As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand (only 49 percent of the population said they were Christian in the last census), public space has become ...more receptive to other forms of religiosity. In particular, community rituals around the winter movements of the Matariki (Pleiades) constellation have gained support since the year 2000. For instance, the capital city, Wellington, has replaced a centuries’ old British fireworks festival, Guy Fawkes, with an enlarged version of its Matariki celebrations: an action seen as a tipping point in the incorporation of Māori spiritual values into public life. Interactions between European colonisers and Māori have been characterised for more than 250 years by tensions between the relational thinking of Māori who see human beings as both participating in and constrained by an environment resonant with divine energies, and the quantitative, hierarchical, ‘Great Chain of Being’ model that had long been dominant among Europeans. Now, when the natural environment worldwide is under strain from population and economic pressures, it seems to some both appropriate and vital to look to epistemological and spiritual models that are intimately responsive to the specificities of location.
Objective. To measure utilization of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) by US adults. Methods. We analyzed data from the 1999 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which covers the ...noninstitutionalized civilian US population. Information on 12 types of CAM use in the past 12 months was obtained from 30,801 respondents aged 18 years and older. Statistical analyses were performed using the SUDAAN software package to account for the complex sample design of the NHIS. Results. An estimated 28.9% of US adults used at least one CAM therapy in the past year. The three most commonly used therapies were spiritual healing or prayer (13.7%), herbal medicine (9.6%), and chiropractic therapies (7.6%). The use of CAM was most prevalent among women, persons aged 35 to 54 years, and persons with an educational attainment of ≥16 years. The overall CAM use was higher for white non-Hispanic persons (30.8%) than for Hispanic (19.9%) and black non-Hispanic persons (24.1%). Although the use was higher for persons who had health insurance than for those who did not, the difference was not statistically significant after adjusting for age, gender and educational attainment. Compared with nonusers, CAM users were more likely to use conventional medical services. Conclusions. Estimates of CAM use in this nationally representative sample were considerably lower than have been reported in previous surveys. Most CAM therapies are used by US adults in conjunction with conventional medical services.
The 3D high frame rate version of Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit film was touted as offering one of the most realistic and engaging movie-going experiences to date, its innovative projection ...technologies promising to greatly enhance viewers’ sense of immersion in the fantastical world of Middle-earth. However, our empirical research suggests the specific combination of technologies in The Hobbit had paradoxical perceptual and experiential effects. Whereas the groundbreaking hyperrealistic aesthetic enhanced both spectacular and narrative immersion for many viewers, a significant number experienced this same visual aesthetic as unconvincing and distracting and as undermining suspension of disbelief. In this article, we identify key factors contributing to polarization among Hobbit viewers on aesthetic grounds and offer empirical insights into how emerging cinematic technologies may be reshaping film spectatorship.
This article examines the extent to which prefigurative ‘horizons of expectations’ shaped audience engagements with Peter Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (AUJ). Whereas previous ...research often focuses on examining prefigurative materials, discussions and debates themselves, this article draws on audience surveys conducted before and after the film’s release to illustrate the impact of prior hopes and expectations on post-viewing responses. While Hobbit pre-viewers were often deeply familiar with various prefigurative materials and intertextual resources, AUJ nonetheless retained the capacity to delight, confound, impress and distress viewers in ways that superseded pre-existing structures of meaning. Thus, while our findings illustrate that processes of reception potentially begin prior to and continue beyond initial moments of viewing, they also affirm the need to engage – theoretically and empirically – with the complex specificity and fluidity of actual reception experiences.
Recent scholarship, notably that of Charlotte Ward and David Voas (2011), has developed the category of conspirituality to describe the contemporary melding online of New Age beliefs and conspiracy ...theories. This article seeks to interrogate the premise that conspirituality is primarily web-based through an examination of the media practices of leading UK-based conspiritualist David Icke. It argues that conspirituality operates through a synergistic model of media use, in which the web functions in a complementary fashion alongside other media such as books and lecture presentations. Drawing on frameworks from digital religion studies, the article further argues that this model serves to reinforce Icke's authority as a conspiritualist, along with developing a sense of community among his audience.
In 1, p. 58, the caption of Figure 1 should be “Genie Project: Paul Morton, Melvin Pirtle, and Wayne Lichtenberger. Photograph courtesy of Dennis Galloway.”
The University of California’s Project Genie was an ARPA sponsored project to create an interactive programming environment. The SDS-930 was a relatively inexpensive machine with a maximum of 32 K of ...physical memory. To create a time-sharing machine from the base SDS-930 architecture, Pirtle and Lichtenberger extended the ’930 architecture to include protection and memory mapping. Deutsch and Lampson implemented an operating system for the modified ’930. Ultimately, SDS decided to market the Berkeley modifications to the ’930 and denoted it the ’940. They sold the machine to a new company called Tymshare. Tymshare heavily modified the Berkeley operating system over more than five years. Utilizing the system call manuals and the source code from Tymshare, it is possible to trace the operating system modifications that parallel the development of disk and telecommunication hardware in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also illustrates what is required to turn a prototype system into a hardened commercial success.
Settling into a new society and wishing to have a visible presence in that new environment are goals that require differing performances of the self. This article, which looks at how the combination ...of religion and food forms a convenient representational nexus for both of those goals, is drawn from their study, conducted in New Zealand, that investigates the role that diasporic filmmakers play in public culture. This study focuses on the film Apron Strings (2008, directed by Sima Urale), which was written by Shuchi Kothari, a member of the Indian diaspora and one of several Asian female filmmakers bringing new textures to the New Zealand screen (Zalipour).
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