A Comedy of Errors or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sensibility‐Invariantism about ‘Funny’

In this article, I argue that sensibility‐invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility‐invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility‐invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the fact that disagreements about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable

Who Cares How Congress Really Works?

Legislative intent is a fiction. Courts and scholars accept this, by and large. As this Article shows, however, both are confused as to why legislative intent is a fiction and as to what this fiction entails. This Article first argues that the standard explanation—that Congress is a “they,” not an “it”—rests on an unduly simple conception of shared agency. Drawing from contemporary scholarship in the philosophy of action, it contends that Congress has no collective intention, not because of difficulties in aggregating the intentions of individual members, but rather because Congress lacks the sort of delegatory structure that one finds in, for example, a corporation. Second, this Article argues that—contrary to a recent, influential wave of scholarship—the fictional nature of legislative intent leaves interpreters of legislation with little reason to care about the fine details of legislative process. It is a platitude that legislative text must be interpreted in “context.” Context, however, consists of information salient to author and audience alike. This basic insight from the philosophy of language necessitates what this Article calls the “conversation” model of interpretation. Legislation is written by legislators for those tasked with administering the law—for example, courts and agencies—and those on whom the law operates—for example, citizens. Almost any interpreter thus occupies the position of conversational participant, reading legislative text in a context consisting of information salient both to members of Congress and to citizens (as well as agencies, courts, etc.). The conversation model displaces what this Article calls the “eavesdropping” model of interpretation—the prevailing paradigm among both courts and scholars. When asking what sources of information an interpreter should consider, courts and scholars have reliably privileged the epistemic position of members of Congress. The result is that legislation is erroneously treated as having been written by legislators exclusively for other legislators. This tendency is plainest in recent scholarship urging greater attention to legislative process—the nuances of which are of high salience to legislators but plainly not to citizens

Using school gardens as a vehicle for health promotion for elementary school youth: A review of the literature

Gardens have been incorporated into elementary school education since the 1800s and are gaining popularity once again. The growing interest in school gardens stems from recent trends toward eating locally grown food as well as public health concerns about improving the nutrition of youth. School garden programs can be utilized as a vehicle for improving the health and well being of elementary school youth, in both low and non-low socioeconomic (SES) elementary schools. A review of the literature indicates that school garden programs have been successful in improving academic achievement, increasing fruit and vegetable consumption and nutrition knowledge, building social skills, interpersonal relationships and team-building skills among elementary school youth. Through hands-on learning, gardens can enhance classroom lessons while providing youth with environmental experiences. However, barriers to successful implementation exist especially in low SES schools. These include: a lack of funding, the onus of responsibility is placed on teachers who lack knowledge of gardening skills, and little community and parent involvement. Some recommendations for improving school garden programs in order to increase sustainability and success include: 1) provide gardening techniques, skills and tips on how to incorporate gardens into classroom lessons during pre-service education for early education teachers, 2) include community volunteers to alleviate the burden on teachers, 3) complete garden program evaluations

Basic Filters for Convolutional Neural Networks Applied to Music: Training or Design?

When convolutional neural networks are used to tackle learning problems based on music or, more generally, time series data, raw one-dimensional data are commonly pre-processed to obtain spectrogram or mel-spectrogram coefficients, which are then used as input to the actual neural network. In this contribution, we investigate, both theoretically and experimentally, the influence of this pre-processing step on the network's performance and pose the question, whether replacing it by applying adaptive or learned filters directly to the raw data, can improve learning success. The theoretical results show that approximately reproducing mel-spectrogram coefficients by applying adaptive filters and subsequent time-averaging is in principle possible. We also conducted extensive experimental work on the task of singing voice detection in music. The results of these experiments show that for classification based on Convolutional Neural Networks the features obtained from adaptive filter banks followed by time-averaging perform better than the canonical Fourier-transform-based mel-spectrogram coefficients. Alternative adaptive approaches with center frequencies or time-averaging lengths learned from training data perform equally well.Comment: Completely revised version; 21 pages, 4 figure

“Shit Show” or Everyone That Needs to go to the Bathroom Should Go Now: Personal Experiences No One Thinks They Need to Know

Through a comic one-woman show, I will involve the audience in an exploration of my own personal stories and experiences with menstruation and feces. I purpose to break down some of the stigma that is associated with bodily functions by talking about them with open and blunt language and dialogue throughout the performance. One person shows have arguably been around ever since the first storytellers. While this show would be different in the nature of the stories being told, it would follow a very similar theatrical tradition by having one person narrate a story in a way that made the audience feel as if they were present within the room where it was happening. My primary focus in these stories will be on how we view periods and feces as a society and the unnatural feelings of shame that are associated with these two functions. Although I will mention other bodily functions briefly, I will spearhead this show behind those two functions in order to give the performance a definite shape and focus. This performance will include my own personal stories that I will retell by using present-tense language in order to fully engage the audience with what is happening on stage and to drive the action and plot of each story forward. At the end of this process I will have created a fully formed one-woman show that was performed June 9th, 2019 at 5:15pm in the Rice Auditorium Black Box. I aim to have the show’s run time be approximately 30-45 minutes