275 research outputs found
Thomas Frederick Arndt ; Men in America : Photographs, 1973-1987
No full textTravis describes Arndt's photographs of stereotypical working-class heterosexual men. Biographical notes on both artist and author
Doris Eaton Travis: An oral history of her life in theatre, film and dance.
No full textThe purpose of this study was to document through an oral history the life of Doris Eaton Travis from the beginning of her career in entertainment as a child actor in the Poli Theatre Stock Company in Washington, D.C. and later in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, 1919 and 1920 to the end of her professional career with the Arthur Murray Dance Studios in 1968. This study chronicles not only her work on Broadway with the Ziegfeld Follies, but her transitional work in silent and early sound films, her contributions to trends in social dance via the Arthur Murray Dance Studios, and her development and implementation of a televised instructional program on social dance.Based on research for this paper, the author recommended the following for further study: similar historical research should be conducted with living individuals from this era regarding their views of theater and dance history further studies that concentrate on the role of women in theater and dance in the early part of this century should be undertaken, a thorough investigation of occupations available to women in the first part of this century is warranted, and one major archive dedicated to the Women of the Ziegfeld Follies or Women or American Popular Culture and Theater should be established where materials from the personal collections of performers from this period can be catalogued for future research.This study was based on interviews with Dons Eaton Travis. Through these interviews, Doris provided an oral narrative of her career from 1918 to 1968. Data were collected through: structured, semi-structured and non-structured interviews with Doris Eaton Travis, review of pertinent documents, such as newspaper articles, production playbills, music manuscripts, letters, and other professional memorabilia that Doris has collected, interviews with other members of Doris Eaton Travis' family completed prior to this study, observation of the subject directly recorded on film and video media
Arthur William Upfield: a biography
No full textThis dissertation is an exhaustive account of the life and work of Arthur William Upfield (1890-1964). It is presented as a critical biography and narrates the life of the writer, in his socio-cultural milieu, from birth. It also positions Upfield as a writer who dealt with issues of Aboriginality at a time when this was a singularly polemical subject. My work is informed by the theory of Zygmunt Bauman and others and is posited in the context of late-modern biography theory.
English-born, Upfield arrived in Australia in 1911 and took work in the bush, serving overseas with the Australian army at the outbreak of World War I and marrying an Australian army nurse in Egypt. Returning with his wife and son to Australia in 1921 he intermittently carried his swag until he was employed patrolling the Western Australian number 1 rabbit-proof fence for three years to 1931. By that time he had published four novels, including two crime novels featuring his fictional creation, the part-Aboriginal, part-European, Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte ('Bony'), arguably the first fully-developed character in Australian popular fiction.
Leaving the fence, Upfield settled with his family in Perth and wrote full-time until joining the Melbourne Herald in 1933. Retrenched, he resumed career writing to be further interrupted by a war-time intelligence posting in 1939. In 1943 the first Bony mysteries were published in America, where Upfield's critical success was maintained until his death. In 1945 he left his wife for Jessica Uren, to whom he remained devoted.
Upfield's in all twenty-nine Bony novels, many of which have been translated across eleven languages, afforded him notable success both at home and abroad, in good part due to his descriptive gifts and the uniqueness of his fictional character, the part-Aboriginal Bony
Systematic review of sedentary behaviour and health indicators in school-aged children and youth
No full textAbstract
Accumulating evidence suggests that, independent of physical activity levels, sedentary behaviours are associated with increased risk of cardio-metabolic disease, all-cause mortality, and a variety of physiological and psychological problems. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to determine the relationship between sedentary behaviour and health indicators in school-aged children and youth aged 5-17 years. Online databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE and PsycINFO), personal libraries and government documents were searched for relevant studies examining time spent engaging in sedentary behaviours and six specific health indicators (body composition, fitness, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease, self-esteem, pro-social behaviour and academic achievement). 232 studies including 983,840 participants met inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Television (TV) watching was the most common measure of sedentary behaviour and body composition was the most common outcome measure. Qualitative analysis of all studies revealed a dose-response relation between increased sedentary behaviour and unfavourable health outcomes. Watching TV for more than 2 hours per day was associated with unfavourable body composition, decreased fitness, lowered scores for self-esteem and pro-social behaviour and decreased academic achievement. Meta-analysis was completed for randomized controlled studies that aimed to reduce sedentary time and reported change in body mass index (BMI) as their primary outcome. In this regard, a meta-analysis revealed an overall significant effect of -0.81 (95% CI of -1.44 to -0.17, p = 0.01) indicating an overall decrease in mean BMI associated with the interventions. There is a large body of evidence from all study designs which suggests that decreasing any type of sedentary time is associated with lower health risk in youth aged 5-17 years. In particular, the evidence suggests that daily TV viewing in excess of 2 hours is associated with reduced physical and psychosocial health, and that lowering sedentary time leads to reductions in BMI
Aircraft collision avoidance using Monte Carlo Real-Time Belief Space Search
No full textThesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-95).This thesis presents the Monte Carlo Real-Time Belief Space Search (MC-RTBSS) algorithm, a novel, online planning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). MC-RTBSS combines a sample-based belief state representation with a branch and bound pruning method to search through the belief space for the optimal policy. The algorithm is applied to the problem of aircraft collision avoidance and its performance is compared to the Trac Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) in simulated encounter scenarios. The simulations are generated using an encounter model formulated as a dynamic Bayesian network that is based on radar feeds covering U.S. airspace. MC-RTBSS leverages statistical information from the airspace model to predict future intruder behavior and inform its maneuvers. Use of the POMDP formulation permits the inclusion of different sensor suites and aircraft dynamic models. The behavior of MC-RTBSS is demonstrated using encounters generated from an airspace model and comparing the results to TCAS simulation results. In the simulations, both MC-RTBSS and TCAS measure intruder range, bearing, and relative altitude with the same noise parameters. Increasing the penalty of a Near Mid-Air Collision (NMAC) in the MC-RTBSS reward function reduces the number of NMACs, although the algorithm is limited by the number of particles used for belief state projections. Increasing the number of particles and observations used during belief state projection increases performance.(cont.) Increasing these parameter values also increases computation time, which needs to be mitigated using a more efficient implementation of MC-RTBSS to permit real-time use.by Travis Benjamin Wolf.S.M
Big Data, Big Libraries, Big Problems?: the 2014 LibTech Anti-talk?
No full textThe desire to create automatons is a familiar theme in human history, and during the age of the Enlightenment mechanical automatons became not only an “emblem of the cosmos”, but a symbol of man’s confidence that he would unlock nature’s greatest mysteries and fully harness her power. And yet only a century later, automatons had begun to represent human repression and servitude, a theme later picked up by writers of science fiction. Man’s confidence undeterred, the endgame of the modern scientific and technological mindset, or MSTM, seems to be increasingly coming into view with the rise of “information technology” in general and “Big data” in particular. Along with those who wield them, these can be seen as functioning together as a “mechanical muse” of sorts – surprisingly alluring – and, like a physical automaton can serve as a symbol – a microcosm – of what the MSTM sees (at the very least in practice) as the cosmic machine, our “final frontier”. And yet, individuals who unreflectively participate in these things – giving themselves over to them and seeking the powers afforded by the technology apart from technology’s rightful purposes – in fact yield to the same pragmatism and reductionism those wielding them are captive to. Thus, they ultimately nullify themselves philosophically, politically, and economically – their value increasingly being only the data concerning their persons, and its perceived usefulness. Likewise libraries, the time-honored place of, and symbol for, the intellectual flowering of the individual, will, insofar as they spurn the classical liberal arts (with the idea that things are intrinsically good, and in the case of humans, special as well) in favor of the alluring embrace of MSTM-driven “information technology” and Big data - unwittingly contribute to their irrelevance and demise as they find themselves increasingly less needed, valued, wanted. Likewise for the liberal arts as a whole, and in fact history itself, if the acid of a “science” untethered from what is, in fact, good (intrinsically), continues to gain strengt
IL-6 boosts synaptogenesis STAT!
No full textMaternal infection during pregnancy increases the offspring's risk of developing neurodevelopmental disorders. While IL-6 is involved, the mechanism by which IL-6 and other cytokines affect developing neural circuits is unknown. In this issue of Immunity, Mirabella et al. (2021) show that the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-6 specifically increases synaptogenesis in immature excitatory neurons through downstream neuronal STAT3-dependent transcriptional regulation of Rgs4
"We Mexicas went everywhere in that land" : the Mexican Indian diaspora in the Greater Southwest, 1540-1680
No full textBeginning with Hernando Cortés’s capture of Aztec Tenochtitlan in 1521, legions of “Indian conquistadors” from Mexico joined Spanish military campaigns throughout Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century. Scholarship appearing in the last decade has revealed the awesome scope of this participation—involving hundreds of thousands of Indian allies—and cast critical light on their motivations and experiences. Nevertheless this work has remained restricted to central Mexico and areas south, while the region known as the Greater Southwest, encompassing northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, has been largely ignored. This dissertation traces the movements of Indians from central Mexico, especially Nahuas, into this region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and charts their experiences as diasporic peoples under colonialism using sources they wrote in their own language (Nahuatl). Their activities as laborers, soldiers, settlers, and agents of acculturation largely enabled colonial expansion in the region. However their exploits are too frequently cast as contributions to an overarching Spanish colonial project. This dissertation seeks to uncover underlying indigenous agendas and reveal what colonial service meant for native participants. Nahuatl sources demonstrate that activities typically portrayed as contributions to Spanish colonial causes reflected indigenous attempts to wrest land, privileges, and rights to self-governance from the colonial regime. Overall the project urges us to reconsider the extent to which colonial expansion into the early U.S.-Mexico borderlands was European. It also asks whether we have, by relying on European sources to write histories of nation-states, elided native peoples from key American stories and distorted the history of a transnational region vitally important to both Mexico and the United States today.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Travis Jeffre
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