Diluting the Meaning of Life and Death

Changes in semantics has diluted the meaning of abortion and euthanasia. Using political philosophy, this paper examines the treatment of terminology and linguistic choice and how they serve as a quiet catalyst for both movements. In the first chapter, the rhetorical question ‘what is death’ allows the readers of this thesis to ponder the finality of all that is living. The abortion chapter is chronologically structured beginning with an overview of state laws and national legislation criminalizing activity. Political movements, scientific advancements and new terminology are included and presented in a parallel manner. The euthanasia chapter reveals quite intriguing discoveries of priming and framing techniques. Research pertaining to historical connotations of good death and syntax was also conducted to expand this chapter. Peer reviewed articles, Supreme Court cases, books on death and even one piece of strategic management research was used to develop the thesis. The results are fascinating and divulge a litany of terms, titles and phrases used to describe two words – abortion and euthanasia. The resounding sentiment in the United States at this point in time (circa 2020) is to follow the science. In contrast, there seems to be a loss of appetite when the science leads in a direction opposite a preferred ideological path. Immoral activity that may have seemed unreasonable yesteryear are now deemed reasonable, cost effective and moral today. What is most revealing about the research is the metaphorical greased hill, i.e. slippery slope that is and may possibly continue to lead to an unknown, dangerous place. As new terms are adopted to replace abortion and euthanasia, a chasm expands preventing a realistic connection to their purposed intent. The aim of this paper is to make a cogent case to use plain language that agrees more to the actual procedural outcomes. Adoption of the language should be evident in research, legislation, associations, court rulings, clinical and legal practices and bureaucratic agencies. Among these entities and others, there must be an unequivocal acknowledgement that the result of abortion and euthanasia will always be hastened death

Fifth Freedom, 1978-11-01

S.A.G.E. Works For Funding: pg1 National Switch-Board In Operation: pg1 Buffalo Man New N.Y.S.C.G.O. Head: pg1 U.B. Passes Preference Clause: pg1 From Our Mailbag: pg2 Gay Professional Group Adds Members: pg2 Gay Youth/ Buffalo Organizes: pg2 Classified: pg2 Short Shots: pg3 SELections: pg4 Disco Chat: pg4 Mort D\u27amour: pg5 Night Life In Buffalo: pg7 How Does Your Garden Grow: pg8 Special Effects In The Cinema Part One: pg9 Gay Directory: pg11https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/fifthfreedom/1054/thumbnail.jp

Casco Bay Weekly : 14 July 1988

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1988/1010/thumbnail.jp

Colossal naturality in disordered territories

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-315)."A controversial new development has recently been put up for debate within the discipline of Geology: Do current levels of human interaction in Earth's geology and atmosphere justify the proclamation of a new geological age or era: The Anthropocene? Entering a realm of scientific uncertainty and discourse, this thesis argues that the conceptualization of the Anthropocene (as a product of human ubiquity) yields the premise to summarize and critique a whole number of recent influential paradigm shifts and theoretical frameworks in architecture, which, in essence, address the relationship between the "man-made"and the "natural" The main hypothesis of this thesis is based on the assumption that principles of dirt and contamination (states of disorder) will replace principles of natural preservation and mythical naturality (seemingly ordered states) as the new primary vessel of meaning for the production of Anthropocene environment, architecture, ecology, society and culture. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will serve as a case study for investigating the Anthropocene condition."by Sasa Zivkovic.M.Arch

Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress: The Golden Age of Italian Cult Cinema 1970-1985

Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress is a volume that fully explores the emergence of 1970s Italian cult film genres in light of the wider social, political and cultural anxieties that dominated during the decade. As part of this consideration, the volume provided the first theoretical readings of a range of key Italian directors, performers and cycles associated with 1970s Italy.Through these considerations, the volume situated 1970s Italian cinema against the toxic backdrop of political violence and terrorist activity that shocked the nation. The volume also considered why the iconography of the sexually liberated female became recast as a symbol of fear and violation in a range of Italian cult film narratives. In addition, the book also analysed how longstanding regional distinctions between Italy’s urban North and the much maligned rural South fed into a number of film cycles produced between 1970 and 1985

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

Sandspur, Vol 113, No 09, October 23, 2006

Rollins College student newspaper, written by the students and published at Rollins College. The Sandspur started as a literary journal.https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cfm-sandspur/2819/thumbnail.jp

The Repetition of difference: Marginality and the films of Hal Hartley

PhD ThesisHal Hartley is prominent within the recent rise of the independent film-making movement in America. This thesis is centred around the issues of repetition, difference and marginality which characterise his films. Marginality inhabits Hartley's position as an American independent who makes a European art-house style of film. He is an auteur who articulates his influences through his reference to Godard. Marginality is also the dominant characteristic of those who people Hartley's films. Difference, which is marginality pushed to its greatest extent, is further imposed upon Hartley's characters. It is interposed through Hartley's concern with repetition, in which the degree of formal repetition becomes so high that difference is forefronted. This thesis asserts that the essential difference in Hartley's films lies in gender. After an introduction which engages with the issues highlighted above, Chapter I contains a literature review which serves both to delineate critical opinions on Hartley, and to demonstrate the lack of sustained material which this thesis hopes to go some way towards redressing. Chapter II's taxonomy emphasises the consistency of Hartley's concern with repetition. It establishes both the formal repetition, linear and cyclical, which structures Hartley's films, and the behavioural repetition which his characters exhibit. Chapter III extends the taxonomy by applying theories of repetition to Trust. It uses Deleuze to engage with the tensions between the linear and cyclical modes of formal repetition in the film. An analogy with minimalism introduces difference into this repetition. Finally, the chapter examines Matthew's marginality and crisis of masculinity, embodied within the compulsion to repeat passive behaviour, in light of Freud's theories on repetition. Chapter IV extends male marginality into the interrogation of Thomas' criminality in Amateur. It is a criminality largely instituted through parodic generic reference. Thomas' amnesia does not allow him either to repent or to escape the reputation through which his criminality is perpetuated. Religion, notably the figure of Redeemer, is introduced as a means to bring about Thomas' redemption. The film's engagement with the resonances of pornography problematises both the Redeemer, Isabelle (who is both Virgin and Whore) and wider gender issues. Chapter V extends the concern with pornography, which defiles the ecstatic experience of writing characteristic of Henry Fool's shamanic figures. The film questions Henry's status as a criminal who refuses to repent. The blurring of legal and moral judgement in the film suggests an analogy with the genre of a morality play. Without repentance, redemption occurs though forgiveness and trust. The pornographic, which in invoked but never seen, serves to interrogate gender positioning in relation to it. Chapter VI examines female agency, with The Unbelievable Truth's Audry ostensibly exerting control over her commodification. Audry is not as able to control her commodification as much as the film suggests. She loses her ideals through the sale of images of herself. The film attempts a Godardian engagement with the problem of the commodified female image. It does so without showing the images of Audry, resisting their inherently exploitative nature and not allowing them to become pornographic by eliciting viewing pleasure. Yet by not showing these images, Hartley increases their coding as objects of desire. He does not escape the problems of the auteur using female images. Chapter VII concerns Simple Men, a film which seeks to make reparation for the exploitative use of women by placing women as the film's necessary centre. However, in alluding to male-centred genres, Hartley's film displaces women into the margins of male scenarios, reducing them both to function and difference in relation to men. Rather than the problems of femininity, the film engages with the troubled masculinities which its genre invokes. Chapter VIII reprises repetition in light of Hartley's wider questioning of gender. Applying formal and behavioural theories of repetition to Flirt, the chapter asks: What is the difference in Hartley's repetitions? Since Flirt's repetitions involve the gendering of masochism as female, and mark femininity as the essential difference, it can retrospectively be asserted that it is gender that is the key difference, the ultimately signified, of Hartley's repetitions. It is with this that the thesis concludes by drawing together the central themes of Hartley's films. These include male marginality, and its association with troubled masculinities, and the problematic associations of pornography with the objectification and commodification of women. Although marginality extends across gender boundaries within Hartley's films, it is ultimately women who are more fundamentally marginalised by them. This is brought about through the association of the difference which inhabits repetition with femininity

Mathematical modelling of gas flow networks in pellet induratlon systems

The objective of this research is to develop a simulation software tool, GASFLO, which should evaluate pressure, flow and temperature distributions of process gas in pellet induration system networks. Pellet induration systems are complex industrial systems composed of heterogenous components. The magnitude of gas through leaks i.e. the air entering or leaving the system from the points other than the known exits, is substantial and it adversely effects the performance of induration process. These leaks are very difficult to measure because of the hostile environment in the plant. The modelling of such industrial systems requires a notable amount of experimentation so the tool has been designed to enable the user modeller to change the component models and solution algorithms easily. The conventional methods for flow network simulation are based on process centred approach, mostly composed of homogeneous components. For ease of computation, the non-pipe elements are modelled with an approximate linear or non-linear generic equation, whose coefficients can simulate different states of the element. The resulting set of non-linear equations is linearised and solved simultaneously using some iterative method. By contrast, GASFLO is based on device centred or unit based approach, and uses a two level hierarchical solution algorithm. The pellet induration system network is first idealised into a connected graph of streams (sets of serially connected components) and nodes. At the top or coordination level the flow and pressure distributions satisfying the Kirchhoff's laws are evaluated for the connected graph. At the lower or component level the exact mathematical models of components ale computed, in order of their occurrence in respective streams, using coordination variables as parameters. The converged flows are used for the temperature computation. The solution algorithm requires partitioning of the connected graph into forest and coforest structures, for which secondary algorithms have been developed using specific heuristics relevant to the pellet induration systems. The rigorous application of software engineering techniques for the design and implementation of software, enabled the resolution of the complexity of the modelled system, embedded the characteristics of 'quality software' into the resulting code and benefits from object orientation, even though it is implemented in standard FORTRAN 77. GASFLO predicted results are in a good agreement with the measured results, it has been validated for a real life pellet induration system. It has been applied to simulate several practical scenarios, like addition of extra wind boxes to the zones and to determine how the plant production can be increased by certain ratio, such simulations were not feasible otherwise. GASFLO takes less than a minute to simulate a real-life pellet induration system on a 486 PC. The combined simulation with an other software tool, INDSYS, which evaluates the heat distribution in the solids, is also feasible