Journal articles on the topic 'Voice onset times'

The two experiments described in this paper were designed to investigate further the phenomenon called motor-motor adaptation. In the first investigation, subjects were adapted while noise was presented through headphones, which prevented them from hearing themselves. In the second experiment, subjects repeated an isolated vowel, as well as a consonant-vowel syllable which contained a stop consonant. The findings indicated that motor-motor adaptation is not a product of perceptual adaptation, and it is not a result of subjects producing longer voice onset times after adaptation to a voiced consonant rather than shorter voice onset times after adaptation to a voiceless consonant.

Voice onset times of /d/ and /t/ were measured for 16 adult subjects (age range 21 to 26 years) under conditions of sobriety and intoxication. Subjects consumed beer to reach intoxication levels between 0.075 and 0.100% as measured using a portable breathalyzer test. Analysis indicated consistent variabilities over time for each subject and resistance of VOT variability to alcohol influence.

ABSTRACTThis paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study examining the acquisition of the English voice system by a three-year-old native speaker of Dutch. The study aims to examine whether the child develops two different phonetic systems or uses just one system for both languages, and compares the early L2 acquisition process with L1, simultaneous bilingual and late L2 acquisition. The results reveal that the child successfully acquires the English contrast between short-lag and long-lag stops, but gradually changes the Dutch system, which contrasts prevoiced with short-lag stops, into the direction of the English system.

Speech-related reaction time measures (laryngeal premotor and adjustment time for /a/, labial initiation and physiological voice onset time for /pa/) and fluency-related measures (number of stutterings, number of normal disfluencies, and time needed to complete an oral reading) of 24 stutterers and a like number of nonstutterers were assessed to determine their diagnostic discriminative power. Discriminant analysis showed that stutterers were most effectively differentiated from normally fluent speakers by the total number of stutterings and normal disfluencies during oral reading and by the duration of laryngeal adjustments prior to cued phonation. Factor analysis revealed that the fluency failure and reaction time measures clustered independently for both stutterers and nonstutterers. These findings suggest that both fluency failures and the duration of laryngeal adjustment time are useful diagnostic measures for discriminating stutterers from those who are normally fluent.

The effects of two different forms of verbal feedback on speech production were studied in 7 dysarthric speakers. Both forms of verbal feedback signaled that the listener failed to understand the message. The more general form of feedback gave no specific cues regarding the reason the listener failed to understand. The more specific feedback indicated that a voiceless initial consonant was perceived as its voiced cognate. The subjects studied had inconsistent voicing errors. Voice onset times (VOTs) and syllabic intensity, duration, and rate were measured in the phrases produced prior to and after verbal feedback. The results showed a significant change in VOT after the specific feedback and no significant change in VOT after the more general feedback. The use of specific feedback to induce articulatory change during speech treatment is discussed.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between several temporal measures of speech movements and perceived nasalization in speakers with cleft palate. Four adult subjects with repaired cleft palate were filmed using high-speed (100 frames/s) cinefluorography as they produced target syllables embedded in a carrier phrase. Perceived nasalization of each extracted acoustic target syllable was rated by 18 trained judges. Movements of the tongue tip, tongue dorsum, jaw, velar knee, velar tip, and posterior pharyngeal wall were plotted over time. Time of movement onsets and movement offsets was identified from the plots. Voice onset and offset times were identified from the synchronized acoustic recordings. The findings indicate that normally expected velopharyngeal movements occurred near the time of jaw-lowering onset during nasalized CVC and CVN productions in two subjects who were judged to exhibit high levels of nasalization. The other two subjects showed no velopharyngeal movements during the CVC production. It is speculated that velopharyngeal movements normally expected in CVC utterances may be avoided by some speakers with cleft palate in order to minimize perceptible nasalization.

This paper reports on a comprehensive phonetic study of American classroom learners of Russian, investigating the influence of the second language (L2) on the first language (L1). Russian and English productions of 20 learners were compared to 18 English monolingual controls focusing on the acoustics of word-initial and word-final voicing. The results demonstrate that learners’ Russian was acoustically different from their English, with shorter voice onset times (VOTs) in [−voice] stops, longer prevoicing in [+voice] stops, more [−voice] stops with short lag VOTs and more [+voice] stops with prevoicing, indicating a degree of successful L2 pronunciation learning. Crucially, learners also demonstrated an L1 phonetic change compared to monolingual English speakers. Specifically, the VOT of learners’ initial English voiceless stops was shortened, indicating assimilation with Russian, while the frequency of prevoicing in learners’ English was decreased, indicating dissimilation with Russian. Word-final, the duration of preceding vowels, stop closures, frication, and voicing during consonantal constriction all demonstrated drift towards Russian norms of word-final voicing neutralization. The study confirms that L2-driven phonetic changes in L1 are possible even in L1-immersed classroom language learners, challenging the role of reduced L1 use and highlighting the plasticity of the L1 phonetic system.

abstractWhile theories on predictive processing posit that predictions are based on one’s prior experiences, experimental work has effectively ignored the fact that people differ from each other in their linguistic experiences and, consequently, in the predictions they generate. We examine usage-based variation by means of three groups of participants (recruiters, job-seekers, and people not (yet) looking for a job), two stimuli sets (word sequences characteristic of either job ads or news reports), and two experiments (a Completion task and a Voice Onset Time task). We show that differences in experiences with a particular register result in different expectations regarding word sequences characteristic of that register, thus pointing to differences in mental representations of language. Subsequently, we investigate to what extent different operationalizations of word predictability are accurate predictors of voice onset times. A measure of a participant’s own expectations proves to be a significant predictor of processing speed over and above word predictability measures based on amalgamated data. These findings point to actual individual differences and highlight the merits of going beyond amalgamated data. We thus demonstrate that is it feasible to empirically assess the variation implied in usage-based theories, and we advocate exploiting this opportunity.

An unresolved issue in speech perception concerns whether top-down linguistic information influences perceptual responses. We addressed this issue using the event-related-potential technique in two experiments that measured cross-modal sequential-semantic priming effects on the auditory N1, an index of acoustic-cue encoding. Participants heard auditory targets (e.g., “potatoes”) following associated visual primes (e.g., “MASHED”), neutral visual primes (e.g., “FACE”), or a visual mask (e.g., “XXXX”). Auditory targets began with voiced (/b/, /d/, /g/) or voiceless (/p/, /t/, /k/) stop consonants, an acoustic difference known to yield differences in N1 amplitude. In Experiment 1 ( N = 21), semantic context modulated responses to upcoming targets, with smaller N1 amplitudes for semantic associates. In Experiment 2 ( N = 29), semantic context changed how listeners encoded sounds: Ambiguous voice-onset times were encoded similarly to the voicing end point elicited by semantic associates. These results are consistent with an interactive model of spoken-word recognition that includes top-down effects on early perception.

Abstract We present a study of the development of L2 stop VOT (voice onset time) in lower-level English-speaking learners of Spanish over the course of a college semester. Participants were recorded six times in two-week intervals. Halfway through the semester, students received a brief pronunciation training session with practice and feedback. Overall, the learners did not lower their L2 VOTs in the first half of the study, before pronunciation training. Following training, however, they lowered their mean VOTs for Spanish voiceless stops significantly. A similar effect was not found for their mean VOTs of Spanish voiced stops, in line with prior work suggesting that prevoicing may be harder to acquire. Yet careful examination suggests that learners are increasing the frequency with which they use prevoicing in Spanish, suggesting this metric might inform future work on L2 Spanish pronunciation development. This work has implications for teaching and research in second language pronunciation.

The Four-Level Framework of speech sensorimotor control (Van der Merwe, 1997) complicates the traditional view of dysarthria as a purely motor execution disorder. According to this framework, hypokinetic, hyperkinetic and ataxic dysarthria are programming-execution dysarthrias, while flaccid dysarthria is the only execution dysarthria. This preliminary study aimed to differentiate programming-execution dysarthria from execution dysarthria by examining variability of the temporal control of speech. Six participants and five control participants repeated 15 stimulus words ten times. Voice onset time, vowel duration, vowel steady state duration and vowel formant transition duration were measured acoustically. The coefficient of variation of the temporal parameters, and the correlation coefficient between the durational parameters, were calculated and analysed using descriptive statistics. The coefficient of variation revealed that the speakers with dysarthria were more variable than the control speakers. All participants, except those with flaccid dysarthria, showed similar patterns of intra-subject variability. Those with flaccid dysarthria exhibited greater intra-subject variability of voice onset time. The correlation analysis did not reveal differences between dysarthria type, or between the dysarthric speakers and the controls. Differences found in the patterns of variability may support the hypothesis that individuals with programming-execution dysarthria resort to a different level of control than those with execution dysarthria. Further research in this field is necessary.

Ten normally hearing and 10 age-matched subjects with moderate-to-severe hearing impairment were recorded producing a protocol of 18 basic syllables [/pi/,/pa/,/pu/; /bi/,/ba/,/bu/; /ti/,/ta/,/tu/; /di/,/da/,/du/; /ki/,/ka/,/ku/; /gi/,/ga/,/gu/] repeated five times. The resulting 90 syllables were digitized and measured for (a) total duration; (b) voice-onset time (VOT) of the initial consonant; (c) fundamental frequency (F 0 ) at midpoint of vowel; and (d) formant frequencies (F 1 , F 2 , F 3 ), also measured at midpoint of vowel. Statistical comparisons were conducted on (a) average values for each syllable, and (b) standard deviations. Although there were numerical differences between normally hearing and hearing-impaired groups, few differences were statistically significant.

When bilinguals speak to one another, they choose a base language to interact in and then, depending on the need, code-switch to the other (guest) language for a word, a phrase, or a sentence During the perception of a code switch, there is a momentary dominance of base-language units at the onset of the switch, but it is unknown whether this base-language effect is also present in production, that is, whether the phonetics of the base language carry over into the guest language In this study, French-English bilinguals retold stories and read sentences monolingually in English and in French and bilingually in French with English code switches Both the stories and the sentences contained critical words that began with unvoiced stop consonants, whose voice onset times (VOT) were measured The results showed that the base language had no impact on the production of code switches The shift from one language to the other was total and immediate This manifestation of cross-linguistic flexibility is accounted for in terms of a bilingual production model

Purpose Speech perception is facilitated by listeners' ability to dynamically modify the mapping to speech sounds given systematic variation in speech input. For example, the degree to which listeners show categorical perception of speech input changes as a function of distributional variability in the input, with perception becoming less categorical as the input, becomes more variable. Here, we test the hypothesis that higher level receptive language ability is linked to the ability to adapt to low-level distributional cues in speech input. Method Listeners ( n = 58) completed a distributional learning task consisting of 2 blocks of phonetic categorization for words beginning with /g/ and /k/. In 1 block, the distributions of voice onset time values specifying /g/ and /k/ had narrow variances (i.e., minimal variability). In the other block, the distributions of voice onset times specifying /g/ and /k/ had wider variances (i.e., increased variability). In addition, all listeners completed an assessment battery for receptive language, nonverbal intelligence, and reading fluency. Results As predicted by an ideal observer computational framework, the participants in aggregate showed identification responses that were more categorical for consistent compared to inconsistent input, indicative of distributional learning. However, the magnitude of learning across participants showed wide individual variability, which was predicted by receptive language ability but not by nonverbal intelligence or by reading fluency. Conclusion The results suggest that individual differences in distributional learning for speech are linked, at least in part, to receptive language ability, reflecting a decreased ability among those with weaker receptive language to capitalize on consistent input distributions.

Neste trabalho, investigamos o efeito da instrução explícita de pronúncia no desenvolvimento do padrão de Voice Onset Times (VOT) das oclusivas surdas iniciais do inglês como língua não nativa por aprendizes soteropolitanos. O estudo contou com três coletas de dados, um pré-teste, um pós-teste imediato e um pós-teste postergado, de 16 aprendizes soteropolitanos, divididos em grupos controle e experimental, e com uma sessão de instrução sobre a produção das oclusivas surdas iniciais do inglês. Análises acústicas do VOT são reportadas. Os resultados revelaram que o grupo controle, que não recebeu instrução, não produziu o padrão de VOT esperado para o inglês em nenhuma das coletas. Por outro lado, no grupo experimental, que recebeu instrução explícita, pudemos notar um aumento considerável na duração das oclusivas da L2. Nossos dados revelam efeitos positivos da instrução explícita de pronúncia para o desenvolvimento do VOT da L2 e vão ao encontro de Sancier e Fowler (1997) e Autor 1 (2016), que afirmam que brasileiros são capazes de atingir produções estatisticamente próximas ao esperado para o inglês, ao menos no que concerne ao VOT.

Fifty-six Portuguese speakers born and raised in Brazil produced Portuguese words beginning in one of four plosives, /p b k ɡ/. Twenty-eight of them were monolinguals (controls), and the rest were learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The learners were also asked to produce English words beginning with one of four plosives, /p b k ɡ/. We measured the plosives’ voice onset times (VOT) to address the following research questions: Do foreign-language learners, whose exposure to native English oral input is necessarily limited, form new sound categories specific to their additional language? Does engaging in the learning of a foreign language affect the phonetics of one’s native language? The EFL learners were found to differ from the controls in their production of Portuguese voiced (but not voiceless) plosives—prevoicing was longer in learner speech. The learners displayed different VOT targets for voiced (but not voiceless) consonants as a function of the language they were speaking—prevoicing was longer in Portuguese. In EFL learners’ productions, English sounds appear to be fundamentally modeled on phonologically similar native sounds, but some phonetic development (or reorganization) is found. Phonetic development induced by foreign-language learning may lead to a minor reconfiguration of the phonetics of native language sounds. EFL learners may find it challenging to learn the pronunciation patterns of English, likely due to the reduced access to native oral input.

This study was designed to compare high- and low-intelligibility productions of /t/ and /d/ in esophageal speakers by using a combination of acoustic, perceptual, and physiologic measurements. Observations from these comparisons were incorporated into clinical strategies for modifying a single subject's low-intelligibility utterances. Acoustic comparison indicated that esophageal speakers used voice onset and phonation off-times but not vowel durations to differentiate /t/ and /d/ in high-intelligibility productions. Intraoral pressure measures during /t/ and /d/ production demonstrated excessively high intraoral pressures in both consonants for a low-intelligibility speaker and did not suggest systematic differences in intraoral pressure between /t/ versus /d/. Two weeks of biofeedback treatment with a low-intelligibility speaker were associated with a reduction in intraoral pressures for /t/ and /d/ productions, improved intelligibility, and changes in acoustic characteristics for /t/.

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.

This study examined temporal parameters of speech in subjects with apraxia of speech, conduction aphasia, and normal speech. They were asked to repeat target words in a carrier phrase 10 times. Acoustic analyses involved measurement of stop gap duration, voice onset time, vowel nucleus duration, and consonant-vowel (CV) duration. Speakers with apraxia of speech had longer and more variable stop gap, vowel, and CV durations than did subjects with aphasia or normal speech. Speakers with conduction aphasia had longer vowel durations and CV durations than subjects with normal speech. Also, subjects with apraxia of speech showed greater token-to-token variability than the other subject groups. The variability shown by subjects with apraxia of speech was significantly correlated with perceptual judgments of their speech. The significance of these results is discussed in the context of motoric and phonological explanations for apraxia of speech and conduction aphasia.

This study looks at the relative importance of phonation type in identifying tones in languages with a ‘mixed’ pitch/phonation tone system. Green Mong is a tone language with an inventory of 7 contrastive tones and a tonal system that incorporates both fundamental frequency (FO) and phonation type distinctions. The study examines 3 Green Mong tones, which have similar FO contours and are characterized by the distinctive use of breathy, creaky and modal phonation. Acoustic analyses of 3 male and 3 female speakers' productions indicate that the tones are distinguished by their FO, relative amplitude of lower and higher harmonics (H1-H2), vowel duration, vowel quality and voice onset times. Discriminant analyses, used to estimate the relative value of these different cues, indicate that H1-H2 is the best predictor of tone category membership. This is the case for both high and low vowels, although the magnitude of the H1-H2 difference is substantially smaller for high vowels. The 2 predictor variables which are next most strongly correlated with the discriminant functions also relate to phonation type. However, FO does continue to play a role in classification of tokens into tone categories.

This study evaluated the relationship between specific acoustic features of speech and perceptual judgments of word intelligibility of adults with cerebral palsy-dysarthria. Use of a contrasting word task allowed for intelligibility analysis and correlated acoustic analysis according to specified spectral and temporal features. Selected phonemic contrasts included syllable-initial voicing; syllable-final voicing; stop-nasal; fricative-affricate; front-back, high-low, and tense-lax vowels. Speech materials included a set of CVC stimulus words. Acoustic data are reported on vowel duration, formant frequency locations, voice onset times, amplitude rise times, and frication durations. Listeners’ perceptual assessment of intelligibility of the 16 dysarthric adults by transcription and rating tasks is also presented. All but one acoustic contrast was successfully made as evidenced by measured acoustic differences between contrast pairs. However, the generally successful acoustic contrasts stood in marked contrast to the poorly rated intelligibility scores and high error percentages that were ascribed to the opposite pair members. A second analysis examined the contribution of these acoustic features towards estimates and prediction of intelligibility deficits in speakers with dysarthria. The scaled intelligibility was predicted by multiple regression analysis with 62.6% accuracy by acoustic measures related to one consonant contrast (fricative-affricate) and three vowel contrasts (front-back, high-low, and tense-lax). Other measured contrasts, such as those related to contrast voicing effects and stop-nasal distinctions, did not seem to contribute in a significant way to variability in the intelligibility estimates. These findings are discussed in relation to specific areas of production deficiency that are consistent across different types of dysarthria with cerebral palsy as the etiology.

Previous research has shown differential degrees of attention in processing hierarchical linguistic information where higher order cues require greater attention in speech processing. The current study investigated the influence of attentional resources on acoustic cue weightings in speech perception by examining Korean listeners’ identifications of the three-way laryngeal stops (tense vs. lax vs. aspirated). Using a dual-task paradigm, we presented 28 adult Korean listeners with identification tasks blocked by no-distractor versus distractor conditions where arithmetic calculations distracted the listeners’ speech processing. Auditory stimuli were prepared by combining voice-onset times (VOTs) and fundamental frequencies (F0s) based on natural production. Group analyses revealed that VOT was an informative parameter across the three stop laryngeal categories and the listeners’ reliance on VOT was consistently reduced under the distracting condition. Subsequent individual-level analysis further showed that listeners with heavier perceptual reliance on VOT were hindered by the distractor more than others in utilizing VOT. Unlike VOT, the F0 cue did not systematically interact with the distracting listening condition. The findings indicated that VOT (but not F0) required greater attention in processing the Korean laryngeal stops, and was presumably a higher order acoustic cue than F0. The current study contributes to the understanding of attention and cue primacy in general as well as to the clarification of the relative roles of VOT and F0 for the Korean stop laryngeal contrast.

Background: Cocaine addiction is a global health issue with limited therapeutic options and a high relapse rate. Attentional bias towards substance-related cues may be an important factor for relapse. However, it has never been compared in former and current cocaine-dependent patients. Methods: Attentional bias towards cocaine-related words was assessed using an emotional Stroop task in cocaine-dependent patients ( N = 40), long-term abstinent former cocaine-dependent patients ( N = 24; mean abstinence: 2 years) and control subjects ( N = 28). Participants had to name the colour of cocaine-related words, neutral words and colour names. We assessed response times using an automatic voice-onset detection method we developed and we measured attentional bias as the difference in response times between cocaine-related and neutral conditions. Results: There was an overall group effect on attentional bias towards cocaine, but no group effect on the colour Stroop effect. Two-by-two comparison showed a difference in attentional bias between cocaine-dependent patients and controls, whereas long-term abstinent former cocaine-dependent patients were not different from either. Although cocaine-dependent patients showed a significant attentional bias, consistent with the literature, neither long-term abstinent former cocaine-dependent patients nor controls showed a significant attentional bias towards cocaine-related words. We found no link between attentional bias size and either addiction severity or craving. Conclusions: Cocaine abstinence was associated with an absence of significant attentional bias towards cocaine-related words, which may be interpreted either as an absence of attentional bias predicting success in maintaining abstinence, or as attentional bias being able to disappear with long-term cocaine abstinence. Further research is needed to distinguish the role of attentional bias in maintaining abstinence.

Abstract. Research on implicit sequence learning with the Serial Reaction Task (SRT) has demonstrated that people automatically acquire knowledge about fixed repeating sequences of responses and can transfer response sequence knowledge to novel stimuli. Such demonstrations are, however, mostly limited to setups with visual stimuli and manual responses. Here we systematically follow up on scarce attempts to demonstrate implicit sequence learning in word reading. While the literature on implicit sequence learning can be taken to suggest that sequence knowledge is acquired and affecting performance in word reading, we show that neither is the case in a series of four experiments. Sequence knowledge was acquired and affecting performance in color naming but not in word reading. On the one hand, we observed slowing of voice-onset times in off-sequence as compared to regularly sequenced trials when people named the color of a centrally presented disk. Yet, hardly any effect was observed when the very same sequence of words was verbalized in word reading instead. Transfer of sequence knowledge to and from color naming was not observed, either. This contrasts with sequence learning studies with manual responses, which have been taken to suggest that a fixed and repeating sequence of responses is sufficient for learning to occur even in fast choice reaction tasks and to transfer across stimuli as long as the sequence of responses remains intact. Rather, in line with dimensional action accounts of task performance, the results underline the role of translation between processing streams for implicit sequence learning.

Abstract The voiced onsets and associated tonal reflexes of Northern Mǐn (NM), motivation for Norman’s (1973; 1974) proto-Mǐn “softened” stops and affricates, remain a subject of controversy. Following a brief introduction (§ 1), I begin by reviewing the various apparent sources of voiced onsets in NM, including old complex onsets, non-Sinitic substrate, voicing alternations, and late koine material (§ 2). I then take up Akitani’s (2008) colloquial glossary of Shíbēi 石陂 and Norman’s (1969) of Jiànyáng 建陽, outlining on this basis an adjusted account of the subgroup’s development: pre-PNM preserved early Sinitic voiced onsets in Tone A2, with a conditioned split isolating voiced stops in so-called Yángpíng yǐ 陽平乙, here “A2+” (§ 3). It was this conservative feature which allowed items in § 2 to take on voiced onsets across tonal categories, at times leading to further splits. A conclusion considers Mǐn more generally, proposing that the voicing alternants of Huang Chin-wen (2001a) may be NM reflections of group-wide tone sandhi processes (§ 4).

Abstract Produced from experiences at the outset of the intense times when Covid-19 lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, this collaborative paper offers the collective reflections and analysis of a group of teaching and learning and Higher Education (HE) scholars from a diverse 15 of the 26 South African public universities. In the form of a theorised narrative insistent on foregrounding personal voices, it presents a snapshot of the pandemic addressing the following question: what does the ‘pivot online’ to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL), forced into urgent existence by the Covid-19 pandemic, mean for equity considerations in teaching and learning in HE? Drawing on the work of Therborn (2009: 20–32; 2012: 579–589; 2013; 2020) the reflections consider the forms of inequality - vital, resource and existential - exposed in higher education. Drawing on the work of Tronto (1993; 2015; White and Tronto 2004) the paper shows the networks of care which were formed as a counter to the systemic failures of the sector at the onset of the pandemic.

Much has been written about the challenges of tackling climate change in post-political times. However, times have changed significantly since the onset of the debate on post-politics in environmental scholarship. We have entered a politicised, even polarised world which, as this article argues, a number of voices within the climate movement paradoxically try to bring together again. This article scrutinises new climate movements in a changing world, focusing on the School Strikes for Climate in Belgium. It shows how the movement, through the establishment of an intergenerational conflict line and a strong politicisation of tactics, has succeeded in putting the topic at the heart of the public agenda for months on end. By claiming that we need mobilisation, not studying, the movement went straight against the hegemonic, technocratic understanding of climate politics at the time. However, by keeping its demands empty and establishing a homogenised fault line, the movement made itself vulnerable to forms of neutralisation and recuperation by forces which have an interest in restoring the post-political consensus around technocratic and market-oriented answers to climate change. This might also partly explain its gradual decline. Instead of recycling post-political discourses of the past, this article claims, the challenge is to seize the ‘populist moment’ and build a politicised movement around climate change. One way of doing that is by no longer projecting climate change into the future but reframing the ‘now’ as the moment of crisis which calls on us to build another future.

[Formula: see text] There is a growing desire amongst space-faring nations to venture beyond the Van Allen radiation belts to a variety of intriguing locations in our inner solar system. Mars is the ultimate destination. In two decades, we hope to vicariously share in the adventure of an intrepid crew of international astronauts on the first voyage to the red planet. This will be a daunting mission with an operational profile unlike anything astronauts have flown before. A flight to Mars will be a 50-million-kilometre journey. Interplanetary distances are so great that voice and data communications between mission control on Earth and a base on Mars will feature latencies up to 20 min. Consequently, the ground support team will not have real-time control of the systems aboard the transit spacecraft nor the surface habitat. As cargo resupply from Earth will be impossible, the onboard inventory of equipment and supplies must be planned strategically in advance. Furthermore, the size, amount, and function of onboard equipment will be constrained by limited volume, mass, and power allowances. With less oversight from the ground, all vehicle systems will need to be reliable and robust. They must function autonomously. Astronauts will rely on their own abilities and onboard resources to deal with urgent situations that will inevitably arise. The deep space environment is hazardous. Zero- and reduced-gravity effects will trigger deconditioning of the cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and other physiological systems. While living for 2.5 years in extreme isolation, Mars crews will experience psychological stressors such as loss of privacy, reduced comforts of living, and distant relationships with family members and friends. Beyond Earth’s protective magnetosphere, the fluence of ionising radiation will be higher. Longer exposure of astronauts to galactic cosmic radiation could result in the formation of cataracts, impaired wound healing, and degenerative tissue diseases. Genetic mutations and the onset of cancer later in life are also possible. Acute radiation sickness and even death could ensue from a large and unpredictable solar particle event. There are many technological barriers that prevent us from carrying out a mission to Mars today. Before launching the first crew, we will need to develop processes for in-situ resource utilisation. Rather than bringing along large quantities of oxygen, water, and propellant from Earth, future astronauts will need to produce some of these consumables from local space-based resources. Ion propulsion systems will be needed to reduce travel times to interplanetary destinations, and we will need systems to land larger payloads (up to 40 tonnes of equipment and supplies for a human mission) on planetary surfaces. These and other innovations will be needed before humans venture into deep space. However, it is the delivery of health care that is regarded as one of the most important obstacles to be overcome. Physicians, biomedical engineers, human factors specialists, and radiation experts are re-thinking operational concepts of health care, crew performance, and life support. Traditional oversight of astronaut health by ground-based medical teams will no longer be possible, particularly in urgent situations. Aborting a deep space mission to medically evacuate an ill or injured crew member to Earth will not be an option. Future crews must have all of the capability and responsibility to monitor and manage their own health. Onboard medical resources must include imaging, surgery, and emergency care, as well as laboratory analysis of blood, urine, and other biospecimens. At least one member of the crew should be a broadly trained physician with experience in remote medicine. She/he will be supported by an onboard health informatics network that is artificial intelligence enabled to assist with monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment. In other words, health care in deep space will become more autonomous, intelligent, and point of care. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) has dedicated a day of its 5th International Symposium in Adelaide to the theme of Mars exploration. ICRP has brought global experts together today to consider the pressing issues of radiation protection. There are many issues to be addressed: Can the radiation countermeasures currently used in low Earth orbit be adapted for deep space? Can materials of low atomic weight be integrated into the structure of deep space vehicles to shield the crew? In the event of a major solar particle event, could a safe haven shelter the crew adequately from high doses of radiation? Could Martian regolith be used as shielding material for subterranean habitats? Will shielding alone be sufficient to minimise exposure, or will biological and pharmacological countermeasures also be needed? Beyond this symposium, I will value the continued involvement of ICRP in space exploration. ICRP has recently established Task Group 115 to examine radiation effects on the health of astronaut crew and to recommend exposure limits. This work will be vital. Biological effects of radiation could not only impact the health, well-being, and performance of future explorers, but also the length and quality of their lives. While humanity has dreamed of travel to the red planet for decades, an actual mission is finally starting to feel like a possibility. How exciting! I thank ICRP for its ongoing work to protect radiation workers on Earth. In the future, we will depend on counsel from ICRP to protect extraterrestrial workers and to enable the exploration of deep space.

Background: Pemphigus vegetans is a rare variant of pemphigus vulgaris, comprising 1 to 2% of all pemphigus cases. Exposures to oral agents such as captopril and penicillamine and, less commonly, physical or chemical factors have been implicated in the development of pemphigus. Methods: We report a 42-year-old white male with a 12-month history of hypertrophic, vegetative plaques affecting primarily his external nares and upper lips. The patient had a history of alcoholism and intermittent drug abuse, primarily intranasal cocaine, since his youth. He had been using cocaine heavily three to four times/week for 1 month prior to and 1 month following the onset of the eruption but has since ceased use. His clinical features and histopathologic findings were consistent with a diagnosis of pemphigus vegetans. Treatment with high-dose prednisone (80 mg/d) and mycophenolate mofetil (1.5 g/d) resulted in resolution of the lesions after 18 months. Results and Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the second report proposing an association between intranasal cocaine use and the pemphigus family of disorders. Although the relationship between illicit drug use and the development of pemphigus is unclear, we postulate that intranasal cocaine abuse is operative in our patient's disease. Herein we discuss drug and other external precipitants of pemphigus and review previous case reports of pemphigus associated with illicit drugs. Renseignements de base: Le pemphigus végétant est une variante rare du pemphigus vulgaire, comptant pour 1 à 2 % de tous les cas de pemphigus. Un rapprochement a été établi entre l'exposition à des agents oraux tels que le captopril et la pénicillamine et, moins couramment, à des facteurs physiques ou chimiques, dans le développement du pemphigus. Méthodes: Nous exposons le cas d'un homme de race blanche âgé de 42 ans ayant des antécédents de plaques végétatives hypertrophiques pendant 12 mois, touchant principalement ses narines externes et ses lèvres supérieures. Le patient avait des antécédents d'alcoolisme et de consommation intermittente de drogues, principalement de la cocaïne prise par voie intranasale, depuis sa jeunesse. Il avait consommé de façon excessive de la cocaïne trois à quatre fois par semaine pendant le mois qui avait précédé et avait suivi l'apparition de l'éruption, mais il a depuis ce temps cessé d'en user. Ses caractéristiques cliniques et les résultats histopathologiques correspondaient à un diagnostic de pemphigus végétant. Le traitement consistant en la prise de fortes doses de prednisone (80 mg/j) et de mycophenolate mofetil (1,5 g/j) a entraîné la résorption des lésions après 18 mois. Résultats et conclusions: À notre connaissance, ce rapport est le deuxième qui propose l'existence d'une association entre la consommation de cocaïne par voie intranasale et le groupe de maladies pemphigus. Bien que la relation entre la consommation de drogues illicites et le développement du pemphigus ne soit pas claire, nous postulons que la consommation de cocaïne par voie intranasale a une incidence sur la maladie de notre patient. Nous discutons aux présentes des drogues et d'autres déclencheurs externes du pemphigus et nous examinons les rapports de cas antérieurs de pemphigus associé à la consommation de drogues illicites.

Persuasiveness in oral communication in English can be expressed with various vocal phonetic cues that may not be readily accessible to English second language (L2) learners whose native language may employ a different set of cues. With a goal to increase L2 learners’ perceived spoken confidence and persuasiveness, and obtain empirical evidence for phonetic adjustments that native English speakers make to influence listeners, the current study explored the use of consonant prolongation in stressed syllable onsets for emphasis by native British English speakers and English L2 learners. The native speakers’ durations of continuant consonants and voiceless stop consonant voice onset times (VOTs) in (1) neutrally-produced speech and (2) persuasively delivered motivational/shocking/emotional messages were compared to Latvian L2 English speakers’ productions. The results revealed that in persuasive speech, the British speakers’ consonantal durations, particularly those of continuants, got significantly longer relative to the vowels that followed them; for English L2 learners, the duration of consonants did not change as a factor of speech type. This is in line with our previous research with American English speakers and carries implications for L2 speech learning and teaching.

Background: Little is known about “within-patient delay”, time from first symptom of lung cancer to contacting primary care. Aim: Primary outcomes were length of within-patient delay and the proportion of total delay it represents. Secondary outcomes were factors causing delay and survival. Design and Setting: Newly diagnosed lung cancer oncology patients at two hospitals in Norfolk. Method: Patients completed questionnaires regarding onset of symptoms, whether they had delayed, and their reasons. GPs completed correlating questionnaires. Pathway times and other data were extracted from cancer registry and hospital records and outcomes obtained prospectively. Factors causing delay were compared using ratios of geometric means. Results: In 379 patients, mean within-patient delay and pre-secondary care delay were 188.6 and 241 days (61.4% and 78.5% of total delay respectively). 38.8% patients felt they had delayed. Patient-related causes of delay were denial (ratio of means (ROM) 4.36, p=0.002, 95% CIs 1.71-11.1), anxiety (3.36, 0.026, 1.16-9.76), non-recognition of symptoms (2.80, 0.004, 1.41-5.59) and smoking (1.76, 0.021, 1.09-2.86), respectively. These symptoms were associated with delay: finger swelling/discomfort (ROM=2.72, p=0.009, CIs 1.29-5.74), cough (2.53, <0.001, 1.52-4.19), weight loss (2.41, <0.001, 1.49-3.88), weakness (2.35, 0.001, 1.45-3.83), dyspnoea (2.30, 0.001, 1.40-3.80), voice change (1.90, 0.010, 1.17-3.10) and sputum (1.66, 0.039, 1.03-2.67), respectively, also having more than five symptoms (compared to 1-3) (3.69, <0.001, 2.05-6.64). No overall relation between within-patient delay and survival was seen. Conclusion: Using smoking registers, awareness literature and self-care manuals, primary care staff could liaise with ever-smokers regarding their symptoms, to ensure early referral to secondary care.

Purpose Multimodal sensory integration in audiovisual (AV) speech perception is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Modality-specific responses such as auditory left, auditory right, and visual responses to dichotic incongruent AV speech stimuli help in understanding AV speech processing through each input modality. It is observed that distribution of activity in the frontal motor areas involved in speech production has been shown to correlate with how subjects perceive the same syllable differently or perceive different syllables. This study investigated the distribution of modality-specific responses to dichotic incongruent AV speech stimuli by simultaneously presenting consonant–vowel (CV) syllables with different places of articulation to the participant's left and right ears and visually. Design A dichotic experimental design was adopted. Six stop CV syllables /pa/, /ta/, /ka/, /ba/, /da/, and /ga/ were assembled to create dichotic incongruent AV speech material. Participants included 40 native speakers of Norwegian (20 women, M age = 22.6 years, SD = 2.43 years; 20 men, M age = 23.7 years, SD = 2.08 years). Results Findings of this study showed that, under dichotic listening conditions, velar CV syllables resulted in the highest scores in the respective ears, and this might be explained by stimulus dominance of velar consonants, as shown in previous studies. However, this study, with dichotic auditory stimuli accompanied by an incongruent video segment, demonstrated that the presentation of a visually distinct video segment possibly draws attention to the video segment in some participants, thereby reducing the overall recognition of the dominant syllable. Furthermore, the findings here suggest the possibility of lesser response times to incongruent AV stimuli in females compared with males. Conclusion The identification of the left audio, right audio, and visual segments in dichotic incongruent AV stimuli depends on place of articulation, stimulus dominance, and voice onset time of the CV syllables.

Abstract Virilization is the medical term for describing a female who develops characteristics associated with male hormones (androgens) at any age, or when a newborn girl shows signs of prenatal male hormone exposure at birth. In girls, androgen levels are low during pregnancy and childhood. A first physiologic rise of adrenal androgens is observed at the age of 6-8 years and reflects functional activation of the zona reticularis of the adrenal cortex at adrenarche manifesting clinically with first pubic and axillary hairs. Early adrenarche is known as ‘premature adrenarche’. It is mostly idiopathic and of uncertain pathologic relevance but requires the exclusion of other causes of androgen excess (e.g. non-classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia) that might exacerbate clinically into virilization. The second modest physiologic increase of circulating androgens occurs then during pubertal development which reflects the activation of ovarian steroidogenesis contributing to the peripheral androgen pool. However, at puberty initiation (and beyond) ovarian steroidogenesis is normally devoted to estrogen production for the development of secondary female bodily characteristics (e.g. breast development). Serum total testosterone in a young adult woman is therefore about 10-20-fold lower than in a young man, while midcycle estradiol is about 10-20-fold higher. But if androgen production starts too early, progresses rapidly and in marked excess (usually more than 3-5 times above normal), females will manifest with signs of virilization such as masculine habitus, deepening of the voice, severe acne, excessive facial and (male typical) body hair, clitoromegaly and increased muscle development. Several medical conditions may cause virilization in girls and women including androgen-producing tumors of the ovaries or adrenal cortex, (non-)classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and, more rarely, other disorders (also referred to as differences) of sex development (DSD). The purpose of this article is to describe the clinical approach to the girl with virilization at puberty, focussing on diagnostic challenges. The review is written from the perspective of the case of an 11.5-year-old girl who was referred to our clinic for progressive, rapid onset clitoromegaly, and was then diagnosed with a complex genetic form of DSD that led to abnormal testosterone production from a dysgenetic gonad at onset of puberty. Her genetic workup revealed a unique translocation of an abnormal duplicated Y-chromosome to a deleted chromosome 9, including the Doublesex and Mab-3 Related Transcription factor 1 (DMRT1) gene.

In PilsenTwenty-six Station Road,She climbed to the third floorUp stairs which were all that was leftOf the whole house,She opened her doorFull on to the sky,Stood gaping over the edge.For this was the placeThe world ended.Thenshe locked up carefullylest someone stealSiriusor Aldebaranfrom her kitchen,went back downstairsand settled herselfto waitfor the house to rise againand for her husband to rise from the ashesand for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in placeIn the morning they found herstill as stone, sparrows pecking her hands.Five Minutes after the Air Raidby Miroslav Holub(Calder 287) Holding Still Detonation. Affect. During the Second World War, London and other European cities were subjected to the terrors of aerial bombardment, rendered through nightmarish anticipations of the bomber (Gollin 7) and the material storm of the real air-raid. The fall of bombs plagued cities and their citizens with the terrible rain of explosives and incendiary weapons. A volatile landscape was formed as the urban environment was ‘unmade’ and urged into violent motion. Flying projectiles of shrapnel, debris and people; avalanches of collapsing factories and houses; the inhale and exhale of compressed air and firestorms; the scream of the explosion. All these composed an incredibly fluid urban traumatic, as atmospheres fell over the cities that was thick with smoke, dust, and ventilated only by terror (see for instance Sebald 10 and Mendieta’s 3 recent commentary). Vast craters were imprinted onto the charred morphologies of London and Berlin as well as Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden. Just as the punctuations of the bombing saw the psychic as well as the material give way, writers portraying Britain as an ‘volcano island’ (Spaight 5) witnessed eruptive projections – the volleys of the material air-war; the emotional signature of charged and bitter reprisals; pain, anguish and vengeance - counter-strikes of affect. In the midst of all of this molten violence and emotion it seems impossible that a simultaneous sense of quiescence could be at all possible. More than mere physical fixity or geographical stasis, a rather different sort of experience could take place. Preceding, during and following the excessive mobilisation of an air raid, ‘stillness’ was often used to describe certain plateuing stretches of time-space which were slowed and even stopped (Anderson 740). Between the eruptions appeared hollows of calm and even boredom. People’s nervous flinching under the reverberation of high-explosive blasts formed part of what Jordan Crandall might call a ‘bodily-inclination’ position. Slackened and taut feelings condensed around people listening out for the oncoming bomber. People found that they prepared for the dreadful wail of the siren, or relaxed in the aftermath of the attack. In these instances, states of tension and apprehension as well as calm and relief formed though stillness. The peculiar experiences of ‘stillness’ articulated in these events open out, I suggest, distinctive ways-of-being which undo our assumptions of perpetually fluid subjectivities and the primacy of the ‘body in motion’ even within the context of unparalleled movement and uncertainty (see Harrison 423 and also Rose and Wylie 477 for theoretical critique). The sorts of “musics of stillness and silence able to be discovered in a world of movement” (Thrift, Still 50), add to our understandings of the material geographies of war and terror (see for instance Graham 63; Gregory and Pred 3), whilst they gesture towards complex material-affective experiences of bodies and spaces. Stillness in this sense, denotes apprehending and anticipating spaces and events in ways that sees the body enveloped within the movement of the environment around it; bobbing along intensities that course their way through it; positioned towards pasts and futures that make themselves felt, and becoming capable of intense forms of experience and thought. These examples illustrate not a shutting down of the body to an inwardly focused position – albeit composed by complex relations and connections – but bodies finely attuned to their exteriors (see Bissell, Animating 277 and Conradson 33). In this paper I draw from a range of oral and written testimony archived at the Imperial War Museum and the Mass Observation wartime regular reports. Edited publications from these collections were also consulted. Detailing the experience of aerial bombing during the Blitz, particularly on London between September 1940 to May 1941, forms part of a wider project concerning the calculative and affective dimensions of the aeroplane’s relationship with the human body, especially through the spaces it has worked to construct (infrastructures such as airports) and destroy. While appearing extraordinary, the examples I use are actually fairly typical of the patternings of experience and the depth and clarity with which they are told. They could be taken to be representative of the population as a whole or coincidentally similar testimonials. Either way, they are couched within a specific cultural historical context of urgency, threat and unparalleled violence.Anticipations The complex material geographies of an air raid reveal the ecological interdependencies of populations and their often urban environments and metabolisms (Coward 419; Davis 3; Graham 63; Gregory The Colonial 19; Hewitt Place 257). Aerial warfare was an address of populations conceived at the register of their bio-rhythmical and metabolic relationship to their milieu (Adey). The Blitz and the subsequent Allied bombing campaign constituted Churchill’s ‘great experiment’ for governments attempting to assess the damage an air raid could inflict upon a population’s nerves and morale (Brittain 77; Gregory In Another 88). An anxious and uncertain landscape constructed before the war, perpetuated by public officials, commentators and members of parliament, saw background affects (Ngai 5) of urgency creating an atmosphere that pressurised and squeezed the population to prepare for the ‘gathering storm’. Attacks upon the atmosphere itself had been readily predicted in the form of threatening gas attacks ready to poison the medium upon which human and animal life depended (Haldane 111; Sloterdijk 41-57). One of the most talked of moments of the Blitz is not necessarily the action but the times of stillness that preceded it. Before and in-between an air raid stillness appears to describe a state rendered somewhere between the lulls and silences of the action and the warnings and the anticipatory feelings of what might happen. In the awaiting bodies, the materialites of silence could be felt as a kind-of-sound and as an atmospheric sense of imminence. At the onset of the first air-raids sound became a signifier of what was on the way (MO 408). Waiting – as both practice and sensation – imparted considerable inertia that went back and forth through time (Jeffrey 956; Massumi, Parables 3). For Geographer Kenneth Hewitt, sound “told of the coming raiders, the nearness of bombs, the plight of loved ones” (When the 16). The enormous social survey of Mass Observation concluded that “fear seems to be linked above all with noise” (original emphasis). As one report found, “It is the siren or the whistle or the explosion or the drone – these are the things that terrify. Fear seems to come to us most of all through our sense of hearing” (MO 378). Yet the power of the siren came not only from its capacity to propagate sound and to alert, but the warning held in its voice of ‘keeping silent’. “Prefacing in a dire prolepsis the post-apocalyptic event before the event”, as Bishop and Phillips (97) put it, the stillness of silence was incredibly virtual in its affects, disclosing - in its lack of life – the lives that would be later taken. Devastation was expected and rehearsed by civilians. Stillness formed a space and body ready to spring into movement – an ‘imminent mobility’ as John Armitage (204) has described it. Perched on the edge of devastation, space-times were felt through a sense of impending doom. Fatalistic yet composed expectations of a bomb heading straight down pervaded the thoughts and feelings of shelter dwellers (MO 253; MO 217). Waves of sound disrupted fragile tempers as they passed through the waiting bodies in the physical language of tensed muscles and gritted teeth (Gaskin 36). Silence helped form bodies inclined-to-attention, particularly sensitive to aural disturbances and vibrations from all around. Walls, floors and objects carried an urban bass-line of warning (Goodman). Stillness was forged through a body readied in advance of the violence these materialities signified. A calm and composed body was not necessarily an immobile body. Civilians who had prepared for the attacks were ready to snap into action - to dutifully wear their gas-mask or escape to shelter. ‘Backgrounds of expectation’ (Thrift, Still 36) were forged through non-too-subtle procedural and sequential movements which opened-out new modes of thinking and feeling. Folding one’s clothes and placing them on the dresser in-readiness; pillows and sheets prepared for a spell in the shelter, these were some of many orderly examples (IWM 14595). In the event of a gas attack air raid precautions instructions advised how to put on a gas mask (ARPD 90-92),i) Hold the breath. ii) Remove headgear and place between the knees. iii) Lift the flap of the haversack [ …] iv) Bring the face-piece towards the face’[…](v) Breathe out and continue to breathe in a normal manner The rational technologies of drill, dressage and operational research enabled poise in the face of an eventual air-raid. Through this ‘logistical-life’ (Reid 17), thought was directed towards simple tasks by minutely described instructions. Stilled LifeThe end of stillness was usually marked by a reactionary ‘flinch’, ‘start’ or ‘jump’. Such reactionary ‘urgent analogs’ (Ngai 94; Tomkins 96) often occurred as a response to sounds and movements that merely broke the tension rather than accurately mimicking an air raid. These atmospheres were brittle and easily disrupted. Cars back-firing and changing gear were often complained about (MO 371), just as bringing people out of the quiescence of sleep was a common effect of air-raids (Kraftl and Horton 509). Disorientation was usually fostered in this process while people found it very difficult to carry out the most simple of tasks. Putting one’s clothes on or even making their way out of the bedroom door became enormously problematic. Sirens awoke a ‘conditioned reflex’ to take cover (MO 364). Long periods of sleep deprivation brought on considerable fatigue and anxiety. ‘Sleep we Must’ wrote journalist Ritchie Calder (252) noticing the invigorating powers of sleep for both urban morale and the bare existence of survival. For other more traumatized members of the population, psychological studies found that the sustained concentration of shelling caused what was named ‘apathy-retreat’ (Harrisson, Living 65). This extreme form of acquiescence saw especially susceptible and vulnerable civilians suffer an overwhelming urge to sleep and to be cared-for ‘as if chronically ill’ (Janis 90). A class and racial politics of quiescent affect was enacted as several members of the population were believed far more liable to ‘give way’ to defeat and dangerous emotions (Brittain 77; Committee of Imperial Defence).In other cases it was only once an air-raid had started that sleep could be found (MO 253). The boredom of waiting could gather in its intensity deforming bodies with “the doom of depression” (Anderson 749). The stopped time-spaces in advance of a raid could be soaked with so much tension that the commencement of sirens, vibrations and explosions would allow a person overwhelming relief (MO 253). Quoting from a boy recalling his experiences in Hannover during 1943, Hewitt illustrates:I lie in bed. I am afraid. I strain my ears to hear something but still all is quiet. I hardly dare breathe, as if something horrible is knocking at the door, at the windows. Is it the beating of my heart? ... Suddenly there seems relief, the sirens howl into the night ... (Heimatbund Niedersachsen 1953: 185). (Cited in Hewitt, When 16)Once a state of still was lost getting it back required some effort (Bissell, Comfortable 1697). Cautious of preventing mass panic and public hysteria by allowing the body to erupt outwards into dangerous vectors of mobility, the British government’s schooling in the theories of panicology (Orr 12) and contagious affect (Le Bon 17; Tarde 278; Thrift, Intensities 57; Trotter 140), made air raid precautions (ARP) officers, police and civil defence teams enforce ‘stay put’ and ‘hold firm’ orders to protect the population (Jones et al, Civilian Morale 463, Public Panic 63-64; Thomas 16). Such orders were meant to shield against precisely the kinds of volatile bodies they were trying to compel with their own bombing strategies. Reactions to the Blitz were moralised and racialised. Becoming stilled required self-conscious work by a public anxious not to be seen to ‘panic’. This took the form of self-disciplination. People exhausted considerable energy to ‘settle’ themselves down. It required ‘holding’ themselves still and ‘together’ in order to accomplish this state, and to avoid going the same way as the buildings falling apart around them, as some people observed (MO 408). In Britain a cup of tea was often made as a spontaneous response in the event of the conclusion of a raid (Brown 686). As well as destroying bombing created spaces too – making space for stillness (Conradson 33). Many people found that they could recall their experiences in vivid detail, allocating a significant proportion of their memories to the recollection of the self and an awareness of their surroundings (IWM 19103). In this mode of stillness, contemplation did not turn-inwards but unfolded out towards the environment. The material processual movement of the shell-blast literally evacuated all sound and materials from its centre to leave a vacuum of negative pressure. Diaries and oral testimonies stretch out these millisecond events into discernable times and spaces of sensation, thought and the experience of experience (Massumi, Parables 2). Extraordinarily, survivors mention serene feelings of quiet within the eye of the blast (see Mortimer 239); they had, literally, ‘no time to be frightened’ (Crighton-Miller 6150). A shell explosion could create such intensities of stillness that a sudden and distinctive lessening of the person and world are expressed, constituting ‘stilling-slowing diminishments’ (Anderson 744). As if the blast-vacuum had sucked all the animation from their agency, recollections convey passivity and, paradoxically, a much more heightened and contemplative sense of the moment (Bourke 121; Thrift, Still 41). More lucid accounts describe a multitude of thoughts and an attention to minute detail. Alternatively, the enormous peaking of a waking blast subdued all later activities to relative obsolescence. The hurricane of sounds and air appear to overload into the flatness of an extended and calmed instantaneous present.Then the whistling stopped, then a terrific thump as it hit the ground, and everything seem to expand, then contract with deliberation and stillness seemed to be all around. (As recollected by Bill and Vi Reagan in Gaskin 17)On the other hand, as Schivelbusch (7) shows us in his exploration of defeat, the cessation of war could be met with an outburst of feeling. In these micro-moments a close encounter with death was often experienced with elation, a feeling of peace and well-being drawn through a much more heightened sense of the now (MO 253). These are not pre-formed or contemplative techniques of attunement as Thrift has tracked, but are the consequence of significant trauma and the primal reaction to extreme danger.TracesSusan Griffin’s haunting A Chorus of Stones documents what she describes as a private life of war (1). For Griffin, and as shown in these brief examples, stillness and being-stilled describe a series of diverse experiences endured during aerial bombing. Yet, as Griffin narrates, these are not-so private lives. A common representation of air war can be found in Henry Moore’s tube shelter sketches which convey sleeping tube-dwellers harboured in the London underground during the Blitz. The bodies are represented as much more than individuals being connected by Moore’s wave-like shapes into the turbulent aggregation of a choppy ocean. What we see in Moore’s portrayal and the examples discussed already are experiences with definite relations to both inner and outer worlds. They refer to more-than individuals who bear intimate relations to their outsides and the atmospheric and material environments enveloping and searing through them. Stillness was an unlikely state composed through these circulations just as it was formed as a means of address. It was required in order to apprehend sounds and possible events through techniques of listening or waiting. Alternatively being stilled could refer to pauses between air-strikes and the corresponding breaks of tension in the aftermath of a raid. Stillness was composed through a series of distributed yet interconnecting bodies, feelings, materials and atmospheres oriented towards the future and the past. The ruins of bombed-out building forms stand as traces even today. Just as Massumi (Sensing 16) describes in the context of architecture, the now static remainder of the explosion “envelops in its stillness a deformational field of which it stands as the trace”. The ruined forms left after the attack stand as a “monument” of the passing of the raid to be what it once was – house, factory, shop, restaurant, library - and to become something else. The experience of those ‘from below’ (Hewitt 2) suffering contemporary forms of air-warfare share many parallels with those of the Blitz. Air power continues to target, apparently more precisely, the affective tones of the body. Accessed by kinetic and non-kinetic forces, the signs of air-war are generated by the shelling of Kosovo, ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq, air-strikes in Afghanistan and by the simulated air-raids of IDF aircraft producing sonic-booms over sleeping Palestinian civilians, now becoming far more real as I write in the final days of 2008. Achieving stillness in the wake of aerial trauma remains, even now, a way to survive the (private) life of air war. AcknowledgementsI’d like to thank the editors and particularly the referees for such a close reading of the article; time did not permit the attention their suggestions demanded. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to the AHRC whose funding allowed me to research and write this paper. ReferencesAdey, Peter. Aerial Geographies: Mobilities, Bodies and Subjects. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (forthcoming). 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On 17 January 2013, Wired chose the smart contact lens as one of “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World” describing a Google-led research project. Wired explains that the inventor, Dr. Babak Parviz, wants to build a microsystem on a contact lens: “Using radios no wider than a few human hairs, he thinks these lenses can augment reality and incidentally eliminate the need for displays on phones, PCs, and widescreen TVs”. Explained further in other sources, the technology entails an antenna, circuits embedded into a contact lens, GPS, and an LED to project images on the eye, creating a virtual display (Solve for X). Wi-Fi would stream content through a transparent screen over the eye. One patent describes a camera embedded in the lens (Etherington). Another mentions medical sensing, such as glucose monitoring of tears (Goldman). In other words, Google proposes an imagined future when we use contact lenses to search the Internet (and be searched by it), shop online, communicate with friends, work, navigate maps, swipe through Tinder, monitor our health, watch television, and, by that time, probably engage in a host of activities not yet invented. Often referred to as a bionic contact, the smart contact lens would signal a weighty shift in the way we work, socialize, and frame our online identities. However, speculative discussion over this radical shift in personal computing, rarely if ever, includes consideration of how the body, acting as a host to digital information, will manage to assimilate not only significant affordances, but also significant constraints and vulnerabilities. At this point, for most people, the smart contact lens is just an idea. Is a new medium of communication started when it is launched in an advertising campaign? When we Like it on Facebook? If we chat about it during a party amongst friends? Or, do a critical mass of people actually have to be using it to say it has started? One might say that Apple’s Macintosh computer started as a media platform when the world heard about the famous 1984 television advertisement aired during the American NFL Super Bowl of that year. Directed by Ridley Scott, the ad entails an athlete running down a passageway and hurling a hammer at a massive screen depicting cold war style rulers expounding state propaganda. The screen explodes freeing those imprisoned from their concentration camp existence. The direct reference to Orwell’s 1984 serves as a metaphor for IBM in 1984. PC users were made analogous to political prisoners and IBM served to represent the totalitarian government. The Mac became a something that, at the time, challenged IBM, and suggested an alternative use for the desktop computer that had previously been relegated for work rather than life. Not everyone bought a Mac, but the polemical ad fostered the idea that Mac was certainly the start of new expectations, civic identities, value-systems, and personal uses for computers. The smart contact lens is another startling start. News of it shocks us, initiates social media clicks and forwards, and instigates dialogue. But, it also indicates the start of a new media paradigm that is already undergoing popular adoption as it is announced in mainstream news and circulated algorithmically across media channels. Since 2008, news outlets like CNN, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Asian International News, United News of India, The Times of London and The Washington Post have carried it, feeding the buzz in circulation that Google intends. Attached to the wave of current popular interest generated around any technology claiming to be “wearable,” a smart contact lens also seems surreptitious. We would no longer hold smartphones, but hide all of that digital functionality beneath our eyelids. Its emergence reveals the way commercial models have dramatically changed. The smart contact lens is a futuristic invention imagined for us and about us, but also a sensationalized idea socializing us to a future that includes it. It is also a real device that Parviz (with Google) has been inventing, promoting, and patenting for commercial applications. All of these workings speak to a broader digital culture phenomenon. We argue that the smart contact lens discloses a process of nascent posthuman adaptation, launched in an era that celebrates wearable media as simultaneously astonishing and banal. More specifically, we adopt technology based on our adaptation to it within our personal, political, medial, social, and biological contexts, which also function in a state of flux. N. Katherine Hayles writes that “Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress ... rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation, the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (human and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations” (81). This article attends to the idea that in these early stages, symbolic acts of adaptation signal an emergent medium through rhetorical processes that society both draws from and contributes to. In terms of project scope, this article contributes a focused analysis to a much larger ongoing digital rhetoric project. For the larger project, we conducted a discourse analysis on a collection of international publications concerning Babak Parviz and the invention. We searched for and collected newspaper stories, news broadcasts, YouTube videos from various sources, academic journal publications, inventors’ conference presentations, and advertising, all published between January 2008 and May 2014, generating a corpus of more than 600 relevant artifacts. Shortly after this time, Dr. Parviz, a Professor at the University of Washington, left the secretive GoogleX lab and joined Amazon.com (Mac). For this article we focus specifically on the idea of beginnings or genesis and how digital spaces increasingly serve as the grounds for emergent digital cultural phenomena that are rarely recognized as starting points. We searched through the corpus to identify a few exemplary international mainstream news stories to foreground predominant tropes in support of the claim we make that smart contacts lenses are a startling idea. Content producers deliberately use astonishment as a persuasive device. We characterize the idea of a smart contact lens cast in rhetorical terms in order to reveal how its allure works as a process of adaptation. Rhetorician and philosopher, Kenneth Burke writes that “rhetorical language is inducement to action (or to attitude)” (42). A rhetorical approach is instrumental because it offers a model to explain how we deploy, often times, manipulative meaning as senders and receivers while negotiating highly complex constellations of resources and contexts. Burke’s rhetorical theory can show how messages influence and become influenced by powerful hierarchies in discourse that seem transparent or neutral, ones that seem to fade into the background of our consciousness. For this article, we also concentrate on rhetorical devices such as ethos and the inventor’s own appeals through different modes of communication. Ethos was originally proposed by Aristotle to identify speaker credibility as a persuasive tactic. Addressed by scholars of rhetoric for centuries, ethos has been reconfigured by many critical theorists (Burke; Baumlin Ethos; Hyde). Baumlin and Baumlin suggest that “ethos describes an audience’s projection of authority and trustworthiness onto the speaker ... ethos suggests that the ethical appeal to be a radically psychological event situated in the mental processes of the audience – as belonging as much to the audience as to the actual character of a speaker” (Psychology 99). Discussed in the next section, our impression of Parviz and his position as inventor plays a dramatic role in the surfacing of the smart contact lens. Digital Rhetoric is an “emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the interpretation of computer-generated media as objects of study” (Losh 48). In an era when machine-learning algorithms become the messengers for our messages, which have become commodity items operating across globalized, capitalist networks, digital rhetoric provides a stable model for our approach. It leads us to demonstrate how this emergent medium and invention, the smart contact lens, is born amid new digital genres of speculative communication circulated in the everyday forums we engage on a daily basis. Smart Contact Lenses, Sensationalism, and Identity One relevant site for exploration into how an invention gains ethos is through writing or video penned or produced by the inventor. An article authored by Parviz in 2009 discusses his invention and the technical advancements that need to be made before the smart contact lens could work. He opens the article using a fictional and sensationalized analogy to encourage the adoption of his invention: The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.But why stop there?In the Terminator movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character sees the world with data superimposed on his visual field—virtual captions that enhance the cyborg’s scan of a scene. In stories by the science fiction author Vernor Vinge, characters rely on electronic contact lenses, rather than smartphones or brain implants, for seamless access to information that appears right before their eyes. Identity building is made to correlate with smart contact lenses in a manner that frames them as exciting. Coming to terms with them often involves casting us as superhumans, wielding abilities that we do not currently possess. One reason for embellishment is because we do not need digital displays on the eyes, so the motive to use them must always be geared to transcending our assumed present condition as humans and society members. Consequently, imagination is used to justify a shift in human identity along a future trajectory.This passage above also instantiates a transformation from humanist to posthumanist posturing (i.e. “the cyborg”) in order to incent the adoption of smart contact lenses. It begins with the bold declarative statement, “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse,” which is a comforting claim about our seemingly human superiority. Indexing abstract humanist values, Parviz emphasizes skills we already possess, including seeing a plethora of colours, adjusting to light on the fly, and thinking fast, indeed faster than “a high-speed Internet connection”. However, the text goes on to summon the Terminator character and his optic feats from the franchise of films. Filmic cyborg characters fulfill the excitement that posthuman rhetoric often seems to demand, but there is more here than sensationalism. Parviz raises the issue of augmenting human vision using science fiction as his contextualizing vehicle because he lacks another way to imbricate the idea. Most interesting in this passage is the inventor’s query “But why stop there?” to yoke the two claims, one biological (i.e., “The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse”) and one fictional (i.e. Terminator, Vernor Vinge characters). The query suggests, Why stop with human superiority, we may as well progress to the next level and embrace a smart contact lens just as fictional cyborgs do. The non-threatening use of fiction makes the concept seem simultaneously exciting and banal, especially because the inventor follows with a clear description of the necessary scientific engineering in the rest of the article. This rhetorical act signifies the voice of a technoelite, a heavily-funded cohort responding to global capitalist imperatives armed with a team of technologists who can access technological advancements and imbue comments with an authority that may extend beyond their fields of expertise, such as communication studies, sociology, psychology, or medicine. The result is a powerful ethos. The idea behind the smart contact lens maintains a degree of respectability long before a public is invited to use it.Parviz exhumes much cultural baggage when he brings to life the Terminator character to pitch smart contact lenses. The Terminator series of films has established the “Arnold Schwarzenegger” character a cultural mainstay. Each new film reinvented him, but ultimately promoted him within a convincing dystopian future across the whole series: The Terminator (Cameron), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (Mostow), Terminator Salvation (McG) and Terminator Genisys (Taylor) (which appeared in 2015 after Parviz’s article). Recently, several writers have addressed how cyborg characters figure significantly in our cultural psyche (Haraway, Bukatman; Leaver). Tama Leaver’s Artificial Culture explores the way popular, contemporary, cinematic, science fiction depictions of embodied Artificial Intelligence, such as the Terminator cyborgs, “can act as a matrix which, rather than separating or demarcating minds and bodies or humanity and the digital, reinforce the symbiotic connection between people, bodies, and technologies” (31). Pointing out the violent and ultimately technophobic motive of The Terminator films, Leaver reads across them to conclude nevertheless that science fiction “proves an extremely fertile context in which to address the significance of representations of Artificial Intelligence” (63).Posthumanism and TechnogenesisOne reason this invention enters the public’s consciousness is its announcement alongside a host of other technologies, which seem like parts of a whole. We argue that this constant grouping of technologies in the news is one process indicative of technogenesis. For example, City A.M., London’s largest free commuter daily newspaper, reports on the future of business technology as a hodgepodge of what ifs: As Facebook turns ten, and with Bill Gates stepping down as Microsoft chairman, it feels like something is drawing to an end. But if so, it is only the end of the technological revolution’s beginning ... Try to look ahead ten years from now and the future is dark. Not because it is bleak, but because the sheer profusion of potential is blinding. Smartphones are set to outnumber PCs within months. After just a few more years, there are likely to be 3bn in use across the planet. In ten years, who knows – wearables? smart contact lenses? implants? And that’s just the start. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $300bn (£183bn) industry by 2020. (Sidwell) This reporting is a common means to frame the commodification of technology in globalized business news that seeks circulation as much as it does readership. But as a text, it also posits how individuals frame the future and their participation with it (Pedersen). Smart contacts appear to move along this exciting, unstoppable trajectory where the “potential is blinding”. The motive is to excite and scare. However, simultaneously, the effect is predictable. We are quite accustomed to this march of innovations that appears everyday in the morning paper. We are asked to adapt rather than question, consequently, we never separate the parts from the whole (e.g., “wearables? smart contact lenses? Implants”) in order to look at them critically.In coming to terms with Cary Wolf’s definition of posthumanism, Greg Pollock writes that posthumanism is the questioning that goes on “when we can no longer rely on ‘the human’ as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world (in contrast to “humanism,” which uses such a figure to ground further claims)” (208). With similar intent, N. Katherine Hayles formulating the term technogenesis suggests that we are not really progressing to another level of autonomous human existence when we adopt media, we are in effect, adapting to media and media are also in a process of adapting to us. She writes: As digital media, including networked and programmable desktop stations, mobile devices, and other computational media embedded in the environment, become more pervasive, they push us in the direction of faster communication, more intense and varied information streams, more integration of humans and intelligent machines, and more interactions of language with code. These environmental changes have significant neurological consequences, many of which are now becoming evident in young people and to a lesser degree in almost everyone who interacts with digital media on a regular basis. (11) Following Hayles, three actions or traits characterize adaptation in a manner germane to the technogenesis of media like smart contact lenses. The first is “media embedded in the environment”. The trait of embedding technology in the form of sensors and chips into external spaces evokes the onset of The Internet of Things (IoT) foundations. Extensive data-gathering sensors, wireless technologies, mobile and wearable components integrated with the Internet, all contribute to the IoT. Emerging from cloud computing infrastructures and data models, The IoT, in its most extreme, involves a scenario whereby people, places, animals, and objects are given unique “embedded” identifiers so that they can embark on constant data transfer over a network. In a sense, the lenses are adapted artifacts responding to a world that expects ubiquitous networked access for both humans and machines. Smart contact lenses will essentially be attached to the user who must adapt to these dynamic and heavily mediated contexts.Following closely on the first, the second point Hayles makes is “integration of humans and intelligent machines”. The camera embedded in the smart contact lens, really an adapted smartphone camera, turns the eye itself into an image capture device. By incorporating them under the eyelids, smart contact lenses signify integration in complex ways. Human-machine amalgamation follows biological, cognitive, and social contexts. Third, Hayles points to “more interactions of language with code.” We assert that with smart contact lenses, code will eventually govern interaction between countless agents in accordance with other smart devices, such as: (1) exchanges of code between people and external nonhuman networks of actors through machine algorithms and massive amalgamations of big data distributed on the Internet;(2) exchanges of code amongst people, human social actors in direct communication with each other over social media; and (3) exchanges of coding and decoding between people and their own biological processes (e.g. monitoring breathing, consuming nutrients, translating brainwaves) and phenomenological (but no less material) practices (e.g., remembering, grieving, or celebrating). The allure of the smart contact lens is the quietly pressing proposition that communication models such as these will be radically transformed because they will have to be adapted to use with the human eye, as the method of input and output of information. Focusing on genetic engineering, Eugene Thacker fittingly defines biomedia as “entail[ing] the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes, for ends that may be medical or nonmedical (economic, technical) and with effects that are as much cultural, social, and political as they are scientific” (123). He specifies, “biomedia are not computers that simply work on or manipulate biological compounds. Rather, the aim is to provide the right conditions, such that biological life is able to demonstrate or express itself in a particular way” (123). Smart contact lenses sit on the cusp of emergence as a biomedia device that will enable us to decode bodily processes in significant new ways. The bold, technical discourse that announces it however, has not yet begun to attend to the seemingly dramatic “cultural, social, and political” effects percolating under the surface. Through technogenesis, media acclimatizes rapidly to change without establishing a logic of the consequences, nor a design plan for emergence. Following from this, we should mention issues such as the intrusion of surveillance algorithms deployed by corporations, governments, and other hegemonic entities that this invention risks. If smart contact lenses are biomedia devices inspiring us to decode bodily processes and communicate that data for analysis, for ourselves, and others in our trust (e.g., doctors, family, friends), we also need to be wary of them. David Lyon warns: Surveillance has spilled out of its old nation-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play, on the move. So far from the single all-seeing eye of Big Brother, myriad agencies now trace and track mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Abstract data, now including video, biometric, and genetic as well as computerized administrative files, are manipulated to produce profiles and risk categories in a liquid, networked system. The point is to plan, predict, and prevent by classifying and assessing those profiles and risks. (13) In simple terms, the smart contact lens might disclose the most intimate information we possess and leave us vulnerable to profiling, tracking, and theft. Irma van der Ploeg presupposed this predicament when she wrote: “The capacity of certain technologies to change the boundary, not just between what is public and private information but, on top of that, between what is inside and outside the human body, appears to leave our normative concepts wanting” (71). The smart contact lens, with its implied motive to encode and disclose internal bodily information, needs considerations on many levels. Conclusion The smart contact lens has made a digital beginning. We accept it through the mass consumption of the idea, which acts as a rhetorical motivator for media adoption, taking place long before the device materializes in the marketplace. This occurrence may also be a sign of our “posthuman predicament” (Braidotti). We have argued that the smart contact lens concept reveals our posthuman adaptation to media rather than our reasoned acceptance or agreement with it as a logical proposition. By the time we actually squabble over the price, express fears for our privacy, and buy them, smart contact lenses will long be part of our everyday culture. References Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin. “On the Psychology of the Pisteis: Mapping the Terrains of Mind and Rhetoric.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Eds. James S. Baumlin and Tita F. Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. 91-112. Baumlin, James S., and Tita F. Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. Bilton, Nick. “A Rose-Colored View May Come Standard.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2012. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures, 1984. DVD. Cameron, James, dir. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Artisan Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Etherington, Darrell. “Google Patents Tiny Cameras Embedded in Contact Lenses.” TechCrunch, 14 Apr. 2014. Goldman, David. “Google to Make Smart Contact Lenses.” CNN Money 17 Jan. 2014. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012. Hyde, Michael. The Ethos of Rhetoric. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Leaver, Tama. Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Losh, Elizabeth. Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. Boston: MIT Press. 2009. Lyon, David, ed. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mac, Ryan. “Amazon Lures Google Glass Creator Following Phone Launch.” Forbes.com, 14 July 2014. McG, dir. Terminator Salvation. Warner Brothers, 2009. DVD. Mostow, Jonathan, dir. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Warner Brothers, 2003. DVD. Parviz, Babak A. “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.” IEEE Spectrum, 1 Sep. 2009. Pedersen, Isabel. Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media. Anderson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2013. Pollock, Greg. “What Is Posthumanism by Cary Wolfe (2009).” Rev. of What is Posthumanism?, by Cary Wolfe. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9.1/2 (2011): 235-241. Sidwell, Marc. “The Long View: Bill Gates Is Gone and the Dot-com Era Is Over: It's Only the End of the Beginning.” City A.M., 7 Feb. 2014. “Solve for X: Babak Parviz on Building Microsystems on the Eye.” YouTube, 7 Feb. 2012. Taylor, Alan, dir. Terminator: Genisys. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD. Thacker, Eugene “Biomedia.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T Mitchell and Mark Hansen, Chicago: Chicago Press, 2010. 117-130. Van der Ploeg, Irma. “Biometrics and the Body as Information.” Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination. Ed. David Lyon. New York: Routledge, 2003. 57-73. Wired Staff. “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World.” Wired.com, 17 Jan. 2013.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 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