Socioeconomic status and domains of creativity: Is the artist really starving?

Socioeconomic status (SES) influences many aspects of a person\u27s life, and stereotypes concerning level of SES and the domain of creativity exist. It was hypothesized that children classified as low SES would perform more creatively in the visual arts and language arts domains of creativity than in the mathematic and scientific domains

What's It Going To Be Then, Eh? Youth Violence, Free Will, and the Creative Cycle in A Clockwork Orange

This thesis chronicles the development of a contemporary scenographic design for the stage of Anthony Burgess' novel, A Clockwork Orange, based on his original novel and including the 21st chapter, which has been omitted from editions published in the United States prior to 1986 and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 movie. Expressionistic style and scale support the original resolve of the author to question societal interference with individual free will. Burgess's novel, stage script, notations, additional writings and interviews were employed to determine author intent. Substantially different from the impact of Kubrick's film, Burgess envisioned Alex's transformation into an adult, stemming from personal experience and the freedom to choose. 20th Century Expressionistic art inspired large, industrial scale surroundings as a mechanical background for the very human, emotionally charged subject matter of the story. They hint at a far-reaching, self-assured state, ominously watching over all. Splashes of color represent the life that humans (the Oranges) bring to this environment (the Clockwork) and were also borrowed from Graphic Expressionism. Alex and his gangs' violent actions are exposed stylistically and potently without the voyeuristic distraction of bloody, realistic detail which are not the focus of Burgess' story. Separating from the well-known classic film and the oft-banned edition of the novel with only 20 chapters, this production presents Anthony Burgess' originally intended tale of "the danger of stifling free will and the creative urge for the sake of obedience to the State." (http://www.anthonyburgess.org/

Picnic Preparations

April showers may bring May flowers, but they also bring blanket parties and picnics. Tourists turn their cars into caravans; appetites become finicky and so mothers pack the roast beef, bread and fruit into a basket, place the salad in a jar and wrap the casserole ,of vegetables in a paper; then off they go to the woods to picnic. Young couples and gay parties build bonfires and roast steak and bacon over the coals. The hostess, tired after the strenuous winter social season, turns the bored luncheon or dinner party into a picnic, and everyone is gloriously happy and informal

Geodetic Imaging of Coseismic Slip and Postseismic Afterslip: Sparsity Promoting Methods Applied to the Great Tohoku Earthquake

Geodetic observations of surface displacements during and following earthquakes such as the March 11, 2011 great Tohoku earthquake can be used to constrain the spatial extent of coseismic slip and postseismic afterslip, and characterize the spectrum of earthquake cycle behaviors. Slip models are often regularized by assuming that slip on the fault varies smoothly in space, which may result in the artificial smearing of fault slip beyond physical boundaries. Alternatively, it may be desirable to estimate a slip distribution that is spatially compact and varies sharply. Here we show that sparsity promoting state vector regularization methods can be used to recover slip distributions with sharp boundaries, representing an alternative end-member result to very smooth slip distributions. Using onshore GPS observations at 298 stations during and in the ∼2 weeks following the Tohoku earthquake, we estimate a band of coseismic slip between 30 and 50 km depth extending 500 km along strike with a maximum slip of 64 m, corresponding to a minimum magnitude estimate of $M_W = 8.8$. Our estimate of afterslip is located almost exclusively down-dip of the coseismic rupture, with a transition between 40 and 50 km depth and an equivalent moment magnitude $M_W = 8.2$. This depth may be interpreted as coincident with the transition from velocity strengthening to velocity weakening frictional behavior, consistent with the upper limit of cold subduction estimates of the thermal structure of the Japan trench.Earth and Planetary Science

Sexy streamers? The role of natural and sexual selection in the evolution of hirundine tail streamers

In this comment we review some experiments, which address the initial selection pressures promoting the development of tail streamers in some hirundine species. The results of recent experiments have been interpreted as providing evidence for the hypothesis that tail streamers evolved as a handicap, through sexual selection. We offer an alternative explanation with evidence from our studies which suggest that tail streamers may have evolved initially through natural selection for increased manoeuvrability, and would not therefore originally act as a handicap

Assessing the aerodynamic effects of tail elongations in the house martin (Delichon urbica): Implications for the initial selection pressures in hirundines

Of the three species of Hirundine that breed sympatrically across the U.K., one, the barn swallow, has outer tail feathers elongated into streamers, whereas the other two species, the house martin and the sand martin, do not. The tail streamer of the barn swallow is regarded as a classic example of a sexually selected trait. Recent evidence, however, has suggested that streamers may have evolved largely through natural selection for enhanced flight performance and increased maneuverability. We tested the hypotheses that small streamers 1) increase performance in turning flight, but 2) decrease performance in flight variables related to velocity. We manipulated the lengths of house martin outer tail feathers and measured changes in their free-flight performance, using stereo-video to reconstruct the birds’ 3D flight paths. Five flight variables were found to best describe individual variation in flight performance. Of these five, the three variables determining maneuverability predicted that flight performance would be optimized by a 6 to 10mm increase in the length of the outer tail feathers. In contrast, for mean velocity and mean acceleration, extension of the outer tail feathers appears to have a detrimental effect on flight performance. We suggest that the initial selection pressure for streamers in ancestral short-tailed ‘barn swallows’ was via natural selection for increased maneuverability. In addition, we propose that the benefits of increased maneuverability has differed between hirundines in the past, such that the cost of increasing the length of the outer tail feather has, to date, outweighed the benefits of doing so in streamer-less hirundines

Understanding tensions and identifying clinician agreement on improvements to early-stage chronic kidney disease monitoring in primary care : a qualitative study

Funding This article presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research School for Primary Care Research (NIHR SPCR) (reference:120). JE was also supported by the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research programme (Reference: RP-PG-1210-12012). DSL and LL are supported by the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research CentrePeer reviewedPublisher PD

Geodetic Constraints on San Francisco Bay Area Fault Slip Rates and Potential Seismogenic Asperities on the Partially Creeping Hayward Fault

The Hayward fault in the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) is sometimes considered unusual among continental faults for exhibiting significant aseismic creep during the interseismic phase of the seismic cycle while also generating sufficient elastic strain to produce major earthquakes. Imaging the spatial variation in interseismic fault creep on the Hayward fault is complicated because of the interseismic strain accumulation associated with nearby faults in the SFBA, where the relative motion between the Pacific plate and the Sierra block is partitioned across closely spaced subparallel faults. To estimate spatially variable creep on the Hayward fault, we interpret geodetic observations with a three-dimensional kinematically consistent block model of the SFBA fault system. Resolution tests reveal that creep rate variations with a length scale of <15 km are poorly resolved below 7 km depth. In addition, creep at depth may be sensitive to assumptions about the kinematic consistency of fault slip rate models. Differential microplate motions result in a slip rate of 6.7 ± 0.8 mm/yr on the Hayward fault, and we image along-strike variations in slip deficit rate at ∼15 km length scales shallower than 7 km depth. Similar to previous studies, we identify a strongly coupled asperity with a slip deficit rate of up to 4 mm/yr on the central Hayward fault that is spatially correlated with the mapped surface trace of the 1868 $M_W = 6.9–7.0$ Hayward earthquake and adjacent to gabbroic fault surfaces.Earth and Planetary Science