2,892 research outputs found

    Canada\u27s Evergreen Playground: A History of Snow in Vancouver

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    The City of Vancouver is not as snowy as the rest of Canada; rain, not snow, is its defining weather feature. But snow is a common seasonal occurrence, having fallen there nearly every winter since the 1850s. This dissertation places snow at the centre of the City of Vancouver’s history. It demonstrates how cultural and natural factors influenced human experiences and relationships with snow on the coast between the 1850s and 2000s. Following Vancouver’s incorporation, commercial and civic boosters constructed – and settlers adopted – what I call an evergreen mentality. Snow was reconceptualized as a rare and infrequent phenomenon. The evergreen mentality was not completely false, but it was not entirely true, either. This mindset has framed human relationships with snow in Vancouver ever since. While this idea was consistent, how coastal residents experienced snow evolved in response to societal developments (such as the rise of the automobile and the adoption of new snow-clearing technologies) and regional climate change. I show that the history of snow in Vancouver cannot be fully understood without incorporating the southern Coast Mountains. Snow was a connecting force between the coastal metropolis and mountainous hinterland. Settlers drew snowmelt to the urban environment for its energy potential and life-sustaining properties; snow drew settlers to the mountains for recreation and economic opportunities. Mountain snow became a valuable resource for coastal residents throughout the twentieth century. Human relationships with snow in the mountains were shaped, as they were in the city, by seasonal expectations, societal circumstances, and shifting climate conditions. In charting a history of snow in Vancouver and the southern Coast Mountains, this dissertation clears a new path in Canadian environmental historiography by bringing snow to the historiographical forefront. It does so in an urban space not known for snow, broadening the existing geography of snow historiography. In uncovering snow’s impact on year-round activities, this work also expands the field’s temporal boundaries. Through this work, one sees how snow helped to make Canada’s Evergreen Playground

    The Mogadishu Effect: America\u27s Failure-Driven Foreign Policy

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    The October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down,” transformed American foreign policy in its wake. One of the largest special operations missions in recent history, the failures in Somalia left not only the United States government and military in shock, but also the American people. After the nation’s most elite fighting forces suffered a nearly 50 percent casualty rate at the hands of Somali warlords during what many Americans thought was a humanitarian operation, Congress and the American people erupted in anger. Although the United States has continued to be seen as an overbearing global peacekeeping force in the thirty years since Somalia, the Battle of Mogadishu served as the turning point for a generational foreign policy shift that significantly limited future global intervention because of the overt publicization of battle’s aftermath in the media, domestic and international reactions, and a fear of repeating the same mistakes elsewhere. The first major American loss of life after the Cold War, the battle and the reaction that followed, known as the “Mogadishu effect,” forced President Clinton to rethink the United States’ role internationally. Clinton and his administration struggled to convince the American people that involvement overseas, especially global peacekeeping, was vital to international order after becoming the world’s sole superpower. Congressional hearings, presidential correspondence, government documents, poll results, and numerous media releases across Clinton’s presidency mark the distinct shift in American foreign policy that took place after Mogadishu. Although he inherited involvement in the United Nations mission in Somalia from George H.W. Bush, the failures in Somalia transformed Clinton’s humanitarian involvement in Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda, tarnishing the remainder of his presidency and shifting expectations of significant American involvement in international peacekeeping after the Cold War

    The Public Performance Of Sanctions In Insolvency Cases: The Dark, Humiliating, And Ridiculous Side Of The Law Of Debt In The Italian Experience. A Historical Overview Of Shaming Practices

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    This study provides a diachronic comparative overview of how the law of debt has been applied by certain institutions in Italy. Specifically, it offers historical and comparative insights into the public performance of sanctions for insolvency through shaming and customary practices in Roman Imperial Law, in the Middle Ages, and in later periods. The first part of the essay focuses on the Roman bonorum cessio culo nudo super lapidem and on the medieval customary institution called pietra della vergogna (stone of shame), which originates from the Roman model. The second part of the essay analyzes the social function of the zecca and the pittima Veneziana during the Republic of Venice, and of the practice of lu soldate a castighe (no translation is possible). The author uses a functionalist approach to apply some arguments and concepts from the current context to this historical analysis of ancient institutions that we would now consider ridiculous. The article shows that the customary norms that play a crucial regulatory role in online interactions today can also be applied to the public square in the past. One of these tools is shaming. As is the case in contemporary online settings, in the public square in historic periods, shaming practices were used to enforce the rules of civility in a given community. Such practices can be seen as virtuous when they are intended for use as a tool to pursue positive change in forces entrenched in the culture, and thus to address social wrongs considered outside the reach of the law, or to address human rights abuses

    Versions of a Life So Far: Tales from the Ceiling:Versions of a Life so Far: Memoiring the Memoir

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    Louise Rosenblatt champions the belief that the reading of literature—or the encounter with ‘the poem,’ as she would say—is the active process which includes multiple levels of response by the reader. Rather than considering ‘the structure of the work of art as something statically inherent in the text,’ she explains, ‘we need to recognize the dynamic situation in which the reader, in the give-and-take with the text, senses or organizes a relationship among the various parts of his lived-through experience.’ Rosenblatt also talks of ‘text events’ as a way to explain the very particular experience of reading a particular text at a particular place or time. Cue my memoir Versions of a Life so Far: Tales from the Ceiling, which is built around a series of ‘text events,’ that is to say encounters with certain texts at certain points in my life, in particular my childhood years. These years belong primary to the 1960s and early 1970s, and so reflect the foundational text events of my life. Most notably, and at the heart of my text-sense of family, was the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie series. But I have expanded the definition of text to include artifacts, colours, and photographs, among other ‘text events.’ And as I relate and indeed re-enact my encounters with these texts, I find myself experimenting with form in various ways. The result is that the conventional prose of memoir here becomes a shifting of point-of-view as well as a vacillating chronology. By retelling the story or stories of my early life through its textual events, I have sought to produce a text that is itself an event in the sense that these ‘versions’ are at once representativeof a single life (so far), but exist also in the segmented way that a life unfolds

    Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

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    The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop

    The Self The Soul and The World: Affect Reason and Complexity

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    This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us

    Sex, Money, Art and Death: A Biography of my Grandparents, Edith Birks and Basil Burdett with a Family History of the Birks - Napier - McDougall Dynasty

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    The thesis is in the form of a creative non-fiction book with exegesis. The main work is a combined biography and social and intellectual history. I trace the lives and family backgrounds of my grandparents Edith Birks and Basil Burdett who were both avantgarde writers, artists and cultural activists for Modernism in Australia in the 1920s and 30s. Using hybrid methodologies of Social History, the History of Emotions and Genealogy, I trace their family backgrounds in order to understand the provenance of the Modernist, liberal, feminist ideology they both championed. I describe Basil Burdett’s relationship with the Modernists and intellectuals gathered around the journal Art in Australia and I examine in detail Edith Birks’ family, a network of intensely engaged religious and political activists including Northern English landed gentry, Manchester industrialists, London Methodist intellectuals, Women’s suffragists and Utopian Christian Communists. The work contributes to knowledge of the intimate cultures of the politically and culturally activist groups and classes in the British imperial dominions in the period immediately preceding and after the First world war, and to an understanding of how the processes of economic transformation, class formation, migration, and imperial expansion operated at the local level of emotions, intimacy and filial relations. The Exegesis describes the motivation, sources, methodologies and scholarly literature used in the research programme and a summary of its contribution to scholarship.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History, 202
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