A Summer Experience as a Paid Actor: It’s Not All Broken Legs

A Summer Experience as a Paid Actor: It’s Not All Broken Legs Thesis Statement: Finding out that you are going to be paid to act sounds like a dream come true, but there is a lot more to it than just the glitz and glam of the final product

Towards a science of human stories: using sentiment analysis and emotional arcs to understand the building blocks of complex social systems

We can leverage data and complex systems science to better understand society and human nature on a population scale through language --- utilizing tools that include sentiment analysis, machine learning, and data visualization. Data-driven science and the sociotechnical systems that we use every day are enabling a transformation from hypothesis-driven, reductionist methodology to complex systems sciences. Namely, the emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, with profound implications for our understanding of human behavior. Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture\u27s evolution through its texts using a big data lens. Given the growing assortment of sentiment measuring instruments, it is imperative to understand which aspects of sentiment dictionaries contribute to both their classification accuracy and their ability to provide richer understanding of texts. Here, we perform detailed, quantitative tests and qualitative assessments of 6 dictionary-based methods applied to 4 different corpora, and briefly examine a further 20 methods. We show that while inappropriate for sentences, dictionary-based methods are generally robust in their classification accuracy for longer texts. Most importantly they can aid understanding of texts with reliable and meaningful word shift graphs if (1) the dictionary covers a sufficiently large enough portion of a given text\u27s lexicon when weighted by word usage frequency; and (2) words are scored on a continuous scale. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful to us. By classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 4,803 stories from Project Gutenberg\u27s fiction collection, we find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives. We strengthen our findings by separately applying optimization, linear decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads. Within stories lie the core values of social behavior, rich with both strategies and proper protocol, which we can begin to study more broadly and systematically as a true reflection of culture. Of profound scientific interest will be the degree to which we can eventually understand the full landscape of human stories, and data driven approaches will play a crucial role. Finally, we utilize web-scale data from Twitter to study the limits of what social data can tell us about public health, mental illness, discourse around the protest movement of #BlackLivesMatter, discourse around climate change, and hidden networks. We conclude with a review of published works in complex systems that separately analyze charitable donations, the happiness of words in 10 languages, 100 years of daily temperature data across the United States, and Australian Rules Football games

Interannual to Decadal Variability of Atlantic Water in the Nordic and Adjacent Seas

Warm salty Atlantic Water is the main source water for the Arctic Ocean and thus plays an important role in the mass and heat budget of the Arctic. This study explores interannual to decadal variability of Atlantic Water properties in the Nordic Seas area where Atlantic Water enters the Arctic, based on a reexamination of the historical hydrographic record for the years 1950-2009, obtained by combining multiple data sets. The analysis shows a succession of four multi-year warm events where temperature anomalies at 100m depth exceed 0.4oC, and three cold events. Three of the four warm events lasted 3-4 years, while the fourth began in 1999 and persists at least through 2009. This most recent warm event is anomalous in other ways as well, being the strongest, having the broadest geographic extent, being surface-intensified, and occurring under exceptional meteorological conditions. Three of the four warm events were accompanied by elevated salinities consistent with enhanced ocean transport into the Nordic Seas, with the exception of the event spanning July 1989-July 1993. Of the three cold events, two lasted for four years, while the third lasted for nearly 14 years. Two of the three cold events are associated with reduced salinities, but the cold event of the 1960s had elevated salinities. The relationship of these events to meteorological conditions is examined. The results show that local surface heat flux variations act in some cases to reinforce the anomalies, but are too weak to be the sole cause

An Economic Analysis of the Price Discount for Over Thirty Months of Age Cattle

On December 23, 2003, the first confirmed United States case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, was discovered in Washington State. Four major importing countries of United States beef placed import bans on this beef immediately following the emergence of BSE. Since then all four countries have lifted the bans but placed restrictions of not importing beef from cattle over 30 months of age. As a result, cattle priced on formulas or on grids are discounted if older than 30 months. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the impacts that economic factors have upon the over thirty month discount and the relative over thirty month discount. Two models are run, a model showing how the economic factors effect 1) the discount and 2) the relative discount. Time series modeling using the ordinary least squares regression method is employed. Economic factors, such as prices, supplies, United States beef exports, and export restrictions, are shown to affect the discount and relative discount for cattle over 30 months of age. Supplies have the largest impact on the discount and relative discount. As supplies increase the discount and relative discount increases. United States beef exports have the next largest impact on the discount and relative discount. An increase in exports to countries that maintain age restrictions will increase the discount and relative discount, while an increase in exports to countries without age restrictions will decrease the discount and relative discount. The reopening of beef trade between the United States and South Korea is found to cause the discount to grow. This thesis found that as supplies increase or a higher percentage of United States beef exports are imported by countries with age restrictions on beef, the discount will increase, overall decreasing the value of these older cattle. If a higher percent of United States beef exports are imported by counties that do not have age restrictions, the discount will decrease and the value of these older cattle will increase. Overall, this thesis provides insight into the factors that change the discount for cattle over thirty months of age

The Arsenal of the Red Warriors: U.S. Perceptions of Stalin's Red Army and the Impact of Lend-Lease Aid on the Eastern Front in the Second World War

Through the U.S. Lend-Lease program, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to keep Joseph Stalin's Red Army fighting Adolf Hitler's forces to prevent a separate peace and Nazi Germany's colonization of Soviet territory and strategic resources during the Second World War. Yet after the Red Army's 1943 counterattacks, Roosevelt unnecessarily increased Soviet Lend-Lease aid, oversupplying Stalin's soldiers with more armament than they required for the Soviet Union's defense and enabling their subsequent conquest of East Central Europe and large parts of East Asia. Roosevelt's underestimation of the Red Army's capabilities, his tendency to readily rely on Soviet-influenced advisers, and his unquestioning acceptance of Stalin's implicit threats to forge a separate peace all contributed to his excessive arming of Moscow from 1943 forward. Expanding on the findings of other scholars, this work identifies and explains the impact of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty on Roosevelt's reasoning, the key role of the Arctic convoys in delivering material to the Red Army, and how the unnecessary aid routes through Iran and Alaska resulted in the oversupplying of Stalin's troops. Had Roosevelt not opened these unnecessary routes, the Arctic convoys could have continued to sufficiently supply the Red Army's defensive efforts without empowering it to aggressively spread Communism at gunpoint

The impact of positional leadership on secondary school captains

This article examines the impact of positional leadership on secondary school captains in a group of ‘like schools’ in Queensland, Australia. Through six studies, using document analysis, interviews, observations and focus groups, with school captains, parents and teachers, a number of perceived areas of impact on the students holding these positions emerged. These impacts involve relationships, roles and responsibilities, personal well-being, learning skills and learning management, self-management and self-confidence. The study suggests that through the status and responsibilities associated with the position and the self-awareness that grows during school captaincy, the young person is likely to experience deepening maturity more quickly than might otherwise be the case

Simple Synchronous Detector for Spectroscopic Studies

Lock-in-amplifiers are used in many applications for signal processing and offer the ability to discriminate high levels of noise. While these instruments are very powerful and offer many features, they are not portable and are expensive. An economical and easy to use alternative circuit is presented which incorporates pre-amplification, reference, and synchronous detection on one circuit board. The design can be used in laboratory or process control situations where its small size and low cost are advantageous. The circuit was successfully applied to moderate and high level signals as seen in flame infrared emission detection and in a portable radiometer for rocket plume studies

Human-in-the-Loop Operations over Time Delay: NASA Analog Missions Lessons Learned

Teams at NASA have conducted studies of time-delayed communications as it effects human exploration. In October 2012, the Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) Analog Missions project conducted a Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) with the primary stakeholders to share information and experiences of studying time delay, to build a coherent picture of how studies are covering the problem domain, and to determine possible forward plans (including how to best communicate study results and lessons learned, how to inform future studies and mission plans, and how to drive potential development efforts). This initial meeting s participants included personnel from multiple NASA centers (HQ, JSC, KSC, ARC, and JPL), academia, and ESA. It included all of the known studies, analog missions, and tests of time delayed communications dating back to the Apollo missions including NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Desert Research and Technology Studies (DRATS/RATS), International Space Station Test-bed for Analog Research (ISTAR), Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP), Mars 520, JPL Mars Orbiters/Rovers, Advanced Mission Operations (AMO), Devon Island analog missions, and Apollo experiences. Additionally, the meeting attempted to capture all of the various functional perspectives via presentations by disciplines including mission operations (flight director and mission planning), communications, crew, Capcom, Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA), Behavioral Health and Performance (BHP), Medical/Surgeon, Science, Education and Public Outreach (EPO), and data management. The paper summarizes the descriptions and results from each of the activities discussed at the TIM and includes several recommendations captured in the meeting for dealing with time delay in human exploration along with recommendations for future development and studies to address this issue

Public perceptions, preferences, and values for water in the west: a survey of western and Colorado residents

February 2009.Includes bibliographical references