The British state and the Irish rebellion of 1916: an intelligence failure or an failure of response

The teleological narrative that has dominated the handling of intelligence by the British state in the events that led up to the 1916 Irish Rebellion in Dublin has been characterised as a cocktail of incompetence and mendacity. Using new and existing archive material this article argues that both the cabinet in London and key members of the Irish Executive in Dublin were supplied with accurate and timely intelligence by the Admiralty's signals intelligence unit, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police with respect to this event. Far from being a failure of intelligence here is evidence to show that there occurred a failure of response on behalf of key decision-makers. The warnings that were given by intelligence organisations were filtered through the existing policy preferences and assumptions. As a result of these factors accurate evaluations and sound judgement were not exercised by key officials, such as Sir Matthew Nathan, in Dublin Castle.

Svetlana

Svetlana is a series of photographs documenting rehearsals for an opera that was never performed. Written by Waw Pierogi, founder of the 1980s group Xex, little is known of the opera, only that it was inspired by Svetlana, a character from one of their songs and the daughter of Stalin, who defected from the Soviet Union twice. A fictional Svetlana and a bogus Leon Theremin - inventor of the eponymous hands-free electronic musical instrument who was later kidnapped by the KGB - inhabit an archive of photographs from a session of stage rehearsals and location shots. Combining Svetlana’s narrative with a conspiracy to create sound weapons, this documentation of theatre workshops, styled after Bauhaus drama class exercises, produces an entirely spurious story of espionage, sonic weaponry and the clash between love and ideology. The performers sport geometric military costumes, brandishing sculptural forms fashioned after the acoustic locators that preceded radar technology. These redundant locators were still kept in use as props, concealing the introduction of radar from the Germans. They perfectly capture the theatricality of military might and suggest the rhetorical force of sound or even the political power of art. Svetlana was originally produced as part of a residency at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, and was later shown at Tatty Devine, alongside a special capsule collection of jewellery made by Tatty Devine.

Wave trapping in a two-dimensional sound-soft or sound-hard acoustic waveguide of slowly-varying width

In this paper we derive novel approximations to trapped waves in a two-dimensional acoustic waveguide whose walls vary slowly along the guide, and at which either Dirichlet (sound-soft) or Neumann (sound-hard) conditions are imposed. The guide contains a single smoothly bulging region of arbitrary amplitude, but is otherwise straight, and the modes are trapped within this localised increase in width. Using a similar approach to that in Rienstra (2003), a WKBJ-type expansion yields an approximate expression for the modes which can be present, which display either propagating or evanescent behaviour; matched asymptotic expansions are then used to derive connection formulae which bridge the gap across the cut-off between propagating and evanescent solutions in a tapering waveguide. A uniform expansion is then determined, and it is shown that appropriate zeros of this expansion correspond to trapped mode wavenumbers; the trapped modes themselves are then approximated by the uniform expansion. Numerical results determined via a standard iterative method are then compared to results of the full linear problem calculated using a spectral method, and the two are shown to be in excellent agreement, even when $\epsilon$, the parameter characterising the slow variations of the guide’s walls, is relatively large.

Auditory distraction eliminates retrieval induced forgetting: implications for the processing of unattended sound

The Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) paradigm includes three phases: (a) study/encoding of category exemplars, (b) practicing retrieval of a sub-set of those category exemplars, and (c) recall of all exemplars. At the final recall phase, recall of items that belong to the same categories as those items that undergo retrieval-practice, but that do not undergo retrieval-practice, is impaired. The received view is that this is because retrieval of target category-exemplars (e.g., ‘Tiger’ in the category Four-legged animal) requires inhibition of non-target category-exemplars (e.g., ‘Dog’ and ‘Lion’) that compete for retrieval. Here, we used the RIF paradigm to investigate whether ignoring auditory items during the retrieval-practice phase modulates the inhibitory process. In two experiments, RIF was present when retrieval-practice was conducted in quiet and when conducted in the presence of spoken words that belonged to a category other than that of the items that were targets for retrieval-practice. In contrast, RIF was abolished when words that either were identical to the retrieval-practice words or were only semantically related to the retrieval-practice words were presented as background speech. The results suggest that the act of ignoring speech can reduce inhibition of the non-practiced category-exemplars, thereby eliminating RIF, but only when the spoken words are competitors for retrieval (i.e., belong to the same semantic category as the to-be-retrieved items).

The Prophetic Sound: a day and night of noise cabaret(symposium of talks and live performances)

'The Prophetic Sound: a day and night of noise cabaret' is the first event hosted by Agency of Noise. This all day event brought together artists and academics whose subject of focus is noise (in creative practice). Artists from across the UK were invited to consider a future post-digital era in which everything with a microchip has malfunctioned, as a thought exercise and starting point for response through sound. In response to Jacques Attali’s claim that music is prophecy, The Prophetic Sound asks us to consider if noise can communicate in an unbridled, unfiltered, way that is somehow not culturally coded -before it becomes sound that is recognised, refined, manipulated and exploited for musical or other cultured purpose. Featuring students from Reading, Brighton, LCC and Goldsmiths alongside more established artists and academics from across the UK, this event brings into focus locations where pattern, timbre, pitch, organisation and sequencing of sounds become distinguishable from noise and asks us to consider, through diversion within such locations, new origins for future communication systems. The Prophetic Sound included talks, films, presentations and performances from: Ryo Ikeshiro / Inigo Wilkins / Neal Spowage / Dane Sutherland / Poulomi Desai / Benedict Drew / AAS / Polly Fibre / Steven Dickie As part of The Prophetic Sound, POLLYFIBRE (Ellison, C.) performed LIVE RECORDING with Amplified Scissors. This industrial activity by POLLYFIBRE short-circuits the complicated chain that is music production. The distinctive roles of consumer, producer, composer, and performer collapse in a series of live ‘cuts’ where vinyl discs are produced with amplified scissors. Production happens through action and action becomes production. A limited edition of 9 flexi discs were produced and available for special collectors at the event.

W(h)ither phonological awareness? Literate trainee teachers’ lack of stable knowledge about the sound structure of words

Recent national developments in the teaching of literacy in the early years in the UK mean that teachers need to have explicit fluent knowledge of the sound structure of the language and its relationship to orthography in order to teach reading effectively. In this study, a group of 38 graduate trainee primary teachers were given a pencil and paper test of phonological awareness as part of a course on teaching literacy. Results from the pencil and paper test were used as the basis of teaching about the sound structure of words. The test was repeated six months later. The results showed that they did not use a consistent system for segmenting words into component sounds. Though there was substantial improvement on second testing, many trainees still did not show evidence that they had yet developed sufficient insights into the sound structure of words to be able to teach children about phonemes with certainty. It is argued that student teachers need substantial explicit training and practice in manipulating the sound structure of words to enable them to teach this aspect of language confidently.

Archive fever: the publishers' archive and the history of the novel

In recent years, archives have been increasingly important to literary scholarship. Drawing upon Derrida’s description of ‘archive fever’ as an always elusive search for origins, this chapter considers the theoretical and methodological issues of reading in the publishers’ archive, questioning what this brings to our histories of the novel. Through examples drawn from the archives of two British publishers – the Hogarth Press (1917-46) and Chatto & Windus (established 1873) – focussing on Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933) and James Hanley’s The Furys (1935), the chapter assesses the implications of bringing book history to bear on literary history.

'Looking at the Others': Oscar Wilde and the Reading Gaol Archive

In looking at Wilde and the prison, scholarship has understandably focussed on the lengthy and complex De Profundis, and how the prison experience confirmed or re-shaped Wilde as a writer and thinker. Wilde himself claimed to have been saved by the ‘others’ that he encountered in prison, and these ‘others’ have received scant attention. Who were they? How does a greater knowledge of them supplement our sense of the nineteenth-century prison and of Wilde? This essay looks closely at the Reading Gaol archive, tracing out the lives of some of those with whom Wilde was incarcerated and providing analyses of the prison population in Reading while Wilde was there. Aside from yielding the only known photographs of any of the young working-class men in whom Wilde took an interest, the essay seeks to build a more nuanced reading of Wilde's experience. Above all, the aim is to open out the meanings of the Wilde myth, and, in particular, to offer a more socially inclusive version.

An optimized auditory P300 BCI based on spatially distributed sound in different voices

In this paper, a new paradigm is presented, to improve the performance of audio-based P300 Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), by using spatially distributed natural sound stimuli. The new paradigm was compared to a conventional paradigm using spatially distributed sound to demonstrate the performance of this new paradigm. The results show that the new paradigm enlarged the N200 and P300 components, and yielded significantly better BCI performance than the conventional paradigm.

Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution

Background: Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicon—a phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family. Results: Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree. Including regular sound changes yielded an approximately 4-fold improvement in the characterization of linguistic change over a simpler model of sporadic change, improved phylogenetic inference, and returned more reliable and plausible dates for events on the phylogenies. The historical timings of the concerted changes closely follow a Poisson process model, and the sound transition networks derived from our model mirror linguistic expectations. Conclusions: We demonstrate that a model with no prior knowledge of complex concerted or regular changes can nevertheless infer the historical timings and genealogical placements of events of concerted change from the signals left in contemporary data. Our model can be applied wherever discrete elements—such as genes, words, cultural trends, technologies, or morphological traits—can change in parallel within an organism or other evolving group.