The Space Between: Performance, the Body and Scholarship

The thesis is concerned with the interrelationships between the body, making sense of experience through performance, and the conceptual and scholarly understanding that people construct around experience. The lens through which these interrelationships are explored is phenomenology, both in terms of phenomenological theory per se and, more specifically, with theories related to performance and pedagogical process. The research question explores the relationship between the body, space/place and digital media through four cycles of participatory action research in which practice and theory are interrelated. The experience of (the body) in space and place is captured and re-created with digital media in the live performance space drawing attention to spatial and temporal anomalies that both de-stabilise and re-affirm what is it to be ‘now’ and ‘here.’ Ideas shift from the determined to the disintegrated, and the body moves between a critical engagement with experience and a pre-reflective and heightened consciousness of ‘being’ in performance – as maker, performer and viewer, and as learner, teacher and researcher. Answers to questions are replaced by gaps and spaces between – in which the known, the not known, and the imagined unfold and become exposed. Experiments shift from the body immersed in and subsumed by technology to the body, live (not mediatised) in performance, and again to the live as mediatised, exposing the phenomena that we encounter. Performance emerges as the body touched, sensed and multi-faceted in an in-between space of inter-relationships, inter-subjectivities and inter-medialities. The body is both fullness and void, coexistent and isolated – in suspense as it hovers and ‘is’ of all worlds. Investigations are devised and delivered, with students as co-researchers, through a teaching and learning model that guides and exposes, disrupts and transforms – creating a pedagogy of instability and discovery in order to reveal new and innovative performance

NEW YORK COURT OF APPEALS CASE COMPILATIONS: PEOPLE V. MUNDO

PEOPLE V. MUNDO (Decided November 19, 2002

Three essays on credit constraints and capital structure

The first essay, Debt Capacity Constraints, Information, and the Pecking Order Model of Capital Structure , investigates why the pecking order model does not appear to describe the financing choices of small and growth firms. The pecking order model predicts debt issues only when a firm has the capacity to absorb new debt and when firm value is relatively predictable. By explicitly controlling for asymmetric information about firm risk, empirical tests support the predictions of the pecking order model for small and growth firms.;The second essay, The Sensitivity of Investment to Internal Funds When the Costs of External Funds Differ , asks whether the observed investment-cash flow sensitivity of financially constrained firms can be explained by relatively high security issue costs. Security issue costs are indicative of credit constraints. The empirical tests suggest that only cash is relatively more important to investment spending for high issue cost firms, but not because of the need for cash to fund planned investment. Cash serves as an indicator of growth opportunities not captured by empirical approximations of Tobin\u27s Q. Further tests demonstrate that commonly used methods to identify financially constrained firms mimic relatively high security issue costs.;The third essay, The Effect of Competitive Structure on the Relationship between Leverage and Profitability , attempts to explain why firms in concentrated industries have different responses of leverage ratios to current profitability. The leverage-profitability relationship is important to distinguishing between the pecking order and trade-off theories of capital structure. The essay examines whether the speed of reversion in profitability affects the leverage-profitability relationship. When U.S. Census data are used to measure industry concentration, the empirical results support the prediction that differences in the leverage-profitability relationship between competitive and concentrated industries is related to differences in the speed of reversion in profitability

An Analysis of Chemithermomechanical Pulp (CTMP) in the Production of Rotogravure Paper

Introduction Current trends in the printing industry are shifting towards rotogravure printing processes. Today, rotogravure printing is responsible for 20% of the printing industry and is growing rapidly. The printing industry is moving towards rotogravure processes for high print quality for long run jobs. The most commonly found examples of the rotogravure printing process are: cheaper catalogues, periodicals, tabloids, directories, newspaper inserts and the Sunday supplement. Some of America\u27s most popular magazines, for example, Reader\u27s Digest, TV Guide, Better Homes and Gardens, Women\u27s Day and many others are printed using rotogravure processes (1). As the main supplier to the printing industry, the paper industry should be aware of current trends in printing. Since the demand for rotogravure paper is increasing with the increase in gravure printing, the paper industry should make an attempt to find an optimal sheet at the lowest possible production cost. If an optimum gravure sheet were found, gravure printers could produce higher quality print. An increase in the print quality of rotogravure sheets would please and encourage advertisers, thus encouraging production rates

How Will Declining Rates of Marriage Reshape Eligibility for Social Security?

For most older people in the United States, Social Security is the major source of income: nine out of ten people age 65 or older receive benefits, which represent an average of 41 percent of their income. Largely as a result of Social Security, poverty rates for the elderly are at an all-time low, just 10 percent. But pockets of poverty persist: older unmarried persons, blacks, and Hispanics experience poverty rates in excess of 20 percent, and over 40 percent of all older single black women live in poverty. People quality for Social Security based either on their work record or their marital status. Most older women receive noncontributory Social Security spouse of widow benefits on the basis of their marital history. For these women, marital status is more important than employment status in shaping old-age financial security. However, the trend to marry and stay married has declined over time in the United States, particularly among black women. This, we hypothesize, means that fewer women will qualify for spouse and widow benefits in coming decades. As a result, Social Security benefits will shrink among the very population that currently reports higher poverty rates, older single women, particularly black women. In this policy brief, we ask: Compared to earlier cohorts, what proportion of white, black, and Hispanic women born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s will enter old age without a marriage that qualifies them for Social Security spouse and widow benefits? We find that the proportion who will reach age 62 without a qualifying marriage, and thus be ineligible for Social Security spouse and widow benefits, is increasing modestly for whites and Hispanics but dramatically for African Americans. Most of these women will be eligible for retired worker benefits under Social Security, but those benefits are not likely to be as large as the benefits they would have received as spouses and widows, had they been eligible. We then discuss a range of policy alternatives, including the possibility of a minimum benefit.Social Security, spousal benefits, widow benefits, poverty, elderly, social welfare, income security.

Geometric combinatorics and computational molecular biology: branching polytopes for RNA sequences

Questions in computational molecular biology generate various discrete optimization problems, such as DNA sequence alignment and RNA secondary structure prediction. However, the optimal solutions are fundamentally dependent on the parameters used in the objective functions. The goal of a parametric analysis is to elucidate such dependencies, especially as they pertain to the accuracy and robustness of the optimal solutions. Techniques from geometric combinatorics, including polytopes and their normal fans, have been used previously to give parametric analyses of simple models for DNA sequence alignment and RNA branching configurations. Here, we present a new computational framework, and proof-of-principle results, which give the first complete parametric analysis of the branching portion of the nearest neighbor thermodynamic model for secondary structure prediction for real RNA sequences.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Standards, harmonization and cultural differences: examining the implementation of a European stem cell clinical trial

A complex set of European regulations aims to facilitate regenerative medicine, harmonizing good clinical and manufacturing standards and streamlining ethical approval procedures. The sociology of standardization has elaborated some of the effects of regulation but little is known about how such implementation works in practice across institutions and countries in regenerative medicine. The effects of transnational harmonization of clinical trial conduct are complex. A long-term ethnographic study alongside a multinational clinical trial finds a range of obstacles. Harmonization standardizes at one level, but implementing the standards brings to the fore new layers of difference between countries. Europe-wide harmonization of regulations currently disadvantages low-cost clinician-lead research in comparison to industry-sponsored clinical trials. Moreover, harmonized standards must be aligned with the cultural variations in everyday practice across European countries. Each clinical team must find its own way of bridging harmonized compulsory practice with how things are done where they are, respecting expectations from both patients and the local hospital ethics committee. Established ways of working must further be adapted to a range of institutional and cultural conventions that affect the clinical trial such as insurance practices and understandings of patient autonomy. An additional finding is that the specific practical roles of team members in the trial affect their evaluation of the importance of these challenges. Our findings lead to conclusions of wider significance for the sociology of standards concerning how regulation works and for medical sociology about how trial funding and research directions in stem cell medicine intersect

Provider Perspectives on the Influence of Family on Nursing Home Resident Transfers to the Emergency Department: Crises at the End of Life.

Background. Nursing home (NH) residents often experience burdensome and unnecessary care transitions, especially towards the end of life. This paper explores provider perspectives on the role that families play in the decision to transfer NH residents to the emergency department (ED). Methods. Multiple stakeholder focus groups (n = 35 participants) were conducted with NH nurses, NH physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, NH administrators, ED nurses, ED physicians, and a hospitalist. Stakeholders described experiences and challenges with NH resident transfers to the ED. Focus group interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts and field notes were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach. Findings. Providers perceive that families often play a significant role in ED transfer decisions as they frequently react to a resident change of condition as a crisis. This sense of crisis is driven by 4 main influences: insecurities with NH care; families being unprepared for end of life; absent/inadequate advance care planning; and lack of communication and agreement within families regarding goals of care. Conclusions. Suboptimal communication and lack of access to appropriate and timely palliative care support and expertise in the NH setting may contribute to frequent ED transfers

Is the Syllabus Passé? Student and Faculty Perceptions

The syllabus is an essential learning resource for students.  Previous studies have highlighted the importance of the syllabus but to date, no studies have addressed whether the syllabus needs to continue as a stand-alone document given the information contained within it can be, and often is, shared with students via the learning management system.  In this study, conducted with students and faculty members at a community college and a public university granting undergraduate and graduate degrees, this issue was explored.  Survey data from 396 students and 75 faculty members was analyzed. Results indicated that both students and faculty agreed that a separate syllabus document is still preferred, with faculty more strongly agreeing.  No significant differences among students were found based on race, gender, or type of institution, but graduate students, as compared to undergraduate students, were more likely to indicate a preference for a separate syllabus.  No significant differences in terms of type of institution, years teaching overall or online, or race or gender were found in the faculty sample.  Suggestions for how to best share the syllabus, including the importance of the syllabus being easily accessible on mobile devices, are provided