#but taylor’s article does contain a description of it

[ehghtyseven]

devastating news about adam johnson [x] [x]

[ap article about the incident]

[taylor’s article about the incident - contains some graphic description]

[taylor’s article about adam ahead of his penguins debut in 2019]

[antiporn-activist]

The Children of Pornhub

Why does Canada allow this company to profit off videos of exploitation and assault?

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Dec. 4, 2020, New York Times

This article contains descriptions of sexual assault. It’s also really long.

Pornhub prides itself on being the cheery, winking face of naughty, the website that buys a billboard in Times Square and provides snow plows to clear Boston streets. It donates to organizations fighting for racial equality and offers steamy content free to get people through Covid-19 shutdowns.

Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

After a 15-year-old girl went missing in Florida, her mother found her on Pornhub — in 58 sex videos. Sexual assaults on a 14-year-old California girl were posted on Pornhub and were reported to the authorities not by the company but by a classmate who saw the videos. In each case, offenders were arrested for the assaults, but Pornhub escaped responsibility for sharing the videos and profiting from them.

Pornhub is like YouTube in that it allows members of the public to post their own videos. A great majority of the 6.8 million new videos posted on the site each year probably involve consenting adults, but many depict child abuse and nonconsensual violence. Because it’s impossible to be sure whether a youth in a video is 14 or 18, neither Pornhub nor anyone else has a clear idea of how much content is illegal.

Unlike YouTube, Pornhub allows these videos to be downloaded directly from its website. So even if a rape video is removed at the request of the authorities, it may already be too late: The video lives on as it is shared with others or uploaded again and again.

“Pornhub became my trafficker,” a woman named Cali told me. She says she was adopted in the United States from China and then trafficked by her adoptive family and forced to appear in pornographic videos beginning when she was 9. Some videos of her being abused ended up on Pornhub and regularly reappear there, she said.

“I’m still getting sold, even though I’m five years out of that life,” Cali said. Now 23, she is studying in a university and hoping to become a lawyer — but those old videos hang over her.

“I may never be able to get away from this,” she said. “I may be 40 with eight kids, and people are still masturbating to my photos.”

“You type ‘Young Asian’ and you can probably find me,” she added.

Actually, maybe not. Pornhub recently was offering 26,000 videos in response to that search. That doesn’t count videos that show up under “related searches” that Pornhub suggests, including “young tiny teen,” “extra small petite teen,” “tiny Asian teen” or just “young girl.” Nor does it necessarily count videos on a Pornhub channel called “exploited teen Asia.”

I came across many videos on Pornhub that were recordings of assaults on unconscious women and girls. The rapists would open the eyelids of the victims and touch their eyeballs to show that they were nonresponsive.

Pornhub profited this fall from a video of a naked woman being tortured by a gang of men in China. It is monetizing video compilations with titles like “Screaming Teen,” “Degraded Teen” and “Extreme Choking.” Look at a choking video and it may suggest also searching for “She Can’t Breathe.”

It should be possible to be sex positive and Pornhub negative.

Pornhub declined to make executives available on the record, but it provided a statement. “Pornhub is unequivocally committed to combating child sexual abuse material, and has instituted a comprehensive, industry-leading trust and safety policy to identify and eradicate illegal material from our community,” it said. Pornhub added that any assertion that the company allows child videos on the site “is irresponsible and flagrantly untrue.”

II.

At 14, Serena K. Fleites was an A student in Bakersfield, Calif., who had never made out with a boy. But in the eighth grade she developed a crush on a boy a year older, and he asked her to take a naked video of herself. She sent it to him, and this changed her life.

He asked for another, then another; she was nervous but flattered. “That’s when I started getting strange looks in school,” she remembered. He had shared the videos with other boys, and someone posted them on Pornhub.

Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said.

The boy was suspended, but Fleites began skipping class because she couldn’t bear the shame. Her mother persuaded Pornhub to remove the videos, and Fleites switched schools. But rumors reached the new school, and soon the videos were uploaded again to Pornhub and other websites.

Fleites quarreled with her mother and began cutting herself. Then one day she went to the medicine cabinet and took every antidepressant pill she could find.

Three days later, she woke up in the hospital, frustrated to be still alive. Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her.

As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless.

At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. It was a way to make a bit of money, and maybe also a way to punish herself. She thought, “I’m not worth anything any more because everybody has already seen my body,” she told me.

Those videos also ended up on Pornhub. Fleites would ask that they be removed. They usually would be, she says — but then would be uploaded again. One naked video of her at 14 had 400,000 views, she says, leaving her afraid to apply for fast-food jobs for fear that someone would recognize her.

So today Fleites, 19, off drugs for a year but unemployed and traumatized, is living in her car in Bakersfield, along with three dogs that have proved more loyal and loving than the human species. She dreams of becoming a vet technician but isn’t sure how to get there. “It’s kind of hard to go to school when you’re living in a car with dogs,” she said.

“I was dumb,” she acknowledged, noting that she had never imagined that the videos could be shared online. “It was one small thing that a teenager does, and it’s crazy how it turns into something so much bigger.

“A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.”

III.

The problem goes far beyond one company. Indeed, a rival of Pornhub, XVideos, which arguably has even fewer scruples, may attract more visitors. Depictions of child abuse also appear on mainstream sites like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. And Google supports the business models of companies that thrive on child molestation.

Google returns 920 million videos on a search for “young porn.” Top hits include a video of a naked “very young teen” engaging in sex acts on XVideo along with a video on Pornhub whose title is unprintable here.

I asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to compile the number of images, videos and other content related to child sexual exploitation reported to it each year. In 2015, it received reports of 6.5 million videos or other files; in 2017, 20.6 million; and in 2019, 69.2 million.

Facebook removed 12.4 million images related to child exploitation in a three-month period this year. Twitter closed 264,000 accounts in six months last year for engaging in sexual exploitation of children. By contrast, Pornhub notes that the Internet Watch Foundation, an England-based nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse imagery, reported only 118 instances of child sexual abuse imagery on its site over almost three years, seemingly a negligible figure. “Eliminating illegal content is an ongoing battle for every modern content platform, and we are committed to remaining at the forefront,” Pornhub said in its statement.

The Internet Watch Foundation couldn’t explain why its figure for Pornhub is so low. Perhaps it’s because people on Pornhub are inured to the material and unlikely to report it. But if you know what to look for, it’s possible to find hundreds of apparent child sexual abuse videos on Pornhub in 30 minutes. Pornhub has recently offered playlists with names including “less than 18,” “the best collection of young boys” and “under- - age.”

Congress and successive presidents have done almost nothing as this problem has grown. The tech world that made it possible has been mostly passive, in a defensive crouch. But pioneering reporting in 2019 by my Times colleagues has prodded Congress to begin debating competing strategies to address child exploitation.

Concerns about Pornhub are bubbling up. A petition to shut the site down has received 2.1 million signatures. Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, called on the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub. PayPal cut off services for the company, and credit card companies have been asked to do the same. An organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait, documents abuses and calls for the site to be shut down. Twenty members of Canada’s Parliament have called on their government to crack down on Pornhub, which is effectively based in Montreal.

“They made money off my pain and suffering,” an 18-year-old woman named Taylor told me. A boyfriend secretly made a video of her performing a sex act when she was 14, and it ended up on Pornhub, the police confirmed. “I went to school the next day and everybody was looking at their phones and me as I walked down the hall,” she added, weeping as she spoke. “They were laughing.”

Taylor said she has twice attempted suicide because of the humiliation and trauma. Like others quoted here, she agreed to tell her story and help document it because she thought it might help other girls avoid suffering as she did.

IV.

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Pornhub and Mindgeek also stand out because of their influence. One study this year by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third greatest-impact on society in the 21st century, after Facebook and Google but ahead of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Nominally based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, Mindgeek is a private company run from Montreal. It does not disclose who owns it, but it is led by Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both Canadians, who declined to be interviewed.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada calls himself a feminist and has been proud of his government’s efforts to empower women worldwide. So a question for Trudeau and all Canadians: Why does Canada host a company that inflicts rape videos on the world?

Mindgeek’s moderators are charged with filtering out videos of children, but its business model profits from sex videos starring young people.

“The goal for a content moderator is to let as much content as possible go through,” a former Mindgeek employee told me. He said he believed that the top executives weren’t evil but were focused above all on maximizing revenue.

While Pornhub would not tell me how many moderators it employs, I interviewed one who said that there are about 80 worldwide who work on Mindgeek sites (by comparison, Facebook told me it has 15,000 moderators). With 1.36 million new hours of video uploaded a year to Pornhub, that means that each moderator would have to review hundreds of hours of content each week.

The moderators fast forward through videos, but it’s often difficult to assess whether a person is 14 or 18, or whether torture is real or fake. Most of the underage content involves teenagers, the moderator I spoke with said, but some comes from spy cams in toilets or changing rooms and shows children only 8 to 12.

“The job in itself is soul-destroying,” the moderator said.

Pornhub appears to be increasingly alarmed about civil or criminal liability. Lawyers are circling, and nine women sued the company in federal court after spy cam videos surfaced on Pornhub. The videos were shot in a locker room at Limestone College in South Carolina and showed women showering and changing clothes.

Executives of Pornhub appear in the past to have assumed that they enjoyed immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet platforms on which members of the public post content. But in 2018 Congress limited Section 230 so that it may not be enough to shield the company, leading Mindgeek to behave better.

It has doubled the number of moderators in the last couple of years, the moderator told me, and this year Pornhub began voluntarily reporting illegal material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After previously dragging its feet in removing videos of children and nonconsensual content, Pornhub now is responding more rapidly.

It has also compiled a list of banned content. I obtained a copy of this list, and it purports to bar videos with terms or themes like “rape,” “preteen,” “pedophilia” and “bestiality” (it helpfully clarifies that this “includes eels, fish, octopus, insects”). Diapers are OK “if no scatophilia.” Mutilation depends on context but “cannot depict severing parts of the body.”

So while it is now no longer possible to search on Pornhub in English using terms like “underage” or “rape,” the company hasn’t tried hard to eliminate such videos. A member called “13yoboyteen” is allowed to post videos. A search for “r*pe,” turns up 1,901 videos. “Girl with braces” turns up 1,913 videos and suggests also trying “exxxtra small teens.” A search for “13yo” generates 155,000 videos. To be clear, most aren’t of 13-year-olds, but the fact that they’re promoted with that language seems to reflect an effort to attract pedophiles.

Moreover, some videos seem at odds with the list of banned content. “Runaway Girl Gets Ultimatum, Anal or the Streets” is the title of one Pornhub video. Another user posts videos documenting sex with teenage girls as they weep, protest and cry out in pain.

While Pornhub is becoming more careful about videos of potentially litigious Americans, it remains cavalier about overseas victims. One Indonesian video is titled “Junior High School Girl After Class” and shows what appears to be a young teenager having sex. A Chinese sex video, just taken down, was labeled: “Beautiful High School Girl Is Tricked by Classmates and Taken to the Top of a Building Where She Is Insulted and Raped.”

“They’re making money off the worst moment in my life, off my body,” a Colombian teenager who asked to be called Xela, a nickname, told me. Two American men paid her when she was 16 for a sexual encounter that they filmed and then posted on Pornhub. She was one of several Pornhub survivors who told me they had thought of or attempted suicide.

In the last few days as I was completing this article, two new videos of prepubescent girls being assaulted were posted, along with a sex video of a 15-year-old girl who was suicidal after it went online. I don’t see how good-faith moderators could approve any of these videos.

V.

“It’s always going to be online,” Nicole, a British woman who has had naked videos of herself posted and reposted on Pornhub, told me. “That’s my big fear of having kids, them seeing this.”

That’s a recurring theme among survivors: An assault eventually ends, but Pornhub renders the suffering interminable.

Naked videos of Nicole at 15 were posted on Pornhub. Now 19, she has been trying for two years to get them removed.

“Why do videos of me from when I was 15 years old and blackmailed, which is child porn, continuously [get] uploaded?” Nicole protested plaintively to Pornhub last year, in a message. “You really need a better system. … I tried to kill myself multiple times after finding myself reuploaded on your website.”

Nicole’s lawyer, Dani Pinter, says there are still at least three naked videos of Nicole at age 15 or 16 on Pornhub that they are trying to get removed.

“It’s never going to end,” Nicole said. “They’re getting so much money from our trauma.”

Pornhub has introduced software that supposedly can “fingerprint” rape videos and prevent them from being uploaded again. But Vice showed how this technology is easily circumvented on Pornhub.

One Pornhub scandal involved the Girls Do Porn production company, which recruited young women for clothed modeling gigs and then pushed them to perform in sex videos, claiming that the videos would be sold only as DVDs in other countries and would never go online. Reassured that no one would ever know, some of the women agreed — and then were shattered when the footage was aggressively marketed on Pornhub.

Girls Do Porn was prosecuted for sex trafficking and shut down. But those videos continue to surface and resurface on Pornhub; last time I checked, videos of six victims of Girls Do Porn were on Pornhub, which continues to profit from them.

One of the Girls Do Porn women I saw on Pornhub is now dead. She was murdered at 20, allegedly by an angry ex-boyfriend who is about to go on trial. I’m not disclosing her name because she should be remembered as a vibrant college athlete, and not for a sex video that represented her most mortifying moment.

VI.

So what’s the solution?

I had expected the survivors to want to shut down Pornhub and send its executives to prison. Some did, but others were more nuanced. Lydia, now 20, was trafficked as a child and had many rape videos posted on the site. “My stomach hurts all the time” from the tension, she told me, but she doesn’t want to come across as hostile to porn itself.

“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’”

Susan Padron told me that she had assumed that pornography was consensual, until a boyfriend filmed her in a sex act when she was 15 and posted it on Pornhub. She has struggled since and believes that only people who have confirmed their identities should be allowed to post videos.

Jessica Shumway, who was trafficked and had a customer post a sex video on Pornhub, agrees: “They need to figure out who’s underage in the videos and that there’s consent from everybody in it.”

I asked Leo, 18, who had videos of himself posted on Pornhub when he was 14, what he suggested.

“That’s tough,” he said. “My solution would be to leave porn to professional production companies,” because they require proof of age and consent.

Right now, those companies can’t compete with mostly free sites like Pornhub and XVideos.

“Pornhub has already destroyed the business model for pay sites,” said Stoya, an adult film actress and writer. She, too, thinks all platforms — from YouTube to Pornhub — should require proof of consent to upload videos of private individuals.

Columnists are supposed to offer answers, but I struggle with solutions. If Pornhub curated videos more rigorously, the most offensive material might just move to the dark web or to websites in less regulated countries. Yet at least they would then not be normalized on a mainstream site.

More pressure and less impunity would help. We’re already seeing that limiting Section 230 immunity leads to better self-policing.

And call me a prude, but I don’t see why search engines, banks or credit card companies should bolster a company that monetizes sexual assaults on children or unconscious women. If PayPal can suspend cooperation with Pornhub, so can American Express, Mastercard and Visa.

I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.

These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are “insanely reasonable.”

The world has often been oblivious to child sexual abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we prosecute individuals like Jeffrey Epstein or R. Kelly. But we should also stand up to corporations that systematically exploit children. With Pornhub, we have Jeffrey Epstein times 1,000.

[oneweekoneband]

I’m slightly nauseous already with knowing I’m going to say this, but what does “self-awareness”  even mean? In modern parlance, as a descriptive phrase, as a comment on art? I’m asking in earnest, like, I’ve been Googling lately, which for me is basically on par with doctoral study in terms of academic rigor. The self is king, anyway, tyrant, so where is the line of distinction between material that intentionally is nodding at some truth about the artist’s life and what’s just, like, all the rest of the regular navel-gazing bullshit. I mean, I’m all self, I am guilty here. I can’t get it out of my poems or even make it more quiet. This is the tenth time I’ve invoked “I” in the space of six sentences. Processing art has always necessitated a certain amount of grappling with the creator, but the busywork of it lately grows more and more tedious. Joy drains out of my body parsing marks left behind not just in stylistic tendencies and themes, but in literal, intentional tags like graffiti on a water tower. This feels an age old and moth-holed complaint, dull, and I am no historian, or really a serious thinker of any kind. I’ve now complained at some length about self-referential art, but didn’t I love how Martin Scorsese nodded to the famous Goodfellas Copacabana tracking shot with the opening frames of last year’s The Irishman? Didn’t I find that terribly fun and sort of sweet? So there’s distinctions. I’m only saying I don’t know with certainty what they even are. I’m unreliable, and someone smarter than me has likely already solved my quandary about why self-knowledge often transforms into overly precious self-reflexivity in such a way that the knowledge is diminished and obscured, leaving only cutesy Easter eggs behind. Postmodernism has birthed a moralizing culture where art exists to be termed either “self-aware Good” or “self-aware Bad”.  Self-referentiality in media is so commonplace, so much the standard, that what was once credited as metatextual inventiveness often feels lazy now. In 1996, Scream was revitalizing a genre. Today, two thirds of all horror movies spend half their running time making sure that you know that they know they’re a horror movie, which is fine, I guess, except sometimes you just wanna watch someone get butchered with an axe in peace. 

This is all to say that in 2020 Taylor Swift looked long and hard upon her image in the reflecting pool of her heart and has written yet another song about Gone Girl.

“mirrorball” is a very good piece of Gone Girl —feels insane to tell anyone reading a post on a blog what Gone Girl is but, you know, the extremely popular 2012 novel about a woman who pretends to have been murdered and frames her husband for it, and subsequently the 2014 film adaption where you kinda see Ben Affleck’s dick for a second—fanfiction. It would be a fine song, a good song, really, even if it weren’t that, if it were just something normal and not unhinged written by a chill person who behaves in a regular way, but we need to acknowledge the facts for what they are. When Taylor Swift watched Rosamund Pike toss her freshly self-bobbed hair out of her face and hiss, “You think you’d be happy with some nice Midwestern girl? No way, baby. I’m it!” her brain lit up like a Christmas tree, and she’s never been the same. If you Google “taylor swift gone girl” there waiting for you will be a medium sized lake’s worth of articles speculating about how Gone Girl influenced and is referenced in past Swift singles “Blank Space” and “Look What You Made Me Do”. This is not new behavior, and if anything it’s getting a bit troubling to think that it’s been this long since Taylor’s read another book. Still, while the prior offerings were a fair attempt at this particular feat of depravity, “mirrorball” has brought Taylor’s Amy Elliott Dunne deification to stunning new heights. And most importantly, Taylor has done a service to every person alive with more than six brain cells and a Internet connection by putting an end to the “Cool Girl” discourse once and for all. By the power invested in “mirrorball”, it is hereby decreed that the Cool Girl speech from Gone Girl is neither feminist or antifeminist, not ironic nor aspirational. No. It’s something much better than all that. It’s a threat. I ! Can ! Change ! Everything ! About ! Me ! To ! Fit ! In !

Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn

“mirrorball” (2020) by Taylor Swift

When the twinkly musical stylings of Jack Antonoff, a man I distinctly distrust, but for no one specific reason, whirl to life at the beginning of this song I feel instantly entranced, blurry-brained and pleasure-pickled like an infant beneath a light-up crib mobile or, I guess, myself in the old times, the outside times, three tequila sodas deep under the disco lights at The Short Stop. Under a mirrorball in my head. I know very little about music, as a craft, and I really don’t care to know more. I’m happy in a world of pure, dumb sensation. I’m not even sure what kind of instruments are making these jangly little sounds. I just like it. I am vibing. We may not ever be able to behave badly in a club again, but I can sway to my stupid Taylor Swift-and-the-brother-of-the-lady-who-makes-like-those-sweatshirts-with-little-sayings-or-like-vulvas-which-famous-white-women-wear-on-instagram-you-know-what-I-mean song, pressing up onto my tiptoes on the linoleum tile of our kitchen floor and can feel for a second or two something approaching bliss. “mirrorball” is a lush sound bath that I like a lot and then also it’s about being all things to all people, chameleoning at a second’s notice, doing Oscar worthy work on every Zoom call, performing the you who is good, performing the you who is funny, performing the you who draws a liter of your own blood and throws it around the kitchen then cleans it up badly all to get your husband sent to jail for sleeping with a college student... Too much talk about making and unmaking of the self is way too, like, 2012 Tumblr for me now, and I start hearing the word “praxis” ring threateningly in my head, but I’m not yet so evolved that I don’t feel a pull. Musings on the disorganized self—on how we are new all the time, and not just because of all the fresh skin coming up under the dead, personhood in the end so frighteningly flexible—are always going to compel me, I’m afraid, but that goes double for musings on the disorganized self which posit that Taylor Swift still thinks Amy Dunne made some points.

Because on “mirrorball” Taylor is for once not hamfistedly addressing some “hater”, in the quiet and the lack of embarrassing martyrdom it actually offers an interesting answer to the complaint that Taylor is insufficiently self-aware. This criticism emerges often in tandem with claiming to have discovered some crack in the chassis of Swift’s public self, revealing the sweetness to be insincere. My instinct is to dismiss this more or less out of hand as just a mutation of the school of thought that presumes all work by women must be autobiography. And, regardless, it is made altogether laughable by the fact that anyone actually paying attention has known since at least Speak Now, a delightful record populated by the most appalling, horrible characters imaginable, and all of them written by a twenty year old Taylor Swift, that this woman is a pure weirdo. To accuse Taylor Swift of lacking in self-awareness is a reductive misunderstanding, I think, of artifice. Being a fake bitch takes work. Which is to say, if we agree that her public self is a calculated performance—eliding the fact that all public selves are a performance to avoid getting too in the weeds yadda yadda— why, then, should it be presumed that performance is rooted in ignorance? Would it not make more sense that, in fact, someone able to contort themselves so ably into various shapes for public consumption would have a certain understanding of the basic materials they’re working with and concealing? Taylor Swift, in a decade and a half of fame, has presented herself from inside a number of distinct packages. The gangly teenager draped in long curls like climbing wisteria who wrote lyrics down her arms in glitter paint gave way to red lipstick, a Diet Coke campaign, and bad dancing at awards shows. There was the period where she was surrounded constantly by a gaggle of models, then suddenly wasn’t anymore, and that rough interlude with the bleached hair. The whole Polaroid thing. Last year she boldly revealed she’s a democrat. Now it’s the end of the world and she’s got frizzy bangs and flannels and muted little piano songs. Perhaps this endless shape-shifting contradicts or undermines, for some, the pose of tender authenticity which has remained static through each phase, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t been doing it all on purpose the entire time. I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try...

In the Disney+ documentary—which, in order to watch, I had to grudgingly give the vile mouse seven dollars, because the login information that I’d begged off of my little sister didn’t work and I was too embarrassed to bring it up a second time—Taylor referred to “mirrorball” as the first time on the album where she explicitly addressed the pandemic, referring to the lyrics that start, “And they called off the circus, Burned the disco down,” and end with “I’m still on that tightrope, I’m still trying everything to get you laughing at me,” which actually did made me laugh, feeling sort of warmly foolish and a little fond, because it never would have occurred to me that she was trying to be literal there. I suppose we really do all contain multitudes. Hate that.

[rosesupposes]

Ivy League

In which Race goes to dinner with Spot, his professor, and his asshole classmate and Spot ends up defending Race’s honor.

This is v v v self indulgent and probably doesn’t make much sense. Just know that Kelly Smaltzer is modern girlsie Smalls who just hasn’t gotten her nickname yet.

Read on AO3.

-

“Thanks so much for your help, Race. I was sure I was gonna fail this test.”

“No problem, Davey,” Race said, packing the empty containers from his lunch into his bag. Spot was on a meal prep kick and Race hadn’t been able to escape it. “After my midterm this morning, it actually reminded me that physics isn’t crazy.”

“Your Planetary Relations class right?” Davey started packing up his bag. 

“Yeah and then my Dance Comp one later. But Albert and I are having rehearsals beforehand and then we’ve got another rehearsal for a showcase.”

Davey looked confused, as he gathered up the trash from his lunch, along with the trash Jack and Crutchie had left when Race and Davey had started reviewing for Davey’s Physics I test. “I thought you and Spot had that dinner with his professor tonight?”

Race groaned and held up the garment bag he’d had to bring along with his backpack and dance bag. “We do. I’ve been lugging my pants and shirt around all day. I have to wear a tie, Davey. A tie.”

Davey rolled his eyes. “You’ll survive. Spot must really want to impress his professor if he’s risking making you wear a tie.”

“I resent that but it’s not untrue. And he does. She takes an intern every summer from her first year classes and he thinks it’s a really good sign that she invited him to this dinner. But she also invited that asshole classmate that Spot’s always complaining about. He’s bringing his girlfriend.” Race wrinkled his nose. 

“Oh, I see. That’s why your wearing the tie,” Davey said with the know it all tone that Race knew meant he was teasing.

“What?”

“You’re trying to out trophy wife the girlfriend.”

“Shut up and go take your physics test,” Race said, pushing Davey’s arm and then walking away from him. His phone chirped with a text from Davey not 30 seconds later. 

I’m adding 3 points to your pettiness score. You’re in the lead now.

-

His Dance Comp midterm went well, even if it ran over. He blamed Albert for drawing the last performance slot because he could have left early otherwise. His whole body ached, protesting the Pilates class from hell that he’d had before lunch and the three hours of rehearsal he’d had after. Going home and vegging out on the couch sounded infinitely better than going to Spot’s dinner. The food would be good, sure, and Spot’s professor was paying but he’d learned early on in Spot’s law school career that when people at law events found out he wasn’t also in law school, they tended to lose interest pretty quickly. He was usually relegated to the role of trophy boyfriend- which he could do and do well but it was kind of hard when he was this exhausted and coming right from a day of midterms. 

He tied his tie while he waited for his Uber and attempted to fix his hair using Snapchat as a mirror. Spot had mentioned that his asshole classmate’s girlfriend was apparently model pretty and Davey was right; Race was nothing if not petty. He was definitely going to be the better trophy wife tonight, even if he was exhausted and coming from four hours of dancing.

As soon as Race was in his Uber and had an ETA he trusted, he texted Spot.

mdtrm ran ovr b there 5 min l8 blame al

Okay

ur gonna wow her n then well get wine drunk w javid 2nite 2 celbr8

After texting Jack and Davey to make sure they could get wine drunk when Race and Spot got home, Race was happy to find his AirPods shoved into his wallet and he put them in so he could start reviewing the choreography for his upcoming Repertory midterm in his head. He got another text from Spot when he was about five minutes from the restaurant.

They're seating us now. Just ask for Taylor Caine.

k eta 4 min ur gonna kill it luv u

Race went right to the hostess when he entered the restaurant. She probably had a fancier title than hostess at a place like this but Race definitely didn't know the word, even if it was probably Italian. "Hi, I think my party's already been seated. I'm with Taylor Caine?"

The hostess gave him a once over, eyes catching on his poorly tied tie. "Of course, follow me, sir." She led Race through the main dining area and to another, smaller area where Race immediately picked out Spot and his group. He waved, hoping to catch Spot's eye and sure enough Spot saw him, his face brightening in a way that most people didn't recognize.

"Speak of the devil," he said, grinning as Race took the empty seat between Spot and who he assumed was asshole classmate's girlfriend. "This is my boyfriend, Antonio Higgins."

"Call me Tony, please," Race said, as if he ever used that name. "I'm so sorry I'm late, my dance midterm ran over."

The woman on the other side of Spot set her menu down and pushed her reading glasses on top of her head, offering her hand to Race, who took it. "No worries at all, we've only just ordered our drinks. I'm Taylor Caine."

"Oh the famous Professor Caine," Race crowed. "It's so great to meet you after all of Sean's stories."

"Only good ones I hope?"

"The best," Race agreed, grinning at Spot, who was getting the look he did when he was almost about to blush. Race decided to back off a little instead of laying it on so thick. "He loves your classes."

"Oh don't flatter her," the woman next to her said. The way she put her hand on Taylor's shoulder spoke of  years of easy familiarity and it made Race smile to think of having that with someone- with Spot- one day. "I'll never hear the end of it. I'm Dalia."

Race shook her hand and then turned to the man at her side- presumably Spot's classmate. Race offered his hand. The man took it, but not before staring at it disdainfully. He eventually deigned to introduce himself to Race, but not before Race reintroduced himself first. “Antonio Higgins.”

 "Joseph Huntington III. This is my fiancée, Kelly Smaltzer."

"Great to meet you." Race was sitting next to Kelly so he turned to her as well and offered his hand, which she shook. "That dress is absolutely beautiful. Vera Wang?"

Kelly's face lit up. She was very pretty and Race felt a little bitter. "Thank you, yes. How did you know?"

While the others discussed whatever it was lawyers discussed, Race told her about Jack’s internship at the fashion magazine and how they would obsess over spreads together for hours and they fell into an easy conversation about fashion magazines. Kelly, it turned out, was writing for the website of a competing fashion magazine but she quietly admitted to Race that she was hoping to break away from fluff pieces soon and then move to a magazine more like the one Jack worked at- one that was focused on fashion but strived for inclusivity and female empowerment. She had some interesting ideas and Race was slowly starting to like her. She and Jack would be a force to be reckoned with if put in the same room together. If they were relegated to conversation as trophy wives for the night, he didn’t think he would mind it.

Eventually the waiter appeared with drinks. Spot leaned into Race's space to tell him, "I ordered you a seltzer, babe."

Race kissed Spot on the cheek, taking his glass from the waiter. "Perfect, thanks." 

As the waiter took their orders, Race suddenly realized he hadn’t looked over the menu at all- a dangerous choice, since he could be pretty picky with his Italian food. He began reading over but he only got through two appetizers before Spot interrupted him, quietly pointing out two of the menu items. “There’s lasagna you’ll like and a pasta primavera, if you want something lighter.”

“You know me too well,” he said with a wink and Spot rolled his eyes. He thought he heard Joseph scoff but he ignored it.

Once they'd settled back into conversation after ordering, Race found himself the center of attention. "So, Tony," Taylor said as she put away her reading glasses. "Sean tells me you're also at Columbia?"

Race nodded. "I am. I'm still an undergrad though- only a junior. Sean's too smart for me; he graduated high school and undergrad early."

"Don't sell yourself short. You’re-" Spot started but was interrupted by Joseph.

"You're a dance major then?"

"Yes," Race said, taking a sip of his seltzer, "a dance major and-"

“And what do you plan to do with that?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure yet but I also-”

"At Yale, dance is folded into the Theater Studies major. It’s not a very popular major. Most students at Yale choose a more… useful path for undergrad. I majored in political science. Joseph continued, a not so subtle attempt at shifting the focus of conversation to himself..

"Oh, how interesting," Dalia said, sounding perfectly interested though Race didn’t miss the little annoyed look that crossed her face.

Joseph launched into what was probably meant to sound like a description of undergraduate life in New Haven but was actually just a thinly veiled list of his accomplishments. Race nodded politely at all the right points in Joseph’s resume but caught Spot tensing his body out of the corner of his eye. Hoping to head off Spot’s seething, Race grabbed his hand under the table and squeezed it once, shaking his head a little. He waited for Spot to nod back to him before turning to Kelly. God, Spot could be such a drama queen. And, coming from Race, who was now leading on the pettiness scoreboard in their apartment, that was saying a lot.

Race turned back to Kelly, hoping to hear more of her ideas for future articles. She seemed excited just to have the chance to talk about them and after listening to both Katherine and Sarah rant for hours on end, Race felt like he knew how to actually engage in the conversation as an ally without being a total jerk.

By the time their food came, it was clear to Race that Spot’s assessment of Joseph as a Grade A Asshole was correct. He attempted to make every conversation about him and his opinions. He kept making digs at Spot’s less than ideal childhood and cutting off his own fiancée to speak for her. He was sitting next to Dalia but spent the whole time clearly trying to impress Taylor. In his effort to engage with Taylor, he ended up essentially ignoring Dalia, Kelly, and Race, and only engaging with Spot because he had to. No one seemed overly impressed with his accomplishments or his attitude which helped restore Race’s faith in humanity a little but it did not make for a fun dinner table.

Race could tell Spot was getting closer and closer to going off. His jaw was tight and he kept clenching and unclenching his fists under the table. It was one of the things Race loved most about Spot- his righteous outrage in the face of someone treating others like shit- but now was not the time for an outburst. He kept one hand just above Spot’s knee, even while talking to Kelly, slowly rubbing circles right above his knee cap.

Taylor and Dalia were wonderful, trying to keep everyone involved in the conversation. It was when they asked Kelly about herself that Race really started to get annoyed with Joseph. He kept talking over her, even when she was asked a direct question, ascribing opinions to her that Race could tell from her face she didn’t really hold. He told their engagement story with a focus on how amazing his plan had been while barely mentioning Kelly. When he excused himself to use the bathroom shortly after that, Race made it a point to ask Kelly again about the articles she wanted to write for her magazine. Taylor and Dalia both listened intently to her ideas of what fashion magazines could- and should- be.

“Sorry,” she said after a few minutes, putting her hands back in her lap and blushing a little. “I just get really excited about this kind of stuff.”

“No, no,” Taylor said. “Don’t apologize, you have a lot of really intelligent ideas and you’re very good at expressing them.”

Kelly beamed. “Thank you. I don’t have much chance to talk about them, even at work.”

Dalia hummed thoughtfully and nodded. “I remember seeing some profiles on your magazine recently. I thought they mentioned how progressive it was.”

“In some ways, it is,” Kelly said thoughtfully. “But in a lot of ways it’s white feminism and it’s lip service. There are a few articles on intersectionality in relation to feminism that I was sure I would get to write if I pitched them but I’ve been shut down again and again. They only want the type of feminism that’s palatable to their investors and they refuse to push for anything more. And we need to push for more. Intersectionality is the most important part of feminism and if I can somehow provide visibility to trans women or women of color-”

“This again, honey?” Joseph said, grinning as he sat down. “Sorry about that. She gets overexcited sometimes.”

Kelly looked visibly upset but also a little like she was used to it. “I’m not overexcited, Joey. This is important.”

“I don’t know why you care so much. It doesn’t affect you.”

“It does and even if it didn’t, then it’s even more important for me to care.”

Race could see a real argument brewing and, while he wouldn’t mind Joseph making himself out to be even more of an asshole, Kelly didn’t deserve to be put down in the middle of a restaurant, by her fiancee, when she was right. Without even thinking about it, Race took a sip of his almost finished seltzer and then set down his glass towards the edge of the table, tipping it into his own lap. “Oh my god, I’m such a klutz.” He stood, giving Spot a significant look and hoping his boyfriend picked up his cue to change the subject. “Excuse me, I’ll just go clean myself up.”

Race pulled a waitress aside as he headed to the bathroom, telling her about the spill. He cleaned himself up quickly. Thankfully, the air dryer helped with his wet pants. By the time he returned to the table, everyone seemed calm, though Kelly was decidedly not looking at Joseph. Dalia was speaking when Race sat down again. “I can’t say much obviously but it’s very exciting to represent them, even just in the patent filings. I mean, I have a degree in physics so it’s fun to go back to my roots with all the intermediary work before their next spacecraft is ready. Oh, Tony, is everything all right?”

“All set,” he said, taking his seat. “Just a little seltzer. Sorry, did you say you were working on patents for a spacecraft? Is it the Kord Industries one?”

Dalia’s eyes brightened. “Yes, actually, do you know it?”

“I do,” Race said at the same time that Joseph snorted. Race ignored it but could feel Spot seething next to him and reflexively reached a hand down to grab his knee. Spot was not going to blow his shot at this internship over whatever he thought was Race’s honor; not if Race could help it.

“And how do you feel about them? Most people who know enough to recognize them from such a brief description have strong opinions.”

“Oh, he does,” Spot said, a lot calmer than Race would expect.

Race laughed. “I guess that’s fair. I-“

“What would a dance major know about spacecraft?” Joseph had said it quietly to Kelly, who did not look pleased with him. The comment was clearly meant just for her but he hadn’t said it quietly enough because the whole table had heard him loud and clear. 

“Joseph,” Kelly said, sounding scandalized. “Stop it.”

“It’s okay, Kelly,” Race said, forcing a smile onto his face, even though he was kind of exhausted from dealing with Joseph tonight.

“No, it’s not okay,” Spot interjected, standing in his seat and leaning over the table a little. “Antonio is double majoring in Dance and Astrophysics, which you would know if you hadn’t been interrupting him all night. He is the smartest and most passionate man I know. He has more talent in his pinky finger than you have in your entire body and will graduate with two very difficult degrees with no class overlap from an Ivy League school in 4 years. He’s already co-authored 2 papers as an undergrad and presented at 4 major conferences this year alone. And what have you done? Relied on daddy’s name for a degree and law school entry?”

“Spot,” Race hissed under his breath, tugging on Spot’s wrist. Both Joseph and Kelly were frozen on the other side of the table. “Sit down.”

“No, Racer. He’s been rude to everyone all night and he doesn’t get to insult your intelligence because one of your majors is dance and he couldn’t bother to listen to you and find out the other.”

Joseph seemed to have collected himself enough to lift an eyebrow, looking amused. “And you got in based on what? The scholarship for poor orphaned kids from Queens?”

“I’m from Brooklyn, asshole” Spot hissed and Race almost laughed. Leave it to Spot to bring up Brooklyn rather than his LSAT score of 179.

“I’m sorry but that is completely inappropriate language for a restaurant like this,” Joseph said still sounding amused. He looked to Dalia and Taylor, apparently aiming for conspiratorial. “I guess a place at Columbia is no guarantee for good breeding.” He turned back to Spot and Race, arms crossed as if he had won. “You should go now.”

“Actually, I think you should go, Joseph.” All eyes turned to Taylor who did not look happy at all. “Sean is right. You’ve been very rude tonight and I can’t say I blame him for lashing out. Kelly, darling, you’re welcome to stay. I’d love to hear more about your article ideas.”

Joseph’s absolutely shocked face would forever be one of Race’s favorite memories. He seemed frozen in his shock but Kelly jumped to action, standing and pulling Joseph up with her. “Thank you so much, Taylor, Dalia, but we’ll both be going. Sean, it was lovely to meet you. Tony, I’ll send you that article I was telling you about. Thank you all so much again. Have a lovely night.”

Kelly grabbed her coat and purse and pulled a shell shocked Joseph out behind her, without another word from him. Spot relaxed a little as he sat back down but Race saw the exact moment that he realized what had just happened.

“Professor, I am so sorry, that was completely inappropriate. We should go too-”

“Please don’t,” Taylor said. “You and Tony have been a delight tonight unlike Joseph. This is exactly why I do these dinners. You never know how a student behaves outside of class unless you meet them outside of class.”

“Yes, please stay,” Dalia said. “I’d like to hear Tony’s opinions on the Kord Industries spacecraft. The younger generation tends to have the most innovative thoughts on these things, in my experience. But first you’ll have to tell us where the nicknames Spot and Racer come from.”

Spot and Race grinned at each other. 

“Well, you see,” Spot started, turning back to the older women. “My brother likes to think he’s very good at giving people nicknames.”

[makistar2018]

Why Taylor Swift's Open Support of the LGBTQ Community Should Be Celebrated

6/14/2019 by Stephen Daw

There’s nothing hidden about the meaning behind Taylor Swift’s new song “You Need to Calm Down.” The new song, crafted as a message to angry bigoted people around the world, does contain a few subtle lyrics. But just before launching into her second chorus, Swift makes it clear who this song is for, as she sings “‘Cause shade never made anybody less gay.”

Those lyrics only contribute further to Swift’s newly open support of the LGBTQ community. Even in the Apple Music description of her upcoming album Lover, Swift acknowledges that while she hasn’t been open about her political leanings in the past, she’s officially over that and is “standing up and speaking out.”

In the last few months, Swift has ramped up her efforts of being an ally; she donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Tennessee LGBTQ charity, vocalized her support of the Equality Act and urged her state representatives to do the same. “For American citizens to be denied jobs or housing based on who they love or how they identify, in my opinion, is un-American and cruel,” she wrote in an open letter.

While there’s no doubt that Swift has felt this way for a long time, it is still all the more meaningful that she has finally opened up about that support with both lyrics and action. Even in her lyric video, the star gives a shoutout to GLAAD, and highlights the letters “EA” to further promote the Equality Act.

Anthony Ramos, GLAAD’s director of talent and engagement, thanked Swift in a post released on the organization’s website, saying “Taylor Swift is one of the world’s biggest pop stars. The fact that she continues to use her platform and music to support the LGBTQ community and the Equality Act is a true sign of being an ally.”

Ramos is right — Swift is perhaps the biggest pop star in the world, which only gives her promotion of inclusivity more meaning. Where other artists would shy away due to fear of being dropped by a more conservative audience, Swift has planted herself firmly as an ally to the LGBTQ community, regardless of what some prejudiced listeners may think.

Fans of the star are over the moon with the singer’s support, continuing to call her a “gay icon” and referring to the song as a “2019’s gayest anthem.” Check out some of our favorite reactions from fans below:

Billboard

[prettyrosemistress]

Australian Made Swiftie Approach To Lover

                                      written by Kim Jayne Dowling

                                         27th August 2019, 9:27pm

So here it goes. I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Taylor Swift’s new album “Lover” which came out on Friday 23rd August. However, and it could be my biased opinion as a hardcore and long dedicated ‘swiftie’ but I feel that upon judging the tracks, a few points have been off the mark. Having been a listener to Ms Swift’s music for the past 12 years (note I remember the date - 27th February 2007), I believe this makes me someone who understands the growth but yet the essence of Taylor as a songwriter. Leading up to this album, she herself described this album as a “songwriter’s journey” and now that I have listened to this album so much, I can now begin to sing the lyrics to myself acapella, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Sure, there are rises in this where bubblegum pop music production was the focus, but I sincerely believe that the album contains a message behind every lyric. Yes, kids I’m even talking about ‘ME!’ (see what I did there?). So here we go, this is my opinions of each track, because as a swiftie, I must admit this is the first album since RED that I consider has not a single skip. So without further ado, Lover this one’s for you…

1.  I Forgot That You Existed

A fantastic opener in my opinion and definitely holds the message of leaving a dark side of life behind. True, this might not be the perfect number one hit song, but it’s one that leaves you shaking off the feeling of dread of someone who caused you the deepest anxiety and now you can just leap back to being the person you are meant to be. 3 out of 5 stars.

2.  Cruel Summer

To be honest, I heard this one and said out loud, alone on a Friday night - BOP! Yes, I used incorrect language and really connected to the lyrics. We have all had those nights where you get a little too drunk and think you’ve found the one, only to realise later you’ve been a fool, but look back and say, yep, that was fun. 4 out of 5 stars.

3. Lover

This song is classic Taylor, but with maturity. I feel like this is the song she has been trying to write since the beginning. The hooks, the guitar, the beautiful beat...it’s like a warm hug on Christmas morning. 5 out of 5 stars.

4. The Man

As a woman who has worked in ‘men’s industries’ for the past 9 years, I can relate to these lyrics. Sitting in lunch rooms and listening to how they talk about their weekends and then realising that how I spent mine was the same, yet they give me the look like ‘wow’ (dulling that one down). This song is an anthem. Plus the pop production is very current to what is popular, so is a perfect winner. 5 out of 5 stars.

5. The Archer

Track Five Syndrome - check. Before this song, All Too Well was the Track 5 song that I could only relate to every single word. Now that we have The Archer, this makes two. Every anxiety and the beautiful 1980’s inspired production, makes this one for the ages. 5 out of 5 stars.

6. I Think He Knows

Immediately when I listened to the album, this one didn’t stand out too much, but now that I’ve listened to this a few times, I can now admit this is definitely an anthem, a bit of unrequited soul and new beginnings. This one reminds you of a night out on a repeat date where you can’t help but glance a look just because your in full force falling mode. 3 out of 5 stars.

7. Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince

Again, at first I wasn’t sure of this song because of the production compared to the lyrics. This is potentially one of the best pieces of story songwriting on the album. I think this one truly would shine as an acoustic ballad, which I am hoping is brought out on tour? (hint Taylor, hint hint?). 4 out of 5 stars.

8. Paper Rings

This one just makes you want to get up and dance. The old school punk pop feeling to the production, the count in to the chorus (hello Jack!), the lyrics. Now, if only I had a honey I want to marry, I’d serenade them with this in a dance number. 4 out of 5 stars.

9. Cornelia Street

Hands down, absolute favourite on the album. Solely written by Taylor and it speaks completely of her and her ability to tell the emotions of a memory. The final message is one of love, but one that tells of the anxieties once you’ve found love and how much it would break you to see it end. The story, the lyrics, the production, the ability to be great both as a studio song or live. 5 out of 5 stars.

10. Death By A Thousand Cuts

I actually expected a lot more out of this when seeing the title. I was expecting a slow and soppy heartbreaking ballad. Instead, I was presented with a cute bubblegum pop breakup anthem. Looking at the lyrics this could easily be covered and turned into a minor key sort of song, but I suppose this puts a positive spin on a relationship ending. 3 out of 5 stars.

11. London Boy

This one is just very very cute. Presenting us with the idea of creating a new home for yourself, that is completely different to what you are used to, but showing that being committed and in love with someone can change your perspective and ideals in life. 3 out of 5 stars.

12. Soon You’ll Get Better (feat. Dixie Chicks)

Hands down, saddest song on the album. On first listen, I was bawling my eyes out. I would find it hard to believe if anyone out there could listen to this and not relate to it. The simple country melody and harmonies and a tale of watching someone very close to you go through a life challenging battle. 5 out of 5 stars.

13. False God

THAT SAXOPHONE THOUGH. Okay, first of all, the saxophone is hands down my favourite instrument ever existed, so any song that presents this will be an instant hit with me. Then, we listen to the lyrics and this is a very good description of a mature adult relationship where love creates the ideals you live by. If Dress on reputation was one of your favourites, then False God is like the older and wiser sibling that it aspires to be. 5 out of 5 stars.

14. You Need To Calm Down

I’m not usually one to hold Taylor’s pop anthems at the top of my list in an album ranking, but this one and it’s message that love is valid in any form it comes in has me wanting to shout these lyrics from the rooftops. 4 out of 5 stars.

15. Afterglow

So this one has become a bit of a swiftie favourite (from what I’m seeing on my feeds) and whilst I can admit, the production and writing value is superb, I’m failing to connect to it. Yes, it's a very valid song for the phases of a relationship, so perhaps one day I’ll see it in another light (oh wow, my ability to form words is on point.) 3 out of 5 stars.

16. ME! (feat. Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco)

Okay, so everyone hates on this song. But it’s a carefree bubblegum pop song, it's not meant to be the best song on the album. The lyrics are catching and the message is pure, plus anything Brendon does is amazing. This song is fun with or without the spelling is fun line. It makes me just instantly happy listening to it. That’s the sign of a good number one pop song. 3 out of 5 stars.

17. It’s Nice To Have A Friend

So this is a side to Taylor’s writing I’ve never heard and I kinda like it. It’s more of a rhyme, as the structure is not your typical pop song. Short and sweet and really makes you think about the memories you share with anyone you can call a friend and how you got there. 4 out of 5 stars.

18. Daylight

Again, sole Taylor always shines through. This is a perfect way to finish and perfect album. The throwback to RED and how her notion of love has changed, really made me smile on this one. It sounds simple and beautiful. The final spoken word voice memo on the end, shows that Taylor is back and she’s happier than ever. 5 out of 5 stars.

So there you have it, this is my interpretation of in my opinion an album that Taylor was working up to her whole life and it has paid off swimmingly. An overall 4 and a half stars from me, and I cannot wait to see how this is further presenting when it comes to live performance, music videos or anything else the brilliant mind of Taylor Swift might come up with. So for those with a tainted view where they refuse to listen because of how others see her, for a healthier option...

                                       stream Lover now

@taylorswift

[exoticloading368]

Coles Mobile Crane Manual

Mobile Crane Manual Pdf

Home

Return to Tony on the Moon's Menu Page 2 click here.

This site is about cranes, in particular Coles Cranes and the history of Coles. To see why this site came about see the 'About Site' section. This site will discribe somthing about mobile cranes, the history of Coles Cranes and contain a database with pictuers of most of the cranes made by Coles along with some intresting little technical details. Coles stopped trading in 1984 and and the last working factory closed down in 1998. Coles is now only a part of crane history. This site is dedicated to remembering what was once one of the largest crane manufacturing companies in the world and to those people who worked there.

About This Site and Database Navigation

How this site came about. How I came to be the model maker to Coles at Sunderland and a look at the Sunderland works. Find out what an odd looking machine has to do with this story. Also find out about how to navigate the database of images used by this site also how to make contact about any information on the site or to add information.

Select Here or the image to left to go to this section

Main Database

The extensive database of this site contains listings of most of the types of crane produced by Coles over it history. Where possible photographs and details are given along with the introduction date of that type. Select Here or the image to left to go to this section.

Original Coles Crane Site

This is a link to the original Coles Crane site which had to be abandoned when the server closed down. It is not as extensive as the above but does contain things not in this site. These include the History's of J S Neal & Co and F. Taylor And Sons Manchester Limited. Also technical details, catalogues and other miscellaneous items. which just seemed interesting at the time.

Select Here or the image to left to go to this section.

Description Of Crane Types A brief description of the various types of cranes that are in use today with an illustrated example. Not all these types were made by Coles. Select Here or the image to left to go to this section. Picture History - Chronology and Time Line A time line showing when certain models of the basic cranes were developed and introduced by Coles over the years. Also a Chronology of dates with short notes on some of the significent events in the history of the Cole Crane Company. Also here a list of all the Cranes made Select Here or the image to left to go to this section.

History Books

Read on line or download any of a series of PDF books about coles cranes. These can be viewed online or downloaded to you own computer and kept. You can also link through to the photographic database to see the photographs in the books,this database contains extra images not included in the books due to space constraints.

To read online or download booklet select here or image to left.

Works Models and Others Here we take as a starting point the scale models made at the Sunderland works. What these models were for and how they relate to the full sized cranes produced by Coles. These include historical Coles cranes, current types and prototype models.Also we look at toys that have been made based on types of Coles cranes. Here we see Dinky, and other die-cast models, Schoco, Victory and finally hobby made cranes form paper wood metal Lego and Maccano.

Scientific workplace 6 keygen accelerator. Refer to ANSI/ASME B30.22, the standard for Mobile and Locomotive Cranes, for more information on crane design and test criteria. (Contact American Society of Mechanical Engineers at www.asme.org for information on ANSI/ASME B30.22.) Crane operators must also be familiar with OSHA 29CFR, Subpart N, Article 1926.550 and CAL. Crane Specification search result for manufacturer: Coles. Beaver Tree Services Takes Delivery of National 9125A From Select Crane Sales.

Main Database‎ > ‎

Military 1937-1989

Military Cranes 1937-1989

Click on any picture to be taken to the files images. If you have not done so already read the section 'About Site' which explains how the database works.

Military Cranes Coles first involvement with the military came when they won a tender to make cranes for the Ministry Defence in 1937 the order was for a general purpose self propelled light crane for use with the RAF. This order was for 82 units, a large order at that time. From that time on Coles were almost entirely given over to making the same crane throughout the whole of the second world war. From that time Coles had supplied many types of crane for the army, navy and airforce. Not only to the UK but all round the world. All these crane have been based on their civilian range but built to the much higher military specification required by the services and generally heavier and more reliable systems. This of course made them far more expensive so these cranes often have a very good second had value after the military had finished with them. Left is a brochure about Coles Military cranes this was produced in the 1980. The cranes on the cover are, top - Hydra 180 AT 18T, bottom left - All Terrain Hydraulic Husky At422, bottom right - Jumbo Speedcrane.

Model - EMA Mk1First made in 1937 the continued to be made right up until 1946 when it was updated to become first the Aries then the Argus Mobiles.Developed for the air ministry the EMA (Electro Mobile Aerodrome) is a self propelled, twin axled , four tyred, electrically driven mobile crane with 360 slewing and 3 ton 2.4m jib. One major development of this machine was the non-rigid jib made of welded sections.This machine developed from the 2 ton Mk1 through Mk II, III, V, VI, and VII versions increasing capacities up to the 6 ton Mk VII. Images - 5

Model - EMA Utility Mk1Notes - Lattice Jib 2.4 to 3m Long.The EMA slewing unit was also made as a Utility version for use on suitable lorry chassis. This unit was a stripped down version with the minimal parts necessary to make it work. It was intended for the electrical power to be taken from the truck it was mounted on. This was fed by a cable so the crane had to have a limiter on the degrees of rotation. Where the truck could not provide the electrical power a separate small engine and generator were fitted either on the truck chassis, as in the Matador or bolted onto the slewing unit. During the war this slewing unit was fitted to almost any suitable lorry chassis. Two of the most widely used were the 6 ton 6x4 Thorneycroft Amazon and the 6x6 AEC Matador. Also fitted to the Austin K6 and Layland. Note- there is a photograph in the 100 years book showing eleven Thorneycroft Amazon trucks on a row saying they are fitted with the EMA slewing rig, this is incorrect these are a much later units from 1948 fitted with the Ulysses 6T self contained slewing unit. Images - 10

Model - Slewing Recovery CraneNotes - Coles only made the crane unit for the AEC Militant Mark 3 truck. The crane unit took its power from the truck including hydraulic. It could slew 90 degrees each way rase hydraulically under fill load and extend hydraulicly to about 10 feet. Also fitted with powerful cable hook winch. The crane unit weighs 5 to 5.5T. Images - 9 Drawing - yes

Model - Hydra AT 18TNotes - Developed for the military, 4 wheel drive. Both Crane and Truck can be driven from either truck cab or slewing cab position. Not armoured but military specification fittings. This was available from the 1970 but was later updated in 78 and called the Coles/Grove 315M MK2. 4 wheel drive 360 Degree Fully slewing with rear cab, joystick controls, 19m reach, 4 x outriggers, axle locks, PAT 150 DS safe load indicator, ZF 6 speed transmission. Images - 12

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[manuscriptedpod]

When scenes speak louder than words: Verbal encoding does not mediate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention

Manuscript authors: Gwendolyn Rehrig, Taylor R. Hayes, John M. Henderson, and Fernanda Ferreira 

Read aloud by the first author. Please refer to the manuscript documents linked below for in-text citations, references, correspondence information, author affiliations, and figures.

Published manuscript: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-020-01050-4

     DOI: doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01050-4

Preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/3h7au

Supplemental material: https://osf.io/8mbyv/

Citation: Rehrig, G., Hayes, T. R., Henderson, J. M., & Ferreira, F. (2020). When scenes speak louder than words: Verbal encoding does not mediate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention. Memory & Cognition, 48(7), 1181-1195.

Transcript

Gwendolyn Rehrig: When scenes speak louder than words: Verbal encoding does not mediate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention By Gwendolyn Rehrig, Taylor R. Hayes, John M. Henderson, and Fernanda Ferreira. 

Abstract: The complexity of the visual world requires that we constrain visual attention and prioritize some regions of the scene for attention over others. The current study investigated whether verbal encoding processes influence how attention is allocated in scenes. Specifically, we asked whether the advantage of scene meaning over image salience in attentional guidance is modulated by verbal encoding, given that we often use language to process information. In two experiments, 60 subjects studied scenes (30 in experiment 1 and 60 in experiment 2) for 12 seconds each in preparation for a scene recognition task. Half of the time, subjects engaged in a secondary articulatory suppression task concurrent with scene viewing. Meaning and saliency maps were quantified for each of the experimental scenes. In both experiments, we found that meaning explained more of the variance in visual attention than image salience did, particularly when we controlled for the overlap between meaning and salience, with and without the suppression task. Based on these results, verbal encoding processes do not appear to modulate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention. Our findings suggest that semantic information in the scene steers the attentional ship, consistent with cognitive guidance theory. 

Keywords: scene processing, visual attention, meaning, salience, language 

Introduction 

Because the visual world is information-rich, observers prioritize certain scene regions for attention over others to process scenes efficiently. While bottom-up information from the stimulus is clearly relevant, visual attention does not operate in a vacuum, but rather functions in concert with other cognitive processes to solve the problem at hand. What influence, if any, do extra-visual cognitive processes exert on visual attention?  

Two opposing theoretical accounts of visual attention are relevant to the current study: saliency-based theories and cognitive guidance theory. According to saliency-based theories, salient scene regions—those that contrast with their surroundings based on low-level image features (for example, luminance, color, orientation)—pull visual attention across a scene, from the most salient location to the least salient location in descending order. Saliency-based explanations cannot explain that physical salience does not determine which scene regions are fixated and that top-down task demands influence attention more than physical salience does. Cognitive guidance theory can account for these findings: the cognitive system pushes visual attention to scene regions, incorporating stored knowledge about scenes to prioritize regions that are most relevant to the viewer’s goals. Under this framework, cognitive systems—for example, long- and short-term memory, executive planning, etc.—operate together to guide visual attention. Coordination of cognitive systems helps to explain behavioral findings where saliency-based attentional theories fall short. For example, viewers look preferentially at meaningful regions of a scene (for example, those containing task-relevant objects), even when they are not visually salient (for example, under shadow), despite the presence of a salient distractor. 

Recent work has investigated attentional guidance by representing the spatial distribution of image salience and scene meaning comparably. Henderson and Hayes introduced meaning maps to quantify the distribution of meaning over a scene. Raters on mTurk saw small scene patches presented at two different scales and judged how meaningful or recognizable each patch was. Meaning maps were constructed by averaging the ratings across patch scales and smoothing the values. Image salience was quantified using Graph-Based Visual Salience. The feature maps were correlated with attention maps that were empirically derived from viewer fixations in scene memorization and aesthetic judgement tasks. Meaning explained greater variance in attention maps than salience did, both for linear and semipartial correlations, suggesting that meaning plays a greater role in guiding visual attention than image salience does. This replicated when attention maps constructed from the same dataset were weighted on fixation duration, when viewers described scenes aloud, during free-viewing of scenes, when meaning was not task-relevant, and even when image salience was task-relevant. In sum, scene meaning explained variation in attention maps better than image salience did across experiments and tasks, supporting the cognitive guidance theory of attentional guidance. 

One question that remains unexplored is whether other cognitive processes indirectly influence cognitive guidance of attention. For example, it is possible that verbal encoding may modulate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention: Perhaps the use of language, whether vocalized or not, pushes attention to more meaningful regions. While only two of the past experiments were explicitly linguistic in nature (scene description), the remaining tasks did not control for verbal encoding processes. 

There is evidence that observers incidentally name objects silently during object viewing. Meyer et al. asked subjects to report whether a target object was present or not in an array of objects, which sometimes included competitors that were semantically related to the target or were semantically unrelated, but had a homophonous name (for example, bat the tool vs. bat the animal). The presence of competitors interfered with search, which suggests information about the objects (name, semantic information) became active during viewing, even though that information was not task-relevant. In a picture-picture interference study, Meyer and Damian presented target objects that were paired with distractor objects with phonologically similar names, and instructed subjects to name the target objects. Naming latency was shorter when distractor names were phonologically similar to the name of the target object, suggesting that activation of the distractor object’s name occurred and facilitated retrieval of the target object’s name. Together, the two studies demonstrate a tendency for viewers to incidentally name objects they have seen.  

Cross-linguistic studies on the topic of linguistic relativity employ verbal interference paradigms to demonstrate that performance on perceptual tasks can be mediated by language processes. For example, linguistic color categories vary across languages even though the visual spectrum of colors is the same across language communities. A 2007 study showed that observers discriminated between colors faster when the colors belonged to different linguistic color categories, but the advantage disappeared with verbal interference. These findings indicate that language processes can mediate performance on perceptual tasks that are ostensibly not linguistic in nature, and a secondary verbal task that prevents task-incidental language use can disrupt the mediating influence of language. Similar influences of language on ostensibly non-linguistic processes, and the disruption thereof by verbal interference tasks, have been found for spatial memory, event perception, categorization, and numerical representations, to name a few. 

The above literature suggests we use internal language during visual processing, and in some cases those language processes may mediate perceptual processes. Could the relationship between meaning and visual attention observed previously have been modulated by verbal encoding processes? To examine this possibility, we used an articulatory suppression manipulation to determine whether verbal encoding mediates attentional guidance in scenes.

In the current study, observers studied 30 scenes for 12 seconds each for a later recognition memory test. The scenes used in the study phase were mapped for meaning and salience. We conducted two experiments in which subjects performed a secondary articulatory suppression task half of the time in addition to memorizing scenes. In Experiment 1, the suppression manipulation was between-subjects, and the articulatory suppression task was to repeat a three digit sequence aloud during the scene viewing period. We chose this suppression task because we suspected subjects might adapt to and subvert simpler verbal interference such as a syllable repetition, and because digit sequence repetition imposes less cognitive load than n-back tasks. In Experiment 2, we implemented a within-subject design using two experimental blocks: one with the sole task of memorizing scenes, the other with an additional articulatory suppression task. Because numerical stimuli may be processed differently than other verbal stimuli, we instead asked subjects to repeat the names of a sequence of three shapes aloud during the suppression condition. In the recognition phase of both experiments, subjects viewed 60 scenes—30 that were present in the study phase, 30 foils—and indicated whether or not they recognized the scene from the study phase.  

We tested two competing hypotheses about the relationship between verbal encoding and attentional guidance in scenes. If verbal encoding indeed mediated the relationship between meaning and attentional guidance in our previous work, we would expect observers to direct attention to meaningful scene regions only when internal verbalization strategies are available to them. Specifically, meaning should explain greater variance in attention maps than saliency in the control condition, and meaning should explain less or equal variance in attention as salience when subjects suppressed internal language use. Conversely, if verbal encoding did not mediate attentional guidance in scenes, the availability of verbalization strategies should not affect attention, and so we would expect to find an advantage of meaning over salience whether or not subjects engaged in a suppression task.        

Experiment 1: Methods  

Sixty-eight undergraduates enrolled at the University of California, Davis participated for course credit. All subjects were native speakers of English, at least 18 years old, and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They were naive to the purpose of the experiment and provided informed consent as approved by the University of California, Davis Institutional Review Board. Six subjects were excluded from analysis because their eyes could not be accurately tracked, 1 due to an equipment failure, and 1 due to experimenter error; data from the remaining 60 subjects were analyzed (30 subjects in each condition). 

Scenes were 30 digitized and luminance-matched photographs of real-world scenes used in a previous experiment. Of these, 10 depicted outdoor environments, and 20 depicted indoor environments. People were not present in any scenes. Another set of 30 digitized images of comparable scenes (similar scene categories and time period, no people depicted) were selected from a Google image search and served as memory foils. Because we did not evaluate attentional guidance for the foils, meaning and salience were not quantified for these scenes, and the images were not luminance-matched. 

Digit sequences were selected randomly without replacement from all three digit numbers ranging from 100 to 999 (900 numbers total), then segmented into 30 groups of 30 sequences each such that each digit sequence in the articulatory suppression condition was unique. 

Eye movements were recorded with an SR Research EyeLink 1000+ tower mount eyetracker at a 1000 Hz sampling rate. Subjects sat 83 cm away from a monitor such that scenes subtended approximately 26° x 19° visual angle at a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, presented in 4:3 aspect ratio. Head movements were minimized using a chin and forehead rest integrated with the eyetracker’s tower mount. Subjects were instructed to lean against the forehead rest to reduce head movement while allowing them to speak during the suppression task. Although viewing was binocular, eye movements were recorded from the right eye. The experiment was controlled using SR Research Experiment Builder software. Data were collected on two systems that were identical except that one subject computer operated using Windows 10, and the other used Windows 7.

Subjects were told they would see a series of scenes to study for a later memory test. Subjects in the articulatory suppression condition were told each trial would begin with a sequence of 3 digits, and were instructed to repeat the sequence of digits aloud during the scene viewing period. After the instructions, a calibration procedure was conducted to map eye position to screen coordinates. Successful calibration required an average error of less than 0.49° and a maximum error below 0.99°. 

Following successful calibration, there were 3 practice trials to familiarize subjects with the task prior to the experimental trials. In the suppression condition, during these practice trials participants studied three-digit sequences prior to viewing the scene. Practice digit sequences were 3 randomly sampled sequences from the range 1 to 99, in 3-digit format (for example, “0 3 6” for 36). Subjects pressed any button on a button box to advance throughout the task. 

Each subject received a unique pseudo-random trial order that prevented two scenes of the same type (for example, a kitchen) from occurring consecutively. A trial proceeded as follows. First, a five-point fixation array was displayed to check calibration. The subject fixated the center cross and the experimenter pressed a key to begin the trial if the fixation was stable, or reran the calibration procedure if not. Before the scene, subjects in the articulatory suppression condition saw the instruction “Study the sequence of digits shown below. Your task is to repeat these digits over and over out loud for 12 seconds while viewing an image of the scene” along with a sequence of 3 digits separated by spaces (for example, “8 0 9”), and pressed a button to proceed. The scene was shown for 12 seconds, during which time eye-movements were recorded. After 12 seconds elapsed, subjects pressed a button to proceed to the next trial. The trial procedure repeated until all 30 trials were complete. 

Figure 1 shows a schematic of the trial procedure. The first phase shows a fixation array against a gray background. Four peripheral fixations are black, and the central fixation is red. The experimenter presses a button to advance from this screen. In the articulatory suppression condition only, a digit sequence display is then shown, which displays a digit sequence to be rehearsed in white text against a gray background. Subjects press a button on a button box to advance. The button box, represented in the figure as 5 circles corresponding to each of the 5 buttons, has a yellow circle at the top, with a white circle directly below it. On either side of the white circle are a green circle on the left and a red circle on the right. Below the white circle is a blue circle. The third shows an example of a real-world scene. The example scene shows an indoor scene of an area near an entryway. There is a wooden dresser with electronics on it, and cleaning supplies adjacent to the wooden dresser. The walls are sea green, and the floor is tiled in black and white. There is an umbrella in the background in front of a radiator. The scene is shown for 12 seconds, after which an end of trial screen appears to let inform subjects they can press a button on the button box to proceed. 

A recognition memory test followed the experimental trials, in which subjects were shown the 30 experimental scenes and 30 foil scenes they had not seen previously. Presentation order was randomized without replacement. Subjects were informed that they would see one scene at a time and instructed to use the button box to indicate as quickly and accurately as possible whether they had seen the scene earlier in the experiment. After the instruction screen, subjects pressed any button to begin the memory test. In a recognition trial, subjects saw a scene that was either a scene from the study phase or a foil image. The scene persisted until a “Yes” or “No” button press occurred, after which the next trial began. Response time and accuracy were recorded. This procedure repeated 60 times, after which the experiment terminated. 

Fixations and saccades were parsed with EyeLink’s standard algorithm using velocity and acceleration thresholds. Eye movement data were imported offline into Matlab using the Visual EDF2ASC tool packaged with SR Research DataViewer software. The first fixation was excluded from analysis, as were saccade amplitude and fixation duration outliers. 

Attention maps were generated by constructing a matrix of fixation counts with the same x,y dimensions as the scene, and counting the total fixations corresponding to each coordinate in the image. The fixation count matrix was smoothed with a Gaussian low pass filter with circular boundary conditions and a frequency cutoff of -6dB. For the scene-level analysis, all fixations recorded during the viewing period were counted. For the fixation analysis, separate attention maps were constructed for each ordinal fixation. 

We generated meaning maps using the context-free rating method introduced in Henderson & Hayes (2017). Each 1024 x 768 pixel scene was decomposed into a series of partially overlapping circular patches at fine and coarse spatial scales. The decomposition resulted in 12,000 unique fine-scale patches and 4,320 unique coarse-scale patches, totaling 16,320 patches. 

Raters were 165 subjects recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. All subjects were located in the United States, had a HIT approval rating of 99% or more, and participated once. Subjects provided informed consent and were paid $0.50. 

All but one subject rated 300 random patches extracted from the 30 scenes. Subjects were instructed to rate how informative or recognizable each patch was using a 6-point Likert scale (‘very low’, ‘low’, ‘somewhat low’, ‘somewhat high’, ‘high’, ‘very high’). Prior to rating patches, subjects were given two examples each of low-meaning and high-meaning patches in the instructions to ensure they understood the task. Patches were presented in random order. Each patch was rated 3 times by 3 independent raters totaling 48,960 ratings per scene. Because there was high overlap across patches, each fine patch contained data from 27 independent raters and each coarse patch from 63 independent raters. 

Meaning maps were generated from the ratings for each scene by averaging, smoothing, and combining the fine and coarse scale maps from the corresponding patch ratings. The ratings for each pixel at each scale in each scene were averaged, producing an average fine and coarse rating map for each scene. The fine and coarse maps were then averaged. Because subjects in the eyetracking task showed a consistent center bias in their fixations, we applied center bias to the maps using a multiplicative down-weighting of scores in the map periphery. “Center bias” is the tendency for fixations to cluster around the center of the scene and to be relatively absent in the periphery of the image. The final map was blurred using a Gaussian filter via the Matlab function ‘imgaussfilt’ with a sigma of 10. 

Image-based saliency maps were constructed using the Graph-Based Visual Saliency toolbox in Matlab with default parameters. We used GBVS because it is a state-of-the-art model that uses only image-computable salience. While there are newer saliency models that predict attention better, these models incorporate high-level image features through training on viewer fixations and object features, which may index semantic information. We used GBVS to avoid incorporating semantic information in image-based saliency maps, which could confound the comparison with meaning.   

Prior to analysis, feature maps were normalized to a common scale using image histogram matching via the Matlab function ‘imhistmatch’ in the Image Processing Toolbox. The corresponding attention map for each scene served as the reference image. Map normalization was carried out within task conditions: for the map-based analysis of the control condition, feature maps were normalized to the attention map derived from fixations in the control condition only, and likewise for the suppression condition. Results did not differ between the current analysis and a second analysis using feature maps normalized to the same attention map generated from fixations in the control condition. 

Figure 2 shows a schematic of the meaning mapping procedure on the top row and representation saliency, meaning, and attention maps on the bottom row. The first panel of row 1 shows the same example real-world scene (the entryway). The second panel shows the fine-scale spatial grid, which consists of small overlapping circles on the scene. An example small-scale patch is shown on the grid. The patch shows a small group of objects on the dresser. The third panel shows the coarse-scale spatial grid, which consists of larger overlapping circles, and an example coarse-scale scene patch that overlaps with the example small-scale scene patch. It shows the same small group of objects, but additionally shows the top drawer of the dresser and adjacent objects (a phone and a modem) that were not visible in the small scale patch. The fourth panel shows six examples of patches that received high meaning ratings or low meaning ratings. The three high meaning patches show a phone on the dresser, a handle of a drawer on the dresser, and a candle on the dresser. The there low meaning patches all show only surfaces: the green wall in a corner of the room, the door, and several tiles from the floor. The second row shows the saliency, meaning, and attention maps, all of which are heatmaps of the same dimensions as the scene image. Dark colors (black and dark red) indicate low map values, and bright colors (white and yellow) indicate high map values. The saliency map shows high values that correspond to contrasts between objects and the tile floor, a dark gray vacuum cleaner against a white door, white crown molding contrasting with the green walls, and the outlines around each drawer or the dresser. The meaning map shows high values corresponding to the top of the dresser where many small objects are located and dresser drawers, with more diffuse middle values (orange-red) corresponding to objects around the dresser. The attention map for the control condition has several bright spots corresponding to higher fixation density. The hot spots overlap with the objects on the top of the dresser, the vacuum cleaner, other cleaning supplies next to the dresser, and the objects in the background. The attention map for the suppression condition is more or less identical.  

We computed correlations (R2) across the maps of 30 scenes to determine the degree to which saliency and meaning overlap with one another. We excluded the peripheral 33% of the feature maps when determining overlap between the maps to control for the peripheral downweighting applied to both, which otherwise would inflate the correlation between them. On average, meaning and saliency were correlated, and this relationship differed from zero.   

Experiment 1: Results  

To determine what role verbal encoding might play in extracting meaning from scenes, we asked whether the advantage of meaning over salience in explaining variance in attention would hold in each condition. To answer this question, we conducted two-tailed paired t-tests within task conditions. 

To determine whether we obtained adequate effect sizes for the primary comparison of interest, we conducted a sensitivity analysis using G*Power 3.1. We computed the effect size index dz—a standardized difference score—and the critical t statistic for a two-tailed paired t-test with 95% power and a sample size of 30 scenes. The analysis revealed a critical t value of 2.05 and a minimum dz of 0.68.

We correlated meaning and saliency maps with attention maps to determine the degree to which meaning or salience guided visual attention. Squared linear and semipartial correlations (R2) were computed within each condition for each of the 30 scenes. The relationship between meaning and salience, respectively, and visual attention was analyzed using t-tests. Cohen’s d was computed to estimate effect size, interpreted as small, medium, or large following Cohen (1988).           

In the control condition, when subjects were only instructed to memorize scenes, meaning accounted for 34% of the average variance in attention and salience accounted for 21%. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant. In the articulatory suppression condition, when subjects additionally had to repeat a sequence of digits aloud, meaning accounted for 37% of the average variance in attention whereas salience accounted for 23%. The advantage of meaning over salience was also significant when the task prevented verbal encoding.

Because meaning and salience are correlated, we partialed out the shared variance explained by both meaning and salience. In the control condition, when the shared variance explained by salience was accounted for, meaning explained 15% of the average variance in attention, while salience explained only 2% of the average variance once the variance explained by meaning was accounted for. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant. In the articulatory suppression condition, meaning explained 16% of the average unique variance after shared variance was partialed out, while salience explained only 2% of the average variance after shared variance with meaning was accounted for, and the advantage was significant.  

Figure 3a shows scatter box plots for linear correlations on the left panel and semipartial correlations that explain the unique variance explained by meaning and salience, respectively, on the right panel. The y-axis for both panels ranges from 0.00 to 1.00. In the scatter box plots, the mean is shown on the center line and 95% confidence intervals as boxes around the mean. Whiskers correspond to plus or minus one standard deviation. Dots correspond to individual data points. Between the control condition and the suppression condition, image salience—indicated in blue—explains essentially the same amount of variance, and the boxes are almost identical. The box (and central line) for meaning is slightly higher and larger in the suppression condition than in the control. On the right panel, which shows semipartial correlations, the picture is much the same except the box plots for the variance explained by salience are barely visible—thick, dark lines hovering just above 0 on the y-axis. The boxes for meaning look even more similar across conditions than they did for the linear correlations, but unlike the boxes for salience they are clearly visible and hover around 0.15 on the y-axis.

To summarize, we found a large advantage of meaning over salience in explaining variance in attention in both conditions, for both linear and semipartial correlations. For all comparisons, the value of the t statistic and dz exceeded the thresholds obtained in the sensitivity analysis. 

Following our previous work, we examined early fixations to determine whether salience influences early scene viewing. We correlated each feature map (meaning, salience) with attention maps at each fixation. Squared linear and semipartial correlations (R2) were computed for each fixation, and the relationship between meaning and salience with attention, respectively, was assessed for the first three fixations using paired t-tests.  

In the control condition, meaning accounted for 37% of the average variance in attention during the first fixation, and 14% and 13% during the second and third fixations, respectively. Salience accounted for 9%, 8%, and 7% of the average variance during the first, second, and third fixations, respectively. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations. For subjects in the suppression condition, meaning accounted for 42% of the average variance during the first fixation, 21% during the second, and 17% during the third fixation. Salience accounted for 10% of the average variance during the first fixation and 9% during the second and third fixations. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant for all three fixations.            

To account for the correlation between meaning and salience, we partialed out shared variance explained by both meaning and salience, then repeated the fixation analysis on the semipartial correlations. In the control condition, after the shared variance explained by both meaning and salience was partialed out, meaning accounted for 30% of the average variance at the first fixation, 10% of the variance during the second fixation, and 8% during the third fixation. After shared variance with meaning was partialed out, salience accounted for only 2% of the average unique variance at the first and third fixations and 3% at the second fixation. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations. In the articulatory suppression condition, after the shared variance with salience was partialled out, meaning accounted for 34% of the average variance during the first fixation, 14% at the second fixation, and 10% during the third fixation. After the shared variance with meaning was partialled out, on average salience accounted for 2% of the variance at all three fixations. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations.  

Figure 3b shows line graphs for linear correlations on the top row and semipartial correlations that explain the unique variance explained by meaning and salience on the bottom row. The y-axis for both panels ranges from 0.00 to 1.00. Lines in the graph corresponding to the suppression condition are dashed. Error bars around each point indicate 95% confidence intervals. For linear correlations, blue lines corresponding to image salience hover at or below 0.1 for the entire period shown (fixations 1-38), and are almost completely overlapping between conditions. Red lines for meaning start out quite high—around 0.4—and decrease after the first fixation, but both red lines are higher than the blue lines for image salience throughout. The same trend is visible on the graph showing semipartial correlations, except the blue lines for salience are barely above 0 on the y-axis, and the red lines for meaning are more clearly distinguishable from those for salience, but not terribly distinguishable from one another (across conditions). In both graphs, the dashed red lines corresponding to meaning in the suppression condition are higher than the solid red lines for the control condition.       

In sum, early fixations revealed a consistent advantage of meaning over salience, counter to the claim that salience influences attention during early scene viewing. The advantage was present for the first three fixations in both conditions, when we analyzed both linear and semipartial correlations, and all effect sizes were medium or large.            

To confirm that subjects took the memorization task seriously, we totaled the number of hits, correct rejections, misses, and false alarms on the recognition task for each subject, each of which ranged from 0 to 30. Recognition performance was high in both conditions. On average, subjects in the control condition correctly recognized scenes shown in the memorization task 95% of the time, while subjects who engaged in the suppression task during memorization correctly recognized scenes 90% of the time. Subjects in the control conditions falsely reported that a foil scene had been present in the memorization scene set 3% of the time on average, and those in the suppression condition false alarmed an average of 4% of the time. Overall, subjects in the control condition had higher recognition accuracy, though the difference in performance was small. 

Figure 4a shows recognition task performance for each subject using violin plots with data points superimposed. Red violin plots indicate hits, green violin plots indicate correct rejections, blue violins indicate misses, and purple violins show false alarms. Recognition performance for the control condition is shown on the left, and for the suppression condition on the right. In both conditions, there are more hits and correct rejections than misses or false alarms, reflecting high accuracy. However, in the suppression condition (on the right), the violins are thinner and taller for all conditions, indicating more variation in the data for the suppression condition than the control.  

We then computed d’ with log-linear correction to handle extreme values (ceiling or floor performance) using the dprime function from the psycho package in R, resulting in 30 data points per condition (1 data point per subject). On average, d’ scores were higher in the control condition than the articulatory suppression condition. The difference in performance was not significant, and the effect size was small.

Figure 4b shows d’ scores for the control condition and the suppression condition as violin plots with data points superimposed. The gray violin corresponds to d’ for the control condition, and is much higher on the y-axis and wider than that of the suppression condition, showing less variation in the data and slightly better performance in that condition. The yellow violin corresponds to the suppression condition, and it is more narrow and tall, though most of the d’ scores (all but 2) fall within the same range for both conditions.  In sum, recognition was numerically better for subjects who were only instructed to study the scenes as opposed to those who additionally completed an articulatory suppression task, but the difference was not significant.  

Experiment 1: Discussion 

The results of Experiment 1 suggest that incidental verbalization does not modulate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention during scene viewing. However, the experiment had several limitations. First, we implemented the suppression manipulation between-subjects rather than within-subjects out of concern that subjects might infer the hypothesis in a within-subject paradigm and skew the results. Second, because numerical cognition is unique, it is possible that another type of verbal interference would affect the relationship between meaning and attention. Third, we tested relatively few scenes (only 30). 

We conducted a second experiment to address these limitations and replicate the advantage of meaning over salience despite verbal interference. In Experiment 2, the verbal interference consisted of sequences of common shape names (for example, square, heart, circle) rather than digits, and the interference paradigm was implemented within-subject using a blocked design. We added 30 scenes to the Experiment 1 stimulus set, yielding 60 experimental items total. 

We tested the same two competing hypotheses in Experiments 1 and 2: If verbal encoding mediates the relationship between meaning and attentional guidance, and the use of numerical interference in Experiment 1 was insufficient to disrupt that mediation, then the relationship between meaning and attention should be weaker when incidental verbalization is not available, in which case meaning and salience may explain comparable variance in attention. If verbal encoding does not mediate attentional guidance in scenes and our Experiment 1 results cannot be explained by numerical interference specifically, then we expect meaning to explain greater variance in attention both when shape names are used as interference and when there is no verbal interference. 

The method for Experiment 2 was the same as Experiment 1, with the following exceptions. 

Sixty-five undergraduates enrolled at the University of California, Davis participated for course credit. All were native speakers of English, at least 18 years old, and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They were naive to the purpose of the experiment and provided informed consent as approved by the University of California, Davis Institutional Review Board. Four subjects were excluded from analysis because their eyes could not be accurately tracked, and an additional subject was excluded due to excessive movement; data from the remaining 60 subjects were analyzed. 

We selected the following common shapes for the suppression task: circle, cloud, club, cross, arrow, heart, moon, spade, square, and star. Names for the shapes were monosyllabic for eight shape names and disyllabic for two shape names. Shape sequences consisted of 3 shapes randomly sampled without replacement from the set of 10.

Scenes were 60 digitized and luminance-matched photographs of real-world scenes. Thirty were used in Experiment 1, and an additional 30 were drawn from another study. Of the additional scenes, 16 depicted outdoor environments, and 14 depicted indoor environments, and each of the 30 scenes belonged to a unique scene category. People and text were not present in any of the scenes. 

Another set of 60 digitized images of comparable scenes (similar scene categories from the same time period, no people depicted) served as foils in the memory test. Thirty of these were used in Experiment 1, and an additional 30 were distractor images drawn from a previous study. The Experiment 1 scenes and the additional 30 scenes were equally distributed across blocks. 

The apparatus was identical to that used in Experiment 1. 

Subjects were informed that they would complete two separate experimental blocks, and that in one block each trial would begin with a sequence of 3 shapes that they would repeat aloud during the scene viewing period. 

Following successful calibration, there were 4 practice trials to familiarize subjects with the task prior to the experimental trials. The first 2 practice trials were control trials, and the rest were articulatory suppression trials. These consisted of shape sequences (for example, cloud arrow cloud) that were not repeated in the experimental trials. Before the practice trials, subjects were shown all of the shapes used in the suppression task, alongside the names of each shape.  

Figure 5a shows the shape familiarization screen, which depicts all 10 shapes in black against a gray background, accompanied by white text labels to provide the name we wanted subjects to use for each shape. From left to right and top to bottom, the shapes shown are circle, cloud, club, cross, arrow, heart, moon, spade, square, and star. 

The trial procedure was identical to Experiment 1, except that the pre-scene articulatory suppression condition displayed the instruction “Study the sequence of shapes shown below. Your task is to repeat these shapes over and over out loud for 12 seconds while viewing an image of the scene”, followed by a sequence of 3 shapes (for example, square, heart, cross) until the subject pressed a button. 

Figure 5b shows the shape sequence display in the suppression condition, which includes instructions in white text against a gray background, with an example shape sequence shown in black. The shape sequence shown is square, heart, cross. 

Following the experimental trials in each block, subjects performed a recognition memory in which 30 experimental scenes they saw earlier in the block and 30 foil scenes that they had not seen previously were shown. The remainder of the recognition memory task procedure was identical to that of Experiment 1. The procedure repeated 60 times, after which the block terminated. Following completion of the first block, subjects started the second with another calibration procedure. In the second block, subjects saw the other 30 scenes (and 30 memory foils) that were not displayed during the first block, and participated in the other condition (suppression if the first block was the control, and vice versa). Each subject completed 60 experimental trials and 120 recognition memory trials total. The scenes shown in each block and the order of conditions were counterbalanced across subjects.  

Attention maps were generated in the same manner as Experiment 1. 

Meaning maps for 30 scenes added in Experiment 2 were generated using the same procedure as the scenes tested in Experiment 1, with the following exceptions.  Raters were 148 UC Davis undergraduate students recruited through the UC Davis online subject pool. All were 18 years or older, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and reported no color blindness. Subjects received course credit for participation.  

In each survey, catch patches showing solid surfaces (for example, a wall) served as an attention check. Data from 25 subjects who did not attend to the task (responded incorrectly on fewer than 85% of catch trials), or did not respond to more than 10% of the questions, were excluded. Data from the remaining 123 raters were used to construct meaning maps. 

Saliency maps were generated in the same manner as in Experiment 1. Maps were normalized in the same manner as in Experiment 1. 

We determined the degree to which saliency and meaning overlap for the 30 new scenes by computing feature map correlations across the maps of 30 scenes, excluding the periphery to control for the peripheral downweighting associated with center biasing operations. On average, meaning and saliency were correlated, and this relationship differed from zero. 

We again conducted a sensitivity analysis, which revealed a critical t value of 2.00 and a minimum dz of 0.47.

We correlated meaning and saliency maps with attention maps in the same manner as in Experiment 1. Squared linear and semipartial correlations (R2) were computed within each condition for each of the scenes. The relationship between meaning and salience with visual attention was analyzed using t-tests. Cohen’s d was computed, and effect sizes were interpreted in the same manner as the Experiment 1 results.   

We examined early fixations to replicate the early advantage of meaning over image salience observed in Experiment 1 and previous work. We correlated each feature map (meaning, salience) with attention maps at each fixation. Map-level correlations and t-tests were conducted in the same manner as Experiment 1. 

Experiment 2: Results 

We sought to replicate the results of Experiment 1 using a more robust experimental design. If verbal encoding is not required to extract meaning from scenes, we expected an advantage of meaning over salience in explaining variance in attention for both conditions. We again conducted paired t-tests within task conditions. 

Meaning accounted for 36% of the average variance in attention in the control condition and salience accounted for 25%. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant and the effect size was large. Meaning accounted for 45% of the variance in attention in the suppression condition and salience accounted for 27%. Consistent with Experiment 1, the advantage of meaning over salience was significant even with verbal interference, and the effect size was large. 

To account for the relationship between meaning and salience, we partialed out the shared variance explained by both. When the shared variance explained by salience was accounted for in the control condition, meaning explained 15% of the average variance in attention, while salience explained 3% of the average variance after accounting for the variance explained by meaning. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant, and the effect size was large. Meaning explained 20% of the unique variance on average after shared variance was partialed out in the articulatory suppression condition, and salience explained 2% of the average variance after shared variance with meaning was accounted for, and the advantage was significant with a large effect size. 

Figure 6a shows scatter box plots for linear correlations on the left panel and semipartial correlations that explain the unique variance explained by meaning and salience, respectively, on the right panel. The y-axis for both panels ranges from 0.00 to 1.00. In the scatter box plots, the mean is shown on the center line and 95% confidence intervals as boxes around the mean. Whiskers correspond to plus or minus one standard deviation. Dots correspond to individual data points. Between the control condition and the suppression condition, image salience—indicated in blue—explains essentially the same amount of variance, hovering around 0.25 on the y-axis, and the boxes are almost identical. The box (and central line) for meaning is higher and larger in the suppression condition than in the control, both of which are higher than image salience. On the right panel, which shows semipartial correlations, the picture is much the same except the box plots for the variance explained by salience are barely visible—thick, dark lines hovering just above 0 on the y-axis. The box for meaning in the control condition hovers around 0.15, but in the suppression condition it is higher and hovers around 0.20. Both boxes for meaning are clearly visible and higher than the blue boxes for image salience.

Consistent with Experiment 1, we found a large advantage of meaning over salience in accounting for variance in attention in both conditions, for both linear and semipartial correlations, and the value of the t statistic and dz exceeded the thresholds obtained in the sensitivity analysis. 

In the control condition, meaning accounted for 30% of the average variance in attention during the first fixation, 17% during the second, and 16% during the third. Salience accounted for 11% of the variance at the first fixation and 10% of the variance during the second and third fixations. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations, and effect sizes were medium or large. In the suppression condition, meaning accounted for 45% of the average variance during the first fixation, 32% during the second, and 25% during the third. Salience accounted for 13% of the average variance during the first fixation,15% during the second, and 11% during the third. The advantage of meaning over salience was significant for all three fixations. 

Because meaning and salience were correlated, we partialed out shared variance explained by both and analyzed semipartial correlations computed for each of the initial three fixations. In the control condition, after the shared variance explained by both meaning and salience was partialed out, meaning accounted for 23% of the average variance at the first fixation, 11% of the variance during the second, and 9% during the third. After shared variance with meaning was partialed out, salience accounted for 3% of the average unique variance at the first fixation and 4% at the second and third. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations. In the suppression condition, after the shared variance with salience was partialled out, meaning accounted for 35% of the variance on average during the first fixation, 20% of the variance at the second, and 16% during the third. After the shared variance with meaning was partialled out, on average salience accounted for 2% of the variance at the first and third fixations and 3% of the variance at the second. The advantage of meaning was significant for all three fixations, with large effect sizes.

Figure 6b shows line graphs for linear correlations on the top row and semipartial correlations that explain the unique variance explained by meaning and salience on the bottom row. The y-axis for both panels ranges from 0.00 to 1.00. Lines in the graph corresponding to the suppression condition are dashed. Error bars around each point indicate 95% confidence intervals. For linear correlations, blue lines corresponding to image salience again hover at or below 0.1 for the entire period shown (fixations 1-38), and are almost completely overlapping between conditions. Red lines for meaning start out quite high—around 0.3 and 0.45 for the control and suppression conditions, respecitvely—and decrease after the first fixation, but both red lines are higher than the blue lines for image salience until time points 33-38. The same trend is visible on the graph showing semipartial correlations, except the blue lines for salience are barely above 0 on the y-axis. The red lines for meaning are very clearly distinguishable from those for salience. In both graphs, the dashed red lines corresponding to meaning in the suppression condition are higher than the solid red lines for the control condition, moreso than they were for the Experiment 1 data shown in Figure 3b.  

The results of Experiment 2 replicated those of Experiment 1: meaning held a significant advantage over salience when the entire viewing period was considered and when we limited our analysis to early viewing, both for linear and semipartial correlations. 

As an attention check, we totaled the number of hits, correct rejections, misses, and false alarms on the recognition task for each subject. The totals for each response category ranged from 0 to 30. Recognition performance was high in both conditions. In the control condition, subjects correctly recognized scenes shown in the memorization task 97% of the time on average, while subjects correctly recognized scenes 91% of the time after they had engaged in the suppression task during memorization. In the control condition, subjects falsely reported that a foil had been present in the memorization scene set 1% of the time on average, and in the suppression condition, the average false alarm rate was 2%. Overall, recognition accuracy was higher in the control condition than the suppression condition, though the difference was small.  

Figure 7a shows recognition task performance for each subject using violin plots with data points superimposed. Red violin plots indicate hits, green violin plots indicate correct rejections, blue violins indicate misses, and purple violins show false alarms. Recognition performance for the control condition is shown on the left, and for the suppression condition on the right. In both conditions, there are more hits and correct rejections than misses or false alarms overall, reflecting high accuracy. However, in the suppression condition (on the right), the violins are thinner and taller for all conditions, indicating more variation in the data for the suppression condition than the control, and the difference is more apparent in Figure 7a than it was in Figure 4a for Experiment 1.  

We then computed d’ in the same manner as Experiment 1. In the control condition, d’ scores were higher on average than in the suppression condition. To determine whether the difference in means was significant, we conducted a paired t-test, which revealed a significant difference with a large effect size. 

Figure 7b shows d’ scores for the control condition and the suppression condition as violin plots with data points superimposed. The gray violin corresponds to d’ for the control condition. It is shaped like a funnel in that it is very wide at the top, indicating most data points corresponded to high recognition accuracy. It is much higher on the y-axis and wider than that of the suppression condition, is represented by a yellow violin plot which is shaped like an upside-down wine bottle indicating more data points corresponding to poorer accuracy in the suppression condition, and greater variation in the suppression condition.  

For Experiment 2, while recognition accuracy was high overall, recognition was significantly better in the control condition, when subjects memorized scenes and did not engage in the suppression task. 

Experiment 2: Discussion 

The attention results of Experiment 2 replicated those of Experiment 1, providing further evidence that incidental verbalization does not modulate the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention during scene viewing. Recognition performance was significantly worse in the suppression condition than in the control condition, which we cannot attribute to individual differences given that the interference manipulation was implemented within-subject. One possibility is that the shape name interference imposed greater cognitive load than the digit sequence interference; however, we cannot determine whether that was the case based on the current experiment. 

General Discussion 

The current study tested two competing hypotheses concerning the relationship (or lack thereof) between incidental verbal encoding during scene viewing and attentional guidance in scenes. First, the relationship between scene meaning and visual attention could be mediated by verbal encoding, even when it occurs incidentally. Second, scene meaning guides attention regardless of whether incidental verbalization is available, and verbal encoding does not mediate use of scene meaning. We tested these hypotheses in two experiments using an articulatory suppression paradigm in which subjects studied scenes for a later memorization task and either engaged in a secondary task (digit or shape sequence repetition) to suppress incidental verbalization, or had no secondary task. In both experiments, we found an advantage of meaning over salience in explaining the variance in attention maps whether or not incidental verbalization was suppressed. Our results did not support the hypothesis that verbal encoding mediates attentional guidance by meaning in scenes. To the extent that observers use incidental verbalization during scene viewing, it does not appear to mediate the influence of meaning on visual attention, suggesting that meaning in scenes is not necessarily interpreted through the lens of language.            

Our attentional findings do not support saliency-based theories of attentional guidance in scenes. Instead, they are consistent with prior work showing that regions with higher image salience are not fixated more and that top-down information, including task demands, plays a greater role than image salience in guiding attention from as early as the first fixation. Consistent with cognitive guidance theory, scene meaning—-which captures the distribution of information across the scene—-predicted visual attention better in both conditions than image salience did. Because our chosen suppression manipulation interfered with verbalization strategies without imposing undue executive load, our findings demonstrate that the advantage of meaning over salience was not modulated by the use of verbal encoding during scene viewing. Instead, we suggest that domain-general cognitive mechanisms (for example, a central executive) may push attention to meaningful scene regions, although additional work is required to test this idea. 

Many of the previous studies that showed an effect of internal verbalization strategies (via interference paradigms) tested simpler displays, such as arrays of objects, color patches, or cartoon images, while our stimuli were real-world photographs. Unlike real-world scenes, observers cannot extract scene gist from simple arrays, and may process cartoons less efficiently than natural scenes. It is possible that verbal encoding exerts a greater influence on visual processing for simpler stimuli: the impoverished images may put visual cognition at a disadvantage because gist and other visual information that we use to efficiently process scenes are not available.       

We cannot know with certainty whether observers in our suppression task were unable to use internal verbal encoding. However, we would expect the secondary verbal task to have at least impeded verbalization strategies, and that should have impacted the relationship between meaning and attention if verbal encoding is involved in processing scene meaning. Furthermore, the suppression tasks we used (3-digit or 3-shape sequences) were comparable to tasks that eliminated verbalization effects in related work, and so should have suppressed inner speech. We suspect that a more demanding verbal task would have imposed greater cognitive load, which could confound our results because we would not be able to separate effects of verbal interference from those of cognitive load.  

Subjects in the control condition did not perform a secondary non-verbal task (for example, a visual working memory task). Given that our findings did not differ across conditions, we suspect controlling for the secondary task’s cognitive load would not have affected the outcome. Recall that prior work has shown digit repetition tasks do not pose excessive cognitive load, and we would have expected lower recognition accuracy in the suppression condition if the demands of the suppression task were too great. However, we cannot be certain the verbal task did not impose burdensome cognitive load in our paradigm, and therefore this remains an issue for further investigation. 

Our results are limited to attentional guidance when memorizing scenes. It is possible that verbal encoding exerts a greater influence on other aspects of visual processing, or that the extent to which verbal encoding plays a role depends on the task. Verbal interference may be more disruptive in a scene categorization task, for example, than in scene memorization, given that categorization often involves verbal labels. 

The current study investigated whether internal verbal encoding processes (for example, thought in the form of language) modulate the influence of scene meaning on visual attention. We employed a verbal interference paradigm to control for incidental verbalization during a scene memorization task, which did not diminish the relationship between scene meaning and attention. Our findings suggest that verbal encoding does not mediate scene processing, and contribute to a large body of empirical support for cognitive guidance theory.   

Supplemental material available on the Open Science Framework under a project with the title as the current manuscript. 

This work has been published in the journal Memory & Cognition, Volume 48, issue 7, inclusive pages 1181-1195. A preprint of the accepted version of the manuscript is available on PsyArxiv under the same name. Please refer to either document for correspondence information, author affiliations, references, statistics, and figures.

[the-record-newspaper]

Unsolved: Murder at Jumpingoff Place: Epilogue

     By:  Larry J. Griffin

Special Reporter for The Record

“A man who is laden with the guilt of human blood shall be a fugitive until death; let no one support him.”  Proverbs 28:17

I have never been a fan of the State of Mississippi.

There is a certain energy there that I perceived during my initial foray into the Magnolia State—in August, 1967—that remains inconsonant with mine. Yet, I have visited there many times, and in a one-week stretch—not too many years ago—I had speaking engagements in the cities of Columbus, Philadelphia, Jackson, Laurel, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport.  Further, I am fortunate to have a considerable cadre of cogent colleagues and congenial comrades amongst Mississippians.

But I know its bloody history of craven crimes perpetrated against humanity during the Civil Rights Era—hundreds of which remain unsolved.  

The City of Natchez, Miss., hugs the southwestern border of the state. Across the Mississippi River from Natchez--two miles and eleven miles respectively—sit the Louisiana towns of Vidalia and Ferriday.  Because of their geographic proximity, that stretch of highway is referred to as the Natchez-Vidalia-Ferriday area or corridor. Geography, however, is not their only link—they share a sordid past of Civil Rights-based murders and mayhem, perpetrated by a violent cell of the Ku Klux Klan known as the “Silver Dollar Group.”  

Comprised of about 20 men from Mississippi and Louisiana, each member carried a “silver dollar” minted during the year of his birth for identification.  They prided themselves in being the toughest Klansmen found in either state.  They mutilate, murdered, bombed and burned in an effort to “keep the negro in his place.” Moreover, they are responsible for the perpetration of crimes that are among the “cold cases” yet to be resolved through the FBI’s Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative—a 2007 collaboration between the FBI, Civil Rights groups, and state/local law enforcement.

In Ferriday, however, resides a newspaper editor who is a part of a three-person newsroom responsible for publishing The Concordia Sentinel—a weekly publication, like The Record—with a readership of 5,000, half that of Wilkes County’s only international newspaper.  Editor Stanley Nelson has been characterized as a “slow-talking, easy-going good ole’ boy.” But, don’t let that description belie the fact that he is an accomplished investigative journalist who has written 150 stories on three Civil Rights crimes committed five decades ago—cold cases.  And he has reported these in much the same way that I presented the 27 articles comprising the Murder at Jumpingoff Place series.

“I took it week by week and reported what I learned that week so that it would open people’s eyes as it did mine and help jar memories and maybe compel people to come forward,” Mr. Nelson stated in a 2011 interview with Hank Klibanoff of the Columbia Journalism Review.  

Stanley’s journalistic efforts have yielded results.  In January of 2011, for instance, he implicated a living suspect in the 1964 Klan murder of Frank Morris in Ferriday, LA, which led to a subsequent grand jury investigation. Additionally, in May of that same year, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting “for his courageous and determined efforts to unravel a long forgotten KKK murder during the Civil Rights era.”

“Investigative reporting is not something I ever thought I would do. It’s not glamorous, especially when you’re…looking into murders that took place forty and fifty years ago,” Stanley Nelson averred.  “…You feel lucky just to learn whether the people mentioned in old documents are alive. Finding, reaching, and talking with them and others who may know about it [a case] is another challenge altogether. The biggest hurdle is finding out what happened…And how did the killers do it?”

That paragraph characterizes my life for the last eight months, as I have endeavored to reconstruct the 1984 case of the disappearance and death of Sherry Hart for readers of The Record. Despite the challenges—and perhaps because of them—this journalistic journey has been “worth the squeeze.” And I have discovered some things about myself in the process, none-the-least of which is that I am intrigued by investigative journalism.  Perhaps the biggest pay-off has been a more comprehensive understanding of that which occurred a cold Sunday Evening in January along the crest of a precipice known as Jumpingoff Place.  

Along the journey, I have been asked questions by readers relative to what I personally think, posit, and/or have come to believe about the case of the untimely death of Sherry Lyall Hart.  As previously stated, I have assiduously avoided expressing opinions and proffering editorial comments in my columns.  However, since I have been asked to do so in this several part epilogue, I will pose and answer the most “frequently-asked questions” by inquiring readers.

QUESTION:  “Larry, do you think Richard Lynn Bare is guilty of murdering Sherry Hart?”  

Yes—after conducting extensive research across eight months, I believe the evidence to be incontrovertible—Lynn Bare pushed Ms. Hart off that 1200-foot cliff at Jumpingoff Place. Jeff Burgess said so; Lynn’s girlfriend, Dottie Jenkins Staley knew it; even Lynn implicated himself in his statement to Ashe County Sheriff Gene Goss. About the only individuals who maintain his innocence can be found among members of the Bare Family. But I am more interested in the “why” of his actions.  

In the 11th article of this series entitled, “Rhyme and Reason,” I explored several theories which offered explanations for Bare’s actions. Of course, that installment was written prior to my being allowed to peruse the Ashe County case file for the first time in December, 2017. Surprisingly, a couple of the theories resonated with sworn statements and other information contained therein.

The most plausible explanation for Lynn Bare’s action that evening is a pastiche of a couple hypotheses.  There is, however, no substantial evidence to support the notion that his judgment was impaired by his ingestion of drugs or imbibing too much alcohol.  Rather, this impulsive, abusive 19-year-old young man knew that he was on probation.  In fact, if I read correctly the Suspect’s Identification Records secured through the FBI Identification Division, Lynn received—in 1982—two years of confinement and two years of probation for Breaking/Entering/Larceny and 12 counts of Breaking into a Drink Machine.  Having already experienced imprisonment, Bare was disinclined to return to confinement. If Sherry Hart had lodged a complaint with authorities relative to Bare’s two failed attempts to rape her, then likely his probation would have been revoked immediately and he remanded to the Ashe County Detention Center.  Pushing her off the cliff, he reasoned, would alleviate that possibility.

QUESTION:  “Do you think Bare is guilty of first degree murder?”

At first, I didn’t believe that Lynn Bare would have ever been convicted of premeditated murder—I told April Billings, Sherry Hart’s daughter, as much during our initial interview.  And I have never subscribed to the notion that Lynn intended for that January 15th car ride to be Sherry’s last.  It was his intent, however, to lure Sherry into a sexually-compromising liaison. Somewhere along the route of a 30-mile joyride, the dynamic changed.

A couple of statements that Jeff Burgess made across three interviews altered my perception somewhat.  He recounted for Sheriff Goss and SBI Agent Steve Cabe that he urged Cousin Lynn to take a bleeding Ms. Hart to the hospital for treatment.  “There is no way we can get out of it now….It’s too late,” Lynn replied.  It was at that crucial juncture that intentionality was introduced into the equation and an impulsive reactive response transmogrified into a premeditative action.  And when the trio approached the turn-off at Jumpingoff Place near J. D. Taylor’s bar, Lynn Bare knew how all of this was going to end for Sherry Hart.  When Burgess asked him what he did, Lynn retorted, “The bitch got what she deserved….She hung up and then slid on down.”

Admittedly, those two statements bothered me more than I revealed in the reporting of them.  The first reflects a complete lack of empathy and a pervasive, perverse disdain for human life.  The second mirrors a cold-blooded determination to ensure that the job was thoroughly, irrevocably concluded.  It also recommends to suspicion that Bare may have hit Sherry on the head again in an effort to render her unconscious before shoving her over the edge.  The momentum of a victim’s sudden descent is likely to be arrested and “hang up” if the victim in insentient and lifeless rather than grasping and struggling all the way down.  

That being said, even if Richard Lynn Bare had stood trial on July 29, 1985 or even when he eventually does so, I doubt that a jury would have returned or will render a verdict of “murder in the first degree.”  More likely, second-degree murder. There just doesn’t seem to be enough evidentiary support for premeditation.  However, Lynn’s observation, “She hung up and then slid on down,” disturbed me when I first read them—they haunt me still.

Three questions remain….These I will answer next week in the concluding segment of, Epilogue to a Murder Case.

[thebooksaidthat]

20 Favorite Books of 2020 Recommendation List!

Phew, 2020 is about to end. What a year, isn’t it? It’s been a long, tiring and bad year all round for a lot of people in different aspects and reading is a way for all of us to escape our realities. I’ve never had a year like this at all, in terms of my reading habits. The lock downs and time off from school allowed me to read probably the number of books in my entire childhood in less than a year. I read 100+ books this year, varying in pages and formats but it still surprises me that I managed to read that much. This probably won’t happen again in the coming years because of college and etc but I had a good time reading. So, I thought I would share some of my favorite books/series’ that I’ve read this year and give a short description/opinion on it. Hope something catches your eye here! 

side note:

most of these fall under the fantasy category but there are some other genre’s too like romance/contemporaries/non-fiction

the books are listed only based off their category and not in any specific preference order but if you’re interested to see a review/rating on it you can visit my Goodreads profile.

 1. Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Do you enjoy reading fantasy books with powerful female protagonists? Do you like dragons? How about a queer F/F pairing as the main couple within the story? Priory of the Orange Tree was a book which I didn’t expect I would enjoy when I read the first few chapters. It’s a book that requires quite a bit of commitment considering the sheer page count of it (though if you read any Stormlight Archive it shouldn’t be a problem) but I grew on the plot line and characters after a bit. There’s classic tropes thrown in here and there but what made me enjoy it was that it focuses on female characters as the heroes rather than male ones. Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoy some books with male-centered characters too but it’s nice to see some good ol’ fantasy with protagonists I can identify with. 2. Beyond the Ruby Veil by Mara Fitzgerald 

The first book of a series(unsure how many books atm), this debut was just a fun read. I love strong and rule-defying characters and this book gave us just that and more. Although I think the storyline might be a bit bumpy for me, I found that this book perfect for my reading slump and I really liked how it ends too. It might be worth waiting till 2021 to read this because the ending is pretty cliff-hangery in my opinion. I’m hopeful for the sequel to be even better because there are hints of a slow burn, enemies to lovers(F/F) pairing for this one! 3. Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan

This was one of my earliest reads of 2020 and I really enjoyed it. The premise of the story is not one I’ve seen before in YA books and it should appeal to many readers. In a world where the ruling king ‘captures’ beautiful women from around the nation to be made his concubines, we follow Lei as she experiences all of that and her journey in going against everything. This is the 1st book out of 3 and its definitely a strong start to a series. There’s some great topics touched upon that is great for discussion like sexual-abuse and the aftermaths of it. Romance(F/F) also plays a big part in this book so if you’re into fantasy + romance that is done well, add this to your long TBR list! 4. Crier’s War by Nina Varela

Another debut book but this time make it sci-fi! Crier’s War is a fast-paced book set in an era where Automae(robots?) are the rulers and humans are their servants. It’s about how a female Automae, Crier, goes against her father’s opinions about the humans and basically overruling all the norms of Automae being prejudiced. It’s hard to describe the book much without spoiling but this is 1/2 of a duology and the second book picks up right where the 1st ends so make sure you read that too because it gets even better in its sequel!  5. The Weight of the Stars by K. Ankrum

Sometimes all I want is a quiet, character-driven book. This checked off those wants for me in the best ways. In a story where I believe focuses more on character relationships, I found that I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It’s a comfort read packed with some occasional twists and the writing style is immaculate! The book is about how two misfits get entangled into each other’s business when an accident happens to one of them. It’s a slow burn(F/F) romance which I think was written very well and the characters had good chemistry. This includes their other friends in the circle too which is nice to see! 6. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 

If you want to read a different kind of fantasy/sci-fi book, you’ll have to check GtN out! It’s a humor-filled necromancy book with great characters and such an interesting premise. The 1st out of 3 books from The Locked Tomb Trilogy, GtN follows a murder-mystery plot line, similar to And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie but much more fun of course. The main character is also a lesbian which is always nice to see more of in the crowded space of books. Make sure you check out Harrow the Ninth too after GtN because that picks up right after this one and is so different but still does an incredibly good job of hooking readers in. 7. The Poppy War Series by R.F. Kuang

The Poppy War series holds a special place in my heart. I binged all 3 books this year and let me tell you this: I usually find sequels in a series to become less interesting/loses its magic but this is definitely not the case for this. With a very different setting from what we usually see in the fantasy genre, TPW is set in ancient historical China and the books are heavily influenced by real events that happened before. It’s a grim-dark type of series for sure and the protagonist, Rin, is sort of morally-grey in many ways which made it a much more compelling read to me. The final book for me was and iis one of the best ways I’ve seen a writer end a series. If you’re looking for a fantasy series with a fascinating magic system with a grim-dark plot, you’re up for a treat here! 8.  To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

I rarely read novellas but when I do, they usually leave me fairly unsatisfied at the end because I find them to be hard to connect to because of its length. To Be Taught if Fortunate is another book which I would describe as ‘quiet’ and just overall a comforting read. It’s hopeful, filled with a diverse group of characters which is always welcomed in the books I read. I think one of the best parts of the book is the way its written which had a very soothing feel to it. It’s hard to describe but reading this made me really interested in reading other works by the author. The ending is also excellent too and leaves you thinking for a while. 9. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

Is political intrigue something you enjoy in your books? Do you like your characters interestingly named like Six Helicopter or Three Seagrass? How about analytical banters/discussions between characters about language? If that’s so, AMCE is a space-opera that will check all those boxes. Seriously, this is a well-built world with fun characters and I loved them so much! There will be a sequel coming out early next year but the book ends with a fairly satisfactory ending so you can jump into this without a commitment to the series (a duology if I remember correctly). 10. The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

The 1st book out of a currently 6 book series(with more to come), The Final Empire is an action-packed, female-lead book in a world where slavery still exists. The magic system here is one of the more interesting ones I’ve seen too. The thing about Sanderson books is that they are typically written in a straightforward, non-prosey, type of style. I appreciate that especially right after reading a book filled with purple-prose and I think this added to my enjoyment, for sure. In a fairly long first book, the world building here was done well and I think it does a good job of not pushing everything into your face all at once and instead, builds the world up slowly in different interactions between the characters. Although a tad bit cheesy, especially when it comes to the romance, I enjoyed this greatly and will probably continue with the rest of Era 1 in 2021. 11. We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

I’ve read a few of LaCour’s work but I still find myself enjoying this the most. When I read contemporaries, I like characters who I can identify with and drives the story well. In a fairly short novel, the book made me cry several times and I still think about the book once in a while nowadays. The story centers around Marin’s relationship with her grandfather and her best friend Mabel. There’s a mystery regarding her grandfather which is the main plot line of the book but its definitely a more character-driven type of book for sure. It’s a book where you’ll need to read it to understand the hype surrounding it so try this one out if you’re in a mood for an emotional contemporary with good mental health representation.

12. The Falling in Love Montage by Ciara Smyth

The Falling in Love Montage is hands down one of my favorite romance novels that I had read recently. It’s funny, romantic and also touching in all sorts of ways. The main character is a queer,sarcastic mess which frankly, I relate to a whole lot. It’s a book to read if you like your romance novels not entirely very light but also pulls on your emotional strings when you’re reading it. The writing style is also commendable for sure for a debut! I’m very much looking forward to future works from this author for sure. 13. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I rarely read historical fiction but when I saw this recommended in a Goodreads article/list, I was intrigued! This is one that surprised me a lot just cause of how it all ties together at the end. Some things didn’t feel very relevant at first but once  it was revealed, I couldn’t contain my surprise. Also, Evelyn Hugo as a protagonist was such a delight to read about! She’s an empowering woman who’s ambitious and did a lot of things to achieve her goals and she’s an amazing role model in that and many other regards. Besides that, I think this also had great representation on bisexuality too and Madam Evelyn will always remain as one of my favorite fictional bisexual queens! 

14. Loveless by Alice Oseman

It’s rare to have a book which includes asexual characters in general and it is even rarer to find a book with the topic of asexuality as a whole be the main theme of it. Loveless was such a delightful and insightful read into a character who although I don’t identify with, I could understand her frustrations a lot. This is a book about self-discovery and accepting oneself and one another for their identity and I think the author did a great job tackling this topic. If you’re looking for a contemporary book to diversify the type of characters you read about, Loveless is a good choice.

15. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson

If you liked books such as The Falling in Love Montage, You Should See Me in a Crown is another you should definitely try! This light and fun romance(F/F) follows Liz and her journey trying to win her school’s prom. It’s a great title to pick up if you’re in a middle of a reading slump because of it’s pacing and it’s overall just a book I enjoyed a lot. 

16. Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

Do you sense a pattern here? I love reading these light-hearted queer romances which doesn’t go through a series of stressful moments like coming out or homophobia etc. It’s important for books to have representation like that because it still exists and needs to be acknowledged but taking a break from that feels good too. Written in the Stars is an adult romance novel which I can see being a Hallmark-type of cheesy movie for sure and for good reasons! It has all those tropes that people love, enemies-to-lovers(sort of), fake-dating and the whole refusal of feelings for each other even though it’s obvious to the reads type of stuff. Hoping to see more adult romances like these in the future! 17. Who I Was with Her by Nita Tyndall

Who I Was with Her is an emotional roller coaster of a read, in a good way, of course. This book reminds me a lot of Hold Still by Nina LaCour mainly because of the way both the author’s dealt with the topics of death and grief. It’s a book that should be read when in a good mental-state as it might trigger some people as there are discussions on a character’s death. One of the main reasons I like this book is how the main character dealt with her attachment to her ex-girlfriend and her associating running with their relationship. It was a book that was difficult to get through but ended with a meaningful tone.

18. They Never Learn by Layne Fargo 

I love empowering and strong female characters. Even when they’re kind of morally-ambiguous like Scarlett Clark. A woman who goes around killing men who sexually abuse others? Sign me up for that heroic Killing Eve shit! In all serious notes though, this was a great read and I loved the whole alternating viewpoints which seems unrelated at first but ties together well at the end. It’s not exactly super thriller-y like its advertised but its for sure a character-driven book with a bonus romance(F/F) plot too plus bisexuality rep! So if you want to read about a kick-ass lady and don’t mind some murder involved in your books, read this ASAP! 

19. One Life by Megan Rapinoe

I’m not a soccer fan or anything like that but Megan Rapinoe’s advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community and racism intrigued me about her. I listened to this over a few days and I think anyone that wants to have an insight/experience with topics like sexism in the soccer industry, sexuality and racism, this is a must-read. I didn’t find her to be self-flattered or anything like that which I have encountered in some memoirs and I respect her humbleness a lot. 

20. Becoming by Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, was an incredibly fascinating read about her life from her childhood to becoming the First Lady of America. I found her writing to be pleasant and flows very well for a memoir too. It’s a fairly long read but I enjoyed learning about all these experiences she’s had such as her time being a lawyer and her life when Barack Obama, decided to run for president. It gave me a different perspective on her and I have new profound respect for her so much as a person. 

[klphotoawards]

POSITIIV 27 Magazine - The world beyond your backyard: a comparison of Asian and European photography ~ Annika Haas

There is no doubt that photography has immensely expanded our visual perception. Although photos can bring the entire world to our home, it is still not the same as immediate experience. It is always good to meet real people, hear and see their unfiltered thoughts, admire the amazing multitude of ideas and visions, and find common features or experience something entirely new and different from our former perception. This applies regardless of the contemporary facilities available, especially if you are interested in learning about the trends of modern photography and the tendencies prevailing in its imagery and focus in different continents.

In the summer of 2016, I participated as a finalist in the exhibition of the international portrait photo competition “Kuala Lumpur International Photo Awards 2016” (KLPA 2016) in the Malaysian capital. The competition has been held for eight years by now. This venture, started by its head organiser Steven Lee, represents a good example of mutual influence and interaction of different photography schools around the world, based on a simple logic: every new artistic expression in photography develops in specific historical conditions, stemming from current reflections of a global mind. Nowadays, the influence seems to feature a rather west to east orientation, but it is not limited to that. In this article, I will focus on the comparison of mutual relationship between Asian and Western world in photography.

According to Steven Lee, KLPA came to life by the example of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, the most prestigious portrait photography competition in the world, organised by the National Portrait Gallery in London. He says, “There was absolutely no meaningful approach to portrait photography in Malaysia; there were no opportunities to learn the specifcs of this genre. I remember that in the first year of KLPA, majority of the 500 works entered to the competition were so-called beauty pictures with virtually no story-telling focus. Local photography schools focused more on the technical aspects; technical quality prevailed over content. But year-by-year we began to receive conceptual portraits by local Asian photographers, because they had seen the successes of the European school of photography, the key of which consists in focusing on the meaning of portrait photography.”

Despite being one of the most important international competitions of portrait photography in Asia (its number of participants has tripled), the best works of KLPA in 2016 still consist of photos by authors from Europe, USA or Australia. All strong Asian photographers who have succeeded in the competition have global experience. Perhaps our own local artists interested in taking their creations beyond Estonian borders should make their own conclusions from that.

Kathrin Tschirner #14-09-03 Frau VII 

Kathrin Tschirner, Germany

Before coming to Kuala Lumpur, German photographer Kathrin Tschirner, the winner of KLPA 2016 in the category “Stillness and Distance”, thought of Rinko Kawauchi from Japan as the best example of modern Asian photography. “I love her photographic images and their clear yet amazing and poetic language. I could look at them for hours and always find new angles. Perhaps this is because several cultural codes in these photographs are not self-evident for me, but this makes the images even stronger, more mystical and attractive. I experienced that feeling again at the Japanese photo exhibition (Focus Japan) of KLPA 2016. It seems that the photography in Asia operates by using symbols galore. Artists dare to work on alienation and find multiple layers between art and reportage,” she explains.

Here, Kathrin refers to a book by Mayumi Suzuki, in which the artist speaks of losing her parents in the tsunami in Japan. “It is executed beautifully: the photographer works with several narrative elements, plays with text and images, paying attention to different texture, material, colours and visual language. It seems to me that Europe lacks such detailed and experimental courage in the use and execution of photos.  The West is more likely characterised by the fear of losing enshrined principles.”

As one of the winners of KLPA 2016, Tschirner does not refer to herself as a portrait photographer, although she often uses the concept of that particular genre in her work, expanding the definition of portrait photography as she sees fit. She needs human perception in order to delineate something very personal, and she moves in areas that she finds intriguing. Thus, the winning photo belongs to the series on a region in Berlin that has been an active centre of prostitution for the last 130 years. Working as a volunteer in the counselling centre for sex workers enabled the photographer to have a deeper insight in the life of these women. “Walking with them opened new perspectives of this area and my photos revealed new layers. My motifs softened and I removed needlessly loud photographs from the series. I wanted the viewer to feel the message without being too detailed and straightforward. These photos are like puzzle pieces, fragments of the concept of reality.”

Mayumi Suzuki, Japan

Above-mentioned Japanese photo artist Mayumi Suzuki remains modest when describing her photography in the context of her experience of KLPA 2016. “I think that the difference between Asian and Western photography comes from different approaches to photographic education. In Japan, there is not much discussion regarding conceptuality and context, resulting in insincerity of the majority of works. Winning European artists have powerful works built on stories with social, historical, cultural or artistic backgrounds. They have excellent story-telling skills.” 

Mayumi Suzuki. The Restoration Will. In progress (2016).

Mayumi points out a new trend in Japan – compilation of photographic biographies (cf. the works of Estonian art publisher Lugemik (“Textbook”)) that act as a general portrait of the artist. Such books are compiled as an installation of experienced perceptions, and this is truly powerful. When looking at the works created by Mayumi, the viewer sees the light from stars that no longer exist ‒ beautiful, warm, and painfully tender. “Engagement in the process of creating that book was the key to my inner healing,” resumes the Japanese photographer.

Alia Ali, Yemen-Bosnia-North America

One of the most cosmopolitan photo artists I met in Kuala Lumpur was Alia Ali. She does not easily compare different photography practices from geographic aspects. “For someone, who is simultaneously Asian, European and North-American, and lives in Africa (Alia has roots in Yemen, Bosnia and America), it is annoyingly complicated to answer the question about geographical distribution of ideas. In fact, my entire collection of works contests the existence of borders. Many artists of Asian origin have lived in Europe and North America, and then returned to their homeland. Why should we categorise the origin of ideas of these people in any way.  They are just their ideas, their eyes, and their vision. I would rather focus that question on the individuality of every photographer.” 

Alia Ali. Dots II. Cast No Evil.  New Orleans, USA. 2016 

Alia Ali. Semen I.People of Pattern. Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. 2016

In Alia’s interpretation, the division of global photography trends is based more on style and theme. At the same time, she frequently points out the dangers in following visual trends in photography. Photographers should find their own “eye”. However, themes are still crucial. “I think that photographers should bring their creation to public discussions, and also communicate with each other. Discussion of topical issues often remains too verbal. Inaccurate use of words and resulting ambiguity may instead cause misunderstandings in various communities. Acute topics that the photography should address include migration, Islam, identity, disappearing gender concept, climate change and its impact, etc.”

When analysing the works by Alia Ali, her heritage seems to play an important role: both Yugoslavia and South-Yemen no longer exist. After struggling with that on various levels, she decided to exit the polarity and define herself through her photos. Marcel Duchamp has introduced a French term inframince, which suits well to describe Alia’s identity. This term signifies concepts that are impossible to define, but can be illustrated by descriptive examples – “I know it, because I see it”.  Thus, Alia’s identity is that of a photo artist and her projects stem from inframince.

Her ongoing photo projects (e.g. Cast No Evil) often focus on the sincerity of the motives behind our daily activities. At the exhibition, the viewers feel forced to confront themselves and ask inconvenient questions. Fabrics are something that we all know and use on a daily basis, but in Alia’s works, they represent a more far-reaching symbol, denoting “fabricated” borders we built to isolate ourselves either on individual or social level.  The ambiguity of the project manifests already in the title of the series “People of Patterns”, fragments of which were also included among the awarded photos of KLPA 2016. As her work covers seven different countries, she concludes that although we are all similar in terms of needs and self-realisation at birth, we still remain different in terms of reaching satisfaction. Without giving any answers, Alia rather helps the individuals to relate to themselves.

Heiko Tiemann, Germany

One of the most striking exhibitions by European artists participating in KLPA 2016 was that of German photographer Heiko Tiemann. Exhibition contained photos from series Infliction, portraying boys and girls at a school for children with special needs, suffering from traumatic disorders, complicated social background, or raised in an orphanage.

Heiko Tiemann. Infliction

In Malaysia, Heiko was fascinated by photography focussing on the aspects of people’s internal life, and these aspects clearly feature in his own work. He is a sensitive photographer, whose photos do not seem to be taken by a man (yes – stereotypes may occasionally mislead the author as well).

“I believe that the Asian photographers’ skill to probe the depths of human nature originates from the photos by Eikoh Hosoe and  films by Akira Kurosawa,” says Tiemann. “The works of these authors feature a fragile connection between internal processes and external epiphanies. European photography is sometimes limited to visible aspect without perception. I think that this stems from the Europeans’ overall scepticism towards emotions and representation in art. Many photographers tend to have detached, at times even ironic approach. It may work, but in photography it represents the easy way out.”

Heiko considers himself more of a chronicler, observer of daily life, constantly taking mental photos without camera. His long-term projects are not products of rational process; they grow together into a whole over time.

Eiffel Chong and Nadirah Zakariya, Malaysia

Malaysian photo artists Eiffel Chong and Nadirah Zakariya have also participated in previous KLPA competitions.  They have said that in their homeland, photography as an autonomous art discipline is still a very young area of self-expression.  Thus, it is not surprising that they both obtained education in photography outside Malaysia and refer to that experience as an important aspect in their development. Eiffel Chong studied in London (London College of Printing) and Nadirah Zakariya in New York (Fashion Institute of Technology). Eiffel even mentioned that in his homeland, photographers had to look up to the western photographers for a long time, because European photography has had the greatest impact on the developing Malaysian photo community.

Eiffel Chong Pearl River Estuary. Seascape. 2016

“For me, taking pictures serves as a means of communication, an opportunity to visualise my thoughts.  the things I choose to express through photos are very personal.” Chong has primarily studied the subjects of identity and existentialism. For example, he staged an entire series of works based on the idea how people create customary masks and how allegedly protective mask actually exposes their vulnerability and weakness instead of hiding it.

Nadirah Zakariya. Girlhood. 2016

Nadirah Zakariya is a good example of a modern, multicultural creative spirit. She provided a laconic description of her photographic style: raw or unprocessed, emotional and personal. In her most recent art project, she uses photography to disclose the secrets of sisterhood (Girlhood), studies tight connection between sisters and the spirit they share. A seemingly simple topic has been visualised to shape dreams, hope, fear, layers of various feelings, elevating the magic between women. Nadirah boldly crosses standards and often embeds contradicting content and form elements in her photos. The artist’s inner freedom to experiment has paid of.

In an attempt to sum up my meetings and experiences during the events of KLPA 2016, I can say that all the abovementioned artists have peaked in their strength, visibility and unique approaches to photography thanks to their companions and openness towards the world. I call it ‘indivisual’ – individual visual – because such pun seems rather appropriate and accurate in this case.

The world has become more open for Estonian photographers, too. For years, many of my colleagues have cooperated with foreign photo agencies, shown their exhibitions abroad and introduced local photo art in recognised international galleries.  They have reached their current positions not just because of their high-quality and original creative baggage, they are also open and receptive, ready to make contact and communicate with other artists around the world, and they have learned to see other things besides their own work.

I truly wish that our fragmented photo communities would become more open to communicate with each other and curious to see beyond their own noses. There are no limits if we do not limit ourselves. ~ Annika Haas, POSITIIV 27, 2016.

Alia Ali, Yemen-Bosnia-North America, www.alia-ali.com 

Eiffel Chong, Malaysia, www.eiffelchong.com

Heiko Tiemann, Germany, www.heikotiemann.de 

Kathrin Tschirner, Germany, www.kathrin-tschirner.com 

Mayumi Suzuki, Japan, www.mayumi-suzuki.com

Nadirah Zakariya, Malaysia, www.nadirahzakariya.com 

Steven Lee, Malaysia, www.stevenleephotography.com

POSITIIV is a photography magazine published in Estonia

Annika Haas, writer for Documentary & Portrait Photography

www.positiiv.ee

[celticnoise]

It’s that time of the week again, Michael Gannon hour, when I read one of his articles and laugh so much that I wonder why Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais thought they could do comedy when a third rate hack on a Scottish tabloid is so much better at it.

Here’s the thing though; they hit the mark when trying to write humorously.

Which is why I idolise their work and have nearly everything they ever made, from Auf Weidersehen to Porridge.

Gannon doesn’t have their skills.

The parts in his work that are meant to be funny stink like a dead fish left under a radiator and the parts that are meant to be serious are the ones that sometimes leave you gasping for breath with sore sides.

His own skill is in writing preposterous pro-Sevco puff pieces so unmoored from reality that it become hilarious.

Today he’s written one of them.

It’s entitled “Rangers lacked flair but Livingston victory proves they can slug out results.”

So let’s go over the first half of it line by line, because it deserves it. I’m going to ignore the second half, because it becomes a pretty bog standard match report at that point, but I did enjoy the first half of it because it contains some gems, although none better than the opening.

“Top cup competitions are not like Hallmark greeting cards. It’s about the destination in knockout football and nothing to do with the journey.”

Did you know that football competitions are not like Hallmark greeting cards?

Have you ever picked up a Hallmark greeting card and thought “You know, this is just like a top cup competition…”?

No?

Me neither.

Hallmark greeting cards also have nothing to do with either journeys or destinations.

This piece is just opening and I’ve already coughed coffee all over the computer monitor.

“No one cares about the long and winding road as long as it eventually reaches Hampden.”

I actually like The Long And Winding Road.

It’s one of the best songs on a very good album, Let It Be.

One of the other songs on that album is Dig A Pony, which Lennon (John, not Neil) described once as “a piece of garbage” because, in effect, it’s just a collection of random words thrown together with no underlying logic.

A lot like a Michael Gannon piece if you ask me.

“Rangers will just be glad this trip along the M8 was only an awkward detour and didn’t turn out to be a dead end.”

Yep. I agree, because based on what I’ve seen and heard they were rank.

But I see we’re still on the motoring metaphors here without yet returning to Hallmark cards and their significance in this piece.

Still, he has this one right. Sevco were dreadful last night and are very lucky still to be in the cup. Had we been able to loan Bayo, for example, to Livingston prior to that game they would be playing Hearts in the semi and looking forward to the final.

“The Ibrox men are in the Betfred Cup semi-finals and still in the hunt to end their long quest for major silverware. But it was torturously hard work at times against Livingston.”

They have never won major silverware in the history of their club.

It would be an historic event if they were to manage it.

Nobody should be holding his or her breath.

“Glen Kamara’s deflected fourth-minute pile driver proved to be enough for the Light Blues on a wild night that could have been a comfortable win for Steven Gerrard’s side or a shock victory for Livi – or anything in between.”

Dear God. The first major piece of cognitive dissonance.

Livingston could have won that match with room to spare. At no point did the Ibrox club seem remotely “comfortable.” And Sevco’s win is exactly what did fall “in between” a comfortable win for their club and a Livingston victory, so what the Hell is this clown talking about?

“It was lucky for Rangers – and defender Filip Helander in particular – first not to concede a penalty, then not get sent off after a last-man lunge.”

Yes, and instead of talking guff about Hallmark cards – which still haven’t made a reappearance in this piece or even been explained as relevant to it – you’d think the writer would be more focussed on exactly why those decisions didn’t go the home club’s way.

But that would be breaking the sacred compact of Scottish sports journalism, wouldn’t it?

The one that says Thou Shalt Not Scrutinise Refs When They Give Decisions To A Club From Ibrox.

“Likewise, Ricki Lamie for Livi was fortunate to escape any kind of card for wiping out Joe Aribo with a stray elbow that ended the midfielder’s night early.”

Probably right, but it was a challenge for the ball and was not, therefore, as contentious a decision as leaving Helander on the park and refusing Livingston’s penalty claim.

“In between times Gary Holt’s men refused to allow Gers to get into any sort of rhythm, with Helander and Connor Goldson looking relieved at the end just to get out of Dodge.”

Because Gerrard’s team could have “comfortably” won this one, right?

“There were flashes of flair from the Light Blues – but it was a sleeves-up job as Gerrard’s side proved they can slug it out when needed.”

Flashes of flair? Someone must have plugged him in to a stream of Celtic rolling over Thistle, because the only flair that was on show anywhere in Scottish football last night was at Parkhead.

The idea that Gerrard’s team “slugged it out” is entirely apt though.

It is both onomatopoetically appropriate and a very good summation of their style of play.

“The Gers boss wasn’t mucking around with his team sheet. Gerrard could have been tempted to rotate some of his squad but he went full pelt instead.”

In other words, this was Sevco’s strongest eleven last night.

And Gerrard clearly does not trust the rest of his squad.

Celtic made eight changes including giving a youth player a start at right back.

And we blew Thistle away.

Neil Lennon is not mucking about.

“It was understandable. The Rangers support are craving silverware and there’s no room for any slip-ups at this stage. “Kamara and Scott Arfield slotted in for Steve Davis and Brandon Barker in only two changes from the weekend win at St Johnstone.”

Desperate stuff.

Gerrard has signed more than 20 players in two years, and he can just about squeeze a modest starting eleven out of them.

Really, I keep on hearing about their strength in depth, but I’m not seeing it.

We had Sinclair, Brown, Edouard, Forrest and Forster on the bench last night. A Ukrainian international winger didn’t get in the squad. There was no Christie or Griffiths. No Mikey Johnston. No Christopher Jullien. No Bitton. No Greg Taylor, a £2 million signing yet to play a match.

That is what you call strength in depth.

That Gerrard is relying on the same dross week in week out is damning of his signing policies since taking the Ibrox gig.

“Likewise for Livi boss Holt – with striker Lyndon Dykes back after his ban following the red card against Gers a few weeks back.”

Yeah but then they don’t have a £30 million wage bill to fall back on.

“It was a real attacking line-up from the hosts. The plan was to take the game to Rangers, squeeze them up the pitch and get a foothold …”

And it worked for almost all of the game. Gerrard didn’t seem to have much of a plan.

“Ah. Goal down after barely four minutes. So much for that idea.”

So much for it? Livingston kept on going.

They played the better football.

It was the Ibrox club who, before long, were playing hit-and-hope stuff.

At this point, the article devolves into its match-report and is full of Gannon’s attempts to write in colour instead of settling for the black and white laying down of facts.

Take this paragraph for example, which is obsessed with the heat. (It was freezing last night.)

“But the challenge must have been a whisker away from the big Swede getting first dibs on the away dressing-room hot water. Gerrard’s players might have felt the temperature rising at the interval as the manager didn’t look too chuffed at the first half’s lukewarm display. He would have been even more fuming with the way his side started the second half.”

Fresh from Hallmark cards and long journeys he’s now trying to drag out the “hot water” metaphor as much as he can.

Which is perfectly fine as long as we’re not supposed to take this stuff seriously.

Here’s another of his attempted descriptions; the Livingston pitch, soaked after a night of rain, was like “a pinball machine on ice.”

Dig A Pony?

Honestly, I hung in as long as I could but Gannon’s efforts to make a dire Sevco display sound exciting were about as poor as the performance itself.

There is no polishing this turd.

He can praise Gerrard for “grinding it out” as much as he wants … some of us would call that riding his luck and that’s what the Ibrox club is getting by on right now.

Luck is not like a Hallmark Greeting Card.

Did you know that?

It runs out, and they never do.

As we wait for the Ashley hearing judges to come in with what Sevco owes the Sports Direct magnate, the only Long and Winding Road the Ibrox NewCo is on is the Highway to Hell.

Michael Gannon, I salute you.

Another piece of unintended comedy genius.

The idea that this Ibrox club is remotely ready for us is the most laughable one of all though.

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[stewieb223]

Disciplinary Text-set

Garbero, R. (2017). Philosophy of life sciences is 'constructive subversiveness' - On Biology. Retrieved 19 July 2019, from https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-biology/2017/11/16/philosophy-of-life-sciences-is-constructive-subversiveness/

1) bibliographic information,

2) a summary of the text: this article is an interview introducing how philosophy needs to be applied in science. It connects the objective world with the subjective world.

3) a short description of text complexity (including text complexity indicators): this article contains some jargons because the interviewees are well-established scientists in their field (eg they briefly mentioned CRISPR/cas9). The language is also formal. However, it is still comprehensible to an average person.

4) a brief description of task complexity: I think this would be a somewhat challenging read to students because they are not familiar with philosophy.

5) a question for students to consider when using the resource; why would a student be interested in using/reading it: Can two seemingly unrelated fields of studies connect? I believe interdisciplinary studies is how education should promote. Students need to see that their perceptions of the world are in a coherent narrative, not disconnected chunks of knowledge. I believe this would promote critical thinking and creativity in students as they would be able to link knowledge together.

  Science and politics. (2012). Retrieved 19 July 2019, from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0116

1) bibliographic information,

2) a summary of the text: this article introduces how science and money influence each other. This introduces science as a profession and its “behind the scene” through an anecdote. Most of the time, a scientific project needs to be funded. To win funding, science needs to find the topics of public’s interest.

3) a short description of text complexity (including text complexity indicators): The language is casual and easy to understand.

4) a brief description of task complexity: the article is mostly comprehensible to students.

5) a question for students to consider when using the resource; why would a student be interested in using/reading it: How does a scientific project get started? People like to romanticize the idea that science stems from one’s genuine curiosity. However, that is not the reality. The reality is that scientists need funding and they can only do so by pursuing the interest of the public. I want students to understand that behind the data and facts of science, there is a system of how the world operates underneath.

  Milova, E. (2018). Would I Want a Designer Baby? CRISPR, Gene-Editing, and You |. Retrieved 19 July 2019, from https://www.leafscience.org/would-i-want-a-designer-baby/

1) bibliographic information,

2) a summary of the text: this talks about the new gene editing technique (CRISPR/cas9) and its power to redesign humans, follows the issue of ethics and consequences.

3) a short description of text complexity (including text complexity indicators): The language is formal but easy to follow because it is not an academic paper.

4) a brief description of task complexity: the article is mostly comprehensible to students. The article requires students to follow the logic of the writer.

5) a question for students to consider when using the resource; why would a student be interested in using/reading it: Is GMO (genetically modified organism) good? While the technology we have is very exciting and promising, we need to be careful of what the consequences might be if not research carefully. Furthermore, we can start to see that people have different opinions from this topic. Morals and ethics are embedded as well. This is a good interdisciplinary topic.

 Ebdrup, N. (2012). Science has always been driven by money. Retrieved 19 July 2019, from http://sciencenordic.com/science-has-always-been-driven-money

Nguyen, D. (2017). What Is Comparative Biochemistry?. Retrieved 19 July 2019, from https://sciencing.com/comparative-biochemistry-10571.html

Taylor, S. (2019). Spiritual science: how a new perspective on consciousness could help us understand ourselves. Retrieved 19 July 2019, from http://theconversation.com/spiritual-science-how-a-new-perspective-on-consciousness-could-help-us-understand-ourselves-116451

[castyourpodtothewind]

CYPTTW Review #6 - Heaven’s Gate

Who the hell are you?! Hi! I’m Taylor and I recently dived headfirst into podcasts! I have since binged on several of them and decided to make reviews of the ones that really stood out. These are not going to be big, professional reviews (I’m lazy) but they should hopefully contain information to help you get into some great new listens!

Where do you listen to your podcasts? My personal recommendation for listening to podcasts is the Pocket Casts app, available for Android or iPhone. It costs $3.99 to buy, but I think it's super worth it, since it has a lot of great features and zero in-app ads, which to me is worth every penny. But if you like free apps or just don't have the scratch right now, my runner up is Podcast Addict. It's free and has some (but not all) of the features Pocket Casts has, plus you have to deal with the ads. But if you don't like either of those, do some searching! There's lots of options out there.

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Name of Podcast: Heaven’s Gate

Creators of Podcast: Glynn Washington, Pineapple Street Media, Stitcher

Genre(s): Non-Fiction

Start and End Date of Podcast: October 18th, 2017 - December 27th, 2017 (Complete)

Number of Episodes: 10

Release Schedule: N/A, podcast is complete

Where Can I Find It: https://www.heavensgate.show/

Donation/Patreon?: None (if anyone finds one that I missed, please DM me)

Age Rating: This podcast talks about some VERY heavy subjects that even for adults could be too much to handle. Definitely not for kids, but people 13 and up should be okay if they feel they can handle the subject matter. It’s not sensationalized or graphic (except for one part I’ll go into later) but it’s still a podcast about a rather notorious cult, so...yeah.

Where I Am Now: Caught Up

Official Summary: In 1997, thirty-nine people took their own lives in an apparent mass suicide. The events captivated the media and had people across the planet asking the same question…’Why?’ 20 years later, those who lost loved ones and those who still believe - tell their story. Hosted by Glynn Washington of Snap Judgement.

Representation?: N/A, this is a non-fiction podcast

Transcripts?: None that I could find. If anyone knows where they can be or has made some, please DM me.

Trigger Warnings?: Suicide, Cults, Parental Abandonment, Castration (Please see special trigger warning below under Cons)

How Long To Listen Before Giving Up?: This is a short podcast and you are going to want to hear it from beginning to end. I was absolutely enthralled with the host’s insight and even though it hurt to finish I couldn’t stop until I had. I’m not even going to give you a bailout point here, just listen to the whole thing.

Anything Else I Should Know?: Glynn Washington, the host of the podcast, talks about his own experience being raised in a cult in this NPR article. It’s very interesting, so I highly suggest you check it out: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/29/581532036/for-heaven-s-gate-podcast-host-the-cult-story-hits-close-to-home

If You Like This, You Might Also Like: Crimetown, Serial, Limetown, King Falls AM

Pros

If you have reservations about this podcast because you’re concerned that this will be exploitative to the cult members or their families, I can confirm that you have nothing to worry about. The subject and the people involved are treated with the utmost respect, and all the family members interviewed make it very clear that they want to be talking about this and are not being pressured or made uncomfortable in doing so. Glynn Washington, the man who hosts the podcast, was actually raised in a cult himself, the Worldwide Church of God, before leaving in his late teens after the founder died. He wanted to tell this story both as a way of giving a voice to the members and their families, but also to try and explain to people that this kind of thing can happen to anyone, and the members of the cult don’t deserve to be ridiculed for the choices that they made. His warmth and empathy pour out of his voice and I was spellbound by his narration. 

The show features interviews with ex-members of the cult, as well as archival footage of the members/leaders and interviews with the members’ families, who are remarkably generous in sharing what information they have about what went on all those years ago. The families of these people are some of the strongest and most remarkable people you will ever get to know, and by the end of the show you honestly feel like you do know them on some level. The same is true when you listen to the people who decided to leave - or were asked to stay behind to look after affairs - and you realize that these were all real people with real voices and feelings beyond “crazy space cult.” And yes - some of them do still believe, or feel like they missed their chance on that one fateful day.

Since this involves very upsetting subject matter (pretty much everyone knows how this turned out) it can be an intense podcast for the squeamish. However, something this show does very well is telling the story in its proper order, meaning you start off by getting an introduction to the subject matter, talk about who these people were before they joined the group, how and why the leaders decided to start and how they got the followers they did, and the way they lived their lives for the next 20 years. The painful details of the mass suicide aren’t fully addressed until the end of the podcast, (and while many people don’t know this, mass suicide was not even part of the plan until very close to the cult’s end) and by that time you’re already sad because you know what’s going to happen to the people you’ve been getting to know, but you feel like you have to listen anyway.

Cons

Special Trigger Mention: There is a very graphic description of someone getting a botched castration in episode 9. The host warns you several times to skip over it, to the point where you think he’s overblowing it, but he’s not. You’re going to think, like I did, “oh this won’t be so bad, I’ve been to the far reaches of the internet, it’s fine”. It will not be fine. Listen to that part at your own peril.

MY RATING: 9.5/10 UFOs - I adored this podcast. I normally don’t listen to a lot of non-fiction, but this one sucked me in right from the start. I’ve always had an interest in the subject matter, but this was so much more in-depth than just reading about them on paper. Actually getting to hear these people and their families, getting to see just how and why they ended up the way they did, all tied together under a host that clearly cares very deeply about the topic, was so fascinating to listen to. Despite the depressing and at times harrowing subject matter, the podcast is actually quite relaxing to listen to and it’s never presented in a way that I would deem intense. Everything is forewarned beforehand and you get a mostly linear story. If you have any interest in learning about this topic, this is a wonderful podcast to choose. Enjoy.

[rbbox]

Bufo

Bufo

This article is about toads. For the Finnish company, see Bufo (company). Bufo is a large genus of about 150 species of true toads in the amphibian family Bufonidae. Bufo is a Latin word for toad. Description True toads have in common stocky figures and short legs, which make them relatively poor jumpers. As with all members of the family Bufonidae, they lack a tail and teeth, and they have horizontal pupils. Their dry skin is thick and warty. Western toad (Bufo boreas) Behind their eyes, Bufo species have wart-like structures, the parotoid glands. These glands distinguish the true toads from all other tailless amphibians. They secrete a fatty, white poisonous substance which acts as a deterrent to predators. Ordinary, handling of toads is not dangerous, and does not cause warts in contradiction to folk beliefs. The poison of most if not all toads contains bufotoxin; the poison of the Colorado River toad (Bufo alvarius) is a potent hallucinogen containing 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin. The poison's psychoactive effects are said to have been known to pre-Columbian Native Americans. Toads can also inflate their bodies when threatened. Males are usually smaller than females and possess a Bidder's organ, an incomplete ovary. The adult male of many species shows a dark throat. Breeding males have dark nuptial pads on their thumbs. Distribution This is a truly cosmopolitan genus, able to live under adverse conditions, and occurring around the world except in the Arctic and Antarctic, Madagascar, Australia (with the exception of the introduced cane toad), and New Guinea and Oceania. Two species are found in the British Isles: the common toad (Bufo bufo), and the natterjack toad, (Bufo calamita). The former is found almost everywhere in Great Britain, but not in Ireland. The natterjack, which differs in its shorter limbs with nearly free toes (which are so short, the toad never hops but proceeds in a running gait) and in usually possessing orange or red warts, green eyes, and a pale-yellow line along the middle of the back, is local in England, the south-west of Scotland, and the west of Ireland. It is further remarkable for the very loud croak of the males, produced by a large vocal bladder on the throat which, when inflated, is larger than the head. Psychoactive properties Several species of Bufo toads produce poison with psychoactive properties. The poison of one species (Bufo alvarius) contains both 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin, while some others contain only bufotenin. Author Lee B. Croft, in his satiric novel, Toadies: The Explanation of Toxicomania in American Society, has coined the word "bufoglossation" to describe the deliberate licking of Bufo toads for hallucinogenic purposes, but psychoactive substance information site Erowid warns against such use because of the cardiotoxins (bufadienolides) included in the toads' poison. Groups Species in this genus can be quite different, which has led to a recent recommendation in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History to split the genus, a recommendation that has been rejected (in part) by many taxonomists (see Pauly et al., 2004, Evolution 58: 2517–2535; Pauly et al., 2009, Herpetologica 65:115-128). Instead, the relationships between the different species are formalized by categorizing them into subgenera, such as Anaxyrus and Rhinella. Species Colorado River Toad (Bufo alvarius) Bufo is a large group, and it is usually divided into several subgenera. Frost et al. (2006) removed most of the species of former Bufo to other genera and restricted the name Bufo to members of the Bufo bufo group of earlier authors. However, other authors continue to recognize these subgroups of Bufo as subgenera. Rhinella is composed of a combination of Rhamphophryne and Chaunus (two subgroups of Bufo in the broad sense). Rhinella is recognized as a distinct genus by some, although other herpetologists disagree and maintain these species as a subgenus within Bufo. Here the species of Rhinella are treated in a separate page (where they may be considered a separate genus or as a subgenus of Bufo). Main article: Anaxyrus Some authors recognize the Genus, Anaxyrus, as a subgenus of the Genus, Bufo. Anaxyrus contains 22 species found in North and Central America including the common American toad, A. americanus. Composed of 12 species, this subgenus is found in temperate Eurasia and Japan south to North Africa, the Middle East, northeastern Myanmar, and northern Vietnam. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo aspinius (Yang, Liu, and Rao, 1996) Bufo bankorensis Barbour, 1908 Central Formosa toad, Bankor toad Bufo bufo (Linnaeus, 1758) Common toad, European toad Bufo gargarizans Cantor, 1842 Chusan Island toad, Asiatic toad Bufo japonicus Temminck and Schlegel, 1838 Japanese toad Bufo kabischi Herrmann and Kühnel, 1997 Bufo minshanicus Stejneger, 1926 Gansu toad, Minshan toad Bufo tibetanus Zarevskij, 1926 Tibetan toad Bufo torrenticola Matsui, 1976 Honshū toad, Japanese stream toad Bufo tuberculatus Zarevskij, 1926 Qinghai Lake toad, Round-warted toad Bufo verrucosissimus (Pallas, 1814) Caucasian toad Bufo wolongensis Herrmann & Kühnel, 1997 a fossil genus, Bufo linquensis lived during Miocene of China. This assemblage of 23 species remained outside the main groups. Frost et al. denoted the species in this group as polyphyletic by placing "Bufo" in quotation marks. Presumably, as these taxa are studied, they will be allocated to one or another of the existing groups. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo ailaoanus Kou, 1984 Ejia toad, Ailao toad Bufo arabicus Heyden, 1827 Arabian toad Bufo beddomii Günther, 1876 Beddome's toad Bufo brevirostris Rao, 1937 Kempholey toad, Short-nosed toad, Rao's pale brown toad Bufo cryptotympanicus Liu & Hu, 1962 Earless toad Bufo dhufarensis Parker, 1931 Oman toad - very similar to B. scorteccii Bufo dodsoni Boulenger, 1895 Dodson's toad Bufo hololius Günther, 1876 Malabar toad, Gûnther's toad Bufo koynayensis Soman, 1963 Humbali Village toad, Koyna toad, Chrome-yellow toad Bufo mauritanicus Schlegel, 1841 Berber toad, Pantherine toad, Moroccan toad Bufo olivaceus Blanford, 1874 Olive toad, Baluchistan coastal toad, Makran toad Bufo pageoti Bourret, 1937 Tonkin toad Bufo parietalis (Boulenger, 1882) Indian toad, Ridged toad, Timber forest toad Bufo pentoni Anderson, 1893 Shaata Gardens toad, Penton's toad Bufo scaber Schneider, 1799 Ferguson’s toad Bufo scorteccii Balletto & Cherchi, 1970 Scortecci’s toad Bufo silentvalleyensis Pillai, 1981 Silent Valley toad, South Indian hill toad Bufo stejnegeri Schmidt, 1931 Stejneger's toad, Korean toad, Water toad Bufo stomaticus Lütken, 1864 Assam toad, Indus Valley toad, Marbled toad Bufo stuarti Smith, 1929 Stuart’s toad Bufo sumatranus Peters, 1871 Sumatra toad Bufo tihamicus Balletto & Cherchi, 1973 Balletto's toad Bufo valhallae Meade-Waldo, 1909 Pulo Weh toad These four species were removed from the synonymy of Bufo by Frost et al., 2006. Smith and Chiszar, 2006, implied this taxon should be considered a subgenus of Bufo. They are found in South America. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo apolobambicus De la Riva, Ninon Ríos, and Aparicio, 2005 Bufo cophotis Boulenger, 1900 Paramo toad Bufo corynetes Duellman and Ochoa-M., 1991 Abra Malaga toad Bufo variegatus (Günther, 1870) Eden Harbour toad Containing 33 species, Frost et al. moved these members to a separate genus in 2006, first to Cranopsis, then to Ollotis, and then to Incilius. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo alvarius Girard in Baird, 1859 Colorado River toad Bufo aucoinae O'Neill & Mendelson, 2004 Bufo bocourti Brocchi, 1877 Bocourt's toad Bufo campbelli Mendelson, 1994 Campbell's forest toad Bufo canaliferus Cope, 1877 Dwarf toad Bufo cavifrons Firschein, 1950 Mountain toad Bufo coccifer Cope, 1866 Southern round-gland toad Bufo coniferus Cope, 1862 Evergreen toad Bufo cristatus Wiegmann, 1833 Large-crested toad Bufo cycladen Lynch & Smith, 1966 Northern round-gland toad Bufo fastidiosus (Cope, 1875) Pico Blanco toad Bufo gemmifer Taylor, 1940 Jeweled toad Bufo holdridgei Taylor, 1952 Holdridge's toad Bufo ibarrai Stuart, 1954 Jalapa toad Bufo intermedius Günther, 1858 Gunther's tropical toad Bufo leucomyos McCranie & Wilson, 2000 Bufo luetkenii Boulenger, 1891 Yellow toad Bufo macrocristatus Firschein & Smith, 1957 Large-crested toad Bufo marmoreus Wiegmann, 1833 Marbled toad Bufo mazatlanensis Taylor, 1940 Sinaloa toad Bufo melanochlorus Cope, 1877 Dark green toad Bufo nebulifer Girard, 1854 Gulf Coast toad Bufo occidentalis Camerano, 1879 Pine toad Bufo periglenes Savage, 1967 Monte Verde golden toad Bufo peripatetes Savage, 1972 Almirante Trail toad Bufo perplexus Taylor, 1943 confusing toad Bufo pisinnus Mendelson, Williams, Sheil & Mulcahy, 2005 Bufo porteri Mendelson, Williams, Sheil & Mulcahy, 2005 Bufo signifer Mendelson, Williams, Sheil & Mulcahy, 2005 Bufo spiculatus Mendelson, 1997 Bufo tacanensis Smith, 1952 Volcan Tacana coad Bufo tutelarius Mendelson, 1997 Bufo valliceps Wiegmann, 1833 These 11 species are distributed in the Greater Antilles. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo cataulaciceps Schwartz, 1959 Schwartz's Caribbean toad Bufo empusus (Cope, 1862) Cope's Caribbean toad, Cuban toad Bufo fluviaticus Schwartz, 1972 Dominican Caribbean toad Bufo fractus Schwartz, 1972 Bufo fustiger Schwartz, 1960 Bufo guentheri Cochran, 1941 Gunther's Caribbean toad Bufo gundlachi Ruibal, 1959 Gundlach's Caribbean toad Bufo lemur (Cope, 1869) Lowland Caribbean toad Bufo longinasus Stejneger, 1905 Stejneger's Caribbean toad Bufo peltocephalus Tschudi, 1838 Tschudi's Caribbean toad Bufo taladai Schwartz, 1960 Cuban Caribbean toad These two species were redelimited and removed from the synonymy of Bufo by Frost et al., 2006. Others implied this taxon should be considered a subgenus of Bufo. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo asper Gravenhorst, 1829 Malayan giant toad Bufo juxtasper Inger, 1964 Giant river toad, Borneo river toad Frost et al. moved these 10 species in 2006 to a separate genus. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo beiranus Loveridge, 1932 Beira's toad Bufo damaranus Mertens, 1954 Bufo dombensis Bocage, 1895 Dombe toad Bufo fenoulheti Hewitt & Methuen, 1912 Transvaal dwarf toad Bufo grandisonae Poynton & Haacke, 1993 Mossamedes toad, Grandison's toad Bufo hoeschi Ahl, 1934 Okahandja toad, Hoesch's toad Bufo kavangensis Poynton & Broadley, 1988 Khwai River toad, Kavanga toad Bufo lughensis Loveridge, 1932 Lugh toad Bufo parkeri Loveridge, 1932 Parker's toad Bufo vertebralis Smith, 1848 African dwarf toad, pygmy toad Frost et al. moved Bufo calamita Laurenti, 1768, Natterjack toad, in 2006 to a separate genus; it is found in Europe. Frost et al. moved these 15 species in 2006 to a separate genus. It is the B. viridis group of previous authors. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo balearicus Boettger, 1880 Bufo baturae Stoeck, Schmid, Steinlein & Grosse, 1999 Batura toad Bufo boulengeri Lataste, 1879 Bufo brongersmai Hoogmoed, 1972 Tiznit toad Bufo latastii Boulenger, 1882 Ladakh toad, Lataste's toad Bufo luristanicus Schmidt, 1952 Bufo oblongus Nikolskii, 1896 Danata toad, Middle Asiatic toad Bufo pewzowi Bedriaga, 1898 Bufo pseudoraddei Mertens, 1971 Swat green toad Bufo raddei Strauch, 1876 Tengger Desert toad, Radde's toad Bufo siculus Stoeck, Sicilia, et al. 2008 Sicilian green toad Bufo surdus Boulenger, 1891 Pakistan toad, Iranian toad Bufo turanensis Hemmer, Schmidtler & Böhme, 1978 Bufo variabilis Pallas, 1769 Bufo viridis Laurenti, 1768 European green toad Bufo zamdaensis Fei, Ye, and Huang in Fei, Ye, Huang & Chen, 1999 Bufo zugmayeri Eiselt & Schmidtler, 1973 These eight species were redelimited and removed from the synonymy of Bufo by Frost et al., 2006. Others implied this taxon should be considered a subgenus of Bufo. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo anderssoni Melin, 1941 Andersson's toad Bufo blombergi Myers & Funkhouser, 1951 Colombian giant toad, Blomberg's toad Bufo caeruleostictus Günther, 1859 Bufo glaberrimus Günther, 1869 Cundinamarca toad Bufo guttatus Schneider, 1799 Spotted toad, smooth-sided toad Bufo haematiticus Cope, 1862 Truando toad Bufo hypomelas Boulenger, 1913 Choco toad Bufo nasicus Werner, 1903 Werner's toad These five species are the former B. angusticeps group of Tandy and Keith, 1972, placed by Frost et al. in a separate genus. Binomial name and author Common name Bufo amatolicus Hewitt, 1925 Amatola toad Bufo angusticeps Smith, 1848 Sand toad, Common Cape toad Bufo gariepensis Smith, 1848 Karroo toad, Gariep toad Bufo inyangae Poynton, 1963 Inyanga toad Bufo robinsoni Branch & Braacke, 1996 Paradise toad source - Wikipedia Dear friends, if you liked our post, please do not forget to share and comment like this. If you want to share your information with us, please send us your post with your name and photo at RBbox.in@gmail.com. We will publish your post with your name and photo. thanks for joining us www.rbbox.in

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[topmixtrends]

BEFORE HER 2016 novel Chanson douce won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, Leïla Slimani had already made a splash with her 2014 debut Dans le jardin de l’ogre, about a young mother caught between her bourgeois marriage and her sex addiction. These two novels, published by the prestigious press Gallimard, have earned Slimani a reputation as one of France’s brightest young literary talents, a writer whose work attends to the plight of young women struggling to conform to the competing demands of modern urban life. Slimani’s astute sociological gaze was refined through her work as a journalist covering her native Morocco, writing primarily for the online newspaper Jeune Afrique; three volumes of her journalism have been published in Paris in the last year. Recently, she was selected by President Macron to serve as his personal representative to promote French in the Francophone world. Chanson douce, meanwhile, is slated to appear in translation in over 35 languages, and has just been released in the United States as The Perfect Nanny.

The Perfect Nanny is inspired by a notorious 2012 murder case, in which Lucia and Leo Krim, only six and two years old, were stabbed to death in a Manhattan apartment by their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, who then attempted, unsuccessfully, to take her own life. The question at the heart of the novel is one that journalists reporting on that crime also sought to answer: what could possibly motivate a caregiver to kill the children in her charge? After opening with a scene of the murders, the novel flashes back in time, to the moment when Myriam and Paul Massé hire Louise to watch their children, Mila and Adam, and then charts their path back to the present. A wonder-nanny, Louise cooks like a first-rate chef and brings order and calm to the couple’s chaotic work lives, but her troubled past is glimpsed in snatches, suggesting a basis — if not a motive — for the crime she will commit.

Though we know how the story ends, the novel remains primarily focused on the mundane daily rhythms that structure the Massé household. Louise arrives early and leaves late. She transports the children to school and to various outings, hosts their birthday parties, and regales them with fanciful stories and games. “You’re part of the family,” Myriam tells Louise as she mounts her framed photo on a bookshelf in the living room. Within their family unit, Louise occupies the role not of a replacement mother but of a third child whose presence, repeatedly described by Paul as “doll-like,” becomes a fixture in their home.

Most of the novel takes place within the small Massé apartment in the gentrified 10th arrondissement of Paris, a confined space that is exceedingly quotidian but never boring. Paul and Myriam aspire to a conventional upper-middle-class life, where she can escape from the claustrophobia of full-time parenting while he guiltily embraces urban amenities, rejecting the austerity of his own childhood. They celebrate their career successes — Paul is a music producer, Myriam a trial attorney — and their fancy dinner parties, replete with cooking by Louise, make them the envy of their social circle. Their main worry is keeping Louise happy at work: without someone to take care of their kids, the rest of their carefully curated lives wouldn’t be possible. The novel’s insistence on their professional success, and the general sense of plenitude in their work-life balance, augur all the more sharply the downfall that awaits them.

As a fiction writer, Slimani seems most at home in the present tense. Her first novel was told almost exclusively in clipped sentences that dramatized the urgency of the protagonist Adele’s physical needs and gnawing inner voice. In The Perfect Nanny, a similar prose style evokes the repetitive cycle of daily existence. There is something disquieting in Slimani’s present tense, which seems always about to rupture the veneer of equanimity. Occasionally the narrative breaks away from the everyday, splicing in chapters that transport us to scenes from Louise’s past, to her eventual trial, or to a hypothetical future envisioned by one of the characters. Anxious to see her children after a busy week, Myriam imagines that tonight:

she would devote herself entirely to them. Together, they would slip into the big bed. She would tickle them and kiss them, she would squeeze them against her until they were dizzy. Until they struggled.

It’s when the novel ventures out of its comfort zone of the present that it inclines too strongly toward such melodramatic flourishes that forebode a tragic ending.

Although Slimani has said that her work “never meant to describe any true or real event,” The Perfect Nanny tracks the well-known Krim case from New York, even while relocating the story to Paris. Mila and Adam are the same ages as the Krim children were at their deaths and are similarly discovered by their mother in the bathtub, with a kitchen knife in the hands of the nanny. Descriptions of her “scream from deep within” echo the initial news reports of the case. Kevin Krim, the children’s father, was met at JFK airport by policemen to break the news of the murder, just as, in the novel’s closing pages, Lieutenant Verdier awaits Paul Massé at the Eurostar section of the Gare du Nord.

References to Louise’s increasingly unhealthy physical appearance, troubles with her landlord, and history of mental illness all echo news coverage of the Krims’ nanny. One article from The Daily Beast, for instance, describes how Ortega had “continued hearing voices, male and female, speaking in Spanish but still unintelligible to her save for when they urged her to hurt others.” Likewise, in the novel, a voice speaks to Louise:

Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy. Morbid refrains echo inside Louise’s head when she walks. Phrases that she didn’t invent — and whose meaning she is not sure she fully grasps — fill her mind.

There’s nothing new about a novelist drawing on sensational newspaper reports; that’s been common practice in US fiction since at least Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). In France, the faits divers tradition popularized by Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and others in the 19th century pursued a similar topical strategy, and the success of Emmanuel Carrère’s L’Adversaire (2000) attests that this tradition is alive and well. But in its translation into a Paris-based literary thriller, the Krim case has undergone one noteworthy transformation: the novel both flips and elides the dynamics of ethnicity from the news story, with the Dominican New York nanny becoming a white Parisian, while the white employer turns Maghrebi.

This inversion is signaled very subtly — you could almost miss the fact that Myriam Massé, née Charfa, is ethnically Arab, or that Louise is white. Indeed, Louise bears no trace of ethnic origin for half of the narrative. Only when she is firmly anchored within the Massé family, accompanying them on their summer vacations, do we glimpse a few strands of blonde hair peeking out from underneath her swim cap — a suggestive metaphor for the ways that markers of ethnicity unwittingly escape from the novel’s efforts to contain them.

Sam Taylor’s confident English translation retains all French place-markers and cultural signposts. It carefully adapts the pleasing simplicity of Slimani’s prose and adheres to her rigorous resistance to making ethnicity a centerpiece of the story. The book’s paratexts, however, tellingly contravene this thematic reluctance. The English title — itself sensationalistic in tone, and nothing like the original, which literally translates as “sweet song” — is plastered over the image of a woman’s torso, dutifully dressed in a British-style nanny uniform, her pale neck prominently exposed. Meanwhile, Myriam is identified in the back cover copy as a “French-Moroccan lawyer,” and Slimani’s author bio refers to her as the “first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize.”

In other words, where the Gallimard edition makes no reference to the ethnic identity of either the characters or the author, the English translation places this issue front and center. The two versions conform almost too neatly to their cultural contexts: the French political project of laïcité systematically rests on a refusal to acknowledge or privilege forms of identity, while in the United States, race becomes the book’s raison d’être.

As intriguing as The Perfect Nanny is for its translation of an American crime into a French context, it is most compelling as a reflection on how we consume the media today. The novel brims over with visual references to media technologies and texts: Louise leaves the television on all day long, watching “apocalyptic news reports” with the children “in rapt silence” by her side. Slimani describes photographs of the crime scene and of the children taken before their deaths — photos matching those that appeared in newspapers and magazines in the wake of the New York case (such as one of the “bouquets of flowers and children’s drawings” littering the entrance to the couple’s apartment building). She even references pictures from the Krims’s personal blog. “Just uploaded photos from my iPhone,” Marina Krim wrote in one of her last blog posts before the murders, and some of the images of her children — wearing a white dress, lying on the ground half-naked, visiting a friend’s farm — emerge in the novel, recast as Massé family snapshots taken on Myriam’s iPhone.

All of Slimani’s characters, in the end, are stuck behind screens, and if Louise’s crime is figured, at least in part, as a result of our apocalypse-focused news culture, so too does Slimani register her own position as a media consumer, transfixed by images of the event, molding them into literary form.

The novel in that sense can be read not only as an obsessive account of a crime, but also as a meta-story about the ways in which we obsess about crimes today. It bespeaks our era of easy and unfettered access to online media and compulsive news cycling. The Perfect Nanny offers a window onto the experience of being immersed in someone else’s tragedy, all the while expressing deep ambivalence about the contemporary media culture from which such stories emerge.

¤

Sara Kippur is associate professor of French at Trinity College in Hartford and the author of Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French.

The post An American Tragedy by Way of France appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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