568 research outputs found

    Rival Queens : Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater /

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    Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Electronic reproduction.Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.Felicity Nussbaum is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of numerous books, including The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher’s Web site, viewed October 27 2015

    Mitigating writing anxiety through creative practices and community building

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    Writing anxiety has been documented to have an inverse relationship with students’ self-efficacy (Huerta et al., 2016). At the University of Southampton, the authors have devised a set of highly creative and practical steps to help students break the negative cycle of anxiety, negative feedback, and unrealised writing potential.Apprehension around academic writing is a well-established and complex phenomenon that has been shown to negatively impact students in a variety of ways throughout their learning (Daly and Miller, 1985; Calimag, 2021; Mitchell et al., 2023). Furthermore, negative experiences of the writing process and feedback on writing often compound and exacerbate these anxieties in students’ cognitive, social, and behavioural abilities (Bastug et al., 2017; Mercer and Gulseren, 2024). To ameliorate what often becomes a negative cycle of anxiety and stress around academic writing, educators can offer creative and meaningful practices that are easily adaptable to a variety of educational contexts and content (Bandura, 1977; Mitchell et al., 2021)

    Joaquin Miller: Literary frontiersman

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    Joaquin Miller, Western poet and frontiersman, was born in Liberty, Union County, Indiana, on March 10, 1839. Named Cincinnatus Hiner Miller by his parents, he was called Nat or Hiner by his intimates up to the time he adopted the pen name Joaquin. Joaquin Miller\u27s rank as an American poet is not high. His poetry lacks the depth and felicity of expression essential to great poetry. But he is interesting as an example of the literary fecundity of the nineteenth century in America. Relatively untutored, he attained a mastery of certain of the forms of poetry, particularly iambic tetrameter, and exploited with great concentration if not always with literary success, the materials of the Far Western frontier. Joaquin Miller is much indebted to Byron for his poetic temperament and for some of his poetic forms. Like Byron he assumes the role of the proud rebel and wages war on a convention-bound world. At one period, Miller attempted to follow the subtle measures of Swinburne but his failure to master these forms must have been apparent even to himself. Something of the poetic style of Browning creeps into occasional of his poems. But despite these deferences to European, particularly English, models, Miller remains himself. The cardinal ideas that animate Miller\u27s philosophy are not especially significant. He believes in liberty, freedom of conscience, and in democracy. He fights against intolerance and oppression. But we miss in Miller the unified and profound philosophy of what critics have come to call the major poets. Miller\u27s use of poetic language is not unusual. His phrasing is essentially conventional and his diction, though occasionally but not too often touched by originality and elevation, is for the most part in conformity with the poetic diction of the Victorians. Miller at his best is a bold and vigorous painter of scenes of the Western frontier. His word pictures in Columbus, With Walker in Nicaragua, and Kit Carson\u27s Ride are vivid and enduring. (Abstract shortened by UMI.

    Supplemental Material - Influential factors of spousal relationship quality in couples living with dementia – A narrative synthesis systematic review

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    Supplemental Material for Influential factors of spousal relationship quality in couples living with dementia – A narrative synthesis systematic review by Kristi Stedje, Tone KS Kvamme, Kjersti Johansson, Karette A Stensæth, Helen Odell-Miller, Anna Bukowska, Jeanette Tamplin, Thomas Wosch and Felicity Anne Baker in Dementia</p

    Perpetua and Felicity: Faith and Courage in the Face of Death

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    Perpetua was a young, educated wife and mother who was martyred for her Christian faith. Because she was educated, she was able to record most of the events leading to her martyrdom in her diary. Her account was later supplemented by another author and narrator. The account also includes details about Felicity, a slave girl who was arrested with Perpetua. While Felicity is included in Perpetua’s story, most of the information about them focuses on Perpetua. Throughout history, and particularly in Medieval times, the Church has painted her as a perfect saint who rejected her family for unity with Christ. On the other hand, feminists and some egalitarians have used Perpetua as an example of a woman fighting for equality under the patriarchy. However, both of these views misinterpret Perpetua’s motives for the sake of their own gain when in reality, Perpetua was simply a faithful Christian who gave her life for the sake of Christ

    How We Change Our Minds Matters: Misinformation, ABMs, and Deep Uncertainty

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    Misinformation on social media is an urgent grand challenge. Misinformation has caused excess deaths because people abstain from getting vaccinated and other evidence-based prevention behaviors. Misinformation also influences various other important topics such as climate change. And it has the potential to influence countless other areas. In order to exemplify the broader point, this project focuses on simple example of beliefs around the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations. To find ways to successfully tackle this grand challenge, it is crucial to have thorough understanding of the system. Modeling and simulation can be a powerful tool to support our reasoning about big and complex systems such as misinformation on social media. Therefore, I choose to look at how modeling and simulation can be useful for the study of misinformation on social media and of potential counter-measures.Agent-based models (ABMs) are one of the useful modeling paradigms for this grand challenge. And while there is a body of literature on ABMs in the field of misinformation research, there is structural uncertainty about how to represent the way that people change their minds on social media. Different types of representations of this updating process are used. It is unclear which of them is the most suitable representation of the real-world process and also to what extent it makes a difference for the choice of counter-measures. Moreover, the choice between these different belief update functions is usually not discussed. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody has explored the issue of whether the choice between belief update functions makes a substantial difference in the conclusions from the studies.Because of the significance of this grand challenge and the lack of exploring a key structural uncertainty, I choose to apply a method for exploring uncertainty in the context of ABMs. More specifically, because the structural uncertainty about the belief update function is a central component of models in this field, I explore a method for handling this structural uncertainty. This project is a show case of the value that methods from the field of Decision-Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) have for the field of misinformation focused ABMs.Yet, applying a DMDU approach is not only useful for enabling exploration of uncertainties. With many DMDU methods, it is possible to evaluate policies based on not only a single, but on multiple objectives. As far as I know, also the evaluation of multiple objectives has not previously been done in the field of opinion dynamic models such as ABMs which focus on misinformation on social media. However, policies that aim at tackling the misinformation challenge do not only impact one single stakeholder, but a multitude of diverse stakeholders who care about various aspects of the system. If we pick policies by only optimizing for one objective, we run the risk of merely shifting the problem. To find solutions that are sustainable and work for the whole system, it is helpful to consider multiple metrics that stakeholders care about. The ranking and filtering by multiple objectives is not trivial. But there is a method called non-dominated ranking which can be applied to do exactly that. This results in so-called Pareto-optimal policies. It is in this specific niche that I pursue the following methodological question within the field of agent-based misinformation modeling:Main Research QuestionHow does the consideration of structural uncertainty with respect to the choice between different belief update functions influence the resulting Pareto-optimal policies and their performance?I look at three alternative belief update functions, where each belief update function is represented by one model. I show that the choice of the belief update function makes a significant difference for what kind of policies are Pareto-optimal and for the outcomes that stem from these policies. To investigate how the choice of the belief update function influences which policies are Pareto-optimal and what kind of outcomes result, I apply the DMDU-method of Many-Objective Robust Decision-Making (MORDM) approach. With DMDU methods, modellers can acknowledge the uncomfortable situation in which we know that we have uncertainties, ruining the possibility of using models as reliable prediction machines. These uncertainties can be about the real world's states (i.e., parametric uncertainties) or its processes (i.e., structural uncertainty). When applying DMDU methods, modellers can aim to find policies that perform robustly over a large number of possible instantiations of parametric or structural uncertainties. In this project, I first evaluate more than 26'000 candidate policies with each of the three belief update functions. Then, I select a set of Pareto-optimal policies for each belief update function. Additionally, I select a set of policies that seem optimal when only considering a single metric. Subsequently, I re-evaluate Pareto-optimal policies of each belief update function under deep uncertainty to gain a better impression of their performance. Finally, I compare the commonalities and differences between the selected policies and their performances. This, I do for either method of selection and for all three belief update functions.To explore the structural uncertainty, I use a model which can be instantiated with either of the alternative belief update functions. I refer to these three possible instantiations as the three different models. The first model uses the commonly used function based on the research by Deffuant (hereafter 'DEFFUANT model'). In it, beliefs are always updated by a fix percentage towards the newly incoming information. In this project, this newly incoming information is the belief that is represented in a seen post. The second model samples whether a belief update happens or not. If an update happens, the new belief is the average between the previous belief and the newly incoming information. We call this the 'SAMPLE model'. Unfortunately, neither of these two models includes well-established phenomena from social psychology. Examples of such phenomena include for instance that we are more willing to update towards beliefs that are more similar to ours, that we have limited attention capacity, and that it takes more to change someone's mind when they are very convinced of their current belief than when they are uncertain. The third model was chosen to fill this void by basing its belief update function on Social Impact Theory (SIT) and adjusting this theory to the context of social media. This model is referred to as the 'SIT model'.Main Findings- There is a clear distinction between the models' optimal policies as well as their outcomes.- Differences in parameters do make a difference.- The models' optimal policies exhibit an order in how optimistic their outcomes are. This order (in descending direction) is DEFFUANT, SAMPLE, and SIT.- The outcomes of the DEFFUANT and the SAMPLE model are more similar to each other than to the SIT model.The main methodological take-away is that the DMDU approach can bring substantial value to the field of ABM-based studies on the grand challenge of misinformation on social media platforms. While this is shown by a simple exploration of the structural uncertainty with respect to the belief update, many more insights could be gathered by utilizing the DMDU approach. For instance, the DMDU approach offers state-of-the-art methods to identify vulnerable scenarios, i.e., scenarios which would be particularly bleak. Another example could be to explore different problem formulations with different sets of objectives or other structural uncertainties such as the posting behavior.Furthermore, by utilizing the tools of DMDU, also society as a whole can benefit. By including multiple objectives and a wide range of considered uncertainties, the many different world-views and values of the diverse stakeholders can be taken into account in order to avoid potential policy gridlock situations. This could contribute to tackling the misinformation grand challenge more successfully and thus for instance lead to more people embracing evidence-based medical interventions.https://github.com/felicity-reddel/MisinfoPyEngineering and Policy Analysi

    Echo writes back: the figure of the author in 'true short story' by Ali Smith

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    Ali Smith’s 2008 collection The First Person And Other Stories re-examines the implied contract between reader and writer. In particular, the first piece in the collection, ‘True Short Story’, challenges our reading of the text as ‘story’. It is highly metafictive, with little conventional structure, and apparently autobiographical, and the narrator must be the author too – mustn’t she(it)? Smith insists that we read the author into the work, in order to create a new set of questions around the debate of authorial identity. ‘True Short Story’ considers what difference it makes to the reader when the author’s voice is apparently unmediated by any fictional narrator. Does this make the story autobiography rather than fiction? If it is not fiction, does that mean it is not a story either? If it is fiction, why use so many apparently verifiable facts? The article also considers whether Jorge Luis Borges has anything to say about Smith’s disruption of the sujet. The figure of the author in ‘Borges and I’ is compared with that in ‘True Short Story’, together with Paul Auster’s apparent appearance in his City of Glass.(1987

    The Incredible Here and Now: The Play

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    The Incredible Here and Now is a play about cars and boys and having to grow up too soon. Charcoal chicken, a white Pontiac Trans Am, the Council pool, Michael is living in the shadow of his older brother Dom. The biggest guy in the school. Best car in the West. The guy who just can’t help but grab everyone’s attention. The guy with the girlfriend with the huge-arse hair. When he is gone Michael roams the streets, navigating life, friendship, love and family. The Incredible Here and Now is a poignant rollercoaster ride celebrating life, first love, family and new beginnings, traversing the streets of Western Sydney. Adapted for the stage by international award-winning local author and playwright Felicity Castagna

    Armstrong, Wm. H. (Death, 1887-12-22)

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    Address: City HospitalAge at death: 21 yrsPg 189/1887/547/MWS/Ohio/Dr. J. C. Mackenzie/Miller/Felicity OhioOriginal record filed in drawer labeled &#039;ARMBRUSTER-AS&#039;
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