CBC (Canada)

This article considers two very personal audio documentaries that reflect on love and identity via the liminal space between life and death. Swansong, by award-winning UK radio producer Hana Walker-Brown, is set in a hospital, as Hana and her father bear witness to her grandmother’s dying and celebrate her joyful life. Losing Yourself, by US producer Ibby Caputo, is a revelatory account of dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Swansong is a picture of a person fondly remembered but Hana elevates it beyond eulogy into a multi-layered meditation. Her grandmother Joan’s voice flutters in and out of ethereal recreations of the jazz hall parties of her youth. Waves of drone and sparkle transition us from one spirit world to the next. Rhythms are made of Joan’s breath, bringing us back to the body; to earth. In Losing Yourself, Ibby Caputo interweaves audio diaries and retrospective narration to create a vivid picture of a young person coping with the unexpected threat of imminent death. An audio diary objectively documents and leaves ample subjective space for the listener. And for that authenticity it remains one of the more powerful forms in radio. Whereas Swansong builds its experience through layers, the emotional intensity of Losing Yourself comes from its bareness. We are invited into an eavesdropping experience made all the more uncomfortable because of the stripped-down production of the piece: there are no music swells to escape into, no montages to distract. When all is stripped to the bone and made bare, we might indeed see/hear ourselves for who we actually are.

The podcast Love + Radio thrives on cultivating a kind of emotional tightrope, where the listener wavers from curiosity to contempt to empathy. The episodes “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” have stark differences, particularly in terms of sound design, but their aesthetic and production values have a coherency that is exemplary of Love + Radio’s style. Sound is used to distinguish between ‘Ellen’, the subject, and ‘Jack’ her paedo-baiting alter ego. ‘Jack’ is created by pitch-shifting the voice of ‘Ellen’ down, instantly giving the story intrigue and also alluding to the clandestine nature of their work. “Jack and Ellen” is caught somewhere between a radio documentary and a swirling sample-based composition as the skilled musicality of the piece communicates a specific editorial perspective, that is perhaps a glimpse of how the producers were affected during its creation. “The Living Room”, on the other hand, is sparse and neat. Silence is used as strategically as sound. Love + Radio’s use of sound continues to distinguish it from most other podcasts, where music can feel slapped on, repetitive and unintentional. The process of making a Love + Radio episode starts with an initial interview, then uses a first rough cut as a means of illuminating gaps and further questions in the story. Interview subjects/storytellers are re-interviewed two or three more times. Love + Radio is a mostly non-narrated format, but the interviewer is almost always included, however briefly. With “Jack and Ellen” the story becomes focused on the murky moral boundaries of extortion and paedophilia; it is a difficult piece because, depending on your personal morality, Ellen may seem like a pretty disreputable character. In “The Living Room”, Diane is more likeable off the top, but her voyeurism puts her in a questionable position. And it’s this tension that makes both “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” a cut above other radio documentaries. There is no didactic purpose. But there is a genuine attempt to try to convey a facet of the human experience. We as listeners are more likely to be empathetic towards someone of the same social and racial background. Can empathy then, be a dangerous force? Can we ever truly understand someone else’s embodied experience in the world? These are all valuable questions. Through “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” in particular, Love + Radio crafts a tone that leaves the listener continually questioning the role of story in relating to other people, a force that continues to distinguish the show in the now over-abundance of confessional first-person driven podcasts.

This commentary in the Journal of Professional Communication discusses the historical origins of the public relations profession. It discusses how United States President Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information which was formed to favrouably influence opinion among American citizens toward the war effort in Europe. Ivy Lee’s early influence is detailed, as he was the first one to open a public relations agency. As well, the importance of Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud who worked for the Latin American section of the Committee on Public Information is described. Bernays and Lee moved public relations from the publicity model employed by P. T. Barnum to a model of two-way communication where both the organization and its publics felt that they were gaining something from their relationship. ©Journal of Professional Communication, all rights reserved.

this is not a global war against a tactic-terrorism or a religion-Islam." 2 Negative Muslim perceptions of the U.S. need to be understood if there is any hope of reversing the trend.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether objective models can be equally accurate for expert and non-expert viewers. We measured in both expert and non-expert viewers the subjective video quality of several high definition video sequences, which had been processed at several bit-rates using MPEG-2 and H.264 codecs. The results showed only a small but statistically significant difference, particularly at low bit-rates, in perceived quality between experts and non-experts. These subjective data were then compared to objective quality measurements obtained with a JND-based model and the standard PSNR. We found that the JND model performed better than the PSNR, but its predictive performance differed significantly for expert and non-expert viewers.

This article presents a case study of ontology-driven development of intelligent educational systems. Following a review of literature related to ontology development, ontology-driven software development, and traditional software engineering, we developed an ontology-driven software development methodology appropriate for intelligent ontology-driven systems which have ontologies as key execution components, such as e-Advisor, and which is biased toward an integration of incremental and iterative ontology development and downstream Model Driven Architecture for development of software components.

Pulse contour cardiac output (PCCO) analysis is a technique for continuous cardiac output (CO) monitoring through an arterial catheter after calibration by transpulmonary thermodilution (TPTD). Studies in adults show good correlation with pulmonary artery thermodilution (PATD) CO. Data are limited in children and patients with hemodynamic instability. The objective was to determine whether TPTD CO and PCCO analysis correlate with PATD CO in a piglet model of severe hemorrhagic shock. Mixed venous oxygen saturation (SVO2) was also compared with PATD CO. Prospective animal study. University animal research laboratory. Domesticated piglets, 24-37 kg. Hemorrhagic shock was created by graded hemorrhage in anesthetized piglets. Hemorrhage was initiated to achieve mean arterial pressure plateaus of 60, 50, 40, 30, and 20 mm Hg. CO was measured by PATD and simultaneously with two femoral artery PCCO catheters. At each mean arterial pressure plateau, one PCCO catheter was recalibrated by TPTD; the other catheter was not recalibrated during hemorrhage. TPTD CO, PCCO measurements from each catheter, and SVO2 were compared with PATD CO at each mean arterial pressure level. TPTD CO and recalibrated PCCO showed excellent correlation (r2 = .96 and .97) and small bias (+0.11 and +0.14 L/min), respectively, compared with PATD. Without recalibration, PCCO measurements were not accurate during rapid hemorrhage (r2 = .22). SVO2 decline did not correlate as well with PATD CO (r2 = .69). TPTD CO and recalibrated PCCO analysis correlate well with PATD CO in this severe hemorrhagic shock model. The mean difference is small (<0.15 L/min) and is not clinically significant. With rapid changes in blood pressure or intravascular volume, PCCO is not accurate unless recalibrated by TPTD CO. SVO2 did not correlate well with CO in this model.