Shifting Boundaries: Exploring Queer and National Identity in the Sanremo Festival

This study explores the shifting boundaries of queer and national identity in Italian popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lens of the Sanremo Festival, a vital precursor to Eurovision in Europe. In the 1950s, the first versions of Il Festival della Canzone Italiana (Sanremo Festival) promoted “traditional” Italian values influenced by the hegemony of the Catholic church. Despite the idealization of traditional values in Italian culture, this study seeks to analyze how the boundaries of sexual identity have expanded in the last decade to a more open and accepting presentation of the self. This study also argues that queerness has always been a part of the Sanremo Festival. Looking at critical editions of the festival separated by generational gaps, this research analyzes the musical and cultural influences within and outside of Italy, which form and define the borders of sexuality, gender, and national identity. As these boundaries have evolved, the author argues that sexuality has shifted toward a more realized and mediated “authentic” presentation of self. This study critically analyzes the shift in the Italian media's realization of commercialized queerness to comprehend how the media has influenced public perception, by looking at artists like Mahmood, Domenico Modugno, and Gianni Morandi

The city delineated: aesthetic and ideological aspects of colonial discourse in New York

The image has a key role to play in New York City's colonial history. Incorporating an array of unpublished visual and cartographic sources, this dissertation has two principal objectives: [i] to survey the written and graphic records of contemporary cartographers and philosophers, the West India Company, the colonists, and Patroons, with particular emphasis on their polemical aspects, and [ii] to undertake a critical review of existing scholarship's handling of this material, with a view to demonstrating its narrowness.What was New Amsterdam, or more precisely, what has New Amsterdam been thought to have been? After the Introduction defining the dissertation's methodology, the first two chapters provide a broader perspective on representations of the city by analysing visual depictions of colonial New York produced between c. 1776 and 1932. Chapter 1, Practising Peeping! New Notes and Comments on the "Collection des Prospects" ofNew York City, examines the wide-ranging cultural, political and commercial effects associated with one series of eighteenth-century European images of colonial New York. Chapter 2, The 'Wonder-Less' Image of the City: Representations of New Amsterdam in the 19th and 20th Century, surveys the nineteenth and twentieth-century American visual and literary response to the city.The remaining chapters discuss aspects of colonial New York from c. 1617 to 1736, the period of the dissertation's main focus. Chapter 3, On Being In/Between: Expanding the Cultural Episteme in New Netherland, updates the architectural terminology of recent colonial scholarship to provide a new image of the colonists' urban objectives and the spatial construction of colonial rhetoric. Chapter 4, A Heuristic Instrument: The Directors' City, examines how the Special Instructions for the Engineer and Surveyor, Cryn Fredericxsz (etc.) (1625) acted as a key signifier of the Company's colonial teleology, and at the same time fashioned a crucial philosophical and sociological niche in the history of the ideal city. Chapter 5, Take Four: The Pitfalls of a Classical Education, negotiates three unlikely sources: Sebastiano Serlio's Architettura, Libro de prospettiva (1545), Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), and Sir Francis Bacon's Gesta Grayorum (1594), to construct the ideological entity of Manhattan Island. Chapter 6, The Politics of Taste: A Short Essay Resuscitating Willem Kieft, dismantles the unwarranted intellectual favouritism showered on Peter Stuyvesant. It illustrates how, between 1637 and 1647, Kieft, employing ideologies ranging from Aristotle to Niccolo Machiavelli and spatial strategies popularised in literary Utopias, revolutionised the physical concept of the colony. Chapter 7, Flushing Out Fecund Faces: Urbanism in New Amsterdam, 1647-1664, challenges standard assessments of Stuyvesant's colony through a case study of Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt (c. 1665-70), a flawed source which has underpinned later discussion. In conclusion, Chapter 8, Transforming Cultural Determinacy: Early Engravings ofNew York City, 1651-1736, investigates how the commercialism of engraving affected the image of the city, and transformed its representation as a Dutch settlement into a British one

The Strong Medicine of the Overbreadth Doctrine: When Statutory Exceptions Are No More than a Placebo

In United States v. Stevens, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a federal statute criminalizing the interstate sale and distribution of depictions of animal cruelty on First Amendment grounds. While Stevens demonstrates the Court\u27s reluctance to create a new category of speech outside of First Amendment protection, Stevens also stands for the proposition that borrowing the exceptions clause from the Court\u27s obscenity standard will not adequately protect a statute from invalidation as overbroad. This Note discusses the use of the obscenity standard\u27s exceptions clause in nonobscenity statutes and the Court\u27s treatment of the exceptions clause in Stevens. This Note concludes that precise exceptions clauses still serve the important function of protecting statutes from invalidation as unconstitutionally overbroad

State Equity Crowdfunding and Investor Protection

Since Kansas enacted the first blue sky law in 1911, securities regulation has sought to protect investors from fraud and speculation. Historically, this meant precluding substantial numbers of small businesses from raising capital in the form of equity investments. In order to facilitate small-business capital formation, in 2012 the federal government passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act). Although Title III of the JOBS Act required the Securities and Exchange Commission to undergo rulemaking to allow for small-dollar equity investments, the agency dragged its feet. In the interim, states anxious to jumpstart their own economies took the initiative. Legislation has now been enacted in over half the states. Although a laudable attempt to make raising capital easier, this legislation potentially provides an avenue for fraudulent offerings and significant investor losses. This Comment reviews the historical context in which state crowdfunding exemptions have been passed and compares enacted state laws to the JOBS Act’s requirements. It argues that in order to effectively prevent fraud while enabling small-business capital formation, states should adopt specific protection measures in their crowdfunding laws. These prophylactic measures, including requirements on both issuers and intermediaries, as well as protections for investors, promise to better help business while also protecting investors

Kernel Density Estimators for Axisymmetric Particle Beams

Bright beams are commonly represented by sampled data in the numerical algorithms used to simulate their properties. However, in these calculations and the analyses of their outputs, the beam’s density is sometimes required and must be calculated from the samples. Axisymmetric beams, which possess a rotational symmetry and are naturally expressed in polar coordinates, pose a particular challenge to density estimators. The area element in polar coordinates shrinks as the radius becomes small, and weighting the samples to account for their reduced frequency may cause unwelcome artifacts. In this work, we derive analytical expressions for two kernel density estimators, which solve these problems in the spatial coordinates and in the transverse phase space. We show how the kernels can be found by averaging the Gaussian kernel in Cartesian coordinates over the polar angle and demonstrate their use on test problems. These results show that particle beam symmetries can be taken advantage of in density estimation while avoiding artifacts

A comparison of Grass Carp population characteristics upstream and downstream of Lock and Dam 19 of the Upper Mississippi River

Grass Carp Ctenopharyngodon idella have been intentionally stocked for aquatic vegetation control across the Midwestern United States for several decades. During the 1970s, escapement of Grass Carp into the Missouri River facilitated their naturalization into much of the Mississippi River basin, including the Upper Mississippi River. Lock and Dam 19 (LD19) in Keokuk, Iowa, is a high-head dam that represents a focal point for naturalized Grass Carp management where populations may differ between upstream and downstream pools as result of limited upstream migration, but potential differences between populations have yet to be evaluated to the best of our knowledge. The objective of this study was to compare the relative abundance, size structure, condition, growth, and recruitment variability of Grass Carp collected upstream and downstream of LD19. We sampled Grass Carp monthly (April–October) during 2014 and 2015 from four locations in the Des Moines River (downstream of LD19) and five locations throughout the Skunk, Iowa, and Cedar rivers (upstream of LD19) using boat electrofishing and trammel net sets. We captured 29 Grass Carp upstream of LD19 compared with 179 individuals captured downstream. Trammel nets only captured Grass Carp downstream of LD19; trammel net catch per unit effort upstream of LD19 was low and ranged from 0.0 to 8.0 fish/net lift (mean 6 SE¼0.39 6 0.13). Electrofishing catch per unit effort ranged from 0.0 to 22.7 fish/h (1.49 6 0.30) and was higher downstream (2.42 6 0.30) of LD19 than upstream (0.57 6 0.07). Grass Carp downstream of LD19 tended to be smaller, younger, of lower body condition, had higher mortality rates, and were slower growing compared with those collected upstream and to populations documented in other systems. Understanding and monitoring adult Grass Carp population characteristics upstream and downstream of LD19 is necessary to determine how they may change in response to ongoing harvest efforts for invasive carps in these river reaches

Intra-Annual Variability of Silver Carp Populations in the Des Moines River, USA

Since their introduction in the 1970s, Silver Carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix have spread throughout the Mississippi River basin. Management of any species relies on an accurate understanding of population characteristics and dynamics. However, Silver Carp seasonal sampling variation is unknown. Sampling during periods of peak catch rates would facilitate Silver Carp assessment and management, improving monitoring and removal techniques. The objective of this study was to evaluate adult Silver Carp seasonal sampling variation with boat electroshocking and trammel nets. Silver Carp were collected monthly (April–October) during 2014 and 2015 from four locations in the Des Moines River, Iowa. Trammel nets rarely captured Silver Carp (mean ± SE = 4.9 ± 1.6 fish/net; 60% of fish were captured in 6.3% of net sets) and therefore were not included in analyses. Electroshocking catch rates (CPUEs) exhibited a bimodal distribution, with peak CPUEs generally occurring in May, June, and September and lower catch rates observed during July and August. Catch rates were positively related to river discharge at upstream sites but not at downstream sites. Silver Carp size structure was similar among months and sites except at Cliffland, where fish were smaller during August and October compared to earlier in the year. Finally, Silver Carp condition peaked during April and May and decreased throughout the year except at Keokuk, where peaks were observed during both May and August. Although spatiotemporal variability was substantial, these results suggest that sampling of Silver Carp via electroshocking in May–June and September–October generally produces higher catch rates compared to July–August sampling and generates a more representative size structure. Using site-specific knowledge, monitoring and surveillance programs could more effectively sample during these periods of high vulnerability and densities in order to manage the spread and impacts of Silver Carp at statewide and regionwide scales