Expert and Public Evaluations of Technological Risks: Searching for Common Ground

Drs. Flynn and Slovic compare and evaluate the ways in which the public and experts perceive technological risks

Racial Roots of Romanticism: American and European Africanism Are The Creation of Bio-Politics

The British Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the American Edgar Allan Poe shared a number of similarities in their writing styles. Both men came onto the scene early in their respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of the first generation of British literary Romantics, while Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In the work of both men there is an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. This focus on race has been covered at length by authors such as Toni Morrison in her book Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, but such a thorough application of the concept of whiteness has not yet been applied to British Romantic work, despite what I believe are several points of similarity. Morrison discusses the concepts of black others and whiteness in her book, and I believe that how English authors, such as Coleridge, engaged and depicted whiteness in their literary works is similar to how American Romantics such as Poe engaged with it. What’s of special interest is what this shared interest means for the authors, and what prompted this shared literary engagement with race. Along with an examination of the engagement with race within Edgar Allan Poe’s “ Ligeia” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” there will be an in-depth discussion of where this engagement with American Africanism originated for the authors. To do so, I will discuss the biographical information of both authors, and the work of Michel Foucault on bio-politics will play a very important part in identifying why these similarities in the depiction of whiteness arose and what they mean for both the American and British Romantic literary traditions. Both Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge racialize certain characters, and their depictions of whiteness in “Ligeia” and “Christabel” actually represent their engagement with Foucault’s concept of biopower, as it pertains to the state process of bio-politics created in the nineteenth century, as a way to control populations through biological regulation. Poe fully embraced the tenets of biopower, and the biologically based racism it produced, while Coleridge merely adhered to it out of the belief that it provided the best defense against the more violent bio-racism being voiced by the emergent socialist radicals amongst the lower classes of British society

Richard Lovelace a Study in Poetic Design

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, and hopefully, to elevate the literary currency of Richard Lovelace. To this end, various methods and approaches will be utilized in order to capture a comprehensive, yet coherent view of Lovelace and his poetry. Specifically, these methods and approaches will include: a survey of Lovelace\u27s biography, including clarification of discrepancies among authorities concerning pertinent details of his life; a location of Lovelace in the primary social, philosophical, and poetical movements of the early seventeenth century; an identification of Lovelace as a Cavalier poet, differentiating him from other Cavaliers; an analysis of representative poetry according to theme, imagery, and conflict-structures; and a summation of Lovelace\u27s critical reception since the Publication of Lucasta. Recent criticism, while inconclusive and sparse, points to an increased awareness of Lovelace\u27s conscious craftsmanship. This study is an effort at bringing this vision of Lovelace into clearer focus

A Study of the Robustness of the Three-Parameter Item Response Model

Simulation techniques were employed to investigate the use of the three-parameter item response model on psychological test data which violated the model\u27s assumptions of large sample sizes, long tests and test unidimensionality. The accuracy of the person ability and item characteristic curve parameter estimates derived by the three-parameter item response model was evaluated. Data sets and distributions of person ability and item characteristic curve parameters were generated using a computer-based algorithm, AVRAM (Ree, 1980), which employs the three-parameter logistic probability equation described by Birnbaum (1968). A computer software package, LOGIST5 (Wingersky, Burton & Lord, 1982), which utilizes the three-parameter logistic probability equation, was used to derive the parameter estimates for the person response and the item characteristic curves. The present study based its analyses on the unedited person-item data matrix. As such, the findings are somewhat inconsistent with those reported by studies employing an edited data matrix (e.g., Ree, 1979). However, these findings are much more consistent with the types of test situations likely to occur in industrial-organizational research, where the focus of research will be the evaluation of differences in individual and group test scores as opposed to the design and construction of tests. The results showed that the item discrimination, ai, and lower asymptote, ci, parameters of the item characteristic curve were both accurately recovered when small sample sizes and short tests were used, and conditions of item bias existed. The person ability parameter, Bv was also accurately recovered. The recovery of bi, the item difficulty parameter, was most affected. The average absolute differences and root-mean-square errors obtained on bi were extremely large relative to those obtained on ai and ci, as well as, those reported for bi elsewhere in the literature (Ree, 1979). Not only were the individual parameter estimates for bi not accurately recovered, but also, changes in the means of the distributions of bi were observed. When the samples available for item analysis are comprised of less than 2,000 examinees, and conditions of item bias exist, the practitioner of industrial-organizational psychology should consider the following: (1) Use the three-parameter model, but proceed with caution; or (2) adopt an alternative item response model. BICAL (Wright & Mead, 1976), a one-parameter model which employs maximum likelihood procedures, is suggested for sample sizes of 1000 examinees, and PROX (Cohen, 1976), a one-parameter model that uses algebraic procedures, is suggested when samples are comprised of 500 examinees or less

Eugene Debs and the Politics of Parrhesia

The general public often views the practice of politics to be incompatible with truth telling. Despite this perspective, I argue these two concepts coexisted in the 1912 campaign of Eugene V. Debs. Using Michel Foucault‟s unfinished work on parrhesia, or frank speaking, I argue that Debs functioned as a parrhesiast. To make this argument, I analyze Debs‟s discourse against what Foucault‟s work suggests are the three essential elements of parrhesia: compulsion, risk, and authenticity. Because Debs‟s parrhesiastic sensibilities become more obvious when compared with his opponents in the 1912 election, I analyze Debs‟s discourse in relation to William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt. Although a small minority in rhetorical studies have explored Debs‟s ethos as a rhetorical strength, none have situated Debs in relation to parrhesia, but to do so is appropriate and beneficial. Because of Debs‟s success in garnering six percent of the popular vote as a third-party candidate in 1912, his evocation of parrhesia in politics reveals advantages and possibilities for reconciling the practices of truth telling and politics

Washington Irving, the humorist

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit