Robert Browning, playwright : an analysis of "Strafford" and suggestions for its revaluation : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

Browning wrote Strafford at an early stage in his career. He was twenty-four. He had not long completed Paracelsus, and was working on the composition of his most difficult poem, Sordello. The play did not outlive its premiere season on the stage, playing only four nights to moderate but by no means completely discouraging acclaim and critical review. Like the remaining plays in the canon – there were seven in all – it has fallen into disregard as a closet drama. The play is thus, definitionally, a failure. A revaluation of the play appears timely. Such a revaluation would not necessarily demand its reinstatement on the boards, or as mandatory reading within the closet, but would certainly seek to establish its place within the Browning canon. The exercise would also be worthwhile because it would go some way towards explaining why Browning continued to write for the stage, and towards illuminating the dramatic elements that are characteristic of his "best" poetry : character – specifically 'Character in Action' devices of characterisation diction imagery the substitution of process for action. In some respects, Strafford was ahead of its time. William Charles Macready at his prime, for instance, might have been better equipped to direct it, and might thus have secured for it more immediate acceptance. Browning's approach might have been more in accord with stage requirements. In the realm of fact, however, the play was mounted in a time at which the theatre was in decline. Too little work has been done in considering Strafford in the context of the contemporary theatre, and some space is devoted here to a brief survey of English theatre in the 1830's and '40's. Again, elements can he isolated that point to problems and attempts at solving them in the development of theatre to our own time. Included here might be those of poetic diction in dialogue, motivation of characters, the isolate character, and departures from the Aristotelian norms. In this area, Browning has had little or no influence, and suffers some measure of undeserved neglect. The present intention is to show, in examining Strafford, how Browning approached the theatre: not only the sort of play he wrote, but, by implication, the sort of writing he considered appropriate for stage presentation. This will lead to some estimate of the strengths and weaknesses of the play in performance. It ought also to open up an area of speculation about modern trends in thought and practice in the theatre. Early Victorian theatre presents a paradox. It is at once in a state of grievous decline and sprawling vigour. Some understanding of its conditions and status is necessary to a balanced view of Browning's plays, and will be attempted under the difficulties imposed by access to a plethora of data and a dearth of authoritative judgment. Finally, the major criticism of Browning's theatrical ventures will be reviewed, and this, with the questions raised above, will point towards a revaluation of Strafford in particular, and the remaining plays that Browning wrote, generally

Rural demand for drought insurance

Many agricultural regions in the developing world are subject to severe droughts, which can have devastating effects on household incomes and consumption, especially for the poor. To protect consumption, rural households engage in many different risk management strategies - some mainly risk-reducing and some simply coping devices to protect consumption once income has been lost. An important limitation of these traditional risk management strategies is their inability to insure against covariate risks and they are also costly.. The absence of formal credit and insurance institutions, which offer an efficient alternative by overcoming regional covariance problems and reducing the cost of risk management, amounts to a market failure. Past research has paid much more attention to the supply-side reasons for this market failure than to the demand side question of whether there exist financial instruments that farmers want and would be willing to pay for. The authors use a dynamic household model to examine the efficiency of drought management strategies used by peasant households. An attractive feature of the method is that it exploits actual production (input-output) data and does not deal with the usually unreliable data on household consumption and leisure activities. The model is applied to a two-year panel of data on households from five villages in Tamil Nadu (South India). The sample is small, but the data are special, as one of the two years was a severe drought year. The results indicate that agricultural households exhibit significant risk-avoidance bahavior, and that even though they may use a range of risk management strategies, there still remains an unmet demand for insurance against drought risks. The study did not estimate the likely costs of supplying drought insurance, but the latent demand in the study region is strong enough to more than cover the breakeven rate of approximately the pure risk cost (the probability of drought) plus 5 percent administration costs. The findings confirm the inadequacies of traditional strategies of coping with droughts in poor rural areas. Because of the catastrophic and simultaneous effects of droughts on all households over large areas, there is limited scope for spreading risks effectively at the local level. Either households must increase their savings significantly (a problem with low average incomes and an absence of safe and convenient savings instruments), or more effective risk management aids are needed that can overcome the covariation problem. Improved financial markets (with both credit and savings facilities) could be helpful, particularly if they intermediate over a larger and more diverse economic base than the local economy. Alternatively, formal drought insurance in the form of a drought (or rainfall) lottery might be feasible, and the results suggest that it could be sold on a full-cost basis.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers

A High-Speed Fish Evisceration System (FES) for Bycatch and Underutilized Fish Stocks

Development of a high-speed and high-yield water-powered fish evisceration system (FES) to efficiently preprocess small fish and bycatch for producing minced fish meat is described. The concept of the system is propelling fish in a stream of water through an arrangement of cutting blades and brushes. Eviscerated fish are separated from the viscera and water stream in a dual screen rotary sieve. The FES processed head off fish, weighing 170–500 g, at the rate of 300 fish/min when used with an automatic heading machine. Yields of mince produced from walleye pollock, Theragra chalcogramma; and Pacific whiting, Merluccius productus; processed by the FES ranged between 43% and 58%. The maximum yield of minced muscle from fish weighing over 250 g was 52%, and the yield of 250 g was 58%. Test results indicated that surimi made from minced meat recovered from fish processed with the FES was comparable in quality to commercial grade surimi from conventional systems. Redesigned for commercial operation in the Faeroe Islands (Denmark), the system effectively processed North Atlantic blue whiting, Micromesistius poutassou, with an average weight of 110 g at a constant rate of 500–600 fish/min, producing deboned mince feeding a surimi processing line at a rate of 2.0 t/h. Yields of mince ranged from 55% to 63% from round fish. Surimi made from the blue whiting mince meat produced by the FES was comparable to surimi commercially produced from blue whiting by Norway and France and sold into European markets

Implanting Life-Cycle Privacy Policies in a Context Database

Ambient intelligence (AmI) environments continuously monitor surrounding individuals' context (e.g., location, activity, etc.) to make existing applications smarter, i.e., make decision without requiring user interaction. Such AmI smartness ability is tightly coupled to quantity and quality of the available (past and present) context. However, context is often linked to an individual (e.g., location of a given person) and as such falls under privacy directives. The goal of this paper is to enable the difficult wedding of privacy (automatically fulfilling users' privacy whishes) and smartness in the AmI. interestingly, privacy requirements in the AmI are different from traditional environments, where systems usually manage durable data (e.g., medical or banking information), collected and updated trustfully either by the donor herself, her doctor, or an employee of her bank. Therefore, proper information disclosure to third parties constitutes a major privacy concern in the traditional studies

Balancing smartness and privacy for the Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) will introduce large privacy risks. Stored context histories are vulnerable for unauthorized disclosure, thus unlimited storing of privacy-sensitive context data is not desirable from the privacy viewpoint. However, high quality and quantity of data enable smartness for the AmI, while less and coarse data benefit privacy. This raises a very important problem to the AmI, that is, how to balance the smartness and privacy requirements in an ambient world. In this article, we propose to give to donors the control over the life cycle of their context data, so that users themselves can balance their needs and wishes in terms of smartness and privacy

The Labour movement in Nottingham 1880-1918

This study of the Labour Movement in Nottingham 1880-1918 sets out to examine the development in size, self confidence and influence of the working class institutions built by the men and women workers of Nottingham in a period when Socialism in all its variegated forms was becoming the established philosophy of the British working class.Attention is given to the manner in which the Nottingham workers responded to the specific threats and challenges of the period. The main concern of the thesis, however, is to try to understand how it was that although in 1873 the vangard of the local labour movement could earn for Nottingham the description of "advanced" or ''banner town", its developed mass movement was in 1918 being described as "the despair of labour politicians".Part of the explanation for this seeming paradox, it is suggested lies in demographic factors which, up until the First World War, gave'control of the Trades Council to an alliance ot aristocratic lace workers and newly urbanised colliers who tor many years were politically dominated by Liberal coal owners. It is also argued that political "accidents" of personality and geographical factors which ensured that Parliamentary "two member" alliances could not be struck with the Liberals need to be taken into consideration.Less certainly, the geological conditions of the Nottinghamshire coalfield which may have dampened the militancy of the mining community are pointed to as a possible retarding factor. Similarly, it is argued that the appeal of protectionism for some lace workers, and the a-political or anti-political attitudes of the exceptionally large female proletariat were together with the attitudes of the casual poor important special elements in the Nottingham situation which helped to explain its relative backwardness

Structural design of an in-line bolted joint for the space shuttle solid rocket motor case segments

Results of a structural design study of an in-line bolted joint concept which can be used to assemble Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor (SRM) case segments are presented. Numerous parametric studies are performed to characterize the in-line bolted joint behavior as major design variables are altered, with the primary objective always being to keep the inside of the joint (where the O-rings are located) closed during the SRM firing. The resulting design has 180 1-inch studs, an eccentricity of -0.5 inch, a flange thickness of 3/4 inch, a bearing plate thickness of 1/4 inch, and the studs are subjected to a preload which is 70% of ultimate. The mass penalty per case segment joint for the in-line design is 346 lbm more than the weight penalty for the proposed capture tang fix