Community and The Meal: A Rhetorical Investigation

From ancient Greece to post modernity, the meal as a focal point of community life and a cultural practice, and the meaning of eating, have been the focus for numerous scholarly studies and their rhetorical significance. This dissertation will define how interpersonal communication and the enactment of the meal are rhetorical partners within a community. Cultural differences, communication style, and values affect one\u27s perception of the culture\u27s narrative structure, inclusion and exclusion, private and public space, and civility and incivility practices in relationship to the community. These differences impact the meal, food choices, tastes, and communication style and ultimately shape their rhetorical power to texture community and its practices. This study attempts to answer the question: What are the rhetorical implications of interpersonal engagement within community around the common center of the meal? The purpose of this study is to discover the rhetorical significance of food-related gatherings, particularly the sharing and exchange of foods and beverages as a common center within the community as they promote a rhetorical exchange through interpersonal communication. The application of metaphors is broken down into specific investigations in three primary time frames to determine how food and meal-related artifacts engaged and/or disengaged communities in relationship to the meal in the spheres of rhetorical action of these metaphors. Each historical period will have a geographical focus. For example, ancient civilizations will broadly focus on the influences of ancient Greece and its ultimate influence on the communication style of the Romans; the European nations will be included in the Renaissance, and Early America will be included in the Enlightenment period. Modernity and post-modernity will be blended together to explore what influence modern eating styles have had on the family through mediated rhetorical means (e.g., mass communication). The interpretation of the metaphors will be accomplished through interpretive research applied through a hermeneutic screen. People in situations are placed in a social life, a culture of their own, and a culture situated in time. The application of hermeneutics will assist the interpretation and understanding of the rhetorical significance of persons in communities while engaging interpersonal communication around the meal. This will include cultural norms and other elements of the context of the meal engagement. Four areas will be explored: create and recreate narratives within which communities are embedded and examine their particular cultural identity; generate inclusion with and exclusion from communities; manifest and differentiate public and private discourse and experience as part of community life; and display and recreate practices of civility and incivility within the community. In each time period, these metaphoric spheres of rhetorical action work somewhat differently because of the different meanings generating the common sense or sensus communis that is operative in the time and place

Global adaptation in networks of selfish components: emergent associative memory at the system scale

In some circumstances complex adaptive systems composed of numerous self-interested agents can self-organise into structures that enhance global adaptation, efficiency or function. However, the general conditions for such an outcome are poorly understood and present a fundamental open question for domains as varied as ecology, sociology, economics, organismic biology and technological infrastructure design. In contrast, sufficient conditions for artificial neural networks to form structures that perform collective computational processes such as associative memory/recall, classification, generalisation and optimisation, are well-understood. Such global functions within a single agent or organism are not wholly surprising since the mechanisms (e.g. Hebbian learning) that create these neural organisations may be selected for this purpose, but agents in a multi-agent system have no obvious reason to adhere to such a structuring protocol or produce such global behaviours when acting from individual self-interest. However, Hebbian learning is actually a very simple and fully-distributed habituation or positive feedback principle. Here we show that when self-interested agents can modify how they are affected by other agents (e.g. when they can influence which other agents they interact with) then, in adapting these inter-agent relationships to maximise their own utility, they will necessarily alter them in a manner homologous with Hebbian learning. Multi-agent systems with adaptable relationships will thereby exhibit the same system-level behaviours as neural networks under Hebbian learning. For example, improved global efficiency in multi-agent systems can be explained by the inherent ability of associative memory to generalise by idealising stored patterns and/or creating new combinations of sub-patterns. Thus distributed multi-agent systems can spontaneously exhibit adaptive global behaviours in the same sense, and by the same mechanism, as the organisational principles familiar in connectionist models of organismic learning

Casino Stocks and Katrina: An Example of Market Over-Reaction?

How efficient was the market in anticipating the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf coast casino industry? This study uses the event study methodology to investigate the stock market’s reaction affecting equity prices of small casino companies with operations on the Gulf Coast centered on Biloxi, Mississippi. Cumulative Abnormal Returns (CARs) for 1 day, 3 day, and 6 day event windows are examined.. As such the impact of Katrina on stock prices of casino firms in the Gulf Coast is better understood

Divergent confidence intervals among pre-specified analyses in the HiSTORIC stepped wedge trial:an exploratory post-hoc investigation

BACKGROUND: The high-sensitivity cardiac troponin on presentation to rule out myocardial infarction (HiSTORIC) study was a stepped-wedge cluster randomised trial with long before-and-after periods, involving seven hospitals across Scotland. Results were divergent for the binary safety endpoint (type 1 or type 4b myocardial infarction or cardiac death) across certain pre-specified analyses, which warranted further investigation. In particular, the calendar-matched analysis produced an odds ratio in the opposite direction to the primary logistic mixed-effects model analysis. METHODS: Several post-hoc statistical models were fitted to each of the co-primary outcomes of length of hospital stay and safety events, which included adjusting for exposure time, incorporating splines, and fitting a random time effect. We improved control of patient characteristics over time by adjusting for multiple additional covariates using different methods: direct inclusion, regression adjustment for propensity score, and weighting. A data augmentation approach was also conducted aiming to reduce the effect of sparse data bias. Finally, the raw data was examined. RESULTS: The new statistical models confirmed the results of the pre-specified trial analysis. In particular, the observed divergence between the calendar-matched and other analyses remained, even after performing the covariate adjustment methods, and after using data augmentation. Divergence was particularly acute for the safety endpoint, which had an event rate of 0.36% overall. Examining the raw data was particularly helpful to assess the sensitivity of the results to small changes in event rates and identify patterns in the data. CONCLUSIONS: Our experience reveals the importance of conducting multiple pre-specified sensitivity analyses and examining the raw data, particularly for stepped wedge trials with low event rates or with a small number of sites. Before-and-after analytical approaches that adjust for differences in patient populations but avoid direct modelling of the time trend should be considered in future stepped wedge trials with similar designs

Removing Deer Mice from Buildings and the Risk for Human Exposure to Sin Nombre Virus

Trapping and removing deer mice from ranch buildings resulted in an increased number of mice, including Sin Nombre virus antibody–positive mice, entering ranch buildings. Mouse removal without mouse proofing will not reduce and may even increase human exposure to Sin Nombre hantavirus

Rate of carbon sequestration at two thicket restoration sites in

Abstract Ecosystem carbon storage in intact thicket in the Eastern Cape, South Africa exceeds 20 kg/m 2 , which is an unusually large amount for a semiarid ecosystem. Heavy browsing by goats transforms the thicket into an open savanna and can result in carbon losses greater than 8.5 kg/m 2 . Restoration of thicket using cuttings of the dominant succulent shrub Portulacaria afra could return biodiversity to the transformed landscape, earn carbon credits on international markets, reduce soil erosion, increase wildlife carrying capacity, improve water infiltration and retention, and provide employment to rural communities. Carbon storage in two thicket restoration sites was investigated to determine potential rates of carbon sequestration. At the farm Krompoort, near Kirkwood, 11 kg C/m 2 was sequestered over 27 years (average rate of 0.42 ± 0.08 kg C m 22 yr 21 ). In the Andries Vosloo Kudu Nature Reserve, near Grahamstown, approximately 2.5 kg C/m 2 was sequestered over 20 years (0.12 ± 0.03 kg C m 22 yr 21 ). Slower sequestration in the Kudu Reserve was ascribed to browsing by black rhinoceros and other herbivores, a shallower soil and greater stone volumes. Planting density and P. afra genotype appeared to affect sequestration at Krompoort. Closely-packed P. afra planting may create a positive feedback through increased infiltration of rainwater. The rate of sequestration at Krompoort is comparable to many temperate and tropical forests. Potential earnings through carbon credits are likely to rival forestplanting schemes, but costs are likely to be less due to the ease of planting cuttings, as opposed to propagating forest saplings

Thermal Links for the Implementation of an Optical Refrigerator

Optical refrigeration has been demonstrated by several groups of researchers, but the cooling elements have not been thermally linked to realistic heat loads in ways that achieve the desired temperatures. The ideal thermal link will have minimal surface area, provide complete optical isolation for the load, and possess high thermal conductivity. We have designed thermal links that minimize the absorption of fluoresced photons by the heat load using multiple mirrors and geometric shapes including a hemisphere, a kinked waveguide, and a tapered waveguide. While total link performance is dependent on additional factors, we have observed net transmission of photons with the tapered link as low as 0.04%. Our optical tests have been performed with a surrogate source that operates at 625 nm and mimics the angular distribution of light emitted from the cooling element of the Los Alamos solid state optical refrigerator. We have confirmed the optical performance of our various link geometries with computer simulations using CODE V optical modeling software. In addition we have used the thermal modeling tool in COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS to investigate other heating factors that affect the thermal performance of the optical refrigerator. Assuming an ideal cooling element and a nonabsorptive dielectric trapping mirror, the three dominant heating factors are (1) absorption of fluoresced photons transmitted through the thermal link, (2) blackbody radiation from the surrounding environment, and (3) conductive heat transfer through mechanical supports. Modeling results show that a 1 cm3 load can be chilled to 107 K with a 100Wpump laser. We have used the simulated steady-state cooling temperatures of the heat load to compare link designs and system configurations