Decadence on the Silent Screen: Stannard, Coward, Hitchcock, and Wilde

This is the final version. Available from Goldsmiths, University of London via the DOI in this recordIn the final pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library (1988), the figure of Ronald Firbank appears flickeringly in an early home movie: this master of decadent-camp style presents himself, by turns, as a flamboyant entertainer and a Chaplinesque mime, playing up to the camera. It is a fitting tribute because, though Firbank was never really captured on film, cinema defined his own writing, just as his writing would later help to define the aesthetics of filmmakers in Great Britain, Europe, and the US. He was after all a connoisseur of all degenerate and transgressive art forms. This, combined with his love of cinema and a desire to profit from his self-funded novels made him ‘very elated at a letter sent to him by some transatlantic cinema magnate, asking for the film rights of Caprice’. Sadly, the film was never made. But of course it couldn’t have been; as Christopher Fowler reflects, ‘you can’t build a national cinema industry on people hermetically sealed in heavily draped drawing rooms, having peculiar conversations’. Those we recognize as aesthetes and decadents in the mould of the 1890s would not be the ones to bring the principles of their tradition to the big screen. Although a few of these, including Arthur Symons, would recognize the potential of cinema, more would reject any claim it might have to cultural significance – let alone any claim to be a form of art. The decadent tradition reached the screen through figures of the next generation who could make decadence new, restyling it into forms to befit the mass-market appeal of motion pictures

Google Forms with the Graduate School

Register here: https://mtu.libcal.com/event/11376011 Join the Graduate School to learn how we’re using Google Forms to collect information and files from faculty, staff, and students. We’ll share tips on form creation to ensure you get the information you need and how to create workflows for processing the information

An Inquiry into the Causes of Growth in Gross Domestic Product

This study is an inquiry into the causes of growth in nationwide gross domestic product in the United States of America. The primary objective has been to measure the effects of taxation, saving rate and government investment on this important economic indicator. “Taxation” has been broken down into three components; personal income tax, corporate income tax and consumption tax. Personal income tax is separated once again into the highest and lowest brackets to facilitate more incisive analysis of the results. Consumption taxes are decided at the state level which meant that an average national consumption tax had to be calculated for every period in study. An ordinary least squares regression, in keeping with econometric studies of this kind, will be the method employed for exploring the relationships of the exogenous variables to the endogenous. This project covers the thirty year stretch between 1977 and 2007, just before the Great Recession. The data for each of the variables have been arranged as indices with the first quarter of 1977 as the base period in all cases. The anticipated outcome, based on the existing research, is that lower levels of taxation and a lower saving rate, will be positively correlated with GDP growth, and that lower levels of government investment will be negatively correlated with GDP growth

Nucella ostrina

The most recent version of this chapter is at this URL. The archival versions of each species description are maintained in the full volumes of the first, second and third editions of “Oregon Estuarine Invertebrates”

Redefining the Origins of Camp: The Queer Correspondence of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Johns Hopkins University Press via the DOI in this recor

Relay exchanges in elite short track speed skating

In short track speed skating, the relay exchange provides an additional strategic component to races by allowing a team to change the skater involved in the pack race. Typically executed every 1 ½ laps, it is the belief of skaters and coaches that during this period of the race, time can be gained or lost due to the execution of the relay exchange. As such, the aim of this study was to examine the influence of the relay exchange on a team's progression through a 5000 m relay race. Using data collected from three World Cup relay events during the 2012-13 season, the time taken to complete the straight for the scenarios with and without the relay exchange were compared at different skating speeds for the corner exit prior to the straight. Overall, the influence of the relay exchange was found to be dependent on this corner exit speed. At slower corner exit speeds (12.01 - 13.5 m/s), relay exchange straight times were significantly faster than the free skating scenario (P < 0.01). Whilst at faster corner exit speeds (14.01 - 15 m/s), straight times were significantly slower (P < 0.001). The findings of this study suggest that the current norm of executing relay exchanges every 1 ½ laps may not be optimal. Instead, varying the frequency of relay exchange execution throughout the race could allow: (1) time to be gained relative to other teams; and (2) facilitate other race strategies by providing an improved opportunity to overtake

Measuring relay exchange kinematics in short-track speed skating using a multi-camera network

To support their targeted improvement of the relay exchange, Great Britain Speed Skating required a tool that could be used to advance knowledge on ‘how to execute the relay exchange effectively’. A tool that measures relay exchange kinematics in representative race scenarios, over its entirety, and with an acceptable level of measurement error (± 0.19 m·s-1). A review of existing measurement solutions found that the Olympic Oval (CAN) multi-camera network was the only tool that came close to meeting this criterion. However, while this multi-camera network satisfied the metrics, scenarios, and scope of relay exchange measurement, its ± 1.53 m·s-1 error exceeded the target measurement error. For these reasons, this thesis developed a multicamera network to measure accurate, two-dimensional, relay exchange kinematics. The literature review identified that the accuracy of the National Ice Centre (GBR) multi-camera network was dependent on five sources of measurement error. Accordingly, a series of investigations quantified how these errors propagated, independently, to errors in relay exchange kinematics. In the case where these errors exceeded the target measurement error, additional studies investigated minimising each error. Using this empirically informed measurement workflow, Monte Carlo simulations showed that the multi-camera network’s total error was ± 0.17 m·s-1. This error was within the target measurement error and significantly less than the benchmark Olympic Oval (CAN) multi-camera network. Investigations into the execution of the relay exchange demonstrated how this reduction in error allowed Great Britain Short-Track Speed Skating to advance knowledge on ‘how to execute the relay exchange effectively’. In turn, supporting the team’s targeted improvement of the relay exchange, and ultimately, their aim of delivering medal-winning performances at the Winter Olympic Games

Walter Pater's Individualism: Philosophical Aesthetics and the 'Elusive Inscrutable Mistakable Self'

It is the individual and not art that is at the heart of Walter Pater’s philosophical aesthetics. Even as Pater realizes the ‘illusive inscrutable mistakable’ nature of the individual under the conditions of modernity, his aesthetics revolve around it. He boldly attempts to reconsider the kind of individualism that will be possible in the wake of modernity, searching within the chaos and ephemera of a Godless universe to seek Man’s raison d’etre within the imagination. Certainly, his idiosyncratic thought is not a system, nor even a consistent vision, so much as a faltering meditation on what kind of individualism is possible under the conditions of modernity. It is a discourse situated at a schism in humankind’s consciousness of itself: on one hand, looking to the philosophies Pater studied carefully -- those of Hume, Kant, Schiller and Goethe, amongst others -- and on the other hand, understanding that the emerging future will require its own conception of reality. With these issues in mind, my study has two main aims. First, it explores the troubled vicissitudes of Pater’s conception of the individual. Second, it argues that Pater has a significant position, not only in the history of literary style, but in the history of ideas, by tracing how his thought interacts with and reconceives the philosophical traditions of British empiricism, German Romanticism and Idealism. Its chapters are organized around six central concerns: the relationship between self and world, the nebulous conceptions of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul,’ sensuality, the body as subject and object, passing time and the eternal moment, and ethics. These issues are considered with reference to the full range of Pater’s essays and imaginary portraits, including his unpublished manuscripts, ‘The History of Philosophy and ‘The Aesthetic Life.’ Their significance is understood within the context of Pater’s intellectual milieu, his own life and their resonances through literary modernism

Effective use of storyboarding as a co-design method to enhance power assisted exercise equipment for people with stroke

Power assisted exercise equipment designed to assist multi-directional movements represent an exercise solution for people with stroke. Users identified digitization of the equipment through a new Graphical User Interface (GUI) to display feedback on exercise performance as a development priority. The Medical Device Technology (MDT) framework was adopted to structure the four-stage digitization programme and ensure meaningful user involvement. This paper reports on stage two of the digitization programme, the aim of which was to create a prototype GUI. Storyboarding followed by participatory data analysis was selected as a co-design method to engage professional (n ¼ 6) and expert (n ¼ 8) end users to create artefacts and express preferences relevant to the design of the GUI. Four overarching themes emerged from thematic analysis of the data; (a) aesthetic format, (b) functional features, (c) exercise programme, (d) motivation and reward. The data was crystallized with external sources to generate a design criterion matrix which directed the first iteration of the prototype GUI. Storyboarding with participatory analysis was an effective method for engaging participants in the design of the GUI and associated user experience. This paper represents a novel application of storyboarding to the MDT framework in user centred digital design

Measuring straight time in elite short track speed skating relays

In short track speed skating, the relay exchange provides an additional strategic component to races by allowing a team to change the skater involved in the pack race. It is thought that during this period of the race, time can be gained or lost due to the execution of the relay exchange. However, the only temporal measurement reported in short track speed skating is lap time, of which the relay exchange accounts for less than 30 %. As such, a more appropriate measurement of relay exchange performance might be the time taken to complete the straight where the relay exchange was executed. The aim of this study, therefore, was to validate a method for measuring straight time during elite short track speed skating relays. The proposed method used a single HD camcorder to create virtual timing gates at the start and end of both straights. To validate the method, straight times measured using the single HD camcorder were compared to synchronised cameras located perpendicular to the virtual timing gates. The root mean square error for both near and far straight times was less than the temporal resolution of the camera. In addition, Bland-Altman plots showed that the single HD camcorder method was invariant to race speed. Collectively, these findings suggest that a single HD camcorder does provide a valid method for measuring straight times during elite short track speed skating relays