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The social category of “teen” has become ubiquitous in Western English-speaking popular culture. Also, with the global success of cultural products from the United States of America, such as music, movies and television programs featuring teens, the word “teen” is being employed in other cultures and languages. However, a comparison of the girl teen—often portrayed as a vulnerable stage of human development—with other cultural representations of developing womanhood (the Japanese shoujo and the French jeune fille en fleur) shows the representation of the “teen” to be a construction of its cultural context and questions its universal applicability.

The utility of Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) has been diminished since the 2003 scan-line corrector (SLC) failure. Uncorrected images have data gaps of approximately 22% and gap-filling schemes have been developed to improve their usability. We present a method to classify a northeast Montana agricultural landscape using ETM+ SLC-off imagery without gap-filling. We use multitemporal data analysis and employ an object-oriented approach to define objects, agricultural fields, with cadastral data. This approach was assessed by comparison to a pixel-based approach. Results indicate that an ETM+ SLC-off image can be classified with better than 85% overall accuracy without gap-filling.

A system to aid composition with analysis, transformation, and re-synthesis of natural sounds is described. Sinusoidal analysis is used to isolate and extract deterministic sounds, and transients are also isolated/extracted, leaving the stochastic background which is parameterized by wavelet tree analysis. All of these components become templates for the synthesis phase, which is controlled (1) by placing templates on timelines or in groups, (2) by real-time manipulation of parameters, and (3) via scripting using the ChucK language. The result is a flexible “workbench” for doing modern day musique concrete or acousmatic composition, sound design, and other sonic sculpting tasks.

This article describes systems for capturing gestures from a performing artist playing North Indian instruments. Modified traditional instruments use sensor technology and microcontrollers to digitize performance, enabling a computer to synthesize sound and generate visual meaning. Specifically, systems were built to capture data from three traditional North Indian instruments: the tabla (a pair of tonal hand drums), the dholak (a barrel-shaped folk drum played by two people) and the sitar (a 19-stringed, gourd-shelled instrument). The article discusses how these instruments are modified to capture gestural movement, how these signals are mapped to sounds and graphical feedback, and gives examples of the new instruments being used in live performance. Modified performance techniques with the aid of a laptop computer are introduced; however, the hardware is built to try and preserve the techniques passed down from generations of tradition.

From the advent of electronic music, and even from early organ consoles and other remote manipulated instruments, much of the design and research of new musical interfaces has focused on abstracting (both physically and in the design process) the “controller” from the “synthesizer” and then investigating how to best interface those two classes of hardware with each other and the player. Yet, many of the striking lessons from our history of intimate expressive musical instruments lie in the blurred boundaries between player, controller, and sound producing object. Bowed strings, winds, and certainly the human voice all blur these boundaries, both in the design and construction of the “instrument” and in the resulting controls and expressions. This article looks at some of the issues involved with creating new expressive electronic musical instruments, and presents an overview of a number of recent projects in the co-design of musical controllers and computer sound synthesis algorithms. Specific cases are d...

Producers in the semiarid Canadian prairies have begun to extend and diversify their cropping systems. These newer cropping systems are often considered to be more sustainable. We examine the agronomic, environmental, and economic effects of reducing summerfallow use and including grain lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus) in rotation with spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Data from a long-term crop rotation experiment conducted on a medium texture soil at Swift Current, Saskatchewan were analyzed. Four cropping systems were evaluated over the 1979 to 1997 period; namely, fallow-wheat (F-W), fallow-wheat-wheat (F-W-W), continuous wheat (W), and wheat-lentil (W-L). Nitrate leaching below the 120 cm rooting depth of wheat was lower under continuously cropped systems than under fallow-based rotations, and was lowest overall for W-L. Wheat, whether grown on fallow or stubble, used almost all of the available water in the 0–120 cm depth soil profile, but lentil extracted about 1.5 cm less water than whe...

Traditional musical instruments provide compelling metaphors for human-computer interfacing, both in terms of input (physical, gestural performance activities) and output (sound diffusion). The violin, one of the most refined and expressive of traditional instruments, combines a peculiar physical interface with a rich acoustic diffuser. We have built a new instrument that includes elements of both the violin’s physical performance interface and its spatial filtering audio diffuser, yet eliminates both the resonating body and the strings. The instrument, BoSSA (Bowed-Sensor-Speaker-Array), is an amalgamation and extension of our previous work with violin interfaces, physical models, and directional tonal radiation studies. In addition to describing the various physical and software elements that make up BoSSA, we discuss some of its musical features and potentials; we are particularly impressed by the sense of presence and intimacy it provides, and by its potential for creating a new kind of electronic cha...

Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945 Jane Slaughter, 1997 Denver: Arden. xx + 171 pp., ISBN 0 912869 13 5, hardback, $32, ISBN 0 912869 14 3, paperback, $22.50 In guerra senza armi. Storie d...

The phenomenon of two-beam coupling in photorefractive crystals results from the interaction of two beams with the index grating written by those two beams. In this paper we show that the process can be understood by considering the photorefractive crystal to be a nonlinear beam splitter, with reflectivity and transmission coefficients dependent upon the relative intensities of the two beams. The relative phase relationships upon reflection, determined by the Fresnel equations, as well as the phase shift between the intensity and index grating, are the sources of the asymmetric coupling. A simple derivation of coupled mode equations describing two-beam coupling based upon the beam splitter model is proffered.

Human attachment levels to companion animals were compared to whether a companion animal accompanied a military family at transfer time. Attachment levels were measured by combining preexisting subscale instruments to form a 21-item pet attachment scale. Data were collected through a mail survey (67% response rate) of registered pet owners who were to transfer within six months from 13 military installations. Attachment levels to companion animals were positively associated with taking the pet upon transferring (X2=11.44, p