Starting again: making art after a spinal cord injury

This thesis explores how one's art practice changes after suffering a spinal cord injury. Throughout this MFA I document how my art practice changed after suffering a broken neck. It asks and answers the question of whether my injury and new limited capabilities will have to lead me away from my previous figurative way of painting. It delves into not just the changes I have had to make physically to continue to paint but also how what's happened to me and the subsequent medical/physical/social repercussions of a spinal cord injury have influenced the theme and content of my latest series of artworks

Unit organization of three topics in the social sciences

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1946. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Master of Science

thesisThis thesis details the development of the Algorithmic Robotics Laboratory, its experimental software environment, and a case study featuring a novel hardware validation of optimal reciprocal collision avoidance. We constructed a robotics laboratory in both software and hardware in which to perform our experiments. This lab features a netted flying volume with motion capture and two custom quadrotors. Also, two experimental software architectures are developed for actuating both ground and aerial robots within a Linux Robot Operating System environment. The first of the frameworks is based upon a single finite state machine program which managed each aspect of the experiment. Concerns about the complexity and reconfigurability of the finite state machine prompted the development of a second framework. This final framework is a multimodal structure featuring programs which focus on these specific functions: State Estimation, Robot Drivers, Experimental Controllers, Inputs, Human Robot Interaction, and a program tailored to the specifics of the algorithm tested in the experiment. These modular frameworks were used to fulfill the mission of the Algorithmic Robotics Lab, in that they were developed to validate robotics algorithms in experiments that were previously only shown in simulation. A case study into collision avoidance was used to mark the foundation of the laboratory through the proving of an optimal reciprocal collision avoidance algorithm for the first time in hardware. In the case study, two human-controlled quadrotors were maliciously flown in colliding trajectories. Optimal reciprocal collision avoidance was demonstrated for the first time on completely independent agents with local sensing. The algorithm was shown to be robust to violations of its inherent assumptions about the dynamics of agents and the ability for those agents to sense imminent collisions. These experiments, in addition to the mathematical foundation of exponential convergence, submits th a t optimal reciprocal collision avoidance is a viable method for holonomic robots in both 2-D and 3-D with noisy sensing. A basis for the idea of reciprocal dance, a motion often seen in human collision avoidance, is also suggested in demonstration to be a product of uncertainty about the state of incoming agents. In the more than one hundred tests conducted in multiple environments, no midair collisions were ever produced

What Is Wardian?: Formulating Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Style And Technique Through Textual Analysis, Comparison, And Differentiation

Over the past twelve years, Jesmyn Ward has published three novels, one memoir, one anthology, and a series of articles. After two National Book Awards, Ward has risen to the top ranks of contemporary literature, invited to universities and lecture series across the country. This thesis seeks to delineate the distinct style with which Ward writes. In doing so, her relation to other authors, both old and new, will become apparent. Not only is Ward writing fiction that is good, even great, but her writing is always urgent and contextualized within contemporary politics. From De Lisle, Mississippi, Ward often employs Southern gothic themes in her fiction. Further, she develops these themes to fit a present voice and subject. Her engagement with the tradition always seeks to create space for marginalized narratives that canonical literature has typically ignored or suppressed. Ward’s narrative structure lends itself to the polyperspectivity she desires to produce at a metaliterary level. Thus, her technique often aligns with writers ranging from William Faulkner, Ernest J. Gaines, and Toni Morrison. Ward’s writing is astoundingly fresh, yet other contemporary Southern writers exhibit stylistic similarities with her style. This thesis shall investigate why certain commonalities appear across these authors works and how their artistic decisions reflect and influence the reality within which the texts are situated. In total, I seek to offer a comprehensive examination of Ward as a writer, as a student of literary history, and as a contemporary voice conversing with others

The Challenge to Catholic Teacher Education in Scotland

Maintaining a strong sense of religious purpose is a challenge facing private education. Institutions of higher learning confront special challenges when addressing issues of religious identity, governance, and mission. Scotland’s Catholic community encountered a major challenge when the only teacher education college for those aspiring to teach in Catholic schools, St. Andrew’s College, began merger talks with the University of Glasgow, an institution with historical ties to the Church of Scotland. After reviewing the historical context of the merger discussions, the authors provide a helpful analysis of the process and offer a four-fold model of analysis for other institutions in similar transitional stages

Integrating Management, Research, and Monitoring: Balancing the 3-Legged Stool

Research and monitoring programs are often thought of as competing with “on the ground management” for attention and funding. This is false trichotomy; instead, it is more appropriate to view management, research, and monitoring as complementary endeavors, in which loss of any 1 of the 3 is disruptive to the remaining 2. There is often significant or even profound uncertainty about the system’s likely response to management, beyond environmental and other sources of uncontrolled variation. Sometimes this uncertainty can be reduced through directed research studies, including experimentation. However, management decisions usually cannot await the completion of elaborate, multiple-year studies. Adaptive resource management (ARM) provides managers a way to make optimal decisions with respect to resource objectives, given the current level of uncertainty about system response, and in anticipation that learning will improve decision-making through time. Under ARM, resource goals and objectives are always paramount and research and monitoring programs exist to provide managers with the tools they need to make better decisions. The essentials of ARM are clear, compelling, and critically needed in natural resource management. We can no longer afford the luxury, if we ever could, of management divorced from research and monitoring, and vice versa. By keeping the focus on management decision-making and resource objective outcomes, ARM places an explicit value on research and monitoring that then can be used to justify monitoring and research programs

Function-based Intersubject Alignment of Human Cortical Anatomy

Making conclusions about the functional neuroanatomical organization of the human brain requires methods for relating the functional anatomy of an individual's brain to population variability. We have developed a method for aligning the functional neuroanatomy of individual brains based on the patterns of neural activity that are elicited by viewing a movie. Instead of basing alignment on functionally defined areas, whose location is defined as the center of mass or the local maximum response, the alignment is based on patterns of response as they are distributed spatially both within and across cortical areas. The method is implemented in the two-dimensional manifold of an inflated, spherical cortical surface. The method, although developed using movie data, generalizes successfully to data obtained with another cognitive activation paradigm—viewing static images of objects and faces—and improves group statistics in that experiment as measured by a standard general linear model (GLM) analysis