Emerging Trends: Scenic Design Beyond The Stage

The role of a scenic designer is so exciting but opportunities to design can fluctuate a bit. While the work is rewarding, the career itself can be much like a gig at times. Then when you factor in a major event such as a global pandemic, where does this leave a scenic designer in terms of employment and livelihood? Are there other possibilities for work with a Master of Fine Arts in Scenic Design? How do we continue to tell stories while providing for ourselves? Have artists considered how these skills are transferrable to other allied fields? As a scenic design graduate student, I’m approaching graduation during a pandemic. These are some of the many critical questions that come to mind as I prepare to enter the workforce. It encouraged me to question if new coursework could be offered to explore job opportunities and training beyond the stage. Because if nothing else, the pandemic has taught us to adapt and evolve so that we can continue to thrive. Perhaps Scenic Design course offerings could evolve to encompass targeted training where designers unpack their toolboxes and explore the application of skills beyond the theater. Diversifying the scenic design curriculum to incorporate training in allied design areas would expand who we tell stories to. It would also serve a higher purpose in that it would broaden scenic designers range of viable job opportunities

The Implementation, Interpretation, and Justification of Likelihoods in Cosmology

I discuss the formal implementation, interpretation, and justification of likelihood attributions in cosmology. I show that likelihood arguments in cosmology suffer from significant conceptual and formal problems that undermine their applicability in this context

Core Aspects of Dance: Schiller and Dewey on Grace

Part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves,” this essay concerns the third Move, “grace.” The etymology of the word “grace” reveals the entwined meanings of pleasing quality and authoritative power, which may be combined as “beautiful force.” I examine the treatments of grace in German philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who understands it as playful, naive transformation of matter; and in American philosopher John Dewey, for whom it represents rhythmic organism/environment reversal. I conclude by showing how “grace” can be used in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole

Quality control for terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies

BACKGROUND: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way. RESULTS: We present computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO. CONCLUSION: Our methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation

The road to modern logic - an interpretation

This paper aims to outline an analysis and interpretation of the process that led to First-Order Logic and its consolidation as a core system of modern logic. We begin with an historical overview of landmarks along the road to modern logic, and proceed to a philosophical discussion casting doubt on the possibility of a purely rational justification of the actual delimitation of First-Order Logic. On this basis, we advance the thesis that a certain historical tradition was essential to the emergence of modern logic; this traditional context is analyzed as consisting in some guiding principles and, particularly, a set of exemplars (i.e., paradigmatic instances). Then, we proceed to interpret the historical course of development reviewed in section 1, which can broadly be described as a two-phased movement of expansion and then restriction of the scope of logical theory. We shall try to pinpoint ambivalences in the process, and the main motives for subsequent changes. Among the latter, one may emphasize the spirit of modern axiomatic, the situation of foundational insecurity in the 1920s, the resulting desire to find systems well-behaved from a proof-theoretical point of view, and the metatheoretical results of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, the mathematical and, more specifically, the foundational context in which First-Order Logic matured will be seen to have played a primary role in its shaping

Are We Making Progress In Visualization Research?

In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods sufficient to get us there? My respondents discussed several potential challenges for visualization research in terms of knowledge formation: a lack of rigor in the methods used, a lack of applicability to actual communities of practice, and a lack of theoretical structures that incorporate everything that happens to people and to data both before and after the few seconds when a viewer looks at a value in a chart. Orienting the field around progress (if such a thing is even desirable, which is another point of contention) I believe will require drastic re-conceptions of what the field is, what it values, and how it is taught

Right-Remedy Equilibration and the Asymmetric Entrenchment of Legal Entitlements

Public-law litigation often gives rise to a basic but important asymmetry: claimants wishing to obtain a particular form of redress for a particular legal wrong must satisfy all the relevant procedural, substantive, and remedial prerequisites to the issuance of judicial relief. In contrast, governments wishing to avoid the issuance of that remedy need only demonstrate that a single such requirement operates in their favor. This Article considers the extent to which this asymmetry influences the development of the law. Specifically, this Article hypothesizes that, where the remediation of a right depends on a claimant’s satisfaction of multiple, mutually necessary procedural, substantive, and remedial rules, it will often be easier for courts to achieve and maintain decisions that frustrate the vindication of that right (and thus move the law in an “entitlement-weakening” direction) than to achieve and maintain judicial decisions that promote the vindication of that right (and thus move the law in an “entitlement-strengthening” direction). “Entitlement-strengthening” initiatives, after all, can often be undone by a single, counteractive change to any one of the several rules on which a claimant’s vindication of the right depends. “Entitlement-weakening” initiatives, by contrast, will often be immune to such a simple counterattack. Consequently, an “asymmetric entrenchment of entitlements” is hardwired into the basic architecture of public-law doctrine, rendering “entitlement-strengthening” decisions consistently more vulnerable to down-the-road retrenchment than their “entitlement-weakening” counterparts