The Fourth Wall

“The Fourth Wall” is the beginning of a fiction novel set in the comedy scene in Lincoln, NE during the #MeToo movement. The story follows a young female comedian in the scene, Kara, from the perspectives of several significant people in her life. Though the novel never inhabits Kara’s perspective directly, it seeks to give readers an intimate look at the difficulty she faces as she tries to navigate the male-dominated world of stand-up comedy during a time when the community is being forced to confront its troubling history of sweeping reports of sexual violence under the rug

Breaking the Fourth Wall

This creative, non-fiction thesis is written in memoir form and analyzes how a person perceives reality, how that perception is broken, and how a person copes with the limitations of a new reality. In examining my life, I came to realize that many of my performative tendencies stemmed from a desire to be loved and the belief that love was contingent upon perfection. What follows is my struggle to try to maintain that perfection, the failure to do so, and the slow acceptance of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world

Expansion in the Width and Collective Dynamics of a Domain Wall

We show that collective dynamics of a curved domain wall in a (3+1)-dimensional relativistic scalar field model is represented by Nambu-Goto membrane and (2+1)-dimensional scalar fields defined on the worldsheet of the membrane. Our argument is based on a recently proposed by us version of the expansion in the width. Derivation of the expansion is significantly reformulated for the present purpose. Third and fourth order corrections to the domain wall solution are considered. We also derive an equation of motion for the core of the domain wall. Without the (2+1)-dimensional scalar fields this equation would be nonlocal.Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX, no figure

Hard paternalism, fairness and clinical research: why not?

Jansen and Wall suggest a new way of defending hard paternalism in clinical research. They argue that non-therapeutic research exposing people to more than minimal risk should be banned on egalitarian grounds: in preventing poor decision-makers from making bad decisions, we will promote equality of welfare. We argue that their proposal is flawed for four reasons. First, the idea of poor decision-makers is much more problematic than Jansen and Wall allow. Second, pace Jansen and Wall, it may be practicable for regulators to uncover the values that a potential research participant holds when agreeing to enter a research project, so their claim that we must ban such research projects for all if we are to ban them for poor decision-makers looks to be unmotivated. Third, there seem to be cases where the liberty to enter the sort of research project Jansen and Wall discuss is morally weighty, and arguably should outweigh concerns of egalitarian distribution. Fourth, banning certain types of research, which seem on the face of it to offer an unfavourable risk-benefit ratio, would have unwelcome consequences for all clinical research, which Jansen and Wall do not recognize

Technology in theatre: breaking the fourth wall

For a long time, theatre has been seen as a medium of the past. With new technologies such as cellphones being more commonplace, there could be a way to utilize them in theatre. This thesis is a reflection on writing an interactive script, figuring out the best way for an audience to interact with a performance utilizing their phones. The play comments on women in not only theatre, but all sorts of media and how they are portrayed

Measurements in the near-wall region of a relaxing three-dimensional low speed turbulent air boundary layer

An experimental investigation was conducted at selected locations of the near-wall region of a three dimensional turbulent air boundary layer relaxing in a nominally zero external pressure gradient behind a transverse hump (in the form of a 30 deg swept, 5-foot chord wing-type model) faired into the side wall of a low speed wind tunnel. Wall shear stresses measured with a flush-mounted hot-film gage and a sublayer fence were in very good agreement with experimental data obtained with two Preston probes. With the upstream unit Reynolds number held constant at 325,000/ft. approximately one-fourth of the boundary layer thickness adjacent to the wall was surveyed with a single rotated hot-wire probe mounted on a specially designed minimum interference traverse mechanism. The boundary layer (approximately 3.5 in thick near the first survey station where the length Reynolds number was 5.5 million) had a maximum crossflow velocity ratio of 0.145 and a maximum crossflow angle of 21.875 deg close to the wall

Numerical and experimental studies of the natural convection within a horizontal cylinder

Numerical solutions are obtained for the quasi-compressible Navier-Stokes equations governing the time-dependent natural convection within a horizontal cylinder. The early flow development and wall heat transfer are obtained after a uniformly cold wall is imposed as a boundary condition on the cylinder. Results are also obtained for a time-varying cold wall as a boundary condition with windward explicit differencing used for the numerical solutions. The viscous truncation error associated with this scheme is controlled so that first-order accuracy is maintained in time and space. Experiments within a small-scale instrumented horizontal cylinder revealed the time development of the temperature distribution across the boundary layer as well as the decay of wall heat transfer with time. Agreement between temperature distributions obtained experimentally and numerically was generally good. The time decay of the dimensionless ratio of the Nusselt number to the one-fourth power of the Grashof number is found both numerically and experimentally, and good agreement is obtained between these two results over most of the cylinder wall