The Mid-Century Showroom: Knoll, Herman Miller and the Retail Exhibition of Modern American Design

Although occasionally illustrated and referenced in contemporary histories of modern furniture and design, there is surprisingly little critical discussion or consideration of the role of the showroom in the promotion and dissemination of modern design during the mid-twentieth century. In these years, when the American lifestyle was popularly articulated and forcefully propagandized, the furniture showroom served as a principle site of professional and public indoctrination. Appropriating display techniques from modern exhibition design to showcase the American lifestyle as an abstracted, spatially integrated art form, the showroom provided an unencumbered landscape ideally suited to camera’s lens and the public’s imagination. Leading modern American furniture manufacturers, such as Herman Miller and Knoll Associates collaborated with major cultural institutions as well as department stores and retailers to maximize exposure and consumer demand for their products. Through such integrated marketing and merchandising strategies, showrooms also contributed to the broader social project to educate American consumers about modern design and the advantages of modern living. Related to the many model home programs and “good design” exhibitions of the 1950s, the furniture showroom occupies a unique place within the history and discourse of the postwar era. The peculiarities of the furniture showroom and its position as a point of intersection between the trade and the consumer, the commercial and the cultural, and the aesthetic and the ideological form the focus of this study.

‘Enough is enough’: Songs and messages about alcohol in remote Central Australia

This article examines some of the ways in which Australia’s First Peoples have responded to serious community health concerns about alcohol through the medium of popular music. The writing, performing and recording of popular songs about alcohol provide an important example of community-led responses to health issues, and the effectiveness of music in communicating stories and messages about alcohol has been recognised through various government-funded recording projects. This article describes some of these issues in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, exploring a number of complexities that arise through arts-based ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to social and health issues. It draws on the author’s own experience and collaborative work with Aboriginal musicians in Tennant Creek, a remote town in Australia’s Northern Territory.

The Pricing of American Put Options on Stock with Dividends

Pricing American put options on dividend-paying stocks has largely been ignored in the option pricing literature because the problem is mathematically complex and valuation usually resorts to computationally expensive and impractical pricing applications. This paper computed a simulation study, using two different approximation methods for the valuation of American put options on a stock with known discrete dividend payments. This to find out if there were pricing errors and to find out which could be the most usable method for practical users. The option pricing models used in the study was the dividend approximation by Blomeyer (1986) and the one by Barone-Adesi and Whaley (1988). The study showed that the approximation method by Blomeyer worked satisfactory for most situations, but some errors occur for longer times to the dividend payment, for smaller dividends and for in-the-money options. The approximation method by Barone-Adesi and Whaley worked well for in-the-money options and at-the-money options, but had serious pricing errors for out-of-the-money options. The conclusion of the study is that a combination of the both methods might be preferable to any single model.

Vapaussodan perintö : Valkoisuus paikallisyhteisössä sisältö, ylläpitäjät ja rapautuminen Iisalmessa 1918 1933

Legacy of the Finnish Civil War. White nationalism in a local community - content, supporters and disintegration in Iisalmi 1918 - 1933. Using one local community (Iisalmi) as an example, this study centres around the winners of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, exploring their collectivity its subsequent breakdown during 1918 - 1933. Referring to this collectivity by the methodological concept of white nationalism, the thesis first discusses its origin, content and forms. This is done by elucidating the discourses and symbols that came to constitute central ideological and ritualistic elements of white nationalism. Next, the thesis describes and analyzes fundamental actors of the Finnish civil society (such as White Guard and Lotta Svärd) that maintained white nationalism as a form of counter or parallel hegemony to the integration policy of the 1920s. Also highlighted is the significance of white nationalism as a power broker and an instrument of moral regulation in inter-war Finnish society. A third contribution of this thesis involves presenting a new interpretation of the legacy of the Civil War, i.e., the right-wing radicalism during the years 1919 - 1933. I shall describe attempts of the extreme right (Lapua Movement and IKL, Patriotic People s Movement) to use the white nationalism discourse as a vehicle for their political ambitions, as well as the strong counter-reaction these attempts induced among other middle-class groups. At the core of this research is the concept of white nationalism, whose key elements were the sacrifice of 1918, fatherland under threat and warrior citizenship. Winners of the civil war strove to blend these ideals into a homogenized culture, to which the working class and wavering members of the middle-class were coaxed and pressurized to subscribe. The thesis draws on Anglo-American symbol theories, theory of social identity groups, Antonio Gramsci s concept of cultural hegemony and Stuart Hall s approach to discourse and power.

Mining sentiments from songs using latent dirichlet allocation

Song-selection and mood are interdependent. If we capture a song’s sentiment, we can determine the mood of the listener, which can serve as a basis for recommendation systems. Songs are generally classified according to genres, which don’t entirely reflect sentiments. Thus, we require an unsupervised scheme to mine them. Sentiments are classified into either two (positive/negative) or multiple (happy/angry/sad/...) classes, depending on the application. We are interested in analyzing the feelings invoked by a song, involving multi-class sentiments. To mine the hidden sentimental structure behind a song, in terms of “topics”, we consider its lyrics and use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Each song is a mixture of moods. Topics mined by LDA can represent moods. Thus we get a scheme of collecting similar-mood songs. For validation, we use a dataset of songs containing 6 moods annotated by users of a particular website.

Comparison of North American universities with and without medical schools and their technology transfer initiatives

Empirical research available on technology transfer initiatives is either North American or European. Literature over the last two decades shows various research objectives such as identifying the variables to be measured and statistical methods to be used in the context of studying university based technology transfer initiatives. AUTM survey data from years 1996 to 2008 provides insightful patterns about the North American technology transfer initiatives, we use this data in our paper. This paper has three sections namely, a comparison of North American Universities with (n=1129) and without Medical Schools (n=786), an analysis of the top 75th percentile of these samples and a DEA analysis of these samples. We use 20 variables. Researchers have attempted to classify university based technology transfer initiative variables into multi-stages, namely, disclosures, patents and license agreements. Using the same approach, however with minor variations, three stages are defined in this paper. The first stage is to do with inputs from R&D expenditure and outputs namely, invention disclosures. The second stage is to do with invention disclosures being the input and patents issued being the output. The third stage is to do with patents issued as an input and technology transfers as outcomes.

Dynamics of the North American continent

The forces that cause deformation of western North America have been debated for decades. Recent studies, primarily based on analysis of crustal stresses in the western United States, have suggested that the deformation of the region is mainly controlled by gravitational potential energy (GPE) variations and boundary loads, with basal tractions due to mantle flow playing a relatively minor role. We address these issues by modelling the deviatoric stress field over western North America from a 3-D finite element mantle circulation model with lateral viscosity variations. Our approach takes into account the contribution from both topography and shallow lithosphere structure (GPE) as well as that from deeper mantle flow in one single model, as opposed to separate lithosphere and circulation models, as has been done so far. In addition to predicting the deviatoric stresses we also jointly fit the constraints of geoid, dynamic topography and plate motion both globally and over North America, in order to ensure that the forces that arise in our models are dynamically consistent. We examine the sensitivity of the dynamic models to different lateral viscosity variations. We find that circulation models that include upper mantle slabs yield a better fit to observed plate velocities. Our results indicate that a model of GPE variations coupled with mantle convection gives the best fit to the observational constraints. We argue that although GPE variations control a large part of the deformation of the western United States, deeper mantle tractions also play a significant role. The average deviatoric stress magnitudes in the western United States range 30-40 MPa. The cratonic region exhibits higher coupling to mantle flow than the rest of the continent. We find that a relatively strong San Andreas fault gives a better fit to the observational constraints, especially that of plate velocity in western North America.

Assessing resilience and state-transition models with historical records of cheatgrass Bromus tectorum invasion in North American sagebrush-steppe

1. Resilience-based approaches are increasingly being called upon to inform ecosystem management, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. This requires management frameworks that can assess ecosystem dynamics, both within and between alternative states, at relevant time scales. 2. We analysed long-term vegetation records from two representative sites in the North American sagebrush-steppe ecosystem, spanning nine decades, to determine if empirical patterns were consistent with resilience theory, and to determine if cheatgrass Bromus tectorum invasion led to thresholds as currently envisioned by expert-based state-and-transition models (STM). These data span the entire history of cheatgrass invasion at these sites and provide a unique opportunity to assess the impacts of biotic invasion on ecosystem resilience. 3. We used univariate and multivariate statistical tools to identify unique plant communities and document the magnitude, frequency and directionality of community transitions through time. Community transitions were characterized by 37-47% dissimilarity in species composition, they were not evenly distributed through time, their frequency was not correlated with precipitation, and they could not be readily attributed to fire or grazing. Instead, at both sites, the majority of community transitions occurred within an 8-10year period of increasing cheatgrass density, became infrequent after cheatgrass density peaked, and thereafter transition frequency declined. 4. Greater cheatgrass density, replacement of native species and indication of asymmetry in community transitions suggest that thresholds may have been exceeded in response to cheatgrass invasion at one site (more arid), but not at the other site (less arid). Asymmetry in the direction of community transitions also identified communities that were at-risk' of cheatgrass invasion, as well as potential restoration pathways for recovery of pre-invasion states. 5. Synthesis and applications. These results illustrate the complexities associated with threshold identification, and indicate that criteria describing the frequency, magnitude, directionality and temporal scale of community transitions may provide greater insight into resilience theory and its application for ecosystem management. These criteria are likely to vary across biogeographic regions that are susceptible to cheatgrass invasion, and necessitate more in-depth assessments of thresholds and alternative states, than currently available.

Examining the Effectiveness of Discriminant Function Analysis and Cluster Analysis in Species Identification of Male Field Crickets Based on Their Calling Songs

Traditional taxonomy based on morphology has often failed in accurate species identification owing to the occurrence of cryptic species, which are reproductively isolated but morphologically identical. Molecular data have thus been used to complement morphology in species identification. The sexual advertisement calls in several groups of acoustically communicating animals are species-specific and can thus complement molecular data as non-invasive tools for identification. Several statistical tools and automated identifier algorithms have been used to investigate the efficiency of acoustic signals in species identification. Despite a plethora of such methods, there is a general lack of knowledge regarding the appropriate usage of these methods in specific taxa. In this study, we investigated the performance of two commonly used statistical methods, discriminant function analysis (DFA) and cluster analysis, in identification and classification based on acoustic signals of field cricket species belonging to the subfamily Gryllinae. Using a comparative approach we evaluated the optimal number of species and calling song characteristics for both the methods that lead to most accurate classification and identification. The accuracy of classification using DFA was high and was not affected by the number of taxa used. However, a constraint in using discriminant function analysis is the need for a priori classification of songs. Accuracy of classification using cluster analysis, which does not require a priori knowledge, was maximum for 6-7 taxa and decreased significantly when more than ten taxa were analysed together. We also investigated the efficacy of two novel derived acoustic features in improving the accuracy of identification. Our results show that DFA is a reliable statistical tool for species identification using acoustic signals. Our results also show that cluster analysis of acoustic signals in crickets works effectively for species classification and identification.

Soundings: the Newsletter of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. 1980

(PDF contains 39 pages.)

Soundings: the Newsletter of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. 1981

Missing the April issue. (PDF has 26 pages.)