NPR

While useful in establishing U.S. public media, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is an imperfect instrument for moving public radio to a secure future. Policies governing public broadcasting are insufficient to address the economic, political, social, and technological changes upending media organizations, both commercial and non-commercial. The urgent need is for more flexible structural arrangements as public radio and public television stations merge, partner with non-profit media entities, and seek funding that builds on the strength of the local public radio network as well as responds to the demand for imaginative, on-demand content from national networks.

This article considers National Public Radio's (NPR) relationship with music and the web. I argue that the NPR Music project has successfully leveraged NPR's perceived autonomy from commercial factors, sophisticated cultural sensibility, established audience, and unique network of member stations to become an important curator of music-based radio and music itself. Building on an emerging discussion of the politics of curation and publicity in the social media and streaming paradigm, this article extends the concept of 'soundwork' to argue that national public media organizations must increasingly both produce and curate content in order to compete for attention and engagement on the platform-based social web. As this case study of NPR Music demonstrates, these legacy institutions can leverage their valuable 'national public' identities in order to facilitate these activities, but this strategy threatens to undermine their legitimacy during a period in which 'public' is an increasingly contested and contingent term. … I do not believe that music provides a future for public radio. With satellite broadcasting, Internet radio, and Internet file sharing, all types of music are now widely available to anyone at any time … In the future, music will have little, if any, role. (Mitchell, 2005: 190–191) Thus wrote Jack Mitchell, National Public Radio's (NPR) first employee and one of its founding figures, at the conclusion of his history of the institution. Yet even as Mitchell was typing these words, the popularity of longtime Director of All Things Considered

Recent works in image editing are opening up new possibilities tomanipulate and enhance input images.
Within this context, we leverage well-known characteristics of human perception along with a simple
depth approximation algorithm to generate non-photorealistic renditions that would be difficult to
achieve with existing methods. Once a perceptually plausible depth map is obtained from the input
image, we show how simple algorithms yield powerful new depictions of such an image. Additionally, we
show how artisticmanipulation of depth maps can be used to create novel non-photorealistic versions, for
which we provide the user with an intuitive interface. Our real-time implementation on graphics
hardware allows the user to efficiently explore artistic possibilities for each image. We show results
produced with six different styles proving the versatility of our approach, and validate our assumptions
and simplifications by means of a user study.

There have been few studies to date of the cultural work performed by NPR's information radio programmes, and those that have been conducted have overlooked the role of musical interludes in those programmes. This article combines quantitative data analysis with textual and discourse analysis to elucidate the nature of the interludes and their function within the context of All Things Considered, NPR's flagship afternoon newsmagazine programme. It argues that the structured diversity of the interludes embodies the homologous aesthetic and ideological dispositions of NPR's personnel and its core audience. The interludes themselves suggest a tension between highbrow and middlebrow aesthetic dispositions that are manifested in the structured diversity and hybridity of the genre selections as they are deployed in the context of the programme.

Recent works in image editing are opening up new possibilities to manipulate and enhance input images. Within this context, we leverage well-known characteristics of human perception along with a simple depth approximation algorithm to generate non-photorealistic renditions that would be difficult to achieve with existing methods. Once a perceptually plausible depth map is obtained from the input image, we show

Recent works in image editing are opening up new possibilities to manipulate and enhance input images. Within this context, we leverage well-known characteristics of human perception along with a simple depth approximation algorithm to generate non-photorealistic renditions that would be difficult to achieve with existing methods. Once a perceptually plausible depth map is obtained from the input image, we show

Cotton is an economically important crop worldwide that suffers severe losses due to a wide range of fungal/bacterial pathogens and nematodes. Given its susceptibility to various pathogens, it is important to obtain a broad-spectrum resistance in cotton. Resistance to several fungal and bacterial diseases has been obtained by overexpressing the Non-expressor of Pathogenesis-Related genes-1 (NPR1) in various plant species with apparently minimal or no pleiotropic effects. We examined the efficacy of this approach in cotton by constitutive expression of the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) NPR1 gene. The results show that NPR1-expressing lines exhibited significant resistance to Verticillium dahliae isolate TS2, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. vasinfectum, Rhizoctonia solani, and Alternaria alternata. Interestingly, the transformants also showed significant resistance to reniform nematodes. Analysis of defense-related, biochemical and molecular responses suggest that when challenged with pathogens or certain systemic acquired resistance-inducing chemicals, the transgenic lines respond to a greater degree compared to the wild-type plants. Importantly, the basal activities of the defense-related genes and enzymes in uninduced transformants were no different than those in their non-transgenic counterparts. The results provide additional evidence supporting the role of NPR1 as an important part of the plant defense system and suggest a means to achieve broad-spectrum resistance to pathogens via genetic engineering.

We present an approach for creating non-photorealistic renderings of 3D scenes in real-time. We employ a hybrid system which uses both image-space and object-space techniques for creating fast and effective results. A reliable method of edge detection is presented to find all important edges within a scene. This edge detection technique is combined with a painterly renderer to render the scene using different levels of abstraction. This is used to increase the saliency of important objects and remove extraneous detail. 3D object information is used to apply an object-based segmentation technique which allows each scene object to be rendered using a single abstraction level depending on its scene importance. The abstraction techniques are implemented on the GPU which helps the system achieve interactive rates.

This article consists of two parts. In the first one, I analyse relations between a reportage and a feature. Differences can be found in the way these notions are defined by scholars in Poland and in Western Europe. Polish radio documentaries are based on authenticity, while in a feature the truth intermingles with fiction. My Lobotomy, by David Isay and Piya Kochhar, serves as an example of a work which presents both authentic characters and some fictional elements. In the second part of the article I focused on the analysis of this American feature. As far as I am concerned, what makes the work most interesting is the relationship between the protagonist’s authentic and spontaneous reactions and the read out narrative sequences

Painterly rendering has been linked to computer vision, but we propose to link it to human vision because perception and painting are two processes that are interwoven. Recent progress in developing computational models allows to establish this link. We show that completely automatic rendering can be obtained by applying four image representations in the visual system: (1) colour constancy can be used to correct colours, (2) coarse background brightness in combination with colour coding in cytochrome-oxidase blobs can be used to create a background with a big brush, (3) the multi-scale line and edge representation provides a very natural way to render finer brush strokes, and (4) the multi-scale keypoint representation serves to create saliency maps for Focus-of-Attention, and FoA can be used to render important structures. Basic processes are described, renderings are shown, and important ideas for future research are discussed.

Phytohormone salicylic acid (SA) is a crucial component of plant-induced defense against biotrophic pathogens. Although the key players of the SA pathway are known, there are still gaps in the understanding of the molecular mechanism and the regulation of particular steps. In our previous research, we showed in Arabidopsis suspension cells that n-butanol, which specifically modulates phospholipase D activity, significantly suppresses the transcription of the pathogenesis related (PR-1) gene, which is generally accepted as the SA pathway marker. In the presented study, we have investigated the site of n-butanol action in the SA pathway. We were able to show in Arabidopsis plants treated with SA that n-butanol inhibits the transcription of defense genes (PR-1, WRKY38). Fluorescence microscopy of Arabidopsis thaliana mutants expressing 35S::NPR1-GFP (nonexpressor pathogenesis related 1) revealed significantly decreased nuclear localization of NPR1 in the presence of n-butanol. On the o...

Recent works in image editing are opening up new possibilities to manipulate and enhance input images. Within this context, we leverage well-known characteristics of human perception along with a simple depth approximation algorithm to generate non-photorealistic renditions that would be difficult to achieve with existing methods. Once a perceptually plausible depth map is obtained from the input image, we show