Fortnight

Fortnight is a two-week long, fully immersive, experience based in the interactions and communications of daily life. Up to 200 participants sign up to receive messages that are sent to their mobile phones, email, and home address; these messages contain a series of poetic nudges that encourage those participating to question their sense of place. Participants also receive daily invitations to visit locations throughout their city where they can pause to reflect on what it means to be here now. Fortnight enables the experience of “theatre” to penetrate beneath a seemingly brittle aesthetic surface of performance, deep into the consciousnesses of our participants as they begin to interact with and perceive world around us as the performance itself; the place where we act out our own daily lives. In Fortnight, the spectator becomes participant; the journey becomes narrative. Fortnight therefore subverts the notion of an audience, in which each spectator’s perspective is forced to examine not the situation and setting of performers on a stage, but rather the situation and setting of our own sense of place and the meaning we apportion to our everyday lives. Fortnight uses various forms of ubiquitous technology such as: Radio Frequency Identification (aka, RFID tags of the type contained in key fobs), which are used in badges sent to each participant that allow them to interact with real-world “portals” to trigger certain effects in their surroundings; QR technology (in the form of barcodes on posters that reveal additional hidden messages, should the participant choose to delve further; SMS messages; email; and, Twitter. Alongside this, older modes of communication such as handwritten letters, give Fortnight a decidedly low-fi aesthetic. Throughout Fortnight, participants are encouraged to explore the creative possibilities of pervasive and communicative media without reverting to mere technological fetishism. In Fortnight, each mode of communication is used not only for its functionality but also as symbols that bind the project and the participant together, rooting them to the here and now with the everyday tools of modern society. The mediated messages within Fortnight lead participants down a living, breathing rabbit hole where the familiar becomes unfamiliar and reality distorts. The project becomes an experience for the participant that is as immersive as their own life; creating an alternative reality, that not only co-exists alongside their own everyday realities, but also merges with them.This is a performance with shared responsibilities, reflecting the actions and consequences of our daily lives: what we put in, we get out

Beyond Instructions to Disregard: When Objections Backfire and Interruptions Distract

Researchers have proposed many explanations for the replicated finding that jurors often fail to disregard evidence when instructed by a judge to do so. We propose a novel explanation: that the act of objecting may cause the effect because an objection (a) draws attention to the testimony and (b) heightens the perceived importance of the testimony (because of the implication that the objecting party wants to prevent jurors from using it). In previous studies, the act of objecting has always been confounded with the presence of the critical (objected-to) testimony. We devised two new experimental conditions that unconfound these factors. We found that whereas objections increase the use of objected-to (incriminating) testimony, random (non-objection) interruptions decrease use of this testimony. We conclude that, unlike random interruptions, an objection communicates to the jurors that an attorney is concerned about the objected-to testimony, increasing the perceived importance of that testimony

Perspective on Freedom

What is Freedom? The answer to this question depends on who you ask. People\u27s perspectives on freedom depend on one\u27s experiences, culture, and environment. Along with differences in perspectives of liberty between locations, there are differing understandings within the continents studied. Some comparisons drawn explore the effect of occupation, class, gender, and color on one\u27s freedom. Explore what freedom means to those individuals in the interactive map we created using Prezi. Travel the world and see how your idea about freedom differs from those of different experiences, culture, and environment.https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/freedom-movement-fall-2017/1002/thumbnail.jp

Actionable Impact Management Guidebooks: Strategy, Metrics, Data, & Communication

This is a 4-part series of ebooks covering step-by-step social impact measurement, including groundwork, metrics, data, and communication. This guide is designed for functionality and accessibility of content, complete with instruction and activities to work through the process

A Search For Organic Molecules in Intermediate Redshift DLAs

There has been a renewed interest in searching for diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) due to their probable connection to organic molecules and, thus, their possible link to life in the Universe. Our group is undertaking an extensive search for DIBs in DLAs via QSO absorption-line systems. Six of our DLA targets are presented here. Our equivalent width (EW) limits for the 5780 DIB line strongly suggests that DIB abundance is below the Milky Way expected value or that metallicity plays a large role in DIB strengths.Comment: 3 pages; 2 figures; presented at IAU 199; Probing Galaxies through Quasar Absorption Line

Unlocking biomarker discovery: Large scale application of aptamer proteomic technology for early detection of lung cancer

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths, because ~84% of cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Worldwide in 2008, ~1.5 million people were diagnosed and ~1.3 million died – a survival rate unchanged since 1960. However, patients diagnosed at an early stage and have surgery experience an 86% overall 5-year survival. New diagnostics are therefore needed to identify lung cancer at this stage. Here we present the first large scale clinical use of aptamers to discover blood protein biomarkers in disease with our breakthrough proteomic technology. This multi-center case-control study was conducted in archived samples from 1,326 subjects from four independent studies of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in long-term tobacco-exposed populations. We measured >800 proteins in 15uL of serum, identified 44 candidate biomarkers, and developed a 12-protein panel that distinguished NSCLC from controls with 91% sensitivity and 84% specificity in a training set and 89% sensitivity and 83% specificity in a blinded, independent verification set. Performance was similar for early and late stage NSCLC. This is a significant advance in proteomics in an area of high clinical need

Photometric Redshift Probability Distributions for Galaxies in the SDSS DR8

We present redshift probability distributions for galaxies in the SDSS DR8 imaging data. We used the nearest-neighbor weighting algorithm presented in Lima et al. 2008 and Cunha et al. 2009 to derive the ensemble redshift distribution N(z), and individual redshift probability distributions P(z) for galaxies with r < 21.8. As part of this technique, we calculated weights for a set of training galaxies with known redshifts such that their density distribution in five dimensional color-magnitude space was proportional to that of the photometry-only sample, producing a nearly fair sample in that space. We then estimated the ensemble N(z) of the photometric sample by constructing a weighted histogram of the training set redshifts. We derived P(z) s for individual objects using the same technique, but limiting to training set objects from the local color-magnitude space around each photometric object. Using the P(z) for each galaxy, rather than an ensemble N(z), can reduce the statistical error in measurements that depend on the redshifts of individual galaxies. The spectroscopic training sample is substantially larger than that used for the DR7 release, and the newly added PRIMUS catalog is now the most important training set used in this analysis by a wide margin. We expect the primary source of error in the N(z) reconstruction is sample variance: the training sets are drawn from relatively small volumes of space. Using simulations we estimated the uncertainty in N(z) at a given redshift is 10-15%. The uncertainty on calculations incorporating N(z) or P(z) depends on how they are used; we discuss the case of weak lensing measurements. The P(z) catalog is publicly available from the SDSS website.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, single colum

THRIVE elaborated

Introduction to THRIVE Elaborated: Since we published the THRIVE framework a year ago in November 2014 it has generated a lot of interest. We are delighted by this. We want to take this opportunity to clarify and elaborate as relevant, including addressing areas of potential confusion, as well as updating the document in light of our emerging thinking and elaboration of elements of the framework. It is important to note that nothing relating to the central ideas of the framework has been changed

Estimating photometric redshifts with artificial neural networks

A new approach to estimating photometric redshifts - using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) - is investigated. Unlike the standard template-fitting photometric redshift technique, a large spectroscopically-identified training set is required but, where one is available, ANNs produce photometric redshift accuracies at least as good as and often better than the template-fitting method. The Bayesian priors on the underlying redshift distribution are automatically taken into account. Furthermore, inputs other than galaxy colours - such as morphology, angular size and surface brightness - may be easily incorporated, and their utility assessed. Different ANN architectures are tested on a semi-analytic model galaxy catalogue and the results are compared with the template-fitting method. Finally the method is tested on a sample of ~ 20000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The r.m.s. redshift error in the range z < 0.35 is ~ 0.021.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS, 9 pages, 9 figures, substantial improvements to paper structur