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Thursday, December 20, 2012
Snowman Soup. Cute Christmas class treats.
2 comments:
- Nancy said...
They're really lovely Tiffany, and such a delicious treat! I hope you're enjoying this wonderful season! A Very Merry Christmas to you! :o)
- December 20, 2012 at 3:35 AM
- Anonymous said...
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- December 31, 2012 at 1:20 AM
I have moved!!! Find my website HERE!


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Here's what's being discussed about your Nashville Predators this Monday morning:
First off, Margie Newman gives us this report from the Predators Foundation "Club 501 Disco" that was held last night to benefit the charitable arm of the team. Check out Joel Ward and Greg de Vries in their 70's finest...
Is it just me or is de Vries channeling the spirit of Reggie Dunlop there?
Buddy Oakes of Preds on the Glass has an article featured over at FoxSports.com about the tightening race for the Calder Trophy; once presumed to be wrapped up by Columbus goalie Steve Mason, Pekka Rinne is making his case for the rookie award with his phenomenal play over the last several weeks.
John Glennon at the Tennessean lays out what is called a "key week in fight for playoffs." Actually, with Eastern Conference opponents like the Capitals and Rangers scheduled for this week, along with the Coyotes who have dropped out of the Western Conference race, I'd say this is the least critical week left on the schedule. Most of the games the rest of the way are against playoff rivals, so those games matter more in the standings.
The Metro West Daily News of Framingham, Massachusetts provides a glimpse into what it's like for team doctor Paul Rummo, who keeps an on the team from his seat eight rows behind the bench.

subset: commoncrawl


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An apparel contractor is an agent or company who help brands launch. They offer services that a brand need to convert a great idea into a reality. In other words a fashion contractor act as a sourcing agent for the fashion brand. And he handles sourcing for both materials and men power. For example sourcing technical designer, sampling unit and clothing manufacturing unit. So, he serves as an end to end supply chain for a brand to bring its idea live. In simple terms an individual or a company who offers end to end supply chain like from concept to customer. There are several companies who provide this service. However, very few have their own infrastructure to give this end to end solution. Some of them are middle men with few contacts from overseas. And they charge an hefty amount both from vendors and clients to connect them.
Apparel contractors are individual or company helping fashion brand bring their collections. They help in sourcing, and execution of collection from scratch. When you start a brand either you source technical designer, pattern maker, manufacturer. Most of us think they create a sketch and send to a pattern maker. The pattern maker prepares the pattern and you are good to go for sampling and production. But, this is not how clothing manufacturers operate. You need a tech pack for the style you want to prepare sample and do mass production.
Choosing Between Offshore and Domestic Apparel Manufacturing
If you have access to the pattern maker and seamstress and you can be available, then you wont need a tech pack. The pattern and few information about the style is enough. Yet, you need certain number of alteration to get the best fit. But, working with clothing manufacturer offshore, is an expensive and time taking process. And you need to give proper documentation about your style in the form of tech pack.
Working with Apparel Contractor and Preparing Collection With Production In Mind
Not everywhere you have access to pattern master or clothing manufacturers. And most of the time you have to depend on offshore clothing manufacturers.There may be two reasons for this. One the factories do not accept low MOQ garment production and charge three to 4 times more. Two they do not prefer to develop the samples and if they do they charge high to alter if there is any changes needed. In both the cases it is important that you prepare the project map before you actually proceed. Means, you prepare tech pack and detailed size specs and jump in to sampling and production. Option two is always better and more scientific way to move forward. Moreover, once you have the tech pack and measurement specs with you, you know what you want to do. Your vision is clear and you are more focused than circling around the idea.
Looking for tech packs to contact apparel contractor to produce your clothing? Wait no more. Visit tech pack template store and choose the tech pack from wide range of apparel styles. You will get the tech pack with complete detailing and measurement spec sheet. Download tech pack from tech pack template store and you are good to go.


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Decentralized Vision, the blockchain company that developed PumaPay PullPayment Protocol, has announced its newest addition to PumaPay's advisory board, Kenji Sasaki, Co-Founder of Cardano, CEO of Next Chymia Consulting HK, Corporate Officer of Emurgo. Sasaki has successfully demonstrated entrepreneurial achievements within the industry in Asia, especially in Japan. Sasaki will serve as an Advisor on PumaPay's Board, and brings with him extensive expertise from the blockchain world to PumaPay.
PumaPay created PullPayment Protocol with the mission to bring crypto payments in the daily life. Its innovative approach reverses the mechanisms of a transaction, enabling merchants to 'pull' crypto funds from their customers' account, thus avoiding the drawbacks of the current banking systems, such as high transaction costs, the insecurity of chargebacks (reverse transactions) and associated fines, and the lack of customer anonymity. PumaPay Protocol supports payment practices that have been impossible on the blockchain, including recurring payments with fixed and variable amounts, pay-per-use transactions, split payments, and more, enabling merchants to run their businesses the way they're used to with credit cards.
PumaPay's solution has gained support from prominent businesses worldwide. Referred to as early adopters, over 60 global companies have already agreed to implement the payment protocol as their payment method. PumaPay has collaborated with notable companies, including Wix, Fashion TV, Pornhub, Vivid Entertainment, Rent24, ImLive, to name a few.
I'm honored to join PumaPay and work with the team to continue to develop its PullPayment Protocol and build its growing ecosystem," said Kenji Sasaki, Co-Founder of Cardano. "It's a challenging yet very important task due to the project's disruptive potential, values and high focus on usability. This is the kind of project the blockchain industry needs today.
We're very happy to announce that Mr. Sasaki will be a part of our strategic team," commented Yoav Dror, CEO of PumaPay. "It's an honor to welcome a leader of such caliber, who has believed in PumaPay from the company's early stages, and has now stepped up in helping us move from vision to execution.


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eCite Digital Repository
Development of a hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) simulation model 4. Model description and validation
Lisson, S and Mendham, NJ and Carberry, PS, Development of a hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) simulation model 4. Model description and validation, Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 40, (3) pp. 425-432. ISSN 0816-1089 (2000) [Refereed Article]
DOI: doi:10.1071/EA99061
In studies assessing the prospects for a hemp industry, as well as in longer term research activities, the use of a hemp simulation model to complement the more traditional agronomic field trials would offer a number of potential advantages. In addition to being cost and labour intensive, field trials with hemp have political, social and security implications. With these implications in mind, a simulation model that captures the growth and development processes of hemp in response to management, genotypic, soil and climate factors, has the potential to increase research efficiency. The model could be used to assess the need, extent and nature of field trials, to help interpret field trial results, and to investigate temporal and spatial variability in selected crop responses. This paper describes a hemp crop growth and development model (APSIM-Hemp) and its validation against an independent dataset. The model was developed as a crop module within the framework of the larger systems model, Agricultural Production Systems simulator (APSIM), to extend the capability to encompass the agricultural system in which hemp is grown. APSIM-Hemp incorporates relationships developed in the previous papers in this series relating to pre- and post-emergent phenology and leaf area production. Other parameters relating to biomass partitioning, biomass production, water uptake and nitrogen uptake were derived from separate field studies and selected references. APSIM-Hemp adequately predicted phenology, leaf area and biomass production for the cultivar Kompolti at Forthside in north-western Tasmania, for a dataset comprised of results from trials conducted over 3 seasons and including treatments of sowing date, irrigation regime and plant density. Although performing well against this independent dataset, the performance of the model needs to be further validated over a range of other soil, climate and management conditions in order to assess its broader predictive capability. Notwithstanding these limitations, the sound basis of a model for simulating the growth and development of hemp has been developed.
Item Details
|Item Type:
|Refereed Article
|Research Division:
|Agricultural, Veterinary and Food Sciences
|Research Group:
|Crop and pasture production
|Research Field:
|Crop and pasture improvement (incl. selection and breeding)
|Objective Division:
|Animal Production and Animal Primary Products
|Objective Group:
|Other animal production and animal primary products
|Objective Field:
|Other animal production and animal primary products not elsewhere classified
|UTAS Author:
|Lisson, S (Dr Shaun Lisson)
|UTAS Author:
|Mendham, NJ (Dr Neville Mendham)
|ID Code:
|Year Published:
|Web of Science® Times Cited:
|Deposited By:
|Agricultural Science
|Deposited On:
|Last Modified:
Repository Staff Only: item control page


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"But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me"
2 Corinthians 12:9
Weakness is a quality this world frowns upon. It is the state or condition of lacking strength. Along with it is the frailty to succeed in school, at work, in ministry or even in personal relationships. In other words, it is not good.
Paul uttered these words after pointing out that he had a thorn in the flesh, it was a struggle for him to live under such harassment from Satan. Paul pleaded three times that his thorn would be taken away. He clearly wanted God to remove it but the Lord allowed it to remain so that Paul would not become conceited. He lived in the brokenness. He gloried in his weakness.
In the same way for the Christian, weakness is a state in which we humbly acknowledge our inability to succeed. It is in this state that we come to God, not of own effort and merit.
Weakness in us is greatness in God.
Weakness in spirit brings forth the declaration of helplessness and surrender, compelling us to step back, allowing God to be who He is, take over, and demonstrate His glory and might. Weakness pulls us down to our knees. Paul certainly was humbled by his weakness that allowed him to say "For when I am weak, then I am strong" (v10).
Weakness in the Christian is the revelation of God's grace. And in that alone, we can boast.
We boast of our God's sovereignty and omnipotence. We boast of our Creator's splendor and might. We boast of our King's victory and power. In the moment that we allow God to be God, true success is accomplished. The strength and power that God supplies amidst our weakness and limitations bring the ultimate glory to Him and not to us.
Are there things in your life that you are still trying to control, solve, or overcome? Do you have weaknesses or limitations that you cannot accept? Perhaps its time that you hand over the reigns to Him who is truly able, and see how amazing your weakness will turn out to be.
Written By: Anne Ilagan


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Peach Creek Plantation - Montgomery County
Peach Creek Estates - San Jacinto County
We've moved to a new website. Please click HERE to find us!
To access our private owner section, you will need your account number, the last name on the account, and the billing zip code. Please register by clicking here.
Thank you to all of the volunteers who make up the Board and various committees. They donate their time and energy to help make Peach Creek Plantation a wonderful neighborhood to live in. Please be mindful that timely payment of annual dues is absolutely critical to our ability to pay for the mowing, landscaping and the other overhead expenses required to keep the POA functioning.


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Thursday, 1 May 2008
May Merry May
May is going to be a great month. I will celebrate turning 42 and entering my sixth Cycle of Seven years - in style. I will spend time with the people I love, and by myself. I will read at least one great book. I will write 20,000 words, maybe more. The sun will shine at least some of the time.
Yep, it's going to be a great month. It started well, with a couple of acceptances from EDF, and it's going to get even better. I feel it, in all the right places. Happy May, everyone!
Posted by Sarah Hilary at 09:47
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How coffee fueled literature, the French Revolution and Union Army victory
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Not long ago, author Michael Pollan quit caffeine cold turkey. He wasn't keen to give up his daily coffees and green teas, but, as he was reporting a story about caffeine, multiple experts told him he couldn't understand its power — why caffeine withdrawal is even included in the vaunted "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" — until he gave it up.
The experts, he found, were right. Pollan found himself severely mentally impaired for weeks, and even after that initial withdrawal subsided, he still felt noticeably out of it. When he did return to caffeine after three months, it felt like he was consuming an illicit drug.
It was "almost as if my cup had been spiked with something stronger, something like cocaine or speed," Pollan writes in his new book "This Is Your Mind On Plants" (Penguin Press), out now. "I looked around me, taking in the mellow sidewalk scene, the kids in their strollers, and the dogs trailing them for crumbs. Everything in my visual field seemed pleasantly italicized, filmic."
Pollan goes so far as to assert that the stimulant created the modern world.
"It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed . . . everything," he writes. "Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too."
He notes that coffee first made its way from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the 15th century, at a time when the Islamic world was more advanced in the sciences than Europe. In the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had hundreds of coffeehouses, and some historians have linked the rise of java in the Islamic world with the advent of modern mathematics.
In the early 17th century, the first coffeehouse in Europe opened in Venice, and thousands soon followed, creating a new kind of intellectual space. "You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information — in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation — was free," Pollan writes.
The political conversations in coffeehouses were so potentially powerful that in 1675 in England, King Charles II moved to close them down. He abandoned his efforts after 11 days, upon seeing how dependent his countrymen were on caffeine. In France, coffeehouses were a venue for rebellion; the mob that stormed the Bastille and ignited the French Revolution first assembled at the Cafe de Foy.
The Enlightenment and subsequent intellectual movements were also fueled by coffee. Voltaire is said to have drunk as many as 72 cups a day. Diderot relied upon it to put together the "Encyclopédie." Balzac credited his literary proliferation to coffee and he went so far as to consume it in powder form, rather than allow brewing to dilute it.
And, of course, caffeine also helped dramatically improve more humble laborers' output. The minute hand on clocks was invented in the late 16th century, and it rose in use as coffee-drinking became widespread, something that Pollan writes is "surely more than coincidence." As work moved away from physical outdoor endeavors to more nuanced indoor pursuits, "a new temporal discipline that coffee and tea could help to enforce" was called for.
In America, one of the first employers to use coffee to increase productivity was the Union Army during the Civil War, when soldiers were each issued 36 pounds of joe per year. Economic blockades deprived Confederate troops of coffee — giving the Union a winning edge, historians have theorized.
Humans started consuming tea long before coffee — it was used as a medicine at least as early as 1,000 BC — and it has had similar historical importance. Pollan writes that tea's popularity in the latter half of the first century AD in China coincided with a golden age for the Tang dynasty. Tea became widely accessible to people in the West in the 1800s. In England, it helped laborers work long hours in harsh conditions, and when sweetened with sugar provided a cheap source of calories. "It's difficult to imagine the Industrial Revolution without it," Pollan writes.
But caffeine has also been a victim of the productivity it has enabled. Industrial growth and pollution has led to climate change, which is now severely affecting finicky coffee plants. Some estimate that by 2050, roughly half of the area used to grow coffee will no longer be conducive to the crops.
"Capitalism," Pollan writes, "having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose."
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We value our customers and want to reward you for returning each and every time. Our rewards program is an easy way to earn store credit and save more!
How do I join your rewards program?
Joining our loyalty program is easy. If you have a registered account on our store, then you have to do nothing. All registered users are automatically enrolled.
If you don't have a registered account, simply register for an account here or during checkout the next time you shop and you will be enrolled in our loyalty program.
How does your loyalty program work?
Earn 1 point for every dollar you spend with us. When you have enough points, we will automatically convert them into store credit.
Depending on your spending level with our store, you will earn anywhere from 3% to 5% store credit.
Below are our three reward levels.
Reward Level
Spend Level
Reward Amount
|3% store credit. eg spend $200, get $6
|4% store credit, eg. spend $1000 get $40
|5% store credit eg spend $2000 get $100
How do I check my balance ?
Just Sign In to your account. You'll be able to view your store credit balance on you account page.
How do I Use my Points ?
Your points are automatically redeemed for store credit once you have earned the $5.00 minimum amount.
This means that the next time you shop with us, your store credit will be ready and waiting for you as a payment method in your account.
Just log in before purchase! We want to make it easy to earn your loyalty.
Rules and Regulations
- Reward points are available to registered online members only.
- Points/Store Credit will not be applied to accounts until after delivery.
- Store Credit cannot be applied to tax or shipping costs.
- Store Credit is applied to the full retail price of a product before any discounts.
- Points/Store Credit are earned and redeemable by the e-mail address on account only.
- Points/Store Credit are non-transferable.
- Points/Store Credit may only be redeemed for purchases and have no cash value.
- Points/Store Credit are accumulated by current purchases only.
- Members must be 18 years or older.
- Accounts will be audited monthly and any suspicious activity will be inactivated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law when necessary.
- We hold the right to cancel an account at any time.
- Unused points never expire. However, site accounts without any purchase activity in the past 12 months may be cancelled without notice.
The more you shop, the more you save
We appreciate your repeat business and we intend to do all we can to provide more value with every purchase.
Take a moment to be sure and bookmark our site and remember to sign in when ordering online so you don't miss any reward point opportunities.


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The Aces "Ace" The Suns to Win Their First Franchise Title
Las Vegas is known for its world-class entertainment and lived up to the name on Sunday by taking home the 2022 WNBA Championship.
The Aces wrote their names in the history books by defeating the Connecticut Suns 3-1. Not only was this their first win in franchise history, but this was also the first time Las Vegas celebrated a professional sports team championship.
Although the title was claimed on the East Coast, the celebration started in the Entertainment Capital of the World the second the clock ticked to zero, with the Aces winning 78-71.
Their success on the court was constant all season, and the Aces were the number one seed going into the playoffs.
The WNBA debuted a new playoff format this year, with the first round being a best-of-three, and the semi-finals and finals being a best-of-five. After powering through the Phoenix Mercury in just two games in the first round and beating the Seattle Storm 3-1 in the semis, the Aces proved to be unstoppable.
The Suns also were a force to be reckoned with after eliminating the Dallas Wings 2-1 in the first round and defeating the defending WNBA Champions, the Chicago Sky, in a nail-biting series 3-2.
Although they were not able to claim the 2022 title, the Suns did avoid a shutout series by forcing a game four, after winning game three 105-76.
The Finals MVP came down to two incredible players: forward A'ja Wilson and point guard Chelsea Gray. Both were admirable choices, with Wilson averaging 20 points and 9.8 rebounds per game, with Gray coming in at 18.3 points and six assists per game.
Gray ultimately became the winner by scoring 20 points in the Championship Game to top off her amazing playing in the series.
The team is coached by legend Becky Hammon who has already had such an impressive career. In her 16 years of WNBA play, she recorded six All-Star selections, was named one of the top 25 greatest players to ever play in the WNBA and had her jersey retired by Las Vegas last year.
However, she didn't win a ring in her career as an athlete, so finally securing the victory as a coach was a personal goal achieved after a long-time coming.
Hammon tops off her list of accomplishments by being named the WNBA's Coach of the Year in her first year of being the Aces' coach. She is only the third former WNBA athlete to win this honor and the first since 2014.
Additionally, Hammon is the only head coach to win the championship in her rookie season besides for the original season of the league in 1997, where Van Chancellor secured the victory for the Houston Comets.
With the Aces' title comes the end of their incredible season, where they recorded the franchise's third-highest regular season winning percentage.
Nonetheless, the team is already looking ahead to next season and beyond, with their season motto staying true until the end: they are "all in."
Allie Wenskoski is a first-year majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact her, email firstname.lastname@example.com.


text: From time to time I like to draw your attention to some pearls that we find, and the pearls were not promoted enough. Terra incognita. One of them is Byzantian Blue Slivovitz, a masterpiece of plum brandy aged for 12 years. Suppliers and producers of brandy in Serbia are sometimes too … [Read more...]


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Singer Demi Lovato took the stage at last week's Grammy Awards to deliver an emotional rendition of "Anyone," a striking and vulnerable ballad she penned just four days before her overdose in 2018.
This Sunday, Lovato followed up her Grammys performance by singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Projecting strength and power in an all-white pantsuit, her rendition was emotional yet full of confidence. Watch the full performance below:
At just 17, Lovato was predicting on Twitter that she'd sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl someday, and although her dream did finally come true, Lovato overcame an incredible amount of adversity to get to this point. Lovato has been open about her struggles with addiction and an eating disorder.
That said, if Lovato's Grammys performance was an impassioned public acknowledgment of the unimaginable pain she's been through over the past few years, her Super Bowl performance felt like an assurance that she is very much back. Delivering the national anthem at the Super Bowl fulfills a very specific version of the American dream, and by taking on that responsibility—and nailing it, by the way—Lovato proved she has the strength and resilience to keep charting the course of her career on her own terms.
Fans were thrilled to see Lovato triumph in the highly watched performance, and shared their feelings on Twitter:


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Market Basket Analysis
Hello everyone, and welcome. This post is about Market Basket Analysis. Market Basket Analysis is a kind of "association analysis", which is a method for discovering interesting relationships between variables in datasets. Market Basket Analysis is association analysis aimed at modeling associations between products by determining the sets of items that are frequently purchased together. Association rules are then built based on those itemsets, and recommendations are derived from them. In this post, I am going to discuss how to prepare sample transaction data for use with association mining algorithms, and how to use those algorithms to mine associations.
Process Overview
First, a dataset of transactions is loaded with attributes containing transaction ids, product ids, purchase amounts, and sales prices. This data can be found in the inside the Repository in RapidMiner:
Next, the data moves into the "Data Prep" subprocess where it is aggregated by summation to account for multiple occurrences of the same product in a transaction, pivoted so that each transaction is represented by a row, and transformed so that the purchase amounts change to binary "product purchased true/false " indicators. Finally, the data is split so that 75% of it is sent into the "FP-Growth" and "Create Association Rules" operators and 25% is sent into the "Apply Association Rules" operator. The "FP-Growth" operator determines which items (products) in the dataset have been purchased together most frequently, the "Create Association Rules" operator then creates rules based on the frequently purchased item sets (which can be used for product recommendations depending on the confidences of the rules), and the rules are then applied to data using the "Apply Association Rules" operator (which returns suggested items given the items currently in a customer's basket).
Data Preparation
Above is a snapshot of the transaction data before processing and after processing. The original data contains a transaction id (Invoice), a product id (product 1), order number (Orders), and item value (Sales value). After it has been processed, the "Invoice" attribute has been tagged as an "id", and all the other columns represent an individual product with a label of "true" or "false" to denote if the product was purchased in an individual transaction. Now, let's look at how this transformation was done.
First, is aggregation by summation to account for multiple occurrences of the same product in a transaction. The two things that need to be done here is to choose which attributes to group by and which attribute to aggregate on. To choose these, click on the "Select Attributes" button of the "group by attributes" parameter (circled in blue) and the "Edit List" button of the "aggregation attributes" parameter (circled in red).
For the "group by attributes" parameter (see above), since we want to remove multiple occurrences of the same product in a transaction, the transaction should be the highest level of grouping (Invoice) followed by the product (product 1). Click on those two attributes from the "Attributes" column on the left and click the right arrow button so that they get moved into the "Selected Attributes" column on the right.
For the "aggregation attributes" parameter, the attribute that needs to be aggregated by summation is the "Orders" attribute. To set that up, click on the down arrow (circled in red) for the "aggregation attribute" column and choose "Orders", then click on the down arrow for the "aggregation functions" and choose "sum". The data should now look like this:
Next, the data needs to be pivoted so that each transaction is one row and each product is a column. To do this, choose "Invoice" as the "group attribute" (circled in red), "product 1" as the "index attribute (circled in blue), and leave everything else as their default settings. The data should now look like this:
Next, set the role of "id" (circled in blue) to the "Invoice" attribute (circled in red). This will allow for this attribute to be ignored by all the operators that follow, for both the data prep and modeling stages.
Next, the attribute names need to be altered so that they are the name of the product only. Right now, each attribute has a name like "sum(Orders)_Product 10", so the "sum(Orders)_" part needs to be removed. For help creating the appropriate regex (circled in red above), click on the right most button for the "replace what" parameter (circled in blue) to open the window shown below.
To test if the regex is selecting the appropriate part of each attribute, an example attribute name can be typed into the "Text" box (circled above in red). The part of the text that has been captured is highlighted yellow, and the resulting text will show up in the "Results preview" box (circled in blue). For more in-depth information on Regexes, see this post.
Finally, the missing values need to be converted to a number using the "Replace Missing Values operator (top picture), and all of the numbers must be converted to binominal "True/False" values using the "Numerical to Binominal" operator. In the "Replace Missing Values" operator, the only thing that needs to be changed is the "default" parameter (circled in red). It is set to "average" by default but changing this to "zero" (as shown) makes the next step much easier. In the "Numerical to Binominal" operator, all the parameters can be left at their default values. Since the "min" and "max" values are set to zero (circled in red), any zero value in the data will become "false" and all other values will become "true". Now the data should look like the example below and be ready to use in the "association" operators that follow.
Split the Data
Now that the data has been prepared for input into the "FP-Growth" and "Apply Association Rules" operators, the data needs to be split so that data used in the "Apply Association Rules" operator isn't the same data used to create the rules. As seen in the picture above, I chose to do a linear split by choosing "linear sampling" for the "sampling type" parameter (circled in blue). To choose the ratio for the split, click on the "Edit Enumeration" button for the "partitions" parameter (circled in red). I chose to send 3/4ths of the data into the "FP-Growth" operator and 1/4th into the "Apply Association Rules" operator, but that ratio can be adjusted to your requirements.
Association Operators
The most important parameters for the "FP-Growth" operator are the "input format" (circled in red) and the "min requirement" and "min support" parameters (circled in blue). For the "input format", three different forms are accepted:
– An item list in a single column: All the items belonging to a transaction appear in a single column, separated by item separators in a CSV-like format.
– Items in separate columns: All the items belonging to a transaction appear in separate columns, with the first item name appearing in the first column, the second item name in the second column, etc.
– Items in dummy coded columns: Every item in the dataset has its own column, and the item name is the column name. For each transaction, the binominal values (true/false) indicate whether the item can be found in the transaction.
The reason for choosing the "dummy coded columns" form is because that is the form that the "Apply Association Rules" operator requires.
With "min requirement" the choices are "frequency" (the number of times an item appears in the dataset) or "support" (which is the default). Like frequency, support is an indication of how frequently the itemset appears in the dataset, but "support" is calculated by dividing the frequency of an item by the number of transactions in the dataset.
The support value can be changed in one of two ways, manually or with the "requirement decrease factor" (circled above in green), when the "find min number of itemsets" box is checked (by default). At the default settings, 0.95 (the "min support" value) will be multiplied by 0.9 (the "requirement decrease factor" value) a maximum number of 15 times (the "max number of retries" value) until there are at least 100 itemsets returned (the "min number of itemsets" value). However, the default values returned zero itemsets. As a result, I arbitrarily tried reducing the "requirement decrease factor" value by half to 0.45, and 144 itemsets were returned:
From these itemsets, association rules now need to be created. The most important parameters here are the "criterion" and "min confidence". The criterion are confidence lift, conviction, ps, gain, and laplace, but the most common is confidence (the default value). Confidence is an indication of how often the rule has been found to be true (with a number ranging from 0 to 1) and is calculated as follows:
In plain English, the confidence that item(s) Y will be bought if item(s) X is bought is equal to the support for occurrences of transactions where X and Y appear together, divided by the support for item(s) X in the dataset. The higher the confidence, the more certain the rule is.
For this dataset, the higher the confidence of the rule, the lower the support for it in the dataset was. As you do your own analysis, you should think about how much of a balance between these two values is required for your circumstances.
This will return a set of rules that look like this:
Finally, the "Apply Association Rules" operator. If "binary" is chosen for the "confidence aggregation method" parameter, items that have been recommended according to the previously created association rules is marked as a "1", and items not recommended are marked with a "0". The other choices for this parameter are aggregated confidence, aggregated conviction, aggregated LaPlace, aggregated gain, and aggregated lift. If any of these are chosen, the value for the chosen aggregation method will be the positive value for that method and a "0" for the negative value.
This will return a dataset that looks like this (positive values have been circled red):
Very few positive values have been returned, but that is because the original confidence level of the rules was set so high. All the rules had a confidence level of "1" with a support level of "0.008" at most, so lowering the "min confidence" parameter value in the "Create Association Rules" operator would likely increase the number of suggested products.
In summary, the transaction data was loaded into the process, and it was then prepared for the association algorithm operators inside of the "Data Prep" subprocess. Inside of this subprocess, the transaction data was aggregated by summation to account for multiple occurrences of the same product in a transaction, pivoted so that each transaction is represented by a row, and had the purchase amounts changed to a binary "product purchased true/false " indicator. The data was then split so that a portion was sent into the "FP-Growth" operator and another portion was sent into the "Apply Association Rules" operator. Finally, itemsets were created by the "FP-Growth" operator, association rules were then created from these itemsets by the "Create Association Rules" operator, and product suggestions were then created by applying those rules to separate data using the "Apply Association Rules" operator.
I hope this post has helped you understand the basic process needed to perform Market Basket Analysis, and that you now feel more confident in performing your own analysis.
See you in the next post!


text:
Published in Organised Sound, 17(3), 1-9, 2012.
A purely aesthetic approach may be problematic when artists wish to deal with the external world as part of their work. The work of R. Murray Schafer in formulating soundscape studies is described, as well as the author's extension of that work within a communicational framework. Soundscape composition is situated within a continuum of possibilities, each with its own practice of mapping or representing the world. Current technological possibilities as well as ethical issues involved in the production process are discussed, along with the author's work in creating a multi-channel imaginary soundscape. The evolving nature of the listener's relationship to acoustic space over the last century is discussed in comparison to developments in soundscape composition.
1. Aesthetics and the Soundscape
If artists wish to deal with issues involving the environment, particularly if they decide to incorporate those issues directly into their artistic work, they will encounter significant problems that their training may have left them ill-equipped to deal with. In the case of musicians, composers and sound artists, the lack of formal training in dealing with real-world issues, as well as acoustics, may be problematic to the extent that artistic concerns have been traditionally framed in terms of musical sound, that is, sounds primarily related to each other, and only secondarily to their possible relationships to the environment or society at large. I often refer to this distinction as that involving the 'inner complexity' of sound, whether acoustic or electroacoustic, as opposed to the 'outer complexity' of the real world (Truax 1992, 1994).
The issues of relating inner and outer complexity become particularly problematic if the subject matter is drawn from the soundscape. Do the composer and sound artist become caught in the dilemma of either aestheticising the sounds of the environment, for instance, or else subordinating artistic values in order to convey a social message? How can the composer's skills be best used to deal with the external world? The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer attempted to deal with this problem in his writing in such publications as the booklets, The New Soundscape (1969) and The Music of the Environment (1973), through to his major work The Tuning of the World (1977). The titles as well as the arguments presented in these works heavily rely on musical metaphors to suggest that we are all composers of the universal soundscape which we can become attuned to if we learn to listen to it as if it were music, as also suggested by John Cage if perhaps from a different aesthetic stance. Schafer often referred to acoustic design as 'orchestration' so much so that a recent critic argues that his work 'is a prescriptive text that is often referred to as a descriptive one' (Kelman 2010: 214).
Schafer's call for musicians and the public at large to become involved with soundscape issues stemmed largely from his frustration with urban, technological noise, as exemplified in his highly rhetorical The Book of Noise (Schafer 1970), and his experience in framing the issue within the tradition of anti-noise lobbies (Thompson 2002; Bijsterveld 2008), a negative approach which does not lead to positive action or solutions, only bureaucratic legislation and public apathy. He wanted to inspire individuals through 'ear cleaning' by applying a musician's innate sensitivity to sound in order to value what is positive in a soundscape, while raging against the negative aspects. However, his background was humanistic and artistic, not grounded in the social sciences, and hence, inspired by the Bauhaus' insistence on functional aesthetics, his arguments relied heavily on acoustic design as composition, with all of the attendant aesthetics that such a musical approach implies. Nevertheless, his legacy in founding the World Soundscape Project (WSP) at Simon Fraser University (SFU) during the 1970s inspired several generations worldwide as evidenced by the 1993 founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), with its website (wfae.net), listserve, occasional conferences, and the Soundscape Journal.
Despite my own lack of formal training in the social sciences, I had the good fortune to benefit from Schafer's positioning of the WSP in the fledgling Department of Communication Studies at SFU, now the School of Communication. This interdisciplinary school based in the social sciences provided a different conceptual paradigm based in information processing and communication understood as a system of relationships created by that information, including all technological mediation. I saw that a communicational model could transcend, as well as incorporate, both the objective scientific model of sound as energy and signal transfer, and the purely subjective listener-centred approach of soundscape studies. The basic model of acoustic communication is grounded in the understanding that information and meaning arise through listening from both the inner structure and patterns of sound itself and also the listener's knowledge of context. In other words, both inner and outer complexity inform our understanding of sound. Further, sound is not merely information exchange, but is capable of creating relationships between listeners and their environment in a dynamic process of embodied cognition. This mediating role of sound creates the possibility of the 'acoustic community', examples of which are outlined in the Finnish study of six European villages (Järviluoma, Kytö, Truax, Uimonen, and Vikman 2009) that re-visited the five villages the WSP had studied in 1975, hence providing a longitudinal dimension to the study. This updated study showed how fluid the cultural dynamics of an acoustic community are, as it evolves with economic and social change and deals with issues such as tourism which commodifies the community and its character.
When I came to write about acoustic design in the first edition (1984) of my book Acoustic Communication, I was able to base the criteria for acoustic design not on musical aesthetics but rather on 'the analysis of positively functioning soundscapes' in a shift 'away from artifacts, and causes and effects, towards process' (Truax 2001: 109, 110). One advantage of understanding acoustic communication as a process relating listeners and communities to their environments through sound is that interventions in the sense of design can be effective at any level of the system, the effects of which will have their own dynamic behaviour. Change can begin with the sound itself, or the listener, or the context, as opposed, for instance, to a situation where an 'expert' imposes change without involving listeners in the process. Listeners are entirely capable of negotiating their own relationship to the environment to achieve their functional goals, as seen by the current popularity of personal portable audio systems (Bull 2000, 2006, 2007).
Where does the communicational approach leave the artist and composer? At the very least, it would seem to require a broadening if not an actual re-definition of that person's role. Some new roles may be as an aural educator, an informed mediator, a social activist, or as a contributor to an interdisciplinary team. Clearly, not all such roles may suit any particular individual, and also clearly, the education of future artists will require a broader base of studies for them to be well equipped for this work. Of particular interest, however, is work that combines artistic creativity with social concerns, work that I broadly refer to as soundscape composition. By its sheer diversity and use of technological innovation, it presents opportunities and challenges that surpass more traditional forms of composition.
2. Soundscape Composition: mapping and representing the real
In order to situate soundscape composition, it may be useful to consider it in relation to two continua, the first of which represents possible musical relationships with outer complexity:
Internal Dominant (text) < ——— > External Dominant (context)
On the left side where the composer concentrates on the structuring of musical sounds, we can say that 'text' is dominant and the relation to the outer world is most often expressed as musical 'inspiration'. In fact, if one were to believe composers' program notes, one would think that every piece of music reflects the outer world as references abound to personal experience, books read, non-musical intellectual concepts, poetry, travel experiences, and so on. However, most of these influences can be read as having an inspirational role for the composer, hence of great value, but not necessarily to the listener. If one reads these notes only after hearing the work, these sources of inspiration may be curiously surprising, but unnecessary to understanding the work itself which usually falls into a familiar style. At the other end of the continuum, one can imagine work that is almost entirely contextually driven, as in sonification or site-specific sound installations that are discussed next. Real-world data is mapped onto sound, hopefully with some aural sensitivity but not necessarily. In between is the range of a balanced interplay between text and context that is characteristic of soundscape composition.
Soundscape composition may be situated along another continuum of practices:
Sonification < ——— > Phonography < ——— > Virtual Soundscapes
The left half of this continuum involves processes that map the real world onto sound. The direct use of real-world data can be called 'audification' if it is literally interpreted as an audio waveform, or more commonly 'sonification' if a mapping process is made of that data onto sonic parameters to create some kind of auditory display. In some cases, sonification is the aural counterpart of the visualisation of data where it takes advantage of the aural perception of pattern in appropriate mappings, for instance, which may not be apparent in a purely visual approach. This kind of sound design may be thought of as art in the service of science. Installation artists can turn the approach around as science in the service of art, where scientific data is mapped onto sound (and possibly visuals) for the purpose of communicating that data to the public. Most of the work of Andrea Polli (www. andreapolli.com), for instance, embodies this practice in the communication of environmental issues such as global warming to a public unfamiliar with the purely scientific discourse around those issues. Likewise, sound sculptures and other installations can be activated and driven by forces or data from the real world, which may direct the listener's attention back to an understanding of some facet of that world.
In the middle of the continuum, phonography (by analogy to photography) endeavours to map the real world onto sound recordings that are usually not further manipulated other than transparent editing or mixing (Drever 2002). All recordists, as well as photographers, understand that the act of recording is far from objective or neutral, both technically in terms of microphone characteristics and strategically in terms of recording perspective and other choices with regard to location. However, the further manipulation of those recordings raises ethical issues for the artists as to representation, of what, for whom, and in what future context. John Drever himself argues for a more self-reflexive ethnographic approach, as opposed to what he calls 'sonic tourism' or 'sonic fetishism' that we will return to later.
The right half of the continuum clearly involves issues of representing the real, and it is here that activities of composers influenced by the World Soundscape Project generally situate their work, moving from a more documentary approach to that which is more clearly abstracted, though never completely abstract in the sense that sounds and context remain easily recognizable (Truax 2002). I am going to suggest that further right along the continuum we move from the abstracted to the virtual, first in the sense that compositional manipulation is intended to invoke the implicit aspects of soundscape perception, that is, the inner world of memory, metaphor, and symbolism. Even farther along the continuum is the creation of a purely imaginary or virtual world, one that perhaps seems 'hyper-real' with recognizable elements and structure, yet logically impossible, and possibly interpretable as mythic.
This entire range of possibilities in soundscape composition is based within a technological environment where it has never been easier to obtain, through recording or filesharing, and to process environmental sound. I should point out in passing that in the traditional definition of 'soundscape' (dating from the 1978 edition) in the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Truax 1999), it is emphasized that the soundscape depends on listeners' understanding and interpretation of a sonic environment, and that it can refer to both acoustic soundscapes and electroacoustic compositions interpreted as such. Elsewhere I have argued that the everyday soundscape is becoming increasingly electroacoustic in its constituents, and contemporary electroacoustic composition, particularly with the multi-channel format, is becoming more environmental (Truax 2008).
With soundfiles so freely available (e.g. freesound.org) and portable memory-based recorders so inexpensive, it is not surprising that the younger generation often seems bewildered by the opportunities available, and perplexed by the issue of what one can or should do with all of this material. In other words, one can easily obtain and arbitrarily manipulate environmental sounds with no contact or experience whatsoever of the original context. In fact, one may question whether one has any obligation to do so? Just as Drever's reference to 'sonic tourism' implies a transient relationship as an outsider to some particular context, so too online sound libraries create a potentially even more distanced relationship to the material presented. Besides being of usually limited sound quality in the recorded representation, these 'samples' or files (note the generic reference to them) are usually accompanied by only cursory information as to their provenance. One is tempted to treat them as 'text', not 'context'.
Sound maps have become increasingly common on the Internet, where instead of files organized by subject matter (or not at all), a Google-style map is used to situate the geographic origin of the recordings (e.g. www.worldlisteningproject.org). I have found that the sound map is useful to orient people who are unfamiliar with the soundscape concept to the idea that soundscape recordings are markers of place. However, lacking any coherent temporal perspective, and usually lacking any interpretative analysis, the listener is left trying to imagine what has been recorded and what significance it has. An interesting variant of this approach is a live microphone in a fixed location that is constantly streaming audio, thereby linking it to a surveillance camera, even if the intent is different.
The issues involved with such recording and sampling are reminiscent of the ethics of appropriation with respect to other cultures. Robert Gluck has provided a nuanced survey of the motivations and strategies that have been used by a wide range of composers, and argues for a 'reflective practice' (Gluck 2008: 143) involving a repeated self-reflexive process at every stage, including feedback from those directly involved with the culture in question. The tone of respect and appreciation for the culture being represented seems appropriate for the practice of soundscape composition being discussed here, and in fact, Gluck makes reference to that practice.
An excellent example of deep involvement by recordists in the soundscape they are documenting comes with Gregg Wagstaff's Touring Exhibition of Sound Environments (TESE) in the Isles of Harris and Lewis in northern Scotland (Drever 2002). In this project and its meticulous documentation, the recordists engaged the local public not only via the recordings they made, but enabled the locals to make their own recordings and facilitated a group composition as an outcome. In addition, listening exercises and sound journals were practiced in the local school and examples recorded. In other words, the soundscape was not interpreted as raw material to be exploited in a quasi-industrial mining and post-production project, even if it left the soundscape more intact than the physical counterpart does with the landscape. In fact, it seems quite likely that a learning experience was initiated with the local population whose eventual influence and results could not be foreseen.
My own practical suggestion with regard to soundscape recording and composition is not to begin with recording or processing in the studio, but rather with the experience of soundwalking in the soundscape. Soundwalking is best done with the only intent being listening, without the distraction of operating a recorder. It is arguably the most direct aural involvement possible with a soundscape and one where repetition does not dull its effectiveness, since each walk is unique and unrepeatable. It is also a good practice to open one's ears and self to whatever is inherent in an environment, with minimal pre-conception, ideally treated as a phenomenological experience. Several soundwalks in the same area are desirable at different times of day or even seasons, since any one exposure is a small slice of the totality. This advice is as true for one's own community as for where one is a visitor (but preferably guided by a local). After various soundwalks have been completed, the listener can make a more informed choice about recording, along with what is the best way to represent the soundscape through recording. Later in the studio, the question as to what is a reasonable representation of the soundscape can be judged based on that experience. This is not to say that an intentional emphasis or exaggeration cannot be contemplated for a specific effect or to raise an issue. I often use the example of mixing the Vancouver Harbour ambience track on the Vancouver Soundscape recording from 1996 (Sound example 1). In order to parallel the 1973 recording of the harbour, we wanted a four-minute mix that would include the most typical elements: waves, gulls, seaplanes, boathorns, ferry whistle, and the noonday "O Canada" Horn soundmark (which plays the first four notes of the national anthem), now situated at the harbour. If a single take had been used, only those sounds occurring just before or just after noon could have been included, and therefore many of the typical sounds of the area would probably be missed. Instead, up to four simultaneous stereo tracks were mixed together, all recorded from the same vantage point, such that even the Seabus ferry whistle (which does not occur on the hour) was present. The issue also arose as to how many seaplanes to include, since the choice was arbitrary. In the end, three occurrences were included which most listeners find reasonable. But the possibility existed that, in the spirit of a tourism agency wanting to present an 'air-brushed' image of the city, we could have erased all such references; or else, in order to reflect the high proportion of complaints about seaplane noise from local residents, we could have 'made a point' by including so many that a listener would realize we were making a protest statement. How to achieve a more neutral, plausible representation was determined by the experience of soundwalks in the area that noted the actual frequency of this element.
3. The Virtual Soundscape
Soundscape composers use a variety of electroacoustic techniques to expand the communicational scope of their compositions beyond a seemingly literal representation of actual soundscapes. It is beyond the scope of this article to survey all of their approaches, but perhaps a few illustrative examples will give a sense of their practices. Hildegard Westerkamp provides a running commentary on some of the processing she uses in Kits Beach Soundwalk to simulate how listening to small foreground sounds on the beach might interact with one's awareness of the ambient city sounds in the background. In Beneath The Forest Floor, she includes a mysterious low, thumping sound along with the forest ambience to suggest a hidden, perhaps symbolic aspect of the forest soundscape; in fact, the sound is a processed version of one of the other sounds in the piece, but she does not reveal the source to the listener, and instead plays on its ambiguity in the listener's imagination. With Into The Labyrinth, she transforms the spectromorphological shape of the hammering sounds she recorded in India to give them a clearly musical and symbolic identity. With my Pendlerdrøm piece, the commuter waiting in the train station and traveling in the local train falls into a daydream in which sounds heard previously in realistic sections of the piece return in loops, surrounded by stretched and resonated versions of other sounds from the immediate environment. In the various scenes in Island, I deliberately juxtaposed eight surround sound tracks of realistic ambiences with eight tracks that processed the same sounds in order to suggest a mysterious and somewhat magical character to this island visit. At times, the transformed sounds signify a distinct, 'other' element, whereas in other sections, the two types of sounds fuse together.
Over the last decade, multi-channel playback of soundscape compositions has provided listeners with a compelling, immersive sonic experience. Even a simple ring of eight speakers around the audience creates a convincing simulated soundscape. Multiples of those eight speakers, particularly if positioned at different heights, can create a three-dimensional sense of space and volume. If independent (i.e. uncorrelated) sounds are fed to specific loudspeakers, sound sources appear highly localized, and with computer-assisted diffusion, sounds can also appear to move in trajectories around the space (Truax 1998). Compositional techniques (Baalman 2010; Wilson and Harrison 2010) incorporating spatial elements, along with models for their importance in perception and cognition (Kendall 2010) have been well documented in recent years, and will no doubt continue to develop as more composers gain access to multi-channel formats.
As soundscape compositions incorporate both narrative and abstracted elements into their language, a further development is to create completely imaginary, yet hyper-realistic spaces. Purely synthetic sound design for environmental sounds lags behind the synthesis techniques for instrumental and vocal sound that have been developed over the last decades, particularly in terms of the possible complexity and realism of the sound material. On the other hand, processing of recorded environmental sounds tends to suggest a level of abstraction that leads one away from realism, even if fruitfully as described above. I have discovered an interesting hybrid approach that involves convolution of different classes of environmental and synthetic sounds that I used exclusively to create my 8-channel work, Chalice Well (2009).
Convolution is traditionally used to place a dry recording within a reverberant space by convolving it with the impulse response of that space (Roads 1996). The process simulates the way in way each reflection in an enclosed space colours the original sound and adds together with all other reflections to create a reverberant field. The theory behind the technique is described as a multiplication of spectra in the frequency domain such that frequencies that are strong in both the source and the impulse remain strong in the output, whereas weak frequencies in either spectrum get even weaker. However, it is the combination of the frequency colouration with the temporal character of the impulse that give the results the realism of sound placed in a real acoustic space.
The approach I used in Chalice Well was to convolve different types of textured sounds, those with a particulate quality, mainly water drops, splashes, streams and trickles, but also glass breaking, bubbles, percussive locks and doors, transposed male consonants, and differing densities of granular synthesis textures (as used in my work Riverrun) as both sources and impulses. Normally when one convolves continuous sounds together, the result is a smeared and quite blurred texture, but because these sounds were comprised of numerous impulses, the results of the convolution were highly detailed and well defined. Moreover, the spatial qualities of the original soundfiles ranged from dry to reverberant, and so each combination produced a well-defined sense of space, dry convolved with dry producing a foreground texture, reverberant with reverberant a distant, background texture, and dry with reverberant a middle ground sound. Each combination (approximately 200 were used) could be described as a hybrid sound, situated somewhere between synthetic and processed and incorporating elements of each of its parents. Families of sound textures were created and documented, since each possible permutation of sources resulted in a different but related output. Moreover, convolving file A with file B is not equivalent to convolving file B with file A if one uses a window function that is not a rectangle, hence the number of variants is potentially doubled.
While experimenting with this technique, I quickly began to sense the type of imaginary soundscape the results were suggesting which was an underground cavern in which many types of water flows were present. One class of splashing and dripping water had in fact been recorded in a resonant well (and had already been used in the third section of my piece Island) and these sounds made me think of the aura surrounding wells and caverns in general, and that of Chalice Well in Glastonbury in particular. Chalice Well is a holy well situated at the foot of Glastonbury Tor in southwest England, thought to be originally the island of Avalon from Arthurian legend, and the site where Joseph of Arimathea placed the chalice known as the Holy Grail. According to legend, the Tor, a masculine symbol, is hollow underneath and the entrance to the underworld, guarded by the Grail. The well, on the other hand, is a symbol of the feminine aspect of deity, and its waters are believed to possess healing qualities. The narrative idea emerged that a soundscape composition could simulate a journey down the well into the legendary and highly symbolic caverns (which have never been proven to exist). Although the convolved sounds were bright and distinct, their hybridity blurred the edges of the more realistic source sounds, and supported the illusion that one was in an imaginary space.
The well, as noted, has been gendered as feminine for centuries, and therefore I convolved a female speaking voice (that of Thecla Schiphorst as used in my work Song of Songs) with the various water sounds in order to create a disembodied female vocal texture that could float around the space. The sounds of the Underworld are symbolized by percussive locks and male consonants (those of Norbert Ruebsaat as used in my piece The Blind Man) transposed down one or two octaves and convolved with each other. I created a sonic image of the Grail by convolving a resonant temple bowl with itself and mixing four transpositions of the resulting sound. The piece has four sections, beginning with the descent into the well and the first cavern, followed by what I call the Chamber of the Feminine (Sound example 2), then the Glass Chamber and the entrance to the terrifying Underworld, followed by the appearance of the Grail that quells the menace, and finally ending in the Chamber of the Spirits where both masculine and feminine gendered sounds (with wind and water qualities respectively) appear to coexist.
The spatial deployment of the tracks was achieved with four sets of eight tracks each, that is, four stereo pairs spread evenly around the listener. Because of the familial nature of each set of eight tracks, and their individual spatial qualities in terms of apparent distance, it was relatively easy to create an illusion of a coherent space of great depth as well as presence. The 32 tracks were mixed to eight in a circular format, though when performed in halls with speakers on various vertical levels (such as the premiere at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast in March 2009), it proved very effective to double the eight tracks onto more than one height of loudspeakers, supporting the illusion of being in an underground cavern.
Chalice Well represents for me a break-through in my personal compositional evolution related to the soundscape theme, one that might be indicative of a wider trend as well. The goal of this evolution can be expressed as a realistic, but entirely synthetic, soundscape. Although one occasionally encounters claims about such a realization, I have yet to hear a convincing example involving only sound synthesis, mainly due to the complexity of synthesizing a wide range of environmental sounds. My 1986 work, Riverrun, now available in an 8-channel version, might be cited as an example of a synthesized soundscape because of its overarching metaphor of a river from source to ocean, realized with granular synthesis. However, none of its sounds and textures could be mistaken for actual water. The piece is intended to evoke the grandeur of a powerful river, and my original choice of the river metaphor (using Joyce's more active version of the word from Finnegan's Wake in the title) was designed to give a simple, coherent form to the aurally rich material that emerged from real-time granular synthesis. The fact that grains as 'droplets' could form high-density textures that had the depth of actual accumulations of water was an inviting solution at an aural level, just as the 'lifecycle' of the river flowing towards the ocean and eventual evaporation gave the piece its structural rationale.
The example of Chalice Well, though not satisfying this goal, suggests at least two avenues of approach. The first is a purely compositional evolution, as I have sketched out above, that proceeds through various degrees of processing sounds in ways that create abstracted representations of the real world. I suggest that these processed sounds appeal to the inner world of memory, symbolism and metaphor. The listener is invited not merely to identify the elements of a soundscape, but to meditate on their associations and inherent meanings. In other words, the soundscape composition is not entirely focused on the literal, outer realism of its constructions, but regards the listener's mental participation and interaction with its sounds as equally important. In Chalice Well, the disembodied female and male vocal material, and the symbolic representation of the Grail are clear examples of abstracted elements.
The second approach addresses the technical issues of simulating realism. Sound synthesis of musical instrument sounds has traditionally followed approaches that model either the instrument (physical modeling) or its sounds (synthesis by analysis) (Roads 1996). Both approaches are computationally challenging for synthesizing environmental sounds. Likewise, realistic environmental processing such as reverberation can also be quite complex. However, the use of convolution in Chalice Well to combine an environmental sound with either another such sound or a synthetic one is an efficient technique for synthesizing particular types of soundscape material, one that integrates timbre with spatial colouration in a manner that is similar to actual environments. Each impulse or impulsive element in the first file triggers a timbrally coloured version of the second file, and just as multiple reflections add together to produce reverberation, so too do the various convolved versions combine to produce a synthetic texture, one that acquires whatever reverberant character is present in the original sound. One can argue whether the result is truly synthetic or merely processed, but I would suggest that it lies between the two extremes. Just as the computational simplicity of the waveguide approach simplified physical modeling (by avoiding having to solve differential equations), so too convolution by analogy presents an efficient technique for simulating certain kinds of environmental sound textures, even if lacking in the type of generality that synthesis techniques aspire to.
The goal that is currently attainable, and in some ways more attractive than synthetic realism, is the creation of virtual soundscapes using multi-channel diffusion (for instance, multiple 8-speaker configurations) with abstracted sounds that evoke the realism of the natural world while offering a space for reflection by listeners about their relationships to that realism. To bring us back to the theme of sound, listening and place, one might ask whether such experiences in virtual reality will enhance our involvement as listeners with the real world, or further remove us from that kind of interaction. In order to gain some insight into this controversial contemporary issue, it may be useful to examine the evolution of soundscape composition with the parallel evolution of the soundscape from a social perspective.
4. The Evolving Nature of Listeners and Space
One of the many implications of electrification in the 20th century is that it fundamentally changed listeners' relationships to their everyday acoustic spaces by allowing sounds originating from a different space and time to be introduced arbitrarily into both public and private spaces. Whereas mechanical technology had introduced a different scale of noise intensity into the soundscape, often with negative effects on individuals, electrification introduced a choice of sound, most notably music, to be added to a space, with varying degrees of public acceptance. Although the early experiments with the Telharmonium allowed music to be piped into upscale New York restaurants in 1907 to create a pleasant musical ambience, and coincidentally to increase liquor consumption (Weidenaar 1995), it was the electrification of sound recording and reproduction in the mid 1920s that permanently changed the soundscape via the loudspeaker. The city of New York's noise study in 1929 identified the sound of radios in homes, streets and stores as the third most prevalent source of complaints (after traffic and other transportation sounds), which lead to a ban on outdoor loudspeakers outside stores, most notably the vendors on Radio Row in lower Manhattan (Thompson 2002).
However, recorded music (and radio) found favour in factories, peaking to an estimated 90% of British industries by World War II (Cardinell 1948), with the norm not being a continuous presence, but where its effects were considered optimal during one-third of an 8-hour shift. Radio and music were also popular in private homes as a background ambience during this period, prompting George Orwell in 1946 to comment that 'In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out.' In the same essay he predicted that in the 'pleasure spots' of the future, besides creating a completely controlled, artificial environment, one would never be out of the sound of music (Orwell 1968: 80). The modern theme resort or even some larger shopping malls would seem to have fulfilled his prediction. In a 1961 survey of 1000 listeners in New York and New Jersey, Harold Mendelsohn (1964) discovered that 78% considered radio to play an important role in their lives, mainly in functional ways such as bracketing the day, as companionship during the routine of boring tasks or to counteract loneliness, to control mood and to provide information that could function as shared experience with others, what he termed 'social lubrication'.
The practice of audio documentation of sounds other than speech or music was much slower to develop or was confined to specialized bioacoustic collections such as birdsong. Although there were isolated early experiments, such as Walter Ruttman's 1930 radio piece Week End about the sounds of Berlin, field recording was not sufficiently portable, accessible or of high enough quality until after World War II with the advent of analogue tape recording. Tony Schwartz adapted an early 'sound mirror', as the tape recorder was then called, to allow him to record the everyday sounds of New York City, and produce various LP records for the Folkways label (Schwartz 1973). Once the microphone was turned towards the everyday soundscape, it reflected a different attitude towards what was worth recording from a social perspective, and gradually the larger soundscape became not incidental sound effects or background noise, but the subject of deliberate representation.
By the early 1970s, both of these trends – music as soundscape, and soundscape as music – converge to what I call soundscape composition. Not coincidentally, both approaches use the same analogue technology of a recording medium where sounds can be edited and mixed with usually modest amounts of processing such as equalization and filtering. Compression started to be used in music recording, but was thought to be unnecessary for soundscape composition except perhaps for a limiter on peak sounds. If we use the 1973 publication of The Vancouver Soundscape as a reference point, the techniques that were used were largely edited collages of unprocessed recordings with minimal mixing, the only exception being the 'Entry to the Harbour' sequence where a ferry journey into the harbour was simulated, fairly crudely in fact, by simple mixing techniques that appeared to make sounds approach and recede. The compositional techniques were largely fixed perspective, or a series thereof, with the one example of a moving perspective (Truax 2002). However, unlike the intention of background music at the time to be ignored by what I call the 'distracted listener' (Truax 2001), these early examples of soundscape composition were designed to engage the listener in a more active form of listening, even to the point of becoming the subject of analytical listening. In other words, whereas the practice of music as an accompaniment medium was intended to impose a mood onto an existing space, one that the listener could easily ignore and accept as normal, the soundscape composition's intent was to bring the listener's existing relationship with everyday spaces into a sharper aural focus, both in listening to the composition and in daily life.
Today much has changed on both fronts. Background music gave way to foreground music with greater specialization of the choice of music to fit the environment, and starting in the late 1970s, the cassette-based Walkman, followed by the portable CD player called the Discman, and then today's iPod digital files, progressively gave the individual listener greater choice of sonic material in everyday surroundings. Whereas background and foreground music could be said to impose themselves on a soundscape, and thereby raise issues of public versus private space, the portable accompaniment medium of the iPod might better be described as a voluntary embedding of one soundscape within another, with the listener controlling not only the material but the degree to which it mixes with the surrounding environment. Michael Bull (2000, 2006, 2007) refers to this embedding as creating an 'acoustic bubble' for the listener and has extensively documented the functional uses reported by his informants. Many advertisements as well as personal testimonials refer to this practice as creating a 'soundtrack' for everyday life, implying perhaps that the listener views the daily environment as a kind of film for which one is a somewhat detached spectator.
There are some fairly superficial comparisons one can make between the iPod user and the soundscape composer. Both can download tracks or files for their personal use; both can sequence or shuffle their materials, and both can adjust levels and perhaps apply some form of equalization. No doubt, applications being currently introduced for the myriad of handheld devices now available will provide much more sophisticated signal processing models to the point where we can imagine that the resources for users and composers may become more or less the same. It is the degree and type of user control that has changed over the last century as briefly documented here that brings about this potential convergence. Even if aspects of this control are tightly controlled by the industry to work within accepted scenarios and formats, the appeal to the listener remains the opportunity to create a sense of order in what otherwise might seem uncontrollable daily circumstances.
I have argued above that soundscape composition during recent decades has moved towards a more abstracted approach, one that leads to the creation of virtual soundscapes. The digital game world has undergone a similar evolution, but within the form of a fairly small number of narrative scenarios. It would be a simplification to say that the distinction is merely between art and entertainment, though those identities are still very much present. From the perspective I have offered here, the most significant differences between the evolution of music as soundscape and soundscape as music are the respective concepts of the listener's relationship to place. Whether using an iPod or a game device, the listener is choosing to imbed him or herself within a virtual environment that is set apart from the real world, often characterized as an escape from it. The soundscape composer on the other hand always seems to be drawing the listener back into the real world, perhaps to stress an ecological perspective, or to rejuvenate the listener's aural sensibilities. The progression from phonographic documentation to a more abstracted approach to ultimately a virtual synthetic soundscape is one that takes the listener from surface level of an environment, recognizing its sound sources and ambiences, to the mental world of psychological and cultural associations, memories and symbolism provoked by those sounds, and then to the unbounded world of the imagination.
5. Conclusion
The aesthetic dilemma referred to in the title is the question of how artistic practices and concerns can fit with the real-world issues of listening and place, as well as the social and environmental issues that are related to our being in the world. There is a potentially large audience ready to listen if artists have something meaningful to say about their concerns, even if (or perhaps because) the communication arises from outside the domain of commercial culture. Clearly, sound-based art has a strong potential to communicate (and I personally believe that art is about communication) if it appears to be contextualised in real-world experience, as distinct from a purely abstract world. Soundscape composition, in its varied and diverse forms, now has a lengthy tradition of working with contextualised sounds, as well as educating aural perception around everyday listening. Contemporary technology and communication channels provide new opportunities for this kind of work, most of which are only starting to be explored. However, what will give depth to this new form of artistically inspired communication is, in my opinion, a deep involvement with particular social, cultural and environmental contexts and careful thought about what needs to be said about them. The result may not always be a personal creation, but emerge rather from a grassroots process of community engagement. It may involve technology guided by artistic intent, or it may remain purely acoustic and unprogrammable like a soundwalk. Whatever path it takes, the role of the artist composer will need to be re-defined and expanded, if not replaced by other roles such as sound designer or acoustic ecologist. But what all of these roles will have in common is the desire to creatively engage with the world through sound.
Baalman, M. A. J. 2010. Spatial composition techniques and sound spatialisation technologies. Organised Sound 15(3): 209-18.
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Woman convicted in Milton drive-by shooting sentenced to life in prison
The woman who was found guilty of murder in a 2017 drive-by shooting in Milton was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison.
Melissa Pocopanni was convicted in November of principal to second-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder in the Feb. 4, 2017, drive-by shooting that left one person dead and two injured. Investigators said her car was used in the shooting and she rode in the backseat during the crime.
Pocopanni was arrested in April 2017, just hours after an NAACP press conference where civil rights advocates accused local authorities of deliberately excluding Pocopanni, a white woman, from murder charges in the shooting. Her three co-defendants in the case, who are all black, were arrested within days of the shooting.
At trial, Pocopanni's attorney, Patrece Cashwell, sought to prove her client wasn't aware a crime was going to take place. But prosecutor Matt Gordon successfully convinced the jury that Pocopanni was complicit in the shootings.
She faced a minimum of 29 years in prison, but Judge David Rimmer, who also presided over her trial, sentenced her to life without the possibility of parole.
Arrested:Milton woman arrested after NAACP discrimination claim
Trial:Three found guilty of murder in Milton drive-by shooting
That was the same sentence Rimmer handed down to Dedric Keandre Davis, Walter Ramone Ford and Kyhem Jalil Johnson, the three men who were in the car with Pocopanni at the time of the shooting. Johnson drove the car while Davis and Ford fired numerous shots into a crowd of people gathered around a fire in the backyard of a residence.
Thomas Buckhalter, 34, was killed, and two other people suffered gunshot wounds.
After Pocopanni's sentencing Tuesday, Gordon said he believed she got a fair sentence.
"The judge was very clear in his opinion that she was not a minor participating in the crime, that she willingly provided the vehicle that was used in the crime," Gordon said. "He repeated what he had said before, which was, 'No car, no crime. No crime, no murder,' and that she knew they had intended to 'hit a lick,' ... (she knew) the co-defendants had guns, and it's reasonable to expect that someone would get hurt, and she made her decision."
Family members of the victims testified at the more than three-hour hearing, while the defense called multiple witnesses to talk about Pocopanni's diminished mental capacity and her mental health diagnoses.
Cashwell, Pocopanni's attorney, could not be immediately reached for comment Tuesday.
Annie Blanks can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com and 850-435-8632.


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Month: October 2017
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Contact: GovPress@wisconsin.
MADISON — Gov. Tony Evers today announced his appointment of Amy Pechacek as the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) Secretary-designee. Secretary-designee Pechacek has been leading the agency as transition director since earlier this year.
"The DWD has faced historic levels of claims, hindered by antiquated technology and burdensome bureaucracy created by those who always intended to make it harder for folks to access these vital benefits. Despite these obstacles, Amy has been exceptional, and I am grateful she will be able to continue her good work in the months and years ahead," said Gov. Evers. "Amy understands that during these challenging and unprecedented times, Wisconsinites are depending on a government that works for them and does so quickly and effectively. I have great confidence in her leadership and ability to move the DWD and our state forward."
"I am pleased to accept Governor Evers' appointment to serve as secretary of DWD," Secretary-designee Pechacek said. "It has been an honor to lead the agency over the past three months toward helping clear the backlog of unemployment insurance claims. I look forward to continuing our work to improve Wisconsin's unemployment system and support our state's economic recovery."


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The Trump administration moved to overturn Obama-era environmental rules on power-plant emissions, a long-telegraphed action designed to help coal-burning plants compete with natural gas and other cleaner alternatives as a national energy source.
Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump's acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, on Monday signed a proposal to scrap environmental restrictions on power plants and leave much of the regulation of the industry to states. The move is the agency's first under Trump to detail how it will regulate the power-sector carbon emissions that contribute to climate change, and it sets up months of public and legal reviews, and potentially a yearslong court battle.
Environmental groups are already plotting a challenge, saying the proposal at best provides minimal legal cover for a 2007 Supreme Court decision requiring the agency to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant. They will likely seek to reinstate the Obama-era policy, called the Clean Power Plan, which itself is hung up at the Supreme Court in a case about whether it was illegally broad.
The new plan, an advance copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, recommends a menu of upgrades designed to let coal-fired plants produce energy with less fuel and seeks to eliminate triggers that mandate costly technological overhauls at coal plants. While the Clean Power Plan was designed to reduce greenhouse gases and fight the cause of climate change, the Trump administration cast the regulation as setting unfair rules that coal plants wouldn't be able to meet.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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