Spectacular drama in urban entertainment: the dramatisation of community in popular culture

This is a study of some of the many types of entertainment that have been called spectacular, of the cultural significance of certain conventions in ways of transforming space and identity. Forms of spectacular drama both require and celebrate urban social relations, they constitute essential parts of the popular cultural landscape. They display an idealisation of ways of picturing collective experience. Although I note continuities in forms of spectacular drama through different eras, it is differences in the ways in which our sense of collective life or community is experienced and expressed that provide for very different understandings of forms of spectacular display. I describe and discuss forms of spectacular drama in the fifteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have chosen the fifteenth century as it was a period when there was a flourishing range of dramatic entertainment but no theatres. The principal features of the culture that I stress are the looseness of the dramatic frame. In contrast, the nineteenth century is a period of both urban expansion and theatrical supremacy. In the course of the century the population became urbanised and the growing cities became spectacular stages for new forms of social experience. I describe a broad framework of popular entertainment which provided many forms of spectacular experience, but concentrate upon the theatrical form of melodrama and forms of pictorial realism. In the chapter on the twentieth century I am principally concerned with the implications of processes of massification - both of society and culture. I argue that the democratic individualism of consumer culture and mass leisure has made the vocabulary of identity and community peculiarly problematic. The theme is that spectacular drama in contemporary culture has become more insistent and more public and yet our participation and response has been increasingly privatised

The Collateral Channel: How Real Estate Shocks Affect Corporate Investment

International audienceWhat is the impact of real estate prices on corporate investment? In the presence of financing frictions, firms use pledgeable assets as collateral to finance new projects. Through this collateral channel, shocks to the value of real estate can have a large impact on aggregate investment. To compute the sensitivity of investment to collateral value, we use local variations in real estate prices as shocks to the collateral value of firms that own real estate. Over the 1993-2007 period, the representative US corporation invests $0.06 out of each$1 of collateral

Production Practices and Sample Costs for a Diversified Organic Vegetable Operation on the Central Coast of California

Organic vegetable farms on the Central Coast region of California are generally intensive operations. That is, two and sometimes three crops may be harvested off the same acreage each year. Many approaches exist for rowing and marketing organic vegetables. This publication describes the range of soil management practices, pest management, crop rotations, cover crops, and harvest and packing methods currently used by organic growers on the Central Coast of California. Marketing options and state and federal regulations governing organic commodities are also discussed. A general sequence of operations, equipment requirements, resource use, costs, yield and return ranges are presented for thirteen vegetable crops and two cover crops. The vegetables included are cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, garlic, lettuce (leaf and romaine), onions (red and yellow), snap peas, snow peas, bell peppers (green and red), sweet corn, and winter squash (large and small varieties). Barley and vetch are the two cover crops detailed.Crop Production/Industries,

The Collateral Channel: How Real Estate Shocks Affect Corporate Investment

What is the impact of real estate prices on corporate investment? In the presence of financing frictions, firms use pledgeable assets as collateral to finance new projects. Through this collateral channel, shocks to the value of real estate can have a large impact on aggregate investment. Over the 1993-2007 period, the representative U.S. corporation invests 6 cents out of each additional dollar of collateral. To compute this sensitivity, we use local variations in real estate prices as shocks to the collateral value of firms that own real estate. We address the endogeneity of local real estate prices using the interaction of interest rates and local constraints on land supply as an instrument. We address the endogeneity of the decision to own land (1) by controlling for observable determinants of ownership and (2) by looking at the investment behavior of firms before and after they acquire land. The sensitivity of investment to collateral value is stronger the more likely a firm is to be credit constrained.

The Occurrence and Distribution of Heterandria formosa (Teleostei, Poeciliidae) in Lowndes County, Georgia

Heretofore in the literature, Heterandria formosa had not been reported from Lowndes County, Georgia. Based on a survey of Lowndes County; we discovered eight localities from the southeast­ern portion of the county that collectively produced 30 specimens of H. formosa. The southeastern portion of the county is primarily flatwoods with numerous wetlands and low gradient streams compared to the remainder of the county, which is typified by a more upland habitat with greater relief and greater stream gradients. It is postulated that the greater stream gradients inhibited the migration of H. formosa into the southwestern and northern portions of the county

Table of Contents and Prologue

Editorial board, Table of contents, and Prologue, an introduction to volume

The hierarchical sparse selection model of visual crowding

Because the environment is cluttered, objects rarely appear in isolation. The visual system must therefore attentionally select behaviorally relevant objects from among many irrelevant ones. A limit on our ability to select individual objects is revealed by the phenomenon of visual crowding: an object seen in the periphery, easily recognized in isolation, can become impossible to identify when surrounded by other, similar objects. The neural basis of crowding is hotly debated: while prevailing theories hold that crowded information is irrecoverable – destroyed due to over-integration in early stage visual processing – recent evidence demonstrates otherwise. Crowding can occur between high-level, configural object representations, and crowded objects can contribute with high precision to judgments about the “gist” of a group of objects, even when they are individually unrecognizable. While existing models can account for the basic diagnostic criteria of crowding (e.g., specific critical spacing, spatial anisotropies, and temporal tuning), no present model explains how crowding can operate simultaneously at multiple levels in the visual processing hierarchy, including at the level of whole objects. Here, we present a new model of visual crowding—the hierarchical sparse selection (HSS) model, which accounts for object-level crowding, as well as a number of puzzling findings in the recent literature. Counter to existing theories, we posit that crowding occurs not due to degraded visual representations in the brain, but due to impoverished sampling of visual representations for the sake of perception. The HSS model unifies findings from a disparate array of visual crowding studies and makes testable predictions about how information in crowded scenes can be accessed

The perceived stability of scenes : serial dependence in ensemble representations

Participants were affiliates of UC Berkeley and provided written informed consent before participation. This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship P2ELP3_158876 (M.M.). We would like to thank Allison Yamanashi Leib for useful comments on the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD