = './_temp/';
var _clientDir = '../../breeze.js/'
var _clientSrcDir =  _clientDir + 'src/'
var _clientBuildDir = _clientDir + 'build/';
var _clientTsSrcDir    = _clientDir + 'typescript/typescript/';
var _clientLabsDir = '../../breeze.js.labs/';
var _serverLabsDir = '../../breeze.server.labs/';
var _serverNetDir = '../../breeze.server.net/';
var _vendorDir = _clientDir + 'test/vendor/'
var _metadataDir = _clientDir + 'docs/metadata/';

// var _msBuildCmd = 'C:/Windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v4.0.30319/MSBuild.exe ';
var _msBuildCmd = '"C:/Program Files (x86)/MSBuild/12.0/Bin/MsBuild.exe" '; // vs 2013 version of MsBuild
var _msBuildOptions = ' /p:Configuration=Release /verbosity:minimal ';

var _nugetPackageNames = [
  'Breeze.Client',
  'Breeze.Server.WebApi2',
  'Breeze.Server.ContextProvider.EF6',
  'Breeze.Server.ContextProvider.NH',
  'Breeze.Server.ContextProvider',
  'Breeze.WebApi2.EF6',
  'Breeze.WebApi2.NH'
];

var breezeDlls = [
  'Breeze.ContextProvider',
  'Breeze.ContextProvider.EF6',
  'Breeze.ContextProvider.NH',
  'Breeze.WebApi2'
];

var _versionNum = getBreezeVersion();
gutil.log('LocalAppData dir: ' + process.env.LOCALAPPDATA);

var _sampleSolutionFileNames = glob.sync('../**/*.sln');
// exclude zza
_sampleSolutionFileNames = _sampleSolutionFileNames.filter(function(item) {
  return item.indexOf('zza') == -1;
});

/**
 * List the available gulp tasks
 */
gulp.task('help', require('gulp-task-listing'));

gulp.task('breezeClientBuild', function(done) {
  execCommands(['gulp'], { cwd: _clientBuildDir }, done);
});

gulp.task('getLibs', ['breezeClientBuild'], function() {
  var destDir = './libs/'
  return eventStream.concat(
    gulp.src(_clientBuildDir + 'breeze.*.*')
        .pipe(flatten())
        .pipe(gulp.dest(destDir + 'js')),
    gulp.src(_clientBuildDir + 'adapters/*.*')
        .pipe(flatten())
        .pipe(gulp.dest(destDir + 'js.adapters')),
    gulp.src([_clientLabsDir + '*.js', _clientLabsDir + '*.css'])
        .pipe(flatten())
        .pipe(filter([
              "*.*",
              "!b00_breeze.modelLibrary.new-backingstore.js",
              "!breeze.ajaxrestinterceptor.js",
              "!breeze.to$q.shim.js",
              "!ngMidwayTester.js"
        ]))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(destDir + 'js.labs')),
    gulp.src(_serverLabsDir + '*.cs')
        .pipe(flatten())
        .pipe(gulp.dest(destDir + 'server.labs'))
  );

});

gulp.task('sampleSolutionsUpdateNugets', function(done) {
  async.each(_sampleSolutionFileNames, function (fileName, cb) {
    execNugetInstallUpdate(fileName, _nugetPackageNames, cb);
  }, done);

});

gulp.task('sampleSolutionsBuild', ['getLibs', 'sampleSolutionsUpdateNugets'], function(done) {
  async.each(_sampleSolutionFileNames, function(fileName, cb) {
    msBuildSolution(fileName, cb);
  }, done);
});

gulp.task('breezeServerBuild', function(done) {
  var solutionFileName = _serverNetDir + 'Breeze.Build.sln';
  msBuildSolution(solutionFileName, done);
});

gulp.task('copyToTempDir', ['breezeServerBuild'], function() {
  del.sync(_tempDir, { force: true} );

  try { fs.mkdirSync(_tempDir); } catch(e) {}; // in case it doesn't exist.
  fs.writeFileSync(_tempDir + 'version.txt', 'Version: ' + _versionNum);

  var srcDlls = [];
  breezeDlls.forEach(function(dllName) {
    var path = _serverNetDir + dllName + '/bin/release/';
    srcDlls.push(path + dllName + '.dll');
    srcDlls.push(path + dllName + '.pdb');
    srcDlls.push(path + dllName + '.xml');
  })

  return eventStream.concat(
    gulp.src('./readme.txt').pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir)),
    // gulp.src('../readme.md').pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir));

    gulp.src([_clientBuildDir + 'breeze.*min.js', _clientBuildDir + 'breeze.*debug.js',  _vendorDir + 'q.**js'])
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'Scripts')),
    gulp.src(_clientSrcDir + 'b??_breeze.**js')
        .pipe(rename(function(path) {
          // replace 'b??_breeze' with 'breeze.'
          var name = path.basename;
          path.basename = 'breeze' + name.substring(name.indexOf('.'));
        }))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'Scripts/Adapters')),
    gulp.src(_clientSrcDir + 'breeze.*.*.js')
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'Scripts/Adapters')),
    gulp.src(_clientTsSrcDir + '*.d.ts')
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'Typescript')),
    gulp.src(_metadataDir + '*.*')
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'Scripts/Metadata')),
    gulp.src(srcDlls)
        .pipe(gulp.dest(_tempDir + 'NetDlls'))
  );
})

gulp.task('zip', ['copyToTempDir'], function() {
// gulp.task('zip', function() {
  gutil.log('Zipping...');
  var zipFileName = 'breeze-runtime-' + _versionNum + '.zip';
  del.sync('./' + zipFileName);
  gulp.src(_tempDir + '**/*')
      .pipe(zip(zipFileName))
      .pipe(gulp.dest('.'));
});

// gulp.task('default', ['sampleSolutionsBuild'] , function() {
gulp.task('default', ['sampleSolutionsBuild', 'zip'] , function() {

});

function msBuildSolution(solutionFileName, done) {
  var baseName = path.basename(solutionFileName);
  var rootCmd = _msBuildCmd + '"' + baseName +'"' + _msBuildOptions + ' /t:'

  var cmds = [rootCmd + 'Clean', rootCmd + 'Rebuild'];
  var cwd = path.dirname(solutionFileName);
  execCommands(cmds, { cwd: cwd},  done);
}

function execNugetInstallUpdate(solutionFileName, nugetPackageNames, done ) {

  var solutionDir = path.dirname(solutionFileName);
  var packagesDir = solutionDir + '/packages';
  gutil.log('Executing nuget install for file: ' + solutionFileName);
  var configFileNames = glob.sync(solutionDir + '/**/packages.config');

  var installCmds = configFileNames.map(function(configFileName) {
    return 'nuget install ' + configFileName + ' -OutputDirectory ' + packagesDir;
  });

  var baseUpdateCmd = 'nuget update ' + solutionFileName +  ' -FileConflictAction Ignore -Id ';
  var updateCmds = nugetPackageNames.map(function(npn) {
    return baseUpdateCmd + npn;
  });
  var cmds = installCmds.concat(updateCmds);
  execCommands(cmds, null, done);

}

function getBreezeVersion() {
  var versionFile = fs.readFileSync( _clientSrcDir + '_head.jsfrag');
  var regex = /\s+version:\s*"(\d.\d\d*.?\d*.?\d*)"/
  var matches = regex.exec(versionFile);

  if (matches == null) {
    throw new Error('Breeze client version number not found');
  }
  // matches[0] is entire version string - [1] is just the capturing group.
  var versionNum = matches[1];
  gutil.log("Breeze client version from: " + _clientSrcDir + ' is: ' + versionNum);
  return versionNum;
}

// utilities

// added options are: shouldLog
// cb is function(err, stdout, stderr);
function execCommands(cmds, options, cb) {
  options = options || {};
  options.shouldThrow = options.shouldThrow == null ? true : options.shouldThrow;
  options.shouldLog = options.shouldLog == null ? true : options.shouldLog;
  if (!cmds || cmds.length == 0) cb(null, null, null);
  var exec = require('child_process').exec;  // just to make it more portable.
  exec(cmds[0], options, function(err, stdout, stderr) {
    if (err == null) {
      if (options.shouldLog) {
        gutil.log('cmd: ' + cmds[0]);
        gutil.log('stdout: ' + stdout);
      }
      if (cmds.length == 1) {
        cb(err, stdout, stderr);
      } else {
        execCommands(cmds.slice(1), options, cb);
      }
    } else {
      if (options.shouldLog) {
        gutil.log('exec error on cmd: ' + cmds[0]);
        gutil.log('exec error: ' + err);
        if (stdout) gutil.log('stdout: ' + stdout);
        if (stderr) gutil.log('stderr: ' + stderr);
      }
      if (err && options.shouldThrow) throw err;
      cb(err, stdout, stderr);
    }
  });
}

function mapPath(dir, fileNames) {
  return fileNames.map(function(fileName) {
    return dir + fileName;
  });
};

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


A vacancy notification in regard to DSSSB Recruitment has been circulated by Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board. Skilled & well qualified Individuals can submit their applications through online mode for the 204 unoccupied posts of LDC, Legal Assistant, Welfare Officer before last date which is 5th March-2019.
Education Info: Job finders should have passed 12th, Degree in Engineering /Environment/Civil, Degree in Law, Master's Degree in social work or Master of Art (Sociology) or Post Graduate Degree in Criminology with good academic records from well recognized Institute / board.
Candidates belonging to SC/ST/PWD/Ex-serviceman/Women categories are exempted from payment of application fee.
Pay Scale: Successfully appointed contenders against this recruitment will attain salary of Rs. 5200-20200/- With 1900/2400/- Grade Pay (Post 1-3), Rs. 9300-34800/- With 4200/- Grade Pay (Post 4-7) from recruiting organization.
Visit the web portal of organization which is http://delhi.gov.in.
Click Here For DSSSB Job Notification Link.
A newest career advertisement as DSSSB Recruitment has been advertised by Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board. Result oriented and hard working Indian Citizens have to submit the form through online mode for the 264 positions of Junior Engineer, Assistant Engineer before the end date which is 1st March 2019.
Academic Details: Job finders should have passed Diploma in Civil/Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, Degree in Electrical/Civil Engineering with good academic records from well recognized Institute / board.
Candidates belonging to SC/ ST/ Woman/PWD / Ex-serviceman categories are exempted from payment of application fee.
Applicants who are interested to apply for above mentioned post they should not be exceeding than 32 Years (Post 1), 30 Years (Post 2), 27 Years (Post 3,4).
What amount I'll get as pay band?: Those contenders who will fulfill the required eligibility criteria for DSSSB Vacancies will get a monthly consolidated of Rs. 9300 - 34800/- With 4200/4600/- Grade Pay as per the rules of the organization.
Contenders will be hired against this recruitment on the basis of their performance in Written Exam, Skill Test that will be conducted by selection committee of recruiting organization.
Dead Line For Apply Online : 01-03-2019.
Jobs Hunter can also get latest updates about DSSSB Vacancies by bookmarking this page using CTRL+D.


I happened to overhear a conversation between a couple of those golfers recently that I thought I would share with you - not because what was said was particularly useful.
Lets' pause for a minute here and consider that statement - an infrequent golfer that has never (I assume) played more than 9 holes a time, who it seemed had a skill level of novice or less, which I gathered from hearing the comment.
Not to mention that after figuring all that out - we then have all the subtleties to work out – wind, in between distances, trees and rough, different types of shots, sand traps and other hazards.
Any idea after reading that - whether I'd suggest playing golf or getting the coaching first?
If you play poorly for a third time in a row, go see your club professional.


Author(s): Anzalchi, J. ; Couchman, A. ; Gabellini, P. ; Gallinaro, G. ; D'Agristina, L. ; Alagha, N. ; Angeletti, P.
A key requirement for the future multi-beam broadband satellite design is the provision of flexibility to adapt to different traffic demands by re-assigning capacity to beams in accordance with changing traffic distributions. Such flexibility would enable the best match to be maintained between the system resources and traffic demands over the satellite lifetime, thereby greatly enhancing the system utilisation and competitiveness. The current paper examines the use of beam hopping to provide such flexibility. It investigates the advantages of beam hopping and compares the performance and capacity capabilities of a beam hopped with that of equivalent non-hopped systems also designed to provide flexibility.


text:
Home / Chemical and Material Science
Chemical and Material Science
Chemical and Material Science January 17, 2022
Overview on Organic and Inorganic Materials Used for Furniture and Its Decorations
Natural resources aided in the evolution of human existence on the planet. For almost 10,000 years, these materials have been in use. Furniture has been made out of raw wood or stone for…
Selected Coating Properties of Black Alder Wood as a Function of Surface Preparation, Varnish Type, Coating System and Exposure Conditions
On the market, solid wood furniture maintains its popularity. The key factors used to describe the overall quality of solid wood are reliability, environmental friendliness, appearance, and value. Black alder is one of…
An Ecological Approach for Recovery Residual Area of the Human Productive Activity: A Brief Study
Cities and their suburbs develop, expand, and replace natural lands with agricultural lands as urban populations grow. Land use changes as a result of urbanisation, changing the connection between human societies and natural…
Study on Decomposition and Transformation of Calcite-1 by Shearing at High Pressure
Transmission Calcite-1 was gently sheared at high pressure up to 16 GPa parallel to the (101) plane and in the [2-1-1] direction at room temperature, resulting in X-ray diffraction patterns on imaging plates….
Determining the Bulk Growth, Nucleation Kinetics, Optical and Spectral Analysis of Organic Nonlinear Material: 4-Chloroaniline (pCA) Single Crystal
The organic nonlinear optical material 4-chloroaniline was formed as a single crystal by slow cooling (pCA). The material solubility was determined via gravimetric analysis, and the metastable zonewidth MSZW was evaluated at various…
Investigation of Electrical, Acoustical and Optical Properties of Nanopowder Dispersed Cholesteric Liquid Crystal
Due to its unique features, such as improvement in different properties such as electrical, optical, thermal, energy storage, and spontaneous polarisation, composite materials based on nanopowder dispersed liquid crystals are essential both in…
A Detailed Review on the Properties and Applications of WO3 Nanostructure-Based Optical and Electronic Devices
Tungsten oxide (WO3) is a wide bandgap semiconductor with accidentally doped n-type, strong electrical conductivity, and high electron Hall mobility, making it a potential material for optoelectronic applications. Recent publications have included reviews…
Chemical and Material Science November 25, 2021
Geotechnical Interattraction of Granites from Ouaddai Region (East) for Use in Civil Engineering
This research focuses on the various properties of granitic materials that can be used in construction in Chad's eastern area. The towns of Achklun and Amgala are located in the north and south…
Study on Preparation and Characterization of Subsurface Silver Particulate Films on Polymer Blends of Polystyrene/Poly (2-Vinyl pyridine) /Poly (Vinylpyrollidone)/Poly (4-Vinyl pyridine)
In the last few decades, polymer nanocomposites have been an enormously growing topic of research for producing materials. When a little amount of nanosized particles is added to a polymer matrix, the polymer…
Study on Fruit Based Dye Sensitized Solar Cell
In the field of solar energy conversion, finding a cost-effective and environmentally acceptable solar cell is always a scientific problem. As a result, Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs), which offer low-cost production and…
Assessment of Spectroscopic Characterization of Pure and Malachite Green Doped Polysulfone Samples by X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), UV- Visible and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) Techniques
Polymers have strong dielectric properties when subjected to a field-temperature treatment because they may permanently store charge. The electret state and carrier mobility of polymers can be significantly changed by impregnating them with…
Study on 𝛾-Rays Irradiation Induced Structural and Morphological Changes in Copper Nanowires
The influence of -irradiations on the structural and morphological features of copper nanowires (Cu-NWs) at doses ranging from 6 to 25 kGy is discussed in this paper. Cu-NWs began welding at 9 kGy,…
Failure of Standard Duplex Stainless Steel X2CrNiMoN22-5-3 under Corrosion Fatigue in Geothermal Environment: A Recent Study
Corrosion fatigue has long been known to reduce the lifetime of high alloyed steels. X2CrNiMoN22-5-3 duplex stainless steel is a viable candidate for corrosion and mechanical stress resistance. As a result, the corrosion…
Determination of Response Statistics of Single Degree of Nonlinear Random Structure with Nonlinear Damping Characteristic and Nonlinear Elastic Characteristic
The applicability of the route integral solution approach for determining the response statistics of nonlinear dynamic systems whose equations of motion may be described using linearization differential equations is investigated in this work….
Thermo Catalytic Decomposition of Methane over Cu – Al2O3 and 5 – 20wt% Ni – Cu – Al2O3 Catalysts to Produce Hydrogen and Carbon Nanofibers: Experimental Investigation
Hydrogen is an environmentally beneficial fuel with the potential to reduce the use of fossil fuels greatly; yet, it faces numerous important difficulties before it can be widely adopted. TCD (thermo catalytic decomposition…
Study on Development of a Deformation Prediction System for 3D Printed Parts in Additive Manufacturing
SLM is a promising additive manufacturing (AM) process that has the ability to build practically any three-dimensional (3D) metallic item with complex structures. The thermal behaviour of metal powder during the SLM process…

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Picking the best Pension Private Investors to save against devastation.
Before retirement woes ruin you at old age, you can seek help from pension private investors to pep up your sagging financial conditions. Easy said than done, pension private investors are sometimes dubious people who would only fleece you of your hard earned money. There are others who don't have enough financial foresight to handle your expenditure and savings. In short, if people choose the wrong pension private investors, they are destined to endure a struggling post-retirement life.
Before choosing the investment that can provide you with pension benefits, take a look at the risks, returns, and efficiency of the private investment. For instance, Life Insurance policies are regarded as one of the safe investments – but, they still have a low income as compared to mutual funds. The pension private investors would look for mutual funds which offer good interest rates, offer tax benefits, and series of benefits and reinvestments. One such example is Templeton Pension Plan (TPP) where you can also withdraw money even if you have not attained the retirement age.
Pension private investors choose the best possible mutual fund in the market that has an efficient fund manager and asset distribution facility. Interests offered by banks or government institutes are generally low. Loans are provided only when there is a huge guarantee against it. Pension seeking people don't have this luxury to avail the money offered by banks and such institutions at an old age. Pension private investors help to bridge the basic need and monetary requirement of the people.
Investing in stock market is a difficult proposition for pension private investors. As stock market is froth with ups and downs, pension private investors may lose their annuity and interests if they invested money in stocks that was ultimately devalued in the stock market. Often, you may be blocking the money for years – sometimes till death of the investor.
Compared to stocks and shares, pensions got from government bonds are much better and yield good profit. There can also be options of using such bonds with corporate bonds. Even if there are economic high or a recession, the pensioner would still get his dues. Today, the economic condition in the world is fluctuating immensely. There are economic booms at times while there are suffocating recessions. Pension private investors need to address this problem for those who depend largely for annuity for post-retirement days.
Experts opine that the first option for pension private investors is to pick the investment option that locks the money only for a short-term. Pros and cons must be weighed to ensure that there is least investment risk involved in the process. Before deciding the investment policy, pension seekers need to understand that private pensions are little risky but yield better returns than the public pension schemes. In public owned pension schemes, the interest rate is very low.
Pension private investors therefore seek private equities, bonds, and similar investments which yield better interests. However, with inflation knocking at the door, bond prices are expected to decrease in the near future. Although this situation can vary from one country to another, the general trend in the world economy is that prices will be subjected to inflation.
There are many reasons to suggest that private pensions can take a toll on your financial condition, pension relief, and asset earning. These alternative investments are subjected to changes – a change that goes against the investor can be quite harmful. As pension private investment is not a new concept but a tested financial option, the market has genuine pension private investors who can however, manage pension investment successfully.
But here is a word of caution for those who blindly trust pension private investors. Hedge fund investment has been rising in recent times. This option is still risky for pension seekers. Moreover, pension fund managers can always try to maximize returns by not providing the clear picture of the company's performance. There are wrong speculations of the pension fund managers regarding the investment. In short, pension private investment through hedge funds and private equity is highly risky.
Careful pension private investors would not subject the investment to such high risk. Efficient ones would not narrow their limit to the economy of the country as a whole but would look for turn around companies. These companies would reap profits and provide useful interest to the investors. Additionally, the companies can break even in business and curtail the loss in business.
Most people like to invest and reinvest their savings to get the maximum yield. Pension private investment is a new concept today where risk takers can reap profits immeasurably. Pension private investors hunt for mutual funds, equity, or hedge funds which can provide maximum interest rate at a minimum risk. The tactics of managing the fund allotted for pension is quite different than what was followed earlier. Today, guarantees and securities against a loan have been largely reduced to boost business. And, more business would ideally mean better prospects and good returns against the pension private investment.
What's required is that pension private investors choose the right equity, mutual funds scheme, and so on. For instance, investment in IT sector today is far more lucrative and less risky than the one in ore or metal manufacturing company. With the technological boom in recent times, it is useful to invest in equity share of prestigious software firms. Pension private investors would check how well these investments can perform in future. They would also identify the tax sops offered through such investment. Additionally, they would also check the risk factors associated with the investment.
Pension private investors can also work for those pension seekers who have invested a huge sum in a scheme that blocks the capital for life. There are options to help the customers seek their pension facilities, withdraw money is required from the scheme, and utilize other benefits associated with it.
In a nutshell therefore, people would like to have a secured life in post retirement age, earn a good living, and get tax sops wherever possible. Through judicious thinking, immense study, and practical experience, sincere pension private investors can come up with many such pension investment policies.


Summary of Job Duties: This position will assist with the identification and development of internship placements and the Field Instructors who supervise interns, serve on field committees, and serve on curriculum committees. The Online Field Education Coordinator will revise and develop field policies/procedures/documents, maintain community relationships with agencies, provide supervision and training as necessary for field liaisons, advising for online MSW students, teach one class per semester, and will maintain an online learning platform for class. This position must exhibit student-centeredness, skills in teamwork and collegiality, an innovative and collaborative nature, and must be student-, university-, or community service- oriented. Regular, non-disruptive and reliable attendance is required. Driving to off-campus locations is required.
Special Instructions: For a complete position announcement and information regarding how to apply, visithttps://jobs.uark.edu/postings/7770. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. To be considered for the position, applicants should submit (1) a letter of interest (demonstrating how your strengths match the duties and qualifications listed above) and (2) complete curriculum vitae. Transcripts will be required from finalists. Completed applications received by August 14, 2015 will be assured full consideration. Late applications will be reviewed as necessary to fill the position. The University of Arkansas is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution. The University welcomes applications without regard to age, race, gender (including pregnancy), national origin, disability, religion, marital or parental status, protected veteran status, military service, genetic information, sexual orientation or gender identity. Persons must have proof of legal authority to work in the United States on the first day of employment. All applicant information is subject to public disclosure under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.


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10 Dead in Deadly Crash of Charter Bus & Fed Ex Truck
It is a tragic fact of accidents that they can occur at any time to anyone. It's all the worse when those accidents could have been prevented by someone following simple safety regulations or through common sense. Restitution should always be required from those who cause accidents through willfully disregarding the safety of others.
A busload of low-income high school students, many of whom were hoping to be the first in their families to attend college, suffered a terrible accident. An explosive crash on the way from Los Angeles to a school in Northern California left 10 dead and dozens of others hospitalized.
It is still unknown why a FedEx big rig jumped the median into oncoming traffic and crashed head on into the bus full of students. Both vehicles burst into flame after colliding. Most of the survivors suffered injuries, including some with broken bones or critical burns. Those who got out of the bus did so through a kicked-out window.
Only some of the students managed to get out before explosions engulfed the vehicles in flames. Firefighters put out the fire, but by then there was nothing left by blackened, twisted wrecks. Bodies inside the bus were draped in blankets.
The drivers were both killed, as were three adults traveling with the students and five teenagers, according to reports from California Highway Patrol. According to rescuers, most of the bodies were at the front of the bus or outside on the ground in front of it.
A spokeswoman for FedEx said her company was cooperating with the investigation, as did the CEO of the bus company which was chartered by the college the students were going to visit. CHP and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating, but they say it make take months to determine just why the FedEx truck swerved into that deadly accident.
If you or a loved one has been harmed in through the reckless or careless actions of another, call the offices of Hofland & Tomsheck today. We will do everything we can to bring your case to its best possible resolution.


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Figurative Language in Rap?
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A Guide to Similes, Metaphors & More
Hip-hop music and poetry are full of figurative language. Here is a guide for identifying and using figurative language in rap songs and poems. In this list, each figurative language term has a pronunciation guide, a definition, and an example. Remember: Rap is poetry, and a lot of poetry is rap. Also check out examples of metaphors in popular hip-hop page.
Simile (SIH-muh-lee): a comparison between two or more things using the words like or as.
Example: "I move fast like a cheetah on the Serengeti."
Metaphor (MET-uh-for): a comparison between two or more things that doesn't use the words like or as.
Example: "You are an ant, while I'm the lion."
Alliteration (uh-LIT-er-AY-shuhn): a phrase with a string of words all beginning with the same sound.
Example: "Five freaky females finding sales at retail."
Hyperbole (hie-PER-buh-lee): an exaggeration.
Example: "I fought a million rappers in an afternoon in June."
Personification, (per-son-if-ih-KAY-shon): giving an animal or object human-like characteristics.
Example: "Alright, the sky misses the sun at night."
Paradox (PARE-uh-docks): a statement that seems untrue, that seems to contradict itself.
Example: "The poorest man is the richest, and the rich are poor."
Symbol (SIM-bull): something that stands for something else (often something more abstract).
Example: In Tupac Shakur's song Me and My Girlfriend, the "girflfriend" referenced is actually his gun.
Assonance (ASS-uh-nince): the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyme.
Example: "Hear the mellow wedding bells." - Edgar Allen Poe"
Onomatopoeia (ON-uh-maht-uh-PEE-uh): a word that imitates the sound it is describing.
Example: "Out of reach, I pull out with a screech."
Apostrophe (uh-POS-troh-fee): a figure of speech that addresses (talks to) a dead or nonpresent person, or an object.
Example: "O, King Vitamin cereal, you blow my mind!"
Imagery (IM-aj-ree): a very general term that encompasses nearly any description of something that conjures an image, sound, taste, smell or feeling to mind. In other words a literal or concrete representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by one or more senses.
Example: "Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells" - T.S. Eliot
Metonymy (met-TON-im-ee): a figure of speech that replaces the literal thing with a more vivid, but closely related thing or idea.
Example: Instead of saying "give me your attention," you could say "give me your ear."
Understatement (UHN-der-stayt-ment): the opposite of hyperbole, an understatement makes something that is a big deal seem not very important. It's often used for humor.
Example: "The boat had been ripped apart by the storm and now a dozen hungry sharks began circling the captain. 'This isn't great,' he told his wife."
Want to add to our list of figurative language examples? Write your own figurative language example, define the technique and email it to escher(AT)flocabulary.com.


for information that leads to an arrest or arrests. the archdiocese of milwaukee will hold a prayer vigil tomorrow night as part of the healing in sherman park. the vigil will be held in all saints parish at 6:30 thursday night at all saints parish, 40-51 north 25th street. all members of the milwaukee archdiocese are invited. a statement from the archdiocese reads, the hoplessness of seeming insurmountable issues must be met together from wherever we live. these billboar all over the city of milwaukee. lamar billboards put up the heart, and the initials m-ke to promote the healing in sherman park. a local business owner took matters into his own hands to show the every day spirit of the people who live in sherman park. he's making sure kids look their best for the start of the new school year. scott steele is live in sherman park with that part of our coverage. changing the buzz of the last week from protest to peace.
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This course is for building maintenance personnel and construction workers who work in schools, residential housing and commercial buildings and perform activities that may disturb lead paint where the anticipated exposures will be below the OSHA Action Level.


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Does Thinking About God Have a Down Side?
Research led by University of Waterloo psychologist Kristin Laurin has yielded a result that's surprising to me, and that raises questions about a possible unwanted effect of work by many thinkers, including myself.
Laurin and her colleagues did several experiments, and tested two main hypotheses. I'll focus on one: God thoughts lead to reduction in active pursuit of goals. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments, all of which supported it. A summary of just one of the experiments will explain what the hypothesis means, and give some idea of how it can be investigated. (The other hypothesis, which did not surprise me, was this: God thoughts lead to increase in resistance to temptation.)
How can you be sure people have recently had "God representations" in mind? One way is to give them the task of composing sentences from lists of words they are given, and include words like "God", "divine", sacred" on the lists. That was the set up for one group of participants. Another group of participants was given the same task with other lists that contained none of those words, but did contain words for positively valued items (e.g., "sun", "flowers", "party"). A third group did the same task using lists with neutral words.
To get at the effect of the differences among these groups, Laurin and her colleagues asked all participants to do a new verbal task. They were told that high scoring on this second task was a good predictor of success in their chosen field (engineering, as it happens). The task was to write down as many English words as they could in 5 minutes that are composed of just the letters R, S, T, L, I, E, and A.
The key result – predicted by the researchers but surprising to me – was that participants who had received the list of religion-related words on the first task did less well on this second task than the other participants – they averaged 19.5 words, compared to 30.4 and 30.3 for the participants who had gotten non-religion-related words that were positive, or neutral, respectively.
Several weeks before this experiment was conducted, the authors had given a questionnaire to their participants that included a religion identification question. They were thus able to test whether their experimental result depended on participants' religious classification. They found that their result did not depend on religious classification, even when that classification was "atheist' (about half of the participants in this study).
The authors suggest a mechanism for their observed effect, namely that exposure to the religion-related words in the lists in the first task "activated the idea of an omnipotent, controlling force that has influence over [participants'] outcomes". In a second study, they found experimental support for this mechanism, and concluded that "only those who believed external forces could influence their career success demonstrated reduced active goal pursuit following the God prime" (where receiving the "God prime" = receiving the religion-related lists in the first task).
This conclusion gives me pause, for the following reason. As is evident from several posts on this and several other blogs, recent books, and newspaper reports, there are many lines of research that show the importance of unconscious processes. A large number of effects on our behavior come from circumstances of which we are unaware, or circumstances that we consciously notice, but that influence our behavior in ways we do not realize. In the last decade, and continuing today, our dependence on processes that are unconscious, and therefore not under our control, has become more and more widely publicized.
It thus seems that there is a serious question whether the increasing recognition of the effects of unconscious processes may have an unwanted, deleterious effect of reducing our motivation to actively pursue our goals. Your Brain and You resolved somewhat similar issues about the relation of unconscious processes to responsibility and certain attitudes toward ourselves. But, of course, it could not consider this recent experiment, and it did not address the question of what effect the recognition of our dependence on unconscious processes might have upon our degree of motivation to pursue our goals.
I do not think I have an answer to this question, but I wonder whether the following distinction may turn out to be relevant. Getting people to think about a god is getting them to think about an agent – an entity with its own purposes and ability to enact them. On the other hand, accepting that there are causes of behavior that lie beyond our control is not the same as accepting that our outcomes depend on another agent's purposes. So, it seems possible that the growing recognition of the importance of unconscious processes to our thoughts and actions may not lead to reduced motivation to achieve our goals.
[Laurin, K., Kay, A. C. and Fitzsimmons, G. M. (2012) "Divergent Effects of Activating Thoughts of God on Self-Regulation", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(1):4-21.]
2 Comments	| Control	| Tagged: active goal pursuit, God thoughts, unconscious processes	| Permalink
Gazzaniga's Modules
I've been reading Michael Gazzaniga's 2009 Gifford Lectures, now published as Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. I can't say that I think he's untied the knot of the free will problem, but the book contains some interesting observations about split brain patients, brain scans, and modules. Most of this post is about modules, but Gazzaniga's remarks about brain scans deserve top billing.
These remarks come in the last and most useful chapter, which focuses on problems in brining neuroscience into court. Gazzaniga provides a long list of such problems, and anyone who is interested in neuroscience and the law should certainly read it.
The general theme is this. Extracting statistically significant conclusions from brain scans is an extremely complex business. One thing that has to be done to support meaningful statements about the relation between brain regions and our mental abilities is to average scans across multiple individuals. This kind of averaging is part of what is used to generate the familiar pictures of brain regions "lighting up".
But in any court proceeding, the question is about the brain of one individual only. Brain scans of normal, law-abiding individuals often differ quite noticeably from averages of scans of people doing the same task. So, inferences from an individual's showing a difference from average in a brain scan to conclusions about that individual's abilities, proclivities, or degree of responsibility are extremely difficult and risky.
The individual differences in brain scans show that our brains are not standard-issue machines. Brains that are wired differently can lead to actions that have the same practical result across a wide variety of circumstances. This implies that there is a limit to how specialized each part of our brains can be.
But what about modularity? Don't we have to think of ourselves as composed of relatively small sub-networks that are dedicated to their given tasks?
Here is where things get interesting; for in Gazzaniga's book, there seem to be two concepts of "module" at work, although the distinction between them is not clearly drawn.
The first arises out of some observations that have been known for a long time, but are not often referred to. (They're on pp. 32-33 of Gazzaniga's book.) One of these is that while our brains are 2.75 larger than those of chimpanzees, we have only 1.25 times more neurons. So, on average, our neurons are more distant from each other. What fills the "extra" space is connections among neurons; but if the same degree of connectivity among neurons were maintained with the extra distance, there would have to be many more miles of connecting lines (axons) than there actually are. So, in us, the degree of connectivity is, on average, less than that in chimps. There are still groups of close-lying neural cells that are richly connected, but the connections of one group to another are sometimes relatively sparse. We have thus arrived, by a sort of physiological derivation, at modules.
It must be noticed, however, that this explanation of the existence of modules does not say anything about what kind of functions the small, relatively well connected groups might be performing. So, this explanation does not contribute any reason for supposing that there are "modules" for anything so complex as – to take a famous case – detecting people who cheat on social rules. There is good evidence that we have a well developed ability to detect cheaters, and that this ability fails to extend to similar problems that are not phrased in terms of social rules. But it is another question whether there is one brain part that is dedicated to this task, or whether we can do it because we have several small groups of neurons, each of which does a less complicated task, and whose combined result enables us to detect cheaters with ease.
Modularity reaches its apogee when Gazzaniga introduces the "interpreter module". The job of this item is to rationalize what all the other modules are doing. It is the module that is supposed to provide our ability to make up a narrative that will present us – to others, and to ourselves – as reasonable actors, planning in accord with our established desires and beliefs, and carrying out what we have told ourselves we intend to do.
According to the interpreter module story, we can see this inveterate rationalizer at work in many ways. It reveals itself in startlingly clear ways in cases of damaged brains. Some of the patients of interest here are split brain patients; others have lost various abilities due to stroke or accidents. Some parts of their brains receive less than the normal amount of input from other parts. Their interpreter modules have incomplete information, and the stories they concoct about what their owners are doing and why are sometimes quite bizarre.
But people with intact brains can be shown to be doing the same sort of rationalizing. For example, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) had people watch a movie. For one group, the circumstances were normal, for another the circumstances were the same except for a noisy power saw in the hall outside. Participants were asked to rate several aspects of the movie, such as interest, and likelihood of affecting other viewers. Then they were asked whether the noise had affected their ratings. In fact, there was no significant difference in the ratings between the non-distracted group and the group exposed to the noise. But a majority of those in the latter group believed that the noise had affected their ratings.
While false beliefs about our own mental processes are well established, I am suspicious of the "interpreter" story. The interpreter is called a "module" and is supposed to explain how we bring off the interesting task of stitching together all that goes on, and all that we do, into a coherent (or, at least, coherent sounding) narrative. But we might be doing any of very many things, under many different circumstances. To make a coherent story, we must remain consistent, or nearly so, with our beliefs about how the physical and social worlds operate. We must anticipate the likely reactions of others to what we say we are doing. So, according to the interpreter module story, this "module" must have access to an enormous body of input from other modules, and be able to process it into (at least the simulacrum of) a coherent story.
To me, that sounds an awful lot like an homunculus – a little person embodied in a relatively tightly interconnected sub-network, that takes in a lot of inputs and reasons to a decently plausible output that gets expressed through the linguistic system. That image does nothing to explain how we generate coherent, or approximately coherent, narratives; it just gives a name to a mystery.
It would be better to say that we have an ability to rationalize – to give a more or less coherent verbal narrative – over a great many circumstances and actions. Our brains enable us to do this. Our brains have parts with various distances between them; somehow, the combined interactions of all these parts results in linguistic output that passes, most of the time, as coherent. We wish we understood how this combined interaction manages to result in concerted speech and action over extended periods of time; but, as yet, we don't.
[Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, The Gifford Lectures for 2009 (New York: Harper Collins, 2011). Nisbett, R. E. & Wilson, T. D. (1977) "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes", Psychological Review 84:231-259. This paper describes many other cases of false belief about our mental processes. The physiological comparison between humans and chimpanzees, and its significance, are referenced to Shariff, G. A. (1953) "Cell counts in the primate cerebral cortex", Comparative Neurology 98:381-400; Deacon, T. W. (1990) "Rethinking mammalian brain evolution", American Zoology 30:629-705; and Ringo, J. (1991) "Neuronal interconnection as a function of brain size", Brain, Behavior and Evolution 38:1-6.]
3 Comments	| Brain scans, Modularity	| Tagged: cheater detection, Gazzaniga, modules, neurolaw	| Permalink
Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?
In the late 19th Century, Thomas Huxley advanced a view he called "automatism". This view says that conscious thoughts themselves don't actually do anything. They are, in Huxley's famous analogy, like the blowings of a steam whistle on an old locomotive. The steam comes from the same boiler that drives the locomotive's pistons, and blowings of the whistle are well correlated with the locomotive's starting to move, but the whistling contributes nothing to the motion. Just so with conscious thoughts: the brain processes that produce our behavior also produce conscious thoughts, but the thoughts themselves don't produce anything.
Automatism (later known as epiphenomenalism) is currently out of favor among philosophers, many of whom dismiss it without bothering to argue against it. But it has enough legs to be the target of an article by Roy F. Baumeister and colleagues in this year's Annual Review of Psychology. These authors review a large number of studies that they regard as presenting evidence "supporting a causal role for consciousness" (p. 333). A little more specifically, they are concerned with the causal role of "conscious thought", which "includes reflection, reasoning, and temporally extended sense of self" (p. 333). The majority of the evidence they present is claimed to be evidence against the "steam whistle" hypothesis that "treats conscious thoughts as wholly effects and not causes" (p. 334).
To understand their argument, we need to know a little more about the contrast between unconscious thought and conscious thought. To this end, suppose that a process occurs in your brain that represents some fact, and enables you to behave in ways that are appropriate to that fact. Suppose that you cannot report – either to others or to yourself in your inner speech – what fact that process represented. That process would be a thought that was unconscious. But if a process occurs in you, and you can say – inwardly or overtly – what fact it is representing, then you have had a conscious thought.
What if I tell you something, or instruct you to do some action or to think about a particular topic? Does that involve conscious thought? Baumeister et al. assume, with plausible reason, that if you were able to understand a whole sentence, then you were conscious, and at least part of your understanding the sentence involved conscious thought. (For example, you could report what you were told, or repeat the gist of the instruction.) They also clearly recognize that understanding what others say to you may, in addition, trigger unconscious processes – processes that you would not be able to report on.
If you want to do a psychological experiment, you have to set up at least two sets of circumstances, so that you can compare the effect of one set with the effect of another. If your interest is in effects of conscious thoughts, you need to have one group of participants who have a certain conscious thought, and another group who are less likely to have had that conscious thought. The way that differences of this kind are created is to vary the instructions given to different groups of participants.
For example, in one of the reviewed studies, participants randomly assigned to one group were given information about costs and features of a cable service, and also instructed to imagine being a cable subscriber. Participants in another group received the same information about costs and features, but no further instruction. A later follow up revealed that a significantly higher proportion of those in the group that received the special instruction had actually become cable subscribers.
In another study, the difference was that one group was asked to form specific "implementation intentions". These are definite plans to do a certain action on a certain kind of occasion – for example to exercise on a particular day and time, as contrasted with a more general intention to take up exercise, but without thinking of a particular plan for when to do it. The other group received the same information about benefits of the action, but no encouragement to form specific implementation intentions. Significantly more of those who were encouraged to form implementation intentions actually engaged in the activity.
The logic behind these studies is that one group was more likely to have a certain kind of conscious thought than the other (due to the experimenters' instructions), and it was that group that exhibited behavior that was different from the group that was less likely to have had that conscious thought. The correlation between the difference in conscious thoughts and the difference in subsequent behavior is then taken as evidence for a causal connection between the (earlier) thoughts and the (later) behavior.
There is, however, a problem with this logic. It arises from the fact (which, as noted earlier, the authors of the review article acknowledge) that conscious processing of instructions triggers unconscious processes. We can easily see that this is so, because processing what is said to us requires that we parse the grammar of sentences that we understand. But we cannot report on how we do this; our parsing is an unconscious process. What we know about it comes from decades of careful work by linguists, not from introspection.
Since conscious reception of instructions triggers unconscious processes, it is always possible that behavioral effects of the different instructions are brought about by unconscious processes that are set in motion by hearing those instructions. The hearing (or reading) of instructions is clearly conscious, but what happens after that may or may not be conscious. So, the causal dependence of behavior on instructions does not demonstrate causal dependence of behavior on conscious processes that occur after receiving the instructions, as opposed to unconscious processes that are triggered by (conscious) hearing or reading of instructions.
This point is difficult to appreciate. The reason is that there is something else that sounds very similar, and to which we really are entitled to claim on the basis of the evidence presented in the review article. This claim is the following (where "Jones" can be anybody)
(1)	If Jones had not had the conscious thought CT, Jones would not have been as likely to engage in behavior B.
This is different from
(2)	Jones's conscious thought CT caused it to be more likely that Jones engaged in behavior B.
What's the difference? The first allows something that the second rules out. Namely, the first, but not the second, allows that some unconscious process, UP caused both whatever conscious thoughts occur after receiving instructions, and the subsequent behavior. The experimenter's giving of the instructions may set off a cascade of unconscious processes, and it may be these that are responsible for both some further conscious (reportable) thoughts and for subsequent actions related to the instructions. If the instructions had not been given, those particular unconscious thoughts would likely not have occurred, and thus the action might not have been produced.
Analogously, if the flash of an exploding firecracker had not occurred (for example, because the fuse was not lit) it would have been very unlikely that there would have been a bang. But that does not show that, in a case where the fuse was lit, the flash causes the bang. Instead, both are caused by the exploding powder.
The procedure of manipulating instructions and then finding correlated differences in behavior thus establishes (1), but not (2). So, this procedure cannot rule out the steam whistle hypothesis regarding conscious thought.
Interestingly, there are some cases for which the authors of the review identify good reasons to think that the steam whistle view is actually the way things work.
For example, one study compared people who imagined a virtuous choice with those who had not done so. In a subsequent hypothetical choice, people in the first group were more self-indulgent than those in the comparison group. This difference was removed if the same activity was imagined as a court-ordered punishment rather than a choice to volunteer.
However, it seems very unlikely that anyone consciously reasoned "I imagined myself making a virtuous choice, therefore I'm entitled to a bit of self-indulgence". In this, and several similar reported cases, it seems far more likely that the connection between imagining a virtuous choice, feeling good about oneself, and feeling entitled to self-indulgence runs along on processes that do not cause conscious thoughts with relevant content.
The article under discussion is full of interesting effects, and these are presented in a way that is highly accessible. But it does not succeed in overturning an alternative to its authors' preferred view. According to this alternative view, the causing of behavior (after consciously perceiving one's situation, or consciously receiving instructions) is done by unconscious processes. This alternative view allows that sometimes, but not always, these unconscious processes also cause some conscious thoughts that we express either in overt verbal behavior, or in sentences about what we are doing that we affirm to ourselves in our inner speech.
[The article under discussion is Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen Vohs, "Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?", Annual Review of Psychology 62:331-361 (2011). The difference between (1) and (2) is further explained and discussed in Chapter 4 of Your Brain and You. ]
7 Comments	| causation, consciousness	| Tagged: Baumeister, epiphenomenalism, thought	| Permalink
Thinking About Modules
In a recent Wall Street Journal review article, Raymond Tallis expresses dissatisfaction with what he calls "biologism" – the view that nothing fundamental separates humanity from animality. Biologism is described as having two "cardinal manifestations".
The first is that the mind is the brain, or its activity. This view is held to have the consequence that one of the most powerful ways to understand ourselves is through scanning the brain's activities.
The second manifestation of biologism is the claim that "Darwinism explains not only how the organism Homo sapiens came into being (as, of course, it does) but also what motivates people and shapes their day-to-day behavior".
Tallis suggests that putting these ideas together leads to the following view. The brain evolved under natural selection, the mind is the (activities of the) brain, our behavior depends on the mind/brain, therefore the mind and our behavior can be explained by evolution. A further implication is claimed, namely, that "The mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of genes that are expressed in our bodies". Studying the mind can be broken down into studying (by brain scans) the operation of these modules.
Tallis laments the wide acceptance of this way of looking at ourselves. He affirms that brain activity is a necessary condition of all of our consciousness, but holds that "many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction".
But how could aspects of our consciousness elude neural reduction, if everything in our consciousness depends on the workings of the brain? Tallis answers: "For we belong to a boundless, infinitely elaborated community of minds that has been forged out of a trillion cognitive handshakes over hundreds of thousands of years. . . . Because it is a community of minds, it cannot be inspected by looking at the activity of the solitary brain."
This statement, however, is not an answer to the question of how aspects of our consciousness can elude neural reduction. It explains, instead, why we cannot understand facts about societies by looking at a solitary brain, and why we cannot reconstruct the evolutionary history of our species by looking at the brain of one individual. But the question about elusiveness of neural reduction concerns the consciousness of individuals. It's about how individual minds work, and what gives rise to each person's behavior.
Aside from rare cases of feral children, individuals grow up in societies. Even so, their motivations and behavior depend on their individual brains. Individuals must have some kind of representation of societal facts and norms in their own brains, if those brains are to produce behaviors that are socially appropriate and successful. At present, alas, we do not understand what form those representations take, nor how they are able to contribute, jointly with other representations, to intelligent behavior. But the question of how the individual mind works is a clear one, and the search for an answer is one of the most exciting inquiries of our time.
Despite my dissatisfaction with Tallis's account, I am sympathetic to some of his doubts about reduction of motivation and behavior to the operations of modules. The true source of the problem, however, is not our attention to the mind/brain of solitary individuals.
The real problem is, instead, uncritical acceptance of modules. The modular way of looking at things does not follow from Tallis's two cardinal manifestations. They say, in sum, that whatever we think and whatever we do depends on the activities of a brain that developed under principles of Darwinian evolution. They do not say one word about modules. They do not imply any theory of how the evolved brain does what it does.
These remarks are in no way a denial of modules, and in some cases, there is very good reason to accept them. But, even accepting that there are many modules, it does not follow that for any given motivation or behavior, X, there is a module that is dedicated to providing X – i.e., that functions to provide X and does not do anything else. Moreover, it is clear that our evolved brain allows for learning. If we learn two things, they may be related, and if we recognize a relation among things that we had to learn in the first place, there cannot be a module for recognizing that relation.
Caution about introducing modules for specific mental or behavioral features that may interest us is compatible with supposing not only that there are many modules, but even with supposing that operations of several modules is required for everything we do. That's because plurality of modules carries with it the possibility of variability in how they are connected. Such variability may depend on genetic differences, developmental differences, and/or differences in learning. In any case of combined action of several modules, therefore, there will be no simple relation between a motivation or a behavior and a single module, nor any simple relation between a motivation or behavior and a collection of modules.
So, even granting Tallis's two cardinal manifestations and a commitment to extensively modular brain organization, we cannot expect any simple relation to hold between some ability that interests us and the operation of a module dedicated to that ability. So, I agree with Tallis that we should be suspicious of facile "discoveries" of a module for X, where X may be, e.g., an economic behavior or an aesthetic reaction. But I think that the complexities that lie behind this suspicion are to be found in the complexity of the workings of individual brains. Our social relations with others provides distinctive material for us to think about, but they will not explain how we do our thinking about them.
[Raymond Tallis, "Rethinking Thinking", The Wall Street Journal for November 12-13, 2011, pp. C5 and C8. Readers of _Your Brain and You_ will be familiar with reasons for regarding sensations as effects of, rather than the same thing as, neural activities; but this kind of non-reducibility is not relevant to the issues discussed in this post. They will also be aware of reasons for saying that we do not presently understand how individual minds work.]
Leave a Comment »	| Brain scans, Evolution, Modularity	| Tagged: biologism, Raymond Tallis, thinking	| Permalink
Do You Look Like a Self-Controlled Planner?
In an article soon to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kurt Gray and colleagues question whether we "objectify" other people, if that means to regard them as objects with no mental capacities. They suggest that there are two kinds of mental capacities, and that what's often thought of as "objectification" may actually a redistribution of judgments about these kinds. They did a series of experiments to test this possibility.
The two kinds of mental capacities are Agency and Experience. "Agency", in these experiments, comprises the capacities for self-control, planning, and acting morally. "Experience" covers abilities to experience pleasure, desire, and hunger or fear.
The hypothesis, stated a little more fully, is that people who attended to a target's bodily aspects would tend to rate those targets higher on Experience and lower on Agency, with reverse effects when attention is focused less on bodily aspects and more on cognitive abilities.
They tested this hypothesis in several ways, of which I'm going to describe only the first. The general result of this set of experiments was converging support for the hypothesis.
The first experiment was admirably simple. 159 participants, recruited from campus dining halls, were given a sheet of paper that had one picture, a brief description, and a series of six questions. The single picture was one of the following four:
Erin, presented in a head shot that had been cropped from the following picture.
Erin, presented in a fairly cleavage-revealing outfit from just below the breasts up.
Aaron, presented in a head shot cropped from the following picture.
Aaron, presented shirtless from just below the pectorals up.
Both of these targets are attractive young people and look very healthy. The two head shots will be referred to as Face pictures, and the two others as Body pictures. (The head shots were enlarged, so each of the pictures was about the same size.)
The description given was the same for both, except for the names and corresponding appropriate pronouns. It provided only the information that the person in the picture is an English major at a liberal arts college, belongs to a few student groups, and likes to hang out with friends on weekends.
The questions were all of the form "Compared to the average person, how much is [target's name] capable of X?". Fillers for X were self-control, planning, and acting morally (combined into an Agency measure); and experiencing pleasure, experiencing hunger, and experiencing desire. (Since ability to experience hunger did not correlate highly with the other two, only experiencing pleasure and experiencing desire were used to compose the Experience measure.) Answers took the form of a rating on a five point scale, ranging from "Much less capable" to "Much more capable", with "Equally as capable" for the midpoint.
The key results of this experiment are that participants who were given Body pictures rated the targets higher on Experience and lower on Agency than participants who were given Face pictures. The differences are not large (.27 out of five for Experience, .33 out of five for Agency), but they are statistically significant.
The authors take these results to support the view that "focusing on the body does not involve complete dementalization, but instead redistribution of mind, with decreased agency but increased experience" (pp. 8-9).
As noted, the remaining experiments in this study point in the same direction. In a way, that seems to be good news – 'different aspect of mind' seems better than 'no mind, mere object'. The authors make it explicitly clear, however, that being regarded as less of an agent would, in general, not be in a person's interest. Some other intriguing aspects of this experiment are that the gender of the participants doing the ratings was not found to matter, and Erin came out a little ahead of Aaron on the Agency measure.
However, the aspect of this experiment that intrigues me the most is one that lies outside of the authors' focus, and on which they do not comment. To explain this aspect, note first that the description provides very little information – it could be fairly summarized by saying the person in the picture is a typical college student. A person could be forgiven for reacting to the rating request with "How on Earth should I know whether this person is above or below average on self-control (or planning ability, or moral action, experiencing pleasure, or experiencing desire)!?"
Since the participants were college students, and thus similar to the depicted targets as described, perhaps we should expect them to rate the targets as somewhat above average in mental abilities. However, one rating was below average: the rating for Agency in response to Body pictures was 2.90 (where capability equal to that of the average person would be 3). The difference between this rating for Body pictures and higher rating for Face pictures indeed supports the authors' hypothesis, but it leaves me wondering what could have been in the consciousness of those doing the ratings.
An even greater puzzle comes from fact that the highest rating was for Experience in response to Body pictures – it was 3.65. (Remember, the highest number on the scale was 5, so 3.65 is about a third of the distance between "Equally as Capable" and "Much More Capable"). So, I wonder: Do college students really think they and their peers are better at experiencing pleasure and desire than the average person? That seems a very strange opinion.
[ Kurt Gray, Joshua Knobe, Mark Sheskin, Paul Bloom, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, "More than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press. ]
1 Comment	| consciousness, Values	| Tagged: agency, objectification	| Permalink
An Unusual Aphrodisiac
Imagine you're a prehistoric heterosexual man who's going into battle tomorrow. The thought that there's a fair chance of your dying might so completely occupy your mind that you'd be uninterested in anything save, perhaps, sharpening your spear.
On the other hand, your attitude might be that if you're going to be checking out tomorrow, you'd like to have one last time with a woman tonight.
We are more likely to be descendants of the second type of man than the first. So, we might expect that there would be a tendency among men for thoughts of their own death to raise their susceptibility to sexual arousal.
In contrast, women who were more erotically motivated when they believed their own death might be just around the corner would not generally have produced more offspring than their less susceptible sisters. So, there is no reason to expect that making thoughts of death salient should affect sexual preparedness in women.
These ideas have recently been tested in two studies by Omri Gillath and colleagues. Of course, they didn't send anybody into battle. Instead, they used two methods – one conscious, one not – to make the idea of death salient.
In the first study, one group of participants wrote responses to questions about the emotions they had while thinking about their own death and events related to it. Another group responded to similarly phrased questions about dental pain. The point of this contrast was to distinguish whether an arousal (if found) was specific to death, or whether it was due more generally to dwelling on unpleasant topics.
After responding to the questions, participants were shown either five sexual pictures (naked women for men, naked men, for women) or five non-sexual pictures (sports cars for men, luxury houses for women). Previous studies had found that all the pictures were about equal for their respective groups on overall perceived attractiveness. Participants had all self-identified as heterosexual. They had five minutes to carefully examine their set of five pictures.
Participants were each connected to a device that measured their heart rate. The key result was that the men who answered the questions about death and viewed erotic pictures had a significantly higher average heart rate during the picture viewing than any other group. That means that, on average, they had a higher rate than other men who saw the same pictures, but had answered questions about dental pain. They also had a higher rate than other men who had answered questions about death, but then saw non-sexual pictures. And they had a higher rate than women who answered either question and viewed either pictures of naked men or non-sexual pictures.
In the second study, the death/pain saliency difference was induced by flashing the word "dead" (for half the participants) or the word "pain" (for the other half) before each item in a series of pictures. The presentation of the words was very brief (22 thousands of a second) and came between masks (strings of four X s). With the masks, that's too short to recognize the word. The pictures either contained a person or did not. Half of the pictures that contained a person were sexual, half were not. Pictures remained visible until the participant responded.
The response was to move a lever if, but only if, the picture contained a person. The movement was either pulling the lever toward oneself, or pushing it away. There were 40 consecutive opportunities for pulling, and 40 for pushing; half of participants started with pulling, half started with pushing.
The logic of this experiment depends on a connection previously established by Chen and Bargh (1999) between rapidity of certain responses and the value of what is being responded to. Pulling brings things closer to you, and if what's before your mind is something you like, then that will speed the pulling (relative to pulling in response to something you'd ordinarily try to avoid, or something toward which you are neutral).
The reasoning, then, is that those who had a higher degree of sexual preparedness should pull faster in response to erotic materials than those who were not so highly prepared. Gillath and colleagues hypothesized that participants who received the brief exposure to "dead" and then saw an erotic picture should be faster pullers than those who received a brief exposure to "pain" before an erotic picture.
And that is what they found – for men. There was no such result for women. Nor did the brief exposure to "dead" result in faster pulling after being presented with non-sexual pictures; the faster reaction times depended on both the exposure to "dead" and the sexual nature of the following picture.
These two studies are certainly interesting in relation to the evolutionary thinking that led them to be undertaken. But I also find them fascinating in relation to a more general point. The second study provides evidence that our brains can (a) make a distinction (between pain and death) and (b) relate it to another difference (sexual vs. non-sexual material) completely unconsciously and extremely rapidly. And the first study, although done at a much slower time scale and with consciousness of the materials used to manipulate mood (i.e., the writing about death vs. pain), showed an effect on heart rate, which is not something that was under participants' control. The brain processes of which we are unaware (except when revealed in studies like these) are amazing indeed.
[O. Gillath, M. J. Landau, E. Selcuk and J. L. Goldenberg (2011) "Effects of low survivability cues and participant sex on physiological and behavioral responses to sexual stimuli", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47:1219-1224. The previous study mentioned in the discussion of Study 2 is M. Chen and J. A. Bargh (1999) "Consequences of automatic evaluation: Immediate behavioral dispositions to approach or avoid the stimulus", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25:215-224. ]
Leave a Comment »	| consciousness, Uncategorized	| Tagged: gender difference, sexual preparedness, unconscious processes	| Permalink


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Mike Williams named president of Harding University
After a nine-month search, Harding University has found its next president. Mike Williams, the current president of Faulkner University in Montgomery, Ala., will move back…
Faulkner and Heritage Christian universities to cooperate in graduate theology education
Two Alabama universities associated with Churches of Christ — Faulkner, in Montgomery, and Heritage Christian, in Florence — announced a cooperative agreement between their graduate…


Construction companies Skanska and Strabag submitted their complaint over their exclusion from public competition for construction of the cross-country D1 highway section Lietavská Lúčka - Višňové - Dubná Skala to the Public Procurement Office (ÚVO). They consider it an error, saying that the National Highway Company (NDS) had originally accepted their offer, the SITA newswire reported.
Skanska and Strabag offered to construct the 13.5-kilometre section near Žilina, including the 7.5-kilometre Višňové tunnel, for €338.29 million, without VAT. The sum represents only 37.7 percent of the costs expected by NDS. The second lowest bid was submitted by a consortium of companies, Doprastav, Metrostav and Marti Contractors, which offered €382.83 million.
The unsuccessful bidder later sent the ÚVO a complaint in which it challenged the very low amount and the proposed ventilation system in the Višňové tunnel. The ÚVO accepted the complaint and ordered the NDS to re-assess the bids. The NDS subsequently excluded the Strabag and Skanska's bid and provisionally accepted the bid by Doprastav, Metrostav and Marti Contractors, SITA wrote.


President Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech on government surveillance programs Friday, announcing reforms to how the National Security Agency collects data and the manner in which that data is stored. It was obviously a speech intended to assuage civil libertarians and other critics of the NSA, but did it work? That depends who you ask — but so far, the consensus seems to be that no, it didn't.
A couple of NSA critics had nice things to say about the speech. Senator Mark Udall, one of the few members of Congress to publicly criticize the NSA's programs, called Thursday "a milestone day," and praised Obama's reforms.
Ultimately, the radical essence of the NSA – a system of suspicion-less spying aimed at hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world – will fully endure even if all of Obama's proposals are adopted... That's because Obama never hid the real purpose of this process. It is, he and his officials repeatedly acknowledged, 'to restore public confidence' in the NSA. In other words, the goal isn't to truly reform the agency; it is deceive people into believing it has been so that they no longer fear it or are angry about it.
The Washington Post's Greg Sargent thinks that the speech may actually the opposite effect than what was intended, placing a spotlight on the ideological gulf between Obama and his detractors rather than narrowing it.
The most telling reaction may have been from Peter King, a congressman from New York who vociferously supports the NSA's data collection.
"I would hope that what the president is doing will satisfy much of his critics [so] that we can get this reauthorized and continued the way it should be," King said after the speech. He added that "99 percent" of the NSA's programs will be untouched by the reforms.
That's basically an admission from one of the NSA's strongest proponents that the speech was a PR move, and that nothing major will really change. Wonderful.