Tracing/training rebellion - object work in Meyerhold's biomechanics

[First paragraph] Lying in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts in Moscow (RGALI) is a nine-page document entitled Programme of Biomechanics, Meyerhold Workshop (1922). Though modest in size, it is an unashamedly ambitious programme, which sought to redefine acting in a post-revolutionary context and to place performer training in Russia on a par with science. ‘The task of the biomechanical laboratory is to work out through experimentation a biomechanical system of acting and of actor’s training’ (Hoover 1974: 314), the document claims, setting out a dedicated model of Practice as Research, seventy years before the term became common place in the UK

Predicting and Analyzing Gentrification in Atlanta, Georgia

First viewed as an aberration by some when it began to occur in inner cities, the process of gentrification is now common and even significant in U.S. cities, as it runs counter to the urban sprawl that plagues most of them. Gentrification can have far-reaching effects, as it usually involves rising property values and changes in ethnic make-up, and sometimes gives rise to concerns over displacement of original residents and affordable housing. In the context of a broad literature on gentrification which has failed to produce much agreement on its causes or how it works, this research attempts, utilizing census data from Atlanta, Georgia for 1990 and 2000 to attempt to understand how gentrification begins and progresses in a Southern city. I conduct T-tests between gentrifying and non-gentrifying inner city neighborhoods for socioeconomic, housing and geographic characteristics, and then attempt to create a predictive model for where gentrification will occur based on these variables. I then further examine the geography of gentrification and the housing and ethnic make-up of gentrifying neighborhoods in Atlanta. Only one housing variable, percent built before 1940, and no socioeconomic variables were significant in the model. The significance of this variable, coupled with the overall difficulty in predicting gentrification, confirmed that various forms of gentrification are taking place in Atlanta, with older housing in some areas being cleared by development companies to make way for large multifamily housing developments, and in others being renovated one by one. Significantly, this research found that geography has an important role in the process, with clustering of gentrifying neighborhoods probably as a result of diffusion from maturing gentrified neighborhoods. Despite Atlanta’s sizable African-American middle class, the data did not indicate African-Americans playing a larger role in gentrification there during the 1990s. Along with these findings, this study confirms the need for further research on the ways gentrification starts, progresses, and affects the people involved

Post-training unilateral amygdala lesions selectively impair contextual fear memories.

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) are both structures with key roles in contextual fear conditioning. During fear conditioning, it is postulated that contextual representations of the environment are formed in the hippocampus, which are then associated with foot shock in the amygdala. However, it is not known to what extent a functional connection between these two structures is required. This study investigated the effect on contextual and cued fear conditioning of disconnecting the BLA and dHPC, using asymmetrically placed, excitotoxic unilateral lesions. Post-training lesions selectively impaired contextual, but not cued, fear, while pretraining lesions resulted in a similar but nonsignificant pattern of results. This effect was unexpectedly observed in both the contralateral disconnection group and the anticipated ipsilateral control, which prompted further examination of individual unilateral lesions of BLA and dHPC. Post-training unilateral dHPC lesions had no effect on contextual fear memories while bilateral dHPC lesions and unilateral BLA lesions resulted in a near total abolition of contextual fear but not cued conditioned fear. Again, pretraining unilateral BLA lesions resulted in a strong but nonsignificant trend to the impairment of contextual fear. Furthermore, an analysis of context test-induced Fos protein expression in the BLA contralateral to the lesion site revealed no differences between post-training SHAM and unilateral BLA lesioned animals. Therefore, post-training unilateral lesions of the BLA are sufficient to severely impair contextual, but not cued, fear memories

Materialising the Unseen: The Multisensory Cinema of the Invisible Body

The long century of western cinema has produced numerous depictions of invisible bodies – those bodies that function as any other, save for the distinctive feature of their invisibility. The invisible body challenges conventions of cinematic production, presentation and reception, suggesting an ‘extra-visual’ cinema. But, as well as this, the invisible body also challenges conceptions of the limits and categorisation of the human sensorium. In tracing a sensory history of invisible bodies, this thesis is concerned with how such depictions connect with and contribute to constructions of the senses in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis thus makes an original contribution to knowledge by asking: What kind of history of the senses can be found in the onscreen invisible body? In doing so, this thesis engages a film theory of the senses that asks what the depiction of the invisible body – itself a delicate cultural construction that has no direct equivalent in nature – brings to a cultural understanding of the modern sensorium. Chapter One introduces the sensualities of the invisible body in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924). Chapter Two connects the imagery of The Invisible Man cycle (1933–1951) with a tendency towards sensory reconfiguration. Chapter Three addresses a Cold War phase of invisible extraterrestrials in terms of technologised sensory extension. Chapter Four identifies the late twentieth-century onscreen invisible body as representative of a reconstituted social sensorium. Finally, Chapter Five analyses sequences from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), interpreting invisible embodiment in relation to the disorientations of both pain and intersensoriality. Through my approach, I connect the multisensory with the multidisciplinary, identifying the unsettling character of the onscreen invisible body as a consequence of its taxonomical unsettling of sensory and media boundaries

Scalable Bayesian Time Series Modelling for Streaming Data

Ph. D. ThesisUbiquitous cheap processing power and reduced storage costs have led to increased deployment of connected devices used to collect and store information about their surroundings. Examples include environmental sensors used to measure pollution levels and temperature, or vibration sensors deployed on machinery to detect faults. This data is often streamed in real time to cloud services and used to make decisions such as when to perform maintenance on critical machinery, and monitor systems, such as how interventions to reduce pollution are performing. The data recorded at these sensors is unbounded, heterogeneous and often inaccurate, recorded with different sampling frequencies, and often on irregular time grids. Connection problems or hardware faults can cause information to be missing for days at a time. Additionally, multiple co-located sensors can report different readings for the same process. A exible class of dynamic models can be used to ameliorate these issues and used to smooth and interpolate the data. Irregularly observed time series can be conveniently modelled using state space models with a continuous time latent-state represented by di usion processes. In order to model the wide array of different environmental sensors the observation distributions of these dynamic models are exible, in all cases particle filtering methods can be used for inference and in some cases the exact Kalman filter can be used. The models along with a binary composition operator form a semigroup, making model composition and reuse straightforward. Heteroskedastic time series are accounted for by using a factor structure to model a full-rank time-dependent system noise matrix for the dynamic models which can account for changes in variance and the correlation structure between each time series in a multivariate model. Finally, to model multiple nearby sensors a dynamic model is used to model a time-dependent common mean and a time-invariant Gaussian process can account for the spatial variation between the sensors. Functional programming in Scala is used to implement these time series models. Functional programming provides a unified principled API (application programming interface) for interacting with different collection types using higher order functions. This, combined with the type-class pattern, makes it possible to write inference algorithms once and deploy them locally using serial collections and later on unbounded time series data using libraries such as Akka streams using techniques from functional reactive programming

Labor-Management Cooperation: Bath Iron Works\u27s Bold New Approach

An increasing number of employers and unions have found that the best way to compete in the marketplace and secure both profits for the firm and good jobs for workers is through cooperative worker-management relations. As Americans obtain more education, and with the changing nature of some work, employers increasingly find it appropriate to rearrange responsibilities and tasks to employees, who work sometimes as teams and other times as individuals. For their part, more highly educated employees express greater desire to participate in workplace decisions and have the knowledge and competence to undertake more tasks at the workplace. It is clearer now than in the past that creating value at the workplace is the joint responsibility of management and labor. To compete in the world market, Bath Iron Works must change. We must expand our vision to look at the big picture, instead of focusing on just a small piece of the world. In order to achieve the significant improvements necessary to better our performance on naval contracts, as well as enable us to enter into the commercial/industrial market, we must develop a rational plan that allows us to be the most efficient and competitive manufacturing organization in the world

On the transition from reconsolidation to extinction of contextual fear memories.

Retrieval of an associative memory can lead to different phenomena. Brief reexposure sessions tend to trigger reconsolidation, whereas more extended ones trigger extinction. In appetitive and fear cued Pavlovian memories, an intermediate "null point" period has been observed where neither process seems to be engaged. Here we investigated whether this phenomenon extends to contextual fear memory. Adult rats were subjected to a contextual fear conditioning paradigm, reexposed to the context 2 d later for 3, 5, 10, 20, or 30 min, with immediate injections of MK-801 or saline following reexposure, and tested on the following day. We observed a significant effect of MK-801 with the 3- and 30-min sessions, impairing reconsolidation and extinction, respectively. However, it did not have significant effects with 5-, 10-, or 20-min sessions, even though freezing decreased from reexposure to test. Further analyses indicated that this is not likely to be due to a variable transition point at the population level. In conclusion, the results show that in contextual fear memories there is a genuine "null point" between the parameters that induce reconsolidation and extinction, as defined by the effects of MK-801, although NMDA receptor-independent decreases in freezing can still occur in these conditions

A Visual Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Nexium Prescription Drug Advertisements According to the Methodology of Sonja Foss

Direct‐to‐consumer advertising has gathered much negative attention. It’s purpose is filled with questions of ethics and legitimacy. This analytical study takes a deeper look into the advertisements that promote prescription drugs. The advertisements can be seen at the flip of a magazine, click of a button, or a walk down the road. The methodology for analyzing visual images according to Sonja Foss provided a framework to provide results. This preliminary study found evident problems in the drug advertising industry. Further research was beckoned due to the findings of this exploratory project