Instant Canons: Film Festivals, Film Criticism, and the Internet in the Early Twenty-First Century

Film festivals have been major events on the yearly film calendar since the first international festival at Venice in 1938. A handful of events--Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Rotterdam, among others--have traditionally dominated discussion, although there are several parallel circuits within the festival world that generate different types and degrees of discourse among critics and audiences. Popular film criticism, concurrent with the recent crisis in print journalism, has undergone a broad shift toward the online sphere during the first decade of the twenty-first century, which has engendered new forms of criticism and consensus, such as the review aggregator. This thesis examines online reviews of two festival films--Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) and The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, 2011)--at three North American film festivals: the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Portland International Film Festival. I show that the critical narrative for each film revolves around a few dominant discussion points, but the difference between them also highlights the implicit power structures at play within the festival world. However, in conclusion, I delineate the ways in which these films retain the ability to be read for ideological content, since online discussion has only tended to allow for readings based in narrative and aesthetics

The Chenega Project

A young Furman graduate spends a year in Alaska, recording the culture and traditions of a small but proud community

Development of Ice Releasing Epoxy-Siloxane Marine Coatings

In this study, epoxy-siloxane coatings were prepared and modified using various polysiloxane oil additives with the goal of developing an ice releasing epoxy-siloxane coating. Contact angle, surface energy, and ice adhesion tests were conducted to study the effect each oil additive had on the surface properties of the coatings. Additionally, antifouling and fouling release properties were assessed using two micro-organisms, Cellulophaga lytica and Navicula incerta, and one macro-organism, Amphibalanus Amphitrite (barnacles). The goal of which was to compare the ice and fouling releasing properties of the coatings to see if any correlations could be made between the two. One of the coating formulations yielded lower ice adhesion and barnacle adhesion. The 5% PMDM-010s, coating with oil containing 8-12% phenylmethylsiloxane and 88-92% dimethylsiloxane, showed improved properties compared to the base coating and outperformed the other coating formulations that containing oils of different composition

Reimagining the “Team Four Plan” with an Eye Toward Community Collaboration and Private Capital

When first introduced to St. Louis residents, the Team Four Plan, and its underlying policy of urban triage, shook the city. Reprimanding the Plan for its overt endorsement of strategic neglect and corresponding disparate impact, public and local government officials rejected the Team Four Plan’s targeted approach, identifying the Plan’s policies as mere continuations of the racially restrictive real estate practices endorsed throughout the twentieth century. An analysis of modern St. Louis, however, demonstrates the degree to which the Team Four Plan, while never officially adopted, has been embraced by local municipalities in the form of a modern segregation tool—the Missouri Tax Increment Financing statute. Misused across the region, the legislation, though posited as a mechanism for eradicating blight across the state, has served to effectuate Team Four’s most powerful vision by neglecting truly blighted neighborhoods in favor of commercial and residential development for neighborhoods on the brink of tangible economic success. Upheld by the courts and recent legislation, the Act has enabled municipalities’ mistreatment of low-income and largely African American neighborhoods and provides little hope for future use modifications. As such, this Note proposes the implementation of a blight-focused Social Impact Bond, suggesting that private investment replace public hesitation in dealing with deteriorating regions across the city. By way of initial private investment, local municipalities will be able to target neighborhoods most vulnerable to impending blight and rampant vacancy without fear of political backlash or financial restraints, thereby working with private parties to effect true change in the City of St. Louis

Stroke Rehabilitation, Length-of-Stay, and Re-Admission Rates: A Literature Review

Stroke is shown to be a significant U.S. health problem with a profound impact on the nation’s rising healthcare costs (Hall, Levant, & DeFrances, 2012). Longer patient length-of-stay [LOS] and higher re-admission rates have brought consequences to healthcare systems as institutional budgets are unable to reconcile the additional services and the influx of healthcare demands. Through a comprehensive literature review, the author illustrates the general knowledge available on the stroke experience, on stroke care and rehabilitation, and on patient LOS and re-admission rates. The literature review is based on general medical research with a focus on the stroke population. The objectives of the literature review were: (1) to explore the patient and family experience of stroke, (2) to assess stroke rehabilitation services and the recovery process, (3) to evaluate LOS and re-admission rates associated with this population, and (4) to explore areas for improved practice and implications for social work intervention

Generative LSTM Models and Asset Hierarchy Creation in Industrial Facilities

In the evolving field of maintenance and reliability engineering, the organization of equipment into hierarchical structures presents both a challenge and a necessity, directly impacting the operational integrity of industrial facilities. This paper introduces an innovative approach employing machine learning, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models, to automate and enhance the creation and management of these hierarchies. By adapting techniques commonly used in natural language processing, the study explores the potential of LSTM models to interpret and predict relationships within equipment tags, offering a novel perspective on understanding facility design. This methodology involved character-wise tokenization of asset tags from approximately 29,000 entries across 50 upstream oil and gas facilities, followed by modeling these sequences using an LSTM-based recurrent neural network. The model's architecture capitalizes on LSTM's ability to learn long-term dependencies, facilitating the prediction of hierarchical relationships and contextual understanding of equipment tags.Comment: Code available on reques

Public Ownership as a Signalling Device

We study public ownership from the perspective of political economics. A partly partisan government runs a state-owned firm. The number of employees the government wants to hire depends both on economic conditions and on the preferences of the government, both unknown to the electorate. The government's policy towards the state-owned firm gives a signal of its preferences, and may thereby influence the probability that the government is re-elected. As a result, the governance of the firm becomes inefficient and static, in the sense that it does not react adequately to changing economic conditions.

Scaling Near-Surface Remote Sensing To Calibrate And Validate Satellite Monitoring Of Grassland Phenology

Phenology across the U.S. Great Plains has been modeled at a variety of field sites and spatial scales. However, combining these spatial scales has never been accomplished before, and has never been done across multiple field locations. We modeled phenocam Vegetation Indices (VIs) across the Great Plains Region. We used coupled satellite imagery that has been aligned spectrally, for each imagery band to align with one another across the phenocam locations. With this we predicted the phenocam VIs for each year over the six locations.Using our method of coupling the phenocam VIs and the meteorological data we predicted 38 years of phenocam VIs. This resulted in a coupled dataset for each phenocam site across the four VIs. Using the coupled datasets, we were able to predict the phenocam VIs, and examine how they would change over the 38 years of data. While imagery was not available for modeling the 38 years of weather data, we found weather data could act as an acceptable proxy. This means we were able to predict 38 years of VIs using weather data. A main assumption with this method, it that no major changes in the vegetation community took place in the 33 years before the imagery. If a large change did take place, it would be missed because of the data lacking to represent it. Using the phenocam and satellite imagery we were able to predict phenocam GCC, VCI, NDVI, and EVI2 and model them over a five-year period. This modeled six years of phenocam imagery across the Great Plains region and attempted to predict the phenocam VIs for each pixel of the satellite imagery. The primary challenge of this method is aggregating grassland predicted VIs with cropland. This region is dominated by cropland and managed grasslands. In many cases the phenology signal is likely driven by land management decisions, and not purely by vegetation growth characteristics. Future models that take this into account may provide a more accurate model for the region