MediaScape: towards a video, music, and sound metacreation

We present a new media work, MediaScape, which is an initial foray into a fully interdisciplinary metacreativity. This paper defines metacreation, and we present examples of metacreative art within the fields of music, sound art, the history of generative narrative, and discuss the potential of the “open-documentary” as an immediate goal of metacreative video. Lastly, we describe MediaScape in detail, and present some future directions

Micro-Resonators: The Quest for Superior Performance

Microelectromechanical resonators are no longer solely a subject of research in university and government labs; they have found a variety of applications at industrial scale, where their market is predicted to grow steadily. Nevertheless, many barriers to enhance their performance and further spread their application remain to be overcome. In this Special Issue, we will focus our attention to some of the persistent challenges of micro-/nano-resonators such as nonlinearity, temperature stability, acceleration sensitivity, limits of quality factor, and failure modes that require a more in-depth understanding of the physics of vibration at small scale. The goal is to seek innovative solutions that take advantage of unique material properties and original designs to push the performance of micro-resonators beyond what is conventionally achievable. Contributions from academia discussing less-known characteristics of micro-resonators and from industry depicting the challenges of large-scale implementation of resonators are encouraged with the hopes of further stimulating the growth of this field, which is rich with fascinating physics and challenging problems

Complexity: Theoretical and methodological applications for sociology

This thesis examines the usefulness of Complexity as a new tool for sociology. Complexity, as its own branch of study, developed from the new science of Chaos. Recent paradigmatic disputes occurring in the scientific community have been the force of a growing sense of change in the way many different disciplines view complex systems. Since it is evident that social systems are typically highly complex, it makes sense that a scientific paradigm, which investigates the nature of complex systems, should also be applicable to social systems. Science now argues that the old Newtonian clockwork mentalities and classical experimental models cannot adequately describe highly complex systems. Instead anti-reductionist and nonlinear theories and methods may be much better suited for the task. The sociological relevance of Complexity---both its conceptual framework and its methodologies---is important and timely as we reach the limits of our current knowledge using standard reductionist thinking and methods

Safer to steal than score : press coverage of financial and sexual scandals, and electoral outcomes

This dissertation examines communication processes surrounding political scandal. It demonstrates that scandal coverage is improperly calibrated to the severity of scandal accusations, with trivial but salacious sex scandals tending to receive inordinate amounts of press attention while deeper forms of financial corruption go unreported or underreported. Patterns of scandal coverage, in turn, result in real-world effects on public perceptions and electoral outcomes. Specifically, sex scandals generate such intense media scrutiny that accused officials often resign their offices rather than generate unwanted publicity. Financial scandals are often downplayed, resulting in little or no ramifications for the accused. Recognizing basic differences in scandal typology is key to understanding press coverage and political ramifications of scandal. Previous efforts to explain and predict scandal coverage tend to take a “one size fits all” approach, assuming that different types of scandal create basically the same type of effects on public opinion and electoral outcomes. Rather than taking an “all scandals are created equal” approach, this study sheds new light on how different types of scandals – sexual and financial – are covered by the press, how voters react to news of these scandals, and how differential coverage decides electoral fortunes. Chapter 1 outlines factors that influence press coverage of political scandals. A variety of economic and partisan incentives, and institutional journalistic routines are considered. Chapter 2 analyzes over five years of scandal news from the Pew News Coverage Index (NCI), showing differential patterns of coverage across a wide range of scandals. Chapter 3 uses a survey-based experiment to determine the influence of financial and sexual misconduct on judgments of accused officials. Using aggregated data collected on members of the U.S. House from 1996 to 2012, Chapter 4 explores how the interplay of press coverage and scandal type relate to electoral outcomes. Chapter 5’s conclusion suggests that patterns of scandal coverage actually make it electorally safer for public officials to be accused of bribery or extortion than cheating on a spouse. The findings present a challenge to journalistic accounts of official misconduct, suggesting the need for scandal reporting to actively address scope and severity

NASA Tech Briefs, May 1993

Topics include: Advanced Composites and Plastics; Electronic Components and Circuits; Electronic Systems; Physical Sciences; Materials; Computer Programs; Mechanics; Machinery; Fabrication Technology; Mathematics and Information Sciences; Life Sciences

Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus

This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited

Literature review of the remote sensing of natural resources

Abstracts of 596 documents related to remote sensors or the remote sensing of natural resources by satellite, aircraft, or ground-based stations are presented. Topics covered include general theory, geology and hydrology, agriculture and forestry, marine sciences, urban land use, and instrumentation. Recent documents not yet cited in any of the seven information sources used for the compilation are summarized. An author/key word index is provided

Creativity in organizations: Antecedents and outcomes of individual creativity

In this dissertation I set out to expand our collective understanding of creativity in organizations. I accomplish this through three related studies, each organized into independent chapters of this dissertation. The first study explores how demands of organizations, particularly strategic contradictions faced by decision makers, affect creative processes and products. In this chapter I develop the theory of paradoxical creativity, which posits that creative discovery is a function of how strategic contradictions are perceived by decision-makers. The key insight of the theory of paradoxical creativity is that strategic contradictions have independent effects on the two stages of creative discovery (generation and evaluation of ideas) and that a strategic contradiction will result in creativity, as opposed to inertia, when these two cognitive indicators are balanced. This study adds to existing scholarship by describing potential individual differences in how strategic contradictions are perceived and how they can be managed for performance. While the first study explored the antecedents of creativity, the second explores creativity as the antecedent condition. In this study I look at how creativity affects the decision to act on innovative breakthroughs. The central argument of this study is that incremental creativity is more likely to result in innovative breakthroughs than is radical creativity and that more successful innovators are more likely to engage in incremental, rather than radical, creativity. Incremental creativity is more amendable to management, because its outcomes are more predictable. Resultantly, decision-makers are more likely to act on incremental ideas. Because incremental ideas survive transfer to the workplace, they provide an opportunity for creative elaboration. Elaboration feeds the earlier stages of idea generation by helping the innovator refine the idea and can result in better understanding of idea usefulness, new generation, more incubation, and further elaboration. This process creates a virtuous cycle that can result in breakthrough innovation and is more amenable to strategic management in conditions with limited resources and competition. The third study explores creativity as the mediating variable. This study relies on crowdfunding data collected from the Kickstarter.com platform to test whether a sustainability orientation affects funding success of online projects and whether this relationship is moderated by creativity. Findings suggests that a hybrid approach, one combining a sustainability and profitability orientation, will result in higher product creativity and as such result in more funding for the new venture