Film Producer Eleanor Perry (Bayer Rosenfeld)

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

TV studio floor producer trainee

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Producer Jerry Weintraub and reporter for the NY Daily News Pete Hamil on the set of "Cruising" film

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Producer Billy Friedkin

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

Financial sustainability of cooperatives: a case of portuguese olive oil cooperatives

En Portugal, como en otros países, las cooperativas agrícolas tienen un papel económico importante en el sistema alimentario. Similar a otras organizaciones económicas, las cooperativas agrícolas han sido testigos de cambios estructurales en las últimas décadas en términos de modelos de gobernación y gestión. Las cooperativas agrícolas portuguesas se han visto constreñidas por su contexto a adoptar un modelo tradicional de propiedad y control. El objetivo principal de este estudio era analizar cuestiones relacionadas con la estructura de gestión y desempeño financiero de las cooperativas, basada en los datos recogidos de cooperativas de aceite de oliva situadas en la región interior norte de Portugal. La combinación de un análisis cualitativo de la estructura y toma de decisiones, una evaluación financiera y la aplicación de un enfoque en varios criterios (PROMETHEE II), los resultados están en línea con expectativas (por ejemplo, bajos niveles de participación de los miembros, gestión no profesional, ratios de rentabilidad bajos, bajo apalancamiento y una capacidad para cumplir compromisos financieros), excepto la relación entre la gestión profesional y el desempeño financiero. La existencia de gestión profesional no conduce a mejores resultados financieros. Este resultado refuerza la creencia de que las cooperativas que están estructuradas de diferente manera tienen intereses diferentes y contradictorios a las partes interesadas.

Pig producer perspectives on the use of meat inspection as an animal health and welfare diagnostic tool in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland

Background
Currently, there is growing interest in developing ante and post mortem meat inspection (MI) to incorporate measures of pig health and welfare for use as a diagnostic tool on pig farms. However, the success of the development of the MI process requires stakeholder engagement with the process. Knowledge gaps and issues of trust can undermine the effective exchange and utilisation of information across the supply chain. A social science research methodology was employed to establish stakeholder perspectives towards the development of MI to include measures of pig health and welfare. In this paper the findings of semi-structured telephone interviews with 18 pig producers from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are presented.

Results
Producers recognised the benefit of the utilisation of MI data as a health and welfare diagnostic tool. This acknowledgment, however, was undermined for some by dissatisfaction with the current system of MI information feedback, by trust and fairness concerns, and by concerns regarding the extent to which data would be used in the producers’ interests. Tolerance of certain animal welfare issues may also have a negative impact on how producers viewed the potential of MI data. The private veterinary practitioner was viewed as playing a vital role in assisting them with the interpretation of MI data for herd health planning.

Conclusions
The development of positive relationships based on trust, commitment and satisfaction across the supply chain may help build a positive environment for the effective utilisation of MI data in improving pig health and welfare. The utilisation of MI as a diagnostic tool would benefit from the development of a communication strategy aimed at building positive relationships between stakeholders in the pig industry.

The cellular and mechanistic study of nisin inhibition of bacillus anthracis spore outgrowth, nisin alteration of infection, and native producer immunity

A critical step during Bacillus anthracis infection is the outgrowth of germinated spores into vegetative bacilli that proliferate and disseminate rapidly within the host. An important challenge exists for developing chemotherapeutic agents that act upon and kill B. anthracis immediately after germination initiation when antibiotic resistance is lost, but prior to the outgrowth into vegetative bacilli, which is accompanied by toxin production. Chemical agents must also function in a manner refractive to the development of antimicrobial resistance. In this thesis we have identified the lantibiotics as a class of chemotherapeutics that are predicted to satisfy these two criteria. The objective of this thesis was to evaluate the efficacy of nisin, a prototypical lantibiotic, in prevention of outgrowth of germinated B. anthracis spores. Like all lantibiotics, nisin is a ribosomally translated peptide that undergoes post-translational modification to form (methyl)lanthionine rings that are critical for antimicrobial activity. Our studies indicate that nisin rapidly inhibits the in vitro outgrowth of germinated B. anthracis Sterne 7702 spores. Although germination initiation was shown to be essential for nisin-dependent antimicrobial activity, nisin did not inhibit or promote germination initiation. Nisin irreversibly killed germinated spores by blocking the establishment of a membrane potential and oxidative metabolism, while not affecting the dissolution of the outer spore structures. The membrane permeability of the spore was increased by nisin, but germinated spores did not undergo full lysis. Nisin was demonstrated to localize to lipid II, which is the penultimate precursor for cell wall biogenesis. This localization suggests two possible independent mechanisms of action, membrane pore formation and inhibition of peptidoglycan synthesis. Structure-activity studies with a truncated form of nisin lacking the two C-terminal (methyl)lanthionine rings and with non-pore forming mutants indicated that membrane disruption is essential for nisin-dependent inhibition of spore outgrowth to prevent membrane potential establishment. Finally, utilizing an in vitro infection model, it was shown that nisin reduced the viability of B. anthracis spores within an infection resulting in increased survival of immune cells while reducing infection-mediated cytokine expression. Fluorescence microscopy indicated that nisin localizes with spores within phagosomes of peritioneal macrophages in germinating conditions. These data demonstrate the effectiveness of nisin, as a model lantibiotic, for preventing spore outgrowth. It is speculated that nisin targeting of lipid II, resulting in membrane perturbations, may be effective at inhibiting the outgrowth of spores prepared from bacteria across a number of species.

Lactobacillus rossiae, a vitamin B12 producer, represents a metabolically versatile species within the genus Lactobacillus

Lactobacillus rossiae is an obligately hetero-fermentative lactic acid bacterium, which can be isolated from a broad range of environments including sourdoughs, vegetables, fermented meat and flour, as well as the gastrointestinal tract of both humans and animals. In order to unravel distinctive genomic features of this particular species and investigate the phylogenetic positioning within the genus Lactobacillus, comparative genomics and phylogenomic approaches, followed by functional analyses were performed on L. rossiae DSM 15814(T), showing how this type strain not only occupies an independent phylogenetic branch, but also possesses genomic features underscoring its biotechnological potential. This strain in fact represents one of a small number of bacteria known to encode a complete de novo biosynthetic pathway of vitamin B-12 (in addition to other B vitamins such as folate and riboflavin). In addition, it possesses the capacity to utilize an extensive set of carbon sources, a characteristic that may contribute to environmental adaptation, perhaps enabling the strain's ability to populate different niches.

Short-Term Trading for a Wind-PV Power Producer in an Electricity Market

This paper deals with the problem of coordinated trading of wind and photovoltaic systems in order to find the optimal bid to submit in a pool-based electricity market. The coordination of wind and photovoltaic systems presents uncertainties not only due to electricity market prices, but also with wind and photovoltaic power forecast. Electricity markets are characterized by financial penalties in case of deficit or excess of generation. So, the aim o this work is to reduce these financial penalties and maximize the expected profit of the power producer. The problem is formulated as a stochastic linear programming problem. The proposed approach is validated with real data of pool-based electricity market of Iberian Peninsula.

Climatic groups in Ibero-America viticulture compared to worldwide wine producer regions.

The wine production is an important activity in many Ibero-American countries. The wine producer regions of these countries configure a large use of different climate types and viticultural climates. In a vitivinicultural zoning project of CYTED (Ibero-American Program for Science, Technology and Development), a viticultural climatic characterization was done in this macro viticultural region. The project have assembled a climatic database that characterizes the viticultural regions, including relevant variables for viticulture: air temperature (mean, maximum, and minimum), precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, number of sunshine hours, wind speed, and evapotranspiration. Using indices of the Geoviticulture MCC System (HI, CI and DI), more than 70 viticultural regions in different countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Uruguay) were characterized according to its viticultural climatic. The results, which will be integrated to the worldwide database of the MCC System, showed that the Ibero-American viticulture is placed in a wide range of climatic groups of the wine producing regions around the world. This article presents the climatic groups found in Ibero-America, identifying also some new climatic groups not yet found in other regions of the world. This work also identifies some climatic groups not found in Ibero-America viticulture. The research has also highlighted viticultural areas characterized by climates with ?intra-annual climatic variability?, with the potential to produce more than one growing cycle per year. The results allow to conclude that the wide variability and climatic diversity present in Ibero-America may be one of the reasons to explain the diversity in terms of wine types, sensorial characteristics, typicity and uniqueness of wines produced on this macro-region.

At breaking point? Challenges for Australian film policy through the lens of genre (horror) films

Cultural policy settings attempting to foster the growth and development of the Australian feature film industry in era of globalisation are coming under increasing pressure. Global forces and emerging production and distribution models are challenging the “narrowness” of cultural policy – mandating a particular film culture, circumscribing certain notions of value and limiting the variety of films produced through cultural policy driven subvention models. Australian horror film production is an important case study. Horror films are a production strategy well suited to the financial limitations of the Australian film industry with competitive advantages for producers against international competitors. However, emerging within a “national” cinema driven by public subsidy and social/cultural objectives, horror films – internationally oriented with a low-culture status – have been severely marginalised within public funding environments. This paper introduces Australian horror film production, and examines the limitations of cultural policy, and the impacts of these questions for the Producer Offset.

The entrepreneurial vlogger : participatory culture beyond the professional-amateur divide

In this chapter, we frame YouTube as an example of “co-creative” culture – whatever YouTube is, it is produced dynamically (that is, as an ongoing process, over time) as a result of many interconnected instances of participation, by many different people. In order to understand these co-creative relationships, it is important not to focus exclusively on how the “ordinary consumer” or “amateur producer,” are participating in YouTube; rather, we argue it is necessary to include the activities of “traditional media” companies and media professionals, and more importantly, the new models of media entrepreneurialism that are grounded in YouTube’s “grassroots” culture. Hence, this chapter focuses the role that “YouTube stars” – highly visible and successful “homegrown” performers and producers – play in modelling and negotiating these co-creative relationships within the context of YouTube’s social network; and the new models of entrepreneurship within participatory culture that they represent.

Documentary practice in a participatory culture

Debates concerning the veracity, ethics and politics of the documentary form circle endlessly around the function of those who participate in it, and the meaning attributed to their participation. Great significance is attached to the way that documentary filmmakers do or do not participate in the world they seek to represent, just as great significance is attached to those subjects whose participation extends beyond playing the part of eyewitness or expert, such that they become part of the very filmmaking process itself. This Ph.D. explores the interface between documentary practice and participatory culture by looking at how their practices, discursive fields and histories intersect, but also by looking at how participating in one might mean participating in the other. In short, the research is an examination of participatory culture through the lens of documentary practice and documentary criticism. In the process, however, this examination of participatory culture will in turn shed light on documentary thinking, especially the meaning and function of ‘the participant’ in contemporary documentary practice. A number of ways of conceiving of participation in documentary practice are discussed in this research, but one of the ideas that gives purpose to that investigation is the notion that the participant in contemporary documentary practice is someone who belongs to a participatory culture in particular. Not only does this mean that those subjects who play a part in a documentary are already informed by their engagement with a range of everyday media practices before the documentary apparatus arrives, the audience for such films are similarly informed and engaged. This audience have their own expectations about how they should be addressed by media producers in general, a fact that feeds back into their expectations about participatory approaches to documentary practice too. It is the ambition of this research to get closer to understanding the relationship between participants in the audience, in documentary and ancillary media texts, as well as behind the camera, and to think about how these relationships constitute a context for the production and reception of documentary films, but also how this context might provide a model for thinking about participatory culture itself. One way that documentary practice and participatory culture converge in this research is in the kind of participatory documentary that I call the ‘Camera Movie’, a narrow mode of documentary filmmaking that appeals directly to contemporary audiences’ desires for innovation and participation, something that is achieved in this case by giving documentary subjects control of the camera. If there is a certain inevitability about this research having to contend with the notion of the ‘participatory documentary’, the ‘participatory camera’ also emerges strongly in this context, especially as a conduit between producer and consumer. Making up the creative component of this research are two documentaries about the reality television event Band In A Bubble, and participatory media practices more broadly. The single-screen film, Hubbub , gives form to the collective intelligence and polyphonous voice of contemporary audiences who must be addressed and solicited in increasingly innovative ways. One More Like That is a split-screen, DVD-Video with alternate audio channels selected by a user who thereby chooses who listens and who speaks in the ongoing conversation between media producers and media consumers. It should be clear from the description above that my own practice does not extend to highly interactive, multi-authored or web-enabled practices, nor the distributed practices one might associate with social media and online collaboration. Mine is fundamentally a single authored, documentary video practice that seeks to analyse and represent participatory culture on screen, and for this reason the Ph.D. refrains from a sustained discussion of the kinds of collaborative practices listed above. This is not to say that such practices don’t also represent an important intersection of documentary practice and participatory culture, they simply represent a different point of intersection. Being practice-led, this research takes its procedural cues from the nature of the practice itself, and sketches parameters that are most enabling of the idea that the practice sets the terms of its own investigation.

From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation

Alvin Toffler’s image of the prosumer (1970, 1980, 1990) continues to influence in a significant way our understanding of the user-led, collaborative processes of content creation which are today labelled “social media” or “Web 2.0”. A closer look at Toffler’s own description of his prosumer model reveals, however, that it remains firmly grounded in the mass media age: the prosumer is clearly not the self-motivated creative originator and developer of new content which can today be observed in projects ranging from open source software through Wikipedia to Second Life, but simply a particularly well-informed, and therefore both particularly critical and particularly active, consumer. The highly specialised, high end consumers which exist in areas such as hi-fi or car culture are far more representative of the ideal prosumer than the participants in non-commercial (or as yet non-commercial) collaborative projects. And to expect Toffler’s 1970s model of the prosumer to describe these 21st-century phenomena was always an unrealistic expectation, of course. To describe the creative and collaborative participation which today characterises user-led projects such as Wikipedia, terms such as ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are no longer particularly useful – even in laboured constructions such as ‘commons-based peer-production’ (Benkler 2006) or ‘p2p production’ (Bauwens 2005). In the user communities participating in such forms of content creation, roles as consumers and users have long begun to be inextricably interwoven with those as producer and creator: users are always already also able to be producers of the shared information collection, regardless of whether they are aware of that fact – they have taken on a new, hybrid role which may be best described as that of a produser (Bruns 2008). Projects which build on such produsage can be found in areas from open source software development through citizen journalism to Wikipedia, and beyond this also in multi-user online computer games, filesharing, and even in communities collaborating on the design of material goods. While addressing a range of different challenges, they nonetheless build on a small number of universal key principles. This paper documents these principles and indicates the possible implications of this transition from production and prosumption to produsage.

The missing puzzle : birth of a format

The art of storytelling is one of the oldest forms of creative discourse. Apart from finding stories, the most important job in television is the construction of stories to have a broad audience appeal. This first-hand review of Missing Persons Unit, hereafter referred to as MPU, a prime time program on the Nine Network in Australia with immense audience appeal, is an original work by the executive producer (development and series producer Series One, executive producer Series Two and Three) based on an overview of two-and-a-half years of production on three series. Through a case study approach, this Masters project explores how story is constructed into a television format. The thesis comprises two parts: the creative component (weighted 50%) is demonstrated through two programs of MPU (one program for evaluation) and the academic component through a written exegesis (50%). This case study aims to demonstrate how observational hybrid series such as MPU can be managed to quick turn-around schedules with precise skill sets that cut across a number of traditional genre styles. With the advent of radio and then television, storytelling found a home and a series of labels called genres to help place them in a schedule for listeners and viewers to choose. Over recent years, with the advent of digital technology and the rush to collect the masses of content required to feed the growing television slate, storytelling has often been replaced by story gathering. Today even in factual series where a clear story construct is important, third party ‘quick fix’ specialists are hired to shape raw content shot by a field team, who never put their own work together and may never come into the edit suite during a project. This thesis explores the art of storytelling in fast turn-around television. In particular it explores the layer cake approach used in the production process of MPU, that enables producers of fast turn-around television to shepherd their own stories from field through to post-production. While each new hybrid series will require its own particular sets of skills, the exploration of the genesis of MPU will demonstrate the building blocks required to successfully produce this type of factual series. This study is also intended as a ‘road map’ for producers who wish to develop similar series.