Un/Composing (Visual) Rhetorics: A (Strange) Comic(s) View of Writing in the Age of New Media

This dissertation finds its exigency in \u27The 9/11 Commission Report,\u27 and specifically its claim that \u27a failure of imagination\u27 that dismisses possibilities relates to the work currently in focus within rhetoric and composition studies as it relates to writing (with) new media. My argument relies on the underdeveloped concept of `imagination\u27 in composition as a way to argue for an alternate theoretical framework for addressing what writing (with) new media entails as a growing form of art. As such, I take up Geoff Sirc\u27s invitation to `remake\u27 his English Composition as a Happening with all of its references to avant-garde art as conceptualized in Allan Kaprow\u27s figure of the unartist and Dick Higgins calls for intermedia practices. Both of these concepts appear in the unart of comics - an `art\u27 for artists who have left their `homes\u27 in disciplinary iterations of art (unart) and for artists who are more concerned with working between media than they are within a specific medium (intermedia). Comics, as I use the term, does not refer to a specific medium, but works as a form of thought in the Deleuzian sense: a sort of intuition exercised by imagination engaged in the continuous discovery of possibilities. Building on `post-pedagogical\u27 theories of invention--Italo Calvino, Byron Hawk, Cynthia Haynes, Gregory Ulmer--avant-garde writing and art practices (as it relates to new media)--Maurice Blanchot, Andre Breton, Friedrich Kittler, Jean-Francois Lyotard--and institutional rhetorics--Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Bill Readings, Thomas Rickert--I propose a `strange\u27 manner of writing that foregoes the demands of argumentative writing in favor of a playful writing that attunes itself to imaginative possibilities of discovery. To write strangely connotes an unconventional approach to composition that would offer us the opportunities to think about `the coming composition\u27 as we invent new forms and ways of thinking according to methods invented for the occasion. In inventing new forms by thinking in terms of intermedia, we can realize the goal of Lyotard\u27s postmodern writer: to present (allusions to) the unpresentable. If we are to address the `failure of imagination\u27 in institutional practice and in `the scene of teaching,\u27 we need to be willing to be nomadic as both artists AND writers. Comics `artists,\u27 or those who I refere to as unartists, are adept at demonstrating ways in which this work can proceed, especially if we think of comics in terms of Haynes\u27 slash-technology that cuts through the divisions between media. In this dissertation, comics function as a form of thought that extends `multimodal composition\u27 and `art\u27 to their limits in order to suggest a strangely imaginative composition capable of attending to the disast(e)rous `failure of imagination.\u2

Hurst exponents, power laws, and efficiency in the Brazilian foreign exchange market

We find evidence of weak informational efficiency in the Brazilian daily foreign exchange market using Hurst exponents (Hurst 1951, 1955, Feder 1988), which offer an alternative (from statistical physics) to traditional econometric gauges. We show that a trend toward efficiency has been reverted since the crisis of 1999. We also find power laws (Mantegna and Stanley 2000) in means, volatilities, the Hurst exponents, autocorrelation times, and complexity indices of returns for varying time lags.econophysics

Fractal structure in the Chinese yuan/US dollar rate

Price changes of the Chinese yuan/US dollar rate are found to display a Sierpinski triangle in an Iterative Function System clumpiness test. This fractal structure commonly emerges in “the chaos gameâ€, where randomness coexists with deterministic rules. We show that a threshold model with four states, two deterministic and two stochastic is able to replicate the properties of the yuan/dollar returns in general, and the Sierpinski triangle in particular.

Characteristic function approach to the sum of stochastic variables

This paper puts forward a technique based on the characteristic function to tackle the problem of the sum of stochastic variables. We consider independent processes whose reduced variables are identically distributed, including those that violate the conditions for the central limit theorem to hold. We also consider processes that are correlated and analyze the role of nonlinear autocorrelations in their convergence to a Gaussian. We demonstrate that nonidentity in independent processes is related to autocorrelations in nonindependent processes. We exemplify our approach with data from foreign exchange rates.econophysics; central limit theorem; characteristic function; reduced variables; autocorrelation