Brian Friel and the Conflict in Northern Ireland: How the Troubles Have Shaped the Playwright and Informed his Plays

In lieu of an abstract, below is the article\u27s first paragraph. A conflict exists between the countries of Ireland and England stretching back over 800 years. Colonial in nature, the conflict has assumed many faces throughout its history. Evidence of its existence today is most noticeable in the situation in Northern Ireland, a situation euphemistically referred to as the Troubles. The Irish people have been shaped by this conflict and Irish writers have often embraced it thematically within their works. Irish playwright Brian Friel is such a writer. Friel\u27s plays frequently embody this conflict, both explicitly and implicitly

Seeing Polar Bears in a Snowstorm: Examining Racial Equity Work in a Predominantly White Suburban School

This three-part dissertation examines efforts to address racial equity at a predominantly white, suburban school. The first part is a program evaluation of Pacific Educational Group\u27s Beyond Diversity Workshop. The second part proposes a change leadership approach to implementing a youth participatory action research project examining racial equity at the school. The final part proposes a professional development policy ensuring all teachers are prepared to engage in racial equity work at the school

Estimating the Benefits of Water Quality Improvements in the Upper Narragansett Bay

An EPA-sponsored study of the benefits to Rhode Island residents of the water quality improvement in the Upper Narragansett Bay showed that the estimated annual costs ($2.9 million) exceeded the expected annual benefits ($2.0 million). That analysis evaluated only user benefits which were measured via expenditures; nonuser (intrinsic) benefits were not included. This study estimated the benefits to Rhode Island residents using the "Contingent Valuation" approach and responses from 435 residents to a 1985 survey about swimming and shellfishing. Aggregate annual benefits were estimated to be in the range of $30-60 million for "swimmable" and$30-70 million for "shellfishable" water quality, depending on the type of measure (mean or median) and survey format. Secondary objectives of the study were to test different versions of "willingness to pay" questions and compare mean and median values for measurement. Aside from payment vehicle bias, we found no evidence of serious bias.contingent valuation, pollution, water quality benefits, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A LAYERED FRAMEWORK FOR SURGICAL SIMULATION DEVELOPMENT

The field of surgical simulation is still in its infancy, and a number of projects are attempting to take the next step towards becoming the de facto standard for surgical simulation development, an ambition shared by the framework described here. Dubbed AutoMan, this framework has four main goals: a) to provide a common interface to simulation subsystems, b) allow the replacement of these underlying technologies, c) encourage collaboration between independent research projects and, d) expand the on targeted user base of similar frameworks. AutoMan\u27s layered structure provides an abstraction from implementation details providing the common user interface. Being highly modular and built on SOFA, the framework is highly extensible allowing algorithms and modules to be replaced or modified easily. This extensibility encourages collaboration as newly developed modules can be incorporated allowing the framework itself to grow and evolve with the industry. Also, making the programming interface easy to use caters to casual developers who are likely to add functionality to the system

Re-examining the subculture of violence in the South

The Southern region of the United States historically has a high rate of violent crime, especially homicide. This has led to a number of studies tackling the issue by relying on subcultural theory or by using structural correlates of crime to account for the South versus non-South difference in homicide. Macro level research has focused on pitting culture (usually measured by a dummy variable for South) against structural characteristics such as poverty and measures of income inequality, but suffers from a lack of direct cultural measures needed to successfully evaluate the subcultural thesis. Micro level research tends to focus on the attitudes of Southerners and finds that they tend to hold a heightened approval of violence in specific situations. However, micro level studies suffer from similar critiques as they tend to neglect structural explanations and are unable to evaluate whether these attitudes have any effect on violent crime. This dissertation proposes a solution to the problems plaguing previous research by aggregating survey data on attitudes toward violence from the General Social Survey (GSS) to the Primary Sampling Unit (PSU) level of analysis and using them to predict actual rates of violence. Results from this analysis indicate that a measure of Extreme Violent attitudes is positively and significantly related to measures of homicide derived from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. This relationship remains in a multivariate model with several control variables used in previous studies on homicide and on the Southern subculture of violence. This would indicate that areas with cultural values approving of violence in a broad range of situations also have higher levels of homicide offending. However, these findings do not support an exclusively Southern subculture of violence, since it is not clear from these data what accounts for the regional differences in homicide. Nevertheless, this study provides a level of evidence for the existence of a subculture of violence not previously achieved in the earlier work in this area. Limitations of this study and several relevant directions for future research are also discussed in the concluding chapter

Within Groups ANOVA When Using a Robust Multivariate Measure of Location

For robust measures of location associated with J dependent groups, various methods have been proposed that are aimed at testing the global hypothesis of a common measure of location applied to the marginal distributions. A criticism of these methods is that they do not deal with outliers in a manner that takes into account the overall structure of the data. Location estimators have been derived that deal with outliers in this manner, but evidently there are no simulation results regarding how well they perform when the goal is to test the some global hypothesis. The paper compares four bootstrap methods in terms of their ability to control the Type I error probability when the sample size is small, two of which were found to perform poorly. The choice of location estimator was found to be important as well. Indeed, for several of the estimators considered here, control over the Type I error probability was very poor. Only one estimator performed well when using the first of two general approaches that might be used. It is based on a variation of the (affine equivariant) Donoho—Gasko trimmed mean. For the second general approach, only a skipped estimator performed reasonably well. (It removes outliers via a projection method and averages the remaining data.) Only one bootstrap method was found to perform well when using the first approach. A different bootstrap method is recommended when using the second approach

The crisis autobiography : Augustine, Rousseau, and Wordsworth

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 3, 2008)Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.This project, which on the broadest level can be defined as a comparative study of Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's Confessions, and Wordsworth's Prelude, is an attempt to bridge a notable gap in the critical literature. The primary aim of the essay is to explore the ways in which all three authors cope with both the anxiety of self-definition and the anxiety of self-narrative within the mode of the crisis autobiography. The focus is both historical and psychological, as the autobiographical act marks the moment of intersection of self and history. Through this comparative analysis, I hope to contribute to the field of autobiographical studies and to clear up some of the generic and conceptual vagaries which trouble that discourse.Includes bibliographical reference