text:
travelling histories
Tag: academic writing
May 3, 2015 Dave McLaughlin
Between the Canon and the Commons
My time at the Library of Congress's Kluge Center is coming to an end. This is sad news. It might also come as a surprise to many (any?) of you reading this blog, given the little time I have devoted to chronicling the relatively rare experience of being a British Research Councils Fellow at the Library of Congress. (I would recommend anyone interested in finding out what it is like to study at the Library's Kluge Center, or to be a part of the AHRC's IPS programme, to read the fascinating blogs by Sibylle Machat and Natalie Cox, respectively.
Sighting the beginning of the end of my Kluge time has brought with it the honour of presenting to the distinguished crowd of researchers that make up the Center's Fellows and staff. To that end, last week I gave a talk on the ways in which fans of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlockians) have used and framed representations of geographical mobility in their fan fictions. I called my paper, 'Between the Canon and the Commons' in reference to the work of David Brewer and his notion of fan fictions as a 'textual commons', and to suggest that fans' representations of Holmes and his world have always brought with them elements of Doylean originalism and fan evolution.
Like many academics before me, I made life considerably easier on myself by presenting a paper that I had already given: in this case, I wrote 'Between the Canon and the Commons' to be delivered at the Association of American Geographers' (AAG) annual meeting in Chicago, the week before my Kluge talk.
In this post I will talk a bit about each presentation, show some photos and slides and talk a bit about how my work was received. If you want to read a full-length speaking text of my paper (as yet without footnotes – those will come in time), head over to my page on Academia.edu.
AAG – Chicago 2015
Millennium Gate, otherwise known as the Bean, in Chicago's Millennium Park
The AAG Annual Meeting is perhaps the largest gathering of geographers (and some others) at any one time. This year, in Chicago, the conference stretched over three venues and six days, involving thousands of attendees, hundreds of panellists and tens of rooms. Yet, the way the conference was set up, with multiple panels at any one time, meant that I only got a sense of the its size and scale at certain moments – in the lobby of the main hotel venue, for instance, or in the nearby bars and restaurants where nearly every customer was wearing the tell-tale green lanyard. Given the small size of each room and the many choices available, the panels themselves were relatively intimate affairs.
Me and my friend and fellow geographer Edward-John eating Chicago deep dish pizza. Almost everyone in this restaurant was a geographer
There were around thirty people in the room when I spoke. My paper was part of a panel organised by myself and my supervisor, partly to give us both space in which to contextualise our work and partly to ensure that, at a conference where literary geographers are a rare breed, we would't get lost on panels with little or no relevance to what we are doing. Phil chaired the first panel, in which I spoke, which was about mobility and circulation as they related to the relationship between literature and the world. Here is a photo of me speaking, and few slides from the presentation:
The author presenting his paper in a windowless room in Chicago's Hyatt hotel
We had a good series of papers, with the first two (my own and Maddy Hamlin's) considering the formal relationship between literary representations of mobility and meaning in quite different texts; and the latter two (by Perry Carter and Stephen Dreiver) looking at the ways circulation of books or their authors have affected their representations and their impact on the world.
Kluge Center Work-in-Progress
At the Kluge Center I was back on home turf, presenting to a group of academics and the center's staff,with whom I had discussed my own topic many times. The paper as I gave it was essentially unchanged. Again, here is a photo of me giving the talk, along with a few slides:
The author speaking in the Library of Congress
What was really interesting was the difference, in depth and complexity, of the questions I received at the Kluge. Whereas in Chicago I was speaking to a room of geographers, many of whom presumably shared many of my underlying assumptions about the importance of representations of geography in narratives, at the Kluge I was in front of an interdisciplinary audience, whose members' work differs greatly from my own.
While in Chicago questions focussed on my use of theory, in Washington the questions probed more deeply into my own orientation to the texts and to the ideas of readerly 'borrowing' and relationships to originary authors that I was exploring. The different angles from which each listener came gave fresh (and valuable) insights into my work which I will certainly build on.
Perhaps the message to take away here is, even if large, many-panelled conferences seem more prestigious and vital to one's academic CV, it's the small, intimate, interdisciplinary places where the real academic growing happens.
November 26, 2014 November 26, 2014 Dave McLaughlin
Clueless in the Kluge (that's 'Kloo-gee' to you, sunshine)
Usually I hate working in an office. The feeling of having to be somewhere each and every day, having to start work at a certain time and stop (or 'stop') working at a certain time fills me with dread. One of the joys of doing a PhD is that I have the freedom to plan my own work week. For now at least. Yet, every day for the past three weeks I have cheerfully left the house at a reasonable time in the morning, walked two miles across town and settled down in my cubicle to study. So what's changed?
Two words: archival research. Having passed through the fire and torment of the First Year Upgrade ("No, please, no more edits. I'll do anything: clean the gutters, hoover the cat, pretend to enjoy someone else's paper! Please…") I now find myself poised to strike out into manuscripts unknown. I'm not just in any old archives, either. I am among twenty or so lucky people to have been awarded this year's slew of AHRC/ESRC International Placement Scheme grants to research at the Library of Congress. The IPS is a scheme for PhD students and Early Career Researchers, providing funding on top of the AHRC/ESRC stipends for a research visit of two to six months at one of seven institutions around the world, including the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntingdon Library in California and the Library of Congress here in Washington DC.
It's a pretty good deal too. Research Councils UK (the umbrella organisation for the AHRC, ESRC and NERC) won't send it's stipendees just anywhere. For instance, the IPS used to fund placements in India, until RCUK got fed up with the lack of support provided by the institution in question and pulled the plug on that partnership. I can't speak for researchers on other IPS placements but at the Library of Congress things are pretty well set up to make sure you have a good (research-filled) time.
The Kluge Fellows and staff 2014-15
It was a relatively long road from my first encounter with the IPS at the AHRC's showcase in London last November to sitting here in my cubicle in the Library's Kluge Center with shelves of books and stacks of research papers taunting me to read them. ("I'll get to you, wait your turn!") When I first heard about the scheme my own PhD project was still a hazy concept to me. I was caught between the halcyon days before my course started, when I thought I had a grasp on what I was doing because I hadn't read anything yet, and the darker days of my second full term, when the true size of a PhD really smacked me in the face. Though I was holding on to the basic shape of my project, outlined in my original application, I had no real idea of where I was going or what 'there' looked like.
Looking back, it would have been tempting to argue that I knew too little to make a convincing case for an IPS grant; that I should wait until I knew more; that I didn't stand a chance against second years, thirds years and postdocs. Little did I know then that the feeling of ignorance never really goes away, it just gets applied to new and different things. (The Thesis Whisperer has a great guest post on the levels of academic knowing – I'll put it here when I rediscover the link.) With a great deal of positive encouragement from my supervisor, I set my cheek to the wind (or something) and tried to sort out a decent archive research proposal. Throughout my career I have seemed to do better when a display of potential is called for: university admissions, applications for entry-level jobs with advancement possibilities, grant applications and so on.
The IPS falls squarely into the 'potential' category. Not only are research grants made before the research is ever done, the IPS institutions have collections so vast and custodians so knowledgeable that a measure of flexibility and potential in your application is probably a key to success. You can't come to the Library of Congress, with its thousands of uncatalogued items, reems of uncharted research territory and Librarians who know more than the 'Finding Aids' could ever tell, with a day-to-day schedule of pre-planned research. You'd never find the really juicy stuff that makes the research truly worthwhile.
At the moment, three weeks in to my research, I am finding it difficult not to wallow in the Library's collections. IPS fellows at the Library of Congress are hosted by the Library's Office of Scholarly Programmes, in the John W. Kluge Center. This is a huge two-level wooden structure built inside one of the four massive rooms originally designed to hold the Library's book collection, before it was all moved into closed stacks. The Center hosts and funds it's own Chairs – senior researchers in particular fields – who get proper, closed-door offices on the 'lower deck'. The 'upper deck' is given over to seemingly endless cubicles for Fellows. Cubicle doesn't really do the space justice – it's a office in all but ceiling and door.
Kluge Fellows scoffing cake in my cubicle
Kluge Fellows have the privilege of ordering books from the main reading room collections to their cubicles, up to 350 in all. This often leads to 'reservation overload' as it's all to easy to fill a break in reading or writing by logging on to the catalogue to have a poke around and before you know it another cart-load of books is heading your way. Thus is the researchers' guilt kept freely flowing.
Surprisingly, however, research at the Kluge isn't all about reading books. One of the Library's greatest assets is its people, from the researchers it attracts to the Librarians it employs. IPS Fellows in the Kluge have unparalleled access to both. As a research centre the Kluge brings together academics from across the world. Through working and socialising together it's hard not to learn about each other's projects. It's hard to overstate how useful it can be to talk about your own work to group of scholars with diverse interests, especially when you get so many different questions and suggestions in return. The Librarians are key to really understanding the collections, for IPS applicants and for those who make it to the Kluge.
So a year after I first wrote my IPS application, and almost a month after I landed in DC, my period of being 'clueless in the Kluge' is probably turning a corner. I've started writing a very generalised plan for the next five months, which includes three additional fieldwork or archive visits, drafting three articles and one chapter and tracking down as many relevant books as I can find. I've also come to really feel a part of the Kluge community. For those of you who are now in the midst of the application process, I can only hope that this time next year (or whenever you chose to go), you get the thrill of being clueless on another continent – all at the taxpayers expense, of course.
September 23, 2014 September 23, 2014 Dave McLaughlin
"It's all the same stuff as before, isn't it?" – Conference Season: Part 4
A few months ago I began a series on being a fresh PhDer at academic conferences. In this, the fourth post, I want to talk about my experience of turning my MA Thesis – a study into Australian perceptions of Britain as a tourist destination – into a conference paper and ultimately a publishable article.
As part of the new grad student training programme provided by the Geography Department at Cambridge, students are required to produce a 'dream CV'. The point of the exercise is to make new grads, who spend much of their first term buzzing from the thrill of starting a PhD and eating way too many formal dinners, think seriously about their plans for the future. My own Dream CV, as well as prophesying a future Cambridge Junior Research Fellowship straight after finishing my PhD in three years (!), demanded from me two things in the first year: 1) get AHRC funding for a research visit to the Library of Congress; and 2) write-up my MA thesis into a publishable article. I did the first; the second was (and still is) a bit harder.
In fact, 'write MA thesis into article' was probably the most well-grounded ambition I had when I first started my PhD, right behind 'don't fuck up the PhD'. My MA thesis, while not perfect, is the closest thing I have to an academic article right now – in word count and in substance. Also, although it may dismay many Sherlockians, I came into the PhD vowing to be more than 'the Sherlock guy'. My main academic interest is in travel, mobilities and the way we use literature to talk about the world. My MA thesis handily combines two of my long-standing interests: Australian history and travel writing. So it seems like a good thing to get this out first, to make my mark as 'the travel writing guy'. Not a great tag but a good first step.
So how did I go from the vague, Dream CV command to 'write an article', to actually being on that road? If it had been up to me alone I would probably still be sitting on that nice pipe dream. I got lucky, really, when two things happened in my first year to kickstart the process. The first was finding a paper called 'Time Travel', published the year before by Richard White, an eminent Australian academic (one who, surely, doesn't need another publication as badly as I do). The paper appeared, at first sight, to cover exactly the same ground as my MA thesis. It definitely used the same or similar sources. I kicked myself when I first saw it. "Why didn't I write up my thesis as an article six years ago?!" I asked anyone within earshot. I would have had the jump on this guy!
The second, more fortuitous event happened shortly afterwards. I learned through a friend about a conference she was organising at my old university on migration and public history. My MA thesis, which used Australian travel writing and guidebooks about Britain to explore the ways in which Australians' perceptions of the old imperial metropole changed over the twentieth century, covered to some extent the idea of a changing sense of 'Britishness' at the root of Australians' identity. This was very much connected to the idea of Australia as founded by Anglo-Celtic migrants. So there my thesis had a link to the conference. This conference was perhaps the more motivating 'event' because it provided my rewriting with focus, direction and a timeframe. Knowing about White's paper and that the debate is still alive was interesting, yet without something towards which I could direct my energies, it's unlikely I would have started looking for ways to improve my writing. Like most pieces of humanities academia, the research story can be told in many different ways. A focus on the Angl0-Celtic migration aspects of my research provided a point around which to organise, and reorganise my ideas.
Encouraged by this thought, I took a second look at the terrifying 'other paper'. Of course, I should have known that the Eminent Australian Academic hadn't covered exactly the same, even nearly the same, questions as I had. His focus was more on tourist experiences of Britain; mine was on how literature written for tourists framed their expectations. A subtle but important distinction. Reading it again I also realised that I disagreed with his argument. I disagreed because my interpretation of my sources told a different story. White argues, in essence, that personal accounts of travel indicate that Australians valued Britain as a travel destination for the idea of history it conveyed. They weren't interested in the content of that history, just the fact that Britain could boast barns, say, that were many times older than the oldest houses in Sydney. My contention, however, is that for many Australians, particularly younger travellers, where they were interested in Britain's history at all it was precisely because of its content: they either saw it as a grounding of their own Australian heritage or they rebelled against it in interesting ways.
I should say here that MA thesis was perhaps the hardest piece of academic writing I ever attempted. Coming up with the idea was relatively straightforward, though over the course of my MA year I'd struggled to hit the nail on what exactly I was interested in, academically speaking. The idea to look at Australian travel writing and guidebooks came out of my already-existing interest in travel writing as a reader. From there, through the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing and the piece by Peter Hulme on his first arrival in the UK, which revealed how at once loaded with significance and yet entirely unexpected the experience of first arriving in Britain could be for an Australian, I arrived at my thesis idea: to explore, using Australian travel writing and guidebooks, what images of Britain Australians were taking with them when they travelled and to ask what role this literature played in their crafting. In the end my argument was (quel surprise!) that Australian travellers approached Britain less as 'British' people 'going home' and more as independent Australian tourists as the decades of the twentieth century wore on.
Thinking about the process of writing my MA thesis whilst rewriting it as a conference paper was useful. We all know, and read all the time, about the alternate pains and joys of academic writing. For me, an awareness of where the writing was painful, where it was fun and what relationship that had to my interpretation, was a good guide to how I should approach the rewriting. It turns out that chapter 1, which dealt with travel writers of the 1940s and 1950s was painful to research, painful to interpret and painful to write. Chapter 2, however, on youthful travels of the 1960s and 1970s was a breeze in comparison. Chapter 3, concerned with the modern period, was an anomaly. I don't think I got the interpretation right then and I'm still working it out now.
This process wasn't just an exercise in dredging up the writing pains of the past. As well as being a good learning moment for writing my First Year Report (rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, ever dissatisfied), thinking about how and why I enjoyed writing a particular argument (or didn't) was key to discovering where my new material was. In this case, an idea I am still working on, I enjoyed writing the section on youthful travels of the 1960s and 1970s because it was, and is, new. My argument is that Australians and to a lesser extent New Zealanders in this period took with them and honed what I am calling an 'Australasian Gaze'. It was a particular type of Urry's and McCannell's tourist gaze; a way of looking at Britain not just as 'another tourist destination', though that packaging was a part of it, nor simply as a repository for a detatched 'sense of history'; the Australasian Gaze was formulated specifically against earlier forms of Australian gazing, themselves developed within the context of the British Empire and with the inherent subtext of British superiority. The Australasian Gaze subverted this, belittling core aspects of British history and Australia's own Anglo-Celtic migrant history and asserting a new Australia (and New Zealand) on a cultural par with Britain.
Interestingly, this concept really challenges the ideas behind the third part of my original MA thesis. In that piece I had argued that the historical focus on many British guidebooks written for Australians betokened an archetypal Australian tourist who wanted to indulge in fantasies of her country's British heritage, at once alive in Britain and yet maintained outside of time, through monuments and historical sites. Thinking about the belligerent rise of the Australasian Gaze in the 1960s and 1970s alters this reading. In fact, it now seems, that Australian tourists in the 1980s and 1990s (generally speaking) really did want a version of White's 'time travel'. While the recognised the importance of certain British historical sites to Australia's own heritage, this wasn't at the core of their tourist experiences. They wanted history, any history, for the sake of history. And Britain, repackaged by the likes of Rough Guide, Australia's own Lonely Planet and all the other guidebook empires, was made into 'just another tourist site' which would deliver what they wanted. The tourists were seeking an authentic experience of medieval castles, Norman churches and old hay barns, but it was one a mile away from the 'authenticity' of the 1940s and 1950s, when Australians still clung on, by the skin of their teeth, to ideas of Empire, Queen and country.
To get from popular 1950s Australian travel writer Frank Clune's idea of Britain as the Grandmotherland, with all the ideas of Imperial loyalty, history and shared culture that it entailed, to the 1990s Australian tourist, hungry for some more historical camera fodder, intent on 'doing' England in a few days, before moving on to 'do' France, Italy and the rest of Europe, required a big shift. That shift was the intense rise of the Australasian gaze, which shredded the Australian tourist imagination of any sense of Anglo-Australian context for Britain's history and tourist sites. This Gaze, written in two specific guidebooks, is what my article will focus on.
Sometimes, the length of the road and the pain caused in walking it can seem worthless, if the traveller ends up back where she started. In my case, my article draft bears many resemblances to my original thesis. Much the same is true of my PhD thesis, one year on from the start, whose basic ideas haven't changed. I'm hoping that's a sign of their academic strength. Really, the truth is I won't know until I test them. That, after all, is what conference season is for.
July 18, 2014 July 16, 2014 Dave McLaughlin
'Walking the Walk' – Conference Season: Part Three
This is Part Three in a series on being presenting at conferences as a first-year PhD student. You can read the other sections, Part One on finding a conference (and finding a topic) and Part Two with an extract from one of my papers, here. In Part Three, I discuss the experience of actually attending and speaking at a conference.
Given my research interests in travel and in literary responses to border crossings (this blog is called travelling histories, after all) it may seem odd that my first conference presentation happened in Cambridge, not a mile from my own front door. Yet again, perhaps it wasn't so odd, after all. I was lucky enough to be selected as a speaker at a conference on 'Thinking with Things', put on as part of Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). In keeping with CRASSH's aims, the conference was avowedly interdisciplinary. The keynote speaker talked about the hidden depths of art history and what an appreciation of materials, of things, can bring to the understanding of works of art. Other presentations ranged across subjects from seventeenth-century didactic geographical board games, to the historical significance of Irish episcopal palaces and the histories of collecting cultures. My work's own interdisciplinary approach, moving across the boundaries of geography, history and literature, meant that I felt quite at home in this apparent academic hodge-podge.
Even the walk from my flat to the conference venue, a journey of about 15 or 20 minutes, depending on how rushed I am, involved the (legal) transgression of a variety of geographical and social borders. For instance, the fastest way across the river Cam to the Sidgewick site, home of the Alison Richards Building and of CRASSH, is through the grounds of King's College. As a member of the university I have the right to walk up to the imposing, be-gowned porters standing outside the college's famous main gate, on King's Parade, wave my card and pass through to the relative calm of the front court on the gate's other side. Yet, as a member of Emmanuel College, not King's, there's always a slight chance that that privilege could be revoked. So, my walk past the throngs of indignant tourists ("why can he go in?!") to the gates is often (as it was on this day) tinged with a small sense of excitement. Of course, on that day, as on most days in term time, I was allowed through.
But today's post shouldn't really begin with the morning of my first academic conference itself. As I'm sure is the case for many people, when I came to read my paper to the room of expectant faces that afternoon, it was not for the first time. Over the course of the previous four or five days I had read and re-read my paper, out-loud to myself and to others, around ten times. This was the real bridge between the draft text with which I ended Part Two of this series, and the paper I read out at CRASSH. Reading my words aloud was key to the redrafting process. It enabled me to actually hear where certain words would cause me to stumble, or where certain sentences ran on for far too long. Given that I will, if left to my own devices, write in a more personal and confessional style (much like the tone of this blog), I have to work hard in academic writing to polish up my prose to a less bloggy, more professional standard. I still strive to maintain a sense of myself in what I write. I am a firm believer that the reader must know it is me writing those sentences, reading those words, framing those ideas. They did not arrive, fully formed on their own. They do not stand for some abstract, academic truth. Sadly, achieving the balance between these two outliers is not always easy and I often fall back on my tried-and-tested, undergraduate writing style: informative, clear but bland and repetitive. Reading my prose aloud helps me to correct for that, too.
One of the things I enjoy most about giving academic presentations is that, at least in my fields, it is very acceptable to 'read' a paper. That is, to prepare a word-for-word text and to read it out across the podium. Good presenters will work, in their text and their delivery, to put a lively and interesting voice to their words and will strive not to simply drone on in monotone for 20, eternal minutes. This practice saved me from the greatest issue I have as a presenter: my habit of forgetting most of what I want to say and the nervous tics, stumbles and 'ums' that accompanying this forgetting. By reading a prepared script, I could fully impart every bit of my in-depth arguments while sounding (I hope) confident and clear. Some may argue, as did the woman sitting next to my during the keynote speech, that reading a paper rather than talking extemporaneously, kills any interest the audience has. I would counter, as I did then, that the point of academic conferences is to listen to, and discuss the ideas. If reading from a paper helps the presenter to argue for all their ideas and not to leave half of them, forgotten, on the cutting floor of their mind, I am all for it.
Another great benefit of reading a written paper is that I was able to listen to and enjoy the speakers whose turn it was to speak before mine. In the past, following the 'speak to a powerpoint, don't use notes' format loved by my old teachers, lecturers and bosses, I wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything other than the looming fear that I would forget something. That was not a problem at CRASSH. One anxiety that still remains is that I might go over time. Thus I am prone, on a first attempt, to cut deeply into my paper and actually go under time. I was a full four minutes under time at CRASSH.
Happily, this meant that I could restore a lot of material and add more things for my paper's second outing, at Portsmouth University's Centre for Studies in Literature's annual symposium, which this year was on 'Material Objects in Detective Fiction'. As at CRASSH, having written out my words and having practiced them out-loud again and again, I was free to listen to the other presentations and contribute to the lively discussion. I was very lucky to attend that conference for three reasons. First, it was organised by the wonderful Christopher Pittard, whose work on Strand Magazine readership and the 'moral community' they constituted has been of great help to my own thesis. Secondly, I was able to meet the interesting Kate Brombley, who is Chris's PhD student and whose work on Doyle and Sherlockian fandom nicely overlaps with my own work.
Thirdly, unlike the horror stories PhDs and ERCs hear of senior academics who use conferences as an opportunity to tear young researchers a new one, I was approached after my paper by the keynote speaker, Janice Allan, senior lecturer at Salford and editor of the journal Clues: A Journal of Detection. Janice simply noted that her paper, which I had unfortunately missed that morning, disagreed in parts with my own analysis. She offered to email me a copy and suggested we discuss our disagreements. Janice certainly provided a lesson on how to handle academic disagreement in a way that doesn't demand a 30-minute 'question' in the Q&A session and which doesn't lead to the humiliation of the inexperienced (and often nervous) speaker.
'I Can't Think of a Better Title Right Now' – Conference Season: Part Two
This is the second part in what will probably be a long-ish series on my recent experiences as a first-year PhD student in the world of academic conferences. In the last post I wrote about looking for a conference to present at, looking for an idea to write about and the writing process itself. This post is an edited version of the paper I presented at Cambridge CRASSH's Thinking with Things: Material Cultures 1400-1940 graduate symposium and Portsmouth University's Detecting Objects: Materials and Detective Fiction symposium. As you can see, in comparison with the 'initial ideas' I briefly covered in the last post, my paper changed shape dramatically between initial proposal and presentation version.
Sherlock Holmes's Things
In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the line between people and their environments is indistinct; bodies are not bounded entities but intimately connected to the world around them. Things can be understood, for instance, by both definitions of the term 'property': as something possessed by a person but also as a distinguishing mark or feature. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, for instance, Dr. Mortimer's cane is not just his possession, it is an item that marks him out as a rural inhabitant, a medical man and a keen walker. Neither is it a mere accessory, for he tells us that he, "would not lose that stick for the world".[1] It is not just things close to the body which distinguish their possessors. At the beginning of The Cardboard Box Holmes is able to break into Watson's train of thought, much to Watson's surprise, by following Watson's gaze around the room and noting which objects his eyes rest on.[2] Holmes's feat of deduction is made possible by recognising the interactive, affective relationship that occurs between Watson and these particular things.
The blurred line between persons and things indicates that these characters are what Carl Knappett has termed, 'extended organisms'.[3] These 'props' emphasise the performative nature of identity, its materiality, and through its dependence on recognition by an observer or observers, its social rather than innate nature. Sherlock Holmes is the best example of this phenomenon of 'fuzzy boundaries' between the human body and its physical environment. As Watson explains in a famous passage from The Cardboard Box, "He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour and suspicion of unsolved crime."[4]
There is a duality at work in this metaphor. Firstly, the imagery is both organic and technological. Undoing the idea that bodies are bounded by their skin, we are presented with a figurative coupling of a man and his environment, where words and messages replace nervous signals, and where people are imagined to be at once individual and yet combined into a system. The term 'filaments' suggests a particular organic and inorganic hybridity. Though it conjures up an image of living nerves, those little rumours and suspicions of crime more often come to Holmes by mechanical means: through telegraph wires, postal services and transport networks. Although Holmes is described at various times in the stories as being akin to a 'calculating machine', he is in fact closer to what Donna Haraway has described as a 'cyborg'.[5] His mental and physical capacities are augmented by materials. These range from the encyclopedia of crime and the communications networks he relies on for information, to the Hansom cabs that speed him around the city and the magnifying glass he uses to discern what his eye alone cannot.
Secondly, the quotation suggests a tension between stillness and mobility at the heart of Holmes's character. The organic and inorganic hybridity of Holmes's filaments reflects the late-Victorian imagery of the 'All Red Routes': the imperial communications network. This was made of postal steamer ships as well as the telegraph wires that spanned the globe (known as the All-Red Line) and connected the various colonial outposts with Britain's heartlands. Although they gained their nickname from the red colouring by which they were marked on maps, these 'All Red Routes' were also metaphorically described as the Empire's arteries and veins; carrying material messages of love, friendship and trade that were the lifeblood of imperial connections.[6]
Yet, as the filaments quotation illustrates, Holmes is not just aware of the power of the communications network; he is a part of its power. This does not just reflect his position as a servant of the law. Though there is an element of the panoptic about his ability to 'lie in the very centre', being, 'responsive to every little rumour and suspicion', Holmes doesn't actually lie in wait, like a Victorian NSA agent. He actively makes use of the network, becoming a part of the great, democratic access to communications, first made possible by the universal penny post.
Following Thrift, the nineteenth-century telegraph system should be regarded as a 'machine complex', one kind of technology – others include stagecoaches, railways and, more recently, the internet – whose operation relies on synergy between humans and machines. The stagecoach and the telegraph are well known for their contributions to the 'annihilation of time and space'. Yet, by enhancing the motility – the potential for movement – in people, they also turn places into "stages of intensity…Traces of movement, speed and circulation".[7] So while Holmes appears to be lying still, in the centre of London, through his connections to the communications networks his stillness is no more than an illusion.
[1] Doyle, Complete Stories, p.181.
[2] Ibid. p.1113.
[3] Carl Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p.16.
[4] Doyle, Complete Stories, p.1113.
[5] Adey, Mobility, p.201.
[6] Kate Thomas, Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal and Victorian Letters, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.162.
[7] Cresswell, On the move, p.47
'The First Draft is Always Shit' – Conference Season: Part One
Looking at the dateline of my last entry I realise with a larger-than-expected pang of guilt that it has been a long time since I last tended to this blog. Perhaps it would help my defence if I mentioned that the months since I hatched the idea to blog my PhD have been the busiest so far. Over and above writing my First Year Report (and feverishly preparing for my oral upgrade exam) I presented at three conferences in the summer term.
I had heard from many fellow students, from academics in my department and read on many blogs (including the excellent Patter and Thesis Whisperer) that writing is the best way to drive ideas forward. I was also aware that presenting papers is a great way to get feedback on work-in-progress. (In fact, my pastoral tutor said to me in the very first week of the academic year, "don't go to conferences unless you are presenting". Wise words, perhaps, for the PhD student looking to get noticed but also a guaranteed way to pile on the pressure.)
While inspiration to present work-in-progress is one thing, finding a suitable conference is another. Although I had signed up to the mildly useful Conference Alerts website, the most useful tips came from university mailing lists (word to the wise: get on as many of these as you can; although I am in the Geography Department I get notice of calls for papers in from the History and English faculties, too), as well as friends who kept an eye out on Twitter. Through a combination of these avenues I found three suitable conferences.
The first was aimed at postgrads and early career researchers and hosted by Cambridge's own, wonderful CRASSH – the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. Thinking with Things, a one-day symposium, brought together presenters from a range of scholarly backgrounds and interests, and from all over the country, to share their research on materials culture thinking in the arts, social science and humanities. Among many excellent papers, on topics as diverse as Belgian shopping-culture and commercial business cards in the nineteenth century, Pierre Duval's seventeenth-century geographical board games and the gendering of casket metaphors in Shakespeare's works, I had the chance to present my own work-in-progress on material objects and Sherlock Holmes's method.
Like all good papers, this one developed out an unexpected idea that had sparked in one of my supervisor's 'critical geography 101' seminars. Reading into material geographies, the strand of human geography that looks at the way objects and materials move through the world and interact with humans, non-humans and each other, I was intrigued by the idea, noted by Jane Bennett, that materials might (in some way) 'vibrate' with an energy of their own, and that people are, to a greater or lesser degree, sensitive to these vibrations. At the furthest end of the sensitivity spectrum are those people Bennett terms 'hoarders': people who collect or are greatly attracted to a variety of objects.
Bennett's aim, which she shares with many materially-oriented human geographers, though she is a political scientist herself, is to reinvest objects and materials with a sense of political participation, or at least to raise the possibility that human-material interactions have political (and social, environmental or emotional) significance in this more-than-human world.
Though her research is broad, her comments on hoarders and on people's sensitivity to materials' vibrations and the role they can play in political and social life got me thinking. As a fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes relies heavily on material objects, from paper and clothing, to footprints and settled dust, to build up his cases. In most instances, Holmes is able to see physical evidence that everyone else, including the official police detectives, his partner Watson and the perpetrators themselves, overlooks or ignores. He displays a heightened sensitivity to materials, objects or things. This is just one way of analysing Holmes's particular relationship with things – Joan Copjec, for instance, reads the detective's abilities from a semiotical point of view: he represents the argument that there are always other ways to view a situation; his habit of noticing the overlooked letter, or the unnoticed door, indicates that there is always "one signifier more": the "potentially infinite extension of meaning".
Yet, materials thinking seemed to offer another way to view the question: does Holmes's highly sensitive relationship to materials reflect Doyle's (and other Sherlockian writers') awareness of the significance that things play in the more-than-human world? There seemed to me to be a number of instances within the stories and their context which make this idea at least plausible. Like Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue, Doyle often includes more-than-human agents into his stories, such as the snake in The Speckled Band, the atavistic, animal-like soldier in The Blanched Soldier or the poison-box in The Dying Detective. At the same time, Doyle's Spritualist beliefs and his use of mediums indicates his understanding that some people have a greater sensitivity to objects and 'vibrations', to use Bennett's word, outside of those places that people tend to look.
With these thoughts cascading out, I sat down to draft a paper. One of the real benefits of presenting at conferences in my first year has been the painful, yet necessary, confrontation with the understanding that, as historian Matt Houlbrook has warned, "the first draft is always shit". Boy, is he right about that. In my case, given my return to academia after half a decade in policy-focussed jobs in Westminster, where lengthy, considered prose wasn't always the aim, this was a tough barrier to face down. My touchstone for academic writing was my undergraduate and masters essays, which I would (sadly) bang out in one sitting and submit, with very little editing. As a doctoral researcher, there's no such luxury. The submission is never final and there's always room for improvement.
As I will demonstrate in the next post, with an extract from my paper, the piece's final form was very, very different from the ideas I started with. I didn't use any interpretation of the stories I mentioned above and avoided entirely any reference to Doyle's life. With only 3,000-or-so words to reel off in 20 minutes, brevity, and simplicity, are the soul of conference presentations. Honestly, as this was my first paper and I was anxious to avoid a train-wreck situation, when my first notions that Sherlock's relationship with objects might in some was puncture the detective's traditional role as final arbiter of power became too knotty, I based my structure on the useful and informative work of archaeologist Carl Knappett, referencing a book he wrote while just up the road from here, in Christ's, Cambridge. Without Carl's excellent analytical framework to draw on (and 'enchance', of course) my paper would not have been in the shape it was.
Once I'd written the damn thing, my next move was to build up the courage to read it. Aloud. And not in my living room.
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text:
Q: Implementing rbind for a series of matrix I want to bind a number of matrix which are result of a function. For the following example, I want to bind the result of Myfn(m) for m<-(1:3)
Myfn <- function(m){
  matrix <- m * matrix(1:6, nrow=2)
  return(matrix)
}

which is
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    3    5
[2,]    2    4    6
[3,]    2    6   10
[4,]    4    8   12
[5,]    3    9   15
[6,]    6   12   18

Any idea how to implement it in R?

A: > do.call(rbind, lapply(1:3, Myfn))
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    1    3    5
[2,]    2    4    6
[3,]    2    6   10
[4,]    4    8   12
[5,]    3    9   15
[6,]    6   12   18

A short explanation: rbind(x, y, z) is equivalent to do.call(rbind, list(x, y, z)), where the second argument to do.call() is a list consists of function arguments you would normally pass to rbind(). And lapply() will apply your function to 1:3, returning the sub-matrices in a list.

A: You could also do:
 Reduce(rbind, lapply(1:3, Myfn)

If your matrices are of different sizes
library(plyr)
rbind.fill.matrix(lapply(1:3,Myfn))

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The LeverSpout tap was designed by Gavin Adams and myself.
Gavin was the mastermind behind the concept of the tap. My job was to design the shape and resolve the issues of industrialisation.
In order to use the tap, simply push down the spout. The further down the more water flows. The tap is off when in an upright position.


text:
Crash - 2014 - Carrara marble - cm 23x90x 3
Giorgio e Walter de Silva
Marguerite Kahrl
Aldo and Mimmo - 2009 - Lambda print - cm 40x80 - ed. 4
Laura Pugno
Form in progress - 2014 - exhibition view
Istanbul New Stories - 2012 - digital archival pigment print - cm 129x156 - ed. 5
Elogio della nuvola - 2013 - Exhibition view
ex libris - 2010-2012 - dOCUMENTA (13)
Westwarde the Course of Empire Takes its Way
Cosimo Veneziano's first personal exhibition at Galleria Alberto Peola features the artworks he has produced over the last four years in the course of various residential projects, from Colombia, at the Lugar centre in Dudas, thanks to the Resò*, to Italy, with C.A.R.S. (Omegna), and the Association L'Ospite Inatteso - Castello InMovimento (Massa Carrara).
The works on display are the result of the artist's exploration of the medium of sculpture and of drawing. The works bear a strong relationship to the places in which they were created and they investigate body gestures and the monumental structures in relation to the materials they are made of. The various materials, from marble to resin, from 3D print to wood, give rise to the multifarious sculptural itinerary of the exhibition. At every stage, the viewer is made to reflect on the process whereby imagination deviates from reality, as well as on possible ways to escape homologation.
November 11 - December 23, 2014
Tanzen. Installations 2013-2014
Alberto Peola Gallery is pleased to present Tanzen, by Giorgio and Walter de Silva.
The two brothers are both professional designers – Walter is internationally renowned for his achievements in the automobile industry as well as in the industrial products sector, and Giorgio is a commercial artist. One summer night they resolved to engage in a very unusual art form, one which Giorgio developed as early as the 1980s.
Tanzen consists of installations made of cardboard and paper, carbon and metal, fragments of all kinds, the most diverse objects which, once assembled, become bodies surrounded by a magical, occult halo. Pieces of writing and of buildings as well as frames within which chaos – made of cut-out pictures, Dinki Toys, marbles, broken glass, rusty relics – transforms itself into a temple celebrating heroes, circus artists, emperors and princesses, saints, athletes and weird creatures – myths invented by two skilful players with a knack for gambling who wish to escape from the modern world.
Alberto Peola is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by American artist Marguerite Kahrl with the gallery.
An unusual invention by any standard. The series Noble Savages by Marguerite Kahrl, inspired by Goya's Los Caprichos (a series of eighty etchings published in 1799), are busts celebrating monstrous figures, not in marble as might be supposed, but in stuffed hemp fabric, a humble cloth made from a plant that until quite recently was grown in many areas of Italy. Ever monsters, but soft monsters whose ears can be affectionately tweaked, they are in a strange way comforting, rendered homely by the rough, handwoven material. These are domestic monsters, tamed and placed on pedestals a little too slender to suggest solidity, and they observe the world with a blind eye, squinting benignly with their lumpy features and lopsided grins.
Form in progress
Alberto Peola is pleased to present Laura Pugno's third solo exhibition with the gallery.
The main theme of Laura Pugno's artistic research is visual perception as a culturally conditioned experience. In that it is the most common subject of traditional visual perception, the landscape provides the ideal domain for Pugno's critical investigation. In the early phases of Pugno's work, the landscape featured only through one of its traits, such as colour or weight, regardless of morphology. Alternatively, it featured in the Plexiglas slabs where Pugno carved the reflections of the actual landscape that was behind her. Later in her 'erasure' phase, she focused on the landscape as a whole, and worked on it through some selective rubbing aimed at 'freeing' some of its parts.
Istanbul New Stories
"Istanbul is a beautiful city, like Venice, San Francisco ...' So begins a talk on Istanbul given by Deyan Sudjic at the annual conference of the Urban Age Programme, which in 2009 was held in that city. His talk, and those of the other scholars and town planners present, emphasized the complexity, contradictions and richness of a protean city/society developing rapidly in both economic and social terms, with a vastly expanding population and major urban development. The city now has over 15 million inhabitants, and its geographical position between Europe and Asia makes it a vital point of cultural and commercial contact between the two continents.
December 5, 2013 - February 28, 2014
Elogio della nuvola
With Elogio della nuvola Sergio Gioberto and Marilena Noro continue to explore dialectical oppositions as in their previous Gazing at the West. Their new research feeds upon Hubert Damish's writings The Origin of Perspective and A Theory of Cloud.
Alberto Peola is pleased to present the works of some of the artists on his books which have recently featured in prestigious cultural events and museums, in Italy as well as abroad.
Selections from "ex libris"
Alberto Peola is pleased to present selections from ex libris, the installation by Emily Jacir at dOCUMENTA(13), 2012.
ex libris (2010-2012) commemorates the approximately thirty thousand books belonging to Palestinian homes, libraries, institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. Six thousand of these books are kept and catalogued at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem under the designation "A.P." (Abandoned Property).
March 25 - May 31, 2013

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In my latest post I wrote about a few things I loved the first week of the new year. If you have read my post, surely you remember mentioning a new place I have added on my travel bucket list, Copenhagen in Denmark. The reason for this sudden love for a new destination has been the book "The Little Book Of Hygge". According to the book author Meik Wiking, CEO of the happiness research institute in Copenhagen, hygge is the main reason why Denmark is often said to be among the happiest countries in the world. But what hygge is really all about?
The word hygge originates from the Norwegian language and the original word in Norwegian means "well-being". Well, hygge can be this very moment you are reading this post and even if you don't know it you can feel it. It can be seating at a warm corner of your home, drinking a hot cup of chocolate, having lit up candles around you, reading an exciting book, feeling calm and euphoria, feeling just the hygge state.
Hygge is mostly about experiences and situations rather than things. However, things help or better yet contribute to the feeling of warmth, a kind of safety and security. It gives you the sense of being exactly where things happen, you are open and enjoying the little and beautiful things in life. Makes you feel the harmony that bonds you with your loved ones, your friends and family and on the other hand you feel no disturbance nor anxiety. You feel relaxed and cool and at the same time you enjoy the moment without guilt (and when you do nothing at all). Even that in the end can be hygge!
You can get to hygge state in various ways and the things that usually help and contribute to that are: the right lighting (many small or bigger candles in your space, a lamp with the right light flow), a nice environment (the dining table where the family would gather in the evening or a little cozy coffee shop), good food and drinks and finally the intimacy with our loved ones (moments with friends eating or playing cards or board games or just watching together our favorite movie or TV series).
Of course hygge is not only about feeling good indoors and in specific seasons. Any time of year is suitable. As well as any place where you can be with loved ones and share moments and create memories, are places to experience hygge. One might think hygge factor is expensive but in fact most important things in life don't need enormous amounts of money to get them. You only need to know how to appreciate the little treasures on life!
Well, what do you think about hygge? Have you read the book yet? Have you ever experienced a hygge state or felt hygge? Share your thoughts with us and let us know in the comment section below. And by the way, in case of hygge emergency what would you put in your kit?
Very intersting post!!! Hygge could become my mantra for the 2017..
My mother has always been a hygge creator by nature and I love nothing more than living those moments and feelings, and now creating them in my own home. Meik Wiking has taken UK by the storm with the book and it's on my reading list for sure.
Thank you Karoliina! You should definitely read it, you will love it.
Thank you my dear Jasmin, hope you can find some time to read it soon.
Lovely post! Must read that book, I agree that lots of cushions and blankets make your home more hygellig.
Thank you Leta, i am glad that i have inspired you a little about Hygge!
Interesting post! That book is definitely on my reading list!
Thank you for your warm comment Ivana!
Hygge state seems so wonderful, I first heard of it in one of your posts Things I love this week, and ever since I started working on it. Even though when I study I want to feel relaxed so I started by recreating my work space and I stopped studying in the last minute (read night before the test).
I true believe that a beautiful and relaxed place around us can make us feel more creative and relaxed as well. Thank you for your warm comment dear.
Glad to hear that Catherine! Thank you for stopping by!
You will love it for sure!
I think so too, you will love it!
I never heard of hygge before. Even though I am located in Stockholm Sweden. Interesting to see the cultural things in Scandinavia. I have to dig into what hygge is more. Thanks for inspiring me!
I am sure you gonna love it! Thank you for stopping by Sabine.
Very interesting!! I need to read this book and share it as well cause I often feel anxious and guilty when I do nothing or procrastinate! sometimes i should learn to sit back, relax and feel the hygge!
I have never heard of hygge before! I love your ideas. Your photos are also beautiful and super relaxing.
I love books and this going to be a good read.
I really enjoyed reading this post of yours. I must admit mine would be reading a book while i'm in bed and having a chocolate to chew on while i read. If my environment are organize then i also feel like that, but at the moment that's not the case.
As someone who hates winter, I've really been trying to embrace hygge this year. Guess I need to check out this book!
What an intriguing read! Thanks so much, I had no idea about it! I need another book to read!
Aww nice, you learn something new everyday! 2017 started off so busy for me but finally getting the time to unwind and get my Hygge on this weekend 😉 Hope I used the word correctly!
thank you for that interesting post!
I'd never heard of hygge until this post, but I've definitely experienced the feeling! This was super informative, definitely going to look in to getting the book soon!


It's the highest time for the new brief tutorial. This time I'm covering the basic application of the CI Vignette effect, and how to use the GUI to quickly adjust its shape and effect.
The second installment of Creative Impatience tutorials is up and running. This time, I'm showing how to use the Feathered Crop plugin to create a border around the cropped footage. It's really easy, and there are a few options which allow for customization.


Goal: Design an integrated approach that encourage school-going children to adopt good nutrition and hygiene behaviours.
The nutritional status of school going children depends on intake of nutrients in food but also losses of nutrient from infectious disease. "Feed the Future Through Fortified Rice" is a project that uses two approaches to improve nutrition status among school going children. The project (1) improves the nutrient intakes by offering fortified rice with lunch meals, and (2) prevent nutrient loss through deworming and Water Sanitation and Hygiene Education (WASH) at schools. Sight and Life was the key technical partner on the nutrition and WASH education.
Over a period of 18 months we co-developed with our partners a three-pronged education strategy, which drew on existing school norms and regular activities. The strategies are peer role models & cues to action (grades 1-10); games (grades 1-5) and helper crews (grades 3-8); and problem-based learning (grade 7-10 only).


We bought our home in 1983. Half of the yard was full of Star Jasmine. Just this year a our gardener's helper cut the plants, now the leave are falling off. It seems as if they are dying. What do we do? We have never had a problem before.
This link will help you.


The skills of bushcraft take you beyond merely surviving in the bush; they are about prospering in the bush.
We're not interested in a mad, sweaty, dash back to civilisation. What would the point of that be, if you could find everything you need in the bush?
Because our approach is less about preparing for disasters, and more about deepening into a relationship with wild nature, we teach bushcraft on an ongoing basis, in small groups that meet once a month or so.
Bushcraft is an art, a philosophy, a journey. It's not something you can learn in a day.
Having said that, there are simple principles and practices that can vastly improve your chances of success, should you find yourself in a sticky situation.
We hold one day workshops, as an introduction to joining an ongoing group, and these are held throughout the year. So if you're interested in having a bash at bushcraft, get in touch and we'll let you know when the next intro day will be.


text:
Q: JavaScript moving slightly down a Message (div)? Is there a way to move down by some pixel a div with a text inside? (Maybe using jQuery or w/e)
The effect I would get is like when stackoverflow shows at top the yellow message (for a badge) But I need it inside a page, without moving down all the rest of the page
EXAMPLE:
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/7324/senzatitolo2mb.jpg
(I would add a fade effect too while the message is moving down)
Ps. Please consider the message can be more than 1 (just like stackoverflow at top)

A: with jQuery this would be done like:

Some message

$("#message").slideDown(500); //where 500 is the time effect in miliseconds..

Online demo: http://jsfiddle.net/NzPfM/
Se more about jQuery effects here: http://api.jquery.com/category/effects/
If you want to slide it down and fade it in at the same time, then you should use .animate() instead, something like:
$("#message").animate({height:"30px", opacity:1 },500);

Online demo: http://jsfiddle.net/NzPfM/1/
UPDATE: If you want to avoid moving other content while animating you can use position:absolute in css see demo below:
Demo avoiding push down: http://jsfiddle.net/NzPfM/2/

A: You can set the div to position:absolute and then animate it down using jQuery.animate to change the top style.
read about jQuery.animate here: http://api.jquery.com/animate/
You can see a simple example here: http://jsfiddle.net/NsxTa/
Note: This method as opposed to using the slideDown will actually slide the entire div down from it's hiding place, where as slideDown will just reveal statically positioned content, which imo looks really awefull

A: Assuming that your page is not laying inside some container with position-absolute,
adding a container element as fist child of the body will push down render all the rest of the page.
(container - any HTML tag that contains HTML. usually DIV).
This is an example using pure javascript:
http://jsfiddle.net/osher/ByngB/
connect the "add" to your messaging event, or render the  on the server
connect the "remove" to the close button of the message bar
and that will be all :)
function $e(s){ return document.getElementById(s) }

function add(){
    var d = document.createElement("div");
    d.innerHTML = "your message: " + $e("txt").value;
    document.body.insertBefore(d, document.body.firstChild);
}

function remove(){
    // assuming that your page content is wrapped in a div with ID="content"
    if (document.body.firstChild.id == "content") return;

    document.body.removeChild( document.body.firstChild);
}


text:
Anti-HS2 campaigners vow to fight 'private land grab' at Euston
By Paul Wright
Published: 3:00 PM March 20, 2014 Updated: 1:38 PM October 14, 2020
Camden Council leader Cllr Sarah Hayward joins campaigners at an anti-HS2 protest this week - Credit: Archant
Campaigners in Camden have vowed to continue fighting against the High Speed 2 rail project – despite news that the HS2 link threatening to decimate Camden Town would be dropped.
Hundreds of homes are still earmarked for demolition and there are clear concerns over compensation and the impact that 10 years of construction will have on residents and businesses, including in Hampstead which remains threatened by HGVs thundering through its streets.
HS2 Ltd chairman Sir David Higgins' published a report on Monday recommending that a controversial link between High Speed 1 services at St Pancras International and new High Speed 2 services at Euston should be dropped.
In it he also supports Chancellor George Osborne's calls for a major redevelopment of Euston station, which has also led to fears that the interests of "powerful private developers" would trump the needs of the surrounding community.
Camden Council leader Cllr Sarah Hayward said: "The report represents something of a pyrrhic victory for Camden with still no mention by Sir David of the unfair and substandard mitigation and compensation for Camden and our residents.
"There's no doubt that our campaigning, with our communities, has led to the recognition that HS2 will devastate Camden."
She continued: "I urge people who care about Camden not to treat this report as a victory, but simply as a staging post.
"We must continue to fight this scheme and for better outcomes for Camden if government insists on pressing ahead following the developments."
Liberal Democrat Cllr Chris Naylor, who organised Camden's first public meeting on HS2 in April 2010, also urged caution but was quick to praise the efforts of residents who supported the campaign.
"I'm sure this grassroots protest has made a real difference," he said. "But we still have to fight for a sensible project for Euston that isn't going to subject Camden to years of construction traffic anyway."
Campaign group SOS Camden, which has repeatedly threatened street-level action against HS2, remains scathing.
"The U-turn shows the huge incompetence of those behind HS2," said Peter Jones, one of the group's spokesmen. "The absurd High Speed 1 to High Speed 2 link was allowed to hang over the heads of Camden for so long despite being opposed by all the major stakeholders.
"They've caused unnecessary anxiety. And the new plans for Euston are making a virtue out of a dog's dinner.
"The funding for it remains unclear and there's a danger for the people of Euston that foreign investors will come in and acquire what is a public asset at a deep discount.
"Needless to say, SOS Camden will be keeping the developments of Euston under close scrutiny."
Traders in Camden Town appeared more welcoming of the news with chief executive of Camden Town Unlimited, Simon Pitkeathley, saying businesses will "breathe a sigh of relief" at the axing of the link.
But Jessica Learmond-Criqui, who delivered a petition against HS2's impact on Hampstead to Number 10 Downing Street last month, said: "Areas including Euston, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill, Belsize and Hampstead face 10 years of traffic gridlock, illegal levels of pollution, massive demolition, 24 hour construction noise and little or no compensation for reduced property prices, bankrupt businesses and blight."


text:
$1,999: GMO Reveals Details of Its New 7nm Bitcoin Miner – CoinDesk
Japanese IT giant GMO Internet has revealed prices and specs for its new-from-the-ground-up bitcoin miner – the world's first based on a 7nm chip.
At a press conference, the company said Tuesday that its 7nm ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) that will power the new B2 miner is designed in Japan, but manufactured in Taiwan.
The arrival of a 7nm chip is notable since it ushers in more hashing power for bitcoin miners, while at the same time theoretically reducing power consumption, an important factor for miners in seeking return on their investment.
According to a Bloomberg reporter who tweeted from the event, the B2 will provide a hash rate of 24TH/s, with power consumption at 1,950W per unit – that breaks down at 81W per 1 TH/s.
By comparison, the current market leader – Bitmain's Antminer S9 – offers 14TH/s at a power consumption of around 1,300W.
The B2 may offer market leading power, if GMO's figures prove to be accurate, but it will come at a price – $1,999 to be exact. That's compared with $837 for the Antminer S9.
As if there was any doubt that GMO plans to knock Bitmain of its pedestal, the firm's CEO Masatoshi Kumagai reportedly stated:
"I respect Bitmain, but we will top them"
As reported by CoinDesk, the B2 was revealed on May 24, with GMP saying pre-orders will start on June 6 and shipments to follow in October.
The launch comes following a months-long testing period since the firm initially revealed it was researching and developing the new mining processor in September 2017.
GMO B2 miner image via Yuji Nakamura/Twitter
Author: Daniel Palmer"


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text:
What season is it in South Africa right now?
What is South Africa's hottest temperature?
How safe is South Africa?
Is South Africa a poor country?
Is South Africa Expensive?
Roughly speaking, the summer months are December to March, autumn is April to May, winter is June to August, and spring is September to November. Because southern Africa is such a large area, and each region's offerings change with the seasons, when you go may determine where you go.
Vioolsdrif, a village in the Northern Cape, has broken a new record for the highest temperature in the country — reaching over 50 degrees Celsius. SA Weather Service forecaster Mbavhi Maliage said Vioolsdrif first broke the record in 1995 with a maximum temperature of 46.2°C.
South Africa has a high level of crime, including rape and murder. The risk of violent crime to visitors travelling to the main tourist destinations is generally low. The South African authorities prioritise protecting tourists and tourism police are deployed in several towns and cities.
It is ranked as number 54 in terms of countries with the lowest GDP per capita in Africa. On a global scale, Somalia is ranked at 188. The poorest countries in Africa are also among the poorest countries in the world....Poorest Countries In Africa 2021.
GDP (IMF '19)
$371.30 Bn
GDP (UN '16)
Per Capita
53 more columns
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The Santa Cruz Island horse lived for centuries on the Channel Islands, but years of isolation and a small gene pool have left the breed teetering on extinction. UC Davis researcher, Amy McLean, is working with El Campeon Farms to save the Santa Cruz Island horse and preserve a piece of California history.
Cochise and Abby Followwill prepare for a morning ride at El Campeon Farms. The duo are part of the farm's marketing effort, traveling to horse shows to promote the breed.
She is tall and lithe, with matching blond hair tucked into her helmet. Vince looks small under her, and though he is young, Santa Cruz Island horses tend to run small. They're also known to be easy-going and carry a hardiness, all formed by generations of living on the rugged island, one of the Channel Islands off the California coast.
In one hand, Followwill cradles a lariat and whips the loop above her head, aiming for a cow-skinned sawhorse. Vince looks, but he doesn't flinch as the rope hooks the plastic horns attached to the wooden legs.
Harmony is what Santa Cruz Island horses have been looking for since being removed from the Channel Islands in the early 2000s. The horses had been there for more than a century, living relics from the time of the conquistadors, evolving to become as unique as the island itself. But after years of surviving in isolation on the island, the breed is teetering on the brink of extinction here on the mainland.
Truffles, the oldest Santa Cruz Island stallion at El Campeon Farms, just after breakfast.
Their unique history and characteristics have led to an effort to save the breed. Amy McLean, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, is working with Lou Gonda of El Campeon Farms to find the right way to do that.
Fifteen horses came off the island, leaving the breed with an incredibly small gene pool. Estimates have the breed at 60 horses now, but they're spread across the country with herds in Florida, Northern California and at El Campeon Farms in Thousand Oaks, California, where 20 now live. McLean is working not only to save the breed, but also improve it.
For the full, multimedia presentation of the story, please visit the UC Davis story here.