Journal articles on the topic 'Design Review Based on Failure Mode: Sidecars'

Background: Error rate in medical laboratories is very low. Only one error is identified every 330–1,000 events. The goal of laboratory services should outweigh patient safety in a well-structured manner. Healthcare Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (HFMEA) is a proactive preventive method for identifying and evaluating potential failure.Aims: This study identified factors affecting patient safety in hospital laboratories and described potential risk identification process using the HFMEA.Methods: This study was conducted between March-July 2020 and retrieved data from PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The data were generalized and extracted into Table 2 based on factors dealing with patient safety in hospital laboratories. This study performed a risk identification design based on the steps of HFMEA.Results: Out of 4,062 articles collected, only 8 articles between 2013–2020 were included for analysis. The highest error rate in laboratories occurred in the pre-analytic phase (49.2%–84.5%). The errors included clotted and inadequate specimen volume, and thus the specimens were rejected. Factors related to patient safety in laboratories were patient condition, laboratory staff performance (including training, negligence, and burnout), facilities, and accreditation.Conclusion: The HFMEA process used the result of hazard analysis with severity and probability criteria categorized into health sector. Decision tree analysis could determine the next step of the work process. The HFMEA must be adjusted to the equipment and technologies in each hospital laboratory. Leader’s commitment in monitoring and evaluation is required to maintain patient safety culture. More comprehensive data from Indonesian hospital laboratories are needed to generate more representative and applicable results.Keywords: error, HFMEA, laboratory, patient safety

Dr. Heki Shibata, Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, who authored this paper, is a pioneer in earthquake engineering in Japan and the leading expert in mechanical engineering and seismic design of involving pressure vessels and piping equipment of nuclear power plants and high-pressure gas plants. In this paper, he classifies and analyzes mode failures and failure mechanisms in a variety of equipment based on his experience in surveying the damage to industrial facilities caused by the 1964 Niigata Earthquake and the 1971 San Fernando Earthquake. He proposes introducing the "factor of importance" based on potential of danger in seismic design, developing basic seismic design calculating the maximum response of a structure using seismic coefficients including those defined using this factor of importance. This idea has been effectively implemented as the basis for seismic design of structures and equipment to this day, and its historical value has been proven. He points out the importance of the reliability of seismic design and the safe design of instrumentation and control in seismic design. Dr. Shibata emphasizes the importance of learning the lessons presented by the damage experienced in earthquakes, the 1995 Kobe Earthquake - yet another example of his invaluable foresight.

The latent problem in the design stage involves unnoticed problems or misunderstood causes of failures. The unnoticed problem can be visualized by the process of the System DRBFM (Design Review Based on Failure Mode) that takes into account the hierarchical structure of products. The misunderstood problems are also visualized by the question by a professional adviser in which involves his important aspects when considers the problems. Afterwards, the contents of the found problems are used to improve Attention in operation, which is the check list of questions, corresponding to the considered failures, that should be asked to designers in next case. The System DRBFM can be regarded as a proactive prevention system by professional adviser, design regulation and attention in operation. This paper proposes an additional function for the System DRBFM. That is an OJT (On-the-Job Training) tool that the professional adviser educates a designer who took misunderstood or unnoticed mistakes in order to timely acquire his lacked knowledge and experiences. To present the effectiveness of this concept, the case study of the design change in a hair drier is illustrated. The application can intelligibly demonstrate the effectiveness of the System DRBFM.

Digital distributed instrumentation and control system (DCS) is critical to the safety of nuclear power plants (NPPs). Static analysis methods developed from analog control system are not applicable to DCS due to its enhanced dynamic interactions and complex structure of hardware/software/firmware. The enhanced dynamic interactions of DCS include both sequence and timing factors, which are hardly modelled in the traditional Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA). In this study, dynamic FMEA (DFMEA) method based on simulation technology is put forward for the design and review of DCS in NPP. DFMEA based on real DCS hardware and software is developed to reveal the dynamic failure paths and failure modes. The results of DFMEA can well support the establishment of the dynamic fault tree/event tree in the review of NPP DCS, which reduces the dependency on the analyst’s experience significantly.

Abstract This paper shares a vision that sustainable water supply requires resilient water infrastructures which are presumably in the centralized control and decentralized execution (CCDE) mode with multiscale resilience. The CCDE should be planned based on the multiscale structure of water infrastructures, in which the systems are divided into a number of hierarchically organized subsystems. The CCDE allows independent execution of all subsystems under normal situations yet coordination of subsystems at different scales to mitigate any disturbances during failure events, i.e. the multiscale resilience. This vision is discussed in detail for water distribution systems (WDSs). Specifically, the conceptual design of the multiscale CCDE is described, and progress on understanding the multiscale structures in WDSs is summarized based on the literature review. Furthermore, a few theories consistent with the multiscale CCDE concept are discussed which include the decomposition theorems, fractal theory, control theories, and complex network theory. The next step in the vision will be to identify the optimal multiscale structure for the CCDE based on the best trade-off of different goals of WDS analysis and management. This process needs support from not only innovative modelling tools and extensive datasets and theories but also inspiring exemplar systems, e.g. natural systems.

Alternating current (AC) microgrids are the next step in the evolution of the electricity distribution systems. They can operate in a grid-tied or island mode. Depending on the services they are designed to offer, their grid-tied or island modes could have several sub-operational states and or topological configurations. Short-circuit current levels and protection requirements between different microgrid modes and configurations can vary significantly. Designing a microgrid’s protection system, therefore, requires a thorough understanding of all microgrid operational modes, configurations, transitional states, and how transitions between those modes are managed. As part of the microgrid protection design, speed and reliability of information flow between the microprocessor-based relays and the microgrid controller, including during microgrid failure modes, must be considered. Furthermore, utility protection practices and customer requirements are not always inclusive of the protection schemes that are unique to microgrids. These and other aspects contribute to the overall complexity and challenge of designing effective microgrid protection systems. Following a review of microgrid protection system design challenges, this paper discusses a few real-world experiences, based on the authors’ own engineering, design, and field experience, in using several approaches to address microgrid protection system design, engineering, and implementation challenges.

This paper focuses on the effect of the transverse reinforcement in concrete poles and its influence on torsional strength in an effort to simplify the governing Canadian prestressed concrete pole code (CSA A14-07). The rationale behind the CSA code values for amount, spacing, and direction of the transverse reinforcement is not apparent. A testing program consisting of 14 concrete pole specimens were produced to investigate the torsional response. The specimens were divided into two groups with different tip diameters. Within each group the spacing and direction of the wound helical transverse reinforcement varied. Experimental cracking torque values were compared with calculated theoretical cracking torques from ACI 318, Eurocode 2, and various journal articles. The theoretical predictions were generally unconservative. Post-cracking behaviour was modelled using the Compression Field Theory (CFT) and Softened Truss Model (STM) for torsion. It was found that the CFT predicts the post-cracking response with reasonable accuracy. The failure mode in pure torsion is brittle and sudden, and the transverse reinforcement provides no post-cracking ductility. The primary function of the transverse reinforcement is to minimize the longitudinal precracking due to prestressing transfer forces. CSA A14 transverse reinforcement spacing requirements were compared against code minimum spacing requirements and a strut and tie model of the prestressing force transfer zone. Based on the strut and tie model of the transfer zone it was concluded that the CSA A14 helical reinforcement spacing values were insufficient to resist the transfer forces. New helical reinforcement spacing values were recommended to simplify the current CSA A14 code requirements. In addition concrete mix designs, prestressing levels, and wall thicknesses all have a large impact on torsional capacity and therefore quality assurance of these factors should be emphasized in CSA A14.

The most probable failure mode of FRP-strengthened RC beams is an intermediate crack-induced debonding. Over the last 13 years, researchers developed several methods for calculation strain corresponding to delamination of FRP. A significant number and diversity of existing foreign and domestic methods make the design complex process. The aim of this study was to propose a simple method for calculating FRP debonding strains, based on the best international achievements and adapted for use in Russia. To achieve this goal, the authors performed a review and reliability assessment of existing foreign and domestic meth-ods. Reliability assessment is made by comparing the calculated and experimental data. Experimental data were collected from the existing literature. After reliability assessment, the most simple and accurate method was selected among the considered. On the basis of the chosen method, the authors proposed a formula for calculating the design value and characteristic value strain corresponding to delamination of FRP. The results of calculations by the authors’ formula are more economical than the original method and have the required reliability for these variables. The proposed method is recommended for use in the design of flexural FRP-strengthened RC beams in Russia.

This review discusses the potential drug and device therapies for pediatric heart failure (HF) due to reduced systolic function. It is important to realize that most drugs that are used in pediatric HF are extrapolated from adult cardiology practices or consensus guidelines based on expert opinion rather than on evidence from controlled clinical trials. It is difficult to conclude whether the drugs that are well established in adult HF trials are also beneficial for children because of tremendous heterogeneity in the mechanism of HF in children and variations in the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs from birth to adolescence. The lessons learned from adult trials can guide pediatric cardiologists to design clinical trials of the newer drugs that are in the pipeline to study their efficacy and safety in children with HF. This paper’s focus is that the reader should specifically think through the pathophysiological mechanism of HF and the mode of action of drugs for the selection of appropriate pharmacotherapy. We review the drug and device trials in adults with HF to highlight the knowledge gap that exists in the pediatric HF population.

The term “damage” in rubble mound breakwaters is usually related to the foremost failure mode of this kind of coastal structures: their hydraulic instability. The characterization of the breakwater response against wave action was and will be the goal of hundreds of studies. Because of the large amount of information, the present review on damage in rubble mound breakwaters is divided in two papers, which are closely linked but conceptually different; whereas Part II is focused on the various approaches for defining and measuring damage, Part I summarizes the diverse strategies for modelling damage development and progression. The present paper compiles 146 references on this topic, chronologically discussed over almost a century of history: from 1933 to 2020. It includes 23 formulations of hydraulic stability models and 11 formulations of damage progression models, together with main advances and shortcomings up to date. The future of rubble mound design is linked to risk-based tools and advanced management strategies, for which deeper comprehension about the spatial and temporal evolution of damage during the useful life of each particular structure is required. For this aim, damage progression probabilistic models, full-scale monitoring and standardization will presumably be some of the key challenges in the upcoming years.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrative approach for improving failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). Design/methodology/approach An extensive literature review on FMEA has been performed. Then, an integrative approach has been proposed based on literature review. The proposed approach is an integration of FMEA and quality function deployment (QFD). The proposed approach includes a two-phase QFD. In the first phase, failure modes are prioritized based on failure effects and in the second phase, failure causes are prioritized based on failure modes. The proposed approach has been examined in a case example at the blast furnace operation of a steel-manufacturing company. Findings Results of the case example indicated that stove shell crack in hot blast blower, pump failure in cooling water supply pump and bleeder valves failed to operate are the first three important failure modes. In addition, fire and explosion are the most important failure effects. Also, improper maintenance, over pressure and excess temperature are the most important failure causes. Findings also indicated that the proposed approach with the consideration of interrelationships among failure effects, failure mode and failure causes can influence and adjust risk priority number (RPN) in FMEA. Research limitations/implications As manufacturing departments are mostly dealing with failure effects and modes of machinery and maintenance departments are mostly dealing with causes of failures, the proposed model can support better coordination and integration between the two departments. Such support seems to be more important in firms with continuous production lines wherein line interruption influences response to customers more seriously. A wide range of future study opportunities indicates the attractiveness and contribution of the subject to the knowledge of FMEA. Originality/value Although the literature indicates that in most of studies the outcomes of QFD were entered into FMEA and in some studies the RPN of FMEA was entered into QFD as importance rating, the proposed approach is a true type of the so-called “integration of FMEA and QFD” because the three main elements of FMEA formed the structure of QFD. In other words, the proposed approach can be considered as an innovation in the FMEA structure, not as a data provider prior to it or a data receiver after it.

Purpose Medical technologies and assets are one of the main drivers of increasing healthcare cost. The rising number and complexity of medical equipment have forced hospitals to set up and regulate medical equipment management programs to ensure critical devices are safe and reliable. The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into maintenance management-related activities for medical equipment. The paper proposes applying a tailored reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) approach for maintenance activities selection for medical equipment. Such approach will support assets management teams in enhancing operation, decrease risk and cost, and ultimately improve health of patients served by these equipment. Design/methodology/approach The traditional RCM approach will be used with a focus on criticality reduction. By criticality, the authors refer to the severity of failures and occurrence. The proposed method relies on the use of reliability growth analysis for opportunity identification followed by a thorough failure mode and effect analysis to investigate major failure modes and propose ways to reduce criticality. The effectiveness of the proposed method will be demonstrated using a case of one of the leading obstetric and gynecological hospitals in United Arab Emirates and in the Gulf Cooperation Council region. Findings The case examines the relationship between the current practice of planned preventive maintenance and the failure rates of the equipment during its life span. Although a rigorous preventive maintenance program is implemented in the hospital under study, some critical equipment show an increasing failure rates. The analysis highlights the inability of traditional time-driven preventive maintenance alone in preventing failures. Thus, a systematic RCM approach focused on criticality is more beneficial and more time and cost effective than traditional time-driven preventive maintenance practices. Practical implications The study highlights the need for utilizing RCM approach with criticality as the most important prioritization criterion in healthcare. A proper RCM implementation will decrease criticality and minimize the risk of failure, accidents and possible loss of life. In addition to that, it will increase the availability of equipment, and reduce cost and time. Originality/value This paper proposes a maintenance methodology that can help healthcare management to improve availability and decrease the risk of critical medical equipment failures. Current practices in healthcare facilities have difficulty identifying the optimal maintenance strategy. Literature focused on medical maintenance approach selection is rather limited, and this paper will help in this discussion. In addition to that, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation supports the initiative of adopting RCM on a large scale in healthcare. Therefore, this paper address the gap in the literature for medical equipment maintenance and the work is in line with the recommendation of leading healthcare association. The paper also presents statistical review of the total number of received maintenance work orders during one full year in the hospital under study. The analysis supports the need for more research to examine current practice and propose more effective maintenance approaches.

Today's high performance manufacturing of digital systems requires VLSI testing at speeds of multigigabits per second (multiGbps). Testing at Gbps needs high transfer rates among channels and functional units, and requires readdressing of data format and communication within a serial mode. This implies that a physical phenomena-jitter, is becoming very essential to tester operation. This establishes functional and design shift, which in turn dictates a corresponding shift in test and DFT (Design for Testability) methods. We, here, review various approaches and discuss the tradeoffs in testing actual devices. For industry, volume-production stage and testing of multigigahertz have economic challenges. A particular solution based on the conventional ATE (Automated Test Equipment) resources, that will be discussed, allows for accurate testing of ICs with many channels and this systems can test ICs at 2.5 Gbps over 144 cannels, with extensions planned that will have test rates exceeding 5 Gbps. Yield improvement requires understanding failures and identifying potential sources of yield loss. This text focuses on diagnosing of random logic circuits and classifying faults. An interesting scan-based diagnosis flow, which leverages the ATPG (Automatic Test Pattern Generator) patterns originally generated for fault coverage, will be described. This flow shows an adequate link between the design automation tools and the testers, and a correlation between the ATPG patterns and the tester failure reports.

The development of potential failure mode analysis and risk analysis has greatly improved the state-of-practice for the safety of dams. Risk analysis are well developed in many industries (such as building design, medicine, and insurance) and has greatly advanced in the dams industry over the last 40 years. Engineers and scientists are now deeply investigating and thinking about failure mechanisms associated with operating dams and the probabilities of dam failures. As such, the condition of dams and the risks associated with their operation are now being portrayed better than ever before to dam safety officials and decision-makers. Accurate and adequate risk analyses for a portfolio of dams is extremely important in today’s environment to manage limited budgets and potentially save (or redirect) expensive rehabilitations to identified and critical needs. The goal is to reduce risks of a portfolio of dams in an efficient and cost-effective manner. This article provides a review on risk-based dam terminology and bridging the semi-quantitative and numerical simulation. Moreover, a review of the current state-of-practice for prioritizing a large portfolio of dams subjected to seismic loadings and potential risks is provided. As a potential application, the seismic risk of the 18 dams (which have been experienced relatively large earthquakes) all over the world is evaluated. The semi-quantitative approach is contrasted with finite element model for one of the selected dams.

In order to secure the safe operation of the ship, it is crucial to closely examine the suitability from the design stage of the ship, and to set up a preliminary review and countermeasures for failures and defects that may occur during the construction process. In shipyards, the failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) evaluation method using risk priority number (RPN) is used in the shipbuilding process. In the case of the conventional RPN method, evaluation items and criteria are ambiguous, and subjective factors such as evaluator’s experience and understanding of the system operate a lot on the same contents, resulting in differences in evaluation results. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the safety and reliability for ship application of the reliability-enhanced fuel cell-based hybrid power system by applying the re-established FMEA technique. Experts formed an FMEA team to redefine reliable assessment criteria for the RPN assessment factors severity (S), occurrence (O), and detection (D). Analyze potential failures of each function of the molten-carbonate fuel cell (MCFC) system, battery system, and diesel engine components of the fuel cell-based hybrid power system set as evaluation targets to redefine the evaluation criteria, and the evaluation criteria were derived by identifying the effects of potential failures. In order to confirm the reliability of the derived criteria, the reliability of individual evaluation items was verified by using the significance probability used in statistics and the coincidence coefficient of Kendall. The evaluation was conducted to the external evaluators using the reestablished evaluation criteria. As a result of analyzing the correspondence according to the results of the evaluation items, the severity was 0.906, the incidence 0.844, and the detection degree 0.861. Improved agreement was obtained, which is a significant result to confirm the reliability of the reestablished evaluation results.

Objectives: To evaluate management and outcome of Iatrogenic Common BileDuct injury after cholecystectomy. Material and methods: Study Design: Descriptive study.Place and Duration of Study: Isra University Hospital Hyderabad during the period of April2013 to April 2014. Methodology: All patients presented with CBD injury after cholecystectomyincluded while CBD tumor and CBD stone and trauma were excluded from study. Total ofsixteen patients with CBD injury were admitted from outside the hospital in surgical ward in IsraUniversity hospital either through OPD or Emergency Room or Endoscopy Suite depending onthe mode of presentation and failure of ERCP if performed according to the need and clinicalpresentation. All patients were resuscitated and investigated thoroughly and the procedurewhether ERCP, or reconstructive surgery or conservative treatment performed based on patient’sclinical presentation and mode of injury and is recorded in the preset approved Performa fromrelative hospital’s ethical review committee and the data compiled in SPSS version 10. Results:All 16 patients; 4(25%) male and 12(75%) females admitted from outside the hospital in twoyear period. Presented in variable time interval12 (75%) patients admitted in 1 month, 3(18.8%)in 6 months& 1(6.3%) in 12 months. Jaundice was the main presenting symptom. Patientswere resuscitated and optimized for invasive procedure i.e. ERCP and reconstructive surgery.Six patients were treated with ERCP successfully and 9 underwent reconstructive surgery and1with some biliary drainage responded to simple conservative treatment. Operative successrate was 75% with 25% mortality which was related to the presence of peritonitis, developmentof multiorgan failure and late repair of bile duct injury. Conclusion: Although CBD injury is oneof the most devastating complication but its early diagnosis and prompt treatment can preventpatient’s life with subsequent few or no complication even after its reconstructive surgery.Training must be emphasized to find the all possible ways of recognizing biliary tract anatomyduring surgery and possess skills to overwhelm the primary and leading cause of bile ductinjury i.e. the visual misperception.

The Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) that is transmitted through the human respiratory system has a very high infection rate worldwide, including Indonesia. To cut off this outbreak, Indonesia has implemented some social distancing strategies that have an impact on the significant decrease of economic growth rate and the increase of poverty rate. To meet basic needs, people should continue their work in the middle of COVID-19 fear. Informal workers are among the most vulnerable groups to COVID-19 transmission because they frequently interact with the outsiders and find it difficult to comply with the health protocols. One way to prevent the COVID-19 transmission is the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as masks, face shields, and gloves. Although these products to some degree are effective in preventing transmission, several risks that may endanger its users, such as incorrect or excessive use, incorrect maintenance, bad PPE design, and others. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the risks of the COVID-19 PPE and review the prevention recommendations for these risks. Risk analysis was carried out using the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) to analyze the use of masks, face shields, and gloves for the context of general informal workers in Indonesia. There are 5 aspects analyzed: product design, preparation for use, use, storage, and disposal. Based on the analysis, there are 10 mask risks, 15 face shield risks, and 12 gloves risks that need to be considered by informal workers and PPE designers and manufacturers as well.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing risk factors in oil and gas projects. Design/methodology/approach This paper consists of several sections. In the first section, 19 common potential risks in the projects of Pars Oil and Gas Company were finalized in six groups using the Lawshe validation method. These factors were identified through previous literature review and interviews with experts. Then, using the “best-worst multi-criteria decision-making” method, the study measured the weights associated with the performance evaluation indicators of each risk. Consequently, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) and the grey relational analysis (GRA)-VIKOR mixed method were used to rank and determine the critical risks. Finally, to assign response strategies to each critical risk, a zero-one multi-objective mathematical programming model was proposed and developed Epsilon-constraint method was used to solve it. Findings Given the typical constraints of projects which are time, cost and quality, of the projects that companies are often faced with, this study presents the identified risks of oil and gas projects to the managers of the oil and gas company in accordance with the priority given in the present research and the response to each risk is also suggested to be used by managers based on their organizational circumstances. Originality/value This study aims at qualitative management of cost risks of oil and gas projects (case study of Pars Oil and Gas Company) by combining FMEA, best worst and GRA-VIKOR methods under fuzzy environment and Epsilon constraints. According to studies carried out in previous studies, the simultaneous management of quantitative and qualitative cost of risk of oil and gas projects in Iran has not been carried out and the combination of these methods has also been innovated.

Introduction:Dental caries is known to be one of the most widespread, chronic infections affecting all ages and populations worldwide. The plethora of oral microbial population paves way for various endogenous infections and plays a crucial role in polymicrobial interactions contributing to biofilm-mediated diseases like caries and periodontal diseases.Methods:Extensive literature survey was conducted using the scientific databases like PubMed, Google scholar, Science Direct,etc. using the key words like dental caries, orodental infections, dental microbes, dental biofilm, secondary caries, phytotherapy,etc. The literature was analyzed thoroughly and critical review was performed.Results:The risk of development of secondary caries and residual caries further results in treatment failure. Drug resistance developed by oral microbes and further side effects pose serious hurdles in the current therapeutic strategies. The hyperactivities of various MMPs and the resulting massive ECM degradation are the challenging part in the design of effective therapeutic approaches. Anticariogenic phytotherapy is well appreciated owing to lesser side effects and versatility of their action. But appreciable outcomes regarding the phytochemical bioavailability and bioretention are still challenging. Site-specific delivery of phytoagents at the infected site may enhance the efficiency of these drugs. Accordingly emerging phytodentistry can be promising for the management of secondary and residual caries.Conclusion:This article presents major cariogens and their mechanisms in initiating and aggravating dental caries. Effectiveness of phytotherapy and different mode of action of phytochemicals against cariogens are outlined. The article also raises major concerns and possibilities of phytochemical based therapeutics to be applied in the clinical arena of caries management.

Design Valid data on acromegaly incidence, complications and mortality are scarce. The Danish Health Care System enables nationwide studies with complete follow-up and linkage among health-related databases to assess acromegaly incidence, prevalence, complications and mortality in a population-based cohort study. Method All incident cases of acromegaly in Denmark (1991–2010) were identified from health registries and validated by chart review. We estimated the annual incidence rate of acromegaly per 106 person-years (py) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs). For every patient, 10 persons were sampled from the general population as a comparison cohort. Cox regression and hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were used. Results Mean age at diagnosis (48.7 years (CI: 95%: 47.2–50.1)) and annual incidence rate (3.8 cases/106 persons (95% CI: 3.6–4.1)) among the 405 cases remained stable. The prevalence in 2010 was 85 cases/106 persons. The patients were at increased risk of diabetes mellitus (HR: 4.0 (95% CI: 2.7–5.8)), heart failure (HR: 2.5 (95% CI: 1.4–4.5)), venous thromboembolism (HR: 2.3 (95% CI: 1.1–5.0)), sleep apnoea (HR: 11.7 (95% CI: 7.0–19.4)) and arthropathy (HR: 2.1 (95% CI: 1.6–2.6)). The complication risk was also increased before the diagnosis of acromegaly. Overall mortality risk was elevated (HR: 1.3 (95% CI: 1.0–1.7)) but uninfluenced by treatment modality. Conclusion (i) The incidence rate and age at diagnosis of acromegaly have been stable over decades, and the prevalence is higher than previously reported. (ii) The risk of complications is very high even before the diagnosis. (iii) Mortality risk remains elevated but uninfluenced by mode of treatment.

Purpose This paper is aimed at clarifying the behaviour of concrete-filled stainless steel tube (CFSST) slender columns. Based on the review of previous works, it can be found that the pieces of research on the behaviour of CFSST slender columns are very rare and the existing studies, to the author’s knowledge, have not covered this topic in greater depth. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural response and strength capacity of eccentric loaded long CFSST columns. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, a new finite element (FE) model is presented for predicting the nonlinear behaviour of CFSST slender columns under eccentric load. The FE model developed accounts for confinement influences of the concrete in-filled material. In addition, the initial local and overall geometric imperfections were introduced in the numerical model in addition to the inelastic response of stainless steel. The interaction between the stainless section and concrete in-filled was modelled using contact pair algorithm. The FE model was then verified against an experimental work presented in the literature. The ultimate strengths, axial load–lateral displacement and failure mode of CFSST slender columns predicted by the FE model were validated against corresponding experimental results. Findings The simulation results show that the improvement in the column strengths (compared to hollow section) is less significant when the composite columns have small width-to-thickness ratio. Finally, comparisons were made between the results obtained from FE simulation and those computed from the Eurocode 4 (EC4). It has been found that the EC4 predictions in most analysed cases are conservative for composite columns analysed under a combination of axial load and uniaxial or biaxial bending. However, the conservatism of the code is reduced with a higher slenderness ratio of the composite columns. Practical implications The simulation results throughout this research were compared with the corresponding Eurocode predictions. Originality/value This paper provides new findings about the structural behaviour of CFSST columns.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel risk analysis method named fuzzy critical risk analysis (FCRA) for assessing the infrastructure risks from a risk-community network perspective. The basis of this new FCRA method is the integration of existing risk magnitude analysis with the novel risk impact propagation analysis performed in specific infrastructure systems to assess the criticality of risk within specific social-infrastructure interrelated network boundary. Design/methodology/approach The FCRA uses a number of scientific methods such as failure mode effect and criticality analysis (FMECA), social network analysis (SNA) and fuzzy-set theory to facilitate the building of risk evaluation associated with the infrastructure and the community. The proposed FCRA approach has been developed by integrating the fuzzy-based social network analysis (FSNA) method with conventional fuzzy FMECA method to analyse the most critical risk based on risk decision factors and risk impact propagation generated by various stakeholder perceptions. Findings The application of FSNA is considered to be highly relevant for investigating the risk impact propagation mechanism based on various stakeholder perceptions within the infrastructure risk interrelation and community networks. Although conventional FMECA methods have the potential for resulting in a reasonable risk ranking based on its magnitude value within the traditional risk assessment method, the lack of considering the domino effect of the infrastructure risk impact, the various degrees of community dependencies and the uncertainty of various stakeholder perceptions made such methods grossly ineffective in the decision-making of risk prevention (and mitigation) and resilience context. Research limitations/implications The validation of the model is currently based on a hypothetical case which in the future should be applied empirically based on a real case study. Practical implications Effective functioning of the infrastructure systems for seamless operation of the society is highly crucial. Yet, extreme events resulted in failure scenarios often undermine the efficient operations and consequently affect the community at multiple levels. Current risk analysis methodologies lack to address issues related to diverse impacts on communities and propagation of risks impact within the infrastructure system based on multi-stakeholders’ perspectives. The FCRA developed in this research has been validated in a hypothetical case of infrastructure context. The proposed method will potentially assist the decision-making regarding risk governance, managing the vulnerability of the infrastructure and increasing both the infrastructure and community resilience. Social implications The new approach developed in this research addresses several infrastructure risks assessment challenges by taking into consideration of not only the risk events associated with the infrastructure systems but also the dependencies of various type communities and cascading effect of risks within the specific risk-community networks. Such a risk-community network analysis provides a good basis for community-based risk management in the context of mitigation of disaster risks and building better community resilient. Originality/value The novelty of proposed FCRA method is realized due to its ability for improving the estimation accuracy and decision-making based on multi-stakeholder perceptions. The process of assessment of the most critical risks in the hypothetical case project demonstrated an eminent performance of FCRA method as compared to the results in conventional risk analysis method. This research contributes to the literature in several ways. First, based on a comprehensive literature review, this work established a benchmark for development of a new risk analysis method within the infrastructure and community networks. Second, this study validates the effectiveness of the model by integrating fuzzy-based FMECA with FSNA. The approach is considered useful from a methodological advancement when prioritizing similar or competing risk criticality values.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elastoplastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elasto-plastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elasto-plastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elasto-plastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elasto-plastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Structural life assessment periodically evaluates the state and condition of a structural system and provides recommendations for possible maintenance actions or the end of structural service life. It is a diversified field and relies on the theories of fracture mechanics, fatigue damage process, probability of failure, and reliability. With reference to naval ship structures, their life assessment is not only governed by the theory of fracture mechanics and fatigue damage process, but by other factors such as corrosion, grounding, and sudden collision. The purpose of this series of review articles is to provide different issues pertaining to structural life assessment of ships and ocean structures. Part I deals with the basic ingredients of the theory of fracture mechanics, which is classified into linear elastic fracture mechanics and elasto-plastic fracture mechanics. The amount of energy available for fracture is usually governed by the stress field around the crack, which is measured by the stress intensity factor. The value of the stress intensity factor, which depends on the loading mode, is evaluated by different methods developed by many researchers. The applications of the theory of fracture mechanics to metallic and composite structures are presented with an emphasis to those used in marine structures. When the inertia of relatively large pieces of a structure is large enough that the correct balancing of the energy of fracture requires the inclusion of kinetic energy, then the dynamic nature of fracture dominates the analysis. For a crack that is already propagating, the inertial effects are important when the crack tip speed is small compared with the stress wave velocities. This fact has been realized in the theory of fracture mechanics under the name of dynamic fracture and peridynamic. In essence, peridynamic replaces the partial differential equations of classic continuum theories with integro-differential equations as a tool to avoid singularities arising from the fact that partial derivatives do not exist on crack surfaces and other singularities. A brief overview of fracture dynamics and peridynamics together with damage mechanisms in composite structures is presented. The limitations of fracture mechanics criteria are also discussed. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure, which are addressed in Part II. Life assessment of ship structures depends on the failure modes and the probabilistic description of failure. In view of structural parameter uncertainties, probabilistic analysis requires the use of reliability methods for assessing fatigue life by considering the crack propagation process and the first passage problem, which measures the probability of the exit time from a safe operating regime. The main results reported in the literature pertaining to ship structural damage assessments resulting from to slamming loads, liquid sloshing impact loads of liquefied natural gas in ship tankers, and ship grounding accidents, and collision with solid bodies are discussed in Part III. Under such extreme loadings, structural reliability will be the major issue in the design stage of ocean structures. The treatment of extreme loading on ship structures significantly differs from those approaches developed by dynamicists. Environmental effects on ship structures play a major factor in the life assessment of ocean systems. In particular, these effects include corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Part IV is devoted to a ship's life assessment resulting from corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Because structural components made from aluminum and its alloys are vital to the ship and aerospace industries, the influence of environment on aluminum structures and the means of corrosion control and monitoring in both aluminum and nonaluminum metals are presented. Hybrid ships consist of a stainless steel advanced double-hull center section, to which a composite material bow and/or stern is attached. Such structures require strong joints between the composite and the steel parts. Some of the difficulties with joining composites and metal are related to the large difference in mechanical properties such as stiffness, coefficient of thermal expansion, etc., between the adherents and the large anisotropy of composites. Such differences generally lead to large stress concentrations and weak joints. Fatigue crack growth, stress concentrations resulting from details, joints, and fasteners are addressed in Part V. Fatigue improvement in welded joints is considered one the major tasks of this part. Brittle fracture of hull structures causes serious structural damage and this motivated the ship structure community to develop some means to prevent brittle cracks from occurring. The basic principle behind the use of a crack arrester is to reduce the crack-driving force below the resisting force that must be overcome to extend a crack. The crack arrestor can be as simple as a thickened region of metal or may be constructed of a laminated or woven material that can withstand deformation without failure. Part VI provides different approaches of passive crack control in the form of crack arresters to stop crack propagation before it spreads over a structure component. Crack arresters used in ship structures and pipelines are described for both metal and composite materials. This six-part review article is by no means exhaustive and is based on over 1800 references. It does not address the structural health monitoring, which constitutes a major task in the structural diagnostic process.

Background: Healthcare statistics, issued by various international organizations, show that medical errors in health centers impose high costs on patients and hospitals and increase the rates of morbidity and mortality around the world. Due to the potential risks of cardiovascular diseases, the occurrence of any errors can potentially endanger the patients’ lives and incur costs on them, as well as hospitals. On the other hand, anesthesia is one of the priorities for risk management in clinical care. Objectives: This study aimed to identify, classify, and evaluate anesthesia failures in open heart surgeries, using the healthcare failure mode and effects analysis (HFMEA) technique. Methods: The anesthesia process in open heart surgery was reviewed using the HFMEA technique, and four processes, 25 sub-processes, 95 activities, and 204 risks were extracted. The causes of failure were also identified, and four failure modes were determined as the most important failures, based on the qualitative and quantitative methods; finally, some solutions were proposed. Changes in the level of healthcare workers’ knowledge and competence, computer use and timing, and the amount of administered medications were identified as the potential risk factors and errors. Results: The inadequate awareness and knowledge of healthcare workers, non-use of computers, prescription errors, technique errors, and timing and amount of medication administration were identified as the errors and risk factors. Based on the present findings, another expert needs to evaluate the design, feasibility, and prioritization of techniques, including continuing medical education for anesthesia professionals and experts, statutory documentation, and control of the individuals’ activities. Conclusions: Based on the present findings, establishing a risk management committee seems essential to identify errors and improve the design and plan of different techniques so as to execute, monitor, control, and review errors in a cycle of continuous improvement.

Progressive plastic deformation is one of the damage mechanisms which can occur in pressure vessels subjected to cyclic loading. For design applications, the main rule proposed by codes against this failure mode is the so-called 3f (or 3Sm) criterion. During the last decade, studies have shown that this condition can be unreliable, and its application should be restricted. In parallel, theoretical developments enabled shakedown analyses to be considered in design methodology, and to be incorporated in codes and standards (EN13445, CODAP) from the early 2000s. This paper gives a review of innovative methods based on shakedown theory, which can be used in the determination of elastic shakedown limits, ratchet limits, or cyclic steady state. These approaches are based on different concepts, such as elastic compensation linear matching method (LMM), Gokhfeld theory (uniform modified yield, load dependent yield modification (LDYM)), or the research of stabilized cycle direct cyclic analysis (DCA). Each method is presented and applied on a Benchmark example in abaqus, and results are compared. A final assessment focuses on computation time, and underlines the benefits that could be expected for industrial applications.

AbstractThis paper critically reviewed 106 scientific papers proposing methods to enrich eco-assessment with failure determination and risk assessment. The provided research perspective is new and significantly different from the reviews in the literature which are mostly limited to analyse the environmental impacts of uncertainties and off-design functioning rather than the failures. The analysis, based on the contributions of the literature over more than 20 years, was carried out manually and allowed to identify and classify the application fields, the types of identifiable failures and the approaches used for their determination, for the analysis of their risk of occurrence and for their eco-assessment. The different classifications have also been intersected with each other and all the proposed approaches have been discussed in detail, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in relation to eco-assessment. From the study emerged a growing and heterogeneous interest on the subject by the scientific community, and a certain independence of the analysed methods with respect to traditional approaches of both failure risk analysis and eco-assessment. Great attention of the methods about product functioning has been highlighted, in addition to the use of tests, simulations, FMEA (failure mode and effect analysis)-based approaches and knowledge databases to determine the failures, while statistical methods are preferred to support risks analysis and LCA (life cycle assessment) for environmental impact calculation. If, in the coming years, this argument also spreads in industry, the results provided by this review could be exploited as a first framework for practitioners. Graphical abstract

In the present era Electric motors are most commonly used actuators for various robotic and bio-robotic applications. However, the functioning of electric motor is not similar to human skeletal muscles. Also, the electric motors are prone to harm human beings in case of failure. Hence, the present work has focused on exploring a bio-inspired actuator, which functions similar to human skeletal muscles and is safe for human beings. The literature review has revealed that such an actuator is pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM). In the present work the researchers have focused on developing an efficient model and control strategy for PAM in order to use it for biorobotic applications. An experimental setup has been prepared to analyze the behavior of PAM for different speeds of operation and different loading conditions during inflation/ deflation. Based on the experimental datasets an experimental model of PAM and Proportional Pressure Regulator (PPR) has been developed using polynomial curve fitting tool of MATLAB. Then a switched mode feedback PID control strategy has been developed for PAM which takes care for the hysteresis behavior of PAM. The control strategy has been simulated to achieve the trajectory angle tracking of ankle joint during the complete gait cycle. The simulation of the proposed control strategy with the developed model has shown that the proposed approach works fairly well and the error in the ankle joint movement could be limited in the range of -0.8° to 0.6° for the complete gait cycle. The result obtained in the present study is similar to the results as reported in the literature. However, this could be achieved with less system complexity using simpler modeling technique and “switched mode feedback PID controller”, which has not been reported by any researcher till date

Purpose The purpose of this study is to present a new failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) approach based on fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods and multi-objective programming model for risk assessment in the planning phase of the oil and gas construction projects (OGCP) in Iran. Design/methodology/approach This research contains multiple steps. First, 19 major potential health and safety executive (HSE) risks in OGCP were classified into six categories with the Delphi method. These factors were distinguished by the review of project documentation, checklist analysis and consulting with experts. Then, using the fuzzy SWARA method, the authors calculated the weights of major HSE risks. Subsequently, FMEA and PROMETHEE approaches were used to identify the priority of main risk factors. Eventually, a binary multi-objective linear programming approach was developed to select the risk response strategies, and an augmented e-constraint method (AECM) was used. Findings Regarding the project triple well-known constraints of time, cost and quality, which organizations usually confront, the HSE risks of OGCP were identified and prioritized. Also, the appropriate risk response strategies were also suggested to the managers to be adopted regarding the situations. Originality/value The present research points at the HSE risks’ assessment integrating the fuzzy FMEA, step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis and PROMETHEE techniques with the AECM. Further to the authors’ knowledge, the quantitative assessment of the HSE risks of OGCP has not been done using the combination of the fuzzy FMEA, MCDM and AECMs.

Populist communication, in this entry, refers to the occurrence of a) specific messages that are seen as the expression of populist ideology and b) characteristic style elements that are often associated with these messages expressing populist ideology in political actors’ (or other actors such as journalists’ or citizens’) communication (Ernst et al., 2019; De Vreese et al., 2018). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Populism has been defined in various terms; e.g., as Ideology (Canovan, 1999; Mudde, 2004), set of ideas (Hawkins et al., 2018, Taggart, 2000), discourse (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018), political style (Moffit, 2016), communication style (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), or political strategy (Weyland, 2017). Thus, there have been numerous operationalizations of populism or populist communication in content analyses that cannot all be accounted for here. This entry specifically follows a communication-centered perspective (Stanyer et al., 2016; De Vreese et al., 2018). Jagers & Walgrave (2007), in a pioneer study on populist communication, define populism as a political communication style “essentially displaying proximity of the people, while at the same time taking an anti-establishment stance and stressing the (ideal) homogeneity of the people by excluding specific population segments.” In a more recent study, Ernst et al. (2019) differentiate between populist communication content and populist communication style. Populist communication content refers to the communicative representation of the populist ideology (what is being said) that can be expressed in the form of populist key messages. Depending on the parsimony of the definition, populist ideology comprises three or four dimensions: people-centrism, anti-elitism, restoring sovereignty, and exclusion (e.g., De Vreese et al., 2018; Mudde, 2004; Jagers & Walgrave, 2007; Wirth et al., 2016). In distinction to the content, Ernst et al. (2019) define populist communication style as the use of populism-related style elements (how something is said) (see also De Vreese et al., 2018; Bracciale & Martella, 2018). Communication-centered content analyses of populist communication are often carried out in three steps. First, specific characteristics of populist communication (e.g., populist key messages or stylistic elements) are identified. Second, the occurrence of these individual elements is then coded either on the statement level (e.g. Ernst et al., 2019; Wirth et al., 2016), excerpts level (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), or on the text/article level (e.g. Blassnig et al, 2019). Third, the level of populism is determined using different indices for populist communication as a whole (e.g. maximum indices; Blassnig et al., 2019; Ernst et al., 2019) or for the individual dimensions separately (e.g., Jagers & Walgrave, 2007). Populism indices can be calculated at the statement level, text level, or actor level. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Whereas this entry focuses on quantitative and deductive approaches, populist communication has also been investigated using qualitative or inductive approaches (e.g., Wodak, 2015), especially in studies following a more actor-centered approach (Stanyer et al., 2016). Most studies on populist communication have used manual content analysis. Yet, some analyses have also applied automated approaches to investigate the occurrence of populist communication in texts (e.g., Hawkins & Castanho Silva, 2018). Example studies: Blassnig et al., (2019); Bracialle & Martella (2017); Ernst et al., (2019); Jagers & Walgrave, (2007) Table 2: Summary of a selection of studies on populist communication Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Jagers & Walgrave, 2007 Content type: political party broadcasts (PPB) Country: Belgium (Flemish part) Political actors: six Belgian-Flemish parties Outlets: 20 PPBs per party Sampling period: 1999 - 2001 Sample size: 1,200 PPB excerpts Unit of analysis: excerpts including ‘thin’ populism (references to the people) Level of analysis: excerpt level and actor level People-index: multiplication of the proportion and intensity of references to the people for each party Anti-state-index: number of anti-state excerpts * average intension anti-state excerpts (1-5) per party Anti-politics-index: number of anti-politics excerpts * average intension anti-politics excerpts (1-5) per party Anti-media-index: number of anti-media excerpts * average intension anti-media excerpts (1-5) per party Anti-establishment-index: anti-state + anti-politics + anti-media per party Exclusivity-index: J-scores; (positive – negative evaluations) / (positive + neutral + negative evaluations of specific population categories) References to the people: terms referring to the population (as a whole or population categories), that cover the people “in political terms”, meaning the “political entity” Anti-state: failure of the state with regard to (1) single failure, (2) systematic failure, (3) public service should be abolished, (4) all public services are criticized at once, (5) the system Anti-politics: criticism directed towards (1) policy measure or present situation, (2) policy, (3) politician, (4) party, (5) group of parties, (6) all parties. (7) the system Anti-media: media targets of criticism; (1) newspaper/ magazine/ tv channel, (2) group of media, (3) all (the) media Evaluation of specific population categories: positive, neutral, negative (for further restrictions for the individual variables and more detailed instructions see the methodological appendix by Jagers & Walgrave, 2007) Reliability is not reported Ernst, Blassnig, Engesser, Büchel, & Esser (2019) (See also Ernst et al., 2018; Ernst, Esser et al., 2019; Wirth et al., 2016) Content type: statements by politicians expressing either a political position, an elaboration on a political issue, or an evaluation/ attribution of a target actor Countries: CH, DE, IT, FR, UK, US Political actors: 98 politicians from 31 parties Outlets: political talk shows (2 per country), politicians’ Facebook and Twitter accounts Sampling period: April through May 2015 Sample size: n = 2’067 (n = 969 talk show statements, n = 734 Facebook posts, and n = 364 Tweets Unit of analysis: a single statement by a politician on a target actor or an issue Level of analysis: statement level and actor level Populism index: Maximum index based on the nine populist key messages and seven stylistic elements (0/1) Populist key messages: Anti-elitism: discrediting the elite, blaming the elite, detaching the elite from the people People-centrism: stressing the people’s virtues, praising the people’s achievements, stating a monolithic people, demonstrating closeness to the people Restoring sovereignty: demanding popular sovereignty, denying elite sovereignty Populist style elements: Negativity: negativism, crisis rhetoric Emotionality: emotional tone, absolutism, patriotism) Sociability: colloquialism, intimization (all items were coded as dummy variables based on more detailed sub-categories) Brennan & Prediger’s kappa average = 0.91 (³0.65) Blassnig, Ernst, Büchel, Engesser, & Esser (2019) Content type: election news coverage about immigration and adjacent reader comments Countries: CH, FR, UK Actors/Speakers: politicians, journalists, and citizens Outlets: 6 online news outlets per country Sampling period: six weeks before the respective election days. CH: September to October 2015; FR: April to May 2017; UK: April to May 2015 Sample size: n = 493 news articles and n = 2904 reader comments Unit of analysis: news article / reader comment Level of analysis: article level Populism index: Maximum index based on the twelve populist key messages (0/1) Populist key messages: Anti-elitism: discrediting the elite, blaming the elite, detaching the elite from the people People-centrism: praising the people’s virtues, praising the people’s achievements, describing the people as homogenous, demonstrating closeness to the people Restoring sovereignty: demanding popular sovereignty, denying elite sovereignty Exclusion: discrediting specific social groups, blaming specific social groups, excluding specific social groups from the people (all items were coded as dummy variables) Brennan & Prediger’s kappa average = 0.75 Bracciale & Martella (2017) Content type: politicians’ tweets Country: Italy Political actors: 5 party leaders Outlets: leaders’ Twiter timelines Sampling period: 1 January 2015 to 1 July 2016 Sample size: n = 7,772 Unit of analysis: tweets Level of analysis: tweets, actors Indices: Populist ideology: three additive synthetic dichotomous indices adding together the indicators for each of the three dimensions of populism (sovereignty of the people, attacking the elite, ostracizing others) The variables for political communication style were summarized using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) into two dimensions: communicative mode (positive vs. negative) and communicative focus (personalization vs. political/ campaign) Political communication style: Stagecraft: emotionalisation; informality, instrumental actualization, intimisation, negative affect, simplification, storytelling, taboo breaker, vulgarism Register (communicative tone): referential/ neutral, aggressive/ provocative, humorous/ ironic, conversational/ participatory Topic: political issues, policy issues, campaign issues, personal issues, current affairs Function: campaign updating, self-promotion, setting the agenda, position-taking, call to action, opposition/ violence, endorsement, irony, request for interaction, pointless babble Populist ideology: Emphasizing sovereignty of the people: refers to the people, refers to ‘ad hoc’ people, direct representation Attacking the elite: generic anti-establishment, political anti-establishment, economic anti-establishment, EU anti-establishment, institutional anti-establishment, anti-elitism media, anti-elitism intellectuals Ostracizing others: dangerous others, authoritarianism (all individual indicators were coded as dummy variables) Krippendorff's Alpha > .83 References Blassnig, S., Ernst, N., Büchel, F., Engesser, S., & Esser, F. (2019). Populism in online election coverage. Journalism Studies, 20(8), 1110–1129. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1487802 Bracciale, R., & Martella, A. (2017). Define the populist political communication style: the case of Italian political leaders on Twitter. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1310–1329. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1328522 Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00184 Cranmer, M. (2011). Populist communication and publicity: An empirical study of contextual differences in Switzerland. Swiss Political Science Review, 17(3), 286–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1662-6370.2011.02019.x De Vreese, C. H., Esser, F., Aalberg, T., Reinemann, C., & Stanyer, J. (2018). Populism as an expression of political communication content and style: A new perspective. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(4), 423-438. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161218790035 Engesser, S., Fawzi, N., & Larsson, A. O. (2017). Populist online communication: Introduction to the special issue. Information, Communication & Society, 20(9), 1279–1292. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1328525 Ernst, N., Blassnig, S., Engesser, S., Büchel, F., & Esser, F. (2019). Populists prefer social media over talk shows: An analysis of populist messages and stylistic elements across six countries. Social Media + Society, 5(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118823358 Hawkins, K. A., Carlin, R. E., Littvay, L., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (Eds.). (2018). Extremism and democracy. The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis. Routledge. Haswkins, K. A., & Castanho Silva, B. (2018). Textual analysis: big data approaches. In K. A. Hawkins, R. E. Carlin, L. Littvay, & C. Rovira Kaltwasser (Eds.). Extremism and democracy. The ideational approach to populism: Concept, theory, and analysis (pp. 27-48). Routledge. Jagers, J., & Walgrave, S. (2007). Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties' discourse in Belgium. European Journal of Political Research, 46(3), 319–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00690.x Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. London: Verso. Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford University Press. Mudde, C. (2004). The populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 542–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x Stanyer, J., Salgado, S., & Strömbäck, J. (2017). Populist actors as communicators or political actors as populist communicators: Cross-national findings and perspectives. In T. Aalberg, F. Esser, C. Reinemann, J. Strömbäck, & C. H. de Vreese (Eds.), Populist political communication in Europe (pp. 353–364). Routledge. Taggart, P. (2000). Populism. Concepts in the social sciences. Open University Press. Wirth, W., Esser, F., Engesser, S., Wirz, D. S., Schulz, A., Ernst, N., . . . Schemer, C. (2016). The appeal of populist ideas, strategies and styles: A theoretical model and research design for analyzing populist political communication. Zurich: NCCR Democracy, Working Paper No. 88, pp. 1–60. https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-127461 Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. SAGE Publications.

IntroductionAccording to Friedrich Nietzsche, the death of Man follows the death of God. Man as a concept must be overcome. Yet Nietzsche extends humanism’s jargon of creativity that privileges Man over animal. To truly overcome the notion of Man, one must undercome Man, in other words go below Man. Once undercome, creativity devolves into a type of building and unbuilding, affording art the ability to conceive of the subject emptied of divine creation. This article will examine how Man is unbuilt in three works by three different artists: Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon” (1953), Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989), and Patricia Piccinini’s “The Young Family” (2002). All three artists evoke the animalistic in their depiction of what could be called the sub-subject, a diminished agent. Unbuilding the subject becomes the basis for building the sub-subject in these depictions of the human remainder. Man, from this vantage, will be examined as a cultural construct. Man largely means human, yet the Renaissance concept favoured a certain type of powerful male. Instead of rescuing Man, Bacon, Švankmajer and Piccinini, present the remnants of the human amidst the animal rather than the human subject detached from the animal. Such works challenge humanism, expressed in Giorgio Vasari’s analysis of art and creativity as indicative of Man’s closeness to the divine, which in a strange way, is extended in Nietzsche’s writings. These artists dismantle and build a subhuman form of subjectivity and thereby provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of creativity that historically favour Man as the creator beneath only God Himself. In the course of this article, I explore the violence of Bacon’s painted devolution, the deflationary animation of Švankmajer and Piccinini’s subhuman tenderness. I do not argue that we must abandon humanism altogether as there are a multiplicity of humanisms, or attempt to invalidate all the various posthumanisms, transhumanisms and antihumanisms. Rather, I attempt to show that Nietzsche’s posthumanism is a suprahumanism and that one possible way to frame the death of Man is through undercoming Man. Art, held in high esteem by Renaissance humanism, becomes a vehicle to imagine and engage with subhuman subjectivity.What Is Humanism? Humanism has numerous connotations from designating atheism to celebrating culture to privileging humans above other animals. The type of humanism I am interested in is not secular humanism, but rather humanism that celebrates and conceptualises Man’s place in the universe and does so through accentuating his (and I mean his given humanism’s often sexist, masculinist history) creativity and intellectual power. This celebration of creativity depends in part on a type of religious view, where Man is at the centre of God’s design. Such a view holds that Man’s power to shape nature’s materials resembles God. This type of humanism remains today but usually in a more humbled form, enfeebled by the scientific realisations that characterised the Enlightenment, namely the realisation that Man was not the centre of God’s universe. The Enlightenment is sometimes characterised as the birth of modern humanism, where the human subject undergoes estrangement from his surroundings through the conceptualisation of the subject–object division, and gains control over nature. A common narrative is that the subject’s autonomy and power came to extend to art itself, which in turn, became valued as possessing its own aesthetic legitimacy and yet also becoming an alienated commodity. Yet Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism?, echoes Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment could be viewed in tension to humanism (“Introduction” n.p.). Indeed, the Enlightenment’s creation of modern science would come to seriously challenge any view of humanity’s privileged status in this world. In contrast, Renaissance humanism conceived of Man as the centrepiece of God’s design and gifted with artistic creation and the ability to uncover truth. Renaissance HumanismRenaissance humanism is encapsulated by Vasari’s preface to The Lives of the Artists. In his preface, Vasari contends that God was the first artist, being both a painter and sculptor: God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting. (3)Interestingly, God discovers creation, which is a type of decoration, where the skies are decorated with bright lights—the stars. Giving colour, light and shade to the world and heavens, qualifies God as a painter. The human body, according to Vasari, is sculpted by God, which in turn inspires artists to depict the human form. Art and design—God’s design—is thereby ‘at the origin of all things’ and not merely painting and sculpture, though the reality we know is still the product of God’s painting and sculpture. According to Vasari, God privileges Man not for his intellect per se, but by bestowing him with the ability of creation and design. Indeed, creativity and design are for Vasari a part of all intellectual discovery. Intellect is the mode of discovering design, which for Vasari, is also creation. Vasari claims “that divine light infused in us by a special act of grace which has not only made us superior to other animals but even similar, if it is permitted to say so, to God Himself” (4). God is more than just a maker, he is a creator with an aesthetic sense. All intellectual human endeavours, claims Vasari, are aesthetic and creative, in their comprehension of God’s design of the world. Vasari’s emphasis on design became outmoded as Renaissance humanism was challenged by the Enlightenment’s interest in humans and other animals as machines. However, evolution challenges even some mechanistic understandings of the human subject, which sometimes presupposed that the human-machine had a maker, as with William Paley’s watchmaker theory. As Richard Dawkins put it in The Blind Watchmaker, nature “has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If [evolution] can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (“Chapter One: Explaining the Very Improbable” n.p.). No longer was God’s universe designed for Man’s comprehension and appreciation, foretelling humanity’s own potential extinction.Man and God’s DeathThe idea that humanity was created by blind processes raises the question of what sort of depiction of the human subject is possible after the death of God and the Enlightenment’s tendency toward disenchantment? An art and self-understanding founded on atheism would be in sharp distinction to Vasari’s characterisation of the nature as an artwork coloured by the divine painter and sculptor in the heavens. Man’s creativity and design are, for the Renaissance humanist, part of discovery, the embodied realisations and iterations of the Platonic realm of divine forms. But such designs, wondrous for Vasari, can be viewed as shadows without origin in a post-God world. In Vasari, Platonism is still present where the artist’s creation becomes a way of discerning the origin of all forms, God himself. Yet, without divine origin, these forms are no longer discoveries and the possibility emerges that they are not even creations, emptied of the divine meaning that gave Man’s creative and scientific work value. Nietzsche understood that the loss of God called for the revaluation of all values. This is why Nietzsche claims that God’s death signifies the death of Man. For Nietzsche, the last Man was such an iteration, a shadow of what man had been (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 9-10). The Post-Man, the Übermensch, is one who extends the human power of creation and evaluation. In Vasari, Man is a model created by God. Nietzsche extends this logic: Man is his own creation as is God Man’s model. Man is capable of self-construction and overcoming without the hindrance of the divine. This freedom unlocked by auto-creation renders Man capable of making himself God. As such, art remains a source of sacred power for Nietzsche since it is a process of creative evaluation. The sacred is affirmed against secular profanity. For Nietzsche, God must be envisaged as Dionysus, a God that Nietzsche claims takes on a human form in Greek festivals dedicated to creation and fecundity. Mankind, in order to continue to have value after God’s death, “must become gods”, must take the place of God (The Gay Science 120). Nietzsche, All-Too HumanistNietzsche begins a project of rethinking Man as a category. Yet there is much in common with Renaissance humanism generated by Nietzsche’s Dionysian belief in a merger between God and Man. Man is overcome by a stronger and more creative figure, that of the Übermensch. By comparing Nietzsche with Vasari we can understand just how humanist Nietzsche remained. Indeed, Nietzsche fervently admired the Renaissance as a rebirth of paganism. Such an assessment of the rebirth of pagan art and values can almost be found in Vasari himself. Vasari claimed that pagan art, far from being blasphemous, brought Man closer to the divine in a tribute to the creativity of God. Vasari’s criticism of Christianity is careful but present. Indeed, Vasari—in a way that anticipates Nietzsche’s view that secular sacrilege was merely an extension of Christian sacrilege—attacks Christian iconoclasm, noting that barbarians and Christians worked together to destroy sacred forms of art: not only did [early Christianity] ruin or cast to the ground all the marvellous statues, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and ornaments of the false pagan gods, but it also did away with the memorials and testimonials to an infinite number of illustrious people, in whose honour statues and other memorials had been constructed in public places by the genius of antiquity. (5) In this respect, Vasari embodies the values Nietzsche so praised in the Italian Renaissance. Vasari emphasises the artistic creations that enshrine distinctions of value and social hierarchy. While Vasari continues Platonic notions that ideals exist before human creation, he nevertheless holds human creation as a realisation and embodiment of the ideal, which is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s notion of divine embodiment. For Nietzsche and Vasari, Man is exulted when he can rise, like a god, above other men. Another possibility would be to lower Man to just another animal. One way to envision such a lowering would be to subvert the mode by which Man is deemed God-like. Art that engages with the death of Man helps conceptualise subhumanism and the way that the subject ceases to be raised above the animal. What follows are studies of artworks that unbuild the subject. Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”Francis Bacon’s work challenges the human subject by depicting nonhuman subjects, where the flesh is torn open and Man’s animal flesh is exposed. Sometimes Bacon does not merely disfigure the human form but violently abandons it to focus on animals that reveal animal qualities latent in the subject. Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”, expresses a sense of human devolution: Man devolved to monkey. In the work, we see a baboon within an enclosure, sitting above a tree that simultaneously resembles a gothic shadow, a cross, and even a smear. The dark, cross-like tree may suggest the conquering of God by a baboon, a type of monkey, recalling the old slander of Darwin’s theory, namely that Darwinism entailed that humanity descended from monkeys (which Darwin’s theory does not claim). But far from victorious, the monkey is in a state of suffering. While the baboon is not crucified on or by the tree, suffering pervades the frame. Its head resembles some sort of skull. The body is faintly painted in a melancholy blue with smudges of purple and is translucent and ghostly—at once a lump of matter and a spectral absence. We do not see the baboon through the cage. Instead we see through the baboon at the cage. Indeed, its very physiology involves the encountering of trauma as the head of the baboon does not simply connect to the body but stabs through the body as a sharp bone, perhaps opaquely evoking the violence of evolution. Similarly, the baboon’s tail seems to stab through the tree. Its eye is an enlarged void and a pupil is indicated by a bluish white triangle splitting through the void. The tree has something of the menacing and looming quality of a shadow and there is a sense of wilderness confronted by death and entrapment, evoked through the background. The yellowy ground is suggestive of dead grass. While potentially gesturing to the psychical confusion and intensity of Vincent Van Gogh or Edvard Munch, the yellowed grass more likely evokes the empty, barren and hostile planes of the desert and contrasts with the darkened colours. The baboon sitting on the cross/tree may seem to have reached some sort of pinnacle but such a status is mocked by the tree that manages to continue outside the fence: the branches nightmarishly protrude through the fence to conquer the frame, which in turn furthers the sense of inescapable entrapment and threat. The baboon is thereby precluded from reaching a higher point on the tree, unable to climb the branches, and underscores the baboon’s confines. The painting is labelled a study, which may suggest it is unfinished. However, Bacon’s completed works preserve an unfinished quality. This unfinished quality conveys a sense in which Man and evolution are unfinished and that being finished in the sense of being completed is no longer possible. The idea that there can finished work of art, a work of art that preserves an eternal meaning, has been repeatedly subject to serious doubt, including by artists themselves. Indeed, Bacon’s work erases the potential for perfection and completion, and breaks down, through devolution, what has been achieved by Man and the forces that shaped him. The subject is lowered from that of human to that of a baboon and is therefore, by Vasari’s Renaissance reasoning, not a subject at all. Bacon’s sketch and study exist to evoke a sense of incompletion, involving pain without resolution. The animal state of pain is therefore married with existential entrapment and isolation as art ceases to express the Platonic ideal and aims to show the truth of the shadow—namely that humanity is without a God, a God that previously shed light on humanity’s condition and anchored the human subject. If there is a trace or echo of human nobility left, such a trace functions through the wild and violent quality of animal indignation. A scream of painful indignity is the last act approaching (or descending from) any dignity that is afforded. Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, DarknessAn even more extreme case of the subject no longer being the subject, of being broken and muted—so much so that animal protest is annulled—can be witnessed in Jan Švankmajer’s animated short Darkness, Light, Darkness. In the animation, green clay hands mould and form a human body in order to be part of it. But when complete, the human body is trapped, grotesquely out of proportion with its environment. The film begins in a darkened house. There is a knocking of the door, and then the first green hand opens the door and turns on the light. The hand falls to the floor, blindly making its way to another door on the opposite side of the house. The hand opens the door only for eyeballs to roll out. The eyes look around. The hand pushes its clay fingers against the eyeballs, and the eyeballs become attached to the fingers. Suddenly with sight, the hand is able to lift itself up. The hand discovers that another hand is knocking at the door. The first hand helps the second hand, and then goes to the window where a pair of ears are stuck together flapping like a moth. The hands work together and break the ears apart. The first hand, the one with eyes, attaches the ears to the second hand. Then a head with a snout, but missing eyes and ears, enters through the door. The hands pull the snout until it becomes a nose, suppressing and remoulding the animal until it becomes human. As with Bacon, the violence of evolution, of auto-construction is conveyed indirectly: in Bacon’s case, through painted devolution and, in the case of the claymation, through a violent construction based on mutilation and smashing body parts together.Although I have described only three minutes of the seven-minute film, it already presents an image of human construction devoid of art or divine design. Man, or rather the hands, become the blind watchman of evolution. The hands work contingently, with what they are provided. They shape themselves based on need. The body, after all, exists as parts, and the human body is made up of other life forms, both sustaining and being sustained by them. The hands work together, and sacrifice sight and hearing for the head. They tear off the ears and remove the eyes and give them to the head. Transcendence is exchanged for subsistence. The absurdity of this contingency becomes most apparent when the hands attempt to merge with the head, to be the head’s feet. Then the feet actually arrive and are attached to the head’s neck. The human subject in such a state is thereby deformed and incomplete. It is a frightened form, cowering when it hears banging at the door. It turns out that the banging is being produced by an angry erect penis pounding at the door. However, even this symbol of masculine potency is subdued, rendered harmless by the hands that splash a bucket of cold water on it. The introduction of the penis signifies the masculinist notions implicit in the term Man, but we only ever see the penis when it is flaccid. The human subject is able to be concluded when clay pours from both doors and the window. The hands sculpt the clay and make the body, which, when complete is oversized and barely fits within the house. The male subject is then trapped, cramped in a foetal position. With its head against the ceiling next to the light, breathing heavily, all it can do is turn out the light. The head opens its mouth either in horror or a state of exertion and gasps. The eyes bulge before one of the body’s hands turns switch, perhaps suggesting terror before death or simply the effort involved in turning off the light. Once completed and built, the human subject remains in the dark. Despite the evident quirky, playful humour, Švankmajer’s film reflects an exhaustion with art itself. Human life becomes clay comically finding its own form. For Vasari, the ideal of the human form is realised first by God and then by Man through marble; for Švankmajer it is green clay. He demotes man back to the substance for a God to mould but, as there is no God to breathe life into it and give form, there is just the body to imperfectly mould itself. The film challenges both Vasari’s humanism and the suprahumanism of Nietzschean spectacle. Instead of the self-generating power and radical interdependence and agency of Übermensch, Švankmajer’s sub-subject is Man undercome—man beneath as opposed to over man, man mocked by its ambition, and with no space to stand high. Švankmajer thereby realises the anti-Nietzschean potential inherent within cinema’s anti-spectacular nature. Antonin Artaud, who extends the aesthetics advanced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, contrasts the theatre’s sense of animal life with cinema. Artaud observes that movies “murder us with second-hand reproductions […] filtered through machines” (84). Thus, films murder creative and animal power as film flattens life to a dead realm of reproduction. Continuing Jacques Derrida’s hauntological framing of the screen, the animation theorist Alan Cholodenko has argued that the screen implies death. Motion is dead and replaced by illusion, a recording relayed back to us. What renders cinema haunting also renders it hauntological. For Cholodenko, cinema’s animation challenges ontology and metaphysics by eschewing stable ontologies through a process that entails both presence and absence. As Cholodenko points out, all film is a type of animation and reanimation, of making images move that are not in fact moving. Thus, one can argue that the animated-animation (such as Švankmajer’s claymation) becomes a refinement of death, a Frankesteinian reanimation of dead material. Indeed, Darkness, Light, Darkness accentuates the presence of death with the green clay almost resembling putrefaction. The fingerprints on the clay accentuate a lack of life, for the autonomous and dead matter that constructs and shapes a dead body from seemingly severed body parts. Even the title of the film, Darkness, Light, Darkness reflects an experience of cinema as deflation rather than joyous spectacle. One goes to a darkened space, watches light flicker on a screen and then the light goes out again. The cartoonish motions of the hands and body parts in the film look only half alive and therefore seem half-dead. Made in the decaying Communist state of Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer’s film aptly acknowledges the deflation of cinema, reflecting that illumination—the light of God, is put out, or more specifically, switched off. With the light of God switched off, creation becomes construction and construction becomes reconstruction, filtered through cinema’s machine processes as framed through Cholodenko. Still, Švankmajer’s animation is not unsympathetic to the plight of the hands. We do see the body parts work together. When a vulgar, meaty, non-claymation tongue comes out through the door, it goes straight to the other door to let the teeth in. The teeth and tongue are aided by the hands to complete the face. Indeed, what they produce is a human being, which has some sense of coherence and success—a success enmeshed with failure and entrapment. Piccinini’s “The Young Family”Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural works offer a more tender approach to the subject, especially when her works focus on the nonhuman animal with human characteristics. Piccinini is interested in the combinations of the animal and the machine, so her ideas can be seen almost as transhuman, where the human is extended beyond humanism. Her work is based on connection and connectedness, but does not emphasise the humanist values of innovation and self-creation often inherent to transhumanism. Indeed, the emphasis on connection is distinct from the entrapment of Bacon’s baboon and Švankmajer’s clay human, which half lament freedom’s negation.The way that Piccinini preserves aspects of humanism within a framework of subhumanism is evident in her work “The Young Family”. The hypperrealistic sculpture depicts a humanoid pig form, flopped, presumably exhausted, as piglet-babies suckle on her nipples. The work was inspired by a scientific proposal for pigs to be genetically modified to provide organs for humans (“Educational Resource” 5). Such a transhuman setting frames a subhuman aesthetic. Care is taken to render the scene with sentiment but without a sense of the ideal, without perfection. One baby-piglet tenderly grasps its foot with both hands and stares with love at its mother. We see two piglets enthusiastically sucking their mother’s teat, while a third baby/piglet’s bottom is visible, indicating that there is a third piglet scrambling for milk. The mother gazes at us, with her naked mammalian body visible. We see her wrinkles and veins. There is some fur on her head and some hair on her eyebrows humanising her. Indeed, her eyes are distinctly human and convey affection. Affection seems to be a motif that carries through to the materials (carefully crafted by Piccinini’s studio). The affection displayed in the artwork is trans-special, emphasising that human tenderness is in fact mammalian tenderness. Such tenderness conflates the human, the nonhuman animal and the material out of which the humanoid creature and its young are constructed. The sub-agency brings together the young and the old by displaying the closeness of the family. Something of this sub-subjectivity is theorised in Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, where he contrasts Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch with the idea of the subhuman. Bull writes that subhumanism involves giving up on “becoming more than a man and think[ing] only of becoming something less” (n.p.; Chapter 2, sec. “The Subhuman”). Piccinini depicts vulnerability and tenderness with life forms that are properly speaking subhuman, and reject the displays of strength of Nietzsche’s suprahumanism or Vasari’s emphasis on art commemorating great men. But Piccinini’s subhumanism preserves enough humanism to understand art’s ability to encourage an ethics of nurturing. In this respect, her works offer an alternative to Bull’s subhumanism that aims, so Bull argues, to devalue art altogether. Instead, Piccinini affirms imagination, but through its ability to conjure new ways to perceive animal affection. The sub-subject thereby functions to reveal states of emotion common to mammals (including humans) and other animals. ConclusionThese three artists therefore convey distinct, if related and intersecting, ways of visualising the sub-subject: Bacon through animal suffering, Švankmajer through adaptation that ultimately leads to the agent’s entrapment, and Piccinini who, instead of marrying anti-humanism with the subhumanism (the procedure of Švankmajer, and Bacon), integrates aspects of transhumanism and Renaissance humanism into her subhuman vision. As such, these works present a realisation of how we might think of the going under of the human subject after Darwin, Nietzsche and the deaths of God, Man and the diminishment of creativity. Such works remain not only antithetical to Vasari’s humanism but also to Nietzsche’s suprahumanism. These artists use art’s power to humble—not through overpowering awe but through the visible breakdown of the human agent, speaking for and to the sub-subject. Such art, by unbuilding and dismantling the subject, draws on prehuman trajectories of evolution, and in the case of Piccinini, transhuman trajectories. Art ceases to be about the grandiose evocations of power. Rather, more modestly, these works build a connection between the human with other mammals. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge Daniel Canaris for his valuable insights into Christianity and the Italian Renaissance, Alan Cholodenko for providing copies of his works that were central to my interpretation of Švankmajer, and Rachel Franks and Simon Dwyer for their invaluable assistance and finding very helpful reviewers. References Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove P, 1958.Art Gallery of South Australia. “Educational Resource Patricia Piccinini.” Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia. 11 Dec. 2016 <https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Learning/docs/Online_Resources/Piccinini_online_resource.pdf>.Bacon, Francis. “Head I.” 1948. Oil on Canvas. 100.3 x 74.9cm. ———. “Study of a Baboon.” 1953. Oil on Canvas. 198.3 x 137.3cm. Bull, Malcolm. Anti-Nietzsche. New York: Verso, 2011. Cholodenko, Alan. “First Principles of Animation.” Animating Film Theory. Ed. Karen Beckman. Duke UP, 2014. 98-110.———. “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema.” Cultural Studies Review 10.2 (2004): 99-113. Darkness, Light, Darkness. Jan Švankmajer, 1990. 35mm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Piccinini, Patricia. “The Young Family.” 2002. Silicone, Polyurethane, Leather, Plywood, Human Hair, 80 x 150 x 110cm. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of Artists. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. Strategy First, 2001. http://www.wwiionline.com/ Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 1967. Der Derian, James. “The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars.” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 187-92. Filewood, Alan. “C:\Games\Dramaturgy: The Cybertheatre of Computer Games.” Canadian Theatre Review 81 (Winter 1994): 24-28. Gittrich, Greg. “Expert Differs with Kids over Video Game Effects.” The Denver Post 27 Apr 1999: AA-06. LexisNexis. Feb. 7 2003. GrimmCAF. “MojoCAF’s Memorial Flight.” Aces High BB, 13 Dec. 2002. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... IEntertainment Network. Warbirds III. Simon and Schuster Interactive, 2002.http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=w... Jenkins, Henry, comp. “Voices from the Combat Zone: Game Grrlz Talk Back.” From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1998. 328-41. Lieberman, Joseph I. “The Social Impact of Music Violence.” Statement Before the Governmental Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Oversight, 1997. http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberma... Feb. 7 2003. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free, 1997. Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pyro. “AH2 FAQ.” Aces High BB, 29 Jan. 2003. Internet. http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/sh... Feb. 8 2003. Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html

IntroductionNew digital technologies hold promise for equalising access to information and communication for the Deaf community. SMS technology, for example, has helped to equalise deaf peoples’ access to information and made it easier to communicate with both deaf and hearing people (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"; Harper). A wealth of anecdotal evidence and some recent academic work suggests that new media technology is also reshaping deaf peoples’ sense of local and global community (Breivik "Deaf"; Breivik, Deaf; Brueggeman). One focus of research on new media technologies has been on technologies used for point to point communication, including communication (and interpretation) via video (Tane Akamatsu et al.; Power and Power; Power, Power, and Horstmanshof). Another has been the use of multimedia technologies in formal educational setting for pedagogical purposes, particularly English language literacy (e.g. Marshall Gentry et al.; Tane Akamatsu et al.; Vogel et al.). An emphasis on the role of multimedia in deaf education is understandable, considering the on-going highly politicised contest over whether to educate young deaf people in a bilingual environment using a signed language (Swanwick & Gregory). However, the increasing significance of social and participatory media in the leisure time of Westerners suggests that such uses of Web 2.0 are also worth exploring. There have begun to be some academic accounts of the enthusiastic adoption of vlogging by sign language users (e.g. Leigh; Cavander and Ladner) and this paper seeks to add to this important work. Web 2.0 has been defined by its ability to, in Denise Woods’ word, “harness collective intelligence” (19.2) by providing opportunities for users to make, adapt, “mash up” and share text, photos and video. As well as its well-documented participatory possibilities (Bruns), its re-emphasis on visual (as opposed to textual) communication is of particular interest for Deaf communities. It has been suggested that deaf people are a ‘visual variety of the human race’ (Bahan), and the visually rich presents new opportunities for visually rich forms of communication, most importantly via signed languages. The central importance of signed languages for Deaf identity suggests that the visual aspects of interactive multimedia might offer possibilities of maintenance, enhancement and shifts in those identities (Hyde, Power and Lloyd). At the same time, the visual aspects of the Web 2.0 are often audio-visual, such that the increasingly rich resources of the net offer potential barriers as well as routes to inclusion and community (see Woods; Ellis; Cavander and Ladner). In particular, lack of captioning or use of Auslan in video resources emerges as a key limit to the accessibility of the visual Web to deaf users (Cahill and Hollier). In this paper we ask to what extent contemporary digital media might create moments of permeability in what Krentz has called “the hearing line, that invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people”( 2)”. To provide tentative answers to these questions, this paper will explore the use of participatory digital media by a group of young Deaf people taking part in a small-scale digital moviemaking project in Sydney in 2009. The ProjectAs a starting point, the interdisciplinary research team conducted a video-making course for young deaf sign language users within the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. The research team was comprised of one deaf and four hearing researchers, with expertise in media and cultural studies, information technology, sign language linguistics/ deaf studies, and signed language interpreting. The course was advertised through the newsletter of partner organization the NSW Deaf Society, via a Sydney bilingual deaf school and through the dense electronic networks of Australian deaf people. The course attracted fourteen participants from NSW, Western Australia and Queensland ranging in age from 10 to 18. Twelve of the participants were male, and two female. While there was no aspiration to gather a representative group of young people, it is worth noting there was some diversity within the group: for example, one participant was a wheelchair user while another had in recent years moved to Sydney from Africa and had learned Auslan relatively recently. Students were taught a variety of storytelling techniques and video-making skills, and set loose in groups to devise, shoot and edit a number of short films. The results were shared amongst the class, posted on a private YouTube channel and made into a DVD which was distributed to participants.The classes were largely taught in Auslan by a deaf teacher, although two sessions were taught by (non-deaf) members of Macquarie faculty, including an AFI award winning director. Those sessions were interpreted into Auslan by a sign language interpreter. Participants were then allowed free creative time to shoot video in locations of their choice on campus, or to edit their footage in the computer lab. Formal teaching sessions lasted half of each day – in the afternoons, participants were free to use the facilities or participate in a range of structured activities. Participants were also interviewed in groups, and individually, and their participation in the project was observed by researchers. Our research interest was in what deaf young people would choose to do with Web 2.0 technologies, and most particularly the visually rich elements of participatory and social media, in a relatively unstructured environment. Importantly, our focus was not on evaluating the effectiveness of multimedia for teaching deaf young people, or the level of literacy deployed by deaf young people in using the applications. Rather we were interested to discover the kinds of stories participants chose to tell, the ways they used Web 2.0 applications and the modalities of communication they chose to use. Given that Auslan was the language of instruction of the course, would participants draw on the tradition of deaf jokes and storytelling and narrate stories to camera in Auslan? Would they use the format of the “mash-up”, drawing on found footage or photographs? Would they make more filmic movies using Auslan dialogue? How would they use captions and text in their movies: as subtitles for Auslan dialogue? As an alternative to signing? Or not at all? Our observations from the project point to the great significance of the visual dimensions of Web 2.0 for the deaf young people who participated in the project. Initially, this was evident in the kind of movies students chose to make. Only one group – three young people in their late teens which included both of the young women in the class - chose to make a dialogue heavy movie, a spoof of Charlie’s Angels, entitled Deaf Angels. This movie included long scenes of the Angels using Auslan to chat together, receiving instruction from “Charlie” in sign language via videophone and recruiting “extras”, again using Auslan, to sign a petition for Auslan to be made an official Australian language. In follow up interviews, one of the students involved in making this film commented “my clip is about making a political statement, while the other [students in the class] made theirs just for fun”. The next group of (three) films, all with the involvement of the youngest class member, included signed storytelling of a sort readily recognisable from signed videos on-line: direct address to camera, with the teller narrating but also taking on the roles of characters and presenting their dialogue directly via the sign language convention of “role shift” - also referred to as constructed action and constructed dialogue (Metzger). One of these movies was an interesting hybrid. The first half of the four minute film had two young actors staging a hold-up at a vending machine, with a subsequent chase and fight scene. Like most of the films made by participants in the class, it included only one line of signed dialogue, with the rest of the narrative told visually through action. However, at the end of the action sequence, with the victim safely dead, the narrative was then retold by one of the performers within a signed story, using conventions typically observed in signed storytelling - such as role shift, characterisation and spatial mapping (Mather & Winston; Rayman; Wilson).The remaining films similarly drew on action and horror genres with copious use of chase and fight scenes and melodramatic and sometimes quite beautiful climactic death tableaux. The movies included a story about revenging the death of a brother; a story about escaping from jail; a short story about a hippo eating a vet; a similar short comprised of stills showing a sequence of executions in the computer lab; and a ghost story. Notably, most of these movies contained very little dialogue – with only one or two lines of signed dialogue in each four to five minute video (with the exception of the gun handshape used in context to represent the object liberally throughout most films). The kinds of movies made by this limited group of people on this one occasion are suggestive. While participants drew on a number of genres and communication strategies in their film making, the researchers were surprised at how few of the movies drew on traditions of signed storytelling or jokes– particularly since the course was targeted at deaf sign language users and promoted as presented in Auslan. Consequently, our group of students were largely drawn from the small number of deaf schools in which Auslan is the main language of instruction – an exceptional circumstance in an Australian setting in which most deaf young people attend mainstream schools (Byrnes et al.; Power and Hyde). Looking across the Hearing LineWe can make sense of the creative choices made by the participants in the course in a number of ways. Although methods of captioning were briefly introduced during the course, iMovie (the package which participants were using) has limited captioning functionality. Indeed, one student, who was involved in making the only clip to include captioning which contextualised the narrative, commented in follow-up interviews that he would have liked more information about captioning. It’s also possible that the compressed nature of the course prevented participants from undertaking the time-consuming task of scripting and entering captions. As well as being the most fun approach to the projects, the use of visual story telling was probably the easiest. This was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of emphasis on scriptwriting (outside of structural elements and broad narrative sweeps) in the course. Greater emphasis on that aspect of film-making would have given participants a stronger foundational literacy for caption-based projectsDespite these qualifications, both the movies made by students and our observations suggest the significance of a shared visual culture in the use of the Web by these particular young people. During an afternoon when many of the students were away swimming, one student stayed in the lab to use the computers. Rather than working on a video project, he spent time trawling through YouTube for clips purporting to show ghost sightings and other paranormal phenomena. He drew these clips to the attention of one of the research team who was present in the lab, prompting a discussion about the believability of the ghosts and supernatural apparitions in the clips. While some of the clips included (uncaptioned) off-screen dialogue and commentary, this didn’t seem to be a barrier to this student’s enjoyment. Like many other sub-genres of YouTube clips – pranks, pratfalls, cute or alarmingly dangerous incidents involving children and animals – these supernatural videos as a genre rely very little on commentary or dialogue for their meaning – just as with the action films that other students drew on so heavily in their movie making. In an E-Tech paper entitled "The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism", Ethan Zuckerman suggests that “web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers and web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats”. This comment points out both the Web 2.0’s vast repository of entertaining material in the ‘funny video’genre which is visually based, dialogue free, entertaining material accessible to a wide range of people, including deaf sign language users. In the realm of leisure, at least, the visually rich resources of Web 2.0’s ubiquitous images and video materials may be creating a shared culture in which the line between hearing and deaf people’s entertainment activities is less clear than it may have been in the past. The ironic tone of Zuckerman’s observation, however, alerts us to the limits of a reliance on language-free materials as a route to accessibility. The kinds of videos that the participants in the course chose to make speaks to the limitations as well as resources offered by the visual Web. There is still a limited range of captioned material on You Tube. In interviews, both young people and their teachers emphasised the central importance of access to captioned video on-line, with the young people we interviewed strongly favouring captioned video over the inclusion on-screen of simultaneous signed interpretations of text. One participant who was a regular user of a range of on-line social networking commented that if she really liked the look of a particular movie which was uncaptioned, she would sometimes contact its maker and ask them to add captions to it. Interestingly, two student participants emphasised in interviews that signed video should also include captions so hearing people could have access to signed narratives. These students seemed to be drawing on ideas about “reverse discrimination”, but their concern reflected the approach of many of the student movies - using shared visual conventions that made their movies available to the widest possible audience. All the students were anxious that hearing people could understand their work, perhaps a consequence of the course’s location in the University as an overwhelmingly hearing environment. In this emphasis on captioning rather than sign as a route to making media accessible, we may be seeing a consequence of the emphasis Krentz describes as ubiquitous in deaf education “the desire to make the differences between deaf and hearing people recede” (16). Krentz suggests that his concept of the ‘hearing line’ “must be perpetually retested and re-examined. It reveals complex and shifting relationships between physical difference, cultural fabrication and identity” (7). The students’ movies and attitudes emphasised the reality of that complexity. Our research project explored how some young Deaf people attempted to create stories capable of crossing categories of deafness and ‘hearing-ness’… unstable (like other identity categories) while others constructed narratives that affirmed Deaf Culture or drew on the Deaf storytelling traditions. This is of particular interest in the Web 2.0 environment, given that its technologies are often lauded as having the politics of participation. The example of the Deaf Community asks reasonable questions about the validity of those claims, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there is still less than appropriate access and that some users are more equal than others.How do young people handle the continuing lack of material available to the on the Web? The answer repeatedly offered by our young male interviewees was ‘I can’t be bothered’. As distinct from “I can’t understand” or “I won’t go there” this answer, represented a disengagement from demands to identify your literacy levels, reveal your preferred means of communication; to rehearse arguments about questions of access or expose attempts to struggle to make sense of texts that fail to employ readily accessible means of communicating. Neither an admission of failure or a demand for change, CAN’T-BE-BOTHERED in this context offers a cool way out of an accessibility impasse. This easily-dismissed comment in interviews was confirmed in a whole-group discussions, when students came to a consensus that if when searching for video resources on the Net they found video that included neither signing nor captions, they would move on to find other more accessible resources. Even here, though, the ground continues to shift. YouTube recently announced that it was making its auto-captioning feature open to everybody - a machine generated system that whilst not perfect does attempt to make all YouTube videos accessible to deaf people. (Bertolucci).The importance of captioning of non-signed video is thrown into further significance by our observation from the course of the use of YouTube as a search engine by the participants. Many of the students when asked to research information on the Web bypassed text-based search engines and used the more visual results presented on YouTube directly. In research on deaf adolescents’ search strategies on the Internet, Smith points to the promise of graphical interfaces for deaf young people as a strategy for overcoming the English literacy difficulties experienced by many deaf young people (527). In the years since Smith’s research was undertaken, the graphical and audiovisual resources available on the Web have exploded and users are increasingly turning to these resources in their searches, providing new possibilities for Deaf users (see for instance Schonfeld; Fajardo et al.). Preliminary ConclusionsA number of recent writers have pointed out the ways that the internet has made everyday communication with government services, businesses, workmates and friends immeasurably easier for deaf people (Power, Power and Horstmanshof; Keating and Mirus; Valentine and Skelton, "Changing", "Umbilical"). The ready availability of information in a textual and graphical form on the Web, and ready access to direct contact with others on the move via SMS, has worked against what has been described as deaf peoples’ “information deprivation”, while everyday tasks – booking tickets, for example – are no longer a struggle to communicate face-to-face with hearing people (Valentine and Skelton, "Changing"; Bakken 169-70).The impacts of new technologies should not be seen in simple terms, however. Valentine and Skelton summarise: “the Internet is not producing either just positive or just negative outcomes for D/deaf people but rather is generating a complex set of paradoxical effects for different users” (Valentine and Skelton, "Umbilical" 12). They note, for example, that the ability, via text-based on-line social media to interact with other people on-line regardless of geographic location, hearing status or facility with sign language has been highly valued by some of their deaf respondents. They comment, however, that the fact that many deaf people, using the Internet, can “pass” minimises the need for hearing people in a phonocentric society to be aware of the diversity of ways communication can take place. They note, for example, that “few mainstream Websites demonstrate awareness of D/deaf peoples’ information and communication needs/preferences (eg. by incorporating sign language video clips)” ("Changing" 11). As such, many deaf people have an enhanced ability to interact with a range of others, but in a mode favoured by the dominant culture, a culture which is thus unchallenged by exposure to alternative strategies of communication. Our research, preliminary as it is, suggests a somewhat different take on these complex questions. The visually driven, image-rich approach taken to movie making, Web-searching and information sharing by our participants suggests the emergence of a certain kind of on-line culture which seems likely to be shared by deaf and hearing young people. However where Valentine and Skelton suggest deaf people, in order to participate on-line, are obliged to do so, on the terms of the hearing majority, the increasingly visual nature of Web 2.0 suggests that the terrain may be shifting – even if there is still some way to go.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Natalie Kull and Meg Stewart for their research assistance on this project, and participants in the course and members of the project’s steering group for their generosity with their time and ideas.ReferencesBahan, B. "Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race. In H-Dirksen L. Baumann (ed.), Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. 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IntroductionThis article explores the work of lists in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In contemporary cultural contexts the endless proliferation of listing forms and practices takes on a “self-reflexivity” that signals their functional and productive role in negotiating the everyday. Grocery lists, to do lists, and other fragmentary notes work as personal tools for ordering and managing daily needs and activities. But what do these fragments tell us about the work of lists? Do they “merely” describe or provide analytical insight into the everyday? To address these questions we explore the issues and anxieties raised by everyday consumption drawing on theories of everyday life. These concerns, which are examined in detail in the second part of the paper, lie at the heart of French writer Georges Perec’s interest in the “infra-ordinary”—that which resides within the everyday. In the parts of his writing that he designated in retrospect as “sociological,” Perec takes the form and function of lists as a starting point for a range of literary experiments that work as tools of discovery and invention capable in their seeming banality of both mapping and disrupting everyday life. Les Choses (Things) and Je Me Souviens (I Remember), for example, take the form of endless and repetitious lists of things, places, people, and memories, collections of fragments that aim to achieve a new kind of sociology of everyday life. While this project may be contentious in terms of its “representativeness,” as a discursive method or mode of ethnographic practice (Becker) it points to the generative power of lists as both of the everyday and as an analytical tool of discovery for understanding the everyday. Perec’s sociology of the everyday is not, we argue, articulated as a form of a cohesive or generalizable characterisation of social institutions, but rather emerges as an “invent-ory” of the rich texture and disjunctures that populated his everyday spaces, personal encounters, and memories. Lists and the EverydayTo see lists as tools of common use, to paraphrase Spufford (2), is to place the list squarely within the realm of the everyday. A particular feature of the everyday—its “special quality,” as Highmore puts it—is that it is characterised by “the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive” (Highmore 1). The everyday is enigmatic, elusive, difficult to grasp, and important because of this. In Maurice Blanchot’s famous formulation, “whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes” (14). Its pervasiveness renders it as platitude, but, as Blanchot adds, “this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived” (13). This tension poses special challenges for critics of the everyday who must register it as a part of, as inhering in, “manifold lived experience” without it “dissolving” into “statistics, properties, data” when it is “made the object of study” (Sheringham 360). In short, as Fran Martin (2) points out, “even though it surrounds us completely and takes up the vast majority of our time, the everyday is extremely difficult to pin down.” It is a predicament that is made all the more difficult in light of the complicated entanglement of the everyday and consumer capitalism (Jagose; Lury; Schor and Holt). This close relationship between consumer objects—things—and everyday life (along with other historical factors), has profoundly shifted critical understanding of the processes of subject formation and identity performance. One influential formulation of these transformations, associated most strongly with the work of Giddens and Beck, is captured in the notion of “reflexive modernity.” This refers to the understanding that, increasingly, at a broader societal level, “the very idea of controllability, certainty or security” is being challenged (Beck, World Risk Society 2)—developments that impact directly on how self-identity is formed (Giddens), reformed and performed (Hall). Faced with such upheavals, it is suggested that the individual increasingly “must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves” (Beck, “Reinvention” 13), they must self-reflexively “invent” themselves. As Slater puts it, individuals, by force of circumstance, are required to “choose, construct, interpret, negotiate, display who they are to be seen as” (84) using a wide array of resources, both material and symbolic. Consumerism, it is widely argued, proffers its goods as solutions to these problems of identity (Slater 85). For instance, Adam Arvidsson notes how goods are used in the construction of “social relations, shared emotions, personal identity or forms of community” (18). This is particularly the case in relation to lifestyle consumption, which for Chaney (11) functions as a response to the loss of meaning in modern life following the sorts of larger societal upheavals described by Giddens and Beck and others. The general implication of lifestyle consumption across its various forms is that “‘every choice’ […] all acts of purchase or consumption, […] ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’” (Warde in Slater 85). It is here that we can place the contemporary work of lists and the proliferation of list forms and practices. Lists figure in vital ways within this context of consumer-based everyday life. At a general level, lists assist us in making sense of the activities, objects, and experiences that feed and constitute daily life. In this sense, the list is a crucial mediating device, a means of organising things and bringing the mundanities and the exigencies of the everyday under control:The list categorises the ongoing chores of everyday life: organising and managing shopping, work, laundry, meetings, parking fines, and body management. (Crewe 33)In relation to lifestyle consumption, lists and inventories constitute one key way in which “we attempt to organise and order consumption” (Crewe 29). In this sense, lists are, for Louise Crewe, important “scripting devices that help us to manage the mundanity and weighty materiality of consumption” (Crewe 29). The use of the phrase “scripting device” is important here insofar as it suggests a double-movement in which lists simultaneously serve as “devices for regulating and disciplining the consuming body” (that is, lists as “prompts” that encourage us to follow the “script” of consumer culture) and work productively to “narrate practice and desire” (part of the “scripting” of self-identity and performance) (Crewe 30).In developing and illustrating these ideas, Crewe draws on Bill Keaggy’s found shopping lists project. Originally a blog, and subsequently a book entitled Milk Eggs Vodka, Keaggy gathers (and offers humorous commentary on) a wide array of discarded shopping lists that range from the mundane, to the bizarre, to the profound, each, in their own way, surprisingly rich and revealing of the scribes who penned them. Individually, the lists relay, through object names, places, actions, and prompts, the mundane landscape of everyday consumption. For example: Zip lockIceBeerFruit (Keaggy 42) SunglassesShoesBeer$Food (Keaggy 205)Keaggy’s collection comes to life, however, through his own careful organisation of these personal fragments into meaningful categories delineated by various playful and humorous characteristics. This listing of lists performs a certain transformation that works only in accumulation, in the book’s organisation, and through Keaggy’s humorous annotations. That is, Keaggy’s deliberate organisation of the lists into categories that highlight certain features over others, and his own annotations, introduces an element of invention and play, and delivers up many unexpected insights into their anonymous compilers’ lives. This dual process of utilising the list form as a creative and a critical tool for understanding the everyday also lies at the heart of Georges Perec’s literary and sociological project. Georges Perec: Towards an Invent-ory of Everyday LifeThe work of the French experimental writer Georges Perec is particularly instructive in understanding the generative potential of the act of listing. Perec was especially attuned to the effectiveness and significance of lists in revealing what is important in the mundane and quotidian—what he calls the “infra-ordinary” or “endotic” (as opposed to the “extraordinary” and “exotic”). As shall be detailed below, Perec’s creative recuperation of the list form as a textual device and critical tool leads us to a fuller appreciation of how, in Crewe’s words, “the most mundane, ordinary, invisible, and seemingly uninteresting things can be as significant and revealing as the most dramatic” (44).Across Perec’s diverse literary output, lists figure repeatedly in ways that speak directly to their ability to shed light on the inner workings of the everyday—their ability to make the familiar strange (Highmore 12)—and to reveal the entangled interactions between everyday consumption and personal identity. It is in this second sense that lists operate in his novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (Les Choses, 1965), a book that the French philosopher Alain Badiou (20, note 1) describes as a “rigorous literary version of the Marxist theme of alienation—especially the prevalence of things over existence.” Things tells of the endeavours of Sylvie and Jérôme, a young Parisian couple who, in Bourdieu’s terms, attempt to improve their social position in part through the cultural capital resources they see as invested in consumer objects, in the “things” that they acquire and desire. Perec’s telling of this narrative is heavily populated with lists of these semiotically loaded objects of consumer desire, taste, and distinction. The book opens, for example, with a descriptive listing of the kinds of decorative elements that visitors would encounter in the entrance hall of an idealised, imagined Paris apartment the couple longed for:Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respectively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle-steamer named Ville-de-Montereau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. (Perec, Things 21) This (and other detailed) listing of idealised objects—which, as the book progresses, are set in stark opposition to their present lived reality—tells the reader a great deal about the two protagonists’ wants and desires (“they both possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them”—Perec, Things 35), and wider collective identification with these desires. Indeed, such identifications clearly had wide social resonance in France (and elsewhere) with Things collecting the Prix Renaudot. The ability of lists to speak to collective social (not just individual) experience was also explored by Perec in Je me souviens (1978), a book modelled on a project by Joe Brainard and which comprised a series of personal recollections of largely unremarkable events, which, nevertheless, at the time, had gained some form of purchase within the collective psyche of the French people—in Perec’s words, a random list of “little fragments of the everyday, things which, in such and such a year, everyone more or less the same age has seen, or lived, or share, and which have subsequently disappeared or been forgotten” (cited in Adair 178). For example:(item 57) I remember that Christian Jacque divorced Renée Faure in order to marry Martine Carol.(item 247) I remember that De Gaulle had a brother named Paul who was director of the Foire de Paris. (cited in Adair 179)Both these texts are component parts in a larger project of Perec’s to develop “an anthropology of everyday life” (Perec, “Notes” 142 note §). Howard Becker has offered a challenging, though also somewhat ambivalent, critique of Perec’s “sociological” method in these and other texts, contrasting Perec’s descriptive ethnography with the work that social scientists do. Becker takes aim at the way Perec’s detailed listing of objects, people, events, and memories eschews narrative and sociological design, referring to Perec’s method as “proto-ethnography,” or “detailed ‘raw description’” (73). Yet Becker is also drawn in by the end products of that method: “As you read Perec’s descriptions, you increasingly succumb to the feeling (at least I do, and I think others do as well) that this is important, though you can’t say how” (71). Ultimately, his criticism decries Perec’s failure to impose an explicit order on his lists and fragments, perhaps missing the significance of the way they are always bounded and underpinned by a conceptual principle: “It does not seem to have the kind of cohesion, at least not obviously, that social scientists like to ascribe to a culture, a similarity or interlocking or affinity of the parts to one another…” (74). That is, Perec’s lists stand as fragments, but fragments that do add up to something, as Becker admits: “The whole is more than the parts” (69). This ambivalence points to the analytical potential Perec found within those fragments, the “raw description,” that can only be understood through the end product. It could be argued that his lists defy the very possibility of presenting the everyday as a cohesive whole, and promote instead the everyday in its rich texture, as repetition and disjuncture. This project presents itself, in short, as a sociology of the everyday, whilst subverting the functionalist traditions of sociological observation and classification (Boyne). As Perec asks of the habitual, “How are we to speak of [...] ‘common things,’ how to track them down rather, flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue [...]?” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists (alongside other forms of description) play a vital role in this project and provide a partial answer to the above questions, and this is why Perec’s lists actively seek out the banal or quotidian. In addition to the examples cited above, fascination with enumeration of this kind is most strikingly realised in his essay, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four” (Реrес, “Attempt” 244-249), and his later radio broadcast, “An Attempt at а Description of Things Seen at Mabillon Junction on 19 Мау 1978” (Bellos 640). At very least, Perec’s experiments serve as testimony to his ability to transform the trivial into the poetic—list-making as “invent-ory”. Importantly, however, Perec makes the shift from the inventory as a pragmatic listing form, “presenting a simple series of units,” “collected by a conceptual principle” (Belknap 2, 3), to a more transformative or analytical discursive practice. In all the above cases, Perec’s “accumulation is used in conjunction with other forms, devices, and intentions” (Bellos 670), such as, for instance, in the deployment of the list (the “invent-ory”) as an effective lever with which to pry open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, memories, in order that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210).In this way, Perec’s use of lists (and various forms of categorisation) can be understood as a critique of the very possibility of stable method applied to classificatory ordering systems. In its place he promotes a set of practices that are oriented towards, and appropriate to, investigations of the everyday, rather than establishing scientific universals. At points in his work Perec expresses discomfort or even anxiety in taking the act of classification as a “method.” He begins his essay “Think/Classify,” for instance, by lamenting the “discursive deficiency” of his own use of classification in grasping the everyday, which at the same time calls “the thinkable and the classifiable into question” (189). And, yet, the act of listing, situated as it is for Perec firmly within the material contexts of particular activities and spaces, ultimately offers a productive means by which to understand, and negotiate, the everyday.ConclusionIn this paper we have examined the everyday work of lists and the functions that they serve in mediating the materiality and complexity of everyday life. In the first section of the paper, following Crewe, we explored the dual function of lists as scripting devices in simultaneously “disciplining” us as consumers as well and as a means of controlling the everyday in ways that also feed our sense of self-identity. In this sense lists are complex devices. Perec was especially attuned to the layers of complexity that attend our engagement with lists. In particular, as we explored in the second part of the paper, Perec saw lists as a critical and productive tool (an invent-ory) and used them to scrutinise common things in the hope that they might “speak of what is [and] of what we are” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). Lists remain, in this sense, an accessible discursive technology often surprising for their subtle revelations about the everyday even while they maintain adherence to an inherently recognisable form.In setting out the importance of his own “project,” and the need to question the habitual, Perec provides a set of instructions (his “pedagogic strategy”—Adair 177), presented as an approach (if not a method), and which signals his desire to critique the traditions of social science as a method of material and social ordering and analysis. Perec’s appropriation of this approach, this discursive technology, also works as a provocation, as a “project” that others might adopt. He prompts his readers to “make an inventory of your pockets, your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out” (Perec, “Approaches” 210). This is a challenge that was built upon in different ways by a number of writers inspired by the esprit of Perec’s approach to the everyday, associated also with “a wider cultural shift from systems and structures to practices and performances” (Sherringham 292). Sherringham, for instance, traces the “redirection of ethnographic scrutiny from the far to the near” in the work of Augé, Ernaux, Maspero and Réda amongst others (292-359). Perec’s lists thus serve as a series of provocations which still hold critical purchase, and the full implications of which are still to be realised.ReferencesAdair, Gilbert. “The Eleventh Day: Perec and the Infra-ordinary.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction XXIX.1 (2009): 176-88.Arvidsson, Adam. Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge, 2006.Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Trans. Gregory Elliott. 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