Resources for Studying Public Participation in the Arts: Inventory and Review of Available Survey Data on North Americans' Participation in and Attitudes Towards the Arts

This study contains summaries, critical reviews, and access information for 25 studies of public participation in the arts, as well as a chart enabling readers to indentify surveys that contain particular combinations of variables in which they are interested.

Public Opinion and Political Vulnerability: Why Has the National Endowment for the Arts Been Such an Attractive Target?

Federal government arts programs appear to deviate from the rule that legislative behavior closely follows public preferences. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, despite stability in public opinion, the NEA evolved from Congress’s bipartisan darling to its controversial scapegoat. We inspect 55 items from public opinion surveys and re-analyze data from 2 state and 8 national surveys undertaken between 1975 and 1996 to resolve this puzzle. Our conclusions: (1) Arts support is not a salient issue to most voters, leaving legislators relatively unconstrained. (2) Positive responses to general questions about arts funding often mask complex, ambivalent views. (3) The core constituency for federal arts support – college graduates – is difficult to mobilize because their interest in the arts is balanced by skepticism about federal government programs. (4) Opponents of arts spending successfully built on ties to Christian conservative and Republican loyalists to mobilize the stable minorities opposed to the NEA. As a result, arts politics in the U.S. has consisted of a standoff between a committed minority of 15 to 20 percent of the public that strongly opposes federal support for the arts and a weakly committed majority of about 60 percent that favors the federal role.

Public Sentiments Towards the Arts: A Critical Reanalysis of 13 Opinion Surveys

This paper summarizes and reviews studies of public perceptions of and sentiments towards the arts. It provides the first critical synthesis of such research based upon original secondary analyses of thirteen of the major data sets collected between 1973 and 1993. In so doing, it reports on what the surveys tell us about several questions of pressing interest to policy makers and others interested in the role of the arts in American society. To what extent do Americans support government funding of the arts, and from what level of government? To what extent do Americans believe that it is important for children to learn about the arts and that the arts are worthy of inclusion in the school curriculum? To what extent do Americans regard the arts as fundamentally important for the quality of community life, on the one hand, or the domain of a select few, on the other? To what extent do sentiments vary between men and women, African-Americans and Euro-Americans, the highly educated and the less schooled, the old and the young, and the wealthy and the less well off? And finally, what, if anything, can we infer about how these patterns have changed over time?

Calibrating the Hurst Parameter for Rough Volatility Models with Application in the South African Market

It is known that accurate and efficient calibration of any fractional stochastic volatility model is important for trading and risk management purposes. Under the rough Heston model proposed by El Euch et al. (2019), the Hurst parameter governs the roughness of the volatility process. This dissertation explores the different calibration methods used to obtain an estimate for the Hurst parameter, under the scope of the rough Heston model. Three different calibration methods are presented, namely, a Brute Force minimisation procedure, a Neural Network calibration and a Linear Regression procedure. European option prices are simulated from the rough Heston model using the characteristic function pricing approach as in El Euch and Rosenbaum (2019) and numerical techniques, such as the fractional Adams method which are implemented in MATLAB. These simulated prices are then used to test and compare the three proposed calibration methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Thereafter, additional experiments are conducted on South African market data from traded options and the fitted models are compared across the calibration methods used. The results of our numerical experiments are used to justify the nature of rough volatility in the South African options market and recommendations are made on the appropriateness of each calibration scheme in practice. Overall, we find that the performance measured by accuracy on our simulated data of the Neural Network method is similar to the Brute Force minimisation method, whereas the Linear Regression method, is the least accurate. When calibrating on the market data, the results of the fitted models show that both the Neural Network and Brute Force method resembles the market behaviour. All three methods were shown to be suitable in estimating the Hurst parameter and suggesting rough volatility in this South African market

The religion of Oliver Cromwell: with special reference to his conception of providence

Countless biographies and other works have treated Oliver Cromwell as a political figure. Some few have dealt sketchily with his personal religious life as seen in his private letters and the testimony of his contemporaries. Few have considered his impact on his times in the light of his religious experience.This study is an attempt to trace the development of Cromwellls central religious convictions, using especially his conception of Providence as a key to an understanding of his life and work

Public Opinion and Political Vulnerability: Why Has the National Endowment for the Arts Been Such an Attractive Target?

Analyzes public opinion surveys, undertaken between 1975 and 1996, to resolve the puzzle of federal government arts programs appearing to deviate from the rule that legislative behavior closely follows public preferences

CORRELATES OF BLACK PARAMILITARY ACTIVITY: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

One indication of the racial polarization of our society is the rise of black paramilitary organizations. Interviews were conducted with a sample of active members of a black paramilitary organization located in a large Southern city. The young male respondents tended to be alienated, to have records of arrest and imprisonment, and to have served in the armed forces. Yet, they were found to adhere to a Protestant Ethnic and to be fairly representative in terms of economic status. It is suggested that race alone provides the motivation for black paramilitary activities.http://web.ku.edu/~starjrn

A Zero-Gravity Cup for Drinking Beverages in Microgravity

To date, the method for astronauts to drink liquids in microgravity or weightless environments is to suck the liquid from a bag or pouch through a straw. A new beverage cup works in microgravity and allows astronauts to drink liquids from a cup in a manner consistent with that on Earth. The cup is capable of holding beverages with an angled channel running along the wall from the bottom to the lip. In microgravity, a beverage is placed into the cup using the galley dispenser. The angled channel acts as an open passage that contains only two sides where capillary forces move the liquid along the channel until it reaches the top lip where the forces reach an equilibrium and the flow stops. When one sips the liquid at the lip of the channel, the capillary force equilibrium is upset and more liquid flows to the lip from the reservoir at the bottom to re-establish the equilibrium. This sipping process can continue until the total liquid contents of the cup is consumed, leaving only a few residual drops about the same quantity as in a ceramic cup when it is drunk dry on Earth