Prejudice in Venus Traces the Roots of Black Female Iconography

This paper aims to verify how a ‘freak’ show performer named The Venus Hottentot of the early 1800’s in England and in France, came to symbolize the sexualized view of the black female icon today. My thesis production of Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Venus will demonstrate how Eurocentric prejudice in the colonial era shaped the historical facts that permeated around this South African woman’s life and death. In keeping with the play’s revised Afrocentric perspective on these alleged facts, ideas about directorial concepts for this show will validate how this play is relevant to contemporary artists and audiences through Parks’ elegant storytelling. This potential narrative of victimization, that could easily come off as maudlin, will be proven to require a sardonic political edge in order to succeed. The director’s challenges and premise, the writer’s background, the play’s roots in truth and fiction, along with production hurdles to overcome will all be discussed

DTIME: Discrete Topological Imaging for Multipath Environments

This report is presented to summarize work completed under a DARPA seedling project for the imaging of urban environments, using radio multipath measurements and topology extraction algorithms. This report provides an overview of the mathematical theory behind the work, as well as a description of the simulation and results that accompanies the theory

“Magic Portraits Drawn by the Sun”: New Orleans, Yellow Fever, and the sense(s) of death in Josh Russell’s Yellow Jack

In ways comparable to the horrors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in 2005, the series of yellow fever epidemics that devastated New Orleans through the nineteenth century were also the result, in part, of the city’s geographical position, its unforgiving climate, and the policies of interested parties; the fever’s awful death toll was likewise accompanied by a grotesque array of sights, sounds and smells. This article will focus upon Josh Russell’s 1999 novel Yellow Jack, which provides a complex portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century city, its fever epidemics, and its conflicting narratives. As well as providing an intense fictional encounter with a formative period in New Orleans’s history, Yellow Jack is a sophisticated study of the role of visual imagery in documenting such horrors, whose prose is steeped in the smells and sounds of the time and place. This article, then, will discuss this novel’s intense engagement with the various “senses” of a very particular Southern place.Dans un certain sens comparables à la tragédie et aux conséquences de l'ouragan Katrina en 2005, les séries d’épidémies de fièvre jaune qui dévastèrent La Nouvelle-Orléans au cours du XIXe siècle furent aussi — du moins partiellement — le résultat de la situation géographique de la ville, de son climat insupportable et de la politique des milieux intéressés; de manière semblable, la rage de cette fièvre ravageuse était accompagnée d’un ensemble grotesque d’images, de bruits et d’odeurs. Dans cet essai, je me limite au roman Yellow Jack de Josh Russell, qui, publié en 1999, trace le portrait complexe de cette ville du milieu du xixe siècle, de ses épidémies de fièvre et de ses récits contradictoires. Yellow Jack ne procure pas seulement une rencontre intense de fiction avec une importante phase historique de la ville mais aussi une étude sophistiquée sur le rôle de la représentation visuelle pour la documentation de telles horreurs, dont la prose est profondément enracinée dans les odeurs et les bruits du temps et du lieu. Cet article traitera donc du profond engagement du roman avec les différentes “modalités sensuelles” d’un lieu particulier des États du Sud

The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice

Contrary to the common wisdom among criminal law scholars, empirical evidence reveals that people\u27s intuitions of justice are often specific, nuanced, and widely shared. Indeed, with regard to the core harms and evils to which criminal law addresses itself-physical aggression, takings without consent, and deception in transactions-the shared intuitions are stunningly consistent across cultures as well as demographics. It is puzzling that judgments of moral blameworthiness, which seem so complex and subjective, reflect such a remarkable consensus. What could explain this striking result? The authors theorize that one explanation may be an evolved predisposition toward these shared intuitions of justice, arising from the advantages that they provided, including stability, predictability, and the facilitation of beneficial exchange-the cornerstones to cooperative action and its accompanying survival benefits. Recent studies in animal behavior and brain science are consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that moral judgment not only has biological underpinnings, but also reflects the effects of evolutionary processes on the distinctly human mind. Similarly, the child development literature provides evidence of predictable stages in the development of moral judgment within each individual, from infancy through adulthood, that are universal across all demographics and cultures. The current evidence does not preclude alternative explanations. Shared views of justice might arise, for example, through general social learning. However, a social learning explanation faces a variety of difficulties. It assumes that individuals will adopt norms good for the group at the expense of self-interest. It assumes an undemonstrated human capacity to assess extremely complex issues, such as what will be an efficient norm. It predicts that the significant variation in circumstances among different groups would give rise to commensurately different norms and variation in the effectiveness of teaching them. It is inconsistent with the developmental data that show intuitions of justice appearing early, before social learning of such complexity is possible. And, finally, a general social learning explanation predicts views of justice as accessible, reasoned knowledge, rather than the inaccessible, intuitive knowledge that we know them commonly to be. Whatever the correct explanation for the consensus puzzle, intuitions of justice seem to be an inherent part of being human and this, in turn, can have important implications for criminal law and criminal justice policy

DYNAMIC TORSO REFLECTION FILTERING FOR INTERACTIVE BINAURAL SPATIAL AUDIO BASED ON BIOLOGICALLY CONSTRAINED IMU DRIFT COMPENSATION

An audio uses information uses a biologically constrained IMU drift compensation for audio spatial rendering to drive a dynamic filtering process to better reproduce the acoustic effects of head on torso orientation on the HRTF

Realism, Punishment, and Reform

Professors Donald Braman, Dan Kahan, and David Hoffman, in their article Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism, to be published in an upcoming issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, critique a series of our articles: Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=932067), The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice (http://ssrn.com/abstract=952726), and Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy (http://ssrn.com/abstract=976026). Our reply, here, follows their article in that coming issue. As we demonstrate, they have misunderstood our views on, and thus the implications of, widespread agreement about punishing the core of wrongdoing. Although much of their attack is therefore misplaced, important disagreements may remain concerning: whether there is a meaningful difference between core and non-core cases; whether judgments about core cases are less malleable than judgments about non-core cases; and whether imposing punishments perceived to be unjust imposes, in turn, significant costs on the criminal justice system. Which of the disputed views is correct can have important implications for the administration of criminal justice. Far from being anti-reformists, as accused, we argue that Reform Realism is the most effective path to bringing about needed reforms

Mathematical analysis of a model for the growth of the bovine corpus luteum

The corpus luteum (CL) is an ovarian tissue that grows in the wound space created by follicular rupture. It produces the progesterone needed in the uterus to maintain pregnancy. Rapid growth of the CL and progesterone transport to the uterus require angiogenesis, the creation of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones, a process which is regulated by proteins that include fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2).\ud \ud In this paper we develop a system of time-dependent ordinary differential equations to model CL growth. The dependent variables represent FGF2, endothelial cells (ECs), luteal cells, and stromal cells (like pericytes), by assuming that the CL volume is a continuum of the three cell types. We assume that if the CL volume exceeds that of the ovulated follicle, then growth is inhibited. This threshold volume partitions the system dynamics into two regimes, so that the model may be classified as a Filippov (piecewise smooth) system.\ud \ud We show that normal CL growth requires an appropriate balance between the growth rates of luteal and stromal cells. We investigate how angiogenesis influences CL growth by considering how the system dynamics depend on the dimensionless EC proliferation rate, p5. We find that weak (low p5) or strong (high p5) angiogenesis leads to ‘pathological’ CL growth, since the loss of CL constituents compromises progesterone production or delivery. However, for intermediate values of p5, normal CL growth is predicted. The implications of these results for cow fertility are also discussed. For example, inadequate angiogenesis has been linked to infertility in dairy cows