Due to Christmas gallery closures, time away over New Year in Jersey in the Channel Islands, and terrible snow and ice that has made it difficult to get around, I shall not, this week, be posting an art review but three poems written in Kerry, on the west coast of Ireland, from my forthcoming suite 'The Idea of Islands'.This will be published later in the spring by Occasional Press with drawings by the Irish artist Donald Tesky.

Ballinskelligs

They come to me in dreams
Scariff and Deenish, rising like those islands
floating in a veil of mist in Japanese prints,
their peaks in a halo of cloud.
Early morning the sun casts
rings of bright water, stepping stones of light
out to the distant shore. Midnight
and the islands are sleeping, turned in
on their own emptiness as if remembering
those ghostly lives gleaned on the barren cliffs
stinking of sea birds and herring,
the air thick with turf smoke and old rain.
Now they’ve gone the islands lie empty
as picked crab shells, the battering sea lashing
their glassy rocks with the spittle of lost tongues.
Outside my window the strait is moon-streaked,
silver as a hairline crack across
an old mirror. It’s as if I could simply rise
from this bed and walk to that distant shore.
Yet the night holds its secrets.
To feel this flat blackness, where even
the stars are hidden, is to understand what
we cannot see at the edge of the visible world.
The single blip of the lighthouse appears
then disappears every fifteen seconds,
its pulsing beam tracing an arc
across the endless sky, a blinking Cyclops
in the inky dark, till suddenly its morning
and the sun comes up;
streaks of blood-red leaching into the grey.

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To Question a Corpse

I cannot call a poem, it calls me
It comes, I never go to it
.

Some days working alone
one will muscle in and say
let’s scope this out
—it’ll pry at essentials and tug
lifting the lid on the casket of the past
to question a corpse
.

think happenstance—
a thing coincidentally side-lit
glancing off bone, or the sound of a song
falling from a window to the street
as I walk by

.

a brush with a miracle might do
and a poem will come, as when alyssum
looks so perfect in July

.

there’s no such thing as inspiration
other than that I inhale whatever comes
and exhale the words a poem discards
as it vanishes in a clear sky

by Jim Culleny, 1/1/10

by Colin Marshall

Silent Light's opening shot, a gradual four-and-a-half-minute predawn push across a bucolic field as the sun inches over the horizon, signals everything about the sensibility and aesthetic to come. It's a cautious yet intimate venture into several different levels of foreignness at once, reverently observational and hyper-aware of the wealth of detail that surrounds it. Here, I suddenly and gratefully recognized upon first viewing, is a film that's not going to mess around with the usual cinematic shorthand of visual, sonic and narrative cliché.

Given that, perhaps “first experience” should replace “opening shot.” Carlos Reygadas demonstrates beyond all doubt that he both understands and readily wields cinema's potential to happen to its audience, rather than merely to throw up sound-and-light summaries of one damn thing after another. Many directors have worked for twenty, thirty, forty years — often prolifically and lucratively — and still failed to grasp this range of their medium's capabilities. But a film like this makes up for several hundred of those content to be their own Cliffs Notes.

Its simple story centers on a romantic dilemma endured by Johan Voth, a middle-aged Mennonite farmer embedded in his remote northern Mexico community. After having fathered a lookalike brood and ostensibly settled down with the unthrilling but loyal and patent Esther, he's discovered the fascinatingly distant, exotically angular Marianne. One of Johan's confidants calls her his “natural woman,” and he grows more and more inclined to agree. Meeting Marianne for assignations on isolated hills or above her restaurant, Johan comes to believe he's hitched himself to the wrong woman. But how on Earth, so deep in such a cloistered, frowning milieu, to right his mistake?
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By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

*

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

*

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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Justin E. H. Smith

“We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, “Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!”)

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

“I hate guitars,” he would often announce. “I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing.” The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. “The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana,” Boone once said to me. “They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates.” Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. “Yes I suppose.”

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious “yes, I suppose,” instead of a thoughtless “yeah, I guess,” the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

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by Shiban Ganju

I wish you all a happy new year and hope it starts on a lighter note; mine did.

After a year of worrying about the health reform – that wasn’t, and economic meltdown – that was, a phone call from brother in law (BIL) made me ruminate about sexually dysfunctional people. They are of two types: overachievers and underachievers. The news of our latest overachiever, Tiger Woods had caused considerable jealousy and anguish to BIL. Reason: Tiger ‘wood’ and BIL wouldn’t. Years at the hedge fund desk had sapped his libido into ‘libidon’t’.

I would not have found out about BIL’s problem, had he not fainted and fallen flat on his face. He phoned to tell me that he felt dizzy often and had fainted thrice. I was aware, that years of two-Marlboro-packs-a-day had smoke- grilled the arteries of his heart and legs into spastic narrow channels and now he had to take nitrate pills to relax them. Drugged vessels would dilate and ease the blood flow. But with drugs, bad always accompanies good. As a side effect – especially, if he stood up suddenly –his legs would accumulate all the blood gushing down with gravity; his blood pressure would drop and his blood- less head would swirl. Fainting spells pointed to excessive fall of blood pressure, which would spin him out of his senses.

Just to pick on him, I asked, “What other medicine are you on? Are you taking Cialis?”

“No, I am not.”

“Then it must be Levitra or Viagra.”

“How do you know?” he was surprised. The fact is, I didn’t know – until then.

“BIL, doubling your vessel dilators is a no-no.”

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“Abraham said to his father and his people: 'What are these images to whose worship you cleave?'
They said: 'We found our fathers worshipping them.' He said: 'Certainly you have been, you and
your fathers, in manifest error.'”
— Koran, Chapter 21, verses 52-54

The Tughra

Loophole

Warnings in the Hadith
to make no image of God
or man or animal
are no match for the loophole
function of the human mind
which will overcome obstacles
like certainty
and threats of hellfire
to make real any
object of longing
mystic or material
as can easily be seen
in the lovely lyrical
portrait, the Tughra
(signature of Sulaiman
the Magnificent),
disguised as calligraphy,
a loophole allowed in
Muhammed’s line by men
who knew the futility of
banning beauty

by Jim Culleny,
January 2, 2009

By Aditya Dev Sood

She begins with the soles of my feet, tracing out nodes and ridges into which all my wanderings in the world are graven. She is a rehabilitating prisoner at the Chiang Mai Women’s Correctional Facility, halfway out of the system, learning massage as a trade that may keep her out of trouble once she’s released. The massage parlour is a long shed of a room, grimly institutional, the green-blue sheets on the mattresses on the floor match the uniforms the masseuses are wearing. Her touch is light, I close my eyes, the memories and impressions she is unleashing are vivid, the idea of this piece has already taken form.

To be massaged by the opposite gender is a pleasure no longer available in India. Islamic social norms, the demise of courtly and courtesanal culture, Victorian prudence, and Gandhian puritanism have all surely conspired to ensure that when a man and woman are on a mattress together, it must be a flagrant scandal. But varieties of massage survive across East and South-East Asia, as techniques of wellness propagated in Buddhist monasteries, and now more widely available in more and less commercialized spas and treatment centers. The massage services offered by the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison may be a novelty, but they also demonstrate how widely and well established is the practice of massage in the culture and institutions of Thailand.

Mister, you lay down now, she said, without introducing herself. She is small and round, and reminds me of Lotta from the comic strip. I am wearing a kind of Karate outfit of cotton pyjama and jacket with two tie-strips, which I was given to wear before entering the massage hall. Here, six or eight mattresses sit on the floor, backpackers and travelers, all of us, laying upon them. They are melting away under Lotta’s hands, I am only dimly aware, my selfhood dissolving into pure patience, a knower only of pleasure.

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Psychological Science: Measurement, Uncertainty, and Determinism – Part 2

by Norman Costa

Part 1 of this article can be found HERE.

Other articles in Norman Costa's 'Psychological Science' series can be found HERE.

The [Sad] Story So Far

Few ideas are as fundamental to psychological science, and all science, as the concept of measurement. Science does not exist without measurement. Yet, many psychologists who would identify themselves as scientists do not seem to understand the most fundamental definition of measurement: Measurement is a comparison to a standard. This does not speak well for those who are responsible for scientists-in-the-making at the undergraduate level and especially at the graduate level.

Standards of measurement are inventions of the human mind, they are arbitrary, and they require only consensus and demonstrated utility. Over time, standards are improved, changed, or even discarded. For example, standards of measuring time have evolved from naturalistic observation of the cycles of day and night, to using the oscillating properties of the cesium atom. Standards for measuring psychological depression have evolved from vague and general descriptions to a tallying of specific behaviors that can be observed.

Science is an approach to understanding nature and ourselves that has method and content. Science as method is the systematic observation of phenomena and the recording of data. Without measurement, there is no recording of data from observation. Measuring, comparing to a standard, takes place on many levels from the most simple to the very complex. The most basic comparison to a standard is determining that a phenomenon is present or not present. Other comparisons allow us to determine similarity or dissimilarity. If a decision is made that something is dissimilar to a standard, then we might determine how dissimilar, and in what direction, like more or less. Science as content is the organization of this information into a body of knowledge. For example, we have the science of metallurgy, the science of biology, and the science of verbal learning.

So where is this academic exercise leading us? I thought you would never ask. It is leading us to the next important topic associated with measurement: Error, more specifically, errors of measurement. One of the biggest mistakes that scientific psychology makes, however, is confusing the notion of errors of measurement with Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle.' Do you want to know why physicists laugh themselves silly when psychology presents itself as a science? Do you want to know why many scientists in other fields regard scientific psychology as an oxymoron? Please read on.

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by Daniel Rourke

“The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world… It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tale. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world.”

Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Take 12 images and splice them end to end: a shaded length of acetate through which a bright white light is to be shone. This makes one second of film. The reel spools onwards, as the seconds tick by, and from these independent images (isolations of time separated in space) an illusion of coherence emerges.

During a recent flurry of internet activity I stumbled across the work of Takeshi Murata. His videos, having made their way, legitimately or otherwise, into the mysterious Realm of YouTube, have achieved something of a cult status. Among various digital editing techniques Murata is one of the most famous purveyors of the 'Datamoshed' video. A sub-genre of 'glitch-art', datamoshing at first appears to be a mode of expression fine-tuned for the computer geek: a harmless bit of technical fun with no artistic future. But as I watched Murata's videos, from Monster Movie (2005), through to Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007) I became more and more convinced that datamoshing has something profound to say about the status of the image in modern society. Furthermore, and at the risk of sounding Utopian, datamoshing might just be to film what photography was to painting.

Take a human subject. Any will do. Have them sit several metres from your projection, making sure to note that their visual apparatus is pointing towards, and not away from, the resulting cacophony of images. There is no need to alert the subject to your film. Humans, like most animals, have a highly adapted awareness of movement. Your illusion cannot help but catch their attention. As soon as the reel begins to roll they will be hooked.

Cinema is all pervasive. Not just because we all watch (and love) movies, nor that the narratives emerging from cinema directly structure our modern mythos. Rather it is through the language of cinema, whether we are sat in front of a screen or not, that much of the past hundred years of cultural change, of technological and political upheaval can be understood. For Walter Benjamin, whose writings on media appeared almost as regularly as the images flashed by a movie projector, the technology of film fed into and organised the perceptual apparatus of the modern era.

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The Furnace

Coffee’s made, the tea-water’s on
and here's a glazed pane of iridescent frost
stroked by a ghost etcher’s point
—struck through with silver and laced with light:
its gravure of fern fronds glistens
on a clear silicon plate
……………….…………
And there's a brilliant postage stamp of blue
piercing an otherwise stratocumulus dome
marking a bit of sky beyond the frost-etcher’s art:
a frame within a frame a window in a window
a thought within a name
…………………………. The furnace sparks
the burner fires before the blower starts and
warm air rushes from a grate
as if a house might warm its cupped hands
to mitigate the lethal silence of a still cold place
as we will sometimes hunch and blow to mitigate
a frigid shadow stillness:
……………………………….a blast of breath
from our own deep furnace in winter
while we wait
………………….
by Jim Culleny, 12/18/09

by Sam Kean

The interviewer asked Bill Gates flat out: “Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking, incredible, and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft … If you had to choose a legacy, what would it be?”

Bill demurred: “Well, the most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer.”

Wha? More important no matter what, than anything else he could ever do?

During the height of the Evil Empire Gates reportedly glanced at the newspaper one morning and became absorbed in an sadly unremarkable article about a disease ravaging the third world—malaria, or polio, or a miserable tapeworm, something along those lines. Gates famously (even a little infamously) had no idea diseases like that still existed in the 1990s, much less that they dominated health care in poor countries the way cancer and heart disease do in the first world. Call him sheltered, but the Gates Foundation was more or less founded that day over coffee. Its goal: to rid the world of such scourges. Bill Gates had a road-to-Damascus moment.

And yet—given the choice between being remembered as the man who liberated humankind from, say, malaria more or less single handedly—and being remembered as the person who foisted PowerPoint on the world—Gates is choosing PowerPoint? Really? He’s picking AutoCapitalization and a dancing paperclip?

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David Schneider

T.S. Eliot might well have smirked at the events of the Naughty Oughties. By one yardstick, they came in with a bang and ended with a whimper, trussed up and devoured by the dirty deeds, done extravagantly, of the stuffed men, the hollow men.

Back in the green days of Communism's defeat (which we, in our typical hubris, called capitalism's victory) an American president spoke of creating a “bridge to the 21st century.” Of course, this was dismissed as mere rhetoric by less (publicly) priapic politicians. Through the hindsight of the intervening years, however, it's become clear that such a bridge was indeed necessary. The left and right banks of America, blue in mood and red in face, were left hanging by chads on a Bridge to Nowhere, suspended within a fiction called The End of History.

History, that's the rub – history, and its myths. From the very first days of the Bush Administration, I sensed that the conservative American consciousness, boiled down into its thick molasses, was simply in fear of the future. We were held back, as a nation, by a persistent fear (predominently by those who witnessed the chaos of the '60s) that history Xeroxes itself; that any struggle towards positive change, any at all, was a fool's errand, doomed to devolve back to Fascism or Communism, except this time with the extra added bonus of nuclear apocalypse. And those of us who came to oppose this nation's decisions perhaps understood ourselves as being held back, from advancing a grade in a school called Democracy and the Pursuit of Happiness. Held back, by a dubiously legitimate leader who clearly attended Bible School dutifully but spoke as if he himself hadn't passed the 3rd grade.

History, as Morpheus said, is not without a sense of irony. And it doesn't like to be declared deceased.

I know we want to leave this low, dishonest decade, but I say: not yet, not quite yet. There are still a few days in which we may legitimately consider what happened to us, before the tsunami of ever-present tensions crashes down upon us anew.

From my peculiar and partial vantage point, every great American crisis of the '00s – Y2K, the Dot-Com Collapse, The Great Indecision, 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, global warming, the Media Crisis, and the Financial Crisis – stemmed from our inability to integrate the hyperspeed advances in media technology with our aging infrastructures – physical, economic, managerial, governmental, and moral. This is the chasm that needed and still needs to be bridged – it is, I believe, the parsing of Clinton's metaphor.

And from this chasm (with ceaseless turmoil seething) I saw two great übercrises mingling, and seeding the events of the Double Zeroes: a Crisis of Information, and a Crisis of “Reality.” Information: too much of it, in terms too jargonized, too euphemized, and too fractured. “Reality”: a state of being controlled by the new technologies of media, without sufficient intellectual tools or time for us to interrogate adequately.

Yeah, whatevs, you say. Too subtle by half, you say. It's the “postmodern condition,” get over it. Or: hubris and incompetence, failing upward rather than failing better, same as it ever was. Or: The Matrix. Live in the sewers, Neo, and jump buildings in your brain (got a better idea?) Sorry, folks, but I need to plumb a little deeper than those keyword searches.

The first true terror I felt in this decade, the first moment I perceived a great unraveling, was not on September 11, 2001. The date was May 8, 2002, when MTV broadcast the episode of “The Real World: Chicago” that was filmed on 9/11.

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I have a very geeky 9 year old daughter; there really is no doubt about that. One day last spring, a school friend had transgressed in some way in the class and her “punishment” was to stay inside at recess and clean out the pencil sharpener. My daughter offered to give up her recess and help her, not really because she is such a loyal friend, but because she was so excited at the idea of taking the pencil sharpener to pieces and then putting it together again. She woke up that morning and declared, “Today is going to be the best day ever, I get to take the pencil sharpener to bits, clean it and put it back together!” To my knowledge, she had never actually taken a pencil sharpener to pieces before and had no real knowledge of what it would take to put it back together again. But she was totally, blissfully unperturbed by the almost certain failure she would encounter before perhaps, by chance, landing upon the correct assembly…or not. I can't remember whether she ever succeeded in her task, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that she was undeterred by the prospect of possible failure. And this fearlessness in the face of likely failure is one of the reasons that I believe that my daughter will grow up to be a very innovative person.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US and the world needs to be more innovative in this new world economy. It is equally clear that the US is in real danger of not only losing traditionally left-brained and factory line jobs to China and India, to name but a few of the growing outsourcing destinations, but is now beginning to lose its much vaulted innovative edge. As this New York Times piece lays out, the “United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness.” And there’s no doubt in my mind that failures in our education system rank high in the US fall from innovation grace. “What skills do children need to be innovative” is an increasingly written about topic and President Obama recently launched a campaign, “Educate to Innovate” to address this very issue.

A lot of competing theories abound in the innovation field, but there is at least one very clear theme that seems to be almost an unchallenged assumption: you cannot have innovation without failure. Fail fast and fail often.

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by Michael Blim

And so the speech, the “just war” speech is given. Or rather “the cold war” speech is given.

President Obama’s Oslo Nobel acceptance speech, that is. It could have been given by John F. Kennedy. It could have been written by Kennedy’s Sorenson, Goodwin, or Schlesinger, filled as it was with allusions to freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the need to defend the vital center. It was all there: America the underwriter of world security and the keeper of world peace since World War II, the historic champion of democracy even when compared with Johnny-come-lately Europe, the everlasting voice for universal human aspirations.

Tough-minded idealism, cold war realism. The United States, the President says, goes to war to defend its interests only when its cause is just. Afghanistan is a war of self-defense, and thus is just. Other wars undertaken while we have protected the peace these last sixty year have been just too, and they include the first Iraq War and the Balkan wars against Serbia. Missing from the ledger of the just are the Korean, Vietnam, and Second Iraq Wars, though American action in the Korean War is still so unquestioned that its costs and consequences lie unexamined.

We live, the President tells us, in an imperfect world. In a breathtaking claim upon human nature and humanity’s history, he argues that we as a species knew war before we knew peace, and accepted war as another fact of life “like drought and disease.” Though our natures remain warlike, and evil and injustice a constant of the human condition, he believes that we have made halting steps toward the rule of reason as well as a greater human interest in governing our conduct, especially during the American half-century.

Obama’s is a profoundly Christian vision, though a less Manichean outlook than was characteristic of the hot Cold War. The persistence of evil, however, is still its center. Humanity must hope for redemption but persevere in the face of life’s inevitable iniquities. Like Browning, he argues, “that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Applying the pilgrim’s progress to war can be both deadly and deceiving. Deadly because devotion makes a casualty of proportion, and memory becomes millennial. The march of human progress makes even terrible human tragedy and mendacity small.

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