Introduction: Popular Music and Space in Post-War German History

Scholars are increasingly turning to rock'n’roll and its many genres as a means of exploring the recent past. What is electrifying about popular music in all its myriad forms is that it becomes a channel for rethinking social relations and affective communities (those held together by emotional ties) in the post-war period. These new identities and unconventional groupings exploded onto national societies, and their emancipatory programmes and inventive scenes drove democratisation. Societal responses to rock'n’roll indicate that popular music and the spaces where it manifested were highly contested, confrontations that enable scholars to reconsider historical narratives from alternative perspectives. Perhaps most importantly, as an expressive genre both driving and recording change, popular music is uniquely positioned to initiate and then document, through its material output, the efforts by individuals to alter everyday life and, as such, is an ideal vehicle for exploring the tremendous transformations that society has undergone in the post-war era.

New automatic minidisk infiltrometer: design and testing

Soil hydraulic conductivity is a key parameter to predict water flow through the soil profile. We have developed an automatic minidisk infiltrometer (AMI) to enable easy measurement of unsaturated hydraulic conductivity using the tension infiltrometer method in the field. AMI senses the cumulative infiltration by recording change in buoyancy force acting on a vertical solid bar fixed in the reservoir tube of the infiltrometer. Performance of the instrument was tested in the laboratory and in two contrasting catchments at three sites with different land use. Hydraulic conductivities determined using AMI were compared with earlier manually taken readings. The results of laboratory testing demonstrated high accuracy and robustness of the AMI measurement. Field testing of AMI proved the suitability of the instrument for use in the determination of sorptivity and near saturated hydraulic conductivity

Curating the CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook is a prime example of a curated database – a database that is constructed and maintained with a great deal of human effort in collecting, verifying, and annotating data. Preservation of old versions of the Factbook is important for verification of citations; it is also essential for anyone interested in the history of the data such as demographic change. Although the Factbook has been published, both physically and electronically, only for the past 30 years, we appear in danger of losing this history. This paper investigates the issues involved in capturing the history of an evolving database and its application to the CIA World Factbook. In particular it shows that there is substantial added value to be gained by preserving databases in such a way that questions about the change in data, (longitudinal queries) can be readily answered. Within this paper, we describe techniques for recording change in a curated database and we describe novel techniques for querying the change. Using the example of this archived curated database, we discuss the extent to which the accepted practices and terminology of archiving, curation and digital preservation apply to this important class of digital artefacts.

Peak nasal inspiratory flow – the plateau effect

To study the efficacy of peak nasal inspiration flow (PNIF) as a means of recording change in nasal patency 20 subjects were given increasing doses of intranasal 5tometazo1ine. Nasal resistance (NR) and peak nasal inspiratory flow (PNIF) were measured in the resting stateand after each xylometazoline administration. Successive increases in dose caused a progressive decrease in nasal resistance and an increase in PNIF but the change in peak nasal inspiratory flow (PNIF) was much less. Peak nasal inspiratory flow shows a plateau effect as nasal resistance decreases. The reasons for this plateau are discussed in terms of respiratory flow mechanics