Someone Who Speaks Their Language: How a Nontraditional Partner Brought New Audiences to Minnesota Opera

Arts organizations of all kinds recognize that their futures depend on cultivating new audiences who will form long-lasting relationships with them. Perhaps no art form faces a bigger challenge in doing so than opera. Many people who've never been to the opera believe it's stuffy and elitist, and certainly not a place they'd like to spend a Saturday night. They think they'll feel like ignorant outsiders who can't possibly understand, let alone appreciate, what's happening on stage. Minnesota Opera set out to dispel those preconceived notions among women ages 35 to 60 through an unlikely partnership with a local talk-radio host who had a knack for relating to this demographic. An opera buff himself, he made the art form relatable and exciting to women who had never been to a performance, so much so that they jammed the phone lines when he announced ticket giveaways to Minnesota Opera on his radio show. After four seasons of the partnership, 1,114 households new to Minnesota Opera had redeemed their free tickets to attend a performance, and 18 percent had paid to come back. The company found that perceptions of opera as elitist were not insurmountable, but also discovered that one or two positive experiences were not necessarily enough to turn most of these new audience members into frequent attendees. Follow-up research identified barriers to that elusive return purchase, and the company has used these insights to adjust its marketing strategy to bring a number of those new audience members back

Converting Family Into Fans: How the Comtemporary Jewish Museum Expanded Its Reach

The last in a series of 10 case studies explores how The Contemporary Jewish Museum in SanFrancisco worked to attract families of all backgrounds and build the next generation of museum supporters. It describes how the museum convened focus groups to better understand the needs of families with young children, designed programs and exhibitions to meet those needs, offered family discounts and entered into community partnerships to build awareness of the museum's offerings.Although The Contemporary Jewish Museum sought to attract families, it did not want to become a children's museum. It therefore took extra efforts to balance the needs of children and adults. It worked to manage parents' expectations, created spaces for children to work on activities and trained its staff to draw families to areas most appropriate for children.These efforts resulted in a nearly nine-fold increase in family visitors over seven years, the report finds. Authors suggest that the museum's successes relied in part on a nuanced understanding of its target audiences, mutually beneficial partnerships with schools and libraries and careful evaluation and refinement of engagement strategies.

Exploring the context of course rankings on online academic forums

University students routinely use the tools provided by online course ranking forums to share and discuss their satisfaction with the quality of instruction and content in a wide variety of courses. Student perception of the efficacy of pedagogies employed in a course is a reflection of a multitude of decisions by professors, instructional designers and university administrators. This complexity has motivated a large body of research on the utility, reliability, and behavioral correlates of course rankings. There is, however, little investigation of the (potential) implicit student bias on these forums towards desirable course outcomes at the institution level. To that end, we examine the connection between course outcomes (student-reported GPA) and the overall ranking of the primary course instructor, as well as rating disparity by nature of course outcomes, based on data from two popular academic rating forums. Our experiments with ranking data about over ten thousand courses taught at Virginia Tech and its 25 SCHEV-approved peer institutions indicate that there is a discernible albeit complex bias towards course outcomes in the professor ratings registered by students.Comment: ASONAM '19. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1905.0227

Portfolio Vol. III N 3

Ewart, Alison. Revenge. Prose. 3-4. Maxwell, Bob. Christ in Cleats. Prose. 5. Martindale, Virginia. Somnolence. Poetry. 6. Frey, Erwin F. Isolt. Picture. 6. Puffer, Harriet. Thirteenth Hour. Prose. 7-8. Cox, James. Selling Denison. Prose. 9-10. Beckham, Adela. Admonition. Poetry. 12. Homer, Winslow. Watching the Breakers. Picture. 12. Varney, Chester. The Snake Tree. Prose. 13-16. Smith, Bob. Review of New Recordings. Prose. 17. Deane, Dorothy. Review of New Books. Prose. 17. Taylor, Dave. An Artist Prepares. Prose. 19. Gratza, Margaret. Poems. Poetry. 20. Reeder, Lydia. Landscape. Picture. 20. Royce, Joe. Youth Hostels. Prose. 21-28

The Freshman, vol. 5, no. 18

The Freshman was a weekly, student newsletter issued on Mondays throughout the academic year. The newsletter included calendar notices, coverage of campus social events, lectures, and athletic teams. The intent of the publication was to create unity, a sense of community, and class spirit among first year students

Exile Vol. XXV No. 1

PROSE Friend by John Marshall Visiting Relatives by Cynthia Lanning Hahn The Mud Lane by Eloise Haveman The Petrification of a Wild Sweet William Blossom by Melissa Simmons ART Three views of Granville by Scott Tryon (front cover) untitled photos by Bogart and Jerry Brown Landscape by Scott Tryon Submissive Defiance by Bogart Three things that Remain by Jerry Brown back cover by Lindy Davies POETRY A Photographer Documents Her Death by Chris Gjessing three Haiku by Eloise Haveman Morning by Melissa Simmons Granite Travel by Lisa Minacci did you year? by Bob McLaughlin he\u27s coming home again by Bob McLaughlin David by Betsy Bates Le Cafe de \u27lUnivers by Ann Leopard untitled by John Marshall The Last Ramona Poem (fat chance) by Lindy Davies Mother Told Me not to Play Next Door by Ellen Cox Poems of the Inconsequentials by Eloise Havema

Picturing classical and quantum Bayesian inference

We introduce a graphical framework for Bayesian inference that is sufficiently general to accommodate not just the standard case but also recent proposals for a theory of quantum Bayesian inference wherein one considers density operators rather than probability distributions as representative of degrees of belief. The diagrammatic framework is stated in the graphical language of symmetric monoidal categories and of compact structures and Frobenius structures therein, in which Bayesian inversion boils down to transposition with respect to an appropriate compact structure. We characterize classical Bayesian inference in terms of a graphical property and demonstrate that our approach eliminates some purely conventional elements that appear in common representations thereof, such as whether degrees of belief are represented by probabilities or entropic quantities. We also introduce a quantum-like calculus wherein the Frobenius structure is noncommutative and show that it can accommodate Leifer's calculus of `conditional density operators'. The notion of conditional independence is also generalized to our graphical setting and we make some preliminary connections to the theory of Bayesian networks. Finally, we demonstrate how to construct a graphical Bayesian calculus within any dagger compact category.Comment: 38 pages, lots of picture

The Freshman, vol. 5, no. 17

The Freshman was a weekly, student newsletter issued on Mondays throughout the academic year. The newsletter included calendar notices, coverage of campus social events, lectures, and athletic teams. The intent of the publication was to create unity, a sense of community, and class spirit among first year students

MRCK-1 Drives Apical Constriction in C. elegans by Linking Developmental Patterning to Force Generation

Apical constriction is a change in cell shape that drives key morphogenetic events including gastrulation and neural tube formation. Apical force-producing actomyosin networks drive apical constriction by contracting while connected to cell-cell junctions. The mechanisms by which developmental patterning regulates these actomyosin networks and associated junctions with spatial precision are not fully understood. Here, we identify a myosin light chain kinase MRCK-1 as a key regulator of C. elegans gastrulation that integrates spatial and developmental patterning information. We show that MRCK-1 is required for activation of contractile actomyosin dynamics and elevated cortical tension in the apical cell cortex of endodermal precursor cells. MRCK-1 is apically localized by active Cdc42 at the external, cell-cell contact-free surfaces of apically constricting cells, downstream of cell fate determination mechanisms. We establish that the junctional components α-catenin, β-catenin, and cadherin become highly enriched at the apical junctions of apically-constricting cells, and that MRCK-1 and myosin activity are required in vivo for this enrichment. Taken together, our results define mechanisms that position a myosin activator to a specific cell surface where it both locally increases cortical tension and locally enriches junctional components to facilitate apical constriction. These results reveal crucial links that can tie spatial information to local force generation to drive morphogenesis