I am very concerned for Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. His website used to be an amusing outlet valve for delicious little secrets that organisations had tried to keep hidden. But now he's releasing information about major world governments, and they are pissed.
Granted, I haven't read anything so far that has really surprised me. The latest news explosion, where U.S. diplomats think that Mexico's armed forces are bureaucratic, corrupt, untrained and unfit to take on sophisticated drug trafficking organisations (DTOs), won't be news to anyone in Mexico. And remember, the army was sent in because the police are even worse.
All the Wikileaks cables are releasing is information that is already known, or at least suspected, but is just not talked about in offical government circles. To show that such things ARE talked about in non-official government circles is apparently a big deal.
The U.S. has been most strident in its condemnation of Wikileaks. Crazy Tea Party Lady Sarah Palin has called for his blood to run, as have government officials and leaders. They've been putting pressure on other governments and agencies to do their part in cornering Julian Assange, with the hope that this particular snake won't be a Hydra.
I know there are some concerns that Wikileaks is harming diplomacy and putting lives at risk. That may have been a problem with previous releases of Iraq war information and details of informants, but I understand that since the first contentious release Wikileaks has been very careful to edit out details that would risk combatants lives. It is sadly amusing however to see that the greatest outbusts of condemnation have not come after publishing accurate war data, but after revealing the words of world leaders to their subjects.
I believe that on balance Wikileaks is supporting democracy, and the right of citizens to find out the truth of what their governments are actually doing behind their back, the better to hold them to account. We can applaud the governments who are actually doing in private what they said they'd do in public, and shame those who are doing the opposite.
Yet the self-righteous, hypocritical politicians appear to be very thin-skinned. They have schemes to take down the public face of Wikileaks, and hopefully the organisation with it. Julian is a brave man. He has done what many of us would dare not. And he will probably pay a major price for it, beyond being forced into hiding. I just hope that he's set up his organisation to survive and thrive after he's gone. Our world is more open and just with Wikileaks around, however much it hurts the pride of national leaders.
My partner and I haven't had to deal with much local corruption here in Mexico. The times when we thought we'd have to pay a bribe here or there: when our car was towed, when receiving a cellphone plan discount, getting our immigration papers etc., nothing was implied. Even trying to give a generous tip was sometimes refused.
It's a nice reality from what we read before we came. We were told that the local police would stop you for a cash payment, border officials might need an incentive to leave you alone, and "morditas" (little bites) would be required to make life smooth.
Instead, in recent years everyday Mexicans seem to be less and less corrupt as a culture. Maybe they instinctively recognise the damage it does to their economy and way of life, or maybe enforcement against such corruption has increased.
Unfortunately, corruption in Mexico still permeates anything to do with the drug war, senior business leaders and politicians.
As part of the federal government's protracted war on drug cartels, swathes of mayors, local police chiefs, elected officials and community leaders are arrested for corruption relating to the drug trade. Even the head of Mexico's narco offensive in 2008 was bought. A lot of the times the problem is greed for money and power. But sometimes the corrupted don't have much choice. Either they accept money and help the drug traffickers, or they and their families may be kidnapped or shot.
And the latter is also common here. An English language client of mine was shot at in his car while giving a friend a ride back home. She is the daughter of a member of the judicial police and had received death threats. Federal police and soldiers are ambushed on the roadside, tortured, decapitated. Senior politicians are assassinated. There are thousands of kidnappings per year.
I still feel safer here than in many parts of the USA and New Zealand – partly because most of the crime is centered near the US border, in Mexico City, and/or is drug related.
The problem is that many state and local police are corrupt or inefficient. I read an estimate that 98% of crimes in Mexico are unpunished. Municipal police can be paid as low as 30 pesos an hour ($US 2.27). That sort of wage doesn't encourage anyone to put themselves in harms way. It also promotes widespread corruption.
There is a lack of transparency and checks and balances in local, state and federal budgets. Politicians earmark essential funds for pet projects, and siphon money as it is spent. This is a problem in the USA as well, but in Mexico it's harder to trace.
In my opinion, Mexico's Drug War started by President Calderon (a good man, but hamstrung by widespread self-interest and corruption in his government and administration) is unwinnable unless the rich and powerful of Mexico renounce corruption and their own ties with the drug cartels.


The cancer is not metastatic beyond three regional nodes.
The tumor is estrogen receptorpositive and or progesterone receptor positive.
The tumor is HER2 receptor negative.
Adjuvant chemotherapy is not precluded due to other conditions such as advanced age or co-morbidities.
The patient and physician have discussed the value, limitations, and implications of the test.


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The Role of Automation and DevOps in Transforming Enterprises
Carbon-Intelligent Computing: Addressing the demands of climate change
Digital accessibility and inclusive design – critical to your digital transformation journey
How AI can transform the assistive technology space
Augment your Cybersecurity Journey with Data Lakes & AI
We have reached an extraordinary stage in the development of technology and its application in solving business problems. In fact, we have reached an inflection point, where the systems that we curre...
By: Andrew Stephen | September 24, 2020
The Role of AI in Digital Content Management
In the Digital Content Management lifecycle — from content composition to content disposition — there are many areas where Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have the potentia...
By: Mitesh V Kothari | September 10, 2020
Logistics transformation in tough times
As we continue to battle this public health emergency, we can see more and more consumers drifting towards e-commerce to purchase anything and everything. Unfortunately, global distribution networks ...
By: Manoj Mannotty | September 02, 2020
How COVID-19 will change the role of every industry
Despite the constant drumbeat of bad news, one positive aspect of the COVID-19 crisis is that it has helped people value their well-being and understand that health is their most prized possession. H...
By: Atul Rangole | August 20, 2020
Overcoming the Pandemic Uncertainty
According to the International Monetary Fund, the ongoing pandemic will cause the global economy to contract sharply by 3% in 2020. Lockdowns, social distancing measures and the lingering psychologic...
By: Gaurav Shrivastava | August 03, 2020
AI and ML: Focus on the Customer, not the Technology!
As a Data Scientist, it can be easy to get carried away with the abundance of AI algorithms and the clever ways to solve problems. It's no crime to be a tech fanatic, but it's important to step b...
By: James Adams | July 23, 2020

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Free seminar on "How to Maximize Your Social Security Benefits" | Giddens & Gatton Law, P.C.
Free seminar on "How to Maximize Your Social Security Benefits"
On behalf of Giddens & Gatton Law, PC on Monday, August 19, 2013.
Giddens & Gatton Law, P.C. is sponsoring the free workshop How to Maximize Your Social Security Benefits from 8-9:30 a.m. on August 28 in the Lockheed Martin Board Room at the Albuquerque Hispano Chamber of Commerce, 1309 4th Street S.W.
Topics include how benefits are calculated; strategies to increase benefits; coordinating benefits with your spouse or ex-spouse; and when you should apply for our benefits.


Are Commercial Air Fresheners Safe?
Some of the chemicals found in commercial air fresheners have been banned by the FDA, but these bans are unenforceable due to trade secret laws that protect the chemical fragrance company.
Methylene Chloride -Prolonged skin contact can result in the dichloromethane dissolving some of the fatty tissues in skin, resulting in skin irritation or chemical burns. It may be carcinogenic, as it has been linked to cancer of the lungs, liver, and pancreas in laboratory animals.
Acetone -Acts as a central nervous system depressant.
The thing about conventional air fresheners is that these chemicals tend to build up over time, mostly on carpets and surfaces where kids play and other areas that we come into regular contact with. We track them outside where they end up contaminating the soil. They don't even work for getting rid of odors and cleaning up the air. Conventional air fresheners just cover up odors for a short period of time, while leaving all their unknown chemicals laying around.


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As entrepreneurs, we like to swing for the fences. We are romanced by big deals and technologies that change the world. If only it were that easy.
Only .004 percent of companies ever achieve $ 100 million in sales. Even fewer reach the lofty status of unicorn (tech companies reaching a $ 1 billion valuation). According to CB Insights there are only 310 of them in existence today.
As a strategy consultant, I have worked with over 140 companies, many of them expansive mid-market companies. On occasion, entrepreneurs have expected me to provide a magic bullet–a key to the universe that will unleash their value, in hopes that they too can achieve standing as a Private Titan.
My world is not one of mystical creatures or magic bullets, but of painstaking work, patience and perseverance. To build a scalable company comes down to four or five key decisions over the course of a company's life cycle.
1. Manage your growth portfolio.
It's well-known in Silicon Valley that the most valuable companies (such as Google) dedicate a portion of investments to disruptive innovation. Research reveals that successful growth companies blend core, adjacent, and disruptive strategies, knowing that 70 percent of enterprise value comes from innovations that could take five years or more to build.
In parallel, they focus on operating their business well and growing into new market adjacencies. One of my clients built over $ 100 million valuation in about three years by winning new contracts, acquiring companies in three new verticals and building out new technologies (including AI) to make their platform more valuable. Sometimes the most effective strategy is to reinvent the business you are already in.
3. Stay above the fray.
In my experience, most companies make one or two major bets when they launch, and then they fall into a trap where they become operational. After all, companies eventually need to make money (at least that's what I'm told).
They become perpetrators of founder's syndrome, making all the decisions and leaving their teams powerless to improve the business.
In any business, there are those that need to be focused on the operations, and those that are dedicated to research and development of new products and improvements that have a lengthy time horizon for return on investment. When one person tries to do both, they get sucked into the vortex of daily operations, which impedes innovation and growth.
My experience is that companies that latch onto growing markets (or those that make markets) gain the most traction. It's almost impossible to build value in a shrinking market. When a market is contracting, the only way to grow revenue is to take it from someone else, usually at a lower price.
Always–and I mean always–know the growth rate of every market segment you wish to participate in. If the prognosis is for a market to contract, get out posthaste. The one exception is if you have a long-tail strategy and want to take advantage of the bloodshed at the end, selling niche products to small customers.
Every year or two, growing companies make a wager of some significance. One of my clients who tripled in size and sold for 11 times mandated that our strategic planning process had at least one major investment every year–a strategic wager that would move the needle on valuation.
Don't be overly focused on revenue and profit if enterprise value is your endgame. Make decisions that are accretive to enterprise value.
5. Include acquisitions in your plan.
It's hard to build scale on organic growth alone. Acquisitions often fail, but companies who are tooled to complete acquisitions grow faster. Using the lens of the growth portfolio, you can bolt on companies that are similar to you, buy into new segments or buy expertise that you don't have.
In considering acquisitions, consider buying in thirds. That is, seek out companies which are about a third of your size. Of course, this is convenient advice as you can only buy companies that are for sale and they may not fit neatly in a size parameter. But, a company about a third your size is digestible and moves the needle in terms of size.
It's just as much work to buy a company 10 percent of your size as one that is 30 percent. Merging two equals builds size but introduces cultural problems as both sides want to prevail in terms of values, vision, etc.
Building enterprise value is a formula, not a magic bullet. Be in it for the long haul.


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Biografia
Francesca ha origini italiane. Inizia a recitare a 7 anni, nella serie del 2005 How I Met Your Mother, comparendo in due episodi. Nel 2011 appare in un episodio della serie televisiva per ragazzi Ant Farm, con la quale fa il suo debutto su Disney Channel. Dal marzo 2013 viene scelta per interpretare Chloe nella sitcom Dog with a Blog, sempre su Disney Channel.
Nel 2015 viene scelta per doppiare la ragazzina dai capelli rossi in Snoopy & Friends - Il film dei Peanuts.

Filmografia

Cinema
 Snoopy & Friends - Il film dei Peanuts, regia di Steve Martino (2015) – voce
Max 2 - Un eroe alla Casa Bianca (Max 2: White House Hero), regia di Brian Levant (2017)

Televisione
 A.N.T. Farm - Accademia Nuovi Talenti – serie TV, episodio 1x19 (2011)
 How I Met Your Mother – serie TV, episodi 7x23-7x24-8x03 (2012)
 3 Day Test – film TV, regia di Corbin Bernsen (2012)
 Dog with a Blog – serie TV, 69 episodi (2012-2015)
 Jessie – serie TV, episodio 4x08 (2015)
 The Dog Who Saved Summer – film TV, regia di Sean Olson (2015)
 Crown Lake -  serie TV,  2019

Doppiatrici italiane
Nelle versioni in italiano dei suoi lavori, Francesca Capaldi è stata doppiata da:
Elisabetta Spinelli in How I Met Your Mother
Arianna Vignoli in Dog with a Blog
Da doppiatrice è sostituita da:
Ginevra Pucci e Carolina Gusev in Snoopy & Friends - Il film dei Peanuts

Collegamenti esterni

Attori italoamericani

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Tag Archive | Brandon LaBelle
by jnmusser
in Acoustics, American Studies, Article, Book Review, Cultural Studies, Ethnographic, History, Identity, Islam/Muslim Identity, Law, Noise, Politics, Public Debate, Religion and Religious Studies, Ritual, SO! Reads, Sound, Sound Studies, Spirituality, Theory/criticism
SO! Reads: Isaac Weiner's Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism
Calling devotees to prayer, preaching on the subway, broadcasted pre-recorded sermons from a moving car, organizing drum circles in the park, resounding church bells through the city – expressions of faith to some, a nuisance, or even a personal offense (or outright danger), to others. Must religion be so noisy? Must it also be so publicly noisy?
Religious studies scholar Isaac Weiner portrays public loudness as but one of many exigencies of the religious worldview in his recent publication, Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism (New York: New York University Press: 2014). Weiner argues that the substantive content of religious doctrine – moral claims, theological arguments, etc. – both constitutes and is constituted by how its ideas are given expression. This might seem unremarkable. However, the claim allows Weiner to re-frame religious pluralism as not only a "matter of competing values, truth claims, or moral doctrines, but of different styles of public practice, of fundamentally different ways of using body and space." (200)
So, according to Weiner, yes: Some religious groups must be so noisy, and must be noisy publicly. If they weren't, their religious beliefs and doctrines would be deprived of the expressive forms that imbue them with significance.
"Street Preacher" by Flickr user Tabitha Kaylee Hawk, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Weiner is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Weiner is not a card-carrying sound studies specialist. Nonetheless, his output is representative of a quickly accelerating interest about religion and spirituality within studies of sound and culture. Religion Out Loud is his first book, and builds from themes explored in his previous publications, including articles such as "Sound" (Material Religion 7, no. 1 [2011]: 108-115), "Sound and American Religions" (Religion Compass 3, no. 5 [September 2009]: 897-908), and "Displacement and Re-placement: The International Friendship Bell as a Translocative Technology of Memory" (Material Religion 5, no. 2 [July 2009]: 180-205). Forthcoming are several chapters and articles that closely relate to topics investigated in Religion Out Loud.
The text ranges from America's colonial period through the early 2000s. It largely attends to legislative efforts seeking to circumscribe the practicing of what Weiner calls "religion out loud" – public, and perceivably exorbitant displays of sonic religiosity. On the other hand, Weiner also details the various ways in which religious practitioners have resisted legal containment. Weiner thus adds to an already copious literature about how contestations over sonic space reflect broader contestations over meaning and power, that includes texts such as Brandon Labelle's Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010), Karen Bijsterveld's Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), and other religion-related work like Philip V. Bohlman's "Music Inside Out: Sounding Public Religion in a Post-Secular Europe" (in Music, Sound and Space, ed. Georgina Born, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). This tension between the embodied practice and legal-discursive regulation of sonic spaces throws into relief what Weiner calls a "politics of religious sensation." However, readers with an interest in the experiential dimensions of the "religious sensorium" should look elsewhere, perhaps the recent volume, Senses and Citizenship: Embodying Political Life, edited by Susanna Trnka (New York: Routledge, 2013). Religion Out Loud appeals more to readers with an interest in the political histories of religious rights and noise abatement policy, and the ways in which "religious sensation" has been regulated according to unstable conceptions of liberalism and pluralism in American jurisprudence.
"Preaching" by Flickr user Boston Public Library, CC BY 2.0
In order to span such a long temporal trajectory (essentially the history of the United States!), Weiner anchors Religion Out Loud in three historically disparate case studies. Each is preceded by a chapter of historical and theoretical contextualization. This forces Weiner to rapidly chronicle decades of developments in noise abatement policy. Yet he does so with both scrupulousness and concision, leaving remarkably few holes left unfilled. This gives the reader the benefit of charting the long-term effects of the policy changes that Weiner more focusedly interrogates. His approach thus differs quite markedly from some other important sound/religious studies literature, such as Leigh Schmidt's Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which investigates a single historical period in more concentrated fashion.
From chapter one's onset, I was struck by the impressive depth of archival research Weiner has infused into his arguments. As a result, Weiner's more speculative conclusions – generally modest in scope – have no shortage of evidence, and are altogether convincing. In chapter one, for instance, Weiner details shifting perceptions of church bells in colonial and postbellum America, an area well tilled in sound studies by the likes of Alain Corbin (Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and Richard Cullen Rath (How Early America Sounded, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003). Weiner furthers this conversation by revealing how religious sounds such as church bells – what had receded to the background of what R. Murray Schafer called the "historical soundscape" – faced unprecedented scrutiny as the symbolic status of noise began to change. Likewise, city governments challenged congregants' rights to occupy acoustic territory. In the burgeoning clamor of the modern city, noise meant progress and prosperity, for some listeners, but, for others, the stylized noise of religion practiced "out loud" signified a kind of regressive primitivism. Noise thus occupied both sides of the evolutionist coin that Weiner suggests ideologically underpinned religious self-understandings of the time.
"St. Mark's Church Philadelphia" by Flickr user Library Company of Philadelphia
Weiner further explores the progressive/primitive duality in his first case study – Harrison v. St. Marks of 1877– in which Weiner quite brilliantly unravels how both perspectives were articulated in legal discourse. According to Weiner, complainants challenged the long-presumed public-acoustic prerogatives of Philadelphia's fashionable St. Mark's Protestant Episcopal Church. The main takeaway from the chapter is that St. Marks's complainants voiced a formulation of suitable, modern, and thus normative religious practice as "properly disentangled from various forms of materiality and mediation, carefully circumscribed and respectful of its bounds, interiorized and intellectualized, invisible and inaudible." (60) From the complainants' perspective, noisy religion signified backward, immature religion. The court sided with this position, treating church bells as it would any other "extraneous" public noise. Yet in so doing, it ironically reinforced the cultural dominance of Protestantism. That is to say, by silencing St. Mark's bells, the ostensibly secularized legal system set a precedent that legitimated the "subjugation" of all forms of religious practice to "proper modes of acceptable piety" – including "religious 'others'" who lacked the pervasive influence that Protestantism could exercise in the public and political spheres, including the courts. (74)
In the second section, Weiner shifts his focus from acoustic territorialization to noisy religiosity as a form of dissent. He details how noise abatement legislation in the early twentieth century harkened a "new regulatory regime" that suppressed the activities of religious practitioners for whom "making noise was not merely incidental to their work; it was their work" (80). The Salvation and Army and the Jehovah's Witnesses, Weiner shows, aggressively challenged norms of community outreach through provocative exhibitions of religious devotion in public spaces. However, while exercising freedoms of speech, religion, and public assembly, such groups turned unsuspecting citizens into "captive audiences," and thus infringed upon rights to privacy. The style of practicing some liberties, as many scholars and critics have suggested, has throughout history limited the enjoyment of liberties by other parties.
"The Watchtower" by Flickr user Scott Kellum, CC BY-NC 2.0
Moreover, as Weiner rightly suggests in his second case study, Saia v. New York of 1946, civil liberties have always been carefully regulated by the state. Samuel Saia, a Jehovah's Witness, drove around the city of Lockhart, NY, and used loudspeakers to broadcast inflammatory sermons from his car. He loudly exercised his first amendment rights through what Weiner calls "sound car religion." Yet the city managed to treat the sermons' noisiness as extraneous to Saia's religion, rather than acknowledging the practice as partially constitutive of it. Lockhart's noise abatement ordinance thus infringed upon his right to religious free exercise. To that end, Weiner repositions McLuhan's famous "the medium is the message," framing religion as media, as opposed to religion and media as separable concepts. Saia spread God's word, and in doing so loudly fulfilled a core tenet of the Witness creed.
Throughout the case study, Weiner critiques the "liberal inclusionary ideology" that has come to characterize the Judeo-Christian tradition of American jurisprudence. But he curiously softens his otherwise pointed critique at the end of the chapter. Saia ultimately won the case, yet the Witnesses' devotional style gradually became unmarked in the ensuing years, as they seemed to assimilate voluntarily to normative expectations of religious devotion. As such, Weiner suggests that dissenters in general often find that they can "afford to quiet down once they feel that their voices have been heard." (135) While it is "important not to exaggerate the coercive effects of American law," I would have nonetheless appreciated a more critical take on how the legal system had its cake and ate it too – that is, how it satisfied the demands of the Witnesses and also managed to keep them quiet. Indeed, Weiner's mild conclusion may unsettle those readers who enjoyed the previous three chapters of incisive and nuanced analysis.
"Carillon of Peter And Paul Cathedral in Saint-Petersburg" by Wikimedia user RuED, CC BY-SA 3.0
In the last section, Weiner shows how a controversial 1990 Supreme Court decision – Employment Division v. Smith, spearheaded by Justice Antonin Scalia – enacted into law a conception of religiosity as interiorized, intellectualized, and privatized. It favored majoritarian notions of religious free exercise such that dissenting – or noisy – religious practice by minority religious subjects risked criminalization. As a result, the granting of religious exemption from preclusive noise ordinances was left not to the courts to decide, but rather to the political arena. Potentially disruptive religious free exercise was no longer constitutionally protected. It now required approval from a political body. The last case study, then, does not deal with legal proceedings. Rather, it examines the public debates and media spectacles that surrounded al-Islāh Islamic Center's petition to broadcast the call to prayer in Hamtramck, MI, in 2004. Al-Islāh was ultimately granted exemption from the local noise ordinance. But over the course of an exasperating six months of debate, Weiner demonstrates, formerly unvoiced identity politics that residents invested into the city's sonic territories were brought to light in highly contentious ways.
Weiner identifies three rhetorical-discursive tropes that various parties used to debate changing the city's noise ordinance to accommodate the call to prayer. One of them, pluralism, will likely be of most interest to readers (the others are exclusivism and privatism). The pluralist debaters envisioned the public sphere as a neutral space in which the particularities of religious difference were accommodated, but only according to an ideal of "agonistic respect." Against this idealistic backdrop, pluralists interpreted the call to prayer not as broadcasters intended it to be heard, but rather as a symbol for the "potential for interfaith harmony." (186) Weiner argues that the hearings refigured – effaced, even – the call's meaning, since the Muslim community's political recognition was achievable only by way of the discourse of pluralist forms of tolerance. In other words, if pluralist discourse takes the form by which Muslim faith can express itself, then Muslim faith itself risks effacement as a result of such "accommodation."
"Muezzin" by Flickr user colin, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Surprisingly, Weiner largely omits Muslim perspectives from the chapter. How did pluralist assimilation change the meanings of religious practice as the Muslim community saw it? How did the Muslims feel they had to modify their rhetoric of self-representation? Moreover, how did Muslims perceive – or perhaps even challenge – displays of Judeo-Christian devotion? Perhaps pursuing such questions exceeds the scope of Weiner's project, as could the inclusion of many other issues that readers might think warrant consideration. For instance, Weiner gestures toward the sonic interpellation of Muslim and Christian subjectivity, but does not pursue the topic. Further analysis could productively complement recent work on religious acoustemology such as Charles Hirschkind's The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Andrew J. Eisenberg's, "Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast" (in Music, Sound and Space, ed. Georgina Born, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Jeanette S. Jouli's "Beat-ification: British Muslim Hip Hop and Ethical Listening Practices," and Ashon Crawley's "Pentecostal Song, Sound, and Authentic Voices." Additionally, Weiner glosses over counterculture in the 1960s. How might a treatment of the Nation of Islam, for but one example, complicate his conclusions about the accommodation of religion practiced "out loud" in the period?
That notwithstanding, Weiner accomplishes his proposed task with great nuance, insight, and lucidity. Religion Out Loud skillfully unites archival research with ethnographic methods, a history of sound with a history of ideas. It will appeal to those with an interest in the "politics of sensation," as Weiner suggests, and even more so to readers with interests in the contradictions of noise abatement policy, the legal history of religious rights, and ways in which they have contributed to religious soundscapes in the United States. And of course, it provides an emphatic—and important—affirmative to that longstanding question "must religion be so noisy?"
Jordan Musser is a graduate student in the musicology program at Cornell University. He has a primary interest in the social practice of musical aesthetics, with a focus on roles of the avant-garde in popular culture. Using theoretical frameworks from media, performance, and cultural studies, his recent projects have investigated virtuosity in 19th-century Europe, musical reenactment, the sonic imaginary, and politics of musical mythologization. In 2012, Jordan earned the M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Before arriving at Cornell, he was an editorial assistant with Grove Music Online, and held teaching positions from the early childhood to high school levels.
Featured image: "Microphone inside Al-Azhar Mosque" by Flickr user John Kannenberg, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
"Listen to the Word: Deafness and Participation in Spiritual Community"-Liana Silva-Ford
"I Love to Praise His Name: Shouting as Feminine Disruption, Public Ecstasy, and Audio-Visual Pleasure"-Shakira Holt
"Sounding Out! Podcast Episode #5: Sound and Spirit on the Highway"-David B. Greenberg
by lindaokeeffe
in Acoustic Ecology, Article, Class, Cultural Studies, Field Recording, Listening, Noise, Place and Space, Public Debate, Sound, Sound Studies, Sounds of the City forum, Soundscapes, Soundwalk, Urban Space, Urban studies
(Sound)Walking Through Smithfield Square in Dublin
Editor's Note: This month Sounding Out! is thrilled to bring you a collection of posts that will change the way you hear cities. The Sounds of the City series will prompt readers to think through ideas about urban space and sound. Are cities as noisy as we think they are? Why are cities described as "loud"? Who makes these decisions about nomenclature and why?
We kicked things off last week with my critical reading of sound in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, a play about African Americans in Chicago that still rings/stings true today. Regular writer Regina Bradley will discuss the dichotomy of urban and suburban in the context of sound (noisy versus quiet, respectively), and CFP winner Lilian Radovac will share with us a photoessay on the sound installation Megaphóne in Montreal. Today, guest writer Linda O' Keeffe takes readers on a soundwalk of Smithfield Square in Dublin, Ireland and specifically of the Smithfield Horse Fair, in order to illustrate how urban renewal disrupts city soundscapes and how sound reclaims those spaces.–Managing Editor Liana M. Silva-Ford
Since 2010, as part of my PhD research, I have conducted over two dozen sound walks through the Smithfield Square and its environs, in Dublin's North Inner city; with teenagers, by myself and through organising deep listening group walks as part of World Listening Day. These walks were designed to encourage the participating walkers to listen intently to this space and compare it to other spaces on the north side of Dublin city. The walks were also designed to examine the changing use and design of the Smithfield space over the past four years. This essay is drawn from the findings of this research, which explored the co-production of space and soundscapes with 84 teenagers (43 girls and 41 boys) from Dublin, Ireland. I include some of their observations of Smithfield Square here.
The Smithfield Square's redesign began in 1996 as part of an urban regeneration project, and was completed in May of 2013. Smithfield is a traditional working class area, historically connected to wholesale markets, and in recent years it has gone through many iterations. In a push towards gentrification, the Smithfield Square space was ripped up, rebuilt, re-imagined and ripped up again because each iteration of its design proved unattractive to potential visitors/users of this space. According to the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (1991), Dublin City Council considered these users were tourists and new middle class urbanites, not the locals.
Large-scale apartment complexes with business premises on the ground floor, tourist facilities, and an art house cinema were situated alongside smaller, older social housing, flat complexes and wholesale markets within the area. This reshaping of architecture impacts the diffusion of sound in space. It changes what Brandon LaBelle (2010) calls the acoustic territories that demarcate space where sound is no longer attributable to specific spaces or communities. Additionally, since the early 1990s, sounds within Smithfield began to change with the removal or downsizing of certain productive practices, such as the fish and fruit markets. This reduced the kind of traffic, both pedestrian and commercial, which would have moved and sounded through the area. The Smithfield Horse Fair disrupts the area's soundscape and opens up the possibilities of the space of Smithfield Square for the broader community.
The design of the square, its restaurants, boutique shops and cafes, suggest that the soundscape designed for this space was meant to be a quiet and calm, recreating in the square what Karin Bijsterveld has defined in Mechanical Sound (2008) as the quiet of the middle classes. The sounds produced by the fair are then seen as counter to the types of sensory experiences that, Monica Montserrat Degen argues in her book Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester (2008), are acceptable to the middle classes, who purchase a type of sensory/sonic experience. However, the soundwalks I describe contest what "quiet" means in the context of the square.
Listening to the Square
The Smithfield square in 2009. All pictures in this post come courtesy of the author, who holds the rights.
The Smithfield Square in 2009
In 2009 the Smithfield Square, which is laid with thousands of cobblestones, had placed around one side twelve 26.5 metre gas lighting masts, at one end of the square two lines of trees were planted with seating placed among them, and at the other end some large concrete plant pots. The seating located within the trees, attracted groups of homeless people and addicts. As a result, the dominant soundscape during the day was the sounds of men and women shouting obscenities at each other, with the susurration of trees rarely heard over this dominant sound. One of my teenage participants noted, "you always hear people screaming in the background" (Participant 2).
Aside from the shouting voices and loud reflections from singular sound sources within the Square such as the clatter of suitcase wheels across the cobblestones, seagulls screeching overhead, the beeping of trucks reversing and even the sounds of people talking at a distance, the teenagers who participated in the soundwalks defined the space as silent. Their use of the word silent did not mean the absence of sound, but rather an absence of activities, life, general sounds of community, consumption and production.
One sound that dominates the soundscape of Smithfield and its surroundings is the sound of the Luas tramline. The Luas line sits at one end of the Square and the sounds produced are distinctive: there is the whoosh as it passes, the ding a ling of its bells and the sounds of the doors opening and closing. The sound of the Luas echoes around the area from 6 in the morning till midnight. The sounds have become synonymous with that part of the city. The teenage participants defined these sounds as rhythmic, musical, "like a ballet." For the teenager participants, the sounds of the Luas has been the only constant sound within Smithfield.
https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/walking-2011-smithfield-square-and-luas.mp3
Public housing areas surrounding Smithfield
The sounds of children and teenagers were absent, even with the vast housing areas that surround Smithfield Square—some dating back to the 1940s. Within five minutes of the square are two primary schools and one all-boy's secondary school. During the day, I would hear the children playing in the school grounds, and in flat complexes close to the Smithfield Square. Each of these spaces were gated and enclosed. Most of the teenage participants lived within such housing areas, and would often refer to the level of noise made by the children within their immediate housing areas. Yet, none of the teenagers, and no young children, used the Smithfield Square for "hanging out" or playing.
A primary school in Smithfield. The play area is on the school roof
The teenagers argued that the Smithfield Square had no point; it was too wide open and too quiet.
Group 11b: Although, there probably was sound for somebody who listened to it but because we were all coming down from the city, the space seemed to be nothing… it just seemed real quiet, empty.
Because of that, the teenagers felt they could not group together to chat. For them, it would be like situating themselves in the middle of a stage. Their sounds were amplified or reverberated, ironically creating a feeling of being surveilled. They felt more comfortable and safer in confined areas, such as street corners, laneways, and the archways of large buildings. Within these smaller spaces, the sounds produced have closer reflections. Teenagers often surround themselves with sounds by shouting, playing music, etc., creating what Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? (2009) call a sonic bubble. These "territorial bubbles appear as if by magic around a group of individuals if they begin to interact, and the group quickly acquires rights to the arena" (2009:34) thus creating a temporal space. They did not feel they could do so in such an open area.
Smithfield Square by the summer of 2010
Because of the poor planning and design of the Smithfield area, there are vast empty spaces surrounded by fencing or construction hoarding, numerous derelict buildings, and closed-down shops and restaurants. The Smithfield Square is no different, with numerous buildings left empty as a result of foreclosures or bankruptcy. The silence in this space is indicative of the loss of the social and economic processes. The vast square then takes on another level of silence, the loss of productive meaning, the presence of poverty, homelessness and unemployment.
On one walk with the teenagers I noted that they would group together in the square, even when they were told to walk around and record sounds within the space independently. Later, they said there were no sounds to record, so they just walked towards the closest sound source, a small shopping market in the square. I had noted numerous individual sounds, but they would have required standing in the middle of the square to record them. During focus group sessions after the soundwalks, the teenagers defined positive soundscapes as places with numerous loud sounds, the voices of hundreds within busy shopping streets, music coming from stores and traffic in the distance. These sounds defined a city, and made the teenagers feel safe and enclosed. Smithfield contained none of these kinds of sounds.
Soundwalking the Smithfield Horse Fair
Displaying horse carriages
There are a few events held regularly within the square since it re-opened in 2013. Some of these events are part of the Dublin City Council's efforts to invigorate the space, such as food and art markets, as well as fairs for various seasons and holidays. One of the few public events that take place in Smithfield Square is the Smithfield Horse Fair, which happens on the first Sunday of every month. Having walked through this space repeatedly over a period of 3 years, it was only when I attended the horse fair that the space came alive, it had a purpose.
The horse fair has been a contentious event for both locals and city managers for the past two decades, with the horse dealers arguing that there is either a historical precedence for the horse fair or with the Dublin city councillors arguing that the land was historically used for the selling of cattle for market. The appearance within the Smithfield Square once a month of the horse fair brings with it a vast and lively, and sometimes, as defined by the media and Dublin City Council, a threatening soundscape/environment.
Some sounds defined as threatening are the loud whinnying of horses as they are jostled around the fair. The media has also reported, on several occasions, large-scale fights, which have broken out during the fair, leading to the presence of riot police. This eventually led to the gating of the fair and an extreme police presence as if these measures might reduce such sounds through the threat of arrest. For those living in the new apartment complexes, the sounds produced at the fair are amplified because of the design of the space, and possibly sound more threatening as a result.
During one walk of the Smithfield horse fair that I did in April 2013, some of the audible sounds were horses neighing and whinnying in panic, horse shoes on the cobblestones, traders shouting out their wares of horse paraphernalia, seats, stirrups etc., the voices of old men, which was the dominant background sound, and the sounds of traditional Irish music.
https://soundstudies.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/the-smithfield-horse-fair.mp3
Outside of the gated fair were the sounds of large groups of teenagers, shouting and calling to each other. The space was alive with sound; the voices of teenagers merged with, or were lost within, the chaos of other sounds, becoming part of a larger soundscape. Because the space was busy with people, activities, music and even security there was a reason to use the square, even if you were not actively taking part in the event. The fair created a space for teenagers to engage with, and perhaps feel safe within the boundaries of its soundscape. Suddenly the square was as busy and as loud as the city centre.
Security at the horse fair
Smith hammering horse shoes at the horse fair
While walking through this soundscape, I encountered different kinds of soundmarks. For example, the banging of horseshoes was quite distinctive because it is, as Schafer would define, an archetypal sound, one that no longer belongs in the city. It felt like hearing a sound from the past. Yet this kind of sound creates a kind of historic continuity with the past (Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2000). When discussing the cobblestones within Smithfield Square, most of the young female participants stated that it was not so much the look of the cobblestones that gave the space a sense of history but rather the sounds made when something moved over them. The lack of people and activities within the square meant that these sounds were rarely activated. The soundscape of the fair on those days transformed Smithfield, lifting it out of its everyday silences, which seemed to invite young people to participate. It was reactivated with life.
What was noticeable about the two fairs I visited was that by the second event in 2013, there were far fewer horses than at previous fairs. There were about 8 or 10 horses being paraded around the space by what looked like homeless people or addicts. There seemed to be no real horse-trading; the soundscape lacked the sounds of horses. Instead, the space had become a gathering space, with groups of tourists wandering around taking pictures of anything and everything.
Teenage boys outside the gates of the horse fair 2013
Teenage girls at the fair
This fair does not fit within the cultural ethos of regenerated urban spaces like Smithfield, where culture is defined as a consumerist process or part of the arts. However, the space takes on new potentialities as a result of the presence of people, sounds and activities, allowing the teenagers to view the possibilities of spatial use. Sounds can distinguish a space, as identified during the Smithfield horse fair. These sounds also remove focus from teenagers' voices audible within the space, and transfer it to other sounds. The space was no longer a large fishbowl viewable from any angle; instead it had become a busy vibrant immersive soundscape.
Featured Image: "Smithfield Horse Fair, Dublin" by Flickr user Admanchester, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Linda O Keeffe is secretary to the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association and editor of the Interference Journal. Her practice is concerned with an exploration, both academic and creative, of the ways in which sound alters our experience of different spaces. Her art training was within the sculpture department of IADT under the tutelage of Finola Jones. She completed a Masters in Virtual Reality in NCAD with Kevin Atherton, and just finished a PhD in sociology in NUIM. Her research examined the urban of Dublin city soundscape as socially and technologically co-constructed. She has composed for dance, theatre, quartets, and new instrument performers, installed sound installations for commissions in Ireland, China and Holland, and has had radio works performed both nationally and internationally. In 2008 she was mentored under Eric Leonardson in Chicago, a sound artist and performer. More recently, she was commissioned by Resonance FM to create a work for radio for the 2013 Derry city of culture event. Current projects include a solo exhibition in November 2014 for the Limerick Sculpture Centre, which will be a creative realization of her PhD research. You can find her at www.lindaokeeffe.com.
"Heard Any Good Games Lately?: Listening to the Sportscape"-Kaj Ahlsved
"Park Sounds: A Kansas City Soundwalk for Fall"-Liana Silva-Ford
"Sounding Out! Podcast Episode #7: Celebrate World Listening Day with the World Listening Project"


Tom Waits has personally curated a 76-song playlist of Tom Waits songs from the first decade of his career. This would normally be considered strange and narcissistic behavior by the gruff troubadour, however Waits got with the times to coincide with the reissue of his seven Elektra Asylum Records releases, from 1973's Closing Time through 1980's Heartattack and Vine, all released on Elektra Asylum Records back in the day.
Several of these records have been out of print for quite some time, and all 180-gram vinyl reissues have been remastered under Waits' strict supervision. The records will be released throughout 2018.
You can listen to his playlist below on Spotify, or you can stream it on Apple Music.


Today we finally take a close look at the RodeLink system! See what I really like and really don't like about this wireless kit.
Very easy to link the transmitter and receiver together.
Strong signal due to dual frequencies (much better than my EW100).
Battery levels for both units (TX and RX) can be seen on the RX unit.
You can mute the TX from the RX.
Kit is less than $400 making it a great buy.
Lav mic has very bad cable shielding resulting in signal issues.
One of the two cables on the RX has failed on me.
The kit is great if you replace the mic and potentially the cable for the RX unit. This doesn't bother me since we can get our hands on this unit for less than $400 which is great. I really do like these units and plan to use them much more than my Sennheiser kit.
You can purchase the RodeLink kit on Amazon as well as B&H Photo Video. Using those links will support future videos like this one. Thank you!
You can also purchase that coiled 3.5mm cable I talked about here on Amazon.


The world of professional gaming is in a bit of an upheaval, with multiple professional Counter-Strike players finding themselves banned after being discovered cheating. The spat is said to have started when the E-Sports Entertainment Association's tools banned Simon "smn" Beck for cheating. This caught the attention of Valve, which then received details from the ESEA and used that to upgrade its own anti-cheat tools. That, then, resulted in multiple players being caught, including professionals players.
The cheats being used were said to offer aim assist, and for some players to also provide aid in making otherwise problematic shots. Among the gamers caught were Gordon "SF" Giry and Hovik "KQLY" Tovmassian, according to Kotaku. Both Tovmassian and Giry were kicked from their teams after probes into the claims revealed both had used unspecified third-party tools.
According to Beck, 30- to 40-percent of professional players are using the third-party tools, though that has not been verified. He also reportedly released a list of other pro-level gamers who are allegedly using the cheats, though again that cannot be verified.
Unfortunately, both the Epsilon and Titan teams — to which Giry and Tovmassian belonged — have been banned from competing in DreamHack Winter 2014, which kicks off on Thursday. The incident is being compared to scandals in other sports where athletes have been discovered using performance-enhancing drugs.


This weekend marks the start of a mo-vement. They say from humble beginnings grows legends and in this case the legacy is back stronger than before and it begins from stubble. If you've not clocked on by now then from the not so subtle hints (…and obvious title) then let us say it loud and clear…it's the start of Movember.
Of course the team here at Elysium Magazine knew you were with us from the very start. We've always flown the flag for the hirsute month formerly known as November because it shines the spotlight oh so brightly on the men's health issues. The campaign which originally started as a vehicle to raise the awareness of prostate cancer amongst men is now well established as the campaign to drive the conversation on a much wider set of men's issues such as testicular cancer and mental health too. Men should not be afraid of facing these medical foes and the Movember movement is all about making it OK to talk openly about these real concerns one by dodgy moustache at a time.
The numbers speak for themselves with the Movember campaign funding more than 800 programmes across 21 countries right now. It's firmly put men's health on the radar for everyone, not just men but their wives and girlfriends too.
So now that the discerning gent is up to speed, it's time to get involved. The drill has been beautifully simplistically as always. Start the month clean shaven and wait for your body's natural rhythm to build that moustache one hair follicle at a time through the course of 30 days and raise sponsorship money for an almighty cause. Beards are strictly a no-go though so all you hipsters need to abide by the rules.
The fun as always lies in crafting your moustache to suit your style – so this is where those creative juices can get flowing as you dream up the best facial topiary to suit the persona you want to rock. Along with all the fun there is also a strong sense of camaraderie and you'll soon acknowledge those Mo-Bros in 'the club' with nods of approval as you go about your daily lives. After all, we're in it together.


Even in this "Age of Data," independent progressive schools have shown a remarkable persistence in offering an alternative educational model. As Traditional Public Schools (TPS) become even more committed to a testing model of achievement, there are schools that continue to operate on identified progressive educational principles. This paper uses observations and interviews at two upstate New York progressive schools to identify characteristics that define the resiliency of such institutions. The author's findings identify four characteristics common to a progressive educational culture: familial grouping, informality, play, and democracy. Four elements that are important to this progressive model of instruction tied to the culture at these schools are present: individualized child-centered instruction, curricular flexibility, and choice/space/time, The nature of and future for non-institutional schools is also considered here.
Kloss, D. (2018). The Culture of the Independent Progressive School. International Journal of Progressive Education, 14(1), pp. 201-219.
Kloss, Dean (2018). "The Culture of the Independent Progressive School". International Journal of Progressive Education 14 (1):201-219. doi:10.29329/ijpe.2018.129.14.