Journal articles on the topic 'College life films'

Investigations on cinematic representations of higher education have sought to provide a deeper understanding of popular culture images and how they intersect with real-life academia. Moreover, such projects have examined how such mass communication texts may influence popular opinion surrounding colleges and universities. The existing literature on specific depictions of college professors in American films has explored a number of themes from various perspectives. Many scholars claim that such cinematic representations of higher education and faculty are negative and reinforce cultural stereotypes. Yet, little has been written about how filmmakers create such images. This article examines cinematic college professors from the viewpoint of the filmmaker by completing a case study of a recently produced college professor film and members of its creative team. Interviews with the screenwriter/director, production designer, and costume designer of a pseudonymously titled film investigates how the work of these film professionals was influenced by a number of factors, including their own experiences in higher education, their personal conceptions of college professors, previously viewed college-themed films, and existing stereotypes about professors.

This conceptual paper was developed to illustrate the planning and implementation of the Industry on Campus (IOC) at Sungai Petani Community College. In general, the IOC was designed based on the basic concepts developed by the Department of Education Polytechnic and Community College, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia. The IOC's implementation at the Sungai Petani Community College was implemented through the one of the SPCC Niche Area, which is Laundry service in the cluster of Hotel Operation. The IOC in Sungai Petani Community College involves collaboration with the industries; D’Kota Resources and MD Chan Enterprise is a form of strategic collaboration to develop high-skilled human resources from the institution to the industries. All the efforts and commitments in regards to the IOC approach at Smart Bubble Laundry have been reported in this paper as a pilot project documentation for the new education concept for TVET education. It is hoped that companies' and institutions' continuous efforts will contribute to high marketability workers, the national economy, and the community's social life.

Drug abuse is one of the serious social problems in Nepal and elsewhere for a long time. Drug abuse has several effects over the human life. Burgeoning unemployment, broken family, crime, depression, love failure, formation of peer group, mass media are major problems faced by the youth of the country. This paper explores the causes of drug abuse among youth in Mid-Western Region of Nepal. Quantitative research method was used to draw the data from 252 respondents. Simple random sampling technique was used to select the respondents of different rehabilitation center of Surkhet, Banke and Dang District. Data were analyzed by using chi-square statistical tools. Drug causes have covered the psychological, peer pressure, school/ college, socio cultural and mass media causes of drug abuse. Among them, majority respondent responded causes of drug abuse is bad relationship with family, to feel relax, failed in exam and films stars and idols which are shown on television.

Introduction: Coracoclavicular joint (CCJ) is a true synovial joint between su­perior surface of coracoid process of scapula and conoid tubercle of clavicle. The radiological prevalence of CCJ in various population ranges 0.55% to 21%. The CCJ are mostly discovered incidentally and is rarely associated with any symptom. Sometimes it may present with shoulder pain, limitation of shoulder movement, upper limb paresthesia and osteoarthritis of itself or adjacent ac­romioclavicular joint. Hence, this study is aiming to determine the prevalence of anomalous CCJ in patient visiting department of Radio-diagnosis in College of Medical Sciences, Bharatpur, Chitwan, Nepal and to observe association of CCJ with laterality, sides and gender. Methods: A total of 1936 digital chest x-rays films were observed for the pres­ence of CCJ, out of which 1097 images were of male and 839 of females. Age of study population ranged from 3 to 90 years. The data obtained were analyzed using Stastical Package for Social Science version (SPSS) 16.0. The prevalence of CCJ was calculated. The cases with CCJ were further analyzed to evaluate the association of CCJ with laterality, sidedness and gender using Chi-square for one-dimensional “goodness of fit” test. Chi-square of Independence was em­ployed to compare the various parameters (laterality and side) with genders. Results: The prevalence of CCJ was 4.6%. CCJ was more frequently observed in male (67.42%) than female (32.57%). Unilateral occurrence of CCJ (55.06%) was slightly more than bilateral (44.94%). Gender difference was not signifi­cantly associated with laterality and sidedness of joint (p<0.05). The incidence of CCJ was more in second decade of life in both male and female. Conclusion: CCJ is not rare, hence, knowledge of presence of CCJ as an etiol­ogy of shoulder pain is essential for rational therapy and will prevent misdiag­nosis.

The Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, the University of Gadjah Mada in 2015 made a milestone in the development of historiography in Indonesia. They made a bold move to produce a scholar with a documentary film work instead of a thesis. In the future, it is not impossible that this step will soon be followed by other universities in Indonesia. This paper was written in response to these developments. In this digital era-and in the midst of still low interest in reading in Indonesia-emerged the discourse to seek new media for historiography in Indonesia. The film, especially documentary films are seen as new media that match the characteristics of history because of they both present real-life reality. Moreover, Indonesia with the diversity of tribes and culture and history, of course, save a variety of themes that will not run out to be appointed a documentary. Based on that, this paper will discuss the types, forms, and format of the documentary that is suitable and possible to be produced by history students as a substitute for thesis-considering the cost of film production tends to be higher than thesis research. Thus, the film of a documentary a college student, especially a history produces the quality of research and aestheticsKata

The author in the form of notes discusses the poetics of Parajanov’s creativity – his realized and unrealized films, collages and life episodes. The film “The Color of Pomegranates” is analyzed in more detail, in which the author acted in a few episodes and is therefore familiar with some of the inner sides of its creation. It is shown how Parajanov visualizes the poetry of the 18th century poet and ashugh (bard) Sayat-Nova, building a new type of poetic cinema, using visual rhymes and repetitions. When the film director was deprived of the opportunity to make movies, he created collages – “pressed films”. The Parajanovian methods of creating collages and the collage principle of his films are explored. The sources and tendencies of the development of Parajanov’s artistic works, his understanding of the canon and improvisation, methods of constructing and transforming images are analyzed. The film director’s adherence to universal color classifications (red, white, black) is revealed with the apparent polychrome coloring of his films and to multivalued and archetypical semantic images, such as “window-cage” or “window-frame-mirror” triad, the last member of which allows the director to operate with twin and androgynous images.

Abstract Asking older adults What Matters to them and assuring that care plans are aligned with these preferences is the cornerstone of an Age-Friendly Health System (AFHS). Health systems have struggled to identify clear ways to ask this question and meaningfully utilize the responses. Both simple and complex options for addressing this challenge have been developed at Rush University Medical Center. At Rush, nurses began asking every inpatient What Matters and placing the response on the white board in the patient’s room. Results of this practice include increased awareness of staff and significant increases in patient satisfaction. Qualitative analysis of responses yields increased awareness of patterns that the hospital can more systematically address. The Rush Center for Excellence in Aging hosts Schaalman Senior Voices, in which older adults from diverse backgrounds are given the unique opportunity to offer their perspectives on life, health and aging related to “What Matters” to them. The films have been used effectively to stimulate conversations among older adults and families in the community and in health professions courses, and with health systems executives. The Rush College of Medicine has integrated AFHS training into communication skills for medical students. Faculty introduce the 4Ms and demonstrate methods for having What Matters (WM) conversations. Students then practice WM conversations with simulated patients; some have had the opportunity to practice with real patients in preceptorships. Implications for the health system and community will be discussed as Rush builds an Age-Friendly Health Community.

Elena Denisova-Schmidt − DSc in Philosophy, MBA, Research Associate, University of St. Gallen (Switzerland); Research Fellow, Boston College Center for International Higher Education (USA). Address: University of St. Gallen, Gatterstr, 3, 9010 St. Gallen, Switzerland. E-mail: elena.denisova-schmidt@unisg.ch Lena Nicolas-Kryzhko − DSc in Philosophy, Mobility Division, Siemens AG (Germany). Address: Siemens AG, Nuernberger Str. 74, 91052 Erlangen, Germany. E-mail: lena.nicolas-kryzhko@siemens.com Citation: Denisova-Schmidt E., Nicolas-Kryzhko L. (2018) Teaching A Course on Corruption and Informality in Russia: An International Experience. Mir Rossii, vol. 27, no 4, pp. 129–140. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2018-27-4-129-140 Corruption has been broadly discussed in the academic literature for several decades, yet there are few studies dedicated to addressing this topic in the classroom. This paper aims to fill this research gap by providing an example of a seminar on corruption and informal practices in Russia, given for international students at one Western European university. The aim of the seminar was to study the phenomenon of corruption from different perspectives, using different teaching techniques and materials, in order to encourage students to conduct their own analyses and reflections on real-life situations. Drawing on the structure of the seminar, this article provides a brief overview of the historical perspective of corruption in Russia, then summarizes the approach and teaching methods used in the seminar, including presentations, group work, discussions and homework. Finally, the authors provide a detailed overview of the learning materials used. They conclude that an interdisciplinary approach involving numerous literary works, films and case studies is particularly suitable for understanding the concept of “corruption” and “informality” in their respective cultural contexts and for preparing students to face this issue in their (future) professional lives.

A key goal of education for any country is to make sure that every pupil has a chance to excel, both in school and life. Increasingly, a child’s success in school will determine his success as an adult; will determine whether he/she goes to college, what profession that he/she enters and how much they are paid. Kenya’s education system has laid emphasis on a cluster of science subjects that must be passed for one to be placed in a meaningful course at tertiary level, university and finally employment. The Visually impaired child has been disadvantaged and this study therefore tried to investigate why there are more street beggars who are Visually impaired as compared to other persons with disabilities in the Kenyan major towns. The study was conducted in the three towns within Kenya, namely: Kisumu, Nakuru and Nairobi. The study population was 145, and a purposive sampling was used to select the 60 respondents. The study found that the Visually impaired persons who were beggars on the street had basic education at primary level and some had form four certificate, however they had failed to gain any meaningful employment due to the growing need of technology in the work place and the increasing interest in the role of information and communication technologies for one to be employed. The study also found that as much as there is an increasing effort by the Government to have computer studies for all schools in Kenya. The Jaw’s programme is lacking in those computers and therefore the visually impaired learners have not had an access to computer education and hence the mass influx of beggars. The study recommends that of the schools where the Visually impaired learners are in inclusive education, there should be at least two computers with a Jaw programme to help the Visually impaired have an access in computer literacy and hence employment opportunity. The study also recommends that the street beggars with form four educations should be given vocational training with information technology so as to empower them with the current basic skills to compete favourable with other job seekers.

Charles Ellington graduated at Duke University, North Carolina, and came to Cambridge in 1973 to work for a PhD on insect flight dynamics. He developed novel methodology and software for the kinematic analysis of freely hovering insects and applied them to his own high-speed films of a range of species. He identified five new non-steady-state mechanisms for lift generation, was the first to develop a vortex theory for flapping flight and developed and extended the use of morphometric parameters in calculating the forces and power requirements of flight. He remained in Cambridge, married a colleague, joined the staff of the Department of Zoology, became a fellow of Downing College and continued to work on insect aerodynamics and energetics, publishing on flight muscle efficiency, the factors limiting flight performance and the aerodynamic implications of the origin of insect flight. Building a closed-circuit wind tunnel connected with a sensitive oxygen analyser, he studied with colleagues how the aerodynamics and metabolic power input of bumblebees vary with flight speed, challenging the orthodox theory that this should follow a U-shaped curve. Outstanding among later research was the discovery that hawkmoths, and by implication many other insects, gain high levels of lift by generating a vortex above the leading edge, stabilized by spiralling out along the span—a major focus of animal flight research ever since. His many administrative roles included editorship of theJournal of Experimental Biology. He became a British citizen in 1995, was elected FRS in 1998 and to a chair of animal mechanics in 1999. Awards include the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society and the University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for teaching excellence. He was diabetic throughout his adult life, and suffered progressive ill health following a heart attack in 1996. He took early retirement in 2010, lived quietly with his wife and two sons at home near Newmarket, and died in July 2019.

Increasing consumer demand for microbiologicallysafer foods, greater convenience,smaller packages, and longer product shelf life is forcing the industry to develop new food-processing,cooking, handling, and packaging strategies. Nonfluid ready-to-eat foods are frequently exposed to postprocess surface contamination, leading to a reduction in shelf life. The food industry has at its disposal a wide range of nonedible polypropylene- and polyethylene-based packaging materials and various biodegradable protein- and polysaccharide-based edible films that can potentially serve as packaging materials. Research on the use of edible films as packaging materials continues because of the potential for these films to enhance food quality, food safety, and product shelf life. Besides acting as a barrier against mass diffusion (moisture, gases, and volatiles), edible films can serve as carriers for a wide range of food additives, including flavoring agents, antioxidants, vitamins, and colorants. When antimicrobial agents such as benzoic acid, sorbic acid, propionic acid, lactic acid, nisin, and lysozyme have been incorporated into edible films, such films retarded surface growth of bacteria, yeasts, and molds on a wide range of products, including meats and cheeses. Various antimicrobial edible films have been developed to minimize growth of spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms, including Listeria monocytogenes, which may contaminate the surface of cooked ready-to-eat foods after processing. Here, we review the various types of protein-based (wheat gluten, collagen, corn zein, soy, casein, and whey protein), polysaccharide-based (cellulose, chitosan, alginate, starch, pectin, and dextrin), and lipid-based (waxes, acylglycerols, and fatty acids) edible films and a wide range of antimicrobial agents that have been or could potentially be incorporated into such films during manufacture to enhance the safety and shelf life of ready-to-eat foods.

Background. Musical culture of Kharkiv has a rich history associated with the names of prominent musicians such as R. Genika, I. Slatin and others. But the creative work of our senior contemporaries, artists, who created in the second half of the XX and early XXI century, made a great influence on the formation of the modern musical face of Kharkiv, the state of professional music education, too. O. I. Litvinov, a composer, pianist (as well as accordion player, performer on wind instruments), conductor and arranger, is no doubt among those artists. However, the creativity of this outstanding musician, who was actually the founder of professional jazz education in Kharkiv, is not currently the subject of widespread discussion in contemporary Ukrainian musicology. There are few sources that would cover O. I. Litvinov’s life and career. For the first time, he is mentioned as the founder of pops’n jazz performance department in a print publication dedicated to the 85th anniversary of KhNUA named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky. In the same context, O. Litvinov’s name is found in O. Kononova’s essay on the evolution of music education in Kharkiv in the jubilee edition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the University. There is a biographical article in this very anniversary publication. In the earlier anniversary edition “Pro Domo mea” (on the 90th anniversary of the institution) there is some information about O. Litvinov regarding the history of the jazz department creation. Basic biographical data are briefly presented in the article of I. O. Litvinova in the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine. A small booklet dedicated to the major milestones of O. Litvinov’s life and creative work was published in the KhNUA (then KhSUA) named after I. P. Kotliarevskyi to mark the 75th anniversary of the musician. There are also several publications devoted mainly to specific dates in the creative life of the maestro (concerts, anniversaries, etc.): by H. Derev’ianko, L. Lohvynenko, M. Dvirnyi, A. Moshna, I. Polska, and O. Sadovnikova. Among purely research works devoted to this striking personality are the Master’s work by Yu. N. Shikova, which was written under the guidance of І. І. Polska at Kharkiv State Academy of Culture. The purpose of the article is to systematize existing information on the life and creative path of the prominent Kharkiv musician, give a brief description of the main features of his performing and composing style. Methods. The work employs historicobiographical, analytical and comparative methods, as well as a genre-stylistic approach. Results. O. Litvinov was born on November 17, 1927 in Zaporozhye. He received his elementary education at a piano music school. From 1943 to 1951 he was in military service, participated in the World War II. After the war, he continued to study music at Kharkiv Music College named after B. Lyatoshynsky, later at the Composition Faculty of Kharkiv Conservatory. He was expelled from there because of his passion for jazz. From 1951 he continued his musical activity as an artist of the MIA Variety Orchestra (in Dnepropetrovsk), in 1955–1956 he was a soloist of the Sakhalin Oblast Philharmonic and Khabarovsk Regional Philharmonic. In 1956–1958 he was the leader of the variety band of the Palace of Culture for Food–Industry Workers, in 1958–1961 he was the leader of the concert band of the Palace of Culture for Builders. From 1961 to 1973, he was the director of his own collective – Honoured Variety Ensemble “Kharkivyanka” at Kharkiv Electromechanical Plant. In 1965 he received the title of Honored Artist of Ukraine, in 1978 – People’s Artist. From 1973 to 1978 – Artistic Director and Conductor of the “Donbass”, Honored Mining Ensemble in Donetsk; from 1978 to 1980 – assistant at the Department of Cultural Studies, director of the Jazz Orchestra at Kharkiv Institute of Law. Since 1980 he worked permanently at Kharkiv I. P. Kotliarevskyi State Institute of Arts: first as a senior lecturer, later as an associate professor of the Chamber Ensemble Department, then as a professor of the Orchestra Wind Instruments Department. Since 1994 he created and headed the Department of Variety Orchestra Instruments, and at the same time he directed the variety-symphony orchestra of Kharkiv State Academy of Culture, the violin ensemble of the National Academy of Law named after Yaroslav the Wise. Since 1999 O. Litvinov was a full member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences of National Progress. In 2001 he became a diploma winner of the regional competition “Higher school of Kharkiv region – the best names” in the nomination “Head of Department”. In 2002 he was awarded the Honorary Medal of the Ministry of Culture and Arts of Ukraine. He died on March 15, 2007. O. Litvinov’s creative personality combines the image of composer, arranger, conductor, performer-multiinstrumentalist (apart from piano O. Litvinov played the accordion, organ, wind instruments, violin). O. Litvinov’s works employ the best achievements of world classics and Ukrainian academic music, in particular, the Kharkiv composition school, and embody the best features of jazz and, more broadly, variety music of the twentieth century. These stylistic origins often coexist organically in one piece by O. Litvinov. The performance style of O. Litvinov as a conductor is characterized by very clear, bright, emotional gestures, especially outstanding sounding of the orchestra, the ability to clearly show every change in the thematic development of the piece. The style of O. Litvinov’s arrangements was significantly influenced by the music of Hollywood films, the art of contemporary Soviet composers – Saulsky, Broslavsky, Pokrass, Dunaevskyi, jazz masters – Tsfasman, Utesov, Bernstein and others. Conclusions. O. Litvinov’s creative life was very bright and rich, and his musical activity was diverse and multifaceted. In the present works, the main focus is made more on the “polyphony” (according to A. Mizitova and A. Sadovnikova (2002, p. 17) of this life, its external events. Characteristics of the composer’s, performing, conducting styles of the artist are “inscribed” in this polyphony only as its “voices”. However, each of these voices needs, in our opinion, more detailed consideration. For example, O. Litvinov’s compositional heritage is very large, but only a few of his compositions are performed today and well known to the public. In fact, only one piece for violin ensemble (or for violin and piano), “Eternal Movement”, received true popularity among the performers and the public. Most other works are not published, and the fate of most scores is unclear. So, the direction of further research can be related to a more detailed study of some particular works of O. Litvinov that have survived as well as to deepening knowledge about his performing and pedagogical activity.

Background: oral lesions can be induced by wearing dentures and have been associated with impacting the quality of life of dental patients. Study objectives: to determine the prevalence of denture associated oral lesions and their associated possible factors in college of dentistry clinics, Aljouf University. Methods and subjects: this was a retrospective study to collect data from files of patients who wear dentures. The study included 344 patients. All files were reviewed and the extracted data were further analyzed using SPSS version 20. The relationships between variables were tested using One Way Anova and Pearson correlation. Data were presented as frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviation. Significance was examined at alpha < 0.05. Results: a total of 344 files were reviewed. The following oral lesions were found: denture stomatitis (48.8%), papillary hyperplasia (39.8%), traumatic keratosis (22.1%), angular cheilitis (16.9%), and erythematous candidiasis (10.2%). No significant relationships were found between oral lesions and both age and gender bases on One Way Anova test. Pearson correlation showed a significant positive correlation between traumatic keratosis and age (r=0.110, p=0.042), and a negative correlation between traumatic keratosis and erythematous candidiasis (r=-0.110, p=0.039). Conclusions: The present studies showed that oral lesions associated with wearing denture are prevalent and create health problems that impact the quality of life of dental patients

This study explored the association between meaning in life and readiness for political participation based on meaning-in-life profiles among Chinese late adolescents. A total of 1030 college students (mean age = 19.69 ± 1.47 years) in Hong Kong participated in this study. First, we used a cluster analysis to investigate meaning-in-life profiles based on two dimensions: “presence of meaning” and “search for meaning”. Furthermore, we investigated the association between meaning profiles and readiness for political participation. Results revealed three distinguishable profiles, which emerged in both male and female adolescents. Students with “high-presence” and “high-search” attributes and students with “low-presence” and “high-search” characteristics showed greater readiness to engage in normative and non-normative political actions than did those with a “high-presence” and “low-search” profile. Our research fills the research gap on meaning profiles in Asian adolescents and provides the empirical basis for an alternative account of youth political participation.

This review discusses the latest advances in the composition of gelatin-based edible films and coatings, including nanoparticle addition, and their properties are reviewed along their potential for application in the food packaging industry. Gelatin is an important biopolymer derived from collagen and is extensively used by various industries because of its technological and functional properties. Nowadays, a very wide range of components are available to be included as additives to improve its properties, as well as its applications and future potential. Antimicrobials, antioxidants and other agents are detailed due to the fact that an increasing awareness among consumers regarding healthy lifestyle has promoted research into novel techniques and additives to prolong the shelf life of food products. Thanks to its ability to improve global food quality, gelatin has been particularly considered in food preservation of meat and fish products, among others.

If comparative politics is in one if its periodic states of theoretical collapse (Blyth 2006, 493), no one feels the lack of roof and walls more acutely than instructors in undergraduate comparative politics classes. With professional colleagues and graduate students one preaches to the choir, but with college students, many of whom may be non-majors, we must workin partibus infidelium, among those who have not yet been converted. Without an orthodox doctrine to work from, this can be a challenging task indeed. The approach used here, combining detailed socio-political narratives with strong analytic theory, tends to engage students because it fills in a full range of national life, rich in national eccentricities, cultural exaggerations, and hidden motives, and because it controls the proliferation of detail by emphasizing its logic. In a sense the abstract becomes concrete and the concrete becomes abstract.

Abstract Objectives: to compare the percentage of collagen fibers in the autopsied women’s uterine body and cervix with and without the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (Aids). Methods: 30 autopsied women’s medical files were selected from 1988 to 2013. 30 fragments of the uterine body and 30 cervix were collected and then divided into two groups, 15 with Aids and 15 without, The quantification of the collagen fibers of the uterine body and cervix was performed on slides stained with picrosirius, using the KS-300® system. Results: the percentage of collagen fibers was lower for cervix (U=336544; p=0.001) and higher for the uterine body (U=308726,5; p=0.004) in the retroviral group when compared to the group without the disease. The percentage was higher for cervix than the uterine body in the group with Aids (t=0,4793; p=0.0031). the same result was found in the group without Aids (t=2,397; p=0.0637). Conclusions: the increase in the percentage of collagen fibers in the uterine body of women with Aids’ indicates an immune response for viral infection and reveals a failure in keeping the infection restricted to the cervix. The interpretation of the histochemical and morphometric parameters can be useful in the diagnosis associated to HIV infection, contributing for clinical improvement and life expectancy.

Vocal cord basement membrane thickening (VCBMT) has been observed in children with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). It has been proposed that this lesion could be used as a positive indicator of this syndrome in autopsies of children who have died unexpectedly. The present investigation aimed to analyze vocal cord basement membranes from autopsies of children 0 to 365 days old. A total of 134 larynges were analyzed. Histological sections of paraffin-embedded larynges stained with H&E and submitted to histochemical staining with periodic acid–Schiff (PAS), Masson's trichrome, syrius red, and Carstairs were used for light microscopy analysis. Immunohistochemistry with monoclonal anti-collagen IV antibody was used to determine the nature of VCBMT. The study was completed with morphometry of H&E–and PAS-stained sections and revision of the clinical information contained in the hospital files. VCBMT was found in 25 cases (18.7%) and showed characteristics of normal basement membrane, including immunoreactivity to collagen IV. Our data support the conclusions that VCBMT is frequently seen in pediatric autopsies, is seen in children in all age-groups studied whose deaths were due to causes other than SIDS, and is commonly associated with infectious diseases. Like SIDS, VCBMT occurs in the first year of life.

Many people who grew up in care have gaps in their childhood memories and unanswered questions about their early lives. In the absence of family photos and stories they turn to records held by the local authorities and charities that looked after them. Accessing these records is a practically and emotionally challenging process. Response times are often long and the records received are redacted because they include confidential information about “third parties’” who are often family and carers. The language and ideas contained reflect the prejudices and assumptions of previous times. Some files are extremely long and confusing, whereas others only have a few pages to cover a whole childhood. Records may have been lost or destroyed altogether. Very few services are available to support people through the experience. MIRRA: Memory-Identity-Rights in Records-Access is a participatory action research project carried out at the Department of Information Studies at University College London since 2017 that explores these issues. It considered how child social care records have been created, kept and used in public and voluntary organizations in England from 1970 to the present. The research is co-produced with care leavers in partnership with The Care Leavers’ Association and reflects on how what it is recorded about a childhood can affect the individual concerned throughout their life. This article republishes edited blog posts produced during the research project. The original blogs in full are available at https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/mirra/.

AbstractTwo different raw hydrolyzed collagens (HCs), by-products of the Tannery industry, were investigated in blends with a bioplastic, as poly(butylene succinate-co-adipate) (PBSA), for the production of thermoplastic items for possible applications in agriculture. Chemical characterization of selected PBSA/HC blends and phytotoxicity assays on garden cress seeds (Lepidium sativum L.), used as spy species, were carried out; in addition, biodegradation and disintegration of specimens were assessed under controlled composting conditions at different temperature (58 and 25 °C). Although one of the HC investigated released sodium chloride in the aqueous extract, all PBSA/HC blends, up to 20 wt.% HC, resulted no-phytotoxic and showed considerable amounts of macro- and micro- nutrients for plants (mainly nitrogen). Regardless the amount added, HCs enhanced the biodegradation rate of PBSA/HC blends in compost at 58 °C compared to pure PBSA; lowering the temperature at 25 °C, as expected, biodegradation rate slightly lowered using the same compost. Most disintegration tests, performed on dog bone samples, corroborated the results of the biodegradation tests, thus suggesting that plastic mixtures could reasonably end their life cycle in a composting facility without decreasing the quality and the safety of the resulting compost. The outcomes achieved encourage the use of raw collagen hydrolysates from tanning industry in the production of PBSA-based thermoplastic blends to produce compostable items (mulching films and/or plant pots) for more sustainable uses in agriculture and/or plant nurseries. In addition, the use of these low-cost by-products can lower the cost of final product and give it fertilizing properties for plants given the presence of organic nitrogen in the hydrolysates.

Purpose The recent motion picture Selma infused fresh interest – and controversy – into the political and emotional peak of America’s modern Civil Rights Movement. Ava DuVernay, the film’s director, faced criticism for her exclusion of the Jewish presence from the movie’s portrayal of the March 21, 1965 Voting Rights March. The recent attention presents a teachable moment and new energy for thinking deeply about this pivotal event in America’s past. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors provide valuable historical domain knowledge surrounding the 1965 Voting Rights March, present the requisite plans and curriculum resources for implementing wise-practice instructional strategies, and explore the rationale underpinning the inquiry-based activities. Findings The authors share innovative approaches, at the secondary and elementary levels, integrating historical domain knowledge with renewed interest in the 1965 Voting Rights March to create powerful teaching-and-learning experiences. The approaches are innovative because they contain dynamic curriculum materials and reflect wise-practice use of historical photographs within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. Practical implications The approaches shared here are centered around questioning, a key to student learning. The lessons feature the development of questions, both from teachers and students, as classes work collaboratively to interpret a potentially powerful historical photograph and use historical events to practice thinking deeply about important topics. Originality/value Social studies classrooms are ideal educational spaces to develop and practice the analytical skills and dispositions students need to meet the challenge of critiquing visual information that concerns complex public issues, such as the role of religion in society.

In the article, the prison period of Sergei Parajanov’s art is examined – Parajanov served his sentence in 1973–1977 in the high security camps in Ukraine. Following the graphic works, collages and film scenarios which he created in the prison, one can conceive of the everyday life in the Soviet prison of 1970s –1980s, more than that, get an outline of the ethnography of the Soviet prison. Parajanov often uses ethnographic realities and attributes in his movies, some of these movies are even considered to be a specific variety of ethnographic cinema. However, there is an opinion that the film director, while reflecting ethnographic realities, no less created pseudoethnographic ones. In this regard, his works of the prison period are something different from the usual Parajanovian fantasies. Unlike the authors who studied the ethnography of the prison, even those who relied on their own experience (for example, L. Samoilov), Parajanov created a significant part of his works of prison content in the camp, like an ethnographer in the field, although there are also works that he created or supplemented after prison, again like an ethnographer, relying on his field notes. In other words, his works of the prison period are much closer to the genre of ethnography than his “ethnographic” films. The article also discusses the problem of the representation of Parajanov’s works of the prison period in the museums. Are they samples of prison art, a representation of a certain period in the author’s biography, or a kind of the prison ethnography?

Context.—Most current proficiency testing challenges for next-generation sequencing assays are methods-based proficiency testing surveys that use DNA from characterized reference samples to test both the wet-bench and bioinformatics/dry-bench aspects of the tests. Methods-based proficiency testing surveys are limited by the number and types of mutations that either are naturally present or can be introduced into a single DNA sample. Objective.—To address these limitations by exploring a model of in silico proficiency testing in which sequence data from a single well-characterized specimen are manipulated electronically. Design.—DNA from the College of American Pathologists reference genome was enriched using the Illumina TruSeq and Life Technologies AmpliSeq panels and sequenced on the MiSeq and Ion Torrent platforms, respectively. The resulting data were mutagenized in silico and 26 variants, including single-nucleotide variants, deletions, and dinucleotide substitutions, were added at variant allele fractions (VAFs) from 10% to 50%. Participating clinical laboratories downloaded these files and analyzed them using their clinical bioinformatics pipelines. Results.—Laboratories using the AmpliSeq/Ion Torrent and/or the TruSeq/MiSeq participated in the 2 surveys. On average, laboratories identified 24.6 of 26 variants (95%) overall and 21.4 of 22 variants (97%) with VAFs greater than 15%. No false-positive calls were reported. The most frequently missed variants were single-nucleotide variants with VAFs less than 15%. Across both challenges, reported VAF concordance was excellent, with less than 1% median absolute difference between the simulated VAF and mean reported VAF. Conclusions.—The results indicate that in silico proficiency testing is a feasible approach for methods-based proficiency testing, and demonstrate that the sensitivity and specificity of current next-generation sequencing bioinformatics across clinical laboratories are high.

AbstractGelatin is a protein obtained from the hydrolysis of collagen. Gelatin is an attractive biodegradable material for use in nano-biotechnology and nano-pharmaceutics. Gelatin nanoparticles (NPs) have been widely used as drug and gene carrier to targeted sick tissues including cancer, tuberculosis, HIV infection along with the treatment of vasospasm and restenosis, due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability. For instance, coating with gelatin lowers the cytotoxicity of quantum dots. Moreover, gelatin NPs have the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier, hence proven as a promising candidate to target brain disorders. Macrophage targeting with gelatin NPs for remedy of different diseases is repeatedly reported in previous years. In tissue engineering gelatin is actively utilized for construction of biological and life-long 3D scaffolds for bio-artificial tissues and organ production. Gelatins have a wide range of potential applications which needs to be unraveled in more detail. This review is mainly focused on the applications of gelatin NPs in biomedical sciences.

Abstract BACKGROUND: In the early 1990’s, the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease (CSSCD) estimated a median life expectancy of 42 years for males, and 48 years for females with sickle cell anemia. We used death certificate data from the late 1990’s and early 2000’s to examine age at death and contributing causes of death for persons with sickle cell disease (SCD). METHODS: We used the National Center for Health Statistics Multiple Cause of Death (MCOD) files to examine age at death and contributing causes of death for persons in the U.S. with SCD during the years 1999 to 2004. The MCOD files contain data from all death certificates filed in the U.S. Each observation in the data has listed an underlying (primary) cause of death, as well as up to 20 conditions thought to contribute to the death. We used ICD-10 codes D570-D578 to identify all deaths attributed to SCD during the time period under study. Records with the ICD-10 code for sickle cell trait (D573) were excluded from further analyses. We used the Clinical Classification Software provided by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to collapse all listed ICD-10 codes into smaller categories. Analyses of age at death were conducted using t-tests, median tests, ANOVA, and multiple linear regression as appropriate. RESULTS: From 1999 to 2004, there were 4553 deaths in the U.S. attributed to SCD (mean = 759/yr, sd = 42.6). SCD was listed as the primary cause in 65% of the deaths. 95% of the deaths were attributed to HbSS disease, and approximately 1% of the deaths were attributed to double heterozygous sickle cell disorders (SC/SD/SE/Thal). 50.4% of the deaths were among males. 64% of the decedents had a high school education or less. 54% of the decedents lived in the South. 68% of the decedents died as inpatients in a hospital. The mean age at death for the time period was 38.2 years (sd = 15.6). There was no change in the mean age at death during the time period. Females were older than males at death (39.4 vs. 36.9, p < 0.0001). Those with HbSS were younger than those with a double heterozygous disorder (38 vs. 47, p < 0.02). Having SCD listed as the primary cause of death was associated with younger age at death (36.8 vs. 40.7, p < 0.0001). Decedents with at least some college education were older at death than those with high school educations or less (40.9 vs. 37.0 p < 0.0001). There were no regional differences in mean age at death. In a multivariate model of age at death with the predictors gender, region, education, and whether or not SCD was listed as the primary cause of death, being female and having some college education remained associated with older age at death, while having SCD listed as the primary cause of death remained associated with younger age at death. Septicemia, pulmonary heart disease, liver disease and renal failure were among the top contributing causes of death for adults, while septicemia, acute cerebrovascular disease and pneumonia were among the top contributing causes of death for kids. CONCLUSIONS: Persons dying from SCD during 1999 to 2004 experienced ages at death that are not improved over those reported by the CSSCD, suggesting the continued need for societal efforts aimed at improving the quality of care for SCD, especially among adults with the condition. Educational attainment is associated with age at death among the SCD population, though it is not possible from the cross-sectional nature of this data to determine the causal directionality of this association.

The article examines the process of formation of identity of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – a charismatic leader, an adept of “moderate Islamism” one of the founders of the Justice and Development Party. Historically strong centralized authority was always normal for Turkey and the need for Turks in the charismatic leaders is evident even at the present time. Erdogan is stubborn and consistent, thanking to religious education in his family and in religious Lyceum Imam Hatib. He was always religious and since his student years, joined Islamic politicians. In his student years he became the head of the Istanbul Youth organization of the Islamist National Salvation Party, in whose ranks and files he received good practice of a political organizer. The crisis in the ranks of the Islamists after repeated bans of the Islamist party led to a split in its ranks and Erdogan and his associates established the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Creating the AKP, Erdogan and his colleagues received a very important support from the well-known Muslim preacher, writer and philosopher Fethullah Gülen living in Pennsylvania (USA). The political support of Gülen who has millions of followers in Turkey and a well-organized educational system of the “Hizmet” Movement operating not only in Turkey but also in 140 countries helped the AKP to win the elections to the Turkish Parliament. Numerous graduates of private schools, colleges and universities of F. Gülen has occupied leading positions in business, police, juridical structures and the armed forces of Turkey and became supporters of Erdogan. Economic reforms of the AKP has substantially strengthened the Turkish economy, increased the income of the population and managed to cope successfully with inflation. On this ground Erdogan’s credibility consequently grew in the face of voters who saw him a successful leader and skilled politician. However, Erdogan gradually returned to the daily life of Turks the Islamic religion, which caused discontent among the supporters of secular development of the country. Repeated attempts to remove the AKP from power were not successful. Using strong support from F. Gülen’s structures in the judiciary, Erdogan managed to organize high-profile lawsuits against the army leadership, politicians, and journalists – supporters of secular development of the country. In a popular referendum, the army was excluded from influence on the political system of the country. However, constant criticism of the policies of Erdogan from the side of F. Gülen led to the crisis of union between the two leaders. Using the failed coup attempt Erdogan accused in its organization Fethullah Gülen and began a wide crackdown against his supporters.

Dance bequeaths a conflicted legacy for resisting neoliberalism: the same portfolio careers; pick-up companies; and freelance working practices through which the artist-entrepreneur negotiates and survives the exigencies of the neoliberal market have themselves been co-opted by neoliberal economics as blueprints for labour practices in ways unimagined and never intended by arts practitioners. ‘The freelancer’ to quote Lauren Berlant (76) ‘is one of the sovereign figures of neoliberalism’.1Looking beyond dance's unwitting complicity in the neoliberal contracting of the body, this paper focuses on dance as an emergent critical aesthetics that calls attention to the incorporation of the geopolitical by the post-statist neoliberal project.Its case study is Maleficent ( 2014 ), the Angelina Jolie popular cinema radical retelling, as prequel, of the back story of Sleeping Beauty's slighted fairy Carabosse. Maleficent's status as dance intertext is many-faceted: its titular character's conjunction of malevolence and magnificence and the sourcing of her predicament to an originating act of socio-economic disenfranchisement are familiar from the characterisation of Carabosse in Marius Petipa's choreography for the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Unspecified in the ballet, this act is elaborated in the film: ‘the winged creature who rose to be protector of The Moors, a kingdom which needed neither king nor queen’ to quote the film's narration, Maleficent is shorn of her wings in an act of land-grab motivated premeditated human interspecies violence. This act, betokening rape for Jolie, renders Maleficent's aerial choreographic spectacle pedestrianised; everyday and earthbound, just as Carabosse, denied vertiginous danse d’école vocabularies, must substitute more mundane mime in their place.This paper begins by establishing the strong bonds which bind Disney to dance; the extent to which, to quote Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, ‘the art of animation…has its forerunner in ballet…At least in Fokine's ballets for Diaghilev…’.2Drawing on analyses of neoliberalism, those of David Harvey in particular, this paper then moves to consider Maleficent as the articulation of a critique of neoliberalism, one which – it will be suggested – relies heavily on Cynic philosophy for its formulation. Cynic philosophy, especially in the extended consideration of the Cynic life presented by Michel Foucault's final series of Collège de France lectures3will be critically important here. Arguing for Maleficent as the choreography of Feminist ethics in response to neoliberal policies that render human relations to the land ever more ethno-biologically precarious, this paper will point up the strong parallels that exist between the film and Cynic thinking. In Foucault's account, Cynicism especially prioritises the vie autre (other life). This makes Cynicism particularly effective as a vehicle for questioning neoliberal values and proposing others in their place.Maleficent's critique will be shown to be choreo-philosophical in the sense that it mobilises, and is highly reliant upon, a range of dance histories – those to do with The Sleeping Beauty especially – and dance practices, particularly those bound up, ultimately, with pantomime dance in Hellenistic ancient Greece. This article will suggest that pantomime dance as a close, cognate ally of Cynic philosophy, was already imbued, in some significant sense, with philosophical intent. It is pantomime dance's philosophical intent – this paper argues – that endures and is mobilised to such effect in the roles of Carabosse and Maleficent. Attention then turns to Alain Badiou's concept of cinema as philosophy. This article will suggest both that Badiou's concept is more indebted to dance than is generally acknowledged, and that it arguably strengthens the sorts of claims that can be made for Maleficent as choreo-philosophical critique. This paper also proposes, in a similar vein, that on the basis of his reading of Cynicism as actually highly motile, the late Foucault is more phenomenological in orientation and – so it would follow – less antithetical to dance and its study, than has hitherto been suggested.

This study aimed to explore the perceived barriers to physical activity among college students Study Design: Qualitative research design Eight focus group discussions on 67 college students aged 18-24 years (48 females, 19 males) was conducted on College premises. Data were analysed using inductive approach. Participants identified a number of obstacles to physical activity. Perceived barriers emerged from the analysis of the data addressed the different dimensions of the socio-ecological framework. The result indicated that the young adults perceived substantial amount of personal, social and environmental factors as barriers such as time constraint, tiredness, stress, family control, safety issues and much more. Understanding the barriers and overcoming the barriers at this stage will be valuable. Health professionals and researchers can use this information to design and implement interventions, strategies and policies to promote the participation in physical activity. This further can help the students to deal with those barriers and can help to instil the habit of regular physical activity in the later adult years.

First generation in college, low family income, and weak writing scores: This describes the students I teach at a historically black institute, Bethune Cookman College, in Daytona Beach, FL. These students dislike writing and hate grammar. Yet through technology, these students can be more motivated to write. With the use of a digital movie camera, students write and produce short films about stories they have written. A research paper becomes more interesting when students can add PowerPoint or film a background for their presentations. Even the digital photo camera becomes a source of interest as students make photographs of the people they are writing about for a biography assignment. Lessons become more meaningful when a projector with computer allows students to interact or watch examples of grammar or writing skills. So the basic grammar and composition class can be enhanced by the use of basic technology. Beyond the basic composition on the computer which is now the standard, students can use these other aspects of technology which encourage creativity, engagement, and motivation. Even for the professor, technology can inspire creativity. After having students help me videotape elderly people who talked about their lives here at the college and who knew the founder Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, I spent the summer transposing these interviews and then researched and wrote a book called The Life and Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune. Thanks to technology, I am now an author. Thus technology inspires students and teachers alike to aspire to higher levels of writing.

Patrick Steptoe was born on 9 June 1913 in Witney, Oxfordshire. He grew up in a family of eight brothers and sisters, the sixth boy and the seventh child of Grace Maud (née Mimms) and Harry Arthur Steptoe. His mother was an advocate of women’s rights, and worked for the Mothers’ Union and Infant Welfare clinics; she died in 1973. His father was Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Witney; he died in 1953. As a schoolboy at the Witney Grammar School, Patrick became interested in medicine and music, and the two subjects demanded virtually equal time during his late teens. This musical talent manifested early and lasted throughout his life, for even at the age of 13 he played incidental piano music during matinees for the silent films of Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Ramon Navarro and Rudolph Valentino. Later he was organist in St Mary’s Church, and director and organist of Christ Church Musical Society, Oxford, when he was 18 years old. He wrote that the heavy weight of the organ keys helped to make his hands and fingers very strong. These early signs of a character full of determination and initiative were apparent later in his life, as he coped with disappointments and opposition during his medical career. He might indeed have become a musician, but medicine finally triumphed when at age 20 he entered King’s College, London, as a medical student. He qualified in 1939 at the age of 26 with the degrees of M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. from St George’s Hospital in London. This hospital retained his affection throughout his life, even though he remembered wards full of cases of pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia since antibiotics had not then been discovered.

Aim of Study: In today’s generation there is a need of biodegradable packaging material to overcome the diseases due to synthetic food packaging. Edible packaging is produced from renewable natural sources and can increase the shelf life of food product. In particular banana peel is abundantly present in nature, loaded with ample nutrients, renewable and low cost. Hence the research aimed to develop edible film from banana peel. Study Design: Experimental design Place and duration of study: Department of Food Science and Nutrition, College of Community and Applied Sciences, MPUAT, Udaipur, from January 2017 to August 2019. Methodology: For film production acetic acid and glycerol was added in solution to provide the better gelatinization, transparency and flexibility of film. The developed film was assessed for its physicochemical properties such as thickness, density, transparency, tensile strength, elongation at break, water solubility, surface reflection spectra and appearance. Moreover sensory evaluation of films was also conducted to know the acceptability of film using nine point hedonic scale. Results: After the various trials edible film was successfully developed from banana peels and developed banana film was found to have desirable properties as a packaging material. Results of sensory evaluation showed that film was neither liked nor disliked by panel members. Conclusion: A non harmful and environment friendly edible film can be developed from the banana peel which will be beneficial for industrial use as a food packaging material. Moreover further researches are needed to bring this film from laboratory to consumer market.

ESP advocates the designing of special courses instead of one multi-purpose course, to suit the needs of different courses of students. The curriculum of English as a course in Engineering Institutes differs from other disciplines in Arts, Commerce and Science colleges. Use of films as a multimedia tool and as an ESP approach in English classrooms of Engineering Institutes has become inevitable. For many students, films are their initial contact with English-speaking culture and a fun way to relax and also learn at the same time. The present study tries to examine the use of films as a multimedia tool in the English language classrooms of Engineering Institutes of Gujarat. The film Life of Pi by Ang Lee is considered as a major instrument for the present study. The study was conducted on a sample of 315 students pursuing their B.Tech in different Government Engineering colleges of Gujarat, India. The study was accomplished by using the survey and observation method. The survey questionnaire was used as a major instrument for the data collection of the study. The results suggests that Films as a teaching tool motivates student to learn English in second language classrooms and also helps them to understand and enhance their second language skills.

To create an antiracism glossary, a team of scholars from Colleagues of Color for Social Justice (CCSJ) identified and defined 48 terms relating to racism and antiracism based on careful review of existing race-related glossaries, scholarly articles, and widely-read books on the topic. This glossary of terms illustrates the daily and pervasive nature of racism that people of color experience and fills a demonstrable gap in resources of this type for college learning assistance centers and programs. The purpose is to recognize and explain terms related to attitudes, behaviors, and policies that impact people’s lives, particularly within academia. The glossary lists the terms in alphabetical order with multiple definitions from various resources and easy to understand examples drawn from personal lives, communities, and professional experiences in educational settings.

Abstract Objectives To examine changes in Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) against the backdrop of rising mortality among less educated white Americans during the first decade of the 21st century. Method This study documented changes in HLE by education among U.S. non-Hispanic whites, using data from the U.S. Multiple Cause of Death public-use files, the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) of the 2000 Census and the 2010 American Community Survey, and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Changes in HLE were decomposed into contributions from: (1) change in age-specific mortality rates; and (2) change in disability prevalence, measured via Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL). Results Between 2000 and 2010, HLE significantly decreased for white men and women with less than 12 years of schooling. By contrast, HLE increased among college-educated white men and women. Declines or stagnation in HLE among less educated whites reflected increases in disability prevalence over the study period, whereas improvements among the college educated reflected decreases in both age-specific mortality rates and disability prevalence at older ages. Discussion Differences in HLE between education groups increased among non-Hispanic whites from 2000 to 2010. In fact, education-based differences in HLE were larger than differences in total life expectancy. Thus, the lives of less educated whites were not only shorter, on average, compared with their college-educated counterparts, but they were also more burdened with disability.

In Cinematographic Poem (29/11/1986), Manoel de Oliveira claims:” We are left with the memory/Of the life we lived/which becomes the food/ Life itself feeds on/The possibility of art itself.” The filmmaker-poet defines memory as the creative impulse behind filmmaking. Visit or Memories and Confessions (1982/2015), Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997) and Porto of My Childhood (2001) are but examples of how art can build the memory. In these films, Oliveira’s camera becomes what he calls the” memory reservoir” where objectivity and subjectivity meet. In the words of João Bénard da Costa, referring to Voyage to the Beginning of the World, it is the vision you get through the rear-view mirror. The going back of time to time, the time labyrinth of spaces and objects, redemption or the refusal of a Proustian look, they all allow one a journey beyond time that only memory can undertake. In these films, Manoel de Oliveira recalls spaces and times. The memory of photos and objects, homemade films, archive footage, ethereal characters, real spaces and acting spaces become the inevitable lever of cinematic creation. Intertextual games and time collages help build the memory path in filmmaking. With Oliveira, memory, captured between fiction and documentary, defines the inevitability of art. Is it the recovery of lost time or the total awareness of the filmic nature of time? Memory is just something inevitable and urgent.

The success of using soft tissue transplants is enough for their spreading in the clinic, but the need to cover the surface, where the transplant was taken from, can be forgotten. It can lead to long-term discomfort of the patient in real life, in some cases to complications alike bleeding; We performed the analysis of the use of different new xenogenic resorbable membranes created within our University in compare with the natural healing of oral mucosa defects in the experiment in vivo on 36 rabbits after performing of the surgical wound on the palatine side (5x5 mm). All animals were separated (divided) for 3 groups: #1 group of control and main groups #2 and #3, where we used pericardium and collagen film for covering mucous defects. We assessed the edema, hyperemia in the operation side, the pain according to animal behavior, the histological picture after animals completion of the experiment (on 3rd, 6th and 10th days); The decrease of clinical signs of inflammation in groups of collagen and pericardium films use (p<0.05) was statistically confirmed. Analysis of histologic investigation of biopsy specimens has shown the faster and massive growth of soft tissue in the donor site after application of pericardium and collagen films (p<0.05). An analysis of the experiment results allows recommending their possible use for closing the donor site after taking a free gingival graft or in the zone of postoperative wound defect in the oral mucosa in clinical oral surgery after specific clinical trials.

This article documents a productive partnership between a local archives and a community college that resulted in an enhanced learning experience for students and provided an opportunity to connect the archives with an underserved audience. Students were asked to creatively commemorate the life of a soldier or nurse who served in the First World War using archival military service files as inspiration. Through the project, students developed their research and communication skills and became familiar with the functions of an archives and the utility of working with primary source documents. The project successfully blended archival research with a creative pedagogical approach and serves as a model that could be adapted to fit a diverse range of subjects, using a variety of archival collections.

Life in the digital age raises the need for computerized medical records. This study was conducted to determine the advantages that the system brings to the school clinic and ease managing the students’ medical records and personnel of Saint Michael College of Caraga (SMCC). The current CPD framework, while superior to paper in general, frequently doesn’t address the client’s issues halfway because they depend on an obsolete paper-outline’ worldview (Gad & Ramadan, 2013). The study revealed that the system was necessary for managing the medical records and that it is very beneficial for the school. In addition, this system stores files with security and adds information to both students and personnel, including their consultation with the clinic. Moreover, the system updates the information whenever there are changes in the patient - fast-tracking data that can be convenient for the clinic attendant. The system also prints three classes of reports that are easy to manipulate. It was recommended that applying the system to the school clinic to boost the performance in managing the medical records, and improve the security standards, maintain privacy and confidentiality of patient data.

From an interview with “Mr A”, executive producer and co-creator of the Getaway in Stockholm (GiS) films: Mr A: Yeah, when I tell my girlfriend, ‘You should watch this, it’s good, it’s a classic, it’s an old movie’ and she thinks it’s, like, the worst. And when I actually look at it and it is the worst, it is just a car chase … [Laughs] But you have to look a lot harder, to how it is filmed, you have to learn … Because, you can’t watch car racing for instance, because they are lousy at filming; you get no sensation of speed. If you watch the World Rally Championship it looks like they go two miles an hour. The hardest thing [of the whole thing] is capturing the speed … I want to engage with the notion of “speed” in terms of the necessary affects of automobility, but first I will give some brief background information on the Getaway in Stockholm series of films. Most of the information on the films is derived from the interview with Mr A carried out over dinner in Stockholm, October 2004. Contact was made via e-mail and I organised with the editors of Autosalon Magazine for an edited transcription to be published as an incentive to participate in the interview. Mr A’s “Tarantino-style” name is necessary because the films he makes with Mr X (co-creator) and a small unnamed group of others involve filming highly illegal acts: one or two cars racing through the streets of Stockholm evading police at sustained speeds well over 200 km/h. Due to a quirk in Swedish traffic law, unless they are caught within a certain time frame of committing driving offences or they actually admit to the driving offences, then they cannot be charged. The Swedish police are so keen to capture these renegade film makers that when they appeared on Efterlyst (pron: ef-de-list; the equivalent of “Sweden’s Most Wanted”) instead of the normal toll-free 1-800 number that viewers could phone to give tips, the number on the screen was the direct line to the chief of Stockholm’s traffic unit. The original GiS film (2000) was made as a dare. Mr A and some friends had just watched Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film C’était un Rendez-vous. Rumour has it that Lelouch had a ten-minute film cartridge and had seen how a gyro stabilised camera worked on a recent film. He decided to make use of it with his Ferrari. He mounted the camera to the bonnet and raced through the streets of Paris. In typical Parisian style at the end of the short nine minute film the driver parks and jumps from the Ferrari to embrace a waiting woman for their “rendezvous”. Shortly after watching the film someone said to Mr A, “you don’t do that sort of thing in Stockholm”. Mr A and Mr X set out to prove him wrong. Nearly all the equipment used in the filming of the first GiS film was either borrowed or stolen. The Porsche used in the film (like all the cars in the films) was lent to them. The film equipment consisted of, in Mr A’s words, a “big ass” television broadcast camera and a smaller “lipstick” camera stolen from the set of the world’s first “interactive” reality TV show called The Bar. (The Bar followed a group of people who all lived together in an apartment and also worked together in a bar. The bar was a “real” bar and served actual customers.) The first film was made for fun, but after Mr A and his associates received several requests for copies they decided to ramp up production to commercial levels. Mr A has a “real job” working in advertising; making the GiS films once a year is his main job with his advertising job being on a self-employed, casual basis. As a production team it is a good example of amateurs becoming semi-professionals within the culture industries. The GiS production team distributes one film per year under the guise of being a “documentary” which allows them to escape the wrath of Swedish authorities due to further legal quirks. Although they still sell DVDs from their Website, the main source of income comes from the sale of the worldwide distribution rights to British “powersports” specialist media company Duke Video. Duke also sells a digitally remastered DVD version of Rendezvous on their Website. As well as these legitimate distribution methods, copies of all six GiS films and Rendezvous are available on the internet through various peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Mr A says there isn’t much he can do about online file sharing besides asking people to support the franchise if they like the films by buying the DVDs. There are a number of groups making films for car enthusiast using similar guerilla film production methods. However, most of the films are one-offs or do not involve cars driven at such radical speeds. An exception was another Swedish film maker who called himself “Ghostrider” and who produced similar films using a motorbike. Police apprehended a man who they alleged is “Ghostrider” in mid-2004 within the requisite timeframe of an offence that had been allegedly committed. The GiS films alongside these others exist within the automotive cultural industry. The automotive cultural industry is a term I am using to describe the overlap between the automotive industry and the cultural industries of popular culture. The films tap in to a niche market of car enthusiasts. There are many different types of car enthusiasts, everything from petite-bourgeois vintage-car restorers to moral panic-inducing street racers. Obviously the GiS films are targeted more towards the street racing end of the spectrum, which is not surprising because Sweden has a very developed underground street racing scene. A good example is the Stockholm-based “Birka Cup”: a quasi-professional multi-round underground street-racing tournament with 60,000 SEK (approx. AUD$11,000) prize money. The rules and rankings for the tournament are found on the tournament Website. To give some indication of what goes on at these events a short teaser video clip for the 2003 Birka Cup DVD is also available for download from the Website. The GiS films have an element of the exotic European-Other about them, not only because of the street-racing pedigree exemplified by the Birka Cup and similar underground social institutions (such as another event for “import” street racers called the “Stockholm Open”), but because they capture an excess within European car culture normally associated with exotic supercars or the extravagant speeds of cars driven on German autobahns or Italian autostradas. For example, the phrase “European Styling” is often used in Australia to sell European designed “inner-city” cars, such as the GM Holden Barina, a.k.a. the Vauxhall Corsa or the Opel Corsa. Cars from other regional manufacturing zones often do not receive such a specific regional identification; for example, cars built in Asian countries are described as “fully imported” rather than “Asian styling”. Tom O’Dell has noted that dominant conception of automobility in Sweden is different to that of the US. That is, “automobility” needs to be qualified with a national or local context and I assume that other national contexts in Europe would equally be just as different. However, in non-European, mainly post-colonial contexts, such as Australia, the term “European” is an affectation signaling something special. On a different axis, “excess” is directly expressed in the way the police are “captured” in the GiS films. Throughout the GiS series there is a strongly antagonist relation to the police. The initial pre-commercial version of the first GiS film had NWA’s “Fuck the Police” playing over the opening credits. Subsequent commercially-released versions of the film had to change the opening title music due to copyright infringement issues. The “bonus footage” material of subsequent DVDs in the series represents the police as impotent and foolish. Mr A describes it as a kind of “prank” played on police. His rationale is that they live out the fantasy that “everyone” wishes they could do to the police when they are pulled over for speeding and the like; as he puts it, “flipping the bird and driving off”. The police are rendered foolish and captured on film, which is an inversion of the normative traffic-cop-versus-traffic-infringer power relation. Mr A specifies the excess of European modernity to something specific to automobility, which is the near-universal condition of urbanity in most developed nations. The antagonism between the GiS drivers and the police is figured as a duel. The speed of the car(s) obviously exceeds what is socially and legally acceptable and therefore places the drivers in direct conflict with police. The speed captured on film is in part a product of this tension and gives speed a qualitative cultural dimension beyond a simple notion from rectilinear physics of speed as a rate of motion. The qualitative dimension of speed as been noted by Peter Wollen: Speed is not simply thrilling in itself, once sufficiently accelerated, but also enables us to enter exposed and unfamiliar situations, far removed from the zones of safety and normality – to travel into space, for instance, beyond the frontiers of the known. (106) Knowledge is subsumed by the dialect of road safety: “safety” versus “speed”. Knowledge takes on many forms and it is here that speed gains its complexity. In the high-school physics of rectilinear motion speed refers to a rate. Mr A discusses speed as a sensation (“thrill” in the language of Wollen) in the quote at the beginning of the essay. If the body develops sensations from affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 179-83), then what are the affects and percepts that are developed by the body into the sensation of speed? The catchphrase for the GiS films is “Reality Beats Fiction By Far!” The “reality” at stake here is not only the actuality of cars traveling at high speeds within urban spaces, which in the vernacular of automotive popular culture is more “real” than Hollywood representations, but the “reality” of automobilised bodies engaging with and “getting away” from the police. Important here is that the police serve as the symbolic representatives of the governmental institutions and authorities that regulate and discipline populations to be automobilised road users. The police are principally symbolic because one’s road-user body is policed, to a large degree, by one’s self; that is, by the perceptual apparatus that enables us to judge traffic’s rates of movement and gestures of negotiation that are indoctrinated into habit. We do this unthinkingly as part of everyday life. What I want to suggest is that the GiS films tap into the part of our respective bodily perceptual and affective configurations that allow us to exist as road users. To explain this I need to go on a brief detour through “traffic” and its relation to “speed”. Speed serves a functional role within automobilised societies. Contrary to the dominant line from the road safety industry, the “speed limit” we encounter everyday on the road is not so much a limit, but a guide for the self-organisation of traffic. To think the “speed limit” as a limit allows authorities to imagine a particular movement-based threshold of perception and action that bestows upon drivers the ability to negotiate the various everyday hazard-events that constitute the road environment. This is a negative way to look at traffic and is typical of the (post)modernist preoccupation with incorporating contingency (“the accident”) into behavioural protocol and technical design (Lyotard 65-8). It is not surprising that the road safety industry is an exemplary institution of what Gilles Deleuze called the “control society”. The business of the road safety industry is the perpetual modulation of road user populations in a paradoxical attempt to both capture (forecast and study) the social mechanics of the accident-event while postponing its actualisation. Another way to look at traffic is to understand it as a self-organising system. Ilya Prigogine and Robert Herman modeled vehicle traffic as two flows – collective and individual – as a function of the concentration and speed of vehicles. At a certain tipping point the concentration of traffic is such that individual mobility is subsumed by the collective. Speed plays an important role both in the abstract sense of a legislated “speed limit” and as the emergent consistency of mobile road users distributed in traffic. That is, automotive traffic does not move at a constant speed, but nominally moves at a consistent speed. The rate and rhythms of traffic have a consistency that we all must become familiar with to successfully negotiate the everyday system of automobility. For example, someone simply walking becomes a “pedestrian” in the duration of automobilised time-space. Pedestrians must embody a similar sense of the rate of traffic as that perceived by drivers in the cars that constitute traffic. The pedestrian uses this sense of speed when negotiating traffic so as to cross the road, while the driver uses it to maintain a safe distance from the car in front and so on. The shared sense of speed demands an affective complicity of road-user bodies to allow them to seamlessly incorporate themselves into the larger body of traffic on a number of different registers. When road users do not comply with this shared sense of speed that underpins traffic they are met with horn blasts, rude figure gestures, abuse, violence and so on. The affects of traffic are accelerated in the body and developed by the body into the sensations and emotions of “road rage”. Road users must performatively incorporate the necessary dispositions for participating with other road users in traffic otherwise they disrupt the affective script (“habits”) for the production of traffic. When I screened the first GiS film in a seminar in Sweden the room was filled with the sound of horrified gasps. Afterwards someone suggested to me that they (the Swedes) were more shocked than I (an Australian) about the film. Why? Is it because I am a “hoon”? We had all watched the same images heard the same sounds, yet, the “speeds” were not equal. They had experienced the streets in the film as a part of traffic. Their bodies knew just how slow the car was meant to be going. The film captured and transmitted the affects of a different automobilised body. Audiences follow the driver “getting away” from those universally entrusted (at least on a symbolic level) with the governance of traffic – the police – while, for a short period, becoming a new body that gets away from the “practiced perception” (Massumi 189) of habits that normatively enable the production of traffic. What is captured in the film – the event of the getaway – has the potential to develop in the body of the spectator as the sensation of “speed” and trigger a getaway of the body. Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the generous funding from the Centre for Cultural Research and the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, in awarding me the 2004 CCR CAESS Postgraduate International Scholarship, and the support from my colleagues at the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden where I carried out this research as a doctoral exchange student. References Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on Control Societies”. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso, 1994. Getaway in Stockholm series. 21 Oct. 2005 http://www.getawayinstockholm.com>. Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1991. Massumi, Brian. “Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation”. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham, London: Duke UP, 2002. O’Dell, Tom. “Raggare and the Panic of Mobility: Modernity and Everyday Life in Sweden.” Car Culture. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 105-32. Prigogine, Ilya, and Robert Herman. “A Two-Fluid Approach to Town Traffic.” Science 204 (1979): 148-51. Wollen, Peter. “Speed and the Cinema.” New Left Review 16 (2002): 105–14. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Fuller, Glen. "The Getaway." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>. APA Style Fuller, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Getaway," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/07-fuller.php>.

In a 1999 interview with the online magazine The AV Club, a subsidiary of satirical news website, The Onion, Bret Easton Ellis claimed: “I’ve never written a single scene that I can say took place, I’ve never written a line of dialogue that I’ve heard someone say or that I have said” (qtd. in Klein). Ten years later, in the same magazine, Ellis was reminded of this quote and asked why most of his novels have been perceived as veiled autobiographies. Ellis responded:Well, they are autobiographical in the sense that they reflect who I was at a particular moment in my life. There was talk of a memoir, and I realized why I couldn’t write a memoir, because the books are the memoir—they completely sum up how I was feeling, what I was thinking about, what my obsessions were, what I was fantasizing about, who I was, in a fictional context over the last 25 years or so (qtd. in Tobias).Despite any protestations to the contrary, Bret Easton Ellis’s novels have included various intentional and unintentional disclosures which reflect the author’s personal experiences. This pattern of self-disclosure became most overt in his most recent novel, Lunar Park (2005), in which the narrator shares a name, vocation and many aspects of his personal history with Ellis himself. After two decades and many assumptions made about Ellis’s personal life in the public media, it seems on the surface as if this novel uses disclosure as the site of closure for several rumours and relationships which have haunted his career. It is possible to see how this fictional text transgresses the boundaries between fiction and fact in an attempt to sever the feedback loop between the media’s representation of Ellis and the interpretation of his fictional texts. Yet it is important to note that with Ellis, there is always more beneath the surface. This is evident after only one chapter of Lunar Park when the novel changes form from an autobiography into a fictional ghost story, both of which are told by Bret Easton Ellis, a man who simultaneously reflects and refracts aspects of the real life author.Before analysing Lunar Park, it is helpful to consider the career trajectory which led to its creation. Bret Easton Ellis made his early fame writing semi-fictional accounts of rich, beautiful, young, yet ambitionless members of generation-X, growing up in the 1980s in America. His first novel, Less Than Zero (1985), chronicled the exploits of his protagonists as they drifted from party to party, from one meaningless sexual encounter to another; all while anesthetised on a cocktail of Valium, Prozac, Percocet and various illegal drugs. The brutal realism of his narrative, coupled with the structure—short vignettes like snapshots and short chapters told in simplistic style—led the text to be hailed as the first “MTV Novel” (Annesley 90; see also: Freese).It is not difficult to discover the many similarities that exist between the creator of Less Than Zero and his fictional creation, Clay, the novel’s narrator-protagonist. Both grew up in Los Angeles and headed east to attend a small liberal-arts college. Both Ellis’s and Clay’s parents were divorced and both young men grew up living in a house with their mother and their two sisters. Ellis’s relationship with his father was, by all accounts, as strained as what is represented in the few meetings Clay has with his own father in Less Than Zero. In these scenes, Clay describes a brief, perfunctory lunch meeting in an expensive restaurant in which Clay’s father is too preoccupied by work to acknowledge his son’s presence.Ellis’s second novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), is set at Camden College, the same college that Clay attends in Less Than Zero. At one point, Clay even guest-narrates a chapter of The Rules of Attraction; the phrase, “people are afraid to walk across campus after midnight” (205) recalls the opening line of Less Than Zero, “people are afraid to merge on highways in Los Angeles” (5). Camden bears quite a few similarities with Bennington College, the college which Ellis himself was attending when Less Than Zero was published and Ellis was catapulted into the limelight. Even Ellis himself has admitted that the book is, “a completely fictionalized portrait of a group of people, all summations of friends I knew” (qtd. in Tobias).The authenticity of Ellis’s narrative voice was considered as an insight which came from participation (A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis). The depiction of disenfranchised youth in the Reagan era in America was so compelling because Ellis seemed to personify and even embody the malaise and listlessness of his narrators in his public performances and interviews. In the minds of many readers and critics, Ellis’s narrators were a fictional extrapolation of Ellis himself. The association of Ellis to his fictional narrators backfired when Ellis’s third novel, American Psycho (1991), was published. The novel was criticised for its detached depiction of Patrick Bateman, who narrates in minute detail his daily routine which includes an extensive beauty regime, lunchtimes and dinnertimes spent in extravagant New York restaurants, a relationship with a fiancée and a mistress, a job on Wall Street in which he seems to do no real “work,” and his night-time hobby where brutally murders women, homeless men, gay men and even a small child. Bateman’s choice of victims can be interpreted as unconsciously aimed at anyone why may threaten his dominant position as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male. While Bateman kills as many men as he does women, his male victims are killed quickly in sudden bursts of violence. Bateman’s female victims are the subject of brutal torture, prolonged violent sexualized attacks, and in many cases inhumane post-mortem disfigurement and dismemberment.The public reception of American Psycho has been analysed as much as the text itself, (see: Murphet; Brien). Because American Psycho is narrated in the first-person voice of Bateman, there is no escape from his subjectivity. Many, including the National Organization of Women, interpreted this lack of authorial comment as Ellis’s tacit agreement and acceptance of Bateman’s behaviour. Another similar interpretation was made by Roger Rosenblatt in his pre-publication review of American Psycho in which he forthrightly encourages readers to “Snuff this Book” (Rosenblatt). Rosenblatt finds no ironic critique in Ellis’s representation of Bateman, instead finding himself at a loss to understand Ellis’s intention in writing American Psycho, saying “one only assumes, Mr. Ellis disapproves. It's a bit hard to tell what Mr. Ellis intends exactly, because he languishes so comfortably in the swamp he purports to condemn” (n.p.).In much the same way as Ellis’s previous narrators had reflected his experience and opinions, Ellis was considered as accepting and even glorifying the actions of a misogynistic serial killer. Ellis himself has commented on the popularised “misreading” of his novel: “Because I never step in anywhere and say, ‘Hey, this is all wrong,’ people get upset. That’s outrageous to me! Who’s going to say that serial killing is wrong?! Isn’t that a given? There’s no need to say that” (qtd. in. Klein)Ellis himself was treated as if he had committed the actual crimes that Patrick Bateman describes. The irony being that, as I have argued elsewhere (Phillips), there are numerous signs within the text which point to the possibility that Patrick Bateman did not commit the crimes as he claims: he can be interpreted as an unreliable narrator. Although the unreliability is Bateman’s narration doesn’t remove the effect which the reader experiences, it does indicate a distance between the author and the narrator. This distance was overlooked by many critics who interpreted Ellis as agreeing and condoning Bateman’s views and actions.When Ellis’s fourth novel, Glamorama was published, the decadent lifestyle represented in the text was again considered to be a reflection of Ellis’s personal experience. The star-studded parties and glamorous night clubs seemed to be lifted straight out of Ellis’s experience (although, no-one would ever claim that Ellis was a fashion-model-turned-international-terrorist like his narrator, Victor). One reviewer notes that “even when Bret Easton Ellis writes about killer yuppies and terrorist fashion models, a lot of people still think he's writing about himself” (Waldren).With the critical tendency to read an autobiographical confession out of Ellis’s fictional works firmly in place, it is not hard to see why Ellis decided to make the narrator of his fifth novel, Lunar Park, none other than Bret Easton Ellis himself. It is my contention that Lunar Park is the site of disclosures based on the real life of Bret Easton Ellis. I believe that Ellis chose the form of a mock-autobiography-turned-ghost-story as the site of exorcism for the many ghosts which have haunted his career, namely, his public persona and the publication of American Psycho. Ultimately, it is the exorcism of a more personal ghost, namely his father Robert Martin Ellis which provides the most private disclosure in the text and therefore the most touching, truthful and abiding site of closure for the entire novel and for Ellis himself. For ease, I will refer to the narrator of Lunar Park as Bret and the author of Lunar Park as Ellis.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is an autobiographical memoir. In one of the many mixed reviews of the novel (see: Murray; "Behind Bret's Mask"; Hand), Steve Almond’s title describes how Ellis masquerading as Ellis “is not a pretty sight” (Almond). The opening chapter is told in autobiographical style and charts Bret’s meteoric rise from college student to member of the literary brat pack (alongside Jay McInerney and Tama Jancowitz), to reviled author of American Psycho (1991) reaching his washed-up, drug-addled and near-death nadir during the Glamorama (1998) book tour. However, careful reading of this chapter reveals that the real-life Ellis is obscuring as much about himself as he appears to be revealing. Although it takes the form of a candid disclosure of his personal life, there are elements of the narrator’s story which do not agree with the public record of the author Ellis.The fictional Bret claims to have attended Camden College, and that his manuscript for Less Than Zero was a college project, discovered by his professor. While the plot of this story does reflect Ellis’s actual experience, he has set Bret’s story at Camden College, the fictional setting of The Rules of Attraction. By adding an element of fiction into the autobiographical account, Ellis is indicating that he is not identical to his narrating counterpart. It also signifies the Bret that exists in the fictional space whereas Ellis resides in the “real world.”In Lunar Park, Bret also talks about his relationship with Jayne Dennis. Jayne is described as a model-turned-actress, an up and coming Hollywood superstar who in the 1980s performed in films alongside Keanu Reeves. Jayne is one of the truly fictional characters in Lunar Park. She doesn’t exist outside of the text, except in two websites which were established to promote the publication of Lunar Park in 2005 (www.jaynedennis.com and www.jayne-dennis.com). While Bret and Jayne are dating, Jayne falls pregnant. Bret begs her to have an abortion. When Jayne decides to keep the child, her relationship with Bret falls apart. Bret meets his son Robby only twice from birth until the age of 10. The relationship between the fictional Bret and the fictional Jayne creates Robby, a fictional offspring who shares a name with Robert Martin Ellis (Bret and Ellis’s father).Many have been tempted to participate in Ellis’s game, to sift fact from fiction in the opening chapter of Lunar Park. Holt and Abbot published a two page point-by-point analysis of where the real-life Ellis diverged from the fictional Bret. The promotional website established by Ellis’s publisher was named www.twobrets.com to invite such a comparison. Although this game is invited by Ellis, he has also publicly stated that there is more to Lunar Park than the comparison between himself and his fictional counterpart:My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not […] All the things that are in the book—my quote-unquote autobiography—I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.)Although Ellis refuses to demystify the text, one of the purposes of inserting himself into the text is to trap readers in this very game, and to confuse fact with fiction. Although the text opens with a chapter which reads like Ellis’s autobiography, careful reading of the textual Bret against the extra-textual Ellis reveals that this chapter contains almost as much fiction as the “ghost story” which fills the remaining 400-odd pages. This ghost story could have been told by any first-person narrator. By writing himself into the text, Ellis is writing his public persona into the fictional character of Bret. One of the effects of blurring the lines between public and private, reality and fiction is that Ellis’s real-life disclosures invite the reader to read the fictional text against their extra-textual knowledge of Ellis himself. In this way, Ellis is able to address the many ghosts which have haunted his career—most importantly the public reception of American Psycho and his public persona. A more personal ghost is the ghost of Ellis’s father who has been written into the text, literally haunting Bret’s home with messages from beyond the grave. Closure occurs when these ghosts have been exorcised. The question is: is Lunar Park Ellis’s attempt to close down the public debates, or to add more fuel to the fire?One of the areas in which Ellis seeks to find closure is in the controversy surrounding American Psycho. Ellis uses his fictional voice to re-write the discourse surrounding the creation and reception of the text. There are deliberate contradictions in Bret’s version of writing American Psycho. In Lunar Park, Bret describes the writing process of American Psycho. In an oddly ornate passage for Ellis (who seldom uses adverbs), Bret describes how he would “fearfully watch my hands as the pen swept across the yellow legal pads” (19) blaming the “spirit” of Patrick Bateman for visiting and causing the book to be written. When it was finished, the “spirit” was “disgustingly satisfied” and stopped “gleefully haunting” Bret’s dreams. This shift in writing style may be an indication of a shift from reality into a fictionalised account of the writing of American Psycho. Much of the plot of Lunar Park is taken up with the consequences of American Psycho, when a madman starts replicating crimes exactly as they appear in the novel. It is almost as if Patrick Bateman is haunting Bret and his family. When informed that his fictional violence has disrupted his quiet suburban existence, Bret laments, “this was the moment that detractors of the book had warned me about: if anything happened to anyone as a result of the publication of this novel, Bret Easton Ellis was to blame” (181-2). By the end of Lunar Park Bret decides to “kill” Patrick Bateman once and for all, by writing an epilogue in which Bateman is burnt alive.On the surface, it appears that Lunar Park is the site of an apology about American Psycho. However, this is not entirely the case. Much of Bret’s description of writing American Psycho is contradictory to Ellis’s personal accounts where he consciously researched the gruesome details of Bateman’s crimes using an FBI training manual (Rose). Although Patrick Bateman is destroyed by the end of Lunar Park, extra-textually, neither Bret nor Ellis is not entirely apologetic for his creation. Bret argues that American Psycho was “about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this?” (182). Extra-textually, in an interview Ellis admitted that when he re-read “the violence sequences I was incredibly upset and shocked […] I can't believe that I wrote that. Looking back, I realize, God, you really sort of stepped over a line there” (qtd. in Wyatt n.p.). However, in that same interview, Ellis admits to lying to reporters if he feels that the reporter is “out to get” him. Therefore, Ellis’s apology may not actually be an apology at all.Lunar Park presents an explanation about how and why American Psycho was written. This explanation is much akin to claiming that “the devil made me do it”, by arguing that Bret was possessed by “the spirit of this madman” (18). While it may seem that this explanation is an attempt to close the vast amount of discussion surrounding why American Psycho was written, Ellis is actually using his fictional persona to address the public outcry about his most controversial novel, providing an apology for a text, which is really no apology at all. Ultimately, the reliability of Bret’s account depends on the reader’s knowledge of Ellis’s public persona. This interplay between the fictional Bret and the real-life Ellis can be seen in Lunar Park’s account of the Glamorama publicity tour. In Lunar Park, Bret describes his own version of the Glamorama book tour. For Bret, this tour functions as his personal nadir, the point in his life where he hits rock bottom and looks to Jayne Dennis as his saviour. Throughout the tour, Bret describes taking all manner of drugs. At one point, threatened by his erratic behaviour, Bret’s publishers asked a personal minder to join the book tour, reporting back on Bret’s actions which include picking at nonexistent scabs, sobbing at his appearance in a hotel mirror and locking himself in a bookstore bathroom for over an hour before emerging and claiming that he had a snake living in his mouth (32-33).The reality of the Glamorama book tour is not anywhere near as wild as that described by Bret in Lunar Park. In reviews and articles addressing the real-life Glamorama book tour, there are no descriptions of these events. One article, from the The Observer (Macdonald), does describe a meeting over lunch where Ellis admits to drinking way too much the night before and then having to deal with phone calls from fans he can’t remember giving his phone-number to. However, as previously mentioned, in that same article a friend of Ellis’s is quoted as saying that Ellis frequently lies to reporters. Bret’s fictional actions seem to confirm Ellis’s real life “party boy” persona. For Moran, “the name of the author [him]self can become merely an image, either used to market a literary product directly or as a kind of free floating signifier within contemporary culture” (61). Lunar Park is about all of the connotations of the name Bret Easton Ellis. It is also a subversion of those expectations. The fictional Glamorama book tour shows Ellis’s media persona taken to an extreme until it becomes a self-embodying parody. In Lunar Park, Ellis is deliberately amplifying his public persona, accepting that no amount of truthful disclosure will erase the image of Bret-the-party-boy. However, the remainder of the novel turns this image on its head by removing Bret from New York and placing him in middle-American suburbia, married, and with two children in tow.Ultimately, although the novel appears as a transgression of fact and fiction, Bret may be the most fictional of all of Ellis’s narrators (with the exception of Patrick Bateman). Bret is married where Ellis is single. Bret is heterosexual whereas Ellis is homosexual, and used the site of Lunar Park to confirm his homosexuality. Bret has children whereas Ellis is childless. Bret has settled down into the heartland of American suburbia, a wife and two children in tow whereas Ellis has made it clear that this lifestyle is not one he is seeking. The novel is presented as the site of Ellis’s personal disclosure, and yet only creates more fictional fodder for the public image of Ellis, there are elements of true and personal disclosures from Ellis life, which he is using the text as the site for his own brand of closure. The most genuine and heartfelt closure is achieved through Ellis’s disclosure of his relationship with his father.The death of Ellis’s father, Robert Martin Ellis has an impact on both the textual and extra-textual levels of Lunar Park. Textually, the novel takes the form of a ghost story, and it is Robert himself who is haunting Bret. These spectral disturbances manifest themselves in Bret’s house which slowly transforms into a representation of his childhood home. Bret also receives nightly e-mails from the bank in which his father’s ashes have been stored in a safe-deposit box. These e-mails contain an attached video file showing the last few moments of Robert Martin Ellis’s life. Bret never finds out who filmed the video. Extra-textually, the death of Robert Martin Ellis is clearly signified in the fact that Lunar Park is dedicated to him as well as Michael Wade Kaplan, two men close to Ellis who have died. The trope of fathers haunting their sons is further highlighted by Ellis’s inter-textual references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet including a quote in the epigraph: “From the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / that youth and observation copied there” (1.5.98-101). The names of various geographical locations in Bret’s neighbourhood: Bret and Jayne live on Elsinore Lane, named for Elsinore castle, Bret also visits Fortinbras Mall, Osric hotel and Ophelia Boulevard. In Hamlet, the son is called upon by the ghost of his father to avenge his death. In Lunar Park, Bret is called upon to avenge himself against the wrongs inflicted upon him by his own father.The ambiguity of the relationships between fathers and sons is summarised in the closing passage of the novel. So, if you should see my son, tell him I say hello, be good, that I am thinking of him and that I know he’s watching over me somewhere, and not to worry: that he can always find me here, whenever he wants, right here, my arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park (453).Although Bret earlier signals the reader to interpret this passage as a message from Bret to his son Robby (45), it is also possible to interpret is as a message from the fictional Robert Martin Ellis to the fictional Bret. In this reading, Lunar Park is not just a novel, a game or a post-modern deconstruction of the fact and fiction binary, it instead becomes an exorcism for the author. The process of writing Lunar Park to casts the spectre of the real-life Robert Martin Ellis out of his life to a place where Bret (and Ellis) can always find him. This relationship is the site not only of disclosure – reflecting Ellis’s own personal angst with his late father – but of closure, where Ellis has channelled his relationship and indeed exorcised his father into the text.Lunar Park contains several forms of disclosures, most of which transgress the line between fiction and fact. Lunar Park does not provide a closure from the tendency to read autobiography into Ellis’s texts, instead, chapter one provides as much fiction as fact, as evident in the discussions of American Psycho and the Glamorama book tour. Although chapter one presents in an autobiographical form, the remainder of the text reveals how fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” really is. Much of Lunar Park can be interpreted as a puzzle whose answer depends on the reader’s knowledge and understanding of the public perception, persona and profile of Bret Easton Ellis himself. Although seeming to provide closure on the surface, by playing with fiction and fact, Lunar Park only opens up more ground for discussion of Ellis, his novels, his persona and his fictional worlds. These are discussions I look forward to participating in, particularly as 2010 will see the publication of Ellis’s sixth novel (and sequel to Less Than Zero), Imperial Bedrooms.Although much of Ellis’s game in Lunar Park is to tease the reader by failing to provide true disclosures or meaningful and finite closure, the ending of the Lunar Park indicates the most honest, heartfelt and abiding closure for the text and for Ellis himself. Devoid of games and extra-textual riddles, the end of the novel is a message from a father to his son. By disclosing details of his troubled relationship with his father, both Ellis and his fictional counterpart Bret are able to exorcise the ghost of Robert Martin Ellis. As the novel closes, the ghost who haunts the text has indeed been exorcised and is now standing, with “arms held out and waiting, in the pages, behind the covers, at the end of Lunar Park” (453). ReferencesAlmond, Steve. "Ellis Masquerades as Ellis, and It Is Not a Pretty Sight." Boston Globe 14 Aug. 2005.Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998."Behind Bret's Mask." Manchester Evening News 10 Oct. 2005.Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). 30 Nov. 2009 < http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php >.Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. London: Vintage, 1985.–––. The Rules of Attraction. London: Vintage, 1987.–––. American Psycho. London: Picador, 1991.–––. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1998.–––. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.Freese, Peter. "Bret Easton Ellis, Less than Zero; Entropy in the 'Mtv Novel'?" Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction. Eds. Reingard Nishik and Barbara Korts. Wurzburg: Konighausen and Naumann, 1990. 68–87. Hand, Elizabeth. "House of Horrors; Bret Easton Ellis, the Author of 'American Psycho,' Rips into His Most Frightening Subject Yet—Himself." The Washington Post 21 Aug. 2005.Klein, Joshua. "Interview with Bret Easton Ellis." The Onion AV Club 17 Mar.(1999). 5 Sep. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis,13586/ >.Macdonald, Marianna. “Interview—Bret Easton Ellis—All Cut Up.” The Observer 28 June 1998.Moran, Joe. Star Authors. London: Pluto Press, 2000.Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.Murray, Noel. "Lunar Park [Review]." The Onion AV Club 2 Aug. 2005. 1 Nov. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/lunar-park,4393/ >.Phillips, Jennifer. "Unreliable Narration in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho: Interaction between Narrative Form and Thematic Content." Current Narratives 1.1 (2009): 60–68.Rose, Charlie. “A Conversation with Bret Easton Ellis”. The Charlie Rose Show. Prod. Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega. PBS. 7 Sep. 1994. Rosenblatt, Roger. "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" The New York Times 16 Dec. 1990: Arts.Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Tobias, Scott. "Bret Easton Ellis (Interview)". The Onion AV Club 22 Apr. 2009. 31 Aug. 2009 < http://www.avclub.com/articles/bret-easton-ellis%2C26988/1/ >.Wyatt, Edward. "Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror." The New York Times 7 Aug. 2005: Arts.

IntroductionIn 2008, researchers at New York University’s Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory challenged our contemporary understanding of audience with an alternative approach to engaging some of the most essential questions regarding film consumption. The study itself used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner during the “free viewing of films” allowing researchers the opportunity to see which sections of the brain are activated during certain parts of the viewing (Hasson et al. 2). In an effort to overcome limitations of fMRI imaging, the researchers further utilized an inter-subjective correlation (ISC) technique to validate their findings. Simply put, ISC looks at the similar effects in neuroimaging across a range of viewers for the same rhetorical artifact; the higher the similarity, the more confident the researchers are that the impact of the film is the same for most or all viewers. This impact is said to “control” the viewers mental and emotional state in that they can be a reliable way to predict a viewer’s “emotions, thoughts, [and] attitudes” (Hasson et al. 2). The researchers termed their work “neurocinematics” and concluded that this new approach could “contribute to the cognitive movement in film theory, analogous to contributions that neuroscience has made to cognitive and social psychology.” (Hasson et al. 21).Since the publication of this research, there have been over a dozen academic essays published, including additional work in the hard sciences, and contributions from psychology and literary and film studies (see Cohen, Shavalian and Rube; Loschky et al.; Erincin; Kauttonen, Hlushchuk and Tikka; Christoforou et al.). Many seem to be responding to the original authors’ calls for neurocinematics to be “a new interdisciplinary field” between “cognitive neuroscience and film studies” that is “part of a larger endeavor that looks for connections between neuroscience and art” (Hasson et al. 1, 21). Noticeably missing from their call for an inter-disciplinary approach, however, is one that includes rhetorical studies. In fact, to date, there has only been a single publication referring to neurocinematics in communication studies – an essay that was not specific to film nor audience, and that limited its discussion to the effectiveness of fMRI imaging (see Weber, Mangus and Huskey). It is the argument of this essay that rhetorical studies should be included in neurocinematics for two reasons: first, rhetorical studies can provide an alternative theoretical understanding of narrative that should prove to be enlightening for this emerging field; and second, rhetorical studies can provide the necessary ethical positioning for this emerging field.The Rhetorical Studies AlternativeThe first justification for the inclusion of rhetorical studies in neurocinematics is the alternative theoretical approach to narrative that rhetoricians can provide. The original neurocinematics research found that structured stories provided a much higher degree of ISC than open-ended, unstructured “real life” depictions. The researchers showed 10 minutes of Sergio Leone’s film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a 10-minute stable shot of a Saturday afternoon in Washington Square Park that represented an unstructured, real-life event. The researchers concluded that, “a mere mechanical reproduction of reality, with no directorial intention or intervention, is not sufficient by itself for controlling viewer’s brain activity” (Hasson et al. 8). That the “slice of real life” didn’t have the same predictive functions as the “intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means” has important implications for rhetorical studies (Hasson et al. 9). It’s not cinematic imagery alone that corresponds to brain activations, but the construction of story and the aesthetic elements of narrative presentations (that is to say, the creation of rhetoric) that has predictive functions. In A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke notes that dramatism “invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (xxii). For Burke, all of our stories are the product of thought, whether it be conscious or unconscious, and this thought belies how we view the world of symbols in which we live. Michael Overington contends that dramatismaddresses the empirical questions of how persons explain their actions to themselves and others, what the cultural and social structural influences on these interpretations might be, and what effect connotational links among the explanatory (motivational) terms might have on these explanations and hence, on action itself. (133)Language is the vehicle for human behaviour and represents how we describe the world to ourselves and to others so that “a rhetor’s language can be used to discover motive” (Foss, Foss and Trapp 200). Film is nothing short of a dramatistic explanation that allows us the opportunity to dissect it with more detail to determine the worldview not only of the auteur, but of the spectator as well. Although film studies has its own theories on story and structure, a “systematic application” of Burke’s dramatism “enables an observer to reconstruct various perspectives of ‘reality’” (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 168). When compared to film studies, as an academic discipline, rhetorical studies offers an alternative understanding of narrative. Film studies asks us to apply a structural model to a narrative, while rhetorical studies asks us to apply a systems model that unmasks a narrative. As an example, film studies might examine a film’s structure, looking at the rising action of subplot B as it corresponds in the third reel to the declining action of the subplot A before denouement. As an alternative example, rhetorical studies could offer a dramatistic reading to examine the motivations of scenic ratios between the two subplots as it defines cinematic reality for the audience. Although neurocinematics may help predict the affective impact of the subplots for an audience, it is currently rooted in a structural assumption of audience and narrative, which fails to provide a full account of the spectator’s experience as it relates to the filmmaker’s rhetorical motivation. The addition of rhetorical studies to the conversation can provide an alternative approach and give an additional richness to our understandings of audience.While film studies may engage the ideological function of films, rhetorical studies amplifies their findings. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin writes,the storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work … is itself an artisanal form of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself’ or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the story-teller, in order to bring it out of him again. (149)For Benjamin, the storyteller is an artisan that exists external to the rhetorical artifact itself, which, of course, means that the structural focus of film studies falls inevitably short. Further, Benjamin argues that there is an ideological component to both narrative and its medium. He writes, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (Benjamin "Reproducibility" 255, emphasis in original). The oral tradition of storytelling is different, as is the storytelling of the novel, film, and so on. Indeed, it is the goal of neurocinematics to illustrate how the rhetoric of film is distinct from other forms of narrative discourse, which necessarily demands an inter-disciplinary focus that allows for an interrogation of the ideological functions that exist both within and without the text, which is what Burke’s dramatism provides.Further, Walter Fisher’s work with narrative extends the role of rhetorical theory into what should be discussed in neurocinematics. Fisher contends that the narrative form is something that is unique to humans, but something that all humans engage in; for him, “stories are fundamental to communication because they provide structure for our experience as humans and because they influence people to live in communities that share common explanations and understandings” (Burgchardt 239). As noted earlier, neurocinematics argues that there is a coherence in cinematic narratives that don’t exist in “slice of life” filmic images. Similarly, Walter Fisher contends that this “coherence” is inborn in the narrative being (his homo narran) “their inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives” (8). The neurocinematics researchers conclude that, “the ISC analysis of brain activity can also serve as a measurement of systematic differences in how various groups of individuals … respond to the same film” (Hasson et al. 20). Fisher notes that the philosophical foundation of the rational world paradigm (which he sets opposite his narrative paradigm) “is epistemology. Its linguistic materials are self-evident propositions, demonstrations, and proofs, the verbal expressions of certain and probably knowing” (4). The danger with neurocinematics rooted in pure rationality is that it co-opts the narrative function, makes the spectator as agent and film as object separate from one another (when ISC begs that they interact), and brackets off questions such as ethics. Fisher concludes, “With knowledge of agents, we can hope to find that which is reliable or trustworthy; with knowledge of objects, we can hope to discover that which has the quality of veracity. The world requires both kinds of knowledge” (18). Of course, this question demands a discussion of ethics, which the current approach to neurocinematics explicitly denies as a subject of inquiry. The authors write, different filmmakers differ in the level of control they choose to impose on viewers, and out methods are not designed to judge this, but rather to measure the effect of a given film on different target groups. Thus the critical evaluation of each film is outside the domain of this research. (Hasson et al. 21-2)This is the danger Fisher warns of. The assumption that neurocinematics can be a purely descriptive project is not only unfeasible, but also unconscionable. Unlike researchers who deny the place of ideology and ethics, “rhetorical critics, of course, have long recognized the centrality of ideology to persuasive discourse” (Burgchardt 451). To illustrate why this is a vital issue for neurocinematics, let’s take its existing descriptive project to its logical conclusion. Theoretically, researchers could reach a point where there was a 100% ISC, meaning that there existed a cinematic formula that would impact every audience member the same way and would “control” their emotional and mental states – for neurocinematics this would constitute the “perfect” film. This “perfect” film, however, wouldn’t exist in a research vacuum, but in a morass of culture, politics, and ideology. Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek notes the impact that Nine-Eleven had on film:the ultimate twist in this link between Hollywood and the ‘war on terrorism’ occurred when the Pentagon decided to solicit the help of Hollywood: … at the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisors and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the ‘war against terrorism’ by getting the right ideological meaning across not only to Americans, but to the Hollywood public around the globe – the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an ‘ideological state apparatus’. (16)The ethical implications are overwhelming: propaganda films are nothing new, but neurocinematics has the potential to usher in a whole new type of propaganda cinema, under the guise of entertainment, that is 100% effective. The original neurocinematic research argued that “the ISC measurement should probably not be used to evaluate the aesthetic, artistic, social, or political value of movies” (Hasson et al. 21). Conversely, rhetorical studies demands that criticism and scholarship not only comment on texts, but ethical considerations “will not be averted either by ignoring it or placing it beyond our provence” (Wander 18).Further, the very goal of neurocinematics demands the critical reaction that current rhetorical theory is prepared to provide. The stated end-game for neurocinematics is to determine how films discursively interact with a viewer’s mental state and, therefore, their affective response to an aesthetic experience. Raymie McKerrow notes that critical rhetorical theory must examine “the manner in which discourse insinuates itself in the fabric of social power, and thereby ‘effects’ the status of knowledge among the members of the social group” (92). Michael Calvin McGee argues, “We do not ‘observe’ objects and human actions … we construct these phenomena through rational acts of ‘selecting,’ ‘coordinating,’ ‘interpreting,’ and ‘applying’ sensory data” (48). There is no potential for a non-normative descriptive project inside of these parameters; there is no neutral observation by the spectator, the filmic experience is one that is constructed internally. Neurocinematics notes that there are interactions between brain spheres (e.g. neocortex and the amygdala) that create an intersubjective experience (which is quantitatively described with the ISC), but to explain, even descriptively, what is occurring in these viewers requires determining what the audience “knows” and how the discursive impact of the film effects them neurologically. The field of neurocinematics is not morally neutral, though it insists on presenting itself that way. At its most basic level, the researchers are not separate from the ethical and ideological functions of their studies: they make normative claims about which films are “worthy” of study, they manufacture inter-subjective reality with their critical reactions to the artifacts, and their communicative reporting in the essay itself provides agency to the film while simultaneously denying agency to the viewers. Further, when neurocinematics is taken to its logical conclusion (the ability to manufacture the descriptively “perfect” film – one with a 100% ISC), the ethical concerns are overwhelming. With Hollywood films operating more and more as a part of the ideological state apparatus, the potential for highly effective propaganda films becomes more and more real, and more and more frightening. If the conclusions by these researchers is true, that these films “control” our mental states, then the power of such propaganda films could be devastating.ConclusionThis essay has argued that rhetorical scholars have not only a unique opportunity, but an ethical obligation, to insert ourselves into one of the most innovative inter-disciplinary fields to emerge in recent history. Neurocinematics has the potential to transform cognitive neuroscience and film studies both and it is imperative that rhetoricians insert themselves into this dialogue. First, the work that rhetorical studies has done on storytelling, narrative, and dramatism provides unique perspectives that have been overlooked by the structural models of film studies. Further, the scientists driving neurocinematics forward deny the need for political and value claims to be assessed to their work. Rhetorical studies has the opportunity to challenge these illusions of neutrality and help neuroscientists to understand that their work is, indeed, ideological, and that the dangers of ideology manifest themselves when these perspectives are pushed to the side under the guise of neutrality. ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. "The Storyteller." Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and others. Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. "Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility." Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burgchardt, Carl, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism. Third ed. State College: Strata Publishing, 2005. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945. Christoforou, Christoforos, Spyros Christou-Champi, Fofi Constantinidou, and Maria Theodorou. "From the Eyes and the Heart: A Novel Eye-Gaze Metric That Predicts Video Preferences of a Large Audience." Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-11. Cohen, Anna-Lisa, Elliot Shavalian, and Moshe Rube. "The Power of the Picture: How Narrative Film Captures Attention and Disrupts Goal Pursuit." PLoS ONE 10.12 (2015): 1-8. Erincin, Serap. "Dance in Translation: Subjectivity, Failed Spectatorship and Tolerance." Word & Text: A Journal of Literary Studies & Linguistics 2.2 (2012): 156-70. Fisher, Walter. "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument." Communication Monographs 51.1 (1984): 1-22. Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Third ed. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2002. Hasson, Uri, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger. "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film." Projections 2.1 (2008): 1-26. Kauttonen, Janne, Yevhen Hlushchuk, and Pia Tikka. "Optimizing Methods for Linking Cinematic Features to fMRI Data." NeuroImage 110 (2015): 136-48. Loschky, Lester C., Adam M. Larson, Joseph P. Magliano, and Tim J. Smith. "What Would Jaws Do? The Tyranny of Film and the Relationship between Gaze and Higher-Level Narrative Film Comprehension." PLoS ONE 10.11 (2015): 1-23. McKerrow, Raymie E. "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." Communication Monographs 56.2 (1989): 91. Overington, Michael A. "Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism." Theory & Society 4.1 (1977): 131. Stewart, Charles J., Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton Jr. Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1994. Wander, Philip C. "The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism." Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 1-18. Weber, René, J. Michael Mangus, and Richard Huskey. "Brain Imaging in Communication Research: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Evaluating fMRI Studies." Communication Methods & Measures 9.1/2 (2015): 5-29. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.

Herbal sedatives have been popular for several centuries, and the accumulated knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation laid the foundation for the development of traditional medicine, and over time for such a science as herbal medicine. Herbal sedatives have a wide range of therapeutic effects, are well tolerated and have no serious adverse reactions, and are not addictive. According to statistical data on the incidence of the population by main classes and individual diseases for 2010-2018, the number of patients with diseases of the nervous system is growing annually, along with this, the need for sedative drugs is increasing. In this regard, the search and development of effective and safe medicines based on medicinal plant raw materials is an urgent area [1, 2]. Pharmaceutical infusions and decoctions, according to the order of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation No. 751n dated October 26, 2015, have a shelf life of 2 days, which significantly limits the possibility of their use. The production of films based on aqueous extracts from medicinal plant raw materials will make it possible to obtain more stable drugs, in addition, films have a number of advantages over other dosage forms. Films containing biologically active substances of plant origin have received the unofficial name phytofilms, which are a type of transdermal therapeutic systems. Phytofilms are hydrophilic systems that swell when in contact with water (or biological fluid), absorbing it in a certain amount, which leads to the dissolution of biologically active substances. They differ from synthetic polymeric therapeutic systems in that phytofilms are made in the form of matrix transdermal therapeutic systems on carriers of natural origin (gelatin, collagen, sodium alginate, agar-agar, etc.), which makes them safer [3, 4].

Imagine John Smith, soon to be John Smith, Esquire. He has completed his last round of finals and is anxiously awaiting graduation from law school. In the time between finals and graduation, when many third-year law students are taking a brief mental vacation before bar exam preparation gets into full swing, John thinks he has found the ultimate loophole. John files a bankruptcy petition, which shows his non-existent current income, minimal assets, and education loans totaling over $100,000. Given John’s apparent insolvency, the court discharges his student loans so that John can have a fresh start and attempt to get back on his feet. John is pleased because he has a great job lined up for after graduation, and getting rid of this debt will make his life better. Luckily for the taxpayers who would then be responsible for John’s federally guaranteed student loans, Congress essentially eliminated such a possibility decades ago, and college students across the country can rest easy knowing that their loans will be fully intact upon graduation.

The latest development of the Internet has brought the world into our hands. Everything happens through internet from passing information to purchasing something. Internet made the world as small circle. This project is also based on internet. This paper shows the importance of chat application in day today life and its impact in technological world. This project is to develop a chat system based on Java multithreading and network concept. The application allows people to transfer messages both in private and public way .It also enables the feature of sharing resources like files, images, videos, etc.This online system is developed to interact or chat with one another on the Internet. It is much more reliable and secure than other traditional systems available. Java, multi threading and client-server concept were used to develop the web based chat application. This application is developed with proper architecture for future enhancement. It can be deployed in all private organizations like Colleges, IT parks, etc.

Absrtak: Tulisan ini merupakan kajian dalam menindaklanjuti saran dari hasil penelitian penulis, tentang perlunya perancangan dan pengembangan model prototipe Sistem Informasi Jabatan Fungsional Dosen berbasis web. Implementasi jabatan fungsional tersebut untuk memudahkan dalam menghitung angka kredit, memudahkan pemasukan dan pencarian data sehingga dapat menghasilkan informasi yang akurat, tepat, dan relevan. Penelitian ini menggunakan paradigma siklus hidup pengembangan sistem, meliputi tahapan pengumpulan data dengan observasi, wawancara dan studi pustaka; analisis dan perancangan sistem dengan star Unified Modeling Language (UML), relasi antar file, struktur file, struktur program, rancangan masukan, rancangan luaran, dan struktur menu dengan menggunakan pemograman PHP & database Mysql. Hasil penelitian ini yaitu adanya prototipe sistem jabatan fungsional yang dapat dimanfaatkan para dosen dalam memproses pengusulan dan perhitungan angka kredit secara mudah, cepat, dan efektif. Oleh karena itu perguruan tinggi (negeri/swasta) perlu mendorong pengembangan dan pemanfaatan Sistem Informasi tersebut. Begitu pula para dosen perlu membiasakan pemanfaatan Sistem Informasi berbasisweb dalam memudahkan mengimplementasikan jabatan fungsional dosen. Kata kunci : Dosen, Tridarma Perguruan Tinggi, Jabatan Fungsional Dosen.Abstract: This paper is a study to follow up the recommendation from the result of the writer’s research, which was about the importance of design and development of information system prototype of web based lecturer functional job. The implementation of functional job will facilitate the calculation of credit rate, ease the data entry and searching to bring about accurate, appropriate and relevant information. This research used life cyclus paradigm of system development which include data collection phase via observation, interview and literature study; system analysis and design using star Unified Modeling Language (UML), interrelation among files, file structure, program structure, input design, output design, and menu structure using PHP and database Mysql. This study resulted that there is a prototype of functional job system which can be used by lecturers to proceed the proposal and calculation of credit rate easily, fast, and effectively. That is why colleges (public/private ones) need to encourage the develepment and utilization of such information system. Similarly, lecturers need to familiarize the utilization of web based information system in order to facilitate the implementation of lecturer functional job. Keywords: Lecturer, College Tridarma, Lecturer Functional Job

There's a moment in Chasing Amy (Kevin Smith, US, 1997) when the character Banky Edwards defends his masculinity. He and childhood friend Holden McNeil are artists who work on a comic named Bluntman and Chronic; Holden produces the pencil drawings which Banky inks over and colours in. When confronted with the suggestion that all he does is tracing, Banky first defends himself, and then resorts to physical and verbal violence: "I'LL TRACE A CHALK LINE AROUND YOUR DEAD FUCKING BODY, YOU FUCK ... YOUR MOTHER'S A TRACER!" (Smith 182, 184). Banky is defending the work that he does, the art, from charges that it is an infantile activity, and the violence he engages in is the kind of behaviour associated with masculinity in general and groups of young single men in particular, who "usually [have] a delinquent character, including a penchant for gratuitous violence" (Remy 45). Kevin Smith's first three films, Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy, formed a loose sequence known as the New Jersey Trilogy, with each focussing on the relationship between a sensitive male and his girlfriend. The relationship is threatened by interaction with the male's crude best friend. The films appear to be romantic comedies, a genre whose usual narrative trajectory is a series of barriers to social union in the form of marriage; however, aside from the studio-backed Mallrats, Smith's films resist the closure typical of his chosen genre. In Clerks and Mallrats the relationship is threatened by a lack of college aspirations, which would lead to a job which could support a nuclear family. Smith is depicting members of the slacker generation(popularised if not coined by Richard Linklater's film) or Generation-X (a term of earlier origin but used by Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel), who would not immediately be associated with work. However, here the lack of a solid job seems to be a cause for angst rather than for a liberation from the tyranny of full-time employment, and on closer inspection the characters' sense of self-worth is tied to their relation to the realm of work. Despite consciousness raising by feminists, it has been argued that the heterosexual male is still expected be "the strong rock, the sexual performer, expected to always cope, not to collapse, expected to be chivalrous, to mend fuses and flat tyres, to make the moves in courtship, expected not to be passive or weepy or frightened, expected to go to war and be killed, or be prepared to kill others" (Horrocks 143). The man without work is cast adrift, still in search of an identity. Banky's work is clearly linked to his sense of self-identity, otherwise he would not feel the need to defend it. The sorts of pressure put upon the male characters by their girlfriends, especially in Clerks and Mallrats, are echoed in anecdotal research conducted by Michael Lee Cohen, a twenty-something who felt that there was more to his generation then simply drop outs from society. He argued that, although the generation which reached its twenties in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s is popularly thought of as a "dis-generation": "disenchanted, disenfranchised, disgruntled, disconnected, and disatisfied" (Cohen 3) as well as "disillusioned ... and frighteningly distrustful" (295), the truth was more complex. One interviewee described the pressure upon him as "Do well in school, do what the teachers say, get good grades, get out, get a boss, do what your boss says. And after thirty years you'll be a boss, and you'll be able to have kids and a car and a house and a lawn mower, and you'll die with an insurance policy that will provide for your kids' college education or their kids' or whatever" (224). This is equated by Cohen with the American Dream, an ideology which espouses concepts of freedom, both of movement and speech, of social mobility (upwards) and of second chances, but which can be boiled down to the need to consume disguised as the freedom to consume. To become a man is to enter into an order of consumption barely paid for by work. In his interviews, Cohen noted that few associated the American Dream with social justice, freedom or opportunity, but instead cited variations upon the materialistic "husband, wife, and a decimaled number of kids living in a nice house with a picket fence, two cars, and maybe a couple of dogs" (290). There remains the aspiration to the bourgeois nuclear family, despite this generation's experience of broken families. The males (and presumably females) are, to paraphrase Tyler Durden from Fight Club, a generation of males raised by women. Given their absent father, they are much less likely to have seen males acting as primary bread winners - especially when they have brought up by women, many of whom have had to work themselves. Furthermore the boom-bust cycle of economics over the last two decades and the explosion of commodity fetishism fed by ever increasing exposure to advertising produces a generation which aspires to owning material goods, but which often despairs of gaining employment which will pay for that consumerism. The New Jersey Trilogy focusses on members of just such uncertain men, men who are moving from the homosocial or fratriarchal bonds formed during school to the world of work and the pressure for a heterosexual bond. Fathers are absent from Smith's work, aside from Jared Svenning in Mallrats. (There are, on the other hand, mothers mentioned if not seen. An Oedipal analysis of Smith's characters would perhaps prove fruitful.) The sequence features men with no discernible job (Mallrats), dead end jobs (Clerks) and apparent dream jobs (Chasing Amy). Drawing comics for a living would appear to be a dream come true, but it has the unfortunate side effect of transforming leisure into work. Clearly work is not the only theme to be traced in the trilogy: the cases of fratriarchal bonds are illuminating for notions of masculinity, and I hope to publish my work on this elsewhere. Equally, despite the focus on male characters and their desire, the narrative comedicly undercuts masculinity in favour of the female characters, offering the space for a feminist interpretation. Smith is also concerned with depictions of race and homosexuality, and indeed of religious, particularly Catholic, belief. In the brief space available to me here I can only examine the theme of work. In Mallrats T S Quint and Brody Bruce go to the mall, not to shop, but to get away from their problems with respective girlfriends. T S is a student enmired in the ideological pressure of his heterosexual relationship. In contrast Brody has not got the kind of college ambitions that his girlfriend wishes him to have and still lives with his mother. Further, he has no visible means of support and seems unlikely to gain a job which will allow him to partake in the Dream. In addition, he and T S resist the work of consumerism, by window shopping rather than purchasing goods. This leads them into conflict with Shannon Hamilton, the manager of Fashionable Male, who hates mallrats for their lack of shopping agenda (cf. Fiske et al. and Fiske). With the addition of capital, the leisure time displayed in Mallrats could easily be transformed into work time. Whilst resisting being transformed into consumers, Brody and T S's winning back of their girlfriends (effectively as prizes in a tv quiz show) does place them within a bourgeois social order. Brody is rewarded with a career as a television host; given that this is on American television, it is likely that his work is in fact to deliver audiences to commercial breaks to provide the broadcaster's revenue (see Jhally). The central characters in Clerks work at neighbouring stores: Randal at a video rental store and Dante in a convenience store. Like Brody, Dante is expected to harbour college ambitions which would lift him out of this hell (his name is significant, and the script mentions that he has a copy of Inferno on his shelves [Smith 3]). Given their appearances in Clerks: The Animated Series (2000) and the cameos in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) it seems unlikely that they are going to escape from these jobs - which after all would only ultimately substitute one job for another. The despair Dante feels in his work defines his character. As a retailer, he is stuck in a node between goods and consumer, within sight of the items which are part of the home but perhaps unable to afford them. Furthermore he is held responsible for the goods' inability to grant the pleasure which consumption always promises: whether it be cigarettes or pornography. His friend Randall, despite being surrounded by videos at his place of work, will drive to another video store to rent his own: "I work in a shitty video store. I want to go to a good video store so I can rent a good movie" (97). In this way Randal can at least make some attempt to maintain the distinction between work and leisure, whereas Dante brings his Saturday hockey game to work and plays it on the roof of the convenience store. Finally, in this brief survey, in Chasing Amy Holden and Banky have managed to escape their family homes and have carved out a bachelor life together, having turned their comics hobby into a business. What borders on an art form is implicated in economics, especially when it is revealed that likeness rights need to be paid to the originals of their Bluntman and Chronic characters, Jay and Silent Bob. Especially when compared to the other comic producers - the black and gay Hooper and the lesbian Alyssa Jones - the duo are highly successful, having both a comfortable income and fratriarchal bonds. However two things destroy the friendship: Banky's desire to to sell the rights to an animated cartoon version of their creation and Holden's on-off relationship with Alyssa. In a seemingly calculated rejection of the romantic comedy framework, Smith has Holden fall out with his friend and fail to win the girl. Holden retreats from economic success, killing off the creation, preferring to produce a more personal, self-financed comic, Chasing Amy, an account of his affair with Alyssa. This appears to be a step away from being exploited, as he appropriates the means of production, but just as the bourgeoise family is constructed to support capitalism and requires the individual to work, so his stepping away from capitalism removes him from the bourgeois order of the family. In the New Jersey trilogy Smith depicts representatives of generation-X, who nevertheless relate to different kinds of work. Selling goods is obviously work, but it should also be clear that leisure is work by other means. Even in the moments when characters attempt to escape from the breadwinning that used to be central to masculinity, the results still define their character. Work still defines a male character's sense of identity and his position within the social order. References Cohen, Michael Lee. The Twenty-Something American Dream: A Cross-Country Quest For A Generation. New York: Plume, 1994. Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge, 1989. Fiske, John, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987. 95-116. Horrocks, Roger. Masculinity in Crisis. London: Macmillan, 1994. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. London: Routledge, 1990. Remy, John. "Patriarchy and Fratriarchy as Forms of Androcracy." Men, Masculinities and Social Theory. Jeff Hearn and David Morgan (Eds.), London: Unwin, 1990. 43-54. Smith, Kevin. Clerks & Chasing Amy. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Links http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/LEAD/genx.html http://uk.imdb.com/Title?0109445 http://uk.imdb.com/Title?0113749 http://uk.imdb.com/Title?0118842 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Butler, Andrew M.. "Work and Masculine Identity in Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Butler.xml >. Chicago Style Butler, Andrew M., "Work and Masculine Identity in Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Butler.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Butler, Andrew M.. (2001) Work and Masculine Identity in Kevin Smith's New Jersey Trilogy . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Butler.xml > ([your date of access]).

“I’m fat–and it’s okay! It doesn’t mean I’m stupid, or ugly, or lazy, or selfish. I’m fat!” so proclaims Joy Nash in her YouTube video, A Fat Rant. “Fat! It’s three little letters–what are you afraid of?!” This is the question I pose to my class on day one of Fat Studies. Sadly, many college students do fear fat, and negative attitudes toward fat people are quite prevalent in this population (Ambwani et al. 366). As I teach it, Fat Studies is cross-listed between Psychology and Gender Studies. However, most students who enrol have majors in Psychology or other behavioural health science fields in which weight bias is particularly pronounced (Watkins and Concepcion 159). Upon finding stronger bias among third- versus first-year Physical Education students, O’Brien, Hunter, and Banks (308) speculated that the weight-centric curriculum that typifies this field actively engenders anti-fat attitudes. Based on their exploration of textbook content, McHugh and Kasardo (621) contend that Psychology too is complicit in propagating weight bias by espousing weight-centric messages throughout the curriculum. Such messages include the concepts that higher body weight invariably leads to poor health, weight control is simply a matter of individual choice, and dieting is an effective means of losing weight and improving health (Tylka et al.). These weight-centric tenets are, however, highly contested. For instance, there exists a body of research so vast that it has its own name, the “obesity paradox” literature. This literature (McAuley and Blair 773) entails studies that show that “obese” persons with chronic disease have relatively better survival rates and that a substantial portion of “overweight” and “obese” individuals have levels of metabolic health similar to or better than “normal” weight individuals (e.g., Flegal et al. 71). Finally, the “obesity paradox” literature includes studies showing that cardiovascular fitness is a far better predictor of mortality than weight. In other words, individuals may be both fit and fat, or conversely, unfit and thin (Barry et al. 382). In addition, Tylka et al. review literature attesting to the complex causes of weight status that extend beyond individual behaviour, ranging from genetic predispositions to sociocultural factors beyond personal control. Lastly, reviews of research on dieting interventions show that these are overwhelmingly ineffective in producing lasting weight loss or actual improvements in health and may in fact lead to disordered eating and other unanticipated adverse consequences (e.g., Bacon and Aphramor; Mann et al. 220; Salas e79; Tylka et al.).The newfound, interdisciplinary field of scholarship known as Fat Studies aims to debunk weight-centric misconceptions by elucidating findings that counter these mainstream suppositions. Health At Every Size® (HAES), a weight-neutral approach to holistic well-being, is an important facet of Fat Studies. The HAES paradigm advocates intuitive eating and pleasurable physical activity for health rather than restrictive dieting and regimented exercise for weight loss. HAES further encourages body acceptance of self and others regardless of size. Empirical evidence shows that HAES-based interventions improve physical and psychological health without harmful side-effects or high dropout rates associated with weight loss interventions (Bacon and Aphramor; Clifford et al. “Impact of Non-Diet Approaches” 143). HAES, like the broader field of Fat Studies, seeks to eradicate weight-based discrimination, positioning weight bias as a social justice issue that intersects with oppression based on other areas of difference such as gender, race, and social class. Much like Queer Studies, Fat Studies seeks to reclaim the word, fat, thus stripping it of its pejorative connotations. As Nash asserts in her video, “Fat is a descriptive physical characteristic. It’s not an insult, or an obscenity, or a death sentence!” As an academic discipline, Fat Studies is expanding its visibility and reach. The Fat Studies Reader, the primary source of reading for my course, provides a comprehensive overview of the field (Rothblum and Solovay 1). This interdisciplinary anthology addresses fat history and activism, fat as social inequality, fat in healthcare, and fat in popular culture. Ward (937) reviews this and other recently-released fat-friendly texts. The field features its own journal, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, which publishes original research, overview articles, and reviews of assorted media. Both the Popular Culture Association and National Women’s Studies Association have special interest groups devoted to Fat Studies, and the American Psychological Association’s Division on the Psychology of Women has recently formed a task force on sizism (Bergen and Carrizales 22). Furthermore, Fat Studies conferences have been held in Australia and New Zealand, and the third annual Weight Stigma Conference will occur in Iceland, September 2015. Although the latter conference is not necessarily limited to those who align themselves with Fat Studies, keynote speakers include Ragen Chastain, a well-known member of the fat acceptance movement largely via her blog, Dances with Fat. The theme of this year’s conference, “Institutionalised Weightism: How to Challenge Oppressive Systems,” is consistent with Fat Studies precepts:This year’s theme focuses on the larger social hierarchies that favour thinness and reject fatness within western culture and how these systems have dictated the framing of fatness within the media, medicine, academia and our own identities. What can be done to oppose systemised oppression? What can be learned from the fight for social justice and equality within other arenas? Can research and activism be united to challenge prevailing ideas about fat bodies?Concomitantly, Fat Studies courses have begun to appear on college campuses. Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer (180) identified and described four Fat Studies and two HAES courses that were being taught in the U.S. and abroad as of 2012. Since then, a Fat Studies course has been taught online at West Virginia University and another will soon be offered at Washington State University. Additionally, a new HAES class has been taught at Saint Mary’s College of California during the last two academic years. Cameron (“Toward a Fat Pedagogy” 28) describes ways in which nearly 30 instructors from five different countries have incorporated fat studies pedagogy into university courses across an array of academic areas. This growing trend is manifested in The Fat Pedagogy Reader (Russell and Cameron) due out later this year. In this article, I describe content and pedagogical strategies that I use in my Fat Studies course. I then share students’ qualitative reactions, drawing upon excerpts from written assignments. During the term reported here, the class was comprised of 17 undergraduate and 5 graduate students. Undergraduate majors included 47% in Psychology, 24% in Women Studies, 24% in various other College of Liberal Arts fields, and 6% in the College of Public Health. Graduate majors included 40% in the College of Public Health and 60% in the College of Education. Following submission of final grades, students provided consent via email allowing written responses on assignments to be anonymously incorporated into research reports. Assignments drawn upon for this report include weekly reading reactions to specific journal articles in which students were to summarise the main points, identify and discuss a specific quote or passage that stood out to them, and consider and discuss applicability of the information in the article. This report also utilises responses to a final assignment in which students were to articulate take-home lessons from the course.Despite the catalogue description, many students enter Fat Studies with a misunderstanding of what the course entails. Some admitted that they thought the course was about reducing obesity and the presumed health risks associated with this alleged pathological condition (Watkins). Others understood, but were somewhat dubious, at least at the outset, “Before I began this class, I admit that I was skeptical of what Fat Studies meant.” Another student experienced “a severe cognitive dissonance” between the Fat Studies curriculum and that of a previous behavioural health class:My professor spent the entire quarter spouting off statistics, such as the next generation of children will be the first generation to have a lower life expectancy than their parents and the ever increasing obesity rates that are putting such a tax on our health care system, and I took her words to heart. I was scared for myself and for the populations I would soon be working with. I was worried that I was destined to a chronic disease and bothered that my BMI was two points above ‘normal.’ I believed everything my professor alluded to on the danger of obesity because it was things I had heard in the media and was led to believe all my life.Yet another related, “At first, I will be honest, it was hard for me to accept a lot of this information, but throughout the term every class changed my mind about my view of fat people.” A few students have voiced even greater initial resistance. During a past term, one student lamented that the material represented an attack on her intended behavioural health profession. Cameron (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) describes comparable reactions among students in her Critical Obesity course taught within a behavioural health science unit. Ward (937) attests that, even in Gender Studies, fat is the topic that creates the most controversy. Similarly, she describes students’ immense discomfort when asked to entertain perspectives that challenge deeply engrained ideas inculcated by our culture’s “obesity epidemic.” Discomfort, however, is not necessarily antithetical to learning. In prompting students to unlearn “the biomedically-informed truth of obesity, namely that fat people are unfit, unhealthy, and in need of ‘saving’ through expert interventions,” Moola at al. recommend equipping them with an “ethics of discomfort” (217). No easy task, “It requires courage to ask our students to forgo the security of prescriptive health messaging in favour of confusion and uncertainty” (221). I encourage students to entertain conflicting perspectives by assigning empirically-based articles emanating from peer-reviewed journals in their own disciplines that challenge mainstream discourses on obesity (e.g., Aphramor; Bombak e60; Tomiyama, Ahlstrom, and Mann 861). Students whose training is steeped in the scientific method seem to appreciate having quantitative data at their disposal to convince themselves–and their peers and professors–that widely held weight-centric beliefs and practices may not be valid. One student remarked, “Since I have taken this course, I feel like I am prepared to discuss the fallacy of the weight-health relationship,” citing specific articles that would aid in the effort. Likewise, Cameron’s (“Learning to Teach Everybody”) students reported a need to read research reports in order to begin questioning long-held beliefs.In addition, I assign readings that provide students with the opportunity to hear the voices of fat people themselves, a cornerstone of Fat Studies. Besides chapters in The Fat Studies Reader authored by scholars and activists who identify as fat, I assign qualitative articles (e.g., Lewis et al.) and narrative reports (e.g., Pause 42) in which fat people describe their experiences with weight and weight bias. Additionally, I provide positive images of fat people via films and websites (Clifford et al. HAES®; Watkins; Watkins and Doyle-Hugmeyer 177) in order to counteract the preponderance of negative, dehumanising portrayals in popular media (e.g., Ata and Thompson 41). In response, a student stated:One of the biggest things I took away from this term was the confidence I found in fat women through films and stories. They had more confidence than I have seen in any tiny girl and owned the body they were given.I introduce “normal” weight allies as well, most especially Linda Bacon whose treatise on thin privilege tends to set the stage for viewing weight bias as a form of oppression (Bacon). One student observed, “It was a relief to be able to read and talk about weight oppression in a classroom setting for once.” Another appreciated that “The class did a great job at analysing fat as oppression and not like a secondhand oppression as I have seen in my past classes.” Typically, fat students were already aware of weight-based privilege and oppression, often painfully so. Thinner students, however, were often astonished by this concept, several describing Bacon’s article as “eye-opening.” In reaction, many vowed to act as allies:This class has really opened my eyes and prepared me to be an ally to fat people. It will be difficult for some time while I try to get others to understand my point of view on fat people but I believe once there are enough allies, people’s minds will really start changing and it will benefit everyone for the better.Pedagogically, I choose to share my own experiences as they relate to course content and encourage students, at least in their written assignments, to do the same. Other instructors refrain from this practice for fear of reinforcing traditional discourses or eliciting detrimental reactions from students (Watkins, Farrell, and Doyle-Hugmeyer 191). Nevertheless, this tack seems to work well in my course, with many students opting to disclose their relevant circumstances during classroom discussions: Throughout the term I very much valued and appreciated when classmates would share their experiences. I love listening and hearing to others experiences and I think that is a great way to understand the material and learn from one another.It really helped to read different articles and hear classmates discuss and share stories that I was able to relate to. The idea of hearing people talk about issues that I thought I was the only one who dealt with was so refreshing and enlightening.The structure of this class allowed me to learn how this information is applicable to my life and made it deeper than just memorising information.Thus far, across three terms, no student has described iatrogenic effects from this process. In fact, most attribute positive transformations to the class. These include enhanced body acceptance of self and others: This class decreased my fat phobia towards others and gave me a better understanding about the intersectionality of one’s weight. For example, I now feel that I no longer view my family in a fat phobic way and I also feel responsible for educating my brother and helping him develop a strong self-esteem regardless of his size.I never thought this class would change my life, almost save my life. Through studies shown in class and real life people following their dreams, it made my mind completely change about how I view my body and myself.I can only hope that in the future, I will be more forgiving, tolerant, and above all accepting of myself, much less others. Regardless of a person’s shape and size, we are all beautiful, and while I’m just beginning to understand this, it can only get better from here.Students also reported becoming more savvy consumers of weight-centric media messages as well as realigning their eating and exercise behaviour in accordance with HAES: I find myself disgusted at the television now, especially with the amount of diet ads, fitness club ads, and exercise equipment ads all aimed at making a ‘better you.’ I now know that I would never be better off with a SlimFast shake, P90X, or a Total Gym. I would be better off eating when I’m hungry, working out because it is fun, and still eating Thin Mints when I want to. Prior to this class, I would work out rigorously, running seven miles a day. Now I realise why at times I dreaded to work out, it was simply a mathematical system to burn the energy that I had acquired earlier in the day. Instead what I realise I should do is something I enjoy, that way I will never get tired of whatever I am doing. While I do enjoy running, other activities would bring more joy while engaging in a healthy lifestyle like hiking or mountain biking.I will never go on another diet. I will stop choosing exercises I don’t love to do. I will not weigh myself every single day hoping for the number on the scale to change.A reduction in self-weighing was perhaps the most frequent behaviour change that students expressed. This is particularly valuable in that frequent self-weighing is associated with disordered eating and unhealthy weight control behaviours (Neumark-Sztainer et al. 811):I have realised that the number on the scale is simply a number on the scale. That number does not define who you are. I have stopped weighing myself every morning. I put the scale in the storage closet so I don’t have to look at it. I even encouraged my roommate to stop weighing herself too. What has been most beneficial for me to take away from this class is the notion that the number on the scale has so much less to do with fitness levels than most people understand. Coming from a numbers obsessed person like myself, this class has actually gotten me to leave the scales behind. I used to weigh myself every single day and my self-confidence reflected whether I was up or down in weight from the day before. It seems so silly to me now. From this class, I take away a new outlook on body diversity. I will evaluate who I am for what I do and not represent myself with a number. I’m going to have my cake this time, and actually eat it too!Finally, students described ways in which they might carry the concepts from Fat Studies into their future professions: I want to go to law school. This model is something I will work toward in the fight for social justice.As a teacher and teacher of teachers, I plan to incorporate discussions on size diversity and how this should be addressed within the field of adapted physical education.I do not know how I would have gone forward if I had never taken this class. I probably would have continued to use weight loss as an effective measure of success for both nutrition and physical activity interventions. I will never be able to think about the obesity prevention movement in the same way.Since I am working toward being a clinical psychologist, I don’t want to have a client who is pursuing weight loss and then blindly believe that they need to lose weight. I’d rather be of the mindset that every person is unique, and that there are other markers of health at every size.Jones and Hughes-Decatur (59) call for increased scholarship illustrating and evaluating critical body pedagogies so that teachers might provide students with tools to critique dominant discourses, helping them forge healthy relationships with their own bodies in the process. As such, this paper describes elements of a Fat Studies class that other instructors may choose to adopt. It additionally presents qualitative data suggesting that students came to think about fat and fat people in new and divergent ways. Qualitative responses also suggest that students developed better body image and more adaptive eating and exercise behaviours throughout the term. Although no students have yet described lasting adverse effects from the class, one stated that she would have preferred less of a focus on health and more of a focus on issues such as fat fashion. Indeed, some Fat Studies scholars (e.g., Lee) advocate separating discussions of weight bias from discussions of health status to avoid stigmatising fat people who do experience health problems. While concerns about fostering healthism within the fat acceptance movement are valid, as a behavioural health professional with an audience of students training in these fields, I have chosen to devote three weeks of our ten week term to this subject matter. Depending on their academic background, others who teach Fat Studies may choose to emphasise different aspects such as media representations or historical connotations of fat.Nevertheless, the preponderance of positive comments evidenced throughout students’ assignments may certainly be a function of social desirability. Although I explicitly invite critique, and in fact assign readings (e.g., Welsh 33) and present media that question HAES and Fat Studies concepts, students may still feel obliged to articulate acceptance of and transformations consistent with the principles of these movements. As a more objective assessment of student outcomes, I am currently conducting a quantitative evaluation, in which I remain blind to students’ identities, of this year’s Fat Studies course compared to other upper division/graduate Psychology courses, examining potential changes in weight bias, body image and dieting behaviour, adherence to appearance-related media messages, and obligatory exercise behaviour. I postulate results akin to those of Humphrey, Clifford, and Neyman Morris (143) who found reductions in weight bias, improved body image, and improved eating behaviour among college students as a function of their HAES course. As Fat Studies pedagogy proliferates, instructors are called upon to share their teaching strategies, document the effects, and communicate these results within and outside of academic spheres.ReferencesAmbwani, Suman, Katherine M. Thomas, Christopher J. Hopwood, Sara A. Moss, and Carlos M. Grilo. “Obesity Stigmatization as the Status Quo: Structural Considerations and Prevalence among Young Adults in the U.S.” Eating Behaviors 15.3 (2014): 366-370. Aphramor, Lucy. “Validity of Claims Made in Weight Management Research: A Narrative Review of Dietetic Articles.” Nutrition Journal 9 (2010): n. pag. 15 May 2015 ‹http://www.nutritionj.com/content/9/1/30›.Ata, Rheanna M., and J. 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New York: New York University Press, 2009.Russell, Connie, and Erin Cameron, eds. The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Salas, Ximena Ramos. “The Ineffectiveness and Unintended Consequences of the Public Health War on Obesity.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 106.2 (2015): e79-e81. Tomiyama, A. Janet, Britt Ahlstrom, and Traci Mann. “Long-Term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7.12 (2013): 861-877.Tylka, Tracy L., Rachel A. Annunziato, Deb Burgard, Sigrun Daníelsdóttir, Ellen Shuman, Chad Davis, and Rachel M. Calogero. “The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss.” Journal of Obesity (2014). 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/›.Ward, Anna E. “The Future of Fat.” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 937-947.Watkins, Patti Lou. “Inclusion of Fat Studies in a Difference, Power, and Discrimination Curriculum.” The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging Weight-Based Oppression in Education. Eds. Erin Cameron and Connie Russell. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, in press. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Rebecca Y. Concepcion. “Teaching HAES to Health Care Students and Professionals.” Wellness Not Weight: Motivational Interviewing and a Non-Diet Approach. Ed. Ellen Glovsky. San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2014: 159-169. Watkins, Patti Lou, and Andrea Doyle-Hugmeyer. “Teaching about Eating Disorders from a Fat Studies Perspective. Transformations 23.2 (2013): 147-158. Watkins, Patti Lou, Amy E. Farrell, and Andrea Doyle Hugmeyer. “Teaching Fat Studies: From Conception to Reception. Fat Studies 1.2 (2012): 180-194. Welsh, Taila L. “Healthism and the Bodies of Women: Pleasure and Discipline in the War against Obesity.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 1 (2011): 33-48. Weight Stigma Conference. 23 Apr. 2015 ‹http://stigmaconference.com/›.

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).

“What is the point of stories in such a moment”, asks author and critic James Bradley, writing about climate extinction: Bradley emphasises that “climatologist James Hansen once said being a climate scientist was like screaming at people from behind a soundproof glass wall; being a writer concerned with these questions often feels frighteningly similar” (“Writing”). If the impact of climate change asks humans to think differently, to imagine differently, then surely writing—and reading—must change too? According to writer and geographer Samuel Miller-McDonald, “if you’re a writer, then you have to write about this”. But how are we to do that? Where might it be done already? Perhaps not in traditional (or even post-) Modernist modes. In the era of the Anthropocene I find myself turning to non-traditional, un-real models to write the slow violence and read the deep time that is where we can see our current climate catastrophe.At a “Writing in the Age of Extinction” workshop earlier this year Bradley and Jane Rawson advocated changing the language of “climate change”—rejecting such neutral terms—in the same way that I see the stories discussed here pushing against Modernity’s great narrative of progress.My research—as a reader and writer, is in the fantastic realm of speculative fiction; I have written in The Conversation about how this genre seems to be gaining literary popularity. There is no doubt that our current climate crisis has a part to play. As Margaret Atwood writes: “it’s not climate change, it’s everything change” (“Climate”). This “everything” must include literature. Kim Stanley Robinson is not the only one who sees “the models modern literary fiction has are so depleted, what they’re turning to now is our guys in disguise”. I am interested in two recent examples, which both use the strongly genre-associated time-travel trope, to consider how science-fiction concepts might work to re-imagine our “deranged” world (Ghosh), whether applied by genre writers or “our guys in disguise”. Can stories such as The Heavens by Sandra Newman and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang—which apply time travel, whether as an expression of fatalism or free will—help us conceive the current collapse: understand how it has come to pass, and imagine ways we might move through it?The Popularity of Time TravelIt seems to me that time as a notion and the narrative device, is key to any idea of writing through climate change. “Through” as in via, if the highly contested “cli-fi” category is considered a theme; and “through” as entering into and coming out the other side of this ecological end-game. Might time travel offer readers more than the realist perspective of sweeping multi-generational sagas? Time-travel books pose puzzles; they are well suited to “wicked” problems. Time-travel tales are designed to analyse the world in a way that it is not usually analysed—in accordance with Tim Parks’s criterion for great novels (Walton), and in keeping with Darko Suvin’s conception of science fiction as a literature of “cognitive estrangement”. To read, and write, a character who travels in “spacetime” asks something more of us than the emotional engagement of many Modernist tales of interiority—whether they belong to the new “literary middlebrow’” (Driscoll), or China Miéville’s Booker Prize–winning realist “litfic” (Crown).Sometimes, it is true, they ask too much, and do not answer enough. But what resolution is possible is realistic, in the context of this literally existential threat?There are many recent and recommended time-travel novels: Kate Atkinson’s 2013 Life after Life and Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2014 End of Days have main characters who are continually “reset”, exploring the idea of righting history—the more literary experiment concluding less optimistically. For Erpenbeck “only the inevitable is possible”. In her New York Times review Francine Prose likens Life after Life to writing itself: “Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final”. Andrew Sean Greer’s 2013 The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells also centres on the WorldWar(s), a natural-enough site to imagine divergent timelines, though he draws a different parallel. In Elan Mastai’s 2017 debut All Our Wrong Todays the reality that is remembered—though ultimately not missed, is more dystopic than our own time, as is also the way with Joyce Carol Oates’s 2018 The Hazards of Time Travel. Oates’s rather slight contribution to the subgenre still makes a clear point: “America is founded upon amnesia” (Oates, Hazards). So, too, is our current environment. We are living in a time created by a previous generation; the environmental consequence of our own actions will not be felt until after we are gone. What better way to write such a riddle than through the loop of time travel?The Purpose of Thought ExperimentsThis list is not meant to be comprehensive. It is an indication of the increasing literary application of the “elaborate thought experiment” of time travel (Oates, “Science Fiction”). These fictional explorations, their political and philosophical considerations, are currently popular and potentially productive in a context where action is essential, and yet practically impossible. What can I do? What could possibly be the point? As well as characters that travel backwards, or forwards in time, these titles introduce visionaries who tell of other worlds. They re-present “not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind”: Margaret Atwood’s “Ustopias” (Atwood, “Road”). Incorporating both utopian and dystopian aspects, they (re)present our own time, in all its contradictory (un)reality.The once-novel, now-generic “novum” of time travel has become a metaphor—the best possible metaphor, I believe, for the climatic consequence of our in/action—in line with Joanna Russ’s wonderful conception of “The Wearing out of Genre Materials”. The new marvel first introduced by popular writers has been assimilated, adopted or “stolen” by the dominant mode. In this case, literary fiction. Angela Carter is not the only one to hope “the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode”. This must be what Robinson expects: that Ken Gelder’s “big L” literature will be unable to contain the wine of “our guys”—even if it isn’t new. In the act of re-use, the time-travel cliché is remade anew.Two Cases to ConsiderTwo texts today seem to me to realise—in both senses of that word—the possibilities of the currently popular, but actually ancient, time-travel conceit. At the Melbourne Writers Festival last year Ted Chiang identified the oracle in The Odyssey as the first time traveller: they—the blind prophet Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years—have seen the future and report back in the form of prophecy. Chiang’s most recent short story, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”, and Newman’s novel The Heavens, both of which came out this year, are original variations on this re-newed theme. Rather than a coherent, consistent, central character who travels and returns to their own time, these stories’ protagonists appear diversified in/between alternate worlds. These texts provide readers not with only one possible alternative but—via their creative application of the idea of temporal divergence—myriad alternatives within the same story. These works use the “characteristic gesture” of science fiction (Le Guin, “Le Guin Talks”), to inspire different, subversive, ways of thinking and seeing our own one-world experiment. The existential speculation of time-travel tropes is, today, more relevant than ever: how should we act when our actions may have no—or no positive, only negative—effect?Time and space travel are classic science fiction concerns. Chiang’s lecture unpacked how the philosophy of time travel speaks uniquely to questions of free will. A number of his stories explore this theme, including “The Alchemist’s Gate” (which the lecture was named after), where he makes his thinking clear: “past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully” (Chiang, Exhalation). In “Story of Your Life”, the novella that the film Arrival is based on, Chiang’s main character-narrator embraces a future that could be seen as dystopic while her partner walks away from it—and her, and his daughter—despite the happiness they will offer. Gary cannot accept the inevitable unhappiness that must accompany them. The suggestion is that if he had had Louise’s foreknowledge he might, like the free-willing protagonist in Looper, have taken steps to ensure that that life—that his daughter’s life itself—never eventuated. Whether he would have been successful is suspect: according to Chiang free will cannot foil fate.If the future cannot be changed, what is the role of free will? Louise wonders: “what if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?” In his “story notes” Chiang says inspiration came from variational principles in physics (Chiang, Stories); I see the influence of climate calamity. Knowing the future must change us—how can it not evoke “a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation”? Even if events play out precisely as we know they will. In his talk Chiang differentiated between time-travel films which favour free will, like Looper, and those that conclude fatalistically, such as Twelve Monkeys. “Story of Your Life” explores the idea that these categories are not mutually exclusive: exercising free will might not change fate; fatalism may not preclude acts of free will.Utopic Free Will vs. Dystopic Fate?Newman’s latest novel is more obviously dystopic: the world in The Heavens is worse each time Kate wakes from her dreams of the past. In the end it has become positively post-apocalyptic. The overwhelming sadness of this book is one of its most unusual aspects, going far beyond that of The Time Traveler’s Wife—2003’s popular tale of love and loss. The Heavens feels fatalistic, even though its future is—unfortunately, in this instance—not set but continually altered by the main character’s attempts to “fix” it (in each sense of the word). Where Twelve Monkeys, Looper, and The Odyssey present every action as a foregone conclusion, The Heavens navigates the nightmare that—against our will—everything we do might have an adverse consequence. As in A Christmas Carol, where the vision of a possible future prompts the protagonist to change his ways and so prevent its coming to pass, it is Kate’s foresight—of our future—which inspires her to act. History doesn’t respond well to Kate’s interventions; she is unable to “correct” events and left more and more isolated by her own unique version of a tortuous Cassandra complex.These largely inexplicable consequences provide a direct connection between Newman’s latest work and James Tiptree Jr.’s 1972 “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket”. That tale’s conclusion makes no “real” sense either—when Dovy dies Loolie’s father’s advisers can only say that (time) paradoxes are proliferating—but The Heavens is not the intellectual play of Tiptree’s classic science fiction: the wine of time-travel has been poured into the “depleted” vessel of “big L” literature. The sorrow that seeps through this novel is profound; Newman apologises for it in her acknowledgements, linking it to the death of an ex-partner. I read it as a potent expression of “solastalgia”: nostalgia for a place that once provided solace, but doesn’t any more—a term coined by Australian philosopher Glen Albrecht to express the “psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change” (Albrecht et al.). It is Kate’s grief, for a world (she has) destroyed that drives her mad: “deranged”.The Serious Side of SpeculationIn The Great Derangement Ghosh laments the “smaller shadow” cast by climate change in the landscape of literary fiction. He echoes Miéville: “fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals; the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or short story to the genre of science fiction” (Ghosh). Time-travel tales that pose the kind of questions handled by theologians before the Enlightenment and “big L” literature after—what does it mean to exist in time? How should we live? Who deserves to be happy?—may be a way for literary fiction to take climate change “seriously”: to write through it. Out-of-time narratives such as Chiang and Newman’s pose existential speculations that, rather than locating us in time, may help us imagine time itself differently. How are we to act if the future has already come to pass?“When we are faced with a world whose problems all seem ‘wicked’ and intractable, what is it that fiction can do?” (Uhlmann). At the very least, should writers not be working with “sombre realism”? Science fiction has a long and established tradition of exposing the background narratives of the political—and ecological—landscapes in which we work: the master narratives of Modernism. What Anthony Uhlmann describes here, as the “distancing technique” of fiction becomes outright “estrangement” in speculative hands. Stories such as Newman and Chiang’s reflect (on) what readers might be avoiding: that even though our future is fixed, we must act. We must behave as though our decisions matter, despite knowing the ways in which they do not.These works challenge Modernist concerns despite—or perhaps via—satisfying genre conventions, in direct contradiction to Roy Scranton’s conviction that “Narrative in the Anthropocene Is the Enemy”. In doing so they fit Miéville’s description of a “literature of estrangement” while also exemplifying a new, Anthropocene “literature of recognition” (Crown). These, then, are the stories of our life.What Is Not ExpectedChiang’s 2018 lecture was actually a PowerPoint presentation on how time travel could or would “really” work. His medium, as much as his message, clearly showed the author’s cross-disciplinary affiliations, which are relevant to this discussion of literary fiction’s “depleted” models. In August this year Xu Xi concluded a lecture on speculative fiction for the Vermont College of Fine Arts by encouraging attendees to read—and write—“other” languages, whether foreign forms or alien disciplines. She cited Chiang as someone who successfully raids the riches of non-literary traditions, to produce a new kind of literature. Writing that deals in physics, as much as characters, in philosophy, as much as narrative, presents new, “post-natural” (Bradley, “End”) retro-speculations that (in un- and super-natural generic traditions) offer a real alternative to Modernism’s narrative of inevitable—and inevitably positive—progress.In “What’s Expected of Us” Chiang imagines the possible consequence of comprehending that our actions, and not just their consequence, are predetermined. In what Oates describes as his distinctive, pared-back, “unironic” style (Oates, “Science Fiction”), Chiang concludes: “reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilisation now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has”. The self-deception we need is not America’s amnesia, but the belief that what we do matters.ConclusionThe visions of her “paraself” that Nat sees in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” encourage her to change her behaviour. The “prism” that enables this perception—a kind of time-tripped iPad that “skypes” alternate temporal realities, activated by people acting in different ways at a crucial moment in their lives—does not always reflect the butterfly effect the protagonist, or reader, might expect. Some actions have dramatic consequences while others have minimal impact. While Nat does not see her future, what she spies inspires her to take the first steps towards becoming a different—read “better”—person. We expect this will lead to more positive outcomes for her self in the story’s “first” world. The device, and Chiang’s tale, illustrates both that our paths are predetermined and that they are not: “our inability to predict the consequences of our own predetermined actions offers a kind of freedom”. The freedom to act, freedom from the coma of inaction.“What’s the use of art on a dying planet? What’s the point, when humanity itself is facing an existential threat?” Alison Croggon asks, and answers herself: “it searches for the complex truth … . It can help us to see the world we have more clearly, and help us to imagine a better one”. In literary thought experiments like Newman and Chiang’s artful time-travel fictions we read complex, metaphoric truths that cannot be put into real(ist) words. In the time-honoured tradition of (speculative) fiction, Chiang and Newman deal in, and with, “what cannot be said in words … in words” (Le Guin, “Introduction”). These most recent time-slip speculations tell unpredictable stories about what is predicted, what is predictable, but what we must (still) believe may not necessarily be—if we are to be free.ReferencesArrival. Dir. Dennis Villeneuve. Paramount Pictures, 2016.Albrecht, Glenn, et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry (Feb. 2007): 41–55. 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