326 research outputs found
Book Review: Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
No full textAuthor: Elizabeth R. Varon
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel James “Andy” Nichols, US Army War College class of 2024
Lieutenant Colonel James “Andy” Nichols reviews Elizabeth R. Varon’s biography of James Longstreet, which Nichols calls “an engaging, well-researched account of [the general’s] journey through disunion, reconstruction, and reconciliation.” He writes that Varon “lifts Longstreet out of the Lost Cause mythology and, through careful archival work, enables readers understand a man who experienced personal and professional transformation and sought redemption.”https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters_bookshelf/1072/thumbnail.jp
Book Review: Thanks for Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US Military
No full textAuthor: Christian Nikolaus Braun
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel James “Andy” Nichols, US Army War College class of 2023
Lieutenant Colonel James “Andy” Nichols provides a thoughtful review of Duke University professor Peter D. Feaver’s book on the reasons for—and proposed ways to maintain—the “high public confidence” that the US military has experienced since 2001. Nichols overviews Feaver’s research methodology and policy recommendations, providing potential readers useful praise of the book’s merits—particularly Feaver’s “discussions surrounding politicization (party) and public pressure”—and some critiques, namely that the policy recommendations are “underdeveloped.” Nichols concludes that “[t]he text advances policy discussions on public confidence in US government institutions, includes valuable quantitative analysis, and points to future research opportunities.”https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters_bookshelf/1048/thumbnail.jp
46: Statistical literacy (with Andy Field)
No full textIn this episode, Dan and James are joined by Andy Field (University of Sussex), author of the “Discovering Statistics” textbook series, to chat about statistical literac
Organic trope craft beauty
No full textAn examination of organic abstraction and craft vernacular in the thesis work of Andy Webber.M.F.A.by Andrew James Webbe
The invisible artist: Arrangers in popular music (1950-2000): Their contribution and techniques
No full textThis thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is based on the research conducted by the author for the series,
Richard Niles' History of Pop Arranging, seven thirty-minute documentary
programmes for BBC Radio 2, researched, written and presented by the author and
broadcast in 2003. It also draws on interviews conducted by the author (and other
research) between 2002 and 2007 both for the radio series and for this thesis and on
the author's experience as a professional arranger in popular music working with
many of the genre's significant recording artists including Paul McCartney, Ray
Charles, Cher, Tina Turner, Westlife, Tears For Fears, Dusty Springfield, James
Brown, Pet Shop Boys, Kylie Minogue and producers including Trevor Hom, Steve
Lipson, Steve Mac and Steve Anderson.
It will be argued that the role of the arranger in popular music has often been
undervalued and that during a critical period of popular music history (1950-2000)
arrangers played a significant part in the evolution of musical content. This thesis is,
to the best of the author's knowledge, the first time (apart from the above mentioned
documentary) the subject has ever been examined. The arranger is "invisible" because musical arrangers are often un-credited on
record liner notes or in books or articles concerning popular music. A considerable
amount of research has been necessary to determine who wrote many of the
arrangements considered herein. Motown's Berry Gordy purposely kept the names of
musicians and arrangers off the records because he feared others might 'poach' the
trademark 'Motown Sound'. Other record labels considered the job of the arranger to
be reminiscent of an earlier era, diluting the Rock 'n' Roll image of emotion and
spontanaeity they wished to promote. Some producers and recording artists disliked
sharing credit for their work. Motown arranger David Van dePitte told the author that
arranging was "thankless and anonymous - a very service-oriented profession where
others often take credit for what you've done." Arranging has therefore remained an
intrinsically unseen art created by 'invisible' artists. By analyzing many recordings,
revealing the techniques and concepts they have used in their work to create popular
records, arrangers and their art will be made more 'visible'
Politicising stardom: Jane Fonda, IPC Films and Hollywood, 1977-1982
No full textPhDThis thesis is an empirical analysis of Jane Fonda’s films, stardom, and political activism during the most commercially successful period of her career. At the outset, Fonda’s early stardom is situated in relation to contemporaneous moral and political ideologies in the United States and how she functioned as both an agent and symbol of these ideologies. Her anti-war activism in the early-1970s constituted the apex of Fonda’s radicalisation and the nadir of her popular appeal; a central question of this thesis, therefore, is how her stardom was rehabilitated for the American mainstream to the point of becoming Hollywood’s most bankable actress.
As the star and producer of IPC Films, Fonda developed political projects using commercial formats, namely Coming Home (1978), The China Syndrome (1979), Nine to Five (1980), and Rollover (1981). The final IPC film, On Golden Pond (1981), signalled an ideological breach in this political strategy by favouring a familial spectacle, and duly outperformed its predecessors significantly. The first and last chapters of this work provide historical parameters for IPC in Fonda’s career, while the remaining chapters are structured by the conceptual and political aspects of each IPC project. Julia (1977) is discussed as an IPC prototype through its dramatisation of political consciousness. Coming Home, The China Syndrome, Nine to Five, and Rollover all exhibit this motif whereas On Golden Pond employs melodramatic nostalgia. Often discussed reductively as a star symbolising change, this thesis instead uses archival and published sources to analyse Fonda’s individual agency in historical context, as well as the cultural and political impact of her stardom. The IPC enterprise provided cinematic apparatus for Fonda’s political recuperation within the American mainstream, which, more broadly, harboured significance for the nation’s conservative resurgence at the end of the 1970s
Jere Nash and Andy Taggart Interview with Thad Cochran
No full textInterview conducted by author Jere Nash with U.S. Senator Thad Cochran as research for Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006. Topics covered include Cochran\u27s decision to run as a Republican in the 1972 congressional race; Richard Nixon; Walter Brown; helping on an Ellis Bodron campaign; Charles Evers and Muhammed Ali; participation in Nixon\u27s 1968 campaign; Gerald Ford\u27s 1976 presidential campaign in Mississippi; Trent Lott; 1978 senate race; Bill Waller and 1976 senate race; James O. Eastland; Charles Pickering; Haley Barbour; Jon Hinson; working with Senator John Stennis; 1984 senate race against William Winter; John Bell Williams; Senate Majority Leader race against Lott; 1962 integration riot at the University of Mississippi; Ross Barnett; Senate Appropriations Committee; Jamie Whitten; and Jefferson Davis\u27s senate desk
City Grocery, front of store (1930s)
No full textLong before it was a James Beard Award-winning restaurant, Oxford\u27s City Grocery was actually a grocery store.
Photograph donated to the University of Mississippi\u27s Department of Archives and Special Collections by Andy Canion. Item is believed to be from the 1930s; photographer unknown, exact date unknown.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/gen_visual/1000/thumbnail.jp
Filmic machines and animated monsters: retelling Frankenstein in the digital age
No full textFrankensteinian monsters have appeared on our screens since the early days of cinema. Indeed, across the history of film we see Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” rewritten as alchemical creations, animated corpses, lumbering fiends, robots, cyborgs, replicants, dinosaurs, artificial intelligences and digital constructions. In particular, Shelley’s text shares its speculative depiction of a posthuman future with fantastic and science-fictional cinema of the digital age. At the same time, posthuman bodies are being created by filmmakers. New possibilities in the digital imaging of human presence – from the replacement of actors with computer-generated imagery to the quest for photorealism in digital animation – themselves evoke the Frankenstein tale and consequently make interesting contributions to the evolving Frankenstein myth.
This thesis investigates the retelling of Frankenstein in popular cinema of the digital age. Through close analysis of a series of chosen texts, I examine the figure of the Frankensteinian monster and his/her/its equivalents in today’s popular culture: posthuman figures who negotiate uneasily with the organic world, boundary creatures who both define and unsettle our understandings of human being. I consider the way the tale, its themes and characters have both endured and evolved over time. I also examine the way these new filmic “machines” and animated “monsters” embody crucial problems associated with the technologies that screen them and the media that contain them.
My concern in this project is twofold. Firstly, I seek to map the (changing) relationship between Frankenstein and film. Since the early 1900s, cinema has provided a fertile ground for the retelling of Shelley’s tale. At the same time, cinema itself has always been a sort of Frankensteinian experiment: a means of breathing life into stillness, of constructing and re-constructing human presence, of stitching together fragmented moments to create a semblance of wholeness. In the digital age, this experiment grows and changes: new modes of production are continually being trialled, allowing us to re-create and re-present human presence in new and often bizarre ways. The figure of the Frankensteinian monster confronts and responds to these concerns, embodying and performing the uncanny, spectacular, mechanical, or organic-mechanical nature of screen presence.
Secondly, this thesis reads the Frankensteinian monster as a mythic figure for the digital age. I move towards the assertion that Frankenstein is a tale about the artificial body and its negotiation with a lost or disrupted origin in the organic world, and that this particular problem reverberates strongly in an age of digital representation. The analyses that constitute this thesis contribute to the argument that each time the Frankenstein tale is retold, re-technologised, and re-imagined using new filmic techniques, the problem of the screen body and its troubled origin stories is revisited and complicated
SaccpaNet : a separable atrous convolution-based cascade pyramid attention network to estimate body landmarks using cross-modal knowledge transfer for under-blanket sleep posture classification
No full text202509 bchyVersion of RecordRGCOthersThis work was supported in part by General Research Fund (GRF) from the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong under Grants PolyU15223822, and in part by the Research Institute for Smart Ageing of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under Grants P0039001. Andy Yiu-Chau Tam and Ye-Jiao Mao are co-first authors. Duo Wai-Chi Wong and James Chung-Wai Cheung contributed equally to this work. (Corresponding author: Duo Wai-Chi Wong, James Chung-Wai Cheung) Andy Yiu-Chau Tam and James Chung-Wai Cheung are with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China, and Research Institute of Smart Ageing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China ([email protected]; [email protected]).Early releaseC
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