The unburiable: Representations of pain and violence in selected works of Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill

In this thesis I intend to answer the question of how representations of pain and violence in the selected plays of Kane and Churchill assist the critical understanding of those works. The works I have selected are Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A play for Gaza. To assist the understanding of the spectator and to enable me to engage with the plays in closer detail I draw on a selection of theories from the philosophers Judith Butler and Arne Johan Vetlesen. In particular I discuss Butler’s theorisation of grief, vulnerability and responsibility to (and for) the Other. I also discuss Vetlesen’s responses to pain and torture, with emphasis on his notions of pain transference. From my reading and analysis of the plays, I find that both works provoke a complex set of responses to issues of communal responsibility and identity. The reference in the title to ‘the unburiable’ is a term coined by Butler to explain the efforts of some people to dehumanise the Other. Applying the theoretical ideas of Butler and Vetlesen to the plays provides a way to negotiate the fragile gap between those that matter and those who have become the unburiable

Workplace Change and the New Labor Movement

[Excerpt] The authors of this set of papers sharply critique, from a variety of perspectives, the approach to workplace change that has dominated labors thinking for decades. We have not attempted to balance these criticisms with arguments that labor can grow and prosper by fostering win-win methods and outcomes, because those arguments are well-known from a wide range of publications. Instead, we hope that these papers will stimulate and broaden the debate over a critical arena that has not been integrated with labor\u27s new ambitions

A Comparison of Attitudinal Loyalty Measurement Approaches

The aim of this paper is to present the empirical tests of two measures of attitudinal brand loyalty to identify if they are items of a single construct or two distinct constructs. These two measures are an individual's propensity to be brand loyal, and attitude towards the act of purchasing a specific brand. This paper also seeks to determine which of these measures would be more useful for explaining purchasing behaviour. The results confirm the hypothesis that there is no significant relationship between the two measures in the business services market. This indicates that they are in fact not measures of the same concept but two separate concepts. Aggregating the scores from both measures to form a single score for attitudinal loyalty would reduce richness of explanation for marketing practitioners. in addition, the results suggest that the attitude towards the act of purchasing a brand can be used to explain or predict purchasing behaviour

A damage model based on failure threshold weakening

A variety of studies have modeled the physics of material deformation and damage as examples of generalized phase transitions, involving either critical phenomena or spinodal nucleation. Here we study a model for frictional sliding with long range interactions and recurrent damage that is parameterized by a process of damage and partial healing during sliding. We introduce a failure threshold weakening parameter into the cellular-automaton slider-block model which allows blocks to fail at a reduced failure threshold for all subsequent failures during an event. We show that a critical point is reached beyond which the probability of a system-wide event scales with this weakening parameter. We provide a mapping to the percolation transition, and show that the values of the scaling exponents approach the values for mean-field percolation (spinodal nucleation) as lattice size $L$ is increased for fixed $R$. We also examine the effect of the weakening parameter on the frequency-magnitude scaling relationship and the ergodic behavior of the model

Modification of the pattern informatics method for forecasting large earthquake events using complex eigenvectors

Recent studies have shown that real-valued principal component analysis can be applied to earthquake fault systems for forecasting and prediction. In addition, theoretical analysis indicates that earthquake stresses may obey a wave-like equation, having solutions with inverse frequencies for a given fault similar to those that characterize the time intervals between the largest events on the fault. It is therefore desirable to apply complex principal component analysis to develop earthquake forecast algorithms. In this paper we modify the Pattern Informatics method of earthquake forecasting to take advantage of the wave-like properties of seismic stresses and utilize the Hilbert transform to create complex eigenvectors out of measured time series. We show that Pattern Informatics analyses using complex eigenvectors create short-term forecast hot-spot maps that differ from hot-spot maps created using only real-valued data and suggest methods of analyzing the differences and calculating the information gain.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure. Submitted to Tectonophysics on 30 August 200

Application of DInSAR-GPS optimization for derivation of fine-scale surface motion maps of Southern California

A method based on random field theory and Gibbs-Markov random fields equivalency within Bayesian statistical framework is used to derive 3-D surface motion maps from sparse global positioning system (GPS) measurements and differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) interferogram in the southern California region. The minimization of the Gibbs energy function is performed analytically, which is possible in the case when neighboring pixels are considered independent. The problem is well posed and the solution is unique and stable and not biased by the continuity condition. The technique produces a 3-D field containing estimates of surface motion on the spatial scale of the DInSAR image, over a given time period, complete with error estimates. Significant improvement in the accuracy of the vertical component and moderate improvement in the accuracy of the horizontal components of velocity are achieved in comparison with the GPS data alone. The method can be expanded to account for other available data sets, such as additional interferograms, lidar, or leveling data, in order to achieve even higher accuracy

Gravity changes from a stress evolution earthquake simulation of California

The gravity signal contains information regarding changes in density at all depths and can be used as a proxy for the strain accumulation in fault networks. A stress evolution time-dependent model was used to create simulated slip histories over the San Andreas Fault network in California. Using a linear sum of the gravity signals from each fault segment in the model, via coseismic gravity Green's functions, a time-dependent gravity model was created. The steady state gravity from the long-term plate motion generates a signal over 5 years with magnitudes of ±~2 μGal; the current limit of portable instrument observations. Moderate to large events generate signal magnitudes in the range of ~10 to ~80 μGal, well within the range of ground-based observations. The complex fault network geometry of California significantly affects the spatial extent of the gravity signal from the three events studied.Peer reviewe

Near mean-field behavior in the generalized Burridge-Knopoff earthquake model with variable range stress transfer

Simple models of earthquake faults are important for understanding the mechanisms for their observed behavior in nature, such as Gutenberg-Richter scaling. Because of the importance of long-range interactions in an elastic medium, we generalize the Burridge-Knopoff slider-block model to include variable range stress transfer. We find that the Burridge-Knopoff model with long-range stress transfer exhibits qualitatively different behavior than the corresponding long-range cellular automata models and the usual Burridge-Knopoff model with nearest-neighbor stress transfer, depending on how quickly the friction force weakens with increasing velocity. Extensive simulations of quasiperiodic characteristic events, mode-switching phenomena, ergodicity, and waiting-time distributions are also discussed. Our results are consistent with the existence of a mean-field critical point and have important implications for our understanding of earthquakes and other driven dissipative systems.Comment: 24 pages 12 figures, revised version for Phys. Rev.