Academic literature on the topic 'Singer, Robert N'

AbstractIn this short paper, we use Robert Bruner's $\cal{A}$(1)-resolution of $P = {\mathbb{F}_2[t]$ to shed light on the Hit Problem. In particular, the reduced syzygies Pn of P occur as direct summands of $\widetilde{P}^{\otimes n}$, where $\widetilde{P}$ is the augmentation ideal of the map $P \to \mathbb{F}_2$. The complement of Pn in $\widetilde{P}^{\otimes n}$ is free, and the modules Pn exhibit a type of “Bott periodicity” of period 4: Pn+4 = Σ8Pn. These facts taken together allow one to analyse the module of indecomposables in $\widetilde{P}^{\otimes n}$, that is, to say something about the “$\cal{A}$(1)-hit Problem”. Our study is essentially in two parts: first, we expound on the approach to the Hit Problem begun by William Singer, in which we compare images of Steenrod squares to certain kernels of squares. Using this approach, the author discovered a nontrivial element in bidegree (5, 9) that is neither $\cal{A}$(1)-hit nor in kerSq1 + kerSq3. Such an element is extremely rare, but Bruner's result shows clearly why these elements exist and detects them in full generality; second, we describe the graded ${\mathbb{F}_2$-space of $\cal{A}$(1)-hit elements of $\widetilde{P}^{\otimes n}$ by determining its Hilbert series.

The article considers the relevance of the interpretation and artistic embodiment of the legend “About two Great Sinners”, which is included in the chapter “A Feast for the whole World” of the poem by N. Nekrasov “Who lives well in Russia”. The authors emphasize that the Nekrasov episode, on the one hand, is based on a familiar folklore plot, on the other — it is interpreted by the poet differently than is traditionally accepted in folk texts. The analysis pointed out that, if in the folklore emphasis is placed on the image of the robber Kudeyar undergoing spiritual transformation, in the poem of Nekrasov focus redirected to the image of “the other robber”, pan Glukhovsky, who, in the view of the author of the poem, is the “most sinful of all”. The article pays special attention to the aspect of the displacement of moral components by social ones. It is demonstrated that Nekrasov approach to solving the core issue of the head, “Who in Russia most sinful of all?” biased and removed from under-standing the triad of “sin of the landowner, sin of the robber, sin of the peasant” pro-posed by the heroes of the Chapter “Feast...”, but makes a scene-meaning “substitute” all “sinners” episodes only responsible for the sinner recognizes the nobleman, only at the social level, opposed to the peasant.

The article examines the rise of the extreme right in the country and the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro in power in the 2018 presidential elections. It analyzes the characteristics of Bolsonarism and its government, as well as its proposals and consequences for public higher education and the production of knowledge in Brazil. It identifies the predominance of cultural war within the scope of the Ministry of Education, manifested in the clash - a contradiction that does not exist in other spheres of government - between market defenders, the ultra-liberals who want to privatize the teaching of daycare to post-graduation, and those who intend to safeguard the state control. Discusses the effects of Constitutional Amendment no. 95/2016 in the deepening of the education and science & technology financing crisis by making the flow of public fund resources to rentier elites structural. It proposes that the proposition programs like Future-se aim to change the social function of public universities in the perspective of cultural war, that is, from the perspective of autocracy, anti-scientific thought, commodification, and utilitarianism that guide the actions of the current government. The anti-Enlightenment, autocratic, conservative and denialist foundations of Bolsonarism presuppose the destruction of the public university as an autonomous institution, producing new knowledge and capable of ensuring the freedom of professorship.ResumoO artigo examina a ascensão da extrema direita no País e a chegada ao poder de Jair Bolsonaro nas eleições presidenciais de 2018. Analisa as características do bolsonarismo e do governo, assim como suas proposições e consequências para a educação superior pública e para a produção do conhecimento no Brasil. Identifica a predominância da guerra cultural no âmbito do Ministério da Educação, manifestada no embate – contraposição inexistente nas demais esferas do governo – entre defensores do mercado, os ultraneoliberais que querem privatizar o ensino da creche à pós-graduação, e aqueles que pretendem resguardar o controle estatal. Discute os efeitos da Emenda Constitucional no. 95/2016 no aprofundamento da crise do financiamento da educação e da ciência & tecnologia ao tornar estrutural o escoamento dos recursos do fundo público para as elites rentistas. Propugna que a proposição de programas como o Future-se tem como objetivo refuncionalizar as universidades públicas na perspectiva da guerra cultural, ou seja, sob a ótica da autocracia, do anticientifismo, da mercantilização e do utilitarismo que norteiam as ações do atual governo. Os fundamentos anti-iluministas, autocráticos, conservadores e negacionistas do bolsonarismo pressupõem a destruição da universidade pública como instituição autônoma, produtora de conhecimento novo e capaz de assegurar a liberdade de cátedra.ResumenEl artículo examina el ascenso de la extrema derecha en el país y la llegada al poder de Jair Bolsonaro, en las elecciones presidenciales de 2018. Analiza las características del bolsonarismo y de su gobierno, así también, sus proposiciones y consecuencias para la educación superior pública y para la producción de conocimiento en Brasil. Identifica el predominio de la guerra cultural en el ámbito del Ministerio de Educación, manifestado en el enfrentamiento – la contraposición inexistente en las demás esferas del gobierno – entre los defensores del mercado, los ultraneoliberales que quieren privatizar desde la educación de la primera infancia, hasta la educación postgraduada, y aquellos, que pretenden conservar el control estatal. Se discuten los efectos de la Enmienda Constitucional N°. 95/2016, en torno a la profundización de la crisis del presupuesto de la educación y de la ciencia y la tecnología al tornar estructural el flujo de los recursos del fondo público para las élites rentistas. Se propone que la propuesta de programas como "Future-se" tienen como objetivo de cambiar la función social de las universidades públicas en la perspectiva de la guerra cultural, o sea, bajo la óptica de la autocracia, del anticientificismo, de la mercantilización y del utilitarismo que nortea las acciones del actual gobierno. Los fundamentos anti-iluministas, autocráticos, conservadores y negacionistas del bolsonarismo presuponen la destrucción de la universidad pública como institución autónoma, productora de conocimiento nuevo y capaz de asegurar la libertad de cátedra.Palavras-chave: Bolsonarismo, Educação superior no Brasil, Produção científica, Direitos humanos.Keywords: Bolsomarism, Brazil Higher Education, Scientific production, Human rights.Palabras clave: Bolsonarismo, Educación superior en Brasil, Producción científica, Derechos Humanos.ReferencesADORNO, Theodor W. Estudos sobre a personalidade autoritária. São Paulo: Unesp, 2019.ADORNO, Theodor. “Teoria freudiana e o padrão da propaganda fascista”. In: Ensaios sobre psicologia social e psicanálise. São Paulo, Unesp, 2015.ALEGRE, Manuel. País de Abril: uma antologia. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2014.ANDERSON, Perry. As origens da pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1999.ANTONIONI, Michelangelo. O fio perigoso das coisas e outras histórias. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1980.ARCARY, Valério. Um reformismo quase sem reformas: Uma crítica marxista do governo Lula em defesa da revolução brasileira. São Paulo: Sundermann, 2011.AMARAL, Nelson Cardoso do. O Financiamento da Educação Pública Superior no Brasil Seminário Andifes – Abruem – Conif: “Proposta da Educação Superior do Brasil à CRES 2018. Disponívem em:< http://www.andifes.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/@@@@@@@apresenta%C3%A7%C3%A3o-ANDIFES-ABRUEM-CONIF-abril-2018.pdf>. Acesso em janeiro de 2020BAGGIO, Kátia Gerab. “Atlas Network e o ultraneoliberalismo”. In: A Terra é Redonda. Disponível em: https://aterraeredonda.com.br/conexoes-ultraliberais-nas-americas/].BOLSONARO, Jair M. “Discurso em jantar na residência do embaixador do Brasil em Washington”. Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm9j0eS5iWYBOLSONARO, Jair M. “E daí? Lamento. Quer que eu faça o quê?”. 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Por que as universidades? <http://marcoaurelionogueira.blogspot.com.br/2014/umberto-eco-por-que-as-universidades.html>. Acesso em: 23 maio 2016.ELEY, Geoff. Forjando a democracia. São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2005.FAORO, Raymundo. A república em transição. Poder e direito na democratização brasileira (1982-1988). Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2018FERREIRA, Otávio Dias de Souza. “A Internacional de extrema-direita”. In: A Terra é Redonda. Disponível em: https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-internacional-da-extrema-direita/.FREITAS, Janio de. A palavra do coprófilo. Folha de S. Paulo, "Poder", 18.08.2019, p. A16.FREUD, Sigmund. Psicologia das massas e análise do eu. In: O mal-estar na cultura e outros ensaios. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2020.GERBASE, Livi. Entenda o Projeto de Lei Orçamentária em 5 infográficos. Brasília: INESC, 2019. Disponível em: <https://www.inesc.org.br/entenda-o-projeto-de-lei-orcamentaria-anual-em-5-infograficos/>. 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augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. 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During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll of their work (Associated Press; Schachtman). Questions about the nature of the stress or trauma that drone operators experience have become a trope in news coverage of drone warfare (see Bumiller; Bowden; Saleton; Axe). This was exemplified in May 2013, when former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant became a public figure after speaking to National Public Radio about his remorse for participating in targeted killing strikes and his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress (PTS) (Greene and McEvers). Stories like Bryant’s express American culture’s struggle to understand the role screen-mediated, remotely controlled killing plays in shifting the location of combatants’s sense of moral agency. That is, their sense of their ability to act based on their own understanding of right and wrong. Historically, one of the primary ways that psychiatry has conceptualized combat trauma has been as combatants’s psychological response losing their sense of moral agency on the battlefield (Lifton).This articleuses the popular science fiction novel Ender's Game as an analytic lens through which to examine the ways that screen-mediated warfare may result in combat trauma by investigating the ways in which it may compromise moral agency. The goal of this analysis is not to describe the present state of drone operators’s experience (see Asaro), but rather to compare and contrast contemporary public discourses on the psychological impact of screen-mediated war with the way it is represented in one of the most influential science fiction novels of all times (The book won the Nebula Award in 1985, the Hugo Award in 1986, and appears on both the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens” lists). In so doing, the paper aims to counter prevalent modes of critical analysis of screen-mediated war that cannot account for drone operators’s trauma. For decades, critics of postmodern warfare have denounced how fighting from inside tanks, the cockpits of planes, or at office desks has removed combatants from the experiences of risk and endangerment that historically characterized war (see Gray; Levidow & Robins). They suggest that screen-mediation enables not only physical but also cognitive and emotional distance from the violence of war-fighting by circumscribing it in a “magic circle.” Virtual worlds scholars adopted the term “magic circle” from cultural historian Johan Huizinga, who described it as the membrane that separates the time and space of game-play from those of real life (Salen and Zimmerman). While military scholars have long recognized that only 2% of soldiers can kill without hesitation (Grossman), critics of “video game wars” suggest that screen-mediation puts war in a magic circle, thereby creating cyborg human-machine assemblages capable of killing in cold blood. In other words, these critics argue that screen-mediated war distributes agency between humans and machines in such a way that human combatants do not feel morally responsible for killing. In contrast, Ender’s Game suggests that even when militaries utilize video game aesthetics to create weapons control interfaces, screen-mediation alone ultimately cannot blur the line between war and play and thereby psychically shield cyborg soldiers from combat trauma.Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game—and the 2013 film adaptation—tells the story of a young boy at an elite military academy. Set several decades after a terrible war between humans and an alien race called the buggers, the novel follows the life of a boy named Ender. At age 6, recruiters take Andrew “Ender” Wiggin from his family to begin military training. He excels in all areas and eventually enters officer training. There he encounters a new video game-like simulator in which he commands space ship battalions against increasingly complex configurations of bugger ships. At the novel’s climax, Ender's mentor, war hero Mazer Rackham, brings him to a room crowded with high-ranking military personnel in order to take his final test on the simulator. In order to win Ender opts to launch a massive bomb, nicknamed “Little Doctor”, at the bugger home world. The image on his screen of a ball of space dust where once sat the enemy planet is met by victory cheers. Mazer then informs Ender that since he began officer training, he has been remotely controlling real ships. The video game war was, "Real. Not a game" (Card 297); Ender has exterminated the bugger species. But rather than join the celebration, Ender is devastated to learn he has committed "xenocide." Screen-mediation, the novel shows, can enable people to commit acts that they would otherwise find heinous.US military advisors have used the story to set an agenda for research and development in augmented media. For example, Dr. Michael Macedonia, Chief Technology Officer of the Army Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation told a reporter for the New York Times that Ender's Game "has had a lot of influence on our thinking" about how to use video game-like technologies in military operations (Harmon; Silberman; Mead). Many recent programs to develop and study video game-like military training simulators have been directly inspired by the book and its promise of being able to turn even a six-year-old into a competent combatant through well-structured human-computer interaction (Mead). However, it would appear that the novel’s moral regarding the psychological impact of actual screen-mediated combat did not dissuade military investment in drone warfare. The Air Force began using drones for surveillance during the Gulf War, but during the Global War on Terror they began to be equipped with weapons. By 2010, the US military operated over 7,000 drones, including over 200 weapons-ready Predator and Reaper drones. It now invests upwards of three-billion dollars a year into the drone program (Zucchino). While there are significant differences between contemporary drone warfare and the plot of Ender's Game—including the fact that Ender is a child, that he alone commands a fleet, that he thinks he is playing a game, and that, except for a single weapon of mass destruction, he and his enemies are equally well equipped—for this analysis, I will focus on their most important similarities: both Ender and actual drone operators work on teams for long shifts using video game-like technology to remotely control vehicles in aerial combat against an enemy. After he uses the Little Doctor, Mazer and Graff, Ender's long-time training supervisors, first work to circumvent his guilt by reframing his actions as heroic. “You're a hero, Ender. They've seen what you did, you and the others. I don't think there's a government on Earth that hasn't voted you their highest metal.” “I killed them all, didn't I?” Ender asked. “All who?” asked Graff. “The buggers? That was the idea.” Mazer leaned in close. “That's what the war was for.” “All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything.” “They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn't your fault. It's what had to happen.” Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! […] but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying. He was out of control. (Card 297–8)The novel up to this point has led us to believe that Ender at the very least understands that what he does in the game will be asked of him in real life. But his traumatic response to learning the truth reveals that he was in the magic circle. When he thinks he is playing a game, succeeding is a matter of ego: he wants to be the best, to live up to the expectations of his trainers that he is humanity’s last hope. When the magic circle is broken, Ender reconsiders his decision to use the Little Doctor. Tactics he could justify to win the game, reframed as real military tactics, threaten his sense of himself as a moral agent. Being told he is a hero provides no solace.Card wrote the novel during the Cold War, when computers were coming to play an increasingly large role in military operations. Historians of military technology have shown that during this time human behavior began to be defined in machine-like, functionalist terms by scientists working on cybernetic systems (see Edwards; Galison; Orr). Human skills were defined as components of large technological systems, such as tanks and anti-aircraft weaponry: a human skill was treated as functionally the same as a machine one. The only issue of importance was how all the components could work together in order to meet strategic goals—a cybernetic problem. The reasons that Mazer and Graff have for lying to Ender suggest that the author believed that as a form of technical augmentation, screen-mediation can be used to evacuate individual moral agency and submit human will to the command of the larger cybernetic system. Issues of displaced agency in the military cyborg assemblage are apparent in the following quote, in which Mazer compares Ender himself to the bomb he used to destroy the bugger home world: “You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it” (298). Questions of distributed agency have also surfaced in the drone debates. Government and military leaders have attempted to depersonalize drone warfare by assuring the American public that the list of targets is meticulously researched: drones kill those who we need killed. Drone warfare, media theorist Peter Asaro argues, has “created new and complex forms of human-machine subjectivity” that cannot be understood by considering the agency of the technology alone because it is distributed between humans and machines (25). While our leaders’s decisions about who to kill are central to this new cyborg subjectivity, the operators who fire the weapons nevertheless experience at least a retrospective sense of agency. As phenomenologist John Protevi notes, in the wake of wars fought by modern military networks, many veterans diagnosed with PTS still express guilt and personal responsibility for the outcomes of their participation in killing (Protevi). Mazer and Graff explain that the two qualities that make Ender such a good weapon also create an imperative to lie to him: his compassion and his innocence. For his trainers, compassion means a capacity to truly think like others, friend or foe, and understand their motivations. Graff explains that while his trainers recognized Ender's compassion as an invaluable tool, they also recognized that it would preclude his willingness to kill.It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough. (298)In learning that the game was real, Ender learns that he was not merely coming to understand a programmed simulation of bugger behavior, but their actual psychology. Therefore, his compassion has not only helped him understand the buggers’ military strategy, but also to identify with them.Like Ender, drone operators spend weeks or months following their targets, getting to know them and their routines from a God’s eye perspective. They both also watch the repercussions of their missions on screen. Unlike fighter pilots who drop bombs and fly away, drone operators use high-resolution cameras and fly much closer to the ground both when flying and assessing the results of their strikes. As one drone operator interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained, "When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling … Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems" (Zucchino). Brookings Institute scholar Peter Singer has argued that in this way screen mediation actually enables a more intimate experience of violence for drone operators than airplane pilots (Singer).The second reason Ender’s trainers give for lying is that they need someone not only compassionate, but also innocent of the horrors of war. The war veteran Mazer explains: “And it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know" (298). When Ender discovers what he has done, he loses not only his innocence but his sense of himself as a moral agent. After such a trauma, his heart is no longer whole.Actual drone operators are, of course, not kept in a magic circle, innocent of the repercussions of their actions. Nor do they otherwise feel as though they are playing, as several have publicly stated. Instead, they report finding drone work tedious, and some even play video games for fun (Asaro). However, Air Force recruitment advertising makes clear analogies between the skills they desire and those of video game play (Brown). Though the first generations of drone operators were pulled from the ranks of flight pilots, in 2009 the Air Force began training them from the ground. Many drone operators, then, enter the role having no other military service and may come into it believing, on some level, that their work will be play.Recent military studies of drone operators have raised doubts about whether drone operators really experience high rates of trauma, suggesting that the stresses they experience are seated instead in occupational issues like long shifts (Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas; Chappelle, Psy, and Salinas). But several critics of these studies have pointed out that there is a taboo against speaking about feelings of regret and trauma in the military in general and among drone operators in particular. A PTS diagnosis can end a military career; given the Air Force’s career-focused recruiting emphasis, it makes sense that few would come forward (Dao). Therefore, it is still important to take drone operator PTS seriously and try to understand how screen-mediation augments their experience of killing.While critics worry that warfare mediated by a screen and joystick leads to a “‘Playstation’ mentality towards killing” (Alston 25), Ender's Game presents a theory of remote-control war wherein this technological redistribution of the act of killing does not, in itself, create emotional distance or evacuate the killer’s sense of moral agency. In order to kill, Ender must be distanced from reality as well. While drone operators do not work shielded by the magic circle—and therefore do not experience the trauma of its dissolution—every day when they leave the cyborg assemblage of their work stations and rejoin their families they still have to confront themselves as individual moral agents and bear their responsibility for ending lives. In both these scenarios, a human agent’s combat trauma serves to remind us that even when their bodies are physically safe, war is hell for those who fight. This paper has illustrated how a science fiction story can be used as an analytic lens for thinking through contemporary discourses about human-technology relationships. However, the US military is currently investing in drones that are increasingly autonomous from human operators. This redistribution of agency may reduce incidence of PTS among operators by decreasing their role in, and therefore sense of moral responsibility for, killing (Axe). Reducing mental illness may seem to be a worthwhile goal, but in a world wherein militaries distribute the agency for killing to machines in order to reduce the burden on humans, societies will have to confront the fact that combatants’s trauma cannot be a compass by which to measure the morality of wars. Too often in the US media, the primary stories that Americans are told about the violence of their country’s wars are those of their own combatants—not only about their deaths and physical injuries, but their suicide and PTS. To understand war in such a world, we will need new, post-humanist stories where the cyborg assemblage and not the individual is held accountable for killing and morality is measured in lives taken, not rates of mental illness. ReferencesAlston, Phillip. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Addendum: Study on Targeted Killings.” United Nations Human Rights Council (2010). Asaro, Peter M. “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators”. Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 196-22. Associated Press. “Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress.” Military.com 2008. Axe, David. “How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD: Blame the ’Bot.” Wired June 2012.Bowden, Mark. “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones.” The Atlantic Sep. 2013.Brown, Melissa T. Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1985. Chappelle, Wayne, D. Psy, and Amber Salinas. “Psychological Health Screening of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operators and Supporting Units.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Mental Health and Well-Being across the Military Spectrum, Bergen, Norway, 12 April 2011: 1–12. Dao, James. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” New York Times 22 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 228.Gray, Chris Hables “Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War.” Body & Society 9.4 (2003): 215–226. 27 Nov. 2010.Greene, David, and Kelly McEvers. “Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales about Drones.” National Public Radio 10 May 2013.Grossman, David. On Killing. Revised. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009. Harmon, Amy. “More than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?” New York Times 3 Apr. 2003: n. pag. Levidow, Les, and Robins. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Random House, 1973. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Orr, Jackie. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Ouma, J.A., W.L. Chappelle, and A. Salinas. Facets of Occupational Burnout among US Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators. Air Force Research Labs Technical Report AFRL-SA-WP-TR-2011-0003. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Research Laboratory. 2011.Protevi, John. “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2008): 405–413. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Saleton, William. “Ghosts in the Machine: Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate.com Aug. 2008. Schachtman, Nathan. “Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope with Robo-Violence.” Wired Aug. 2008.Silberman, Steve. “The War Room.” Wired Sep. 2004: 1–5.Singer, P.W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Zucchino, David. “Drone Pilots Have Front-Row Seat on War, from Half a World Away.” Los Angeles Times 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag.

Hotspots of Cultural InnovationIn the 1960s, a long list of poets, writers, and musicians flocked to the Chelsea Hotel, 222 West 23rd Street, New York (Tippins). Among them Bob Dylan, who moved in at the end of 1964, Leonard Cohen, who wrote Take This Longing dedicated to singer Nico there, and Patti Smith who rented a room there together with Robert Mapplethorpe in 1969 (Smith; Bell; Simmons). They all benefited not just from the low rents, but also from the close, often intimate, presence of other residents who inspired them to explore new creative paths. Around the same time, across the Atlantic, the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, 6 Mason’s Yard, London played a similar role as a meeting place for musicians, artists and hangers-on. It was there, on the evening of 9 November 1966, that John Lennon attended a preview of Yoko Ono's first big solo exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Legend has it that the two met as Lennon was climbing up the ladder of Ono’s installation work ‘Ceiling Painting’, and reaching out to a dangling magnifying glass in order to take a closer look at the single word ‘YES’ scribbled on a suspended placard (Campbell). It was not just Lennon’s first meeting with Yoko Ono, but also his first run into conceptual art. After this fateful evening, both Lennon’s private life and his artistry would never be the same again. There is already a rich body of literature on the geography of music production (Scott; Kloosterman; Watson Global Music City; Verboord and Brandellero). In most cases, these studies deal with the city or neighbourhood scales. Micro-geographies of concrete places are rarer, with some notable exceptions that focus on recording studios and on specific venues (cf. Gibson; Watson et al.; Watson Cultural Production; van Klyton). Our approach focuses on concrete places that act more like third spaces – something in between or even combining living and working. Such places enable frequent face-to-face meetings, both planned and serendipitous, which are crucial for the exchange of knowledge. These two spaces represent iconic cultural hotspots where innovative artists, notably (pop) musicians, came together in the 1960s. Because of their many famous visitors and residents, both spaces are well documented in (auto)biographies, monographs on art scenes in London and New York, as well as in newspapers. Below, we will explore how these two spaces played an important role at a time of cultural revolution, by connecting people and scenes to the micro geography of concrete places and by functioning as nodes of knowledge exchange and, hence, as milieus of innovation.Art Worlds, Scenes and Places The romantic view that artists are solitary geniuses was discarded already long ago and replaced by a conceptualization that sees them as part of broader social configurations, or art worlds. According to Howard Becker (34), these art worlds consist “of all the people necessary to the production of the characteristic works” – in other words, not just artists, but also “support personnel” such as sound engineers, editors, critics, and managers. Without this “resource pool” the production of art would be virtually impossible. Art worlds are also about the consumption of art. The concept of scene has been used to articulate the local processes of taste making and reputation building, as they “provide ways of social belonging attuned to the demands of a culture in which individuals increasingly define themselves” (Silver et al. 2295). Individuals who share certain aesthetic preferences come together, both socially and spatially (Currid) and locations such as cafés and nightclubs offer important settings where members of an art world may drink, eat, meet, gossip, and exchange knowledge. The urban fabric provides an important backdrop for these exchanges: as Jane Jacobs (181) observed, “old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings.” In order to function as relational spaces, these amenities have to meet two sets of conditions. The first set comprises the locational characteristics, which Durmaz identifies as centrality and proximity. The second set relates to socio-economic characteristics. From an economic perspective, the amenity has to be viable– either independently or through patronage or state subsidies. Becoming a cultural hotspot is not just a matter of good bookkeeping. The atmosphere of an amenity has to be tolerant towards forms of cultural and social experimentation and, arguably, even transgression. In addition, a successful space has to have attractors: persons who fulfil key roles in a particular art world in evaluation, curation, and gatekeeping. To what extent did the Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel meet these two sets of conditions in the 1960s? We turn to this question now.A Hotel and a GalleryThe Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel were both highly central – the former located right in the middle of St. James’s in the central London Borough of Westminster (cf. Kloosterman) and the latter close to Greenwich Village in Manhattan. In the post-war, these locations provided a vacant and fertile ground for artists, who moved in as firms and wealthier residents headed for the green suburbs. As Ramanathan recounts, “For artists, downtown New York, from Chambers Street in Tribeca to the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, was an ideal stomping ground. The neighbourhoods were full of old factories that had emptied out in the postwar years; they had room for art, if not crown molding and prewar charm” (Ramanathan). Similarly in London, “Despite its posh address the area [the area surrounding the Indica Gallery] then had a boho feel. William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Anthony Blunt all had flats in the same street.” (Perry no pagination). Such central locations were essential to attract the desired attention and interest of key gatekeepers, as Barry Miles – one of Indica’s founding members - states: “In those days a gallery virtually had to be in Mayfair or else critics and buyers would not visit” (Miles 73). In addition, the Indica Gallery’s next-door neighbour was the Scotch of St James club. The then up and coming singer Marianne Faithfull, married to Indica founder John Dunbar, reportedly “needed to be seen” in this “trendy ‘in’ club for the new rock aristocracy” (Miles 73). Undoubtedly, their cultural importance was also linked to the fact that they were both located in well-connected budding global cities with a strong media presence (Krätke).Over and above location, these spaces also met important socio-economic conditions. In the 1960s, the neighbourhood surrounding the Chelsea Hotel was in transition with an abundance of available and affordable space. After moving out of the Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (Smith) had no difficulty finding a cheap loft to rent nearby. Rates in the Chelsea Hotel – when they were settled, that is - were incredibly low to current standards. According to Tippins (350), the typical Chelsea Hotel room rate in 1967 was $ 10 per week, which would amount to some $ 67.30 per week in 2013. Again, a more or less similar story can be told for the Indica Gallery. When Barry Miles, Peter Asher and John Dunbar founded the Gallery in September 1965, the premises were empty and the rent was low: "We paid 19 quid a week rent" according to John Dunbar (Perry). These cheap spaces provided fruitful economic conditions for cultural experimentation. Innovative relational spaces require not only accessibility in spatial and financial terms, but also an atmosphere conducive to cultural experimentation. This implies some kind of benevolent, preferably even stimulating, management that is willing and able to create such an atmosphere. At the Chelsea Hotel and Indica Gallery alike, those in charge were certainly not first and foremost focused on profit maximisation. Instead they were very much active members of the art worlds themselves, displaying a “taste for creative work” (Caves) and looking for ways in which their spaces could make a contribution to culture in a wider sense. This holds for Stanley Bard who ran the Chelsea Hotel for decades: “Working besides his father, Stanley {Bard} had gotten to know many of these people. He had attended their performances and exhibitions, read their books, and had been invited to their parties. Young and malleable, he soon came to see the world largely from their point of view” (Tippins 166). Such affinity with the artistic scene meant that Bard was more than accommodating. As Patti Smith recalls (100), “you weren’t immediately kicked out if you got behind on the rent … Mostly everybody owed Bard something”. While others recall a slightly less flexible attitude towards missed rents - “… the residents greatly appreciated a landlord who tolerated everything, except, quite naturally, a deficit” (Tippins 132) – the progressive atmosphere at the Chelsea was acknowledged by many others. For example, “[t]he greatest advantage of life at the Chelsea, [Arthur] Miller had to acknowledge, was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually” (Tippins 155).Similarly at the Indica Gallery, Miles, Asher and Dunbar were not first and foremost interested in making as much money as possible. The trio was itself drawn from various artistic fields: John Dunbar, an art critic for The Scotsman, wanted to set up an experimental gallery with Peter Asher (half of the pop duo Peter & Gordon) and Barry Miles (painter and writer). When asked about Indica's origins, Dunbar said: "There was a reason why we did Indica in the first place: to have fun" (Nevin). Recollections of the Gallery mention “a brew pot for the counterculture movement”, (Ramanathan) or “a haven for the free-wheeling imagination, a land of free expression and cultural collaboration where underground seeds were allowed to take root” (Campbell-Johnston).Part of the attraction of both spaces was the almost assured presence of interesting and famous persons, whom by virtue of their fame and appeal contributed to drawing others in. The roll calls of the Chelsea Hotel (Tippins) and of the Indica Gallery are impressive and partly overlapping: for instance, Allen Ginsberg was a notable visitor of the Indica Gallery and a prominent resident of the Chelsea Hotel, whereas Barry Miles was also a long-term resident of the Chelsea Hotel. The guest books read as a cultural who-is-who of the 1960s, spanning multiple artistic fields: there are not just (pop) musicians, but also writers, poets, actors, film makers, fashion designers, and assorted support personnel. If innovation in culture, as anywhere else, is coming up with new combinations and crossovers, then the cross-fertilisation fostered by the coming together of different art worlds in these spaces was conducive to these new combinations. Moreover, as the especially the biographies of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Leonard Cohen, and Patti Smith testify, these spaces served as repositories of accessible cultural capital and as incubators for new ideas. Both Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith benefited from the presence of Harry Smith who curated the Anthology of American Music at the Chelsea Hotel. As Patti Smith (115) recalls: “We met a lot of intriguing people at the Chelsea but somehow when I close my eyes to think of them, Harry is always the first person I see”. Leonard Cohen was also drawn to Harry Smith: “Along with other assorted Chelsea residents and writers and music celebrities who were passing through, he would sit at Smith’s feet and listen to his labyrinthine monologue” (Simmons 197).Paul McCartney, actively scanning the city for new and different forms of cultural capital (Miles; Kloosterman) could tap into different art worlds through the networks centred on the Indica Gallery. Indeed he was credited with lending more than a helping hand to Indica over the years: “Miles and Dunbar bridged the gap between the avant-garde rebels and the rock stars of the day, principally through their friendship with Paul McCartney, who helped to put up the shop’s bookshelves, drew its flyers and designed its wrapping paper. Later when Indica ran into difficulties, he lent his friends several thousands of pounds to pay their creditors” (Sandbrook 526).Sheltered Spaces Inevitably, the rather lenient attitude towards money among those who managed these cultural breeding spaces led them to serious financial difficulties. The Indica Gallery closed two years after opening its doors. The Chelsea Hotel held out much longer, but the place went into a long period of decline and deterioration culminating in the removal of Stanley Bard as manager and banishment from the building in 2007 (Tippins). Notwithstanding their patchy record as viable business models, their role as cultural hotspots is beyond doubt. It is possibly because they offered a different kind of environment, partly sheltered from more mundane moneymaking considerations, that they could thrive as cultural hotspots (Brandellero and Kloosterman). Their central location, close to other amenities (such as night clubs, venues, cafés), the tolerant atmosphere towards deviant lifestyles (drugs, sex), and the continuous flow of key actors – musicians of course, but also other artists, managers and critics – also fostered cultural innovation. Reflecting on these two spaces nowadays brings a number of questions to the fore. We are witnessing an increasing upward pressure on rents in global cities – notably in London and New York. As cheap spaces become rarer, one may question the impact this will have on the gestation of new ideas (cf. Currid). If the examples of the Indica Gallery and the Chelsea Hotel are anything to go by, their instrumental role as cultural hotspots turned out to be financially unsustainable against the backdrop of a changing urban milieu. The question then is how can cities continue to provide the right set of conditions that allow such spaces to bud and thrive? As the Chelsea Hotel undergoes an alleged $40 million dollar renovation, which will turn it into a boutique hotel (Rich), the jury is still out on whether central urban locations are destined to become - to paraphrase John Lennon’s ‘In my life’, places which ‘had their moments’ – or mere repositories of past cultural achievements.ReferencesAnderson, P. “Watch this Space.” Sydney Morning Herald, 19 Apr. 2014.Becker, H.S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.Bell, I. Once upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. Edinburgh/London: Mainstream Publishing, 2012.Brandellero, A.M.C. The Art of Being Different: Exploring Diversity in the Cultural Industries. Dissertation. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2011.Brandellero, A.M.C., and R.C. 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Today, the main research field for the automotive industry is to find solutions for active safety. In order to perceive the surrounding environment, tracking nearby traffic objects plays an important role. Validation of the tracking performance is often done in staged traffic scenarios, where additional sensors, mounted on the vehicles, are used to obtain their true positions and velocities. The difficulty of evaluating the tracking performance complicates its development. An alternative approach studied in this thesis, is to record sequences and use non-causal algorithms, such as smoothing, instead of filtering to estimate the true target states. With this method, validation data for online, causal, target tracking algorithms can be obtained for all traffic scenarios without the need of extra sensors. We investigate how non-causal algorithms affects the target tracking performance using multiple sensors and dynamic models of different complexity. This is done to evaluate real-time methods against estimates obtained from non-causal filtering. Two different measurement units, a monocular camera and a LIDAR sensor, and two dynamic models are evaluated and compared using both causal and non-causal methods. The system is tested in two single object scenarios where ground truth is available and in three multi object scenarios without ground truth. Results from the two single object scenarios shows that tracking using only a monocular camera performs poorly since it is unable to measure the distance to objects. Here, a complementary LIDAR sensor improves the tracking performance significantly. The dynamic models are shown to have a small impact on the tracking performance, while the non-causal application gives a distinct improvement when tracking objects at large distances. Since the sequence can be reversed, the non-causal estimates are propagated from more certain states when the target is closer to the ego vehicle. For multiple object tracking, we find that correct associations between measurements and tracks are crucial for improving the tracking performance with non-causal algorithms.

The long-term course of bipolar disorder (BD) comprises recurrent depressive episodes and persistent residual symptoms for which standard therapeutic options are scarce and often ineffective. Glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, and glutamate and its cognate receptors have consistently been implicated in the pathophysiology of mood disorders and in the development of novel therapeutics for these disorders. Since the rapid and robust antidepressant effects of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist ketamine were first observed in 2000, other NMDA receptor antagonists have been studied in major depressive disorder (MDD) and BD. This chapter reviews the clinical evidence supporting the use of novel glutamate receptor modulators for treating BD—particularly bipolar depression. We also discuss other promising, non-glutamatergic targets for potential rapid antidepressant effects in mood disorders, including the cholinergic system, the melatonergic system, the glucocorticoid system, the arachidonic acid (AA) cascade, and oxidative stress and bioenergetics.

In the guise of artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic/evolutionary computation algorithms (GAs/ECAs), fuzzy logic (FL) inference systems (FLIS) and their variants as well as combinations, the computational intelligence (CI) paradigm has been applied to nuclear energy (NE) since the late 1980s as a set of efficient and accurate, non-parametric, robust-to-noise as well as to-missing-information, non-invasive on-line tools for monitoring, predicting and overall controlling nuclear (power) plant (N(P)P) operation. Since then, the resulting CI-based implementations have afforded increasingly reliable as well as robust performance, demonstrating their potential as either stand-alone tools, or - whenever more advantageous - combined with each other as well as with traditional signal processing techniques. The present review is focused upon the application of CI methodologies to the - generally acknowledged as - key-issues of N(P)P operation, namely: control, diagnostics and fault detection, monitoring, N(P)P operations, proliferation and resistance applications, sensor and component reliability, spectroscopy, fusion supporting operations, as these have been reported in the relevant primary literature for the period 1990-2015. At one end, 1990 constitutes the beginning of the actual implementation of innovative, and – at the same time – robust as well as practical, directly implementable in H/W, CI-based solutions/tools which have proved to be significantly superior to the traditional as well as the artificial-intelligence-(AI)derived methodologies in terms of operation efficiency as well as robustness-to-noise and/or otherwise distorted/missing information. At the other end, 2015 marks a paradigm shift in terms of the emergent (and, swiftly, ubiquitous) use of deep neural networks (DNNs) over existing ANN architectures and FL problem representations, thus dovetailing the increasing requirements of the era of complex - as well as Big - Data and forever changing the means of ANN/neuro-fuzzy construction and application/performance. By exposing the prevalent CI-based tools for each key-issue of N(P)P operation, overall as well as over time for the given 1990-2015 period, the applicability and optimal use of CI tools to NE problems is revealed, thus providing the necessary know-how concerning crucial decisions that need to be made for the increasingly efficient as well as safe exploitation of NE.

In the guise of artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic/evolutionary computation algorithms (GAs/ECAs), fuzzy logic (FL) inference systems (FLIS) and their variants as well as combinations, the computational intelligence (CI) paradigm has been applied to nuclear energy (NE) since the late 1980s as a set of efficient and accurate, non-parametric, robust-to-noise as well as to-missing-information, non-invasive on-line tools for monitoring, predicting and overall controlling nuclear (power) plant (N(P)P) operation. Since then, the resulting CI-based implementations have afforded increasingly reliable as well as robust performance, demonstrating their potential as either stand-alone tools, or - whenever more advantageous - combined with each other as well as with traditional signal processing techniques. The present review is focused upon the application of CI methodologies to the - generally acknowledged as - key-issues of N(P)P operation, namely: control, diagnostics and fault detection, monitoring, N(P)P operations, proliferation and resistance applications, sensor and component reliability, spectroscopy, fusion supporting operations, as these have been reported in the relevant primary literature for the period 1990-2015. At one end, 1990 constitutes the beginning of the actual implementation of innovative, and – at the same time – robust as well as practical, directly implementable in H/W, CI-based solutions/tools which have proved to be significantly superior to the traditional as well as the artificial-intelligence-(AI)derived methodologies in terms of operation efficiency as well as robustness-to-noise and/or otherwise distorted/missing information. At the other end, 2015 marks a paradigm shift in terms of the emergent (and, swiftly, ubiquitous) use of deep neural networks (DNNs) over existing ANN architectures and FL problem representations, thus dovetailing the increasing requirements of the era of complex - as well as Big - Data and forever changing the means of ANN/neuro-fuzzy construction and application/performance. By exposing the prevalent CI-based tools for each key-issue of N(P)P operation, overall as well as over time for the given 1990-2015 period, the applicability and optimal use of CI tools to NE problems is revealed, thus providing the necessary know-how concerning crucial decisions that need to be made for the increasingly efficient as well as safe exploitation of NE.

In the guise of artificial neural networks (ANNs), genetic/evolutionary computation algorithms (GAs/ECAs), fuzzy logic (FL) inference systems (FLIS) and their variants as well as combinations, the computational intelligence (CI) paradigm has been applied to nuclear energy (NE) since the late 1980s as a set of efficient and accurate, non-parametric, robust-to-noise as well as to-missing-information, non-invasive on-line tools for monitoring, predicting and overall controlling nuclear (power) plant (N(P)P) operation. Since then, the resulting CI-based implementations have afforded increasingly reliable as well as robust performance, demonstrating their potential as either stand-alone tools, or - whenever more advantageous - combined with each other as well as with traditional signal processing techniques. The present review is focused upon the application of CI methodologies to the - generally acknowledged as - key-issues of N(P)P operation, namely: control, diagnostics and fault detection, monitoring, N(P)P operations, proliferation and resistance applications, sensor and component reliability, spectroscopy, fusion supporting operations, as these have been reported in the relevant primary literature for the period 1990-2015. At one end, 1990 constitutes the beginning of the actual implementation of innovative, and – at the same time – robust as well as practical, directly implementable in H/W, CI-based solutions/tools which have proved to be significantly superior to the traditional as well as the artificial-intelligence-(AI)derived methodologies in terms of operation efficiency as well as robustness-to-noise and/or otherwise distorted/missing information. At the other end, 2015 marks a paradigm shift in terms of the emergent (and, swiftly, ubiquitous) use of deep neural networks (DNNs) over existing ANN architectures and FL problem representations, thus dovetailing the increasing requirements of the era of complex - as well as Big - Data and forever changing the means of ANN/neuro-fuzzy construction and application/performance. By exposing the prevalent CI-based tools for each key-issue of N(P)P operation, overall as well as over time for the given 1990-2015 period, the applicability and optimal use of CI tools to NE problems is revealed, thus providing the necessary know-how concerning crucial decisions that need to be made for the increasingly efficient as well as safe exploitation of NE.

<em>Abstract.</em>—The nonnative Northern Snakehead <em>Channa argus </em>was first documented in the Potomac River system in 2004. Since then, their range in Virginia has expanded to include other rivers and numerous lakes as a result of dispersal and illegal introductions. Most Northern Snakehead lake populations were discovered after 2012. Through 2017, nearly 4,000 Northern Snakehead were collected via Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) electrofishing surveys, resulting in a robust dataset. These collections provided an opportunity to investigate food habits of Northern Snakehead in both lotic and lentic systems which may assist with management and a better understanding of potential community effects. Incidence of identifiable prey items (<em>n </em>= 677) was evaluated since 2004, however wet weights (<em>n </em>= 370) were not recorded until 2014. A total of 30 prey types were identified from Northern Snakehead stomachs taken from rivers, whereas 7 prey types were identified from lakes. Banded Killifish, Bluegill, and crayfish were the most abundant prey types (in order) based on frequency of occurrence for Northern Snakehead collected from rivers; whereas Bluegill, frogs, and Yellow Perch were most common in Northern Snakehead collected from lakes. Most important food types (in order) based on % wet weight for Northern Snakehead collected from rivers were Bluegill, Gizzard Shad, and Banded Killifish; whereas Bluegill, Yellow Perch, and frogs contributed the most mass for Northern Snakehead from lakes.

Most clinically approved large biotherapeutics are monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), primarily belonging to immunoglobulin G subclass-1 (IgG1) and, to a lesser extent, IgG2 and IgG4. Glycosylation is the main source of post-translational heterogeneity of mAbs, impacting their drug therapeutic mechanism of action (MOA). Glycosylation is also one of the critical factors in drug product solubility, kinetics, stability and efficacy. Thus, monitoring glycan critical quality attributes (CQAs) is an essential part of any biopharmaceutical development. The binding affinity of an IgG to its cellular Fc receptor (FcR) depends on both its IgG subclass and Fc domain glycosylation pattern. Since composition of the N-glycans also correlates to the Antibody-Dependent Cellular Cytotoxicity (ADCC), the glycosylation pattern needs to be monitored for consistency in potency and efficacy. This applies for the original mAb biologics as well as biosimilars. In this chapter, we present a truly novel way to assess the variances in mAb glycoforms using FcγRIIIa-based affinity chromatography. First, a brief overview of the Fc receptor function is presented. Then, the principle of FcR-based affinity chromatography is explained including how this column’s potential to analyze a variety of mAbs according to their N-glycan content is highly selective and robust. Finally, we provide examples of the FcR column’s potential to improve analytical characterization of mAbs with practical applications such as effective cell line screening, monitoring of glycoengineering, process development and process control in manufacturing.

Most clinically approved large biotherapeutics are monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), primarily belonging to immunoglobulin G subclass-1 (IgG1) and, to a lesser extent, IgG2 and IgG4. Glycosylation is the main source of post-translational heterogeneity of mAbs, impacting their drug therapeutic mechanism of action (MOA). Glycosylation is also one of the critical factors in drug product solubility, kinetics, stability and efficacy. Thus, monitoring glycan critical quality attributes (CQAs) is an essential part of any biopharmaceutical development. The binding affinity of an IgG to its cellular Fc receptor (FcR) depends on both its IgG subclass and Fc domain glycosylation pattern. Since composition of the N-glycans also correlates to the Antibody-Dependent Cellular Cytotoxicity (ADCC), the glycosylation pattern needs to be monitored for consistency in potency and efficacy. This applies for the original mAb biologics as well as biosimilars. In this chapter, we present a truly novel way to assess the variances in mAb glycoforms using FcγRIIIa-based affinity chromatography. First, a brief overview of the Fc receptor function is presented. Then, the principle of FcR-based affinity chromatography is explained including how this column’s potential to analyze a variety of mAbs according to their N-glycan content is highly selective and robust. Finally, we provide examples of the FcR column’s potential to improve analytical characterization of mAbs with practical applications such as effective cell line screening, monitoring of glycoengineering, process development and process control in manufacturing.

As reported in the last OMAE conference (Dong, 2003), a robust structural stress method has been developed and validated for fatigue evaluation of ship structures through a major joint industry project. The structural stress method not only provides a consistent method for characterizing stress concentration effects on fatigue in different joint types and loading modes, but also offers a rapid estimation procedure for stress intensity factors for arbitrary joint geometries and loading modes in fracture mechanics context. As a result, a master S-N curve approach has been recently developed by using the mesh-insensitive structural stress parameter and its direct linkage to fracture mechanics principles. The master S-N curve is described by an equivalent structural stress range parameter which provides a single parameter description of stress concentration effects, thickness effects, and loading mode effects on fatigue in welded joints. A massive amount of S-N data since 1947, encompassing drastically different joint types, plate thickness, and loading modes have been used to validate the effectiveness of the master S-N curve approach. With the master S-N curve method, plate joints in ship structures, tubular joints in offshore structures, as well as pipe joints for riser applications can be collapsed into a singe curve, referred to as the master S-N curve. This paper provides the detailed theoretical development, application examples, and validation results. The applications for the master S-N curve approach will be illustrated by using various offshore/marine examples.

Abstract A major hindrance to dynamics and control of flexible robot manipulators is the deficiency of its inherent damping. Damping enhancement, therefore, should result in lower vibration amplitudes, shorter settling times, and improvement of system stability. Since the bulk of robot vibrations is attributed to joint compliance, it is a prudent strategy to design joints with sufficient inherent damping. In this article, a method is proposed to estimate critical damping at each joint and identify the joint that should be targeted for design with sufficient built-in damping. The target joint identification process requires that a n-joint robot system is divided into n-subsystems. Subsystem i includes the compliance of joint i and the inertia of the succeeding links, joint mechanisms, and payload. An equivalent single degree of freedom torsional model is devised and the natural frequency and critical damping is evaluated for each subsystem. The estimated critical damping at the joints are used to determine the elastodynamic response of the entire robot system from a model that includes joint compliance, shear deformation, rotary inertia, and geometric stiffness. The response revealed the following conclusion: The joint of the manipulator that would result in lower amplitudes of vibrations and shorter settling times when designed with sufficient built-in damping is the one that renders a subsystem whose natural frequency is the lowest of all subsystems comprising the robot.

The Cartesian workspace of an n-DOF parallel robot (n &lt; 6) is generally divided by singularity hyper-surfaces of dimension n−1. A common approach to reducing the dimension of the singularity manifold is to use actuation redundancy. However, in all previously reported works, adding one redundant actuator reduces the dimension of the singularity manifold by only one. This paper is the first to demonstrate that a properly designed actuation redundancy can be much more effective than this. Specifically, a 3-RPR design is presented in which the mobile platform and the base are equilateral triangles and show that adding a single RPR leg connecting the centers of these two triangles completely eliminates the singularities of the robot, which are otherwise a surface in the Cartesian space.

Using one single trimmed B-Spline surface to fill an n-sided hole is a much desired operation in CAD, but few papers have addressed this issue. The paper presents the method of using trimmed B-Spline surfaces to fill n-sided holes based on energy minimization or variational technique. The method is efficient and robust, and takes less than one second to fill n-sided holes with high quality B-Spline surfaces under complex constraints. As the foundation of filling n-sided holes, some key issues on variational B-Spline technique are also discussed. The variational technique discussed is significantly much more efficient and powerful than previous research, and the result is very accurate to satisfy CAD systems’ high-precision requirements. We demonstrate that, without any pre-calculation, the discussed technique is efficient enough to solve a B-Spline surface with up to 20,000 control points in real time while satisfying an arbitrary combination of point and curve constraints.

A considerable amount of clustering algorithms take instance-feature matrices as their inputs. As such, they cannot directly analyze time series data due to its temporal nature, usually unequal lengths, and complex properties. This is a great pity since many of these algorithms are effective, robust, efficient, and easy to use. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing an efficient representation learning framework that is able to convert a set of time series with various lengths to an instance-feature matrix. In particular, we guarantee that the pairwise similarities between time series are well preserved after the transformation , thus the learned feature representation is particularly suitable for the time series clustering task. Given a set of $n$ time series, we first construct an $n\times n$ partially-observed similarity matrix by randomly sampling $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ pairs of time series and computing their pairwise similarities. We then propose an efficient algorithm that solves a non-convex and NP-hard problem to learn new features based on the partially-observed similarity matrix. By conducting extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is much more effective, efficient, and flexible compared to other state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Many real-world problems, such as robot control and soccer game, are naturally modeled as sparse-interaction multi-agent systems. Reutilizing single-agent knowledge in multi-agent systems with sparse interactions can greatly accelerate the multi-agent learning process. Previous works rely on bisimulation metric to define Markov decision process (MDP) similarity for controlling knowledge transfer. However, bisimulation metric is costly to compute and is not suitable for high-dimensional state space problems. In this work, we propose more scalable transfer learning methods based on a novel MDP similarity concept. We start by defining the MDP similarity based on the N-step return (NSR) values of an MDP. Then, we propose two knowledge transfer methods based on deep neural networks called direct value function transfer and NSR-based value function transfer. We conduct experiments in image-based grid world, multi-agent particle environment (MPE) and Ms. Pac-Man game. The results indicate that the proposed methods can significantly accelerate multi-agent reinforcement learning and meanwhile get better asymptotic performance.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 schools have gone into lockdown and teachers have had to teach pupils online from home. When pupils go back to school, standard, contemporary learning methods do not seem to be enough to reduce incurred hiatuses. Social robots are slowly becoming an integral component of our society and have great potential as educational technology. This study explores how social robots in classrooms can contribute to reducing mathematics-related hiatuses in Dutch primary education (pupils from four till twelve years old). A social robot as a tutor is evaluated by means of a field study with children (n = 43) to compare a class working with the robot, to a class working without the robot. Multiple factors on learning effect are taken into account by using a survey. Our results demonstrate that a robot can take the role of a tutor and practice with pupils. The results are of interest to researchers in the field of human-robot interaction as well as to educational institutes who wish to understand the implications of adopting robots in education.

This paper offers an exact solution for the perfect gravity-balance of a class of spatial manipulators with no translational joints. The methodology used is based on the concept of conservation of the gravitational and elastic potential energy of the system. The overall gravitational potential energy of a serial-connected, n-link manipulator is identified to be contributed by n subsystems, where each subsystem is kinematically equivalent to one of the primary links of the manipulator, and possesses the accumulated mass of its post-connected links with a fixed mass center located on the subsystem. The gravitational potential energy of such a subsystem can be fully balanced by the elastic potential energy of the spring fitted between the link and its adjacent pseudo-base. Since the rotation axis of the pseudo-base is required to be in the direction of gravity, n serial-connected RSSR modules are constituted along the primary chain of the manipulator to provide a pseudo-base for each of the primary links. With one linear, zero-free-length spring fitted between each of the primary links of the manipulator and its associated pseudo-base, a static equilibrium of the considered mechanism in any configuration can be reached. A numerical example of the model of a six-DOF industrial robot has demonstrated the success of the proposed methodology.