Abstracts
Paper Session 1A
From a Black “Ellipsis” to a Blue “Reprise:” Representations of Memory and Imagination in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue.
Much research within the discipline of Film Studies has been devoted to analyzing how the film image represents internal mental processes such as attention, memory, imagination, and emotion. In this paper, through a close analysis of music in the Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film, Blue (1993) I attempt to delineate how film sound may be used to portray memory and imagination. By focusing this analysis on the question, “how do we understand Julie’s (the film’s principal protagonist) mental state from the film’s musical score?” I hope to address a small part of the larger question of how film sound represents mental processes. The study of the use of film sound to represent the psyche illuminates not just the aesthetics of filmmaking, but our very responses as spectators to a film’s intellectual and affective stimuli, here, through aural means. In considering phenomenological observations on sound, this paper borrows from the discipline of philosophy, while its analysis of the role of musical leitmotifs as signifiers of mental states could potentially be of interest to those with an interest in the intersection of sound and psyche within the disciplines of musicology and psychology.
Empty Spaces, Repetition & Remembrance: The Still Cinema of Kore-eda
In the history of Japanese cinema the tension between perceived reality and chosen or enforced illusion has always been a main motif. Compared stylistically to Yasujiro Ozu, the contemporary cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda explores the importance of stasis, of empty spaces and everyday banality in a merging of documentary and fiction which speak to frailty and constructions of self and memory. Often articulated through exploration of the quotidian, traditional stylistic techniques of long takes and an oft motionless camera remove the importance of action and crisis from the image in favor of the purely visual or static which liberate the spectator in the pursuit of his own meaning, allowing for a deeper contemplation of time, loss, memory and crystalline notions of truth. Memory and celluloid share archival space for character, spectator and director alike, providing a means not simply for the expression of melancholic or nostalgic images but for the critical investigation and storage of the past which finds itself open to reconsideration and thereby new meanings over the passage of time. This paper explores the notion of cinematic vision, of repetition and re-produced memory, and the use of narrative strategies focused on the ordinary and grounded in still and repeating images which insert themselves like ghosts between the self and fixed understandings of reality and truth.
The Rebirth of Authorship in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and The White Diamond
In 1967, Roland Barthes proclaimed the “The Death of the Author” and initiates a discourse about a depersonalized and subjectless writing. In contrast, at almost the same time. The notion of an author asserts itself in the Auteur Theory of the Cahiers du Cinéma and celebrates a new subjective and personalized film directing. In 2003, the bear enthusiast and amateur film-maker Timothy Treadwell was killed and devoured by grizzly bears, his life, work, and death were the subject of the 2005 documentary film Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog. Barthes' dissolution of the author contrasts with Herzog's concept as a decisive film director. These opposing discourses, partly related to the medial differences between literary and filmic texts, provide a productive starting point to discuss authorship and death in the context of film. My presentation will examine the role of the film director Herzog in his various emergences behind and in front of the camera. Herzog's and Treadwell's (self-) staging points toward to a more complicated issue of authorship. The controlling director Herzog, staged in Grizzly Man (2005) and especially in The White Diamond (2004), appears to be a construction of “his own” films.
Sophie in the Cities–Angela Schanelec’s Film Marseille and the View of the Flâneur
Since the abolishment of the EU’s internal borders there is an enlarged realm of experience which the individual has to deal with. The crossings of borders are not worth mentioning any longer, like in Angela Schanelec’s film Marseille from 2004. With her film she constructed more than an aesthetic riddle, but something we can draw on when we want to reflect on the shaping antagonism between the individual and its social urban environment, especially with respect to the search for “the” European mental life. The impact of the main character’s travels between her hometown Berlin and her destination Marseille, and her strolling in the latter shape up as constitutive for her self and her social interactions. In consideration of the metropolitan setting, Schanelec’s film can be related to Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life. It is remarkable how Simmel, already at the beginning of the 20th century, describes a Zeitgeist with all its drifts, opaqueness, pluralism and fragmented perceptions, which still holds truth until today. In the film the concept of blasé, however, can be replaced by a sensitivity which comes along with an increased awareness of the metropolitan space, as it is shown in Marseille. The character’s perceptive moving within an urban surrounding calls Walter Benjamin’s motif of the flaneur into attention. With respect to the expanded mobility within Europe the film and its female character show that a revision of Benjamin’s term is necessary. Marseille gives impulses for the discussion of Europe’s modern mental life and helps to develop and extent Simmel’s and Benjamin’s insights.
Paper Session 1b
The Apocalyptic Genre Considered by the Light of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics
Paul Ricoeur’s interpretive approach to the Christian Bible describes a polyphonic witness to the Wholly Other through five genres which direct the reader’s attention to a referent at the limit of human experience. However, Ricoeur failed to include apocalyptic as a Biblical genre. Many Biblical scholars consider apocalyptic to be a derivative of the prophetic genre, and they frequently characterize the texts as simplistic allegories which represent political and social powers as fantastic, other-worldly beings. As a genre, apocalypticism does not call for self-examination or engagement with the world but encourages a self-congratulatory attitude and a condemnation of the enemy. However, when an apocalyptic text is read in its own light, it offers a richness of meaning of its own. It reframes societal forces as products of spiritual powers at work beyond the human purview. These texts address particular situations, but informs reader of dynamics that affect human experience as a whole. Ricoeur’s approach, particularly his description of religious texts as expressions of limit experience, is particularly well suited for inquiry into the apocalyptic genre. When apocalyptic imagery is understood as metaphoric discourse rather than allegory, the text evokes fresh challenges to new contexts.
Beyond Binaries: Performance Impressions and National Mythmaking in Jacques Milet’s Destruction de Troie le Grant
Binaries such as religious vs. secular and Latin vs. the vernacular, while continuing to dominate scholarship on medieval theatre and drama, nevertheless serve to reinforce themselves rather than reveal new information about drama and performance in the Middle Ages. For example, one of the largest groups of extant documents relating to plays in the 15th century belongs to Jacques Milet's 30,000-line Destruction de Troie. It draws its subject from the history of antiquity, one of 2 out of 222 'mystery plays' to focus on a non-religious topic. Yet this exceptionality has led to its marginalization--there is no modern critical edition in French or English, and few articles discuss it. However, the importance of the Trojan myth to an emergent French identity, coupled with startling details in two early manuscripts, provide an alternate framework for illuminating the play’s significance.
Chaucer’s Refracted Voice, a “Novelized” Exemplum, and “Carnival Hell”: A Bakhtinian Approach to Genre in the Friar’s Tale
Chaucerian critics have argued that the Friar’s Tale is a fractured religious exemplum, citing the instability of its alleged moral and the hypocrisy of its narrator, while other critics have denied that the tale is an exemplum at all. Drawing on the theories of twentieth-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, I intend to reconcile these debates by arguing that in the Friar’s Tale, Chaucer crafts a “novelized,” “carnivalized” exemplum that both pushes the limits of this religious genre and perpetuates traditional practices surrounding it. Although primarily applied to the novel, Bakhtin’s ideas of “double-voiced discourse” and the “interillumination” of multiple genres within narrative fiction equally apply to Chaucer’s experiments in The Canterbury Tales and especially in the Friar’s Tale, where the Chaucerian narrator’s parodic “double-voiced” relationship to Friar Huberd destabilizes the expected connection between narrative content and moral. Chaucer’s “novelization” of this simple tale of a greedy summoner and a demonic yeoman further aids in his innovation of the exemplum; he juxtaposes the pithy religious genre with several secular and sacred, oral and written, late medieval genres, including curses, anticlerical satire, and “scole matere”. With this “interillumination” of genres in mind, we can apply Bakhtin’s concept of carnival to the tale’s darkly comic elements, which have fueled critical debate about genre in the Friar’s Tale: Chaucer’s flippant treatment of devils, cursing, and hell infuses the exemplum with traditional carnival elements that reflect the status and practices of its Franciscan friar narrator. Generally, I reassess Chaucer’s treatment of the exemplum in the Friar’s Tale through a theoretical lens that simultaneously highlights his clever take on this religious genre and respects the broader historical context of these innovations.
Paper Session 1c
Representations of Falconry in Eastern Han China (25-220 CE)
Throughout Chinese history falconry has been a popular activity of both the upper class and commoners. Study of the emergence of the practice in China, however, has long been obscured because of scant visual, textual and archaeological materials. Falconry first appears rather suddenly in visual and textual records dating to the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE). Although the standard ancient Chinese histories offer few details about the practice of falconry at this time, a growing number of excavated tomb reliefs provide a wealth of information regarding the genesis of the sport. Focusing on these depictions, my paper first examines where and how falconry was practiced in ancient China and what types of birds were used. I will then argue that the sport was originally learned by the Chinese from the nomadic pastoralists living to the north of Han China. Finally, I will explain general Han attitudes towards that sport suggesting that initially falconry was viewed as an alien custom and a frivolous activity characteristic of a misspent youth.
Drunken Poetry: Baudelaire, Wine and Kristeva’s Concept of “Chora”
In Charles Baudelaire’s seminal work, Les Fleurs du Mal, the use of and play with wine acts as a unifying element which expresses the inexpressible. Wine takes on sanguinary effects as it flows through the veins of the verses and connects varying extremities of the poetic body which are also embodied in the shape of the wine bottle, with its mouth, neck, shoulders, and feet. Considering this embodiment, I use Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘chora’ to explain how Baudelaire the man, and Baudelaire the poet, are at once ensconced in the debauchery of these oenological poems. The chora is the poetic semiotic, which is rarely able to be articulated through the symbolic i.e. words and written expression, which develops in the interstices of the body and which Baudelaire’s wine subsequently appears to elucidate.
Abrasive Poetics in Four Ancient Roman Poets
In his Institutio Oratoria, the Hispano-Roman Quintilian coaches his readers on writing and its emendation, setting limits on appropriate correction time for both orator and poet. No writer, though, whatever the demands on his time, should surgically excise “flesh [that] is perfectly healthy” or wear it down with anxious scraping. These are but two instances of a Roman fixation on corporeal editing techniques, a fixation particularly prominent in poetry. With verbs and imagery of pumicing, filing, and polishing, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Martial render their poems rough bodies made smooth and inviting to the touch. Editing body language also refers to the poet’s preparation of his book-roll and attendance to his own body. For instance, Ovid, at a moment of poetic self-consciousness, describes both his text and his cheeks as “hairy,” meaning neither are fit for the eyes of others. This mingling of poem, poetry book, and poet tells us about poetic practices in Rome when poets increasingly wrote poetry for a large readership rather than sang it to a select audience. Each poet thus enacts what I call an ‘abrasive poetics’ as a means to smooth rhetorical products, ones with which he aims to please others and well-position himself.
Sound, Light and Motion: The Abstraction and Representation of Inner Occurrences in Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand
The correspondence between the composer, Arnold Schoenberg and painter, Wassily Kandinsky is often mentioned as an example of extraordinary artistic parallel in the early twentieth century. Reference to the relationship occurs in musicological and art historical literature alike, but in-depth investigations of similarities between the two in practice are scarce. Despite fundamental differences between music and painting, the Schoenberg-Kandinsky correspondence between 1911 and 1914 highlights analogous philosophies in regards to the expression of the spiritual in art. Throughout their exchange of letters, Schoenberg emphasized an "art of the representation of inner occurrences" and Kandinsky repeatedly discussed an "inner spirit of art." This paper offers an examination of the one musical work which spanned the duration of the Schoenberg-Kandinsky correspondence: Die glückliche Hand. In this twenty-minute "Drama mit Musik" Schoenberg represents and abstracts the internal spirit of his protagonist with a palette of music and colored light. Because of recent chronological studies regarding Die glückliche Hand, I am able to employ the color theory of Kandinsky to trace spiritual motion throughout the work. In doing so, I reveal how Die glückliche Hand functions as a dynamic aural and visual representation/abstraction of spirituality, composed with Kandinsky's theory of color specifically in mind.
Paper Session 1d
The Banjo as an Instrument of National Identity: An Ethnography of the Pittsburgh Banjo Club
The Pittsburgh Banjo Club (PBC) is one of numerous banjo clubs across the United States that celebrates the banjo as the musical symbol par excellence of America. The PBC meets in Pittsburgh’s Northside to practice a repertory of late 19th and early 20th century popular songs that glorify the banjo as an index of American life in wartime. The celebration of the banjo has profound implications, and constitutes the glorification of a national index that reifies a nostalgic vision of America. Based on fieldwork in Pittsburgh conducted in Fall 2008, this essay articulates music-making and the construction and shaping of national identity among members of the PBC. How does the banjo, an instrument that originated in West Africa, function in the construction and maintenance of a patriotic social space at weekly PBC meetings? Why and how does the banjo fit together with other American indexes in the naturalization of the abstract notion of America? In addition, this essay explores Pittsburgh’s unique position as a site in which American popular music and the banjo flourished together in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due in large part to Stephen Foster, a Pittsburgh native and the ‘Father of American Music.’
The Paradox of Freedom: Jazz and Social Transformation in Pittsburgh During the 1960s
This paper examines how the merger of the black and white musician's unions in Pittsburgh in 1965, and the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 brought about a paradox of freedom in African American communities and in jazz. The merger of the black and white unions (Local 471 and Local 60) as a result of the ALF-CIO desegregation policy led to the closing of the black music union's club, a central point of congregation of touring and local artists. The merger also led to the exclusion of many African American musicians from receiving job contracts and pensions. Due to heightened racial tension after the riots of 1968, many patrons from outside the historically African American Hill District no longer attended nationally recognized black owned jazz venues such as the Crawford Grill, the Hurricane Bar, and the Lowendi Club. Paradoxically, desegregation, which promised freedom and liberation, led to social construction along the axis of race both in the social life of Pittsburgh communities and in jazz. The paper draws from interviews conducted with musicians and audience members who were active participants in the jazz scene of the Hill District in late 1960s. Select photos of the Hill District and its jazz venues, recently made available through the Teenie Harris Archive Project, serve as illustrative material for this paper.
Arriving at the Proper Moral Choice: Pittsburgh Catholics for Obama and the Question of Abortion
On September 6, 2008, the Pittsburgh chapter of Catholics for Obama held its first official meeting. Under the guidance of the Obama campaign’s Catholic Vote Director John Kelly, a couple dozen Catholic citizens from the greater Pittsburgh area passionately discussed their personal reasons for backing Barack Obama in his quest for the presidency. Citing their faith as a primary source for their political views, many expressed anger over well-known failures of the Bush administration—the unjust war in Iraq, the mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina humanitarian crisis, the implementation of torture in the so-called war on terror, and the dismantling of environmental protection policies (to name a few). Others articulated a hope that Obama would bring competency and civility to Washington, D. C., heal a politically divided nation, and bring an end to the amoral policies of the Bush administration. Conspicuously, the participants seemed reluctant to address the thorny issue hanging over all of their heads: Obama’s promise to protect and strengthen abortion rights. But by the end of this meeting, the group acknowledged the urgent need to account for this aspect of Obama’s platform in a way that, over the coming months, might induce the highly coveted Pennsylvania Catholic electorate to vote for Obama. Through participation observation, oral history interviews, and an analysis of various media texts, this presentation shows how members of Pittsburgh Catholics for Obama (PCO) crafted a nuanced stance on Obama’s pro-choice position. Building on Obama’s stated desire to reduce abortions by healing the social ills that cause them, PCO publicly urged local Catholics to abandon the “one-issue voter” mentality and consider where Obama and his opponent, John McCain, stood on a broader series of moral issues: the war in Iraq, torture, U. S. militaristic imperialism, environmental protection, and care for the poor. In doing so, PCO demonstrated how Obama’s platform aligned, for the most part, with Catholic social teaching and provided a space for local Catholics to participate in politics not only as “Democrats,” but also as “Catholics.” Briefly engaging the recent work of William Connolly and Charles Taylor on secularism and religion in American politics, this presentation offers a small inquiry into the larger examination of the presence of religiously based convictions in the public square.
Female Impersonators and Pittsburgh’s African American Neighborhoods 1920-1960
The Carryin’ On photography exhibit, which ran at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum in summer 2007, inspired this research. Shot in Pittsburgh in the 1940s and 1950s, the exhibit’s thirty-five photographs show cross-dressers sipping cocktails clustered around nightclub tables and female impersonators performing for dozens of spectators. Although many historians depict queer American life in this era as invisible and isolated and stereotype African Americans as hyper-homophobic, these photographs illustrate cross-dressers and female impersonators visibly embedded in Pittsburgh’s black entertainment culture. Analysis of these photographs, Pittsburgh’s historic black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, and oral history interviews shows that from the 1920s to the 1950s Pittsburgh nightclubs like the Little Paris and Bambola regularly featured female impersonators alongside jazz bands, comedians, and dancers. These shows drew large audiences that exemplified the cultural diversity in Pittsburgh’s black community. Via this photographic evidence, Pittsburgh Courier coverage, and oral history interviews, this research explores how female impersonators interacted with and supported each other and how their audiences understood and responded to them as entertainers and neighbors. Finally, it investigates what black sub-cultural mores facilitated female impersonators’ prominence in specific cultural locales.
Paper Session 1e
Isotopic Investigation of N Deposition and Vegetation on a Road Gradient
While nitrogen is an important plant nutrient, in surplus it can have widespread detrimental environmental and human health effects. Atmospheric nitrogen oxides (NOx), produced from fossil fuel burning in automobiles and power plants, are a precursor to smog and acid rain and contribute to respiratory illness. They can also have negative effects on forests and surface waters. This study uses stable isotopes to examine the effects of nitrogen deposition on vegetation along a gradient perpendicular to a major highway. Six sites were set up at different distances from I-76 to monitor gaseous nitrogen deposition and the isotopic composition of experimental plants. Each source of N, whether natural or anthropogenic, exhibits a unique isotopic signature. This becomes incorporated into plant tissue when plants assimilate N. The isotopic composition of plant tissue samples indicates the sources of N incorporated by the plant. I hypothesize plants near the road will reflect the isotopic signature of automobile exhaust, while control plants will reflect natural sources. Initial results indicate that gaseous N concentrations are significantly higher within 20 meters of the road. This suggests N deposition may be higher in the near-road environment—with implications for management of water quality and human and ecosystem health.
Nanomaterials for Chemical Sensor Applications
The accurate detection and measurement of potentially harmful chemical species is important for human safety. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of processes that occur on the surfaces of catalytically active sensor materials is crucial for the development of more sensitive chemical analysis platforms and possibly more efficient catalytic pathways. We are interested in understanding the chemical interactions that occur at the surface of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). When decorated with an appropriate sensitizing layer, such as metal nanoparticles or a molecular species, the sensitivity of CNTs towards a particular analyte may be enhanced. Using this approach, one can tailor which chemicals a decorated CNT will demonstrate sensitivity towards. Our research focuses on the development of more sensitive nano-electronic sensors and higher efficiency catalytic platforms. We employ optical spectroscopy and solid-state electrical measurement techniques to study the underlying mechanisms that prompt analyte response from CNT devices. Specifically, spectroscopy reveals changes in electronic density, while charge transport measurements monitor the electrical conductance of the CNT network. Using this combined approach, we can develop a mechanistic understanding of the processes occurring between the CNT, the overlying sensitizing layer, and the incoming analyte molecule.
Closed Timelike Curves
In this paper, we explore the possibility that closed timelike curves might be allowed by the laws of physics. A closed timelike curve is perhaps the closest thing to time travel that general relativity allows. We will begin by discussing just what closed timelike curves are, and in what kinds of contexts they were first shown to appear. We then explore how one might actually travel on a closed timelike curve, and discuss two recent no-go results which suggest that this endeavor is impossible.
Physics Beyond the Standard Model at the LHC
Physicists, technicians, and engineers from more than 80 countries will soon complete the largest and most complex machine ever built. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will collide protons at an unprecedented energy of 14 TeV, shedding light on the physical laws that governed the early universe. The ATLAS detector is one of two multipurpose machines built to detect the products of such collisions. These energy levels should produce many phenomena never seen before, giving particle physicists a glimpse of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM), the current model of particles and fields. Evidence suggests that the four forces of nature were actually one force after the Big Bang. As the universe expanded and cooled, these forces separated into those we see today—the gravitational, strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces. Many theories attempt to merge these forces, but more experimental evidence is needed to determine which Grand Unification Theory (GUT) gives the accurate picture of our early universe. If Grand Unification does occur at high energies, it implies the existence of many theoretical particles. The Leptoquark is one such particle that will be the object of early searches at the LHC.
Paper Session 1f
“I Have Never Been to Bosphorus”: The Appropriation of Subjective Experience in Sergei Esenin’s Persian Motifs
Sergei Esenin’s literary career was one defined by the continuous pursuit of fame and the constant fear of losing his poetic gifts. The Persian Motifs, a cycle written in 1924 and 1925 during journeys in the Caucasus, reflect these drives. Esenin sought to emulate the life of Pushkin, particularly the episode of the Boldino Autumn, and tap into the Romantic tradition of finding inspiration from the grandeur of nature. During this period, Esenin also found inspiration in the classical Persian poets and the travel stories of friends in the Caucasus. Yet in order to incorporate all of these sources of inspiration into his own concept of the poet as genius sui generis, Esenin employed various strategies to appropriate the subjective experiences of others for himself and disguise his dependence on outside sources for poetic inspiration. Even as he speaks of reflecting the experience of others in the Motifs, then, Esenin maintains that it is his talent as poet and imaginer that brings it to life.
“Everybody Draws Himself”: The Many Faces of Edward Gorey
Edward Gorey’s work as a satirist in both verbal and visual forms includes liberal sprinklings of caricature, and this aspect of his oeuvre is most compelling when we consider how he turns the genre on himself. In this paper, I explore Gorey’s self-caricature in terms of implications about his intentions, our reception of these images, and the idiosyncratic relationship between a recognizable and accomplished writer/artist and his viewing public. In the process, this paper offers an intriguingly resonant example of one individual’s experience of and response to the phenomena of celebrity, particularly as it reflects upon the reception of text and/versus image. First, I briefly describe the salient features of and trends in occurrences of self-caricature in eight short works written and illustrated by Gorey. Then, juxtaposing these images with numerous published interviews with Gorey, this paper preliminarily concludes that Gorey consistently self-identifies as a writer or author, and downplays or distances himself from his reputation as an artist/illustrator or writer-cum-illustrator. From this basis, I argue that Gorey evinces ambivalence about the proportion of his artistic/literary reputation derived from his visual work, which in turn creates difficulties with identifying the target and aim(s) of his satire: himself or his audience.
“A Great Mystery”: The Building of Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates
This project has little to do with ‘threes’, save that I am concerned with Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories (four of them) which, like many fairy tales, receive their generic designation partly from the triads that they contain: most often, journeys that occur three times. My interest here, however, has to do with Wilde’s title for the collection A House of Pomegranates: a matter to which little critical attention has been devoted. In this paper, then, I explore the origins of the image of the pomegranate and the idea of the ‘house of pomegranates’: concepts Wilde draws upon in all four stories of the volume. The icon of the pomegranate occurs both Christian and Classical lore, where together it represents a paradoxical image — of fertility, plenty and rebirth, but at the same, through various Greek myths, of blood and death. I argue, then, that one of the central ‘translations’ of the phrase a ‘house of pomegranates’ is the palace: an image that occurs in almost all of the stories with which I am concerned, which suggests a contradictory alliance between a certain type of fruitfulness — which might be described as anaesthetised luxury — and death. The fairy tales of A House of Pomegranates have often been found to be enigmatic and paradoxical: critics have pondered over whether they are intended for children or adults; whether it is in fact appropriate to describe them as fairy tales; whether, perhaps, they contain a secret, encoded message directed by Wilde towards the members of the Victorian underworld. Unlike writers who have attempted to demystify these puzzling tales, in the background to my reading lies the assumption that part of their literary purpose is in their ambiguity. By exploring the multifarious implications of the title, and the manner in which they are played out in the different stories, then, I demonstrate that the complex suggestiveness of the stories of A House of Pomegranates cannot and should not be laid down to a single illuminating reading.
Baklava, Books, and Boundaries: Religious Identity and Education for Eastern Orthodox Children in America
Orthodox Christians may be more prevalent in Pittsburgh than elsewhere in the U.S., but they must still confront their religious identity in ways unnecessary in predominantly Orthodox countries. As parishes, unable to rely on government support, raise money by holding cultural festivals, some clergy worry that the public—and the parish children—are learning identify the church not with theology but with baklava. Temptations to assimilate to majority American culture are often perceived to threaten both the children’s spiritual well-being and the survival of the ethnic community, so many Orthodox parents, priests, and religious educators find themselves engaging in a kind of internal proselytization to ensure that their children will remain Orthodox. In this paper I survey church school curricula, children’s storybooks, and parenting and teaching books used by Orthodox parents, publishers, and religious educators to inculcate broadly Christian and specifically Orthodox beliefs, behaviors, values, and identities in the children under their care. Because many of these materials adapt Orthodox content to forms long used by non-Orthodox American Christians, however, this paper also highlights both the uses and the permeability of boundaries between minority and majority cultures in a pluralistic setting.
Paper Session 2a
“Misunderestimating” Darwin: Evolutionary Theories from the Vantage Point of Musicology
Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) unified the mid-nineteenth-century life sciences and laid the foundation for empirically sound inquiries into biological history. This success encouraged other disciplines to adopt evolutionary theory as a model. Guido Adler (1855-1941), a founding father of musicology, appropriated late nineteenth-century “Darwinism.” Adler’s arguments from the 1880s appeal to the core concepts of Darwin’s theory (including common descent and the struggle for existence) but Adler’s historical narratives suggest that other versions of evolution also factored into his methodology. The most important one is Ernst Haeckel’s, expanding on Darwin in directions that have turned out to be wrong or imprecise. Adler’s choice of Haeckel was due to (i) a good fit between musicology’s needs and the provisions of Haeckel’s theory, and (ii) persistent challenges of Darwin’s notion of natural selection, some of these supported by Adler’s scientist friends. Twentieth-century critiques of Adler and others in his mold have focused on the results of his method. By exposing the roots of his methodology, and by comparing them to more recent emendations to Darwin’s propositions in biology, I critique Adler’s method directly. Nineteenth-century biologists and musicologists both “misunderestimated” the impact and extent of Darwin’s theory of history.
A History of Aristoxenian Harmonic Science
This paper provides a new synthesis of historical texts in music theory from the Classical period through the Renaissance. The topic will interest historians and philosophers of science, as well as music theorists, historians of music, and Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance scholars. Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a student of Aristotle, proposed a unique way of characterizing harmonic intervals. His method, unlike those of his contemporaries, relied heavily on the testing of consonance and dissonance by the ear. This method received much criticism during the millennium following Aristoxenus' life from scholars including the Medieval philosopher Boethius. The first defenses of Aristoxenus' harmonics do not appear until the 16th century. In this paper, I outline Aristoxenus' method of distributing harmonic intervals over an octave. I contrast this method with that of Aristoxenus' contemporary Pythagoras, and I follow later literature on music theory that holds up Pythagoras' method while putting down Aristoxenus'. I survey the first defenses of Aristoxenus' system, which appear during the Italian Renaissance. Finally, I offer a new way of describing the fundamental distinctions between the Pythagorean and Aristoxenian schools of harmonic science that is implicit but unacknowledged in both Aristonexus' own writings and in the criticisms he has received.
Conflicting Lines, Cohesive Structures: Multiple-Directed Linearity in Witold Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony
Witold Lutoslawski is widely recognized as having contributed numerous innovations to the twentieth-century canon of "Western” avant-garde music. His contributions include new approaches to notation and aleatoric technique (especially in ad libitum sections), formal structure (“chain technique” and unusual four movement forms), and pitch organization (interval pairing and non-serial twelve-tone approaches). While emblematic of many of these qualities, Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony also demonstrates an overlooked aspect of his late compositions — multiple-directed linear processes. In my essay, I focus on these processes within several levels of musical structure (pitch, rhythm, orchestration, register, texture, and form). Whereas more traditional modes of linear design fuse most layers to support and articulate the local and large-scale goals, in Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony many levels of the structure arrive at their goal in distinct places or are simultaneously oriented in different directions. These types of multiple-directed linearity are the objects of my study. Although multiple-directed linearity is not exclusive to Lutoslawski’s music, it is a facet that has been overlooked or mentioned only in passing within Lutoslawski studies. My analysis provides a unique insight into these processes and my analytical method represents an unprecedented approach within the field of music theory.
Dramatic Composition in Beckett’s Words and Music
In two of Samuel Beckett's radio plays of the early 1960s, there is a character identified in the script as "Music". This character has no dialogue or specific actions; rather, brief instructive descriptions in the text describe the music to be played. In Words and Music, "Music" is intended to be part of the discourse between characters, and in Cascando "Music" functions as a separate stream of thought that comments on the text presented by the two verbal narrators. In both plays, "Music" tends to blur the distinction between dramatic music which is internal to the action of the play and music which is external or commentary, such as incidental music. As part of a radio play, this distinction between music and character is broken down further, as the world of the play exists in the mind of the listener. My paper will examine difference of function for "Music" between the two plays, considering how a non-verbal character contributes to the overall narrative. I will also compare two interpretations of "Music" by two different composers: Morton Feldman's composition for Words and Music, and Elaine Barkin's realization of "Music" in Cascando.
Paper Session 2b
Immune Response to Influenza A
In mammals, Influenza A virus triggers innate immunity before adaptive immunity, however, an exaggerated innate response is harmful to tissue and does not further the elimination of virus. This project seeks to model the immune response, and identify methods of preventing lung failure and improving recovery. The model introduces a dynamic innate immune response with relevant biological compartments, expanding upon existing models of adaptive immune response to Influenza A virus. The inflammatory process begins with macrophage mediated production of cytokines and chemotaxis of immune cells into the tissue. Virus specific immune responses such as type I interferon and NK cells are introduced subsequently. Finally, type II interferon, CTLs and antibodies are produced to facilitate complete virus removal. The project employs an ODE--based model to study the dynamics of regulation between virus, immune and respiratory cells, and signaling macromolecules. The system allows for stable health and death, with initial viral load leading to each. For some choices of key parameters unstable health and a stable chronic state with viral clearance can be attained. The model, as developed, gives us a metric relating initial infection, strength of various immune responses, and total lung damage. Decoding the pathways of viral immune response allows us to measure their effect on overall damage and time of recovery, and motivates experimental study of interventions successful in the model.
A New Mathematical Model for Necrotizing Enterocolitis
Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC) is a major cause of death in premature low-birth-weight infants. NEC is characterized by bowel wall inflammation often followed by necrosis (death) of the intestine and multisystem organ failure. The risk factors for NEC have not been fully defined. However, it is known that the risk factors include prematurity and formula feeding. NEC apparently begins with a bacterial overgrowth in the intestinal lumen. The bacteria in the lumen induces an inflammatory response that is characterized by the release of cytokines which are part of a very complicated sequence of events that ultimately kills the bacteria. However, the elevated levels of cytokines also induce the release of Nitric Oxide and Oxygen radicals which greatly damage the intestinal wall. Many clinical studies and animal experiments have been done in an attempt to understand NEC and suggest possible therapies. While these studies have produced valuable information, progress has been limited due to the complex nature of the problem. Therefore, over the past several years, a number of mathematical models for NEC have been developed in order to simulate various aspects of the disease. In this paper, a new model is proposed which will simulate part of the NEC mechanism.
The Effects of Papain and EDTA on Bone in the Processing of Forensic Remains
It is essential in forensic anthropology to employ a defleshing method that is both efficient and nondestructive to bone tissue or fine trauma marks, while working within time constraints imposed by law enforcement. The current study suggests that the use of papain, a protein-specific enzyme derived from papaya, may be an effective, nondestructive method of soft tissue removal, however, other studies have found that papain can be destructive to bone. These studies have used ethylenediamine tetra-acetic acid (EDTA), a chelating agent which binds to and removes calcium ions, in combination with papain, which may have caused the noted bone destruction. A sample (n = 16) of New Zealand white rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus ) was obtained from a colony housed at the University of Pittsburgh to address three primary questions: (1) What is the most effective, cost-efficient concentration of papain for soft tissue removal?, (2) is papain destructive to bone at this concentration?, and (3) is EDTA destructive to bone?. Gross bone destruction was not noted in any of the papain samples, whereas severe destruction was observed on several bones in samples containing papain and EDTA. These results strongly suggest that EDTA, rather than papain, is highly destructive to bone and should be avoided in defleshing protocols.
The Suture Biology of the Aleutian Inhabitants: A Test of Population Affinity and Cranial Shape and Form
Research on cranial suture biology suggests there is biological information inherent to suture synostosis pattern (Cray et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2006). Research also suggests a multifactorial explanation for cranial vault phenotype including heritability, diet, biomechanics, etc. (Mooney and Richtsmeier, 2008; Riesenfeld, 1967). This study was designed to test population affinity and the hypothesis that ectocranial suture synostosis pattern will differ according to cranial shape. Ales Hrdlicka identified two phenotypes in remains excavated from the Aleutian Island, one termed Paleo-Aleut, exhibiting a dolichocranic phenotype with little prognathism linked to artifacts distinguished from later inhabitants, Aleutians, exhibiting a brachycranic phenotype with greater prognathism (1945). The relatedness of these populations is debated. 417 crania, culled to eliminate remains lacking a cranium and those with damage preventing analysis, of Paleo-Aleuts and Aleutians were investigated for suture synostosis pattern using Guttmann analyses. Results revealed the same patterns for the Paleo-Aleut and Aleutian suggesting a common affinity as well as suture fusion pattern independence of cranial shape. The patterns were also found to differ from that reported in the literature (Meindl and Lovejoy, 1985), suggesting patterns are population dependent and methodologies using suture fusion to determine age-at-death may not be applicable to all populations.
Paper Session 2c
Congestion Control Using Efficient Explicit Feedback
Achieving efficient and fair bandwidth allocations while minimizing packet loss, bottleneck queue and average flow completion times has long been a daunting challenge in high-speed and long-distance networks. The congestion control algorithm in TCP has significant limitations in achieving this goal. With the increase in the deployment of very high speed links in the Internet, the need for a viable replacement has become increasing important. This paper proposes a framework for congestion control, called Binary Marking Congestion Control (BMCC) for high-speed and long-distance networks. The basic components of BMCC are i) a packet marking scheme for obtaining high resolution congestion estimates using the existing bits available in the IP header for Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and ii) a set of load-dependent control laws that use these congestion estimates to achieve efficient and fair bandwidth allocations, while maintaining a low bottleneck queue and negligible packet loss rate. We present analytical models that predict and provide insights into the convergence properties of BMCC. Using extensive packet-level simulations, we assess the efficacy of BMCC and perform comparisons with several proposed schemes. BMCC outperforms VCP, MLCP, XCP, SACK+RED/ECN and in some cases RCP, in terms of average flow completion times for typical Internet flow sizes.
New Internet Measurement versus Cross-Country Interactions and Globalization
This paper presents a new way of measurement for diffusion of Internet, using a panel of 10 countries during 1998 2007. Different from the previous literature, I use city-level daily databases, which are downloaded from Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), to construct the yearly, monthly, and weekly data across countries. In investigating the Internet influence on the cross-country environment, I study the determinants of Internet cross-traffic traveling by several attributes, which capture the stability and the efficiency of the information travelling, and characterize macroscopic connectivity and performance of Internet. Under this measurement for the development of Internet, the network construction and information technology get new definitions, and, by using a Swiss KOF Globalization Index, the evaluation of business and service, political interaction and social emergence, and the globalization get new evidence.
The Effect of the Internet on Music Sales
Internet usage has increased dramatically over the past few years. At about the same time, the sales from music CDs has witnessed a huge decline. I analyze the effect of downloading music on the current downturn in CD sales, by looking at the progressive disappearance of traditional music stores, using Current Population Survey (CPS) Computer and Internet Use Supplement data for Internet penetration and Almighty Institute of Music Retail data for store closures. However, establishing a causal effect is difficult because a positive association between Internet penetration and store closings might merely reflect that people switch to music downloads whenever CD stores nearby go out of business, thereby raising the demand for faster network connections. In order to identify the causal impact of downloading and to control for endogeneity concerns, I instrument the state Internet penetration rates by information on the adoption of Video Franchise Law (VFL). The results indicate that the implementation of VFL increases Internet access in the states which adopt it, and explains 58.7 percent of the total store closings in those states. Since music stores represent a significant proportion of CD sales and are a substantial source of employment, the results have important public policy implications.
The Impact of Modern Information and Communication Technologies on Social Movements
Accompanied by the growing literacy, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have empowered states and — perhaps most crucially — non-state social actors, such as non-governmental organizations, social movements, revolutionaries and individuals in general, creating a more liberal and democratic environment. Although communication technology has never been the “sufficient” factor in enabling social change, it has often been the “necessary” factor for it. This pattern of empowerment by ICT, traceable throughout the entire human history, is continuing in the Digital Age. With the rise of the Net Generation, and social interactions drift to cyberspace, those trends promise to be even more prominent, as shown by the 2008 election in the USA.
Paper Session 2d
Shoshin-Beginner’s Mind: My Month in an American Zen Monastery
What kind of experience would we allow ourselves to have if we entered into it willingly and with no expectations? Shoshin, or beginner’s mind is a concept vital to Zen Buddhism, encouraging one to enter into practices, new or familiar, openly and with no preconceptions. In so doing, one can become more fully immersed in experience, and thus more open to the possibilities that it brings. In the fall of 2002, I undertook a month-long residency at an American Zen Buddhist monastery. Having no prior knowledge or encounters with Zen, I entered into this time with an open beginner’s mind. Four years later I reflected upon this time from an academic stance, examining daily letters that I had composed during my stay in the context of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. With the help of Suzuki and modern American Buddhist scholars, I attempt to find meaning in my tangible experience through an exploration of the abstract concept of beginner’s mind. The Zen Buddhist theory of learning by doing without direction is explored closely, as is the abundant amount of time that I spent in the monastery kitchen.
Mod Cosmopolitanism: An Anglo-American Youth Phenomenon in Germany and Japan
This paper will present findings from research in Germany and Japan that examines past and contemporary manifestations of the originally Anglo-American Mod culture that originally emerged during the early 1960s. With a “soundtrack” created from a mixture of American Rhythm and Blues, Jamaican Ska, Liverpool-born Merseybeat sounds, and visuals which include British “Carnaby Street” fashions and American pop art, Mod’s inherently transnational sensibility attracted an international following. Given the culture’s emergence only twenty years after World War II, I examine how Mod was able to take root in the formerly fascistic and defeated “Axis” nations of Germany and Japan. German and Japanese postwar youth adopted Anglo-American Mod culture as a way to foster a more cosmopolitan identity and to distance themselves from their nations’ recent past. As one of the most enduring international youth cultures, Mod continues to attract German and Japanese enthusiasts. A theoretical framework regarding the history of youth culture signifiers and their importance, as constructed by the Birmingham School scholars and their academic progeny, helps to inform this analysis.
“Jakob und Yakup”: Reflections of the Self in the Other
"Jakob und Yakup" is a short story written by the Turkish migrant writer Alev Tekinay. It is a story about negotiating one's own identity through the presence of an Other. The protagonists of the story are Jakob and Yakup, whom I will refer to by their last names, Klein and Küçük, respectively from now on in order to avoid confusion. This short story presents the question of how we can define ourselves in terms of national — and personal identity. Although published in 1990, little work has been done with this story since, ignoring the various application of theoretical work in post-colonial discourse as well as psychoanalytic discourse possible. In my paper I will explore the negotiating of one's identity with some focus on Lacan, as Tekinay repeatedly employs the idea of a mirror, or a mirror-image, throughout the story itself. Lacan's mirror-stage describes the "recognition [...] indicated by the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis" (75), i.e. the first recognition of the image in the mirror as being oneself, experienced by an infant. This realization that the reflection in the mirror is in fact oneself is limited in that the infant does not realize that this image is a mirror-image, or a backwards image of the self. This theme of an identical other, a mirror-image, is carried through the entirety of Tekinay's story. The mirror provides Jacob the possibility of negotiating his own identity.
Sun-Kyu Im’s Deceived by Love, Defeated by Money As National Allegory of Korea in the 1930s
My paper analyzes the Korean play written in 1936, Deceived by Love, Defeated by Money, in light of nationalism. Though many academic scholars have criticized this hugely popular melodrama for its pessimism and sentimentalism, I read it as an allegory of the political reality of Korea under the Japanese colonial rule, applying Lynne Hunt’s idea of family and heterosexual relationship as a central element in the way power operation is imagined collectively and Sommer’s idea of heterosexual eroticism as an expression of social and political formations of the nation. First, I argue that the main character Hong-do’s occupation, giesaeng (a courtesan) symbolizes the reality of the nation as exploited and violated by Japan, deprived of its virginity. Secondly, I pay attention to how the play contrast Hong-do with Hae-sook, a “New Woman,” which was a newly coined word in the late 1910s referring to the group of women who received the Western education and distinguished themselves from traditional women. I trace the kind of anxiety to control the sexuality of “New Woman” through Hae-sook’s death and Hong-do’s sympathetic moral victory. Thirdly, I examine Kwang-ho, Hong-do’s husband’s failure to protect her and to rise to a new leader figure. I argue this signifies the failure of the bourgeois elites to suggest ways to revive the nation.
Paper Session 2e
Noisy Addicts? Estimation of Optimal Consumption Choice with Habit Formation and Measurement Error
In this paper we investigate empirically the presence of habit formation in household food consumption using panel data from the PSID. We assume that data on food consumption are observed with some measurement error. We exploit the resulting structure of the consumption optimality condition to develop a nonlinear GMM estimator of structural parameters of interest: time-discount factor, utility curvature parameter, habit formation parameter, and the variance of measurement error in consumption. The results support the existence of a habit in food consumption. The variance of measurement error is estimated to be about 25%. We show that not accounting for measurement error results in underestimation of some structural parameters.
Cross-Border Childbirth between Mainland China and Hong Kong
This presentation examines the social and political implications of the skyrocketing increase of mainland Chinese women who are going to Hong Kong to give birth in recent years. The emergence of this controversial social issue can be traced back to a court judgment in 2001 which vindicated the right of abode to children born in Hong Kong by Chinese citizens before or after the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Since the ruling, the number of births in Hong Kong by mainland women surged dramatically between 2001 and 2006. This presentation analyzes the driving forces and experiences of these mainland women, and discusses the ways in which the Chinese government’s shrinking provision of social welfare during the country’s market economy transformation, combined with the implementation of a one-child policy in 1979, have tremendously influenced and shaped the Chinese people’s familial lives, particularly in terms of the parent-child relationship.
In a ‘Sorry’ State: The Ethics of Institutional Apologies in Response to Medical Errors
The rise in prominence of public apologies since the mid 1990s, in addition to increased awareness of the frequency and severity of medical errors in the United States, has led to scholarly and professional interest in doctors’ apologies in response to medical error. Literature targeting health care professionals indicates a growing consensus about the ethical and professional imperatives for apology. However, it also exposes the authors’ difficulty in achieving conceptual clarity about apology and its application to modern clinical practice carried out by multiple providers within complex medical, legal, and insurance systems. This interdisciplinary project articulates the ethical underpinnings of apology and establishes ethically and professionally appropriate responses—both by clinicians and administrators of health care institutions—to medical error. Foundationally, this argument includes clarifying salient distinctions related to medical error and adverse events and conceptualizing apology as it is applicable to health care contexts. In sum, a policy or culture of apology and responsibility-taking is ethically valuable in contemporary health care institutions and contributes to overall quality of care. The roles and responsibilities of clinicians and administrators within a culture of apology are discussed, in addition to the structure, applications, limitations, and ethical considerations of policies regarding apology.
Expert Advice for Amateurs
Advocates for patient education believe that more information contributes to better decision outcomes. Studies by the medical community indicate, however, that patient use of online information can have negative impacts on health care and health outcomes, including the physician-patient relationship. This paper examines the effects of a decision maker's information on decision outcomes when he interacts with an expert. I analyze strategic information transmission between a biased, perfectly informed expert and a partially informed decision maker. The decision maker can tell whether the state of the world is “high” or “low,” and his definition of “high” and “low” is unknown to the expert. The expert responds to this second layer of asymmetric information by providing less informative advice. For some types of decision maker, this negative, strategic effect outweighs the benefit of information - being informed makes them worse off. Information is always beneficial to the decision maker only when welfare is evaluated ex-ante before the realization of the decision maker's type. The results lend support to the overall merits of Internet health information and patient education while accounting for its negative impacts in individual cases.
Paper Session 3a
Essence and Politics: The Post-Structural and the Real in Post-Gender Theory
Approached from a certain perspective, Post-Gender theories are self-sufficient entities; they don’t serve the reality they model. In contrary if taken literally and fully accepting their post-structural premises in dealing with real existing gender-related phenomena like homophobia, sexism or rape, post-gender discourse makes it difficult to position and hinders - or renders impossible - to act against them or react to them. While many scholars are not yet done celebrating the overcoming of essence in favor of an omnipresent discourse or a similar concept, in this paper I aim to discuss the often overlooked and potentially dangerous impasse that post-structural theory has created towards identity concepts of the individual and his positioning in a political reality. As a vantage point I will critically examine Butler’s critique of traditional gender-roles, to develop on a more general question on the assets and drawbacks of poststructuralist analysis in queer- or gender studies. Why is it for example tempting to use the idea of deconstruction on the concept of masculinity in order to gain a productive new point of view to its traditional hegemonic status? And what is the underlying problem of declaring everything as merely constructed and its meaning as always deferred while it is yet dramatically present in the real (e.g. homophobia, murder, war)?
Contemporary Identification without Borders and Categories: The Pregnant Man–A Case Study
The decisive theoretical approaches of the 20th century questioned and deconstructed the categories of our thinking and perception. Terms like nation, sex, structure and language cannot be thought as a unit anymore. The new terms are now transgender and queer; transnational, post-colonialism or globalization. However, did these new approaches open up our categories or did they just create new ones with the prefixes bi-, trans-, post- and neo- ? In my paper, I want to discuss the consequences of the 20th century. What is left to think? Do we have to forget categories in this century, in order to make identification possible? Are borders in the world and in our head still useful? Do they help in terms of identification or do they categorize and objectify us? Therefore, I first want to discuss modern identification problems for homosexuals, transsexuals and bisexuals, in order to examine Queer and Gender Theory. Taking the example of Thomas Beatie, the pregnant man, I want to examine modern identification problems and the objectifying results of thinking within categories.
A Manufactured Dream: The “New Woman” in Weimar Germany and its Representation in Literary Texts—Irmgard Keun’s “Gilgi — One of Us” and Marie Luiese Fleisser’s “A Decoration for the Club”
Despite the political conflicts due to failures in the construction of the Weimar Constitution and the burden of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany experienced a promising restart to a modern age. Parallel to developments in technology and a partial economic recovery, the Weimar Republic supposedly provided unprecedented opportunities in both the public and private realm from 1918 onwards. Once their equal rights before the law were guaranteed in the Weimar Constitution, a new conception of womanhood entered the public discourse; the so called “New Woman.” The “New Woman,” as she was envisioned primarily by media in popular culture, was to be modern i.e. independent, self-confident, ambitious, career-oriented, and stylish. Despite this progressive definition of woman’s role in society, the tradition notion of woman as wife and mother in domesticity still predominated. My analysis thus addresses this discrepancy as it emerged in two novels written by female authors of that era. Irmgard Keun’s “Gilgi — One of Us” (1931) and Marie Luiese Fleisser’s “A Decoration for the Club” (1931) exemplify how the promises made and transmitted through the media collide with the day-to-day life of women in Weimar Germany and how the historical reality lagged behind the idealistic conception of “New Woman.”
The Ensler Monologues: The Limits of Experience, Identity, and Feminism
Feminism seeks to define the relationship of women to the world around them. This investigation has critiqued male domination over women and advocated “sisterhood” as an answer to female oppression. Within this “sisterhood,” however, we splinter into feminisms, representing diverse sects of women and questioning the implications of a singular feminism meant to speak for all women. Eve Ensler, as a playwright and activist, has become the face of a contemporary American breed of feminism, translating her fieldwork to the stage in The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and most recently, The Good Body. Her works aim to collapse the walls built by cultural difference in order to unite women across the world as a global community. Ensler’s work relies on the interconnectedness of experience and identity to tell its story. Her pieces reveal the limitations and dangers of employing experience and identity as foundational elements of a feminist approach. By putting Ensler’s work in conversation with the insights of feminist scholars, the conflicting objectives of her mission are disclosed and analyzed under the light of their inherent contradictions.
Paper Session 3b
Ecocritical Postcolonial Revolutions: Reclaiming Land for Sustainability in the Caribbean
This essay participates in the budding realm of literary scholarship that integrates ecological and postcolonial criticism. I interpret the poetics of the land in several Caribbean texts, considering the impact of the European, colonial, and capitalist presence in the region and the various forms of resistance to these forces. This literature highlights ways that the land and human relationships to it are central to revolutionary struggle by suggesting that this dynamic is a site for political and ecological sustainability. The works of Merle Collins, Olive Senior and Derek Walcott demonstrate how literature can reveal a power that comes from reclaiming land and re-forming a culture’s interaction with it and conception of it. This analysis focuses primarily on the issue of food production, especially as a form of resistance to colonial and capitalist systems. The people’s use of the plot system, as opposed to a plantation system, encourages a connection to the land that generates subsistence, contributing to psychological and economic empowerment. This represents a more symbiotic relationship with the land, which results in positive changes: political, social and cultural. Though the land may bear witness to the ravaging effects of history, it can be rejuvenated by the people who inhabit it, which rejuvenates them as well.
Steel Drums in the Steel City: The Fusion of Caribbean and American Musical Identities
What happens when a steel oil container is transformed into a musical instrument in the Caribbean and, through cultural globalization and migration processes, is appropriated by musicians in the U.S. Iron Belt? This paper examines changes in musical identity that occur when an instrument that is firmly entrenched in one country's culture becomes a marker of new identities in a different environment. Unlike the cities of New York and Miami, Pittsburgh does not have significant Caribbean populations, yet the city is still home to a strong steel drum scene. Caribbean Vibes, Victor Provost, and Resonance are some of the performers in Pittsburgh using the steel drum, some playing it in traditional genres associated with the instrument and others finding ways of integrating it into other musical genres. Based on ethnographic research conducted among these musicians in Pittsburgh at diverse performances around the city, this paper elucidates the multiple layers of identity associated with the instrument as it is used in America. The fusion of the Caribbean and the United States through the use of the steel drum in its transplanted environment provides an opportunity for examining how a musical instrument can be a vehicle for expressing aspects of different cultures.
Memorization of the Musical Genre Son in the Dominican Republic
The musical genre son, which is generally known as Cuban, provides memories of alternative histories in the Dominican Republic. It is interchangeably symbolizing an opposition to cultural hegemony, though corresponding to the tastes of U.S.-American and European audiences, it is representing a successful world music genre but also cultural authenticity; it further symbolizes the historical integration of the negritúde movement but at the same time indicates Hispanic rather than African cultural heritage. Son is at the same time popular and music for Dominican middle-classes, being on all levels able to refresh contradictory nostalgic images of both eras of rurality or of urban modernity and glory symbolized by elaborated dance-forms. The continuous high popularity of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban son tunes appears to be result of social mediations between memories of the first U.S. - American occupation (1916-1924, when Cuban recordings became popular), Afro-Dominican people, and younger people identifying with bohemia (son as elicit cultural taste and complex dance), the post-Trujillo-generation (son as true Afro-Dominican tradition and antagonist to ideologically abused merengue), and - often nostalgically - returnees or tourists. This poster project is based on interviews conducted in the D.R. and focuses on recollection as memory process.
Cai Guo-Qiang’s Explosion Events as Performances of Planetarity
This past summer, contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang orchestrated the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. It marked a crucial moment in his already hugely successful career. Indeed, Cai is one of the most critically-acclaimed contemporary artists working today, having exhibited in prominent exhibitions spanning all continents except Antarctica. Furthermore, having lived in the U.S. since 1995, and before that in Japan since 1986, Cai not surprisingly focuses on issues of cross-cultural encounter, but art critics and historians overwhelmingly reduce his practice to a discourse on East versus West, registering his practice in simple, catch-all terms such as “globalization” or “post-9/11.” And a number of critics even question whether he “plays the Chinese card.” Instead, I propose to explore Cai’s use of gunpowder for his “explosion events” — a term he employs to distinguish his pyrotechnics or fireworks from simple spectacle or entertainment — in terms of Gayatri Spivak’s recent theory of planetarity. I argue that Cai’s work reflects a need to imagine large-scale social relations in terms of the planet, of a shared eco-social space, where humans coexist in historically-specific, differentiated political geographies but nonetheless share responsibility in inhabiting an-other, paranational system.
Paper Session 3c
Disabling Ability: Exposing the Telethon’s Ideal Logical Order
This paper will explore the intersections between comic theory and disability through the phenomenon of the telethon, as exemplified by the annual MDA telethon and by satirical telethon scenes in two plays by disabled playwrights, Creeps by David Freeman and P.H.*reaks: The Hidden History of People with Disabilities by the Other Voices’ History Project collective. Previous scholarship has tackled the actual telethon from a sociological perspective, and psychology and performance studies have investigated disability in drama; however, little scholarship has explored how disabled artists have creatively responded to the telethon and how these responses disrupt the cultural meaning of the telethon event. This paper interrogates the telethon via its historical roots in carnivalesque freak shows and vaudeville, the biological and social models of disability, and James Feibleman’s assertion that comedy is “an indirect affirmation of the ideal logical order.” By juxtaposing the performativity latent in the MDA telethon, concentrated in its host Jerry Lewis, and its message of “ablebodiedness,” with the subversively satirical deconstruction of the telethon in Creeps and P.H.*reaks and its message of “inclusivity,” I argue that each telethon enactment uses comedy as indirection affirmation—but of two very different ideal logical orders.
Reconsidering the Rosenbergs: Theorizing the Dramatic Frame and the True Political Trial
In September 2008, Morton Sobell confessed to treason, implicating Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as guilty of passing state secrets to the Soviet Union; their trial became one of the most publicized and influential of the Cold War. In writing about major trials of the period, Ronald P. Sokol excludes the Rosenberg trial from his definition of a “true” political trial. Through the use of Donald Freed’s 1970 play Inquest, this paper refutes this omission. Inquest, written in the tradition of American documentary theater, re-examines the Rosenberg trial from the previously accepted stance of their innocence. This paper examines the unique framing devices that begin and end the play. In so doing, it builds a case for the creation of a “moral panic” among Freed’s audience members. This moral panic, viewed through the lenses of diverse theorists such as Michel Foucault, Elias Canetti, and Antonin Artaud, provides sufficient justification for re-positioning the Rosenberg case as a true political trial, while at the same time contextualizing and theorizing Freed’s use of theatrical framing conventions.
Opinion is Not Only Word-Deep: Discourse Level Relations for Opinion Analysis
Opinion analysis focuses on extracting subjective expressions and sentiments from text. Large-scale availability of public opinion over the internet weblogs, review websites, discussion forums and face to face conversations has motivated a great amount of research in this area in recent times. Much of the research in opinion analysis focuses on finding expressions that are opinion-indicators (for example, expressions like "great", “boring", or "failed to kill the spirit"). We feel that such approaches can be augmented by discourse-level analysis of opinions. Discourse-level analysis allows individual opinion expressions in different parts of the discourse to be interpreted in an interdependent, coherent fashion and allows us to capture the varied ways in which people reveal their opinions. In order to achieve discourse-level opinion analysis, we first develop a scheme to relate different opinion expressions in a discourse. We validate this design by showing that human annotators can reliably recognize the opinion relations. Then, we implement our scheme with a machine learning framework of collective inference to show that a computer's ability to recognize opinion expressions is indeed enhanced when the discourse level information is used. Finally, we show that, by performing feature engineering using a simple machine learning framework, the discourse-level opinion relations of our scheme can be automatically detected.
Amusement, Beliefs and Emotions in a Theory of Audience Complicity
This article is concerned with the issue of audience complicity in comic events. While comedy frequently presents the ridicule of a comic butt, this ridicule may become morally questionable. Consider the mistreatment of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. It is acknowledged that complicity in comic events does not entail culpability, which can only be determined by an entirely separate system of ethics. Using the gulling of Malvolio in Twelfth Night as a test case and employing a philosophic methodology, the paper rejects two potential theories of audience complicity before proposing a third theory. Relying on action theory and the scholastic concept of Formal Objects, it is found that complicity results from the real beliefs audience members acquire about the characters and events on stage as opposed to mere amusement by these comic figures and events.
Paper Session 3d
Childhood Abuse and Neglect are Associated with Body Fat Distribution in Adulthood
Childhood abuse and neglect are traumatic early-life stressors that may be risk factors for central adiposity. Our objective was to examine the association between childhood abuse/neglect and body fat distribution in a sample of 311 women (106 Black, 205 White) from the Pittsburgh site of the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN). SWAN included a baseline measurement of women in midlife and 8 follow-up visits during which waist circumference (WC) and body mass index (BMI) were measured. ANCOVAs were used to determine whether a history of any abuse/neglect, or subtypes of abuse or neglect, were associated with WC. Results showed that women with a history of any abuse/neglect, or physical abuse specifically, had significantly higher WC and BMI at baseline than women with no abuse history. Among women with BMI<30, a history of any abuse/neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or physical neglect predicted increased WC over time. Additional mediation analyses showed that Trait Anger scores mediated some relationships between abuse/neglect and WC. This study suggests that traumatic early-life stressors are associated with adulthood body fat distribution, especially among normal-weight and overweight women.
Students’ Right to Their Own: Modeling Style in First-Year Composition
My paper investigates writing pedagogy and explores the value of establishing a concrete standard of how “good” writing looks and sounds. Style-modeling exercises are the objective core of the first-year composition course, and I am interested in how this mode of writing instruction might work more effectively. In my teaching, I have adopted a category of style-modeling exercises designed to produce what I call “the critical, personal” essay. I ask my students to turn those terms inside out—a critical essay is not necessarily negative, or angry, just as a personal essay is not necessarily sentimental or devoid of foundational arguments. Form and content, too, are roused from their separate camps, where content is essential and form is accessory. I ask my students go places they’ve likely been before—behind the lens of a camera, or on vacation surrounded by people who don’t look like them, or confronted with someone who has less when they have more. How did they behave, I wonder? Why might they have acted like they did, and what did their actions mean? How does their experience figure into a larger cultural fabric of decisions? Instead of focusing on originality, I ask students to internalize a writing structure and to make it their own. Students are likely to find success in writing (especially in new forms) when they are encouraged to faithfully follow the whole example of established writers, mimicking syntax and even word choice.
The Impact of Political Conflict on Student Performance
Conflict is a widespread phenomenon. In about 60 countries violence significantly reduced economic growth with half of those countries currently in post-conflict transition. Most studies in post-conflict transition analyze the impact on youth who are directly involved in the armed rebel ignoring the population at large that might not have participated directly in the conflict, but were affected by the conflict nevertheless. Taking the instance of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, I show that the potential population impacted by conflict can be substantial and that the conflict significantly reduced human capital accumulation. I estimate the impact of the conflict on grade transition from Grade 1 to 8, passing rate in a standardized examination at Grade 10, and scores of students passing the standardized examination at Grade10 (i.e. primary to secondary level). To the extent that the insurgency in Nepal was relatively peaceful than the long and violent conflicts in other countries, this study estimates the lower bound impact of conflict on student population at large. Given that I find very strong negative impact, this study draws attention to the fact that ignoring this impact and population being indirectly affected by conflict can significantly attenuate reconstruction effort in post-conflict transition countries.
Education Gender Gap, Time Spent with Kids and the Rise in Returns to Education
Women education attainment has increased dramatically. The educational gender gap is smaller than the labor market gender gap, in terms of earnings, occupation choice and experience in the U.S. Also women spend more time than men with young kids conditional on how much they work outside. This is consistent with the higher participation costs for women with young kids compared to men. Therefore in an inter-generational framework where mothers care about their children’s future income, if returns to education in the labor market have risen dramatically, it may be that returns to time spent with kids at young ages when it has a large effect on their cognitive skill development are higher now and that the returns to time with kids interact with parent’s education. It is empirically confirmed in this paper that the return to time with kids is important only if the mother is highly educated. Therefore the gender gap in the labor market is partially explained when we account for the dynastic considerations of the mothers with high education. Women do not waste their high education but partially invest it in the education of their children by contributing to their human capital with an early education at home. Conditional on what they do we can explain the investment of women in their education given their lower returns compared to men by accounting to returns to educating children. Our empirical strategy is to highlight the effect of highly educated mother’s time spent with her kids on the kids’ future education and possibly other labor market outcomes related to education (such as wage rate). However there are issues we can not address in a reduced form framework. The most important of these issues is the possible change in the behavior of the female under different regimes of return to education. We need a theoretical model to understand and quantify all these effects. Therefore we propose a choice theoretical model with a dynastic structure where mother cares about the utility of her children. We estimate this choice theoretical model by using data from PSID. Finally estimated model is used in order to conduct policy simulations where we simulate different policies in different regimes of returns to education.
Paper Session 4a
A Case for Qochas as Agents of Salinization
Often categorized as one of the principle methods of agricultural production during Tiwanaku governance of the Titicaca Basin, qochas and their true impact on the Andean landscape have received limited scholarly attention, at least in comparison to raised field complexes and terrace systems. It has traditionally been posited that qochas served either as a mechanism of agricultural intensification or perhaps as water retention basins for the massive llama herds thought to have occupied the basin during Tiwanaku IV and V phases. However, after a direct comparison of qocha basin systems with both Andean and global analogues, it is my contention that, no matter what utilitarian purpose qochas may have served, their impact on the hydrological balance of the basin would have been enormously detrimental. By contributing to processes of salinization, qocha systems may have aided in the eventual demise of agricultural viability within the greater basin, including that of raised fields.
Generalist Herbivores Drive Unbrowsed Species Decline: Collateral Damage of Abundant Deer in Forests
Interactions among multiple species simultaneously influence plant population and community dynamics. Yet, the direction (positive or negative) and strength or effect size of interactions can be dependent on the abiotic or biotic context within which interactions occur. High herbivore pressure is expected to facilitate co-occurring but less palatable, unbrowsed plant species through changes in their interactions with browsed species. However, for the unbrowsed forest herb, Arisaema triphyllum, we found surprising and insidious changes in its population structure and demography in highly browsed sites. Reduced growth rates, plant size, and seed rain, a lower proportion flowering adults, and increased male-biased sex ratios in Arisaema populations were all significantly correlated with deer browse on a co-occurring palatable species. Size difference data for Arisaema and four other unbrowsed herbs growing in deer exclusion/access experimental plots support these results. Further, soil compaction is lower in deer exclusion plots, suggesting an indirect mechanism influencing Arisaema's performance declines. Our findings suggest that many unbrowsed species in forests with high deer densities could be negatively affected along with their palatable neighbors. Our study implicates high ungulate density in the cascade of plant species decline and highlights the urgency of this conservation issue.
Production of Pigment Grade Iron Oxide from Mine Drainage Residuals
Acid mine drainage (AMD) results when pyrite minerals are exposed to air as a result of coal mining. AMD is a significant environmental problem, affecting over 2000km of streams in Pennsylvania alone. Fortunately, many techniques have been developed to treat these discharges. The most economical method of treatment is passive treatment, which uses settling ponds and wetlands to remove iron from the discharges. Iron precipitates from the water and collects in the ponds. Every five to ten years, the ponds must be emptied and the collected iron oxide solids disposed of in landfills. A variety of uses have been proposed for these iron oxide solids, and one of the most promising applications is in the pigment industry. Currently, iron oxide pigments are either mined or synthesized, but some AMD precipitates have exhibited comparable pigmentary characteristics. Iron oxides from a number of AMD treatment systems have been analyzed to determine mineralogy, particle size, and chemical composition. The goal of the project is to use these properties to understand and predict the pigment quality that results from different treatment systems. Sale of these precipitates would help to offset the cost of treatment system maintenance, as well as eliminate the costs of landfilling.
Nutrient Input and Dynamics during Baseflow and a Storm Event in Nine Mile Run, a Restored Urban Stream
In urban watersheds, impervious surfaces and leaky sewers route atmospherically deposited and human-produced nutrients to streams, resulting in degraded water quality and habitat. A report by the National Research Council (2005) states “the most pressing water quality problem [in SW Pennsylvania’s urban core] is degradation of the microbiological quality of streams due to Combined Sewer Overflows, Sanitary Sewer Overflows and discharge from separate stormwater systems in wet weather conditions.” Urban stream restorations can potentially restore ecosystem function lost during urbanization. Water was sampled during a summer storm (2008) and bi-weekly since April 2007 from Nine Mile Run (NMR), a restored urban stream in Pittsburgh. Analysis of water quality data from NMR suggests that atmospheric deposition and sewage both contribute pollution to the stream. We estimate input of atmospheric nitrate deposition to the watershed is 18.96 kg NO3-ha-1yr-1 yet a preliminary nitrogen budget suggests that nitrate export from the basin is consistently higher (~21.5 kg NO3-ha-1yr-1). Baseflow nitrate concentrations are higher during the wetter portions of 2008 (12.07 mg NO3-/L) as compared to the drier 2007 (7.3 mg NO3-/L). This suggests increased stream/sewer interactions during wetter periods and highlights challenges inherent in improving urban water quality through physical stream restorations.
Paper Session 4b
Questions of Identity in Beur Comedy
The complexity of the word “Beur” is in what it implies and how it is understood. As it emerged in the early eighties after the publication of Mehdi Charef’s novel Le The Au Harem D’archi Ahmed (Tea in the Harem), it started raising questions about the identity(ies) of a young generation who were born in France and whose parents were of North African origin. This young generation found itself between two different cultures unable to decide where it belongs. The movie Beur, Blanc, Rouge is an Algerian film that shows us in very interesting ways how this instability works and it reflects through many different scenes this notion of loss and/or belonging. In most Beur novels and Beur movies, not only in the eighties but now as well there is this sense of failure in claiming an identity. ‘ici’ (here: France) and ‘la bàs’ (there: the Maghreb “Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia”) is constantly present in films, novels, music lyrics and all artistic productions. Beur, Blanc, Rouge is one of the first Beur films to address the question of Beur in a different way. This paper investigates this emergent genre that I shall call Beur comedy, the way in which it addresses the question of Beur identity, and how it does that.
Untangling /t/: Variation in Suburban Sydney English
Contemporary Australia is debating its national identity, in part because its cities are growing and changing in character due to influences from immigration waves. A wave of European immigrants in the years after World War II, followed by a more recent wave of Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern populations, challenge the cultural and societal norms established by the longer-established Anglo immigrants. The linguistic behavior of Australian English (AusE) speakers is thought to provide a reflection of this social climate, and this paper investigates variation in the pronunciation of /t/ as an indicator of this societal tension. While internal linguistic factors partially condition the appearance of /t/ variants, aspects of speakers’ social identity — particularly sex, age, and ethnicity — can also be used to predict which variant of /t/ they will favor, suggesting that this societal tension is alive and in play in linguistic work. Our findings confirm aspirated /t/ as a ‘prestige variant’ (Horvath 1985), as this variant is used most by older Anglo females following Labovian variation predictions. Unlike previous studies, this study finds that the glottalized variant has replaced the flapped variant as the incoming ‘youth’ variant, reflecting patterns that have been found in other English-speaking areas of the world (Tollfree 1996, Trudgill 1999).
Social Transformations and Identity in the Age of Globalization in Germany
The question of identity has long been a contested category in German consciousness and has cultivated passionate public-political debate. While discussions on this issue continue to be differently motivated, today’s fast-paced social and cultural transformation processes paired with drastic changes in economic practices have only aggravated the intensity of such a question. Recent conceptualizations have conjectured a close link between the effects of globalization and identities in flux. Such considerations challenge and append previous attempts at situating identity, prompting reflections on the recent evolution of national economic policies along with its implications for German society and culture. Premising this newly envisioned entanglement of the economic and social sphere, this paper scrutinizes the collaboration between theoretic discussions of the above issues and the cultural articulation thereof in poetic form. The contemporary pop-literary archive offers fertile ground for study as such writing not only temporally intersects with major economic shift, but as it commonly locates sites of literary themes in the quotidian struggles and mundane anxieties of individuals in the age of globalization. I will analyze the pop-literary novel All that counts (2002) by Georg Oswald for its themes and representational strategies as well as for the public discourses circulating in the text to measure it against theoretic discourse. Can this pop novel operating on the subjective experience of the individual complement a discussion in abstract form intent to make claims at the collective level? How is the question of identity implicated, what statements about the individual in its role as a constitutive member of our larger social structure are made, and what are the ramifications for our society and future per this perspective? Considering the blurring of national boundaries with the emergence of transnational spaces, this discussion carries relevance far beyond Germany.
Bearing the ‘Golden Burden’: Art and Nationalism in the Netherlands
The museum as a state institution is an emblem of a modern nation. In the shifting political grounds of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, national museums were created as a powerful site for cultivating different types of national identities — and, I argue, for presenting to the public a state sanctioned image of ideal citizenship. While this is well established in France, it has not been considered in the context of the Netherlands, nor has the gendered nature of citizenship been directly addressed. This paper seeks to consider the image of the ideal citizen as presented to the Dutch public through the mediating element of the artworks displayed in the Nationale Konst Gallerij and its subsequent reinvention as the modern Rijksmuseum. Moreover, I maintain that this was an inherently gendered image, reflecting nostalgic attitudes about the domestic roles of women in the Netherlands as seen in other contemporary cultural practices. An examination of the acquisition practices as well as the shifting identity of the museum between 1800 and 1815 reveals changing attitudes about the ideal roles of gender and class for the Dutch citizen at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Paper Session 4c
Communication in Bargaining over Decision Rights
This paper studies bargaining over decision-making rights between an informed but self interested agent and an uninformed principal in which the uninformed principal makes a price offer to the agent who then decides either to accept or to reject it. We show that the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome does not satisfy ex-post efficiency. Once we introduce explicit communication into the model, however, there exists a truth-telling perfect Bayesian equilibrium, which is not only efficient ex-post but also neologism proof. Moreover, it is the unique neologism-proof equilibrium if parties’ preferences are sufficiently similar. This equilibrium outcome is ex-ante Pareto superior to that of several dispute resolution schemes studied in the framework of Crawford and Sobel (1982, Econometrica) and Holmström (1977).
Bayesian Bot Detection Based on DNS Traffic Similarity
A bot is a malicious program that an attacker (also known as botmaster) can control remotely through a command and control (C&C) infrastructure. A botnet is a network of hosts infected with such a program. A botnet is typically used for nefarious activities such as spamming and click fraud. Botnets often are detected by their communication with a botmaster's C&C servers. These servers may have fixed IP (Internet Protocol) addresses or, more commonly, domain names that botmasters can map to IP addresses dynamically using the Domain Name System (DNS). To evade detection, botmasters are increasingly obfuscating C&C communications. However, a botmaster's commands tend to elicit similar actions in bots of a same botnet. We propose and evaluate a Bayesian approach for detecting bots based on the similarity of their DNS traffic to that of known bots. Experimental results and sensitivity analysis suggest that the proposed method is effective and robust.
CHAP: Enabling Efficient Hardware-Based Multiple Hash Schemes for IP Lookup
Building a high performance IP lookup engine remains a challenge due to increasingly stringent throughput requirements and the growing size of IP tables. An emerging approach for IP lookup is the use of set associative memory architecture, which is basically a hardware implementation of an open addressing hash table with the property that each row of the hash table can be searched in one memory cycle. While open addressing hash tables, in general, provide good average-case search performance, their memory utilization and worst-case performance can degrade quickly due to bucket overflows. This paper presents a new simple hash probing scheme called CHAP (Content-based HAsh Probing) that tackles the hash overflow problem. In CHAP, the probing is based on the content of the hash table, thus avoiding the classical side effects of probing. We show through experimenting with real IP tables how CHAP can effectively deal with the overflow.
Paper Session 4d
How Pirates Enlightened Europe: The Atlantic Origins of Modern Thought
Where did the Enlightenment come from? To whom do we owe the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity? The traditional narrative credits a few dozen eighteenth-century philosophers and the social world from which they emerged, but these ideas have an older and more global history. A century before Voltaire and Paine, the ideas that would re-emerge in the Enlightenment were forged in practice by Caribbean buccaneers. Drawing on traditions from all corners of the Atlantic, these men brought with them a rich and diverse array of ideas that played an important part in how they organized and understood their lives. The pirate ship became a seventeenth-century seaborne salon, and its motley crews brought these transatlantic traditions together in an early modern outburst of freedom, equality, and camaraderie. After their suppression, stories of their way of life formed the basis of a new genre of utopian literature and inspired key images and rhetoric of the Enlightenment. By reorienting the history of political philosophy, this study seeks to put common people and their ideas at the forefront of our collective intellectual history, and to rescue those values that did not survive the more close-minded revival of the eighteenth century.
“Die and Become!” — A Hegelian Reading of Goethe’s “Blessed Yearning”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Selige Sehnsucht” or “Blessed Yearning,” included in the poetic cycle “West-Eastern Divan” (1827), is a poem of grand oppositions: subject and object, light and darkness, life and death. However, these oppositions are not depicted as binaries. Rather, they can be read as examples of dialectical movement as explicated by Goethe’s contemporary, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This poem displays dialectical movements between the individual and the many as pronominal (universal) entities, between being and nothingness, and between the self-consciousness as its own object of reflection. The culmination of dialectical formation par excellence can be found in the well-known line “Die and become!” This paper shall analyze this famous Goethean maxim as a literary representation of Hegelian becoming; the simultaneous distinctness and unity of being and nothingness which culminates in the telos of becoming. With the assistance of not only selected passages from Hegel but also scholarly commentary and annotations of Goethe’s “Divan,” this paper seeks to explicate the appropriateness of a Hegelian reading to the text not as ideological revision but as an attempt to chart the many relationships which reveal themselves in the poem.
The Case of Divergent Descriptions
In two fascinating articles, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich (2004; forthcoming) use experimental methods to raise a specter of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian subjects about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke’s Gödel example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in subjects’ intuitions about that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We detail a type of perspectival ambiguity found in Machery et al.’s probe but not yet noted in the response literature. We argue that this ambiugity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of perspectival ambiguity on subjects’ responses. We found that this accounts for much of the variation in Machery et al.’s original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, their argument is no longer convincing.
“Listen to the Pictures”: Using Image Schemas to Unpack the Work of Robert Wilson
Many interpretations of the work of Robert Wilson rely heavily on semiotics to unpack and interpret their difficulty and artistic worth. The use of semiotics, however, supposes a lot of sign reading on the part of the audience. There is, however, another way with which to analyze and approach the same work: cognitive science. Utilizing the image schemas of Mark Johnson, one can read past the stylized obscurity of Wilson’s work to a more approachable understanding based simply on the way our minds receive input from the stage. What will be revealed is that through image schemas an understanding of the piece is quite discernible at the unconscsious visual level that precedes other typical theatrical interpretations. This system of understanding and categorizing almost entirely precedes interpretation and awareness. While all images all the time are being interpreted into something more manageable, this significant feature becomes the most powerful part of Wilson’s work: the visceral, cognitive reaction that occurs before any analysis of the plot takes place by the audience leaving the theatre or the critic and scholar much later. This analysis will deal specifically with Wilson’s self-termed pop-rock opera trilogy that includes The Black Rider, Alice, and Time Rocker.
Paper Session 4e
Becoming Citizen(like): Latinos in Southwestern Pennsylvania
The making of citizens has often been described as a process where governments enjoy most control. This paper argues, using a case study, how non-citizens actively engage in this process by carving their own identities as subjects with rights and duties, that is, as citizen-like actors. Latinos in southwestern Pennsylvania have appropriated the identity marker of "Latinos," a minority tag in the US context, in order to acquire a social space and political visibility. As part of this endeavor, Latinos have joined efforts with other politically active groups in the region. In this relationship, in lieu for the votes that tend to be used as leverage by advocacy groups but that many lack, Latinos offer their presence at events organized by their political partners; in exchange, these partners agree to maintain Latino's interests in their agenda. Through the construction of a collective identity as a politically active minority, this community is striving to be recognized as politically significant. In doing so, individuals are able to position themselves as taxpayers, workers, and in general, subjects with rights, creating for themselves a set of identities that allows them to become citizen-like individuals with rights whose protection can, and should, be claimed.
Do Mexican Workers Return Home? Performance and Duration of Mexican Immigrants in the United States
In this paper, I delineate the characteristics of legal and illegal Mexican immigrants in the US and test for significant differences in the evolution of their wages. I also analyze their migration duration and describe some characteristics associated with return migration. The analysis shows that among Mexican workers in the US, illegal migrants earn lower wages than legal workers but the wage gap seems to be closing over time. In general, return migration is higher among illegal and low educated migrants and duration is longer among those with higher migration costs, those uncertain about their after-return activity and those who expect to perform a low paid activity upon return. Survival estimates suggest that within five years, over 63 percent of illegal workers with low education will return to Mexico. Simulations suggest that if the flow of Mexican immigrants were to be stopped today, the number of Mexican migrants would drop to be three fourths the original number in 2 years, half in 7 years and one forth in 13 years.
Political Bargaining in the Chilean Budgetary Process: The Lagos Administration
This paper addresses the political negotiation between the Executive and the Legislative Powers in the Chilean public budgetary process occurred during the Ricardo Lagos Administration (2000-2006). After interviewing the main actors of the negotiations (ministers, deputies, senators, budget staff and scholars involved), game theory is applied to reveal that the process was highly centralized in the Executive Power. I show that during the budgetary process the will of the President is by far more important than the role of the Congress. As a result, the process permits corruption and a great waste of resources. I conclude that the Chilean budget may be used in an utilitarian way by a President that wants to improve his popularity at the expense of public resources. Further studies may assess how the role of the Chilean Congress may be strengthened during the public budgetary process in order to constrain presidential powers.
“A Great Field for Competition”: The Brazilian Mail Subsidy in Post-Reconstruction American Shipping, 1877-19883
This paper examines John Roach's fight for a subsidy from the U.S. Congress to run a packet steamship line between New York and Rio. The significance of this line must be understood in the broader context of trans-Atlantic shipping following several wars, notably the American Civil War and the Latin American War of the Triple Alliance. These conflicts allowed British merchants to dominate blue water Atlantic shipping. Everything shipped between New York and Rio passed through Liverpool where British ships collected the fees. Neither the Crown nor the Liverpool traders wanted to see this end. Additionally, after the wars, iron ship building stopped completely. Resuming production was seen as an essential project to reconstruct the national character and regain political legitimacy in the U.S. and Brazil while asserting regional prerogative in response to British hegemony. The 1877 effort failed but was successfully re-pitched in 1883 as a matter of national prosperity and security. This would come too late as heavy costs associated with personally financing the Brazil line for 6 years caused Roach's failure. Despite this, his efforts were essential in developing the legal and discursive foundations of the New Navy and, more broadly, American internationalism in the 20th century.
Poster Abstracts
Atmosphere Characterization at the Atacama Cosmology Telescope
The study of the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, tells us about the very early history of the universe when the first atoms were formed. The WMAP satellite experiment has mapped the entire sky. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope enhances our understanding of both the CMB and the intervening large-scale structure of matter by taking high-resolution measurements of the microwave sky from the Atacama desert. Unfortunately, water is an efficient emitter and absorber of microwave radiation, so atmospheric moisture is a significant noise source which clouds our view of the universe. The atmosphere may be well-characterized as Kolmogorov turbulence, and is theoretically expected to appear as "frozen turbulence" at the pertinent time and length scales. This assumption is applied to characterize and separate the atmospheric foreground component of the signal from the cosmological signal of interest.
Observational Probes of Black Hole Feedback
Galaxies that harbor super massive black holes at their centers are called active galaxies. An important, but poorly understood aspect of these super massive black holes is the process with which they heat their environments. This heating mechanism by super massive black holes is known as energy feedback and it play an important role on theories of galaxy formation. Using analytic and numerical studies of feedback from super massive black holes we have proposed a new observational tool for studying black hole environments. This involves observations of the signal with millimeter wave experiments. We have also studied the same effect at X-ray waveband, using active galaxies identified at optical surveys. These methods together lead us to a comprehensive understanding of energy feedback process from super massive black holes and their role on formation of structures in the universe.
Auction-Based Admission Control of Continuous Queries
The growing need for monitoring applications such as the real-time detection of disease outbreaks, tracking the stock market, and environmental monitoring via sensor networks, has led to a paradigm shift in data processing, from Database Management Systems (DBMSs) to Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs). In contrast to DBMSs in which data is stored, in DSMSs, monitoring applications submit Continuous Queries (CQs) which continuously process endless streams of data looking for events of interest to the end-user. We consider the perspective of a business selling data stream monitoring/management services. We design auction-based mechanisms for deciding which users to service in the event that the system does not have the resources to process every user's CQ. When submitting a CQ, each user also submits a bid representing how much she is willing to pay for her CQ to be run. Our goal is to choose which CQs to admit and set payments in a way that maximizes system revenue while incentivizing users to bid and submit CQs honestly. A mechanism that provably incentivizes users to always use the system honestly is termed strategy-proof. We propose several strategy-proof auction mechanisms and prove that one of our mechanisms returns a profit close to the optimal possible single-price profit.
Nearest Neighbor Queries over Dynamic Graph Data
A major drawback of most GIS implementations is that they do not support efficient nearest-neighbor(NN) queries on road networks. The traditional method is to represent objects on a road network as vertices on a graph; NN queries are answered by a top-k search. This search takes linear time and cannot be optimized by pre-computing and storing each vertex's nearest neighbors when a vertex's weight can change dynamically. We propose an algorithm for finding nearest neighbors in such edge-weighted vertex-weighted graphs like those used to represent road networks. Our proposed algorithm runs in logarithmic expected time in the number of vertices. Along with the NN search algorithm we propose an algorithm that will allow for the weight of a vertex in the graph to be updated in logarithmic time in the number of vertices. We provide theoretical as well as experimental results that uphold the correctness and expected runtime of each algorithm. In order to illustrate the problem's applicability, we simulate an emergency response system in a city where NN queries are used to determine nearest and most available ambulances and hospitals.
The Role of the Pafl Complex in Transcriptional Repression
Improper gene expression due to alteration of histone modifications and chromatin structure contributes to the development of cancer. The Paf1 complex is a transcription elongation complex that is required for several histone modifications, including histone H2B ubiquitylation and histone H3 K4, K36, and K79 methylation. Members of the Paf1 complex also have links to human cancers. To investigate the role of the Paf1 complex in transcriptional repression in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, ARG1 serves as a model gene. Members of the Paf1 complex are required for ARG1 repression. Analysis of single and double mutant strains indicates that the Paf1 complex represses ARG1 expression through histone modifications in a pathway that functions in parallel to Arg80, another repressor of ARG1. The Paf1 complex localizes to ARG1, suggesting that the Paf1 complex may be a direct repressor of ARG1. Furthermore, deletion of Paf1 results in derepression of HIS3 when under the control of the ARG1 promoter. These findings suggest that the Paf1 complex is important for establishing a repressive chromatin structure at the ARG1 promoter and 5’ region. Future experiments will test this hypothesis further and expand the analysis to other Paf1 complex-repressed genes identified through our genomic tiling array studies.
The Rh(I)-Catalyzed Cyclocarbonylation of Allenol Esters to Prepare α-Acetoxy 4-Alkylidene Cyclopentenones
α-Hydroxy carbonyl compounds are an important synthetic moiety, both as a building block in organic synthesis and due to its presence in a significant number of biologically active molecules. Whereas a variety of methods exist for the formation of α-hydroxy carbonyl compounds, the most common method is the oxidation of enolates. However, the oxidants required may be incompatible with other common functionality. This research demonstrates the Rh(I)-catalyzed cyclocarbonylation reaction of allenol esters as an efficient method to synthesize α-acetoxy alkylidine cyclopentenones. The Rh(I)-catalyzed reaction provides access to α-hydroxy carbonyl compounds without the use of harsh oxidizing conditions. This reaction has been demonstrated for formation of 5, 6, and 7 membered rings. Exploration of stereochemical considerations for both the preparation of the allenol esters and the α-hydroxy alkylidine cyclopentenones were performed. Subsequent removal of the ester group allowed for liberation of the latent hydroxy moiety.
Fertile Ground: A Social Network Analysis of Generations of the Environmental Movement
The environmental movement continues to be a dynamic force for protection of the environment despite new organizations emerging from the “birthing” process of the formation of new groups via factions and schisms. I focus on two aspects of the evolution of the environmental movement. First, how do new organizations emerge from existing environmental groups via benevolent or divisive mechanisms? Second, which organizations produce new organizations? I develop a family tree of the American environmental movement from 1955 — 2005 and identify the mechanisms that result in the formation of new organizations. I use social network analysis to identify which environmental organizations were most likely to produce new groups. This sets the stage for future inquiries into how new environmental organizations reestablish and maintain connections with their progenitors.
Transfer Rule Learning for Biomarker Discovery From Proteomic Mass Spectra
Protein biomarkers are a critical tool for the early detection, diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of diseases, as well as understanding of disease mechanisms and creating of treatments. One tool for discovery of protein biomarkers has been mass spectrometry of whole clinical samples, followed by computational statistical analysis. However, practical difficulties for this process include the scarcity of clinical samples available for each study, the high dimensionality of the produced data, and measurement errors. I propose a novel approach for reducing these problems, based on combining multiple available data sets. The approach is a type of transfer learning based on classification rule learning. Ordinary classification rule learning has been successfully used for many applications, including biomarker discovery, and extending it for transfer seems promising from preliminary results. I develop three novel methods for inductive transfer of selected variables and learned classification rules.
Determining Zeta Potential in Tissue Cultures
Understanding how fluid flows under an electric field is important to both drug design and design of drug delivery systems. We present a method of determining zeta potential in tissue. The zeta potential of tissue is important to understanding electroosmotic flow in tissue- fluid flow induced by electric fields. For example, iontophoresis, used to deliver a drug into tissue using an electric field, is influenced by tissue zeta potential. Zeta potentials of biological materials such as cells and synaptosomes have been studied, but zeta potential of intact tissue in physiological conditions has never been measured. Our tissue model is an organotypic hippocampal slice culture. Inspiration for the method comes from gel electrophoresis. We built an apparatus that sits on an inverted fluorescence microscope for image analysis. Velocities of fluorescent dyes injected into the tissue are measured and related to observed mobilities. Independently, the fluorescent dyes were characterized using capillary electrophoresis. Relating the behavior of the dyes in the tissue to their characteristics in free solution is a linear function. The slope and intercept of the regression line yield zeta potential and tortuosity. Tortuosity is a measure of the compactness of cells. The results support the method's applicability to any tissue.
Testing the Stability of Obligate Mutualism in the Face of Environmental Change
Mutualisms are cooperative relationships between two organisms. However, conflict can occur when one partner experiences an increase in costs or a decrease in benefits, causing the relationship to erode into parasitism. The interaction between native understory plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is commonly cited as a stable mutualism. Plants benefit from AMF by receiving soil nutrients that enhance their physiological processes, but must provide AMF with carbon. The forest invader garlic mustard (GM) produces allelochemicals that kill AMF's soil-mining hyphae. We hypothesized that exposure to GM allelochemicals would diminish AMF nutrient uptake and cause plant-AMF conflict that is detectable as decreased plant physiological rates. To test our hypothesis, we randomly assigned one Maianthemum racemosum plant from each of nine pairs to either a GM or control treatment. Physiological rates did not differ within pairs prior to treatment. However, after 2 weeks GM treated plants had significantly lower stomatal conductance, transpiration, and photosynthetic rates compared to controls (ANCOVA, p = 0.003, p = 0.01, p = 0.05). Our results suggest that GM allelochemicals create conflict within native plant-AMF mutualisms. We are currently quantifying AMF hyphal biomass in the soil surrounding our experimental plants to validate GM's anti-fungal effects.
Comparative Outcomes Among the Problem Areas of Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depression
While previous research has demonstrated that interpersonal psychotherapy is an efficacious treatment for acute depression, the relative efficacy of treatment in the four defined problem areas of IPT (grief, role transitions, role disputes, interpersonal deficits) has received little attention. We sought to provide evidence for the specificity of IPT by comparing outcomes among patients whose treatment focused on each of the four problem areas, and by assessing the effect of personality pathology on the rate of remission among those in the interpersonal deficits group. Individuals with unipolar major depression (n=182) were treated with IPT. Remission was defined as an average HRSD-17 of 7 or below over 3 weeks. Personality disorders were diagnosed using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Personality Disorders (SCID-II). There was a trend for greater likelihood of one or more personality disorders among those in the interpersonal deficits group (X2=3.864, p=0.049 ). Contrary to prediction however, none of the groups differed on time to remission. Thus, in the hands of capable therapists, IPT addresses each problem area with equal success, even in the presence of personality pathology.
User-Centric Annotation Management for Biological Data
Annotations play an increasingly crucial role in scientific exploration and discovery, as the amount of data and the level of collaboration among scientists increases. Although all such systems are implemented to take user input (i.e.,the annotations themselves), very few systems are user-centric, taking into account user preferences on how annotations should propagate and be applied over data. We propose to treat annotations as first-class citizens for biological data management by presenting a user-centric, view-based annotation framework, called ViP. Under the ViP framework we consider user preferences over the time semantics of annotations (by supporting future annotations) and over the network semantics of annotations (by supporting both implicitly-defined and explicitly-defined annotation propagation paths). In addition to novel functionality, we describe a novel materialized view technique which enables ViP to outperform the state of the art. We have developed a prototype of the ViP framework that provides two interfaces: The first is a user-interface supporting the functionality of our system whereas the second is a monitoring system interface to visualize the server/behind-the-scenes aspect.
A Stress Management Intervention Improves Lung Function, Perceived Stress, and Mood in Children with Asthma
Evidence supports a bidirectional relationship between stress and asthma exacerbations in children, raising the possibility that interventions designed to reduce stress may improve both psychosocial quality of life and disease course. To date, no studies have examined the benefits of a comprehensive stress management intervention on disease-related outcomes. Here, we present results of a pilot stress management intervention for 8-12 year olds with asthma. Data were obtained from 2 cohorts: Cohort 1 (n=11) was recruited from the community and attended intervention sessions at an urban university. Cohort 2 (n=7) was school based, recruiting from an African American charter school. The “I Can Cope” intervention included six individual 1-hr sessions, focusing on psychoeducation about asthma, stress, and emotions; problem-solving and coping skills training; and biofeedback-assisted relaxation training. Pre and post-intervention measures included questionnaires (Perceived Stress Scale, Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI), Profile of Mood States (POMS), and a satisfaction survey) and spirometry, a measure of lung function. Cohort 1 showed significant pre- to post-intervention improvements in lung function (p=.007), decreases in perceived stress (p=.001) and depressed mood (POMS, p=.006), and a tendency towards decreased anxious mood (POMS, p=.16). Similar results were observed in Cohort 2, with pre- to post-intervention decreases in perceived stress (p=.04), depression (CDI, p=.016), and anxious, depressed, and angry mood (POMS; p=.04, p=.05, p=.05, respectively). Cohort 2 participants showed a trend towards improved lung function (p=.10) and reported an improvement in perceived wellness (p=.02) following the intervention. For both cohorts, satisfaction surveys were uniformly positive. These findings provide initial evidence that stress management training may be of clinical benefit to asthmatic children. A randomized controlled trial of the benefits of the “I Can Cope” intervention is warranted.
Fire Under Ice: Interaction of Explosive Volcanic Fissure Eruptions with a Now Vanished Ice Sheet
The study of sub-ice volcanoes provides important and unique information that helps constrain the climate conditions of the past. Such volcanoes record evidence of paleo-ice presence and thickness for which there may be no other clues. Additionally, sub-ice volcanic activity influences the stability of ice sheets that are already compromised by global warming. It is essential that we document all of the processes and products of sub- ice eruptions in order to understand how they influence ice sheets and record evidence of their presence. Sub-ice eruptions from isolated central vents are understood much better than those from sub-ice fissures with multiple vents despite the fact that over 1,000 fissure-formed ridges of this origin exist in Iceland. These ridges represent the largest untapped database on North Atlantic Pleistocene terrestrial ice conditions. The products of ice-confined fissure eruptions in Iceland can potentially provide evidence of more ice ages and, more importantly, of ice thicknesses. My research will (a) help describe the complex construction of these landforms; (b) help distinguish them from similar submarine and ice-free edifices; and (c) aid interpretation of former ice presence and thickness in southwest Iceland and elsewhere.
Preliminary Results of a Multi-Proxy Lake Sediment Core Study in East-Central France
This paper presents the preliminary results of a multi-proxy study of natural and human-induced changes in the Burgundian environment, as recorded in the sediment geochemistry of three small reservoirs within east-central France. Continuous X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning is used to quantify geochemical variability throughout the reservoir sediment cores, and to investigate elemental proxies for paleoenvironmental change. These records demonstrate an increase in detrital sediment as a consequence of increased catchment soil erosion and material flux to the water bodies. Data also suggests changes in reservoir primary productivity, also related to soil erosion and changing transport of soil nutrients to the basins. These sedimentary archives, in conjunction with historic records, can be used to better understand past land management strategies. Furthermore, historically documented landscape changes can be examined within the context of prevailing climatic conditions over the last ~800 years to establish future best management practices and the most sustainable land uses under future climate change scenarios. This has broad implications for local research, and the global community of researchers interested in understanding how the sediment record from reservoirs can be used to interpret past (and predict future) human and environmental impacts on the landscape.
Coastal Erosion on Kuwait’s Northern Shore: Diminished Sediment Delivery Following Damming on the Tigris and Euphrates
As the government of Kuwait is set to develop the northern shore of Kuwait, characterizing coastal erosion is crucial for long-term urban planning. The delta of the Tigris and Euphrates historically delivers a substantial amount of sediment to the Persian Gulf. Dams built on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers since the 1960’s have decreased sediment input into the Gulf, and additional dams planned will exacerbate this problem. We are using historical shoreline surveys and an analysis of upstream dam construction to inform a sediment budget approach. Kuwait’s northern coast’s erosion is measured by comparing contemporary shoreline and bathymetry data with historical surveys. Dammed reservoir volume is also estimated to determine the amount of sediment stored upstream by damming. It is expected that a substantial amount of shoreline retreat in northern Kuwait results from decreased sediment inputs to the Persian Gulf by damming.
When Should a Seed Germinate? A Key Question in High Altitude Environments
In the last few years, the importance of exploring the link between demography and evolutionary biology has been suggested. However, not many empirical works have been developed to understand how population dynamics can affect changes in allele frequencies, or how selective pressures can positively select certain genotypes influencing demographic traits like survival and reproduction. In an attempt to understand these relationships, 9 populations of Arabidopsis thaliana, an annual plant used as a model species in molecular genetics from which little is known about its ecology and demography, has been selected across an altitudinal gradient. In these different environments, seed bank dynamics and seedlings establishment was studied during 2007 and this demographic data were related with neutral genetic diversity. Seeds from high altitude populations were more dormant in the next fall (after six months of being buried in the soil) than seeds from low altitude, and they release dormancy in the next spring, while individuals from low altitude germinate similarly along the year. Seedling establishment (from October to December) was lower in high altitude populations, suggesting that less germination (due to a more dormant behavior) or more mortality can be happening in high altitudes. A negative correlation between neutral genetic diversity and altitude was found using 79 SNPs. A possible effect of the seed bank as a reservoir of genetic diversity, and differential selection on certain genotypes in high altitude populations of Arabidopsis is discussed and future lines of research on the light of these results are suggested.
Towards Continuous Workflow Enactment Systems
Many Enterprises use workflows to automate their operations and integrate their information systems and human resources. Workflows have also been used to facilitate outsourcing or collaboration beyond the boundaries of a single enterprise, for example, in establishing Virtual Enterprises. Recently, workflows have been used in the context of scientific exploration to automate repetitive, complex and distributed scientific computations that often require the collaboration of multiple scientists. A common class of applications in both business and scientific domains is monitoring applications that involve the processing of continuous streams of data (updates). Traditional workflow enactment systems and workflow design processes view the workflow as a one-time interaction with the various data sources, executing a series of steps once, whenever the workflow results are requested. The fundamental underlying assumption has been that data sources are passive and all interactions are structured along the request/reply (query) model. Hence, traditional Workflow Management Systems cannot effectively support business or scientific monitoring applications that require the processing of data streams, i.e., when the sources are active, and are sending data continuously. We propose a paradigm shift from the traditional step-wise workflow execution model to a continuous execution model, in order to handle data streams published and delivered asynchronously from multiple sources.
Slightly Dead: Exploring Death Concepts Among Children and Young Adults in Brazil
The objective of the present project lies on investigating how Brazilian children and adults build a concept of death, that is, how age and religious beliefs influence in the different patterns of construction of the death concept. A total of 96 children of 6-8 and 10-12 years old, from public and private schools and 140 university students were tested, all from the city of Recife in Brazil. Participants were presented to two narratives depicting the death of a grandparent, and further asked to judge if certain bodily and metal function cease or not after death. Findings indicate that young children have a strong biological view of death, whereas older children and adults, in spite of having a predominant biological view, start increasingly to incorporate religious aspects. Thus, a biological and a metaphysical conception of death seem to co-exist in the mind of many older children and adults, indicating the existence of dualistic thinking. In addition, the older children and adults made distinctions between body and mind, giving biological justifications to body functions and religious justifications to mental functions. Finally, the results replicated previous research suggesting a universal pattern with respect to the way that children build their concept of death (Harris & Giménez, 2005; Astuti & Harris, 2005; Speece &Brent, 1993).
Using Apparent Thermal Inertia (ATI) to Constrain Aeolian Sediment Availability in the White Sands Dune Field, New Mexico
The spectral emissivity and kinetic temperature of the land surface can be derived from thermal radiance data (TIR) collected by The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection (ASTER) radiometer. The spectral emissivity is used to determine mineral composition for dune fields and sand seas. Kinetic temperature and apparent thermal inertia (ATI) data reveal surface properties such as variation in soil moisture. In a wet aeolian system, soil moisture controls the amount of cohesion between sand and dust grains, and therefore the susceptibility of sediment to wind erosion. Gypsum sand transported by westerly winds is continually resupplied to the dune fields in the White Sands National Monument originating from ephemeral playa lakes southwest of the dune field. Wet-dry cycles resupply material by evaporation and mineral formation on the surface. The dune field remains dynamic with dunes moving in the northeastly direction. Over the duration of ASTER’s mission, a high-temporal resolution, cloud-free remote sensing data set of day- and night-time has been generated for the area from May 2, 2000 to March 12, 2008. Changes in emissivity, temperature and ATI through time can be used to observe and study the relative timing of the wetting and drying of Lake Lucero and many other small playa and interdune areas that would otherwise be undetectable using other lower spatial resolution sensors. Changes in the transport potential of sand and dust emission can be more effectively studied using functions between thermal inertia, soil moisture and wind threshold velocity. Future work will include examining thermal inertia with respect to changes in composition and changes in dune morphology and playa surface crusts. The high temporal ASTER TIR data set may be used as a useful tool for using White Sands as a terrestrial, analogue for aeolian sites on Mars.
Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience
Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they don't and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness.
Similarity as a Determinant of Friendship in Childhood Cancer
Children with cancer may be at risk for adjustment difficulties due to physical symptoms or treatment effects (e.g., missed school, lowered participation in extracurricular activities, fatigue). Children generally choose behaviorally similar friends (e.g., aggressive children often befriend other aggressive children). By interrupting social activities, cancer may disrupt typical friendship patterns. This study examines behavioral similarity within the friendships of children with cancer, relative to the friendships of their non-chronically ill peers. This is the first examination of qualitative friendship characteristics in a pediatric chronic illness sample to date. Results will provide important insight regarding the impact of stressful life events on children’s social networks. 95 children ages 8-15 years undergoing treatment for malignancy were included in this study. Children with cancer and their classmates (n = 2,306) identified their three best friends and provided ratings of behavioral reputation (Revised Class Play) and likeability for all children in their class. Each child with cancer will be matched by behavioral reputation, gender, and ethnicity to a non-chronically ill classmate. The degree of similarity in behavioral reputation between children with cancer and their #1 best friends will be compared to the degree of similarity between matched comparison children and their #1 best friends.
Parental Socialization of Emotion and Emotional Face Processing Biases in Adolescents: Comparing Those at Low and High-Risk for Depression
Researchers have found differences between the parenting of depressed and non-depressed mothers, but little work has examined how these parenting differences may increase risk for depression through influences on adolescent emotional processing. This study examined parenting differences between mothers with and without a history of depression and how these differences may impact adolescent performance on a face-processing task. Participants included mothers and their adolescents divided into groups based on maternal psychiatric history: mothers with no psychiatric history (n= 51), and mothers with major depressive disorder (n= 42). Adolescent’s emotional processing was studied using a computerized face rating task and parental socialization of emotion was measured via questionnaires asking mothers to rate their responses to hypothetical scenarios likely to generate emotions among adolescents. Group differences were analyzed using independent samples t-tests. This study found that mothers with depression may be more likely to use negative emotion socialization practices and feel uncomfortable with their adolescent’s emotional displays. Also, both maternal depression and maternal reprimanding were independently linked to adolescent bias towards angry and fearful faces. These findings raise important questions about the role of maternal depression on adolescent emotional processing biases. Planned analyses of pupil dilation in this sample will help to elucidate relationships between maternal depression, emotion socialization, adolescent emotional processing and physiological reactivity.
Mass Assessment of Protein Structure Models
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) stores models of protein structures, the majority of which are derived from x-ray crystallography, a complex experimental process subject to the pitfalls common to all experimentation. With over 45,000 entries, the PDB has long-since surpassed the point where individual structural biologists can manually assess whether more than a tiny fraction of its contents has avoided those pitfalls. Our lab has developed computational tools for examining large numbers of structure models in a semi-automated manner, allowing for the generation and revision of increasingly sophisticated hypotheses to be tested on increasingly voluminous and complex data. One is a model evaluation measure, called Omega, formed from an aggregation of established and broadly available measures of confidence in structure model accuracy (the degree to which the model can explain the x-ray diffraction data). The development of Omega allowed us to codify an implicitly subjective evaluative process, thus rendering it semi-objective. With it, we have been able to indentify procedural trends and major changes in structure model building and refinement methodology, and successfully automate the screening of a large collection of structure models so as to remove those that are potentially problematic (i.e., could have fallen into a known pit).
ETS Transcription Factors Relay FGF Signals Required for Brain and Heart Development
Fibroblast Growth Factors (FGFs) are secreted molecules that activate the RAS/mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway required for proper development. To understand how FGFs control these processes and dictate gene expression, we are studying the transcriptional regulation of an FGF target gene, dual specificity phosphatase 6 (dusp6). We have identified several putative DNA binding sites within the dusp6 promoter, including consensus sequences for Pea3 ETS transcription factors. Since several ETS factors are known transcriptional mediators of MAPK signaling, we hypothesized that ETS factors function to relay FGF signaling processes. In zebrafish, three Pea3 factors have been identified, erm, pea3 and etv5. Microinjection of activated Etv5 into zebrafish embryos induced dusp6 transcription, thus supporting the notion that Pea3 Ets factors directly regulate expression of FGF target genes. In loss-of-function studies the concerted depletion of ETS proteins, Erm, Etv5, and Pea3, suppressed dusp6 expression, and evoked phenotypes reminiscent of the fgf8 zebrafish mutant, including the disruption of the mid-hindbrain boundary and heart formation. The importance of a specific Pea3 binding element within the dusp6 promoter was determined by direct binding of Etv5 to this site. These results reveal requirements of ETS factors in maintaining FGF signaling in crucial developmental processes.