After the Prestige: A Postmodern Analysis of Penn and Teller

By mocking the magic community and revealing the secret behind some of their tricks, Penn and Teller perform a kind of parodic and post-modern “anti-magic.” Penn and Teller display an artful use of rhetoric; in exposing the secrets and shortcomings of conjuring, they are revolutionizing the way people think about both the art of magic and the magic community. Individuals such as Penn and Teller may use parody to subvert the hegemonic interpretations. However, we also know that it is difficult to bring down a system while operating within that system. Thus, this article explores the way Penn and Teller are challenging the metanarrative of the magic community, using several of the duo’s more popular illusions as examples for analysis. Ultimately, this paper should help us gain a better understanding of the way parody can be used to challenge hegemonic conceptions, and the limitations of this type of rhetorical approach

Regulatory Takings Challenges to Historic Preservation Laws After Penn Central

The Penn Central decision, in its most immediate concern, provided a legal framework within which local governments could enforce historic landmark restrictions without a regular constitutional requirement to pay just compensation. The decision amalgamated regulatory takings analysis of historic landmark restrictions to the familiar and tolerant federal standards for reviewing zoning. Affirming the importance of the public interest goals of historic preservation, the Court directed inquiry to whether sufficient economic potential remained in the control of the property owner, given reasonable expectations at the time of her investment in the property. While the broader jurisprudential merits of Penn Central\u27s approach to the Taking Clause have been the subject of wide debate, the constitutional question of how much of an economic burden the owner of a landmark may be required to bear has received very little attention. Ironically, it is this question that very well may have been the Court\u27s primary concern. This essay looks specifically at how Penn Central protects historic preservation regulation. The constitutional framework created by the decision has fostered a remarkable blossoming of historic preservation as a major tool of urban land use regulation. Preservation could never have played this role without the insulation from constitutional liability provided by the Penn Central Court, likewise, it could not have played this role if property owners had been denied all economic incentives to invest in the renovation and reuse of historic properties. Penn Central appears to have crafted a balance between local control and individual rights that has nourished preservation

Data communications and monitor for the Penn State University profiler network

The profiler network installed by the Department of Meteorology at Penn State University utilizes a microcomputer for network monitoring and control. The network consists of two VHF and one UHF wind profiling Doppler radars. Additional measurement systems added to the network include temperature and humidity profiling radiometers, sodar for boundary layer wind profiling and selected surface based baseline systems. Remote diagnostic capabilities were also implemented in the Penn State network. It is possible to remotely analyze many specific malfunctions of the transmitter or signal processor

Data-oriented parsing and the Penn Chinese treebank

We present an investigation into parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank using a Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) approach. DOP comprises an experience-based approach to natural language parsing. Most published research in the DOP framework uses PStrees as its representation schema. Drawbacks of the DOP approach centre around issues of efficiency. We incorporate recent advances in DOP parsing techniques into a novel DOP parser which generates a compact representation of all subtrees which can be derived from any full parse tree. We compare our work to previous work on parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank, and provide both a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. While our results in terms of Precision and Recall are slightly below those published in related research, our approach requires no manual encoding of head rules, nor is a development phase per se necessary. We also note that certain constructions which were problematic in this previous work can be handled correctly by our DOP parser. Finally, we observe that the ‘DOP Hypothesis’ is confirmed for parsing the Penn Chinese Treebank

The Penn Science Teacher Institute: A Proven Model

The University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Chemistry Education (MCE) program graduated five cohorts of approximately twenty teachers between 2002 and 2006. One year after the teachers in the last cohort earned their degrees, the Penn Science Teacher Institute (Penn STI) initiated a follow-up study to ascertain if the goals of the MCE program had been sustained. For example, were the teachers incorporating updated content knowledge into their lessons and were their students learning more chemistry? A total of seventy-four of the eighty-two graduates participated in some aspect of this study. Because baseline data were not available for the MCE teachers and their students, baseline data from a comparable group of chemistry teachers enrolled in the first cohort of the Penn STI program and their students were used in some analyses. Among other findings, the data indicate that MCE met its goals: 1) to improve the chemistry content knowledge of its teacher participants; 2) to increase the use of research-based instruction in their classrooms; and, 3) to improve student achievement in chemistry (students of MCE graduates scored significantly higher than the comparison group)

Weekly assessment of worry: an adaptation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for monitoring changes during treatment

An adaptation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) [Meyer, T. J., Miller, M. L., Metzger, R. L. and Borkovec, T. D. (1990). Development and validation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28, 487-495.] for weekly assessment of worry was evaluated in a brief treatment study. Cognitive restructuring techniques were taught to 28 nonclinical high-worriers, 14 of whom served as a control group in a lagged waiting-list design. Results showed that the Penn State Worry Questionnaire-Past Week (PSWQ-PW) was highly reliable and substantially valid in the assessment of both (a) weekly status of worry and (b) treatment-related changes in worry: average Cronbach's alpha was 0.91; average convergent correlation with a past-week adaptation of the Worry Domains Questionnaire [Tallis, F., Eysenck, M. W. and Mathews, A. (1992). A questionnaire for the measurement of nonpathological worry. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 161-168.] was 0.63 and pre-post improvement on PSWQ-PW showed a 0.71 correlation with the Questionnaire of Changes in Experiencing and Behavior [Zielke, M. and Kopf-Mehnert, C. (1978). Veränderungsfragebogen des Erlebens und Verhaltens. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz Test Gesellschaft.]. It is concluded that the PSWQ-PW is a useful instrument for monitoring pathological worry in experimental and applied settings

Unmasking Penn Face: Measuring the Phenomenon and Its Relationship to Other Personality Constructs

This study aimed to develop a valid and reliable scale to measure the phenomenon known in the media as “Penn Face”. The scale was simultaneously administered with established measures to gauge its association with personality constructs that were expected to be associated with it (or not). Given that this phenomenon has yet to be empirically investigated, research for scale development relied heavily on the media, internet blogs, and individual student accounts. The finalized measure elicited promising reliability and was correlated with a number of expected personality traits, especially: anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and perfectionism. Our findings suggest that Penn Face is a measurable and potentially dangerous phenomenon that may exist within an undergraduate population

[Review of] W. S. Penn. All My Sins Are Relatives

W.S. Penn writes with wit and cleverness, but also with passion and love, about himself, his blood relatives, and his spiritual relatives. If the sins of the father are visited upon the son, Penn is doubly doomed by his need to understand his grandfather’s generation as well as his father’s. It is his grandfather and his father, as well as numerous others, to whom the book is dedicated, and it is this line of family members who have created the writer and critic who explores his own life as a mixed blood by simultaneously exploring the lives of his relatives and of his relatives and of other writers such as Wendy Rose, Leslie Silko, and Mourning Dove