Form,function, fiction – translations of technology and design in product development

This article is a case study of the design and development of a Norwegian crockery series for institutional households – the 1962 Figgjo 3500 Hotel China. It investigates how this product represented a decisive break with the conventions of postwar Norwegian design and manufacture. The onset of international free trade meant export or die for the manufacturing industry. The elitist aestheticism so prevalent in the so‐called Scandinavian Design movement was abandoned in favour of an ideology remarkably akin to what was at the German Ulm School of Design called scientific operationalism. The paper also analyses how the manufacturer sought to portray this product: first, it was inscribed as science incarnated, and the material morality reigned supreme. But as society's faith in science took some serious blows in the course of the 1960s and modernist design idioms were partly forsaken in the 1970s, the engineered tableware became the fashioned tableware as trends tamed technology. These translations of technology, design, identity and consumption tell the story of how an artefact is constantly in a state of transformation – on both sides of the factory gate.     

Public and Partisan Opinions of the Speaker of the House

Using polling data from 1982 to 2009, I develop a model of public opinion toward the Speaker of the House. I show that, in addition to economic and institutional factors, the speaker's ideology and events associated with the speaker's responsibilities in office affect the public's opinion toward this congressional leader. I also examine the partisan differences in the formation of public opinions about the speaker. I find that minority party partisans are more likely to have negative evaluations of the speaker when the speaker has more ideologically extreme views which lead to higher levels of polarization. In addition, members of different parties weigh economic and institutional factors differently in their evaluations of the speaker.     

THE “RUSSIFICATION” OF ETHNIC MINORITIES IN THE USSR

Among the avowed social policies of the Soviet Union are modernization and industrialization, which may be combined under the label of Sovietization, and the spread of Russian language and culture within the USSR, which may be termed Russianization. But there is also a third process at work in which non-Russians lose their ethnic identity in favor of identification with Russian culture. This process, which may be called "Russification," can be measured by the number of non-Russians who declare Russian to be their first language in the census. The authors use correlation analysis and principal components analysis to identify the factors that promote or hinder the Russification process.     

Formt die Technik die Musik? Montageästhetik zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts

Does technology shape music? Aesthetics of assembly at the beginning of the 20^th century. This article deals with the relationship between assembly in production technology and similar processes in musical composition. Can composers like Eric Satie, Igor Strawinsky or George Antheil, who used assembly methods in some of their compositions, be called assemblers? The authors point out that all three composers used assembly methods in different ways and with different purposes. Applying a theoretical approach inspired by media studies they come to the conclusion that the conditions under which musical works using assembly methods are shaped do not originate in technology but in the aesthetic convictions of the composer. Apart from assembly methods there are many other compositional principles the composer relies on. Technology may inspire music but does not determine the musical outcome.     

Categorical Wombling: Detecting Regions of Significant Change in Spatially Located Categorical Variables

Wombling is a method for discovering boundaries in a collection of continuous variables observed at the same geographic localities. We extend this method to categorical data. A categorical wombling statistic C_i, which identifies areas of rapid change, is defined for every pair i = 1,…, n of adjacent localities, and is equal to the average number of category mismatches at i. We use both simulation and theory to consider the order statistics of C_i under null hypotheses of randomness, and of spatial autocorrelation for each variable, but independence between variables. Graph-theoretical statistics derived from C_i investigate whether areas of rapid change resemble boundaries. Computer simulation is used to study the distributions of these under the two null hypotheses. The methods are applied to linguistic data in three European areas. Other potential applications exist in biology, linguistics, anthropology, and other social sciences.