Making Dance Modern: Knowledge, Politics, and German Modern Dance, 1890 – 1927

Between 1890 and 1927, a group of dancers, musicians, and writers converged in Germany, where they founded an artistic movement known as German modern dance. This dissertation provides a history of the origins of this movement and its central figures, including Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, Hans Brandenburg, and Valeska Gert. These figures, I show, developed modern dance in an attempt to theorize and transform the social order. With the exception of Gert, this was a social order based upon principles of stability, unity, and consensus, which they developed in performance, pedagogy, and writing through inventive approaches to concepts from Western theatrical music, natural science, philosophy, and politics. Such order, they further demonstrated, could be displayed through the physical movements of the individual dancer, whose dancing body and the knowledge it contained formed a model for the coordinated movement of society. In contrast to many of their contemporaries in artistic and literary modernism, German modern dancers developed what this dissertation labels as “embodied conservatism,” which was an attempt to actively shape society according to principles of physical alignment, harmony, and order. Though embodied conservatism was not a discrete program for politics, by the First World War it became a platform for many issues, ideas, and values of the Weimar political right. Among these issues included questions of human agency and freedom, which dancers such as Wigman and Laban made central to their respective approaches to dance. Though these issues were central to modern dance beginning with Jaques-Dalcroze and Duncan, this dissertation shows how, particularly after 1919, questions about social sovereignty and individual capacity for creative genesis were transformed into questions of national identity perceived as vital to the maintenance of a strong, stable society. This dissertation concludes by arguing that embodied conservatism enabled German modern dancers to conceive of National Socialism as an organic extension of their original vision of social order and harmony

M/G/ oo with Batch Arrivals

OR 169-87 Revised Version. Original copy, WP1932-87 September 1987, also enclosed was submitted to the University of Rochester.Let po(n) be the distribution of the number N(oo) in the system at ergodicity for systems with an infinite number of servers, batch arrivals with general batch size distribution and general holding times. This distribution is of impotance to a variety of studies in congestion theory, inventory theory and storage systems. To obtain this distribution, a more general problem is addressed . In this problem, each epoch of a Poisson process gives rise to an independent stochastic function on the lattice of integers, which may be viewed as a stochastic impulse response. A continuum analogue to the lattice process is also provided

The bivariate maximum process and quasi-stationary structure of birth-death processes

AbstractLet N(t) be a birth-death process on {0,1,…} with state 0 reflecting and let qTK be the quasi-stationary distribution of the truncated process on {0,1,…, K} with λK > 0. It is shown that the sequence (qTK) increases stochastically with K. The bivariate Markov chain (M(t), N(t)) where M(t)=max0≤t′≤tN(t′) is studied as a stepping stone to the proof of the result

On exponential ergodicity and spectral structure for birth-death processes, II

AbstractIn Part I, Feller's boundary theory was described with simple conditions for process classification. The implications of this boundary classification scheme for spectral structure and exponential ergodicity are examined in Part II. Conditions under which the spectral span is finite or infinite are established. A time-dependent norm is exhibited describing the exponentiality of the convergence and its uniformity. Specific systems are discussed in detail: Contents:1.7. Spectral structure for the M/M/I process2.8. Exponential ergodicity for processes with entrance, exit, and regular boundaries3.9. Exponential ergodicity for processes with natural boundaries4.10. Uniformity of exponential convergence5.11. Finite and Infinite spectral span6.12. Skip-free processes on the full lattic

Families of infinitely divisible distributions closed under mixing and convolution

Certain families of probability distribution functions maintain their infinite divisibility under repeated mixing and convolution. Examples on the continuum and lattice are given. The main tools used are Polya's criteria and the properties of log-convexity and complete monotonicity. Some light is shed on the relationship between these two properties

The Compensation Method Applied to a One-Product Production Inventory Problem

This paper considers a one-product, one-machine production/inventory probelm. Demand requests for the product are governed by a Poisson process with demand size being an exponential random variable. The production facility may be in production or idle; while in production, the facility produces continuously at a constant rate. The objective is to minimize system costs consisting of setup costs, inventory holding costs, and backorder costs. Given a two-critical-number policy, the problem is analyzed as a constrained Markov process using the compensation method. The policy space may then be searched to find the optimal policy.Research supported, in part, by the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-75-C-0556

Extended Vacation Systems and the Universality of the M/G/1/K Blocking Formula

A simple blocking formula B(K) = (1 - p)EK [1 - pEK]- 1 relates the probability of blocking for the finite capacity M/G/1/K to EK, the steady state occupancy tail probability of the same system with infinite capacity. The validity of this formula is demonstrated for M/G/1 vacation systems augmented by an idle state, an umbrella for a host of priority systems and vacation systems related to M/G/1. A class of occupancy level dependent vacation systems introduced are shown to require a variant of this blocking formula

Networks of Non-homogeneous M/G/oo Systems

For a network of G/oo service facilities, the transient joint distribution of the facility populations is found to have a simple Poisson product form with simple explicit formula for the means. In the network it is assumed that: a) each facility has an infinite number of servers; b) the service time distributions are general; c) external traffic is non-homogenous in time; d) arrivals have random or deterministic routes through the network possibly returning to the same facility more than once; e) arrivals use the facilities on their route sequentially or in parallel (as in the case of a circuit switched telecommunication network). The results have relevance to communication networks and manufacturing systems