Black Culture In A Post-Soul Era (ENGL 068) Syllabus

Generations of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals have emerged since the 1960s to reconsider the meaning of Blackness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that preceded them. Supported by historical and critical studies, we examine how Black novelists, playwrights, and poets in the ‘post-soul’ era have dealt with a complex of shifting, but interconnected, concerns, including the imperatives of racial representation in a society increasingly driven by mass consumption and global media, the contentious discourses of sexual politics, and the polarization of classes within Black America. For this version of the course, the major project entails producing a Wikipedia article on a topic relevant to African American literature and culture from the 1970s to the present

Updating Data Semantics

This paper has three main goals. First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing terms like maybe and if interact: they iterate, and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox, and that exposing that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution. Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories, explores some meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters, and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have

Raoult Was Right After All.

Raoult's law, published in 1887, is taught in chemistry and chemical engineering fields as a first approximation to the vapor pressure and activity of solutes and solvents in mixtures. In ideal solutions, it is exact but many solutions are known to have substantial deviations from Raoult's law as conventionally interpreted. In 1908, Callendar showed that water hydrated to the solute can explain some of the departures from Raoult's law in aqueous solution. Here, we show that by simply assuming equilibria between the free water in solution and its hydrated forms, Raoult's law and Callendar's extension are valid over the full range of concentrations, while also showing how water and solutes interact in solution. This model of solutions has importance in highly concentrated solutions common in atmosphere aerosols relevant to climate change and air quality, and in numerous industrial processes

Alice and Bob get away with it: A playlet

Alice and Bob use Aravind's version of the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem to fend off awkward questions about what exactly they were doing in Amsterdam last week

THE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONAL DETERMINANTS OF LAND-USE CHANGE AND SPRAWL: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

This paper proposes a conceptual land-use change model that includes a framework for analyzing the political institutional determinants of land-use change. The model is used to explain several previous empirical findings and to generate testable hypotheses. The government bias for sprawl is addressed in the context of the model.Land-use change, sprawl, sprawl bias, planning and zoning

Approximate expected delay costs for call and contact centre models under light traffic regimes

This paper studies the form of certain expected delay costs as a function of the arrival rate for customers who pass through a service facility that allows for reneging and retrials. We show that, under certain light traffic conditions, these costs are continuously increasing and convex functions of the arrival rate (within a finite interval). This result is first explored for the processor sharing system, in which a penalty cost is incurred for reneging from the service facility for good without ever receiving service, and then we consider a system with a more general structure governing the output processes and costs incurred per unit time, but without the penalty cost. A suggested application for these results, in which game theoretic considerations are utilized for gauging customer behaviour within a decentralized context, is briefly discussed

Nonlinear optical properties of photoresists for projection lithography

Optical beams are self-focused and self-trapped upon initiating crosslinking in photoresists. This nonlinear optical phenomenon is apparent only for low average optical intensities and produces index of refraction changes as large as 0.04. We propose using the self-focusing and self-trapping phenomenon in projection photolithography to enhance the resolution and depth of focus

Functional limit theorems for generalized variations of the fractional Brownian sheet

We prove functional central and non-central limit theorems for generalized variations of the anisotropic $d$-parameter fractional Brownian sheet (fBs) for any natural number $d$. Whether the central or the non-central limit theorem applies depends on the Hermite rank of the variation functional and on the smallest component of the Hurst parameter vector of the fBs. The limiting process in the former result is another fBs, independent of the original fBs, whereas the limit given by the latter result is an Hermite sheet, which is driven by the same white noise as the original fBs. As an application, we derive functional limit theorems for power variations of the fBs and discuss what is a proper way to interpolate them to ensure functional convergence.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/15-BEJ707 in the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Financial Variables as Predictors of Real Output Growth

We investigate two methods for using daily stock returns to forecast, and update forecasts of, quarterly real output growth. Both methods aggregate daily returns in some manner to form a single stock market variable. We consider (i) augmenting the quarterly AR(1) model for real output growth with daily returns using a nonparametric Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) setting, and (ii) augmenting the quarterly AR(1) model with the most recent r -day returns as an additional predictor. We discover that adding low frequency stock returns (up to annual returns, depending on forecast horizon) to a quarterly AR(1) model improves forecasts of output growth.Forecasting, Mixed Frequencies, Functional linear regression