Black Culture In A Post-Soul Era (ENGL 068) Syllabus

Generations of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals have emerged since the 1960s to reconsider the meaning of Blackness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that preceded them. Supported by historical and critical studies, we examine how Black novelists, playwrights, and poets in the ‘post-soul’ era have dealt with a complex of shifting, but interconnected, concerns, including the imperatives of racial representation in a society increasingly driven by mass consumption and global media, the contentious discourses of sexual politics, and the polarization of classes within Black America. For this version of the course, the major project entails producing a Wikipedia article on a topic relevant to African American literature and culture from the 1970s to the present

Analysis of Pavement Riding Quality: A Triaxial Evaluation of Pavement Roughness

For the last twenty-five years considerable research has been directed toward developing reliable equipment for evaluating pavement roughness. Since roughness inhibits passenger riding comfort and safety, as well as inducing vehicle deterioration, the determination of the features that cause roughness would indicate possible improvements in pavement design, materials, construction practices and equipment. For example, certain types of base design might be found to produce smoother surfaces than others; and a construction practice such as a blade-spread leveling course might result in more uniform pavements. Then too, evaluation of pavement roughness would permit relative comparison of pavements as one of several factors in determining the most needed of possible improvements, with the normally limited finances available. This could appear in a tabulation of sufficiency ratings such as those used by the Kentucky Department of Highway

African American Celebrity Auto/Biographies

Anthony Foy’s chapter asks how do we approach the overdetermined narrative of the African American celebrity as a modern variant of African American autobiography, rather than simply dismissing it for its lack or artistry, activism, or authenticity? Foy observes that (1) the Black celebrity narrative recounts the emergence, circulation, reception, and transformation of the star’s image while also registering the synedcochic function of the star’s racialized body; (2) it features the sites, activities, practices, and products of consumer culture in order to ratify the star’s status as exemplary consumer and alluring commodity; and (3) it commodifies authenticity by promising to reveal the putative real self beneath the racial persona. Ultimately, Foy calls for a fresh examination of the Black star’s autobiographical production that thoroughly attends to its historical contingency, political complexity, and theoretical possibility

Reforming the U. S. health care system: where there's a will, there could be a way

The essay in the 2005 annual report summarizes the themes and consensus-based prescriptions for action that emerged from the Boston Fed's 50th economic conference, Wanting It All: The Challenge of Reforming the U.S. Health Care System, held in June 2005.Health care reform ; Medical care, Cost of

Contending Discourses Of Black Autobiography: Respectability, Authenticity, And Masculinity

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity

Triaxial Acceleration Analysis Applied to the Evaluation of Pavement Riding Qualities

Traditionally the riding qualities of a pavement are expressed as some function of localized irregularities in the contour of the pavement surface. This is predicated on the fact that the portion of passenger comfort or discomfort imparted by all features of the pavement surface can not be isolated and determined separately from other influences such as vehicle characteristics or psychological and physiological aspects of the passenger himself. Measurements of riding qualities have dealt almost exclusively with vehicle displacements in the vertical direction only, these having been and still being the most prominent and most amenable to measurement. By this procedure displacements in other directions have been ignored, although their relative influence on riding comfort as determined by comfort research is known to be great. During the past few years certain features of highway construction and use have emphasized surface irregularities that cause significant amounts of combined transverse and longitudinal motion. In response to this developing need for determination of riding qualities on the basis of component motions, an instrument for measuring and recording induced accelerations in the three principal directions was developed and adapted to a passenger vehicle. This paper describes the equipment and its use in evaluating riding qualities of various pavements in Kentucky

‘Our voice started off as a whisper and now it is a great big roar’ : The Salford Dementia Associate Panel as a model of involvement in research activities

This paper presents the work of the ‘Salford Dementia Associate Panel’, based at the Salford Institute for Dementia, Salford University (UK). We discuss the roles of the Dementia Associates, in particular around the areas of engagement and research. The panel is made up of people living with dementia, and current and former care partners. It highlights the development of this group over a four-year period and demonstrates over time how the role of a Dementia Associate member has evolved. The panel is involved in research, education and public engagement activities conducted by staff and students within the Institute. The motivations for becoming involved are clearly articulated and demonstrate how the personal backgrounds of individuals have driven the collective involvement and desire to bring about change. The benefits and challenges associated with working as part of a panel are discussed. We conclude by bringing together our experiences as a set of suggestions for others who may wish to create a similar forum to promote the involvement of people living with dementia and former and current care partners

Determination of molecular spectroscopic parameters and energy-transfer rates by double-resonance spectroscopy

The spectroscopy of small to medium-size polyatomic molecules can be extremely complex, especially in higher-lying overtone and combination vibrational levels. The high density of levels also complicates the understanding of inelastic collision processes, which is required to model energy transfer and collision broadening of spectral lines. Both of these problems can be addressed by double-resonance spectroscopy, i.e., time-resolved pump-probe measurements using microwave, infrared, near-infrared, and visible-wavelength sources. Information on excited-state spectroscopy, transition moments, inelastic energy transfer rates and propensity rules, and pressure-broadening parameters may be obtained from such experiments. Examples are given for several species of importance in planetary atmospheres, including ozone, silane, ethane, and ammonia