From reader to writer : citizen journalism as news produsage

Today, participatory or citizen journalism – journalism which enables readers to become writers – exists online and offline in a variety of forms and formats, operates under a number of editorial schemes, and focusses on a wide range of topics from the specialist to the generic, and the micro-local to the global. Key models in this phenomenon include veteran sites Slashdot and Indymedia, as well as news-related Weblogs; more recent additions into the mix have been the South Korean OhmyNews, which in 2003 was “the most influential online news site in that country, attracting an estimated 2 million readers a day” (Gillmor, 2003a, p. 7), with its new Japanese and international offshoots, as well as the Wikipedia with its highly up-to-date news and current events section and its more recent offshoot Wikinews, and even citizen-produced video news as it is found in sites such as YouTube and Current.tv.

Frank and Stein : from research scientist to creative writer (a screenplay and exegesis)

The screenplay, “Perfect Blood” (Frank and Stein), is the first two-hour episode of a two-part television miniseries Frank and Stein. This creative work is a science fiction story that speculates on the future of Western nations in a world where petroleum is scarce. A major theme that has been explored in the miniseries is the tension between the advantages and dangers of scientific progress without regard to human consequences. “Perfect Blood” (Frank and Stein) was written as part of my personal creative journey, which has been the transformation from research scientist to creative writer. In the exegetical component of this thesis, I propose that a key challenge for any scientist writing science fiction is the shift from conducting empirical research in a laboratory-based situation to engaging in creative practice research. During my personal creative journey, I found that a predominant difficulty in conducting research within a creative practice-led paradigm was unleashing my creativity and personal viewpoint, practices that are frowned upon in scientific research. The aim of the exegesis is to demonstrate that the transformative process from science to art is not neat and well-structured. My personal creative journey was fraught with many ‘wrong’ turns. However, after reflecting on the experience, I realise that every varied piece of research that I undertook allowed me to progress to the next stage, the next draft of Frank and Stein. And via the disorder of the creative process, a screenplay finally emerged that was both structured and creative, which are equally essential elements in screenwriting.

Portrait of the writer Salamon Dembitzer; New York Portraits Men

Digital Image

Portrait of Austrian writer Karl Kraus reading and holding a cigar; Berlin Portraits Men

Digital Image

Writer Clara Michelson (second from left) seated at an outdoor table with three unidentified women and one unidentified man; Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, France Portraits Groups

Digital Image

Portrait of the rabbi and writer Bruno Italiener at an 80th birthday celebration; Luxembourg Portraits Men

Includes handwritten correspondence from Bruno Italiener dated 17 September 1953

Fabrication of back contacts using laser writer and photolithography for inscribing textured solar cells

Semiconductor fabrication process begins with photolithography. Preparing a photo mask is the key process step in photolithography. The photo mask was fabricated by inscribing patterns directly onto a soda lime glass with the help of a laser beam, as it is easily controllable. Laser writer LW405-A was used for preparing the mask in this study. Exposure wavelength of 405 nm was used, with which 1.2 mu m feature size can be written in direct write-mode over the soda lime glass plate. The advantage of using the fabricated mask is that it can be used to design back contacts for thin film Photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. To investigate the process capability of LW405-A, same pattern with different line widths was written on soda lime glass samples at different writing speeds. The pattern was inscribed without proximity effect and stitching errors, which was characterized using optical microscope and field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). It was proven that writing speed of a mask-writer is decided according to the intended feature size and line width. As the writing speed increases, the edges of the patterns become rougher due to uneven scattering of the laser beam. From the fabricated mask, the solar cell can be developed embedding both the contacts at the bottom layer, to increase the absorption of solar radiation on the top surface effectively by increasing light absorption area.

Jung as a writer

Jung as a Writer traces a relationship between Jung and literature by analysing his texts using the methodology of literary theory. This investigation serves to illuminate the literary nature of Jung’s writing in order to shed new light on his psychology and its relationship with literature as a cultural practice. Jung employed literary devices throughout his writing, including direct and indirect argument, anecdote, fantasy, myth, epic, textual analysis and metaphor. Susan Rowland examines Jung’s use of literary techniques in several of his works, including Anima and Animus, On the Nature of the Psyche, Psychology and Alchemy and Synchronicity and describes Jung’s need for literature in order to capture in writing his ideas about the unconscious. Jung as a Writer succeeds in demonstrating Jung’s contribution to literary and cultural theory in autobiography, gender studies, postmodernism, feminism, deconstruction and hermeneutics and concludes by giving a new culturally-orientated Jungian criticism. The application of literary theory to Jung’s works provides a new perspective on Jungian Psychology that will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of Jung, Psychoanalysis, literary theory and cultural studies. [From the Publisher]

In situ electron holography of the dynamic magnetic field emanating from a hard-disk drive writer

The proliferation of mobile devices in society accessing data via the ‘cloud’ is imposing a dramatic increase in the amount of information to be stored on hard disk drives (HDD) used in servers. Forecasts are that areal densities will need to increase by as much as 35% compound per annum and by 2020 cloud storage capacity will be around 7 zettabytes corresponding to areal densities of 2 Tb/in2. This requires increased performance from the magnetic pole of the electromagnetic writer in the read/write head in the HDD. Current state-of-art writing is undertaken by morphologically complex magnetic pole of sub 100 nm dimensions, in an environment of engineered magnetic shields and it needs to deliver strong directional magnetic field to areas on the recording media around 50 nm x 13 nm. This points to the need for a method to perform direct quantitative measurements of the magnetic field generated by the write pole at the nanometer scale. Here we report on the complete in situ quantitative mapping of the magnetic field generated by a functioning write pole in operation using electron holography. Opportunistically, it points the way towards a new nanoscale magnetic field source to further develop in situ Transmission Electron Microscopy.

Musicologist-driven writer identification in early music manuscripts

Recent renewed interest in computational writer identification has resulted in an increased number of publications. In relation to historical musicology its application has so far been limited. One of the obstacles seems to be that the clarity of the images from the scans available for computational analysis is often not sufficient. In this paper, the use of the Hinge feature is proposed to avoid segmentation and staff-line removal for effective feature extraction from low quality scans. The use of an auto encoder in Hinge feature space is suggested as an alternative to staff-line removal by image processing, and their performance is compared. The result of the experiment shows an accuracy of 87 % for the dataset containing 84 writers’ samples, and superiority of our segmentation and staff-line removal free approach. Practical analysis on Bach’s autograph manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier II (Additional MS. 35021 in the British Library, London) is also presented and the extensive applicability of our approach is demonstrated.