Cultures of denial: managing the past, justifying the present

In this paper, I propose that if dominant white understandings of colonisation rely upon a relatively linear interpretation of history, then the unsettling of this linearity may allow for the voicing of a critical reading of racism in Australia. In order to do this, I suggest that psychoanalysis may provide a means for understanding the everyday talk of white people in ways that may challenge the now/then accounts of history that are used to deny ongoing acts of white violence and, thus, to refuse the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Through a brief analysis of focus group data with white Australians, I suggest that we may see repression at work when those of us who are descendants of white colonisers attempt to manage our relationship to the past. However, I also suggest that such acts of repression are never successful; they reveal the contingency of the present upon the past, and forever unsettle the location of white people in Australia.Damien W. Rigg

Persuasive Intelligence: On the Construction of Rhetor-Ethical Cognitive Machines

This work concerns the rhetorical and moral agency of machines, offering paths forward in machine ethics as well as problematizing the issue through the development and use of an interdisciplinary framework informed by rhetoric, philosophy of mind, media studies and historical narrative. I argue that cognitive machines of the past as well as those today, such as rapidly improving autonomous vehicles, are unable to make moral decisions themselves foremost because a moral agent must first be a rhetorical agent, capable of persuading and of being persuaded. I show that current machines, artificially intelligent or otherwise, and especially digital computers, are primarily concerned with control, whereas persuasive behavior requires an understanding of possibility. Further, this dissertation connects rhetorical agency and moral agency (what I call a rhetor-ethical constitution) by way of the Heraclitean notion of syllapsis ( grasping ), a mode of cognition that requires an agent to practice analysis and synthesis at once, cognizing the whole and its parts simultaneously. This argument does not, however, indicate that machines are devoid of ethical or rhetorical activity or future agency. To the contrary, the larger purpose of developing this theoretical framework is to provide avenues of research, exploration and experimentation in machine ethics and persuasion that have been overlooked or ignored thus far by adhering to restricted disciplinary programs; and, given the ontological nature of the ephemeral binary that drives digital computation, I show that at least in principle, computers share the syllaptic operating principle required for rhetor-ethical decisions and action

COMPUTABLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELING OF RANGELAND FIRES IN NORTHERN NEVADA

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

RANGELAND FIRES IN NORTHERN NEVADA: AN APPLICATION OF COMPUTABLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODELING

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Faraday cup monitor for the Iowa State College synchrotron electron beam

The design, construction, and testing of two high energy electron beam monitors are described. The one, a Faraday cup, is an absolute measuring device and the other is secondary emission monitor. The procedure and results necessary to calibrate the secondary emission monitor against the Faraday cup are included. Since the secondary emission monitor is portable, it is an adaptable instrument for the absolute measurement of high energy electron beams after it has been so calibrated