Weighing up the qualities of independence: 21 grams in focus

At the heart (literally) of 21 Grams (2003) is a concern about questions of identity; of measuring that which seems ineffable – the essence of life, or what makes us distinct, unique as individuals, or otherwise. My aim in this paper is to use the film to attempt a similar, if less lofty, enquiry into the current identity of American independent cinema, a sector that often seems equally resistant to being clearly or definitively pinned down and categorized. 21 Grams is a useful exemplar of a number of significant trends in the contemporary indie sector, including both its situation in the industrial landscape and its most distinctive formal qualities. Industrially, the film lies in a position poised between all-out independence and attachment to the empires of the Hollywood major studio-distribution operations. Formally, and in the intersection between form and content, it also occupies a something of a hybrid position: alternative in some dimensions, especially its narrative structure and the use of hyper-realistic visual textures, but also more familiar-conventional in others, including a storyline that might otherwise seem closer to the stuff of somewhat implausible melodrama. In each case, I suggest, this can be taken as representative of a significant proportion of the American independent sector more widely

Tectonics, volcanism, landscape structure and human evolution in the African Rift

Tectonic movements and volcanism in the African Rift have usually been considered of relevance to human evolution only at very large geographical and chronological scales, principally in relation to longterm topographic and climatic variation at the continental scale. At the more loca1 scale of catchment basins and individual sites, tectonic features are generally considered to be at worst disruptive and at best incidental features enhancing the preservation and exposure of early sites. We demonstrate that recent lava flows and fault scarps in a tectonically active region create a distinctive landscape structure with a complex and highly differentiated topography of enclosures, barriers and fertile basins. This landscape structure has an important potential impact on the co-evolution of prey-predator interactions and on interspecific relationships more generally. In particular, we suggest that it would have offered unique opportunities for the development of a hominid niche characterised by bipedalism, meat-eating and stone tool use. These landscape features are best appreciated by looking at areas which today have rapid rates of tectonic movement and frequent volcanic activity, as in eastern Afar and Djibouti. These provide a better analogy for the Plio-Pleistocene environments occupied by early hominids than the present-day landscapes where their fossil remains and artefacts have been discovered. The latter areas are now less active than was the case when the sites were formed. They have also been radically transfomed by ongoing geomorphological processes in the intervening millennia. Thus, previous attempts to reconstruct the local landscape setting adjacent to these early hominid sites necessarily rely on limited geological windows into the ancient land surface and thus tend to filter out small-scale topographic detail because it cannot be reliably identified. It is precisely this local detail that we consider to be of importance in understanding the environmental contribution to co-evolutionary developments

Who is learning what from student evaluations of teaching?

Student evaluations of teaching (or SET) through anonymous survey forms are a consistent practice in higher education across the world yet research results vary considerably as to the reliability, validity and efficacy of SET. Nonetheless, the widespread use of SET for promotion and tenure decisions ensures that these results are high stakes for tertiary staff. The tension between the purposes of SET (to supposedly improve teaching) and the ramifications of SET results are explored. Staff and students tend to hold very different views of SET and the issue of maintaining high academic standards can be at risk. However, SET can be used as an opportunity for staff and students to work together on issues in teaching and learning that enhance quality for all concerned

Spectacular narratives: Twister, independence day, and frontier mythology

Big-screen spectacle has become increasingly important to Hollywood in recent decades. It formed a central part of a post-war strategy aimed at tempting lost audiences back to the cinema in the face of demographic changes and the development of television and other domestic leisure activities. More recently, in an age in which the big Hollywood studios have become parts of giant conglomerates, the prevalence of spectacle and special effects has been boosted by a demand to engineer products that can be further exploited in multimedia forms such as computer games and theme-park rides, secondary outlets that can sometimes generate more profits than the films on which they are based. These and other developments have led some commentators to announce, or predict, the imminent demise of narrative as a central component of Hollywood cinema. But the case has been considerably overstated. Narrative is far from being eclipsed, even in the most spectacular and effects-oriented of today’s blockbuster attractions. These films still tend to tell reasonably coherent stories, even if they may sometimes be looser and less well integrated than classical models. More important for my argument, contemporary spectaculars also continue to manifest the kinds of underlying thematic oppositions and reconciliations associated with a broadly ‘structuralist’ analysis of narrative. This very important dimension of narrative has been largely ignored by those who identify, celebrate or more often bemoan a weakening of plot or character development in many spectacular features

Following in the steps: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant in the American independent field of cultural production

This paper considers Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) as manifestations of contemporary American independent cinema that, characteristically, balance departures from mainstream/Hollywood convention with the use of frameworks that locate such films as marketable to particular niche audiences. The initial focus is on the use of formal devices, particularly in the very-long take, that mark these films out as distinct from typical mainstream production. Aspects of international art cinema are drawn upon to situate such films within particular regions of the independent spectrum—the latter being understood here as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms a 'field of cultural production', in this case one that stretches from the avant-garde to the margins of Hollywood. Formal analysis is considered in relation to the substantive content of the two films and the specific contexts in which each was produced and distributed, and in relation to the kinds of audiences to which they are likely to be targeted

New multiplicativity results for qubit maps

Let $\Phi$ be a trace-preserving, positivity-preserving (but not necessarily completely positive) linear map on the algebra of complex $2 \times 2$ matrices, and let $\Omega$ be any finite-dimensional completely positive map. For $p=2$ and $p \geq 4$, we prove that the maximal $p$-norm of the product map \Phi \ot \Omega is the product of the maximal $p$-norms of $\Phi$ and $\Omega$. Restricting $\Phi$ to the class of completely positive maps, this settles the multiplicativity question for all qubit channels in the range of values $p \geq 4$.Comment: 14 pages; original proof simplified by using Gorini and Sudarshan's classification of extreme affine maps on R^

Banking and Insurance

This paper studies the economic role of financial institutions in economies where agents' incomes are subject to privately observable, idiosyncratic random events. The information structure precludes conventional insurance arrangements. However, a financial institution -- perhaps best viewed as a savings bank -- can provide partial insurance by generating a time pattern of deposit returns that redistributes wealth from agents with high incomes to those with low incomes, resulting in a level of expected utility higher than that achievable in simple security markets. Insurance is incomplete because the bank faces a tradeoff between provision of insurance and maintenance of private incentives.

Monetary Instruments and Policy Rules in a Rational Expectations Environment

This paper explores the implications of rational expectations and the aggregate supply theory advanced by Lucas (1973) for analysis of optimal monetary policy under uncertainty along the lines of Poole (1970), returning to a topic initially treated by Sargent and Wallace (1975). Not surprisingly, these two "classical"concepts alter both the menu of feasible policy choice and the desirability of certain policy actions. In our setup, unlike that of Sargent and Wallace (1975),the systematic component of monetary policy is a relevant determinant of the magnitudeof "business fluctuations" that arise from shocks to the system. Central bank behavior--both the selection of monetary instruments and the framing of overall policyrespJnse to economic conditions--can work to diminish or increase the magnitude of business fluctuations. However, the "activist" policies stressed by the present discussion bear little (if any) relationship to the policy options rationalized by the conventional analysis of monetary policy under uncertainty. In particular,in contrast to Poole's analysis, money supply responses to the nominal interestrate are not important determinants of real economic activity. Rather, the central bank should focus on policies that make movements in the general price level readily identifiable by economic agents.

Implications of state-dependent pricing for dynamic macroeconomic models.

State-dependent pricing (SDP) models treat the timing of price changes as a profit-maximizing choice, symmetrically with other decisions of firms. Using quantitative general equilibrium models that incorporate a “generalized (S,s) approach,” we investigate the implications of SDP for topics in two major areas of macroeconomic research: the early 1990s SDP literature and more recent work on persistence mechanisms. First, we show that state-dependent pricing leads to unusual macroeconomic dynamics, which occur because of the timing of price adjustments chosen by firms as in the earlier literature. In particular, we display an example in which output responses peak at about a year, while inflation responses peak at about two years after the shock. Second, we examine whether the persistence-enhancing effects of two New Keynesian model features, namely, specific factor markets and variable elasticity demand curves, depend importantly on whether pricing is state dependent. In an SDP setting, we provide examples in which specific factor markets perversely work to lower persistence, while variable elasticity demand raises it.Price levels