Triple Entendre discusses the rise and spread of background music in contexts as diverse as office workplaces, shopping malls, and musical performance. Hervé Vanel examines background music in several guises, beginning with Erik Satie's "Furniture Music" of the late 1910s and early 1920s, which first demonstrated the idea of a music not meant to be listened to and was later considered a precedent to modern, functional background music. Vanel argues that when the Muzak Corporation's commercialized ambient music became a predominant feature of modern life in the 1940s--both as a brand and a genre of background music--it also became a powerful instrument of social engineering in an advanced capitalist society. Different kinds of music were developed to encourage or incite greater productivity in the workplace, more energetic shopping, or more animated socializing. Vanel's discussion culminates in the creative response of the composer John Cage to the pervasiveness and power of background music in contemporary society. Cage neither opposed nor rejected Muzak, but literally answered its challenge by formulating a parallel concept that he called "Muzak-Plus." Forty years after Satie presented his work to general critical puzzlement, Cage saw how background music could be combined with mid-century technology and theories of art and performance to create a participatory soundscape on a scale that Satie could not have envisioned, again reconfiguring the listener's stance to music. By examining the subterranean connections existing between these three formulations of a singular idea, Triple Entendre analyzes and challenges the crucial boundary that separates an artistic concept from its actual implementation in life.

As they continue their quest for the gems that will hopefully save their world, Twig and Splat run afoul of the Trappers, a deadly group of hunters with nothing good on their minds. And the Trappers are not the only menace waiting for them along their way! Part three of the new limited series from Eisner Award-winning writer SKOTTIE YOUNG (I HATE FAIRYLAND, MIDDLEWEST) and artist KYLE STRAHM (SPREAD, UNEARTH) brings the peril and keeps the adventure moving for our hapless heroes.

A leading economist and researcher report from the front lines of a revolution in solving the world's most persistent problem. When it comes to global poverty, people are passionate and polarized. At one extreme: We just need to invest more resources. At the other: We've thrown billions down a sinkhole over the last fifty years and accomplished almost nothing. Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel present an entirely new approach that blazes an optimistic and realistic trail between these two extremes. In this pioneering book Karlan and Appel combine behavioral economics with worldwide field research. They take readers with them into villages across Africa, India, South America, and the Philippines, where economic theory collides with real life. They show how small changes in banking, insurance, health care, and other development initiatives that take into account human irrationality can drastically improve the well-being of poor people everywhere. We in the developed world have found ways to make our own lives profoundly better. We use new tools to spend smarter, save more, eat better, and lead lives more like the ones we imagine. These tools can do the same for the impoverished. Karlan and Appel's research, and those of some close colleagues, show exactly how. In America alone, individual donors contribute over two hundred billion to charity annually, three times as much as corporations, foundations, and bequests combined. This book provides a new way to understand what really works to reduce poverty; in so doing, it reveals how to better invest those billions and begin transforming the well-being of the world.

“Why didn’t they understand me? I was as clear as I could be.” Everyone has had this thought at one time or another. Research from the fields of psychology and cognitive science can provide concrete answers to these questions. In Failing to Communicate, Dr. Roger Kreuz explores the answers to these questions We are exposed to the dangers of miscommunication early in life. As children, we play the Telephone Game and learn an important lesson about the fragility of long communication chains. And as adults, we are constantly on the lookout for misunderstanding. People interrupt each other, on average, about every ninety seconds in order to check their understanding. Despite such vigilance, however, a great deal of what is said and written is not understood as intended. Miscommunication has led to military defeats, the loss of spacecraft, and even more tragically, accidents that cost human lives. It plays a role in road rage and social media feuds. It haunts the courtroom, the boardroom, and the singles bar. Failing to Communicate includes dozens of such examples and explains them in light of what researchers have discovered about how communication works—and why it so often fails. Research from psychology and cognitive science has revealed a host of specific factors that contribute to misunderstanding. Some of these have to do with how our minds make sense of what we hear and read, while others are the result of cognitive, social, and cultural factors. The very structure of a given language can be problematic as well. In short, there is no one reason for miscommunication: there are a host of underlying causes. Issues of misunderstanding have only multiplied as new mediums for communication have arisen. Emails, texts, and social media posts are even more problematic because they are impoverished modes of communication. Without facial cues, tone of voice, gestures, and even the creative use of silence, our intentions in these text-only mediums are even more likely to go awry. Failing to Communicate is intended to appeal, from beginning to end, to the general reader who wants to know more about why our attempts at communication fail so often

Textual criticism is in a period of change, as it seeks to account for an ever-growing body of textual data as well as the development of new methodologies. Since the older methodologies cannot simply be modified to meet our present needs, Multiple Originals seeks to build bridges between methods of traditional textual criticism and those of orality and formulaic analysis. Examining practices of textual criticism across a wide range of texts and disciplines, this book challenges the assumption that there can be only one correct reading and argues for the presence of multivalences of both meaning and text. It demonstrates that in some cases multivalences were intended by the composer, while in other cases, during the periods from which our earliest extant manuscripts derive, they fell within the limits of variability acceptable to those who valued and transmitted those texts.

Come journey with shen brevard-from winter of '98 to summer of '05. Seven years 13 essays One ever present desire Saunter and weave through significant musings inspired by: east Asia's techno mega-city: Tokyo, the Atlantic seaboard's (brash with class) NYC-specifically-Brooklyn-n-Queens, northern Pacific's famed sophisticated 'City by the Bay' (San Francisco) and the Golden State's venerable yet sprawling hiptropolis: Los Angeles. From a native Californian's wanderlust to a fellow American's lament and disgust over their nation's chaotic reflection of magnificence mixed with devastating self-inflicted conflict. Same person. Different angles. Grounded in an ever shifting upward perspective. Political? Not really. Poignant? Yes. More importantly, this 'writer-to-be' invites you to look within-in order-to understand the world without. One-part neutral. Two-parts fresh-n-fun. Half part melancholy. Half part Cosmopolitan. Heed the call. Embark upon a most glorious, verbally artistic, Americana experience.

This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.

This study of Song of Songs uncovers many patterns related to the numerical value twenty-six and related numbers for the divine name YHWH. Patterns are so unique that they clearly show authorial intent. They involve the numerical value of root forms of words, their sequences, and their totals in the book. The beloved man is highlighted by special patterns, which indicate that a typology for God is intended. Deer names in the refrain have number patterns that confirm intention for being circumlocutions for divine names. The disputed presence of the divine name YH in 8:6 is confirmed by the value of its full word. One of the most striking patterns found with the help of a computer is that the totals of root words are all arranged to point to theological numbers in a beautiful intricacy. Besides describing these patterns, this study discusses numerical competence within a proposed Hebrew literary circle, and what steps they might have gone through to create these amazing phenomena. These theological numbers confirm intentionality for allusions to the Hebrew Bible and support a hermeneutic of spiritual applications. A literary analysis of each poem focuses on the use of numbers among other features of prominence.