Performing Empire: Theater and Colonialism in Caroline Link's Nirgendwo in Afrika

In Caroline Link's popular 2001 film Nirgendwo in Afrika, a Jewish family fleeing the Holocaust finds refuge in British-controlled Kenya. Theater plays a crucial role in the film: Members of the Redlich family explicitly call upon one another to engage in roleplaying. They make use of theater to experiment, imaginatively, with their new roles within the colonial establishment. The film's production team, as I point out, was similarly preoccupied with questions of theater and theatricality. In interviews, the film's director and producers claim that their indigenous extras struggled to understand the distinction between fiction and reality, often became overly caught up in the roles they were portraying, and could only be, not truly perform, for the camera. In this way, the film's production team discounts their indigenous extras as genuine collaborators and, ultimately, justifies their monopoly over the work of cultural representation. If theater and performance are often portrayed as opening up a path to greater political and social emancipation, we find here instead an example of how it can be used both to initiate individuals into a colonial hierarchy and to maintain and reinforce patterns of exclusion

The Johnson Space Center Management Information Systems (JSCMIS): An interface for organizational databases

The Management Information and Decision Support Environment (MIDSE) is a research activity to build and test a prototype of a generic human interface on the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Information Network (CIN). The existing interfaces were developed specifically to support operations rather than the type of data which management could use. The diversity of the many interfaces and their relative difficulty discouraged occasional users from attempting to use them for their purposes. The MIDSE activity approached this problem by designing and building an interface to one JSC data base - the personnel statistics tables of the NASA Personnel and Payroll System (NPPS). The interface was designed against the following requirements: generic (use with any relational NOMAD data base); easy to learn (intuitive operations for new users); easy to use (efficient operations for experienced users); self-documenting (help facility which informs users about the data base structure as well as the operation of the interface); and low maintenance (easy configuration to new applications). A prototype interface entitled the JSC Management Information Systems (JSCMIS) was produced. It resides on CIN/PROFS and is available to JSC management who request it. The interface has passed management review and is ready for early use. Three kinds of data are now available: personnel statistics, personnel register, and plan/actual cost

The Johnson Space Center management information systems: User's guide to JSCMIS

The Johnson Space Center Management Information System (JSCMIS) is an interface to computer data bases at the NASA Johnson Space Center which allows an authorized user to browse and retrieve information from a variety of sources with minimum effort. The User's Guide to JSCMIS is the supplement to the JSCMIS Research Report which details the objectives, the architecture, and implementation of the interface. It is a tutorial on how to use the interface and a reference for details about it. The guide is structured like an extended JSCMIS session, describing all of the interface features and how to use them. It also contains an appendix with each of the standard FORMATs currently included in the interface. Users may review them to decide which FORMAT most suits their needs

Electron Self Energy for Higher Excited S Levels

A nonperturbative numerical evaluation of the one-photon electron self energy for the 3S and 4S states with charge numbers Z=1 to 5 is described. The numerical results are in agreement with known terms in the expansion of the self energy in powers of Zalpha.Comment: 3 pages, RevTeX, to appear in Phys. Rev.

The Role of Institutions in Job Teleworkability Before and After the Covid-19 Pandemic

The teleworkability of jobs – whether they can and will be performed remotely – has been increasingly contested in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. To explain which jobs are teleworkable and why, we emphasize the institutional context of a job, including differences among firms, union representation, professional licensing requirements, sector, and employment models. Using a novel dataset of job characteristics extracted from the text of a large sample of online job advertisements from 2010-2021, we examine various explanations for change in the availability of remote job opportunities. Prior to the pandemic, private sector, non-union, and unlicensed jobs lagged federal government, union, and licensed jobs in the growth of telework. Firms are the largest source of variance in remote job offerings relative to other obvious alternatives (technological feasibility, occupation, sector, geography). After March 2020, between-firm differences increased, and institutions influenced the rate of telework adoption