7,033 research outputs found
Manifestos: What Creative Writing Is, Was, and Shall Be
In this letter, we introduce the journal, tell the story of its origin, survey the manifestoes that we publish in this volume, and invite submissions from our readers
Toward a Decolonial Creative Writing Workshop: Mbari as a Case Study in Examining Intercultural Models for Arts Education
The creative writing workshop has been the subject of sustained critique for its tendency to reproduce dominant cultural norms, especially in spaces where admissions to the workshop do not reflect local ethnic and cultural diversity. In an effort to aid the search for alternate models/foundations for creative writing instructions, the authors turn to the history of mbari, a cultural practice among the Owerri Igbo of Nigeria, which was briefly adapted into the pedagogical foundation for a visual arts workshop conducted between the time of Nigeria’s independence and the onset of its civil war. In its original form, mbari was a sacred, collective arts ritual through which practitioners cemented social bonds among diverse groups within the local community. In its later adaptation as pedagogy, mbari became an effort to produce “authentic” local art in a global marketplace. This essay examines the values and local social norms that made mbari so vital for the Owerri Igbo and then teases out cautionary lessons from the appropriation of mbari as a workshop pedagogy. The authors argue that, by examining the successes and failures of previous efforts to adopt “non-western” arts practices into workshop pedagogies, instructors and pedagogues can be more mindful about their efforts to reform the creative writing workshop
Competition and Innovation: Evidence from Financial Services
In this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on competition and innovation by focusing on individual firms within the U.S. banking industry in the period 1984-2004. We measure innovation by estimating technology gaps and find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and the technology gaps in banking. This finding is robust over several different specifications and is consistent with theoretical and empirical work by Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith, and Howitt (2005b). The optimal amount of innovation requires a slightly positive mark up. Also, we find that the U.S. banking industry as a whole has consolidated beyond this optimal innovation level and that state-level interstate banking deregulation has lowered innovation.competition, innovation, stochastic frontier analysis, technology gap ratio, banking
Exploring a search for long-duration transient gravitational waves associated with magnetar bursts
Soft gamma repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars are thought to be magnetars,
neutron stars with strong magnetic fields of order --. These objects emit intermittent bursts
of hard X-rays and soft gamma rays. Quasiperiodic oscillations in the X-ray
tails of giant flares imply the existence of neutron star oscillation modes
which could emit gravitational waves powered by the magnetar's magnetic energy
reservoir. We describe a method to search for transient gravitational-wave
signals associated with magnetar bursts with durations of 10s to 1000s of
seconds. The sensitivity of this method is estimated by adding simulated
waveforms to data from the sixth science run of Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). We find a search sensitivity in terms of
the root sum square strain amplitude of for a half sine-Gaussian waveform with a central
frequency and a characteristic time . This corresponds to a gravitational wave energy of
, the same order of
magnitude as the 2004 giant flare which had an estimated electromagnetic energy
of , where is the distance to SGR 1806-20. We
present an extrapolation of these results to Advanced LIGO, estimating a
sensitivity to a gravitational wave energy of for a magnetar at a distance of .
These results suggest this search method can probe significantly below the
energy budgets for magnetar burst emission mechanisms such as crust cracking
and hydrodynamic deformation
Superactive inhibitors of angiotensin converting enzyme Analogs of BPP9a containing dehydroproline
Development of a Hard X-Ray Polarimeter for Astrophysics
We have been developing a Compton scatter polarimeter for measuring the linear polarization of hard X-rays (100-300 keV) from astrophysical sources. A laboratory prototype polarimeter has been used to successfully demonstrate the reliability of our Monte Carlo simulation code and to demonstrate our ability to generate a polarized photon source in the lab. Our design concept places a self-containedpolarimeter module on the front-end of a a 5-inch position sensitive PMT (PSPMT). We are currently working on the fabrication of a science model based on this PSPMT concept. Although the emphasis of our development effort is towards measuring hard X-rays from solar flares, our design has the advantage that it is sensitive over a rather large field-of-view (\u3e1 steradian), a feature that makes it especially attractive for γ-ray burst studie
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