红月亮与伏特加--蒋跃、李莉俄罗斯视觉之旅

《伏特加里的红月亮——俄罗斯视觉之旅》,是一本刚由浙江文艺出版社出版的游记性质的散文。初看书名颇为有趣:现代感中间有几分小资情调,直白之中也很有内涵。“红月亮”与“伏特加”,两者都具有十分典型的俄罗斯特征。每一年的夏至日前后,气象奇特的彼得堡夜色如昼,一轮红色的月亮在高空升起,倒映在波光粼粼的涅瓦河面,透显出无限的神秘与诡谲。此时此刻你不用点灯就可阅读手中的小说和诗歌,俄国“白银时代”的大诗人勃洛克面对这一神秘的自然现象时,写下了一首脍炙人口的短诗:“白的夜晚,红的月亮在蓝天里浮现,美丽的幻影在浮荡,倒映在涅…     

Re-thinking Copyright Through the Copy in Russia

How one copy of a film or a single is made illegal, while its identical twin is treated as legitimate? By drawing from the material collected in Russia on the illegal copying and distribution of video and musical contents, this paper moves beyond the definition of media piracy in legal terms, and instead examines practices of copying, the properties of copies, and the motivations that drive their circulation, color laws and their continuous application. It approaches the copy not as an isolated, individual unit but part of an assemblage, and demonstrates the existence of a specific culture of circulation which brings together its diverse components as one ‘catchment’. In Russia, the legal and pirate media markets do not stand in opposition to one another but co-exist and even enable each other. Media goods have social value that extends beyond commercial, and which is strongly associated with the cultural reproduction of audiences who are cosmopolitan in character and partake in the transnational circuits of culture. Finally, the very definition of what is ‘legal’ in Russian is an outcome of the unstable process of authentication in which experts test, guess and create material trails of evidence to stabilize elusive digital substances. On the basis of these findings, the paper problematizes the social imaginary around the digital copy and with it, the widely circulating notion of ‘piracy’.     

Building Bridges: Alan Gregg and Soviet Russia, 1925–1928

Minerva - In December 1927, Alan Gregg,Associate Director of the RockefellerFoundation's Division of Medical Education, setoff from Paris on an exploratory mission toRussia. After a...     

Water-repellent and biocide treatments: Assessment of the potential combinations

It is a common practice to use several chemical products during restoration projects of monuments or sculptures. However, care must be taken when combining the products to avoid a misuse. For example, it is well-known that applying a biocide on stone before a water-repellent leads to a diminishment of the hydrophobic effect of the treatment. But the application of biocide after a water-repellent treatment has been poorly analysed, although studies have proven that the stone looses its hydrophobicity after the application of the biocide. Henceforth, this study investigates the effects of biocide application on a water-repellent film and focuses on the possibilities to restore the efficiency of the previous water-repellent treatment (after the application of the biocide). At first, the tests were performed on glass slides to understand the mechanisms, with the subsequent results revealing that the biocide product deposits on the water-repellent film. Then, the study focuses on determining methods to remove the remains of biocide on limestone samples, previously treated with a water-repellent. The water-repellent used in the study is an alkylpolysiloxane, Rhodorsil H224 from Rhodia.     

American beauty: trade flows and export costs of US movies

This paper estimates a hedonic model of revenues for 1431 American movies in 45 non-American countries over the period 2002–2013. Such an extensive analysis is proven to be useful to estimate the effect of indicators of geographical and cultural distance on total revenue and the number of American films exported to non-American countries once the model specification also controls for relevant film features. It is found that indicators of cultural and geographical distance, in addition to the Human Development Index, have a significant effect on both the number of American films shown and the revenue obtained. Estimation results have been also used to appraise the importance of film features in different groups of countries from the perspective of their degree of development and distance from the USA.     

Giving and Taking across Borders: The Rockefeller Foundation and Russia, 1919–1928

Until recently, the links between Rockefeller philanthropies and Russianscience and medicine during the 1920s have been virtually ignored, both inofficial Foundation histories and in Soviet accounts of foreign scientificrelations. Materials from the newly-opened Russian archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center reveal dense and tangled connections between multiple Rockefeller givers and multiple Russian takers. Examining the `Russian matter' from the perspective of both `givers' and `takers', this article highlights the impact of domestic and international politics on giving and taking across borders, and reveals the range of meanings of`internationalism' in philanthropy.     

The presence of trapped carbon dioxide in lapis lazuli and its potential use in geo-sourcing natural ultramarine pigment

The source of the previously unassigned weak band at 2340 cm⁻¹ that is occasionally observed in the infrared spectrum of natural lapis lazuli pigment is here attributed conclusively to CO₂ trapped in the β-cage of lazurite. In addition, the geo-sourcing potential of this infrared feature for lapis lazuli is tested and found to be more ambiguous than previously suggested. The CO₂ absorption band is in fact observed in lapis lazuli samples from numerous disparate geographic locales including Afghanistan, Canada, Myanmar, Siberia, Tajikistan, and the Ural Mountains, as well as mineral hauyne samples from Germany and Italy. The spectral feature was absent from lapis lazuli samples from California, Chile, Colorado, and New York. Furthermore, poor quality lapis lazuli samples, regardless of locale, highly processed natural pigment samples, and all samples of synthetic ultramarine blue, green, and violet pigments were devoid of encapsulated CO₂.     

Prediction as an Impediment to Preparedness: Lessons from the US Hurricane and Earthquake Research Enterprises

No matter one’s wealth or social position, all are subject to the threats of natural hazards. Be it fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, or drought, the reality of hazard risk is universal. In response, governments, non-profits, and the private sector all support research to study hazards. Each has a common end in mind: to increase the resilience of vulnerable communities. While this end goal is shared across hazards, the conception of how to get there can diverge considerably. The earthquake and hurricane research endeavors in the US provide an illustrative contrast. The earthquake community sets out to increase resilience through a research process that simultaneously promotes both high quality and usable – preparedness-focused - science. In order to do so, the logic suggests that research must be collaborative, responsive, and transparent. Hurricane research, by contrast, largely promotes high quality science – predictions - alone, and presumes that usability should flow from there. This process is not collaborative, responsive, or transparent. Experience suggests, however, that the latter model – hurricane research - does not prepare communities or decision makers to use the high quality science it has produced when a storm does hit. The predictions are good, but they are not used effectively. Earthquake research, on the other hand, is developed through a collaborative process that equips decision makers to know and use hazards research knowledge as soon as an earthquake hits. The contrast between the two fields suggests that earthquake research is more likely to meet the end goal of resilience than is hurricane research, and thus that communities might be more resilient to hurricanes were the model by which research is funded and conducted to change. The earthquake research experience can provide lessons for this shift. This paper employs the Public Value Mapping (PVM) framework to explore these two divergent public value logics, their end results, and opportunities for improvement.     

The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US

This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefitted from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the “profit as progress” assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how “science values” (“knowledge as progress”) may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes.     

Rap as a Social and Political Revealer: Diam's and Changes in French Value Systems

Abstract

In 2006, a young female rapper named Diam's released an album that became the best‐selling CD in France: her CD and its reception is treated as a social phenomenon and examined against the backdrop of political arguments which developed in France in 2006–2007. Musical analysis shows that the sonic backgrounds of Diam's rap illustrated the importance of combinations and hard work in the symbolical production of a new order. Her texts manifested new combinations of social values which brought into the public debate changes in value systems that were just becoming developed enough to be taken up by political organisations and leaders. This is why the main themes in Diam's CD converged with topics engaged by the two main candidates in the French 2007 presidential election. This paper, combining the resources of musicology, literary analysis and political sociology analyses how Diam's put in aesthetic and emotional forms combinations of values that had been brewing underground for the past 30 years. It invites a reconsideration of the interpretation of rap as an expression of rebellion, or even as an element of counter‐culture, and apprehends it as a ‘social revealer’ that brings new values and representations into public debate and stimulates discussion around them. Diam's album was an ‘unidentified political object’ that shed original light on the way politics and politician are perceived by ordinary citizens, or specific groups among them, such as the youth.     

Regimes of Knowledge Production in Society: Towards a More Political and Social Reading

The `co-productions' of science and society have undergone dramatic changes in recent decades. However, contrasts between `Mode 1' and `Mode 2' are not compelling inhistorical terms. This essay will argue that, in fact, they offer too naturalistic and a-political a picture.     

Signaling for access to high-demand markets: evidence from the US motion picture industry

We develop a signaling model in which imperfectly competitive firms signal quality through expenditures in segmented markets. Separation in this model results in high-quality firms selling their products in a high-demand, and highly quality elastic, period. Low-quality firms sell their product in a low demand but less quality-sensitive period. A dataset including 1697 US theatrical releases between 1998 and 2008 is compiled and explored for evidence of this separating equilibrium. We find that our measures of signal intensity and realized quality (budgets and critical ratings, respectively) are both significantly greater during high-demand periods. Ticket sales are also shown to be more sensitive to expected quality as measured by budgets during the high-demand season. Other seasonal differences and implications are explored.     

Rent and Political Economy in Culture Industry Work

This paper locates politics in culture industry work at the organisational and firm level through developing the application of the notion of rent to culture industries as revenues from intellectual properties, and as the more general sense of revenues derived from non-equivalential exchanges. The argument is that politics arises from attempts to establish or eliminate rents. The paper discusses ethnographic research on subjectivity and culture industry work and provides a theoretical account of rent in the capitalist imaginary and in explanations of formal problems of power in the entrepreneurial firm as the basis for the analysis of political practices in culture industries. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relation between rent and subjectivity and politics in neoliberalism.     

正气凛然的于谦

西湖西岸三台山东麓,乌龟潭畔,春水晴云,风光幽雅。2003年实施西湖综合整治,恢复湖湾水面,重建名胜古迹,再现野趣与文脉和谐交融的生态环境。我伫立在高大庄严的“热血千秋”牌坊旁,下面就是正气浩然的于谦祠。     

Donor governance and financial management in prominent US art museums

I study “donor governance,” which occurs when contributors to nonprofit firms place restrictions on their gifts to limit the discretion of managers. In a study of US art museums, I find that this practice has grown significantly in recent years, and it represents the largest source of permanent capital in the industry. When donor restrictions are strong, museums shift their cost structures away from administration and toward program services, and they exhibit very high savings rates, retaining in their endowments 45 cents of each incremental dollar donated. Retention rates are near zero for cash generated from other activities. Restricted donations appear to stabilize nonprofits and significantly influence their activities, but they reduce management flexibility and may contribute to lower profit margins. Rising donor governance in US art museums may represent a reaction by contributors to the industry’s high rates of financial distress, weak boards of trustees, and large private benefits of control enjoyed by managers.     

《熹平石经》与汉末的政治、文化规范

“熹平石经”是中国历史上第一次碑刻经书、规范文字的浩大工程。后人多从传播书法艺术、规范书面用字的角度认识它和评价它。本文用文化分析的方法,试图通过对“熹平石经”产生背景及其正经定字作用的剖析,揭示出隐藏在文字、学术规范后的文化、政治规范意义。     

UV-laser radiation: basic research of the potential for cleaning stained glass

A KrF-excimer laser operating at λ = 248 nm was used for basic studies in cleaning ancient glass surfaces. For irradiation a mask projection technique was applied. A modified optical set-up was designed using cylindrical lenses for large area removal by line scanning. Previous investigations revealed insufficient knowledge about interaction processes between UV-laser radiation and individual surface layers of encrusted historical glass. Thus, first detailed studies were carried out on special model glass samples simulating the behaviour of historical glass. The potential of removing crusts, bio layers as well as layers of different conservation materials (due to former conservation work) were examined. The avoidance of damaging material such as gel layers, paint layers or the bulk glass was of great importance. Removal rates and thresholds for the materials mentioned above were carried out. The collected data enables a comparison and evaluation of the feasibility for the removal of superficial layers from historical glass artefacts. The results indicate that in some cases a closed loop process control will be necessary to avoid over-cleaning.