The Ways of Water

The Ways of Water tells the story of recent college graduate Lindsay Cady, who heads to Alabama with his best friend in the hopes that he will find a way to put his new journalism degree to use. After scouring the news for days, a story that seems tailor-made for him appears on television. A child has gone missing in a nearby county, and the police are doing nothing to find him, according to the child’s distressed stepmother. Cady insists that this story demands to be told by him, though it\u27s unclear if his motivation is really about finding this missing child, or his intense captivation with the boy’s stepmother

Comparison of Finite-amplitude Acoustic Models: Single Equation of Motion for Potential vs System-level Approaches

This study evaluates two finite-amplitude acoustic models, by solving the associated equations of motion (in potential form), and then compares the results with recent studies using hyperbolic system-level approaches. An implicit numerical method is employed to solve the second-order equations in one dimension. The performances of the Diaz et al. (2018) and Blackstock (1963) models in approximating the acoustic special case of the Euler system, via velocity profile plots and related metrics, are evaluated and compared. Working in the setting of the classical signaling problem with sinusoidal input, present results (using the single equation of motion approach) provide independent confirmation of earlier findings (based on the hyperbolic system-level approach) that the Diaz et al. model outperforms Blackstock’s

Foodways as Agentive Response to Disaster in Colonial New Orleans: The French Quarter Fires of 1788 and 1794

Disasters have plagued the City of New Orleans since its foundation in 1718. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Most locals have personal memories of Hurricane Katrina or have friends and family who experienced the storm. The effects of Hurricane Katrina were far-reaching and often life-changing. However, Hurricane Katrina is not the only major disaster to have left an indelible mark on the landscape and culture of New Orleans. Two fires in the eighteenth century destroyed significant portions of the colony and left approximately seventy percent of the population homeless. And yet, we know very little about these transformative fires outside of the anecdotal stories repeated by tour guides and historians alike and a recognition that the fires shifted the architectural signature of the colony from French to Spanish design. These well-known but poorly understood events in the history of New Orleans likely had a greater influence on the people and culture of the burgeoning colony than has previously been acknowledged. The purpose of this research is to expand our understanding of the two eighteenth-century fires through an archaeological examination of foodways. New Orleans is well known for its local cuisine, which blends the cultural traditions of the myriad individuals and groups who have inhabited the city since its founding. Foodways are a practical arena in which to examine how disasters affect culture because foodways are literally the embodiment of culture as well as being reflective of the personal choices of individuals and groups. The goal of this research is to elucidate what changes in foodways can tell us about how people responded to two historic disasters in New Orleans. The results of this research are interpreted through the lens of agency theory with particular emphasis on the concepts of daily practice, cultural embodiment, and individual experimentation. Ingenuity and innovation were crucial to survival in colonial environments, especially when disasters were a regular part of colonial life. I argue that New Orleans’ long history of disasters has created a culture of adaptation and creative improvisation that has persisted from its colonial foundations to the present era

The Power of Diversity: Board Diversity as a Driver of Enhanced ESG Performance

The Study examines the impacts of board diversity on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance using a multidimensional index that includes six different diversity measures. The results consistently show that greater board diversity leads to improved ESG performance. Additionally, the Study develops a Structural Diversity Index derived from four board structure measures, revealing that higher structural diversity improves ESG performance. Further analysis highlights that the presence of foreign directors on the Board is particularly associated with enhanced ESG performance. These results are robust across various tests for endogeneity and other potential sources of bias, reinforcing the reliability and validity of the findings

A Woman Of Saint-Domingue: Intimacy, Endurance and the Perpetuation of Saint-Domingue’s Class-Based Social Order in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

This microhistory follows Eugenie Peneault (1774-1853) by means of a journal she kept during the Haitian Revolution and her subsequent relocation to New Orleans. Born the daughter of a baker, Peneault advanced through personal connections within the Creole elite to marry a member of the island-born planter class with ties to the minor nobility. With her fellow emigres, she recreated the patriarchal slave society of Saint Domingue in Cuba, then adapted its values to an urban setting in New Orleans, where she and her husband connected with local elites. This woman’s journal sheds light on experiences of pregnancy and childcare central to Peenault’s existence. After her husband’s death, Peneault cultivated respectability to preserve her husband’s status for the sake of her son, a strategy that made her utterly dependent on the labor of people she enslaved but also allowed her to pave her son’s way into an emerging political class

What Love Left: A Memoir

What Love Left: A Memoir is a collection of creative nonfiction essays and poems that explore the lifelong impact of grief following the death of my older brother when I was just two years old. The collection is divided into four sections—The Child, The Family, The Self, and The World, which shows how such an early loss can form identity, memory, relationships, and views on the world. Through lyrical language, raw character development, and intimate reflections, this memoir shows what grief leaves behind, how it lives inside me, and how storytelling has become a form of survival and preservation. This memoir was formed, not from the need to resolve grief, but to survive within it. The essays reflect what was lost while continuing to discover what can be found through writing. Ultimately, What Love Left: A Memoir is a personal exploration of how destabilizing pain can ultimately become something that helps carry us forward

Evaluating Immersion and Agency in AI-Assisted Live Murder Mystery Games

This thesis explores the impact of AI-assisted narrative generation on player immersion and agency in a live-action roleplaying (LARP) experience. A live-action murder mystery game was designed and run in two formats: a static version with GPT-4 generated characters, dialogue, and stage directions, and a dynamic version where players created their own characters and improvised freely, guided by AI-generated narrative beats, a story element that moves the plot forward [21], that provided a narrative scaffolding for the players. The dynamic version employed a distributed computer vision system that tracks the movement of key items in the play-space so their relevance can be weighted in the generation of narrative elements. Post-game surveys measured immersion, emotional investment, narrative clarity, and perceived Results show a significant increase in all metrics in the dynamic version, particularly in player agency and emotional connection. These findings suggest that AI can be most effective when used to scaffold player creativity and demonstrates the potential of AI to provide a narrative structure for players to express their own creativity