Weimar Anxieties Through Avant Garde Short Film

One of the clearest ways to understand a society and the held mentalities and beliefs over time is through film. The era of the Weimar Republic in Germany through the lens of film shows a society not just rooted in political and post-war fear, but anxiety of changing gender roles and norms in culture. The heavily edited and cut up style of dada in Berlin from artists like Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann act as representations of the held mentalities of fear and anxiety during the Weimar Republic. ‘Kunst an Kunst’, translated into English as ‘Art on Art’, recreates the style and form of Berlin dada art through collage in the medium of film. Following the creative endeavors of Berlin Dadaists, ‘Kunst an ‘Kunst’ heavily plays into the themes of gender roles, fear of modernity, and New Objectivity. By sampling films from German dada directors like Hans Richter, along with other Avant Garde short films of the time and radio plays of the era, this heavily edited and constructed art film displays the same fears and anxieties that controlled Germany from the years 1919 to 1933

Effect of air-entry angle on performance of a 2-stroke-cycle compression-ignition engine

An investigation was made to determine the effect of variations in the horizontal and vertical air-entry angles on the performance characteristics of a single-cylinder 2-stroke-cycle compression-ignition test engine. Performance data were obtained over a wide range of engine speed, scavenging pressure, fuel quantity, and injection advance angle with the optimum guide vanes. Friction and blower-power curves are included for calculating the indicated and net performances. The optimum horizontal air-entry angle was found to be 60 degrees from the radial and the optimum vertical angle to be zero, under which conditions a maximum power output of 77 gross brake horsepower for a specific fuel consumption of 0.52 pound per brake horsepower-hour was obtained at 1,800 r.p.m. and 16-1/2 inches of Hg scavenging pressure. The corresponding specific output was 0.65 gross brake horsepower per cubic inch of piston displacement. Tests revealed that the optimum scavenging pressure increased linearly with engine speed. The brake mean effective pressure increased uniformly with air quantity per cycle for any given vane angle and was independent of engine speed and scavenging pressure

Anatomical substrates and neurocognitive predictors of daily numerical abilities in mild cognitive impairment.

Patients with mild cognitive impairment experience difficulties in mathematics that affect their functioning in the activities of everyday life. What are the associated anatomical brain changes and the cognitive correlates underlying such deficits? In the present study, 33 patients with Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI) and 29 cognitively normal controls underwent volumetric MRI, and completed the standardized battery of Numerical Activities of Daily Living (NADL) along with a comprehensive clinical neuropsychological assessment. Group differences were examined on the numerical tasks and volumetric brain measures. The gray (GM) and white matter (WM) volume correlates were also evaluated. The results showed that relative to controls, the MCI group had impairments in number comprehension, transcoding, written operations, and in daily activities involving time estimation and money usage. In the volumetric measures, group differences emerged for the transcoding subtask in the left insula and left superior temporal gyrus. Among MCI patients, number comprehension and formal numerical performance were correlated with volumetric variability in the right middle occipital areas and right frontal gyrus. Money-usage scores showed significant correlations with left mesial frontal cortex, right superior frontal and right superior temporal cortex. Regression models revealed that neuropsychological measures of long-term memory, language, visuo-spatial abilities, and abstract reasoning were predictive of the patients' decline in daily activities. The present findings suggest that early neuropathology in distributed cortical regions of the brain including frontal, temporal and occipital areas leads to a breakdown of cognitive abilities in MCI that impacts on numerical daily functioning. The findings have implications for diagnosis, clinical and domestic care of patients with MCI

On the construction of nonnegative symmetric and normal matrices with prescribed spectral data

Nonnegative matrices appear in many branches of mathematics, as well as in applications to other disciplines such as economics, computer science, and chemistry. Since the inception of the fundamental results by Perron and Frobenius, the area of nonnegative matrices have been a fertile field for research. In this dissertation, we consider the problem of reconstructing a nonnegative symmetric or normal matrix based on a knowledge of spectral data. Specifically, our exposition is centered around two facets of the just-mentioned problem. First, we consider symmetric matrices with spectrum [sigma] = {[lamba]1, [lamba]2, . . . , [lamba]n} and corresponding orthonormal set of eigenvectors s1, s2, . . . , sn, such that successive spectral decompositions are nonnegative: Xti=1[lamba]isisTi ? 0, t = 1, . . . , k. We determine the zero-nonzero structure of the si's which correspond to positive [lamba]i's, and provide a complete characterization of the si's in case the above holds for [lamba]1 = [lamba]2 = = [lamba]t = 1 for t = 1, . . . , n. The resulting orthogonal matrices S = [s1, s2, . . . , sn], which we call here extended Soules matrices, are then a generalization of the well-studied class of Soules matrices (henceforth called classical Soules matrices). Among other results, we also prove each extended Soules matrix is the limit of a sequence of classical Soules matrices, and that the rank of symmetric matrices whose eigenvectors form an extended Soules matrix is equal to the cp-rank of the matrix. The other associated problem is that of characterizing the set of potential [lamba]i's, where [lamba]1 ? [lamba]2 ? ? [lamba]n ? 0, such that the above partial sum nonnegativity is accomplished for a given fixed set s1, s2, . . . , sn. We provide some initial results in this direction, as well as an example of how such an analysis would proceed using certain orthogonal Hadamard matrices. Second, we consider the nonnegative (nonsymmetric) normal inverse eigenvalue problem (NNIEP), which is the problem of determining necessary and sufficient conditions on a list [sigma] of complex numbers such that [sigma] is the spectrum of a nonnegative normal matrix. We give a summary of some known necessary and sufficient conditions for the NNIEP, and present some preliminary results using the somewhat new technique of analyzing the eigenvectors of certain skew-symmetric matrices, and using the result to construct solution matrices for the NNIEP. Using this technique, we are able to give the strongest possible result for the NNIEP for 3 3 matrices, and make some progress on the NNIEP for 4 4 matrices. That our approach has promise is evidenced by the nonnegative normal matrix we construct whose spectrum is [sigma] = {12?2, ?12, 12 + i, 12 ? i}, even though [sigma] satisfies none of the currently known sufficient conditions for the NNIEP

Pilot stars

Navigate memory and the moment by the hunter's moon in the title poem from Sherod Santos' fourth book