Freak Show

Freak Show PDF Author: Robert Bogdan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622743X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.

Freak Show

Freak Show PDF Author: Robert Bogdan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622743X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This cultural history of the travelling freak show in America chronicles the rise and fall of the industry as attitudes about disability evolved. From 1840 until 1940, hundreds of freak shows crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today’s standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America’s most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan’s fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimens.

Team Human

Team Human PDF Author: Douglas Rushkoff
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393651703
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Porchlight’s Management and Workplace Culture Book of The Year “[A] thoroughly fascinating exploration of the long interplay between power and the technologies of communication.” —Adam Frank, NPR Team Human is a manifesto—a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilization and human nature. In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures, and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together—not as individuals. Yet today society is threatened by a vast antihuman infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect. Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomized and radicalized groups. Team Human delivers a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognize that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology, and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realize greater happiness, productivity, and peace. If we can find the others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity—together—we can make the world a better place to be human.

Why the World Needs Anthropologists

Why the World Needs Anthropologists PDF Author: Dan Podjed
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000182738
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Why does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question. In an accessible and appealing style, each author in this volume inquires about the social value and practical application of the discipline of anthropology. Contributors note that the problems the world faces at a global scale are both new and old, unique and universal, and that solving them requires the use of long-proven tools as well as innovative approaches. They highlight that using anthropology in relevant ways outside academia contributes to the development of a new paradigm in anthropology, one where the ability to collaborate across disciplinary and professional boundaries becomes both central and legitimate. Contributors provide specific suggestions to anthropologists and the public at large on practical ways to use anthropology to change the world for the better. This one-of-a-kind volume will be of interest to fledgling and established anthropologists, social scientists and the general public.

Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence

Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence PDF Author: Vladimir Golovko
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319082019
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence, ICNNAI 2014, held in Brest, Belarus, in June 2014. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on forest resource management; artificial intelligence by neural networks; optimization; classification; fuzzy approach; machine intelligence; analytical approach; mobile robot; real world application.

Showing Off, Showing Up

Showing Off, Showing Up PDF Author: Laurie Frederik
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472122762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The interdisciplinary essays in Showing Off, Showing Up examine acts of showing, a particular species of performance that relies on competition and judgment, active spectatorship, embodied excess, and exposure of core values and hidden truths. Acts of showing highlight those dimensions of performance that can most manipulate spectators and consumers, often through over-the-top heightening and skewing of presentation. Many forms of showing and of heightened performance, however, operate more enigmatically and covertly while still profoundly affecting the social world, even if our reactions to them are initially flippant or unconcerned because “it’s just a show.” Examining a wide range of examples—from dog shows to competitive dancing to carnivals to striptease, the essays illuminate how such events variously foster competition, exaggerate a characteristic, and reveal hidden truths. There is as much to be learned about the power of showing through subtlety and underlying intentionality as through overt display. The book’s theoretical introduction and 12 essays by leading scholars reveal how diverse, particularly efficacious genres of showing are theoretically connected and why they merit more concerted attention, especially in the 21st century.

Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing

Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing PDF Author: John Hallward
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470117400
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
In Gimme!, advertising research expert John Hallward shows you how the most effective advertising campaigns tap into our most basic, primal emotions to convince consumers to buy. For marketers and advertisers, this book looks at the human nature of consumers and presents the proven tactics, techniques, and arguments that best motivate the human animal to buy.

Interactive Approaches to Video Lecture Assessment

Interactive Approaches to Video Lecture Assessment PDF Author: Korbinian Riedhammer
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
ISBN: 3832532358
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
A growing number of universities and other educational institutions record videos of regularly scheduled classes and lectures to provide students with additional resources for their study. However, the video alone is not necessarily the same than a carefully prepared educational video. The main issue is that they are typically not post-processed in an editorial sense. That is, the videos often contain longer periods of silence or inactivity, unnecessary repetitions, spontaneous interaction with students, or even corrections of prior false statements or mistakes. Furthermore, there is often no summary or table of contents of the video, unlike with educational videos that supplement a certain curriculum and are well scripted and edited. Thus, the plain recording of a lecture is a good start but far from a good e-learning resource. This thesis describes a system that can close the gap between a plain video recording and useful e-learning resource by producing automatic summaries and providing an interactive lecture browser that can visualize automatically extracted key phrases and their importance on an augmented time line. The lecture browser depends on four tasks: automatic speech recognition, automatic extraction and ranking of key phrases, extractive speech summarization, and the visualization of the phrases and their salience. These tasks as well as the contribution to the state of the art are described in detail and evaluated on a newly acquired corpus of academic spoken English, the LMELectures. A first user study shows that students using the lecture browser can solve a topic localization task about 29 % faster than students that are provided with the video only.

On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art

On the Essence of Language and the Question of Art PDF Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509536000
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
The texts and notes collected in this volume offer unique insight into the development of Heidegger’s thinking on language and art from the late 1930s to the early 1950s – a tumultuous period both for Heidegger personally and for Germany as a whole. Following Germany’s defeat in World War II, Heidegger was banned from teaching at Freiburg University, where he had been a professor since 1928, and his thinking underwent significant changes as he began to cultivate different modes of silence and non-saying in his philosophy of language. This volume illuminates these shifts and charts the evolution of key terms in Heidegger’s philosophy of language during this key period in the development of his thought. The central theme of Heidegger’s reflections on language in this volume is his repeated engagement with the character of the word, silence and the unsaid, and his rejection of the instrumental conception of language, where he instead prioritized conversation as the “homeland of language.” Alongside references to Hölderlin and von Hofmannsthal and shrewd scrutiny of aural phenomena such as silent thought and speechlessness, speech is demonstrated to be intimately connected to the human essence. In a later section, Heidegger examines the place of art, in particular the plastic arts, and the role of the artist in conjunction with the new industrial landscape and architecture of his time, and in juxtaposition with ancient Greek attitudes to space and the polis. This key work by Heidegger, now available in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s thought.

A Finite Element Model of the Human Head for Simulation of Bone-conducted Sound

A Finite Element Model of the Human Head for Simulation of Bone-conducted Sound PDF Author: You Chang
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176853101
Category : Biological models
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
Bone conduction is usually understood as the hearing sensation based on the vibrations of the skull bone and surrounding tissues. The fact that vibration of the skull bones can result in a sound percept has been known for a long time. However, it is difficult to give a general definition of BC sound. Normally, BC sound is described as the sound energy transmitted through the body (comprising the solid and fluid parts) then the outer, middle and inner ear are involved and finally produce a perception of sound. Even if BC sound perception has been studied for more than a century, the whole pattern of BC sound transmission is still not complete. There are limitations for experimental investigation of BC sound, such as the complexity of experimental manipulations and individual differences between subjects resulting in difficult to interpret outcomes. One way to overcome some of those issues is the use of a simulation model for BC sound. However, until now, the published models are unable to provide a holistic response of BC sound in the human. Therefore, the primary aim of this thesis is to develop a finite element model that could simulate BC sound transmission in the human. Based on cryosectional images of a female, the LiUHead was developed as a FE model of the human head with the structure and material properties of real human. Most the structures and tissues which could contribute to the BC transmission were included in the LiUHead. The simulation results of the LiUHead agreed with experimental data obtained in both cadaver heads and live humans. After the development and validation of the LiUHead, the model was used to investigate BC sound. Since BC sound is transmitted in and between the tissues, the power transmission of BC sound was investigated in the LiUHead in the frequency domain. When the stimulation was applied on the surface of the skull at the mastoid position, the results of the simulations show that, as the name suggest, the skull bone dominants the BC sound transmission. The soft tissues and cartilages are as the second most important media of the BC sound while the skull interior is the least important for the BC transmission. Moreover, according to the power flux in the skull, the BC vibrations are mainly concentrated at the skull base. Other important transmission pathways are located at the occipital bone at the posterior side of the head, but the power transmitted over the face, forehead and vertex is minor. There is power interaction between the skull bone and skull interior near the stimulation position but the transmission of sound power through the brain seem to be minimal. Since the power or energy is difficult to measure in an experimental setting, this investigation gave unique knowledge about BC sound transmission in the head and the interaction between the tissues. As a common application for BC sound, bone-conduction devices are used to stimulate the hearing and is a method for hearing loss rehabilitation. Nowadays many different kinds of BCDs are available. However, most studies failed to compare the different types of BCDs in the same conditions as well as between several BCDs as it is not possible to compare several BCDs within the same subject due to the implantation required for several BCDs. The model gives a unique opportunity to evaluate various BCDs in the same head. Eight different BCDs, including four kinds of skin-drive BCDs, three kinds of direct-drive BCDs, and one in-the-mouth device, were applied to the LiUHead and the simulation results were evaluated. The results proved that the direct-drive BCDs and the in-the-mouth device gave similar vibration responses at the cochlea. At low frequencies, the skin-drive BCDs had similar or even better cochlear responses than the direct-drive BCDs. However, the direct-drive BCDs gave stable responses at mid-frequencies and gave higher responses than the skin-drive BCDs at high frequencies. These results are beneficial evaluating and for designing and improving current BCDs. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to provide a computational model for BC sound that can be used for evaluation of BC sound transmission. This was accomplished by the LiUHead that gave results comparable to experimental data and enabled investigations that cannot easily be conducted in experiments.

Perinatal Physiology

Perinatal Physiology PDF Author: Uwe Stave
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468423169
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 851

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Book Description
Living Nature, not dull Art Shall plan my ways and rule my heart -Cardinal Newman Nature and Art 1868 One of the ineluctable consequences of growth in any field of science is that subjects of inquiry once established tend to give birth to subsubjects and that the subsubjects once established will in time undergo further mitotic division. Not so many years ago, problems surrounding the ietus and newly born infant lay in a realm almost to be described as a "no-man's land." Obstetricians properly gave major consideration to understanding and learning about processes and disorders concerned with maternal health and safety. The welfare of the infant was regarded as of secondary importance. Pediatricians on their part hesitated to invade the nursery, a sanctum regarded as belonging to the domain of the accoucheur. And the pathologist, enveloped in the mysteries of life and death in the adult, found scant tim~ for the neonate and the placenta.