Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? and Other Questions of Value, Meaning and Identity in the Circulation of Janakpur Art

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at a ‘women’s development project’ seeking to empower its participants. And yet, the project’s very successes threaten to displace the producers (and what they produce) from their perceived qualities/identities as ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive,’ thereby bringing into question the authenticity of the ‘art’ they produce. The conundrum begs this question: can developing women produce primitive art?

Biaxial extensional motion of an inertially driven radially expanding liquid sheet

We consider the inertially driven, time-dependent biaxial extensional motion of inviscid and viscous thinning liquid sheets. We present an analytic solution describing the base flow and examine its linear stability to varicose (symmetric) perturbations within the framework of a long-wave model where transient growth and long-time asymptotic stability are considered. The stability of the system is characterized in terms of the perturbation wavenumber, Weber number, and Reynolds number. We find that the isotropic nature of the base flow yields stability results that are identical for axisymmetric and general two-dimensional perturbations. Transient growth of short-wave perturbations at early to moderate times can have significant and lasting influence on the long-time sheet thickness. For finite Reynolds numbers, a radially expanding sheet is weakly unstable with bounded growth of all perturbations, whereas in the inviscid and Stokes flow limits sheets are unstable to perturbations in the short-wave limit.

A Natural Gas Severance Tax-An Economic Analysis

This study estimates the economic effects of a severance tax on the market for natural gas produced from shale sources using non-conventional extraction methods, such as horizontal drilling and fracking. Results suggest that a severance tax of 5% would increase the price of natural gas by as much as 3.82% and decrease gas extraction by an estimated 1.16% to a value of 9.52%. If applied to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, a 5% severance tax is estimated to raise between US$443 and $486 million per year in public revenue. The marginal deadweight loss associated with a 5% severance tax is estimated between 1.27% and 12.85% of the last dollar earned. The burden of this tax falls on both producers and consumers and depends upon the underlying assumptions made regarding the price responsiveness of consumers and producers. Under plausible assumptions, a family consuming 1000 MMcfs (approximate to 2.8 x 10(4) m(3)) per year of natural gas is estimated to pay an additional $100 per year after the implementation of a 5% severance tax.