The South According To Quentin Tarantino

This thesis explores the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of the South and southerners in his films Pulp Fiction (1994), Death Proof (2007), and Django Unchained (2012). In order to do so, it explores and explains Tarantino’s mixture of genres, influences, and filmmaking styles in which he places the South and its inhabitants into current trends in southern studies which aim to examine the South as a place that is defined by cultural reproductions, lacking authenticity, and cultural distinctiveness. Like Godard before him, Tarantino’s movies are commentaries on film history itself. In short, Tarantino’s films actively reimagine the South and southerners in a way that is not nostalgic for a “southern way of life,” nor meant to exploit lower class whites. Tarantino’s application of southerness in his movies are self-reflexive commentaries on “southerness,” assembling them in a postmodern fashion by mixing high and low culture and multiple, even contradictory, genres and images from film history. Tarantino takes traditional southern narratives on their head to reimagine and repurpose generic tropes, making him a pioneer of postsouthern cinema

The German Automobile Paradox

This study compares the performance and reliability of German vehicles sold in the US to those from the rest of the world. The examination uses Consumer Reports’ vehicle road-test performance and predicted reliability from 1994 through 2012. Statistical analysis reveals a contradiction in the two automobile dimensions. The German automobiles had better road-test performance than automobiles from the rest of the world, but the German vehicles’ predicted reliability was much worse

It's not what you play, it's how you play it: timbre affects perception of emotion in music.

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18-30 years, 24 older adults aged 58-75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors

Gravity Duals of Lifshitz-like Fixed Points

We find candidate macroscopic gravity duals for scale-invariant but non-Lorentz invariant fixed points, which do not have particle number as a conserved quantity. We compute two-point correlation functions which exhibit novel behavior relative to their AdS counterparts, and find holographic renormalization group flows to conformal field theories. Our theories are characterized by a dynamical critical exponent $z$, which governs the anisotropy between spatial and temporal scaling $t \to \lambda^z t$, $x \to \lambda x$; we focus on the case with $z=2$. Such theories describe multicritical points in certain magnetic materials and liquid crystals, and have been shown to arise at quantum critical points in toy models of the cuprate superconductors. This work can be considered a small step towards making useful dual descriptions of such critical points.Comment: 17 pages, harvmac; v2 comments about behavior of metric near r=0 added (thanks to S. Hartnoll and G. Horowitz

The synthesis of a pyridine-: N -oxide isophthalamide rotaxane utilizing supplementary amide hydrogen bond interactions

The synthesis of a pyridine-N-oxide containing rotaxane, not requiring an additional ionic template, has been achieved in 32% yield. Successful rotaxane formation is dependent upon the structure of the isophthalamide macrocycle used, an observation which has been rationalised by a combination of NMR spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography and computational modelling

Self-rated effects of reading, TV viewing and daily activities on dreaming in adolescents and adults: The UK library study.

The continuity hypothesis of dreaming states that our daily activities like reading books and watching films, movies and shows should be represented in our dreams. The majority of participants in the UK library study (N = 1375) stated that their dreams are affected by their reading and TV consumption, and by their daily activities. The more time they spend with an activity, the more likely they reported an effect of this activity on dreaming. Future studies should use daily logs and dream diaries to validate the present findings. In addition, measures of emotional intensity of the waking life experience and attitude towards dreaming should be included as these factors might have an effect on the continuity between waking and dreaming

Li non-stoichiometry and crystal growth of untwinned 1D quantum spin system Lix Cu2 O2

Floating-zone growth of untwinned single crystal of Li_xCu_2O_2 with high Li content of x ~ 0.99 is reported. Li content of Li_xCu_2O_2 has been determined accurately through combined iodometric titration and thermogravimetric methods, which also ruled out the speculation of chemical disorder between Li and Cu ions. The morphology and physical properties of single crystals obtained from slowing-cooling (SL) and floating-zone (FZ) methods are compared. The floating-zone growth under Ar/O_2=7:1 gas mixture at 0.64 MPa produces large area of untwinned crystal with highest Li content, which has the lowest helimagnetic ordering temperature ~19K in the Li_xCu_2O_2 system.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Topological Phases: An Expedition off Lattice

Motivated by the goal to give the simplest possible microscopic foundation for a broad class of topological phases, we study quantum mechanical lattice models where the topology of the lattice is one of the dynamical variables. However, a fluctuating geometry can remove the separation between the system size and the range of local interactions, which is important for topological protection and ultimately the stability of a topological phase. In particular, it can open the door to a pathology, which has been studied in the context of quantum gravity and goes by the name of `baby universe', Here we discuss three distinct approaches to suppressing these pathological fluctuations. We complement this discussion by applying Cheeger's theory relating the geometry of manifolds to their vibrational modes to study the spectra of Hamiltonians. In particular, we present a detailed study of the statistical properties of loop gas and string net models on fluctuating lattices, both analytically and numerically.Comment: 38 pages, 22 figure

The arithmetic Tutte polynomials of the classical root systems

Many combinatorial and topological invariants of a hyperplane arrangement can be computed in terms of its Tutte polynomial. Similarly, many invariants of a hypertoric arrangement can be computed in terms of its arithmetic Tutte polynomial. We compute the arithmetic Tutte polynomials of the classical root systems $A_n, B_n, C_n$, and $D_n$ with respect to their integer, root, and weight lattices. We do it in two ways: by introducing a \emphfinite field method for arithmetic Tutte polynomials, and by enumerating signed graphs with respect to six parameters