What a thirst it was: longing, excess and the genre-bending essay

Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes that the essay is restless, always a little too hungry, a little too thirsty (2006). Implicit in this statement is the fact that a good essay is full of desire and creates this response in readers too – building a thirst for more knowledge, for more emotion, for stimuli, satisfaction. Here the essay is unquenchable, undefinable and unsummarizable. This experimental essay talks about the practice and application of writing experimental essays and their capacity to be genre-bending, form-curious texts. Considering specific texts that explore artistic practice and/or, in their hybridity, bring image and text together in essential ways, the hybrid essay will emerge as a way of making, seeing, reading, interpreting and acquiring knowledge. By discussing intentional ambiguity, the unfamiliar familiar, knowledge in context, and the role of language and structure in the creation of presence, silence and absence in texts, this essay draws attention to the complications (and possibilities) of essays and their forms. The best essays create subtle, lively interactions between and within subjects, forms and languages that can howl and shape-shift in the final essay itself. These genre-bending essays can deepen and complicate the knowledge we make for ourselves – as we experience reverberations of meaning in the multiple readings each specific open text encourages. Included here is the writing and thinking of Anne Carson, Gertrude Stein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Lyn Hejinian and others

The psychological basis of adolescent worship

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityFor the basic psychological characteristics that in turn will assist in determining a program of worship, we have considered but five, others of which could be added. Those mentioned are habit, social consciousness, conversion, loyalty and hero-worship. Each of these we feel are essential if we are to properly and adequately construct a worship program

A test of significance in functional quadratic regression

We consider a quadratic functional regression model in which a scalar response depends on a functional predictor; the common functional linear model is a special case. We wish to test the significance of the nonlinear term in the model. We develop a testing method which is based on projecting the observations onto a suitably chosen finite dimensional space using functional principal component analysis. The asymptotic behavior of our testing procedure is established. A simulation study shows that the testing procedure has good size and power with finite sample sizes. We then apply our test to a data set provided by Tecator, which consists of near-infrared absorbance spectra and fat content of meat.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/12-BEJ446 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Detecting changes in functional linear models

We observe two sequences of curve which are connected via an integral operator. Our model includes linear models as well as autoregressive models in Hilbert spaces. We wish to test the null hypothesis that the operator did not change during the observation period. Our method is based on projecting the observations onto a suitably chosen finite dimensional space. The testing procedure is based on functionals of the weighted residuals of the projections. Since the quadratic form is based on estimating the long-term covariance matrix of the residuals, we also provide some results on Bartlett-type estimators

Asymmetric Prices: Implications on Trader’s Market Power in Philippine Rice

Contrary to the commonly held notion that the market power exercised by a handful of unscrupulous traders in the local market has resulted unnecessary hike in prices, this paper presents evidence against this allegation. Findings show that market shocks originate at the farm level that are transmitted as price changes at the wholesale market before it is reflected at the retail market. In addition, symmetry test cannot confirm the presence of market power among Filipino traders. Nevertheless, estimation of price symmetry model does not lend credence to the claim that government’s absence in the market can lead to chaos.price level

Asymmetric Prices: Implications on Trader’s Market Power in Philippine Rice

Contrary to the commonly held notion that the market power exercised by a handful of unscrupulous traders in the local market has resulted unnecessary hike in prices, this paper presents evidence against this allegation. Findings show that market shocks originate at the farm level that are transmitted as price changes at the wholesale market before it is reflected at the retail market. In addition, symmetry test cannot confirm the presence of market power among Filipino traders. Nevertheless, estimation of price symmetry model does not lend credence to the claim that government’s absence in the market can lead to chaos.price level

Dependent Revenues, Capital Risk and Credit Rationing

Much of the literature on financial markets has not dealt with dependency of project revenues. In a setup similar to the seminal SW model, we show that the type of equilibrium can crucially depend on the degree of project dependency. By making aggregate payoffs risky, households face capital risk. Therefore, risk aversion and households’ consumption-savings decision become very important. Capital risk deters households from saving so that there might be a credit rationing equilibrium. Defining the social optimum, we find that project dependency might reduce the number of safe projects in equilibrium in a socially harmful way. Thus, project dependency can aggravate adverse selection. In three extensions, we will show how risk aversion, imperfect revenue dependency and a different modelling of dependency influence our results. Our analysis points out that project dependency is an important factor in the determination of credit market outcomes.

Post Borders: Informal Bilingual Blogging and Iintercultural Ccommunication Competence

This paper describes an informal bilingual blogging environment that was created to develop intercultural communicative competence. After a consideration of ICC, the paper explores the opportunities for development of ICC that were created by three features of this blogging activity. A descriptive analysis shows that the design features of informality of topic, and intentional lack of strict language protocol, as well as attention to cultures of use of blogging\ud were associated with users’ display of ICC