Parenting through the Ages: An Investigation into Familial Grief in The Iliad and Modern Times

Undergraduate Textual or Investigativ

Poetic Economics: Phillis Wheatley and the Production of the Black Artist in the Early Atlantic World

This essay reads Wheatley as a key participant in the shifting economic and emotional relationships between artists, audiences, and texts that we now associate with romanticism. To recover facets of the role that the black artist played in the romantic movement(s), I examine three portraits of Wheatley-the poetic spectacle managed by her promoters, the actual portrait that appeared as the frontispiece for her Poems on Various Subjects, and the portrait that Wheatley herself created through her poetry. These portraits chart the tensions that circulated around the figure of the black African artist 111 the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tensions between genius and barbarity, originality and imitation, exteriority and interiority, and artistic expression and commodification. These binaries have often characterized the terrain of Wheatley studies, marking opposing positions and points of contention. I argue for a different way of reading, one that sees the figure of Phillis Wheatley as produced through the interplay of all of these forces within the context of the early black Atlantic. Wheatley and her work exposed both the emphasis on authentic self-expression through art and the ways in which the mental life of the artist became available to the reader as a consumer product. She created a different vision of the black artist than that which commonly circulated in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, one that fused Christian discourse with romantic elements of imagination, Nature, and the poetic sublime, yet remained distant from and somewhat inaccessible to white readers. Keywords: Wheatley, black Atlantic, poetry, romanti

Robust adaptive kinematic control of redundant robots

The paper presents a general method for the resolution of redundancy that combines the Jacobian pseudoinverse and augmentation approaches. A direct adaptive control scheme is developed to generate joint angle trajectories for achieving desired end-effector motion as well as additional user defined tasks. The scheme ensures arbitrarily small errors between the desired and the actual motion of the manipulator. Explicit bounds on the errors are established that are directly related to the mismatch between actual and estimated pseudoinverse Jacobian matrix, motion velocity and the controller gain. It is shown that the scheme is tolerant of the mismatch and consequently only infrequent pseudoinverse computations are needed during a typical robot motion. As a result, the scheme is computationally fast, and can be implemented for real-time control of redundant robots. A method is incorporated to cope with the robot singularities allowing the manipulator to get very close or even pass through a singularity while maintaining a good tracking performance and acceptable joint velocities. Computer simulations and experimental results are provided in support of the theoretical developments

Effect of Mentorship on New Graduate Nurses’ Assertive Communication: An Evidence Review

New graduate nurses are often hesitant to voice safety concerns despite having a responsibility to do so. Lack of assertive communication is counter to institutional and professional standards, and may lead to serious consequences. A search of Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, MEDLINE, PubMed, Nursing and Allied Health, and Google Scholar databases was conducted to answer the question In new graduate nurses, how does participating in a mentorship program compared to no mentorship affect assertive communication during the first year of practice? Inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed articles written in English, and published between 2015 and 2020. Exclusion criteria were books; dissertations; magazines; trade journals; articles in a language other than English; and studies pertaining to tool development, nurse retention only, or populations other than new graduate nurses. John Hopkins Evidence Based Appraisal Tools were used to guide the appraisal of evidence. Limitations to the existing literature include an absence of Level I and II studies, and studies examining incidences of actualized or missed opportunities to voice safety concerns rather than new graduate nurses’ self-reported willingness to report a safety concern. Due to the limited nature of the evidence, the proposed question cannot definitively be answered. However, the evidence is consistent in reporting several findings including the value of supportive environments and employing multiple strategies

Parenting through Pain

Losing a child to death is one of the hardest trials a mother and father can go through. In the natural progression of life, the parent should die first. Unfortunately, many parents must learn how to live without their son or daughter. Tragedies such as this happen more frequently in the Iliad, because of the war raging around Troy. Hector deals with the possibility of not seeing his infant son ever again when he goes out to fight the Greeks, but he pushes down his fears and wishes for his son to have a long, fulfilling life. Thetis is aware that her son is going to have a short life, yet she chooses to assist him as best as she is able. Priam loses his beloved son Hector and has to balance his responsibilities in life with his grief over the death of his son. These interactions between parents and children translate easily into modern life, because working parents have to leave their children every day as Hector did. Similarly, mothers have to care for children with terminal illnesses, which relates to Thetis’s relationship with Achilles, and fathers such as Priam have to deal with the death of their child. These relevant concerns show that the Iliad has themes pertinent to modern civilization. Especially when dealing with parent’s coping with their child’s death and the different reactions to such trials, the Iliad highlights relevant themes which can be applied to contemporary society