Work Of Miller Research Articles

Mapping HIV community viral load: space, power and the government of bodies

HIV plasma viral load testing has become more than just a clinical tool to monitor treatment response at the individual level. Increasingly, individual HIV plasma viral load testing is being reported to public health agencies and is used to inform epidemiological surveillance and monitor the presence of the virus collectively using techniques to measure ‘community viral load’. This article seeks to formulate a critique and propose a novel way of theorizing community viral load. Based on the salient work of Michel Foucault, especially the governmentality literature, this article critically examines the use of community viral load as a new strategy of government. Drawing also on the work of Miller and Rose, this article explores the deployment of ‘community’ through the re-configuration of space, the problematization of viral concentrations in specific micro-locales, and the government (in the Foucauldian sense) of specific bodies which are seen as ‘risky’, dangerous and therefore, in need of attention. It also examines community viral load as a necessary precondition – forming the ‘conditions of possibility’ – for the recent shift to high impact prevention tactics that are being scaled up across North America.

THE MULTIPLIER AND THE COVER OF DIRECT SUMS OF LIE ALGEBRAS

In this paper, we prove that the Schur multiplier of the direct sum of two arbitrary Lie algebras is isomorphic to the direct sum of the Schur multipliers of the direct factors and the usual tensor product of the Lie algebras, which is similar to the work of Miller (1952) in the group case. Also, a cover for the direct sum of two Lie algebras in terms of given covers of them will be constructed.

Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad

The invention of the one-time pad is generally credited to Gilbert S. Vernam and Joseph O. Mauborgne. We show that it was invented about 35 years earlier by a Sacramento banker named Frank Miller. We identify which Frank Miller it was, and speculate on what might have led him to his idea. We also discuss whether or not Mauborgne might have known of Miller's work, especially via his colleague Parker Hitt.

La seduzione dell'altrove by Dacia Maraini (review)

thenovel,abouttheadvantages of exile, abouttherelationship between sentiment and brutality, aboutthe decline intheneedfor art. Josipovici argues, rather abstractly ,forthenecessity ofmaintaining contact withreality. Kunderatalks aboutreal people and real issues. Josipovici's bookisbasedonlearning, Kundera's onexperience; Josipovici's onanalysis, Kundera's onsympathetic reflection. We canlisten, perhaps guardedly, toJosipovici; we feelthat we cantalktoKundera, whois not only humane buthuman. Robert Murray Davis University ofOklahoma DaciaMaraini. La seduzionedell'altrove . Milan. Rizzoli. 2010.174pages. €1 7.50. isbn 978-88-1 7-04367-0 Alwayscuriousabout the Other, Dacia Marainiopens La seduzione dell'altrove, a collectionof short pieces,witha meditation on why we leavethecomforts ofourhome totravel. Whyourfascination with things foreign, exotic? Itderives, she suggests, from a "loveofthedifferent ,""theseduction ofelsewhere." Herowndesirefor travel was early instilled by hermother and father whosewanderlust tookhertoJapan whenshewas oneyearold. [Editorialnote : Seeheressay"DearJapan" onpage30ofthisissue.]Onlylater, whenshereturned toItaly - a place she had long thought exotic - did shelearn from Italians that they considered Japan a strange andwonderfulplace .Whatis exotic toone(the outsider)is humdrum to another (theinhabitant). Herdesiretosee thenewand different hasledhertomanycountries , traveling on herownorwith a companion, as she believesone cannotreallysee and understand a country or itspeopleon guided tours. Maraini's reputation asa playwright andherinterest inwomen's theater worldwide alsoallowherto makecontacts mosttravelers cannotenjoy .In accordance withher lifelong concern, sheconcentrates on thelivesofwomen inthis collection. InNairobi sheattended a poetry reading bya women's theater group inSwahili, English, andItalian. This groupalso presented a monologue inEnglish, A Woman Alone, written byDarioFo.Shetalked with, shared experiences with, and observed the customs ofwomenin countries as different as Serbia,Africa, China, Korea, South America, Zurich, Cuba, andtheUnited States. Manyofthese twenty-eight articles arebrief summariesas short as three pages;the most detailed piece recountsin twenty-eight pagesa tripto Kenya with Alberto Moravia. In Kenya,Maraini spoke to womenrefugees from Somaliaand Sudan who had fledmen armed withrifles and clubsandwhonow livedinprimitive campssetup for them.Manyof thesewomenhad been forcedto witnessthe murderoftheir husbands andchildren, onlythentobe gangraped.In any negotiations forpeace,however, it is the"Warlords," as themencall themselves, whoparticipate instead ofthose women whokeeplife going intheareasdevastated bywar. Dacia Maraini'squest forthe exotic leadsherawayfrom familiar homecomforts andhabits intonew and strange worlds;aided by her interest in womeneverywhere, she is rewarded bya network ofmeaningful connections. Martha ]. King Clearwater, Florida Nota Bene Rob Vollmar &Marvin Perry Mann Inattna's Tears Archaia Even though our scholarly textbooks may leave itout, Vollmar andMann bring tolife the tale ofEntika, a young priestess ofthe goddess Inanna inancient Sumerian civilization . The illustrations, somewhat reminiscent of Frank Miller's work, lend themselves well tothe energetic force of the story. Amina Zaydan Red Wine American University in Cairo Press This corriing-of-age narrative set inmodern Egypt tells the inner thoughts and emotions of awoman battling religiosity, nationalism, andgender roles. The narrator hasa commanding voice, andtheprose itself reads like poetry. July -August 201 1179 ...

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

ABSTRACT - Recorded music offers a wealth of information for studying practice. This paper examines the challenges of automatically extracting information from audio recordings of the singing voice and discusses our technique for automati catty extracting information such as note timings, intonation, vibrato rates, and dynamics. An experiment is also presented that focuses on the tuning of semitones in solo soprano performances of Schubert's Ave Maria by non-professional and professional singers. We found a small decrease in size of intervals with a leading tone function only in the non-professional group. KEYWORDS - vocal intonation, analysis, audio annotation This paper describes the challenges that arise when attempting to automatically extract pitchrelated data from recordings of the singing voice. The first section of the paper provides an overview of the history of analyzing recorded performances. The second section describes an algorithm for automatically extracting data from recordings of the singing voice where a score of the is available. The algorithm first identifies note onsets and offsets. Once the onsets and offsets have been determined, intonation, vibrato, and dynamic characteristics can be calculated for each note. The main experiment of the paper, described in the third section, is a study of intonation in solo vocal performance, where both the note onsets and offsets and fundamental frequency were estimated automatically. In the study, six non-professional and six professional sopranos performed Schubert's Ave Maria three times a cappella and three times with a recorded piano accompaniment. Our analysis of these recordings focused on the intonation of ascending and descending semitones. We found that the A-Bl, intervals with a leading tone function were on average 8 cents smaller than the non-leading tone A-Bb, but that their average size was approximately the same as the other semitones performed in the piece, regardless of intervallic direction or accompaniment. PREVIOUS WORK ON THE ANALYSIS OF RECORDED PERFORMANCES Interest in studying recorded performances dates back almost as far as the birth of recordable media, beginning with Dayton Miller's (1916) work on visualized pitch information in recordings with phonophotographic apparati. The psychologist Carl Seashore and colleagues at the University of Iowa also undertook extensive work in analysis (Seashore, 1938) employing a number of techniques to study recorded performances. Piano performances were studied from both piano rolls and films of the movement of the hammers during the performance. The team also undertook numerous studies of singing. Schoen (1922) studied five performances of Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria. He found that tuning depended on the direction of the line: notes following a lower tone tended to be flatter whereas notes followed by a higher note tended to be sharper. In general the singers were sharper than either equal temperament or just intonation. Easley's study of vibrato in opera singers found that the rate of the singer's vibrato was faster and the depth broader in songs from opera as compared to concert songs (Easley, 1932). Bartholomew (1934) studied vibrato along with other acoustic features of the singing voice in an attempt to define good singing. He observed the vibrato to be sinusoidal in nature and its rate to be approximately 6-7 Hz. H. G. Seashore (1936) also looked at Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria, as well as Handel's Messiah. He studied nine performances and focused on the connections, or glides, between notes. He was able to correlate glide extent with direction, finding that glide extent was larger going up than going down. Miller (1936) provided a large amount of detail through performance scores, though a lot of the data was not analyzed. His study of vibrato found that the rate of vibrato fell between 5. …

A consistent tissue attenuation coefficient estimator using bubble harmonic echoes

The ultrasonic property of soft tissue can be quantified by its attenuation coefficient α. Traditionally the backscattering signal of tissue is used to estimate α. To improve precision, a large number of spatially independent samples of tissue echoes are required for averaging. In this paper, we propose a new estimation method, which makes use of microbubbles to provide temporally independent samples for averaging. It is easier for temporal sampling to maintain ergodicity and provide a large number of independent samples for statistical averaging. A stochastic model for the harmonic signals of an ideal bubble attenuated by tissue is derived based on Kuc's and Miller's works. An estimator of α is then presented. This estimator is consistent and could be biased because of the unknown squarelaw relation between the second and fundamental harmonics for non-ideal bubble oscillation. In experimental works, we design a simplified phantom for demonstrating the performance of the proposed estimator. It is shown that both first and second harmonics can estimate α consistently. However, the interference of the tissue backscattering signal may cause additional estimation error using the first harmonic.

Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration David Gleeson Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration by Kerby A. Miller, pp. 411. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. $35.00. Field Day has given Kerby Miller the opportunity to compile his most important articles and essays in one volume, with which he says he hopes to pay tribute "to the Whiteboys, the Steelboys, and others," who "strove with gods against their world's destruction." Established scholars and students alike will be glad [End Page 145] that Miller's work has been gathered in such a way. No longer will they have to search out the scattered and diverse sources, although reading his seminal Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), remains compulsory for anyone interested in Irish emigration. Miller introduces the book by stating that he hopes it not only outlines the story but also provides an "understanding" of Ireland and Irish America. Miller divides his fifteen chapters into three sections, and he adds a substantial epilogue, the latter being the most original element of the book. Section one is titled "Culture, Class, and Emigration in Irish Society."Here, he reiterates the thesis outlined so forcefully in Emigrants and Exiles, that the Irish migration experience was in general a very harsh one. The poorer Catholic Irish retained communal premodern values, which emigration destroyed. In Ireland and America these Irish were uncomfortable with the individualism of modern capitalism, and expressed their unease in everything from their correspondence to their language. Miller continues to emphasize that "passivity and fate" dominated migrant lives. Where some sections of the Irish in America displayed cohesion and accommodation with bustling America, such as in their organized supports of Irish nationalism, these merely reflected the hegemonic efforts of the prefamine Irish-American bourgeoisie to establish and "maintain their authority over the Catholic masses." Miller regrets that these poorer and, according to him, often radical masses consented to being co-opted into America and American values in order to achieve the struggle to end British rule in Ireland. These opening chapters are a strong restatement of what Donald Akenson has archly described as the "Celtic-Catholic Handicap thesis." Miller still believes that Irish Catholics justifiably—if not for their stated reasons—felt like exiles in the United States. In his revising for this section, Miller does not address Akenson specifically (indeed, he is never cited), but it is undoubtedly a counter blast to those, like the Canada-based scholar, who criticize his view of prefamine and famine Ireland as well as his description of Irish life in America. Unfortunately, Miller does not answer the charges directly. Section two, "Irish Protestants in Ireland and America," reflects Miller's later career and ongoing research into the story of Irish Protestants and emigration. Influenced by his work with Bruce Boling, Arthur Schrier, and David Doyle for the collection of letters, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (2003), Miller came to revise some of his earlier views on Irish Protestants. Originally, Miller saw Protestants as "more energetic, industrious, innovative, thrifty, and individualistic—more capitalist-minded, in other words—than their Catholic countrymen." The five chapters included in this section indicate that the Protestant experience was more complicated than originally thought. His 1993 [End Page 146] essay "'Scotch-Irish,' 'Black Irish,' and 'Real Irish': Emigrants and Identities in the Old South," while somewhat overstated, remains thought-provoking. The other chapters are stronger and innovative. He provides a provocative account of the development of an Irish identity among Ulster Presbyterian immigrants in America in "'Scotch-Irish' Ethnicity in Early America: Its Regional and Political Origins," which appeared in Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. His chapters on "Class Conflict and the Origins of Unionist Hegemony in Early Nineteenth-Century Ulster" and "The Famine's Scars" explore the growing sense of alienation among Ulster Protestants—particularly Presbyterian—from the British political system in Ireland. He correctly highlights how the recent sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland have not been immutable since the Plantation of Ulster, but have ebbed and flowed through the varying political atmospheres. Here, Miller indicates clearly how the experience of Irish emigrants...

The operating‐financing distinction in financial reporting

This paper addresses an important issue of presentation in the financial statements, namely the distinction between, on the one hand, the obligations and associated flows arising from the provision of finance to an entity ('financing') and, on the other hand, all other activities of the entity ('operating'). This operating‐financing distinction has been wellestablished in the finance literature since the work of Miller and Modigliani (1958, 1961) and is ubiquitous and of considerable importance in practice in financial markets (e.g. Koller et al., 2005; CFA Institute, 2005; Penman, 2006). Yet accounting standards are underdeveloped in this area, and there are gaps and inconsistencies in both IFRS and US GAAP. Drawing upon the distinction between nature and function in the presentation of financial statement information, the paper contributes, first, to enhance our theoretical understanding of the operating‐financing distinction, which is currently defined in different and unreconciled ways in the literature and, second, to propose a practical basis for accounting standard‐setters to determine requirements for the reporting of financing activity in the financial statements.

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity

Reviewed by: Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity Kristin Moriah (bio) Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Monica Miller claims that the history of black dandyism is virtually unknown in spite of the fact that its traces surround us. Black bodies' ability to contain and confront the ethos of key cultural moments and the attendant complex relationships between cosmopolitanism and the corporation, postcolonialism and visual culture are the subjects of Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Identity. In this volume, Miller shows "the ways in which Africans dispersed across and around the Atlantic in the slave trade—once slaves to fashion—make fashion their slave" (1). Miller has performed a cultural excavation, sifting through fragments of visual and literary culture to trace a history of black style and assemble the first history of black dandyism. Her work deserves a place among the finer recent contributions to black performance studies, including Marvin McAllister's White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour (2003) and Harry J. Elam Jr. and Kennell Jackson's Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture (2005). Slaves to Fashion provides a platform from which further theorizing of the relationship between black bodies, culture, and commerce can commence. [End Page 1137] Slaves to Fashion delineates a cultural practice black subjects are not often thought to engage in. Black men have been excluded from most studies of dandyism. Even among scholars of the black Diaspora, Miller's situation of black dandyism within the realm of other modes of black performance is singular. Her study of the shifting visual, literary, and theatrical representations of black people, and black men's move from luxury object to stylish subject, provides a means by which to reevaluate black masculinity within the Diaspora. As Miller points out, "black dandyism is often seen as being imitative of Western dress and as a sign of one's aspiration to enter the mainstream, but when interpreted as a signifying practice, it becomes instead a dialogic process that exists in relation to white dandyism at the same time as it expresses, through its own internal logic, black culture" (14). Miller's work is not merely an extension of previous investigations into the power of black signifiying. Slaves to Fashion takes a nuanced approach to its subject matter by treating black style as performance, as opposed to simply theorizing the performativity of blackness. In the first chapter of her work, "Mungo Macaroni: The Slavish Swell," Miller painstakingly outlines the forced cosmopolitanism that characterized the lives of black slaves and servants. In England, Isaac Bickerstaffe's highly successful play The Padlock (1768) featured an assertive and nattily clad slave named Mungo Macaroni. The use of the term "Mungo" to describe black swells can be traced to this play. "Mungo Macaroni" draws attention to the dark figures often left to sit on the sidelines of eighteenth-century studies. Mapping a transatlantic movement from Africa to the Americas and to England, Miller explains that black dandy figures first emerged in eighteenth-century England as status symbols for their owners. Separated from the British colonies (and thus from the site of the production of their owner's wealth), the black dandy's lifestyle mirrored the lifestyle of the upper classes, even though his social position was tenuous. Luxury blacks piqued curiosity and captured the public's imagination. One of the first English plays to use blackface, The Padlock went on to successful runs in America and was influential in early American theatrical productions. Miller explains that in the figure of Mungo Macaroni and his real life counterparts, one could read "the complicated prehistory of African-diasporic identity formation and representation" (41). In the next chapter, "Crimes of Fashion: Dressing the Part from Slavery to Freedom," Miller shows the relationship between "two indigenous dandyish performative traditions": American slave carnivals and blackface minstrelsy. Miller writes that "in the colonial period and throughout the nineteenth century in America, black dandyism, as enacted at these indigenous festivals, was a practice that destabilized...

Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller Art Redding Jeffrey D. Mason . Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 360. $49.50 (Hb). Initial critical responses to Arthur Miller's most interventionist play, The Crucible, targeted the sentimentalism and presumed "naïveté" of Miller, who, like other liberals and fellow-travellers, seemed temperamentally unable to countenance the genuine threat posed by Stalinism. Irrespective of Miller's dramatized genealogy of secular Jeffersonian republicanism or his common-sense contention that the state had no business judging "invisible" crimes of the heart, the play's overstated analogy between witchcraft and communism implied that the great red menace that underwrote and rationalized every aspect of Cold War society was entirely chimerical. Even Miller might not have fully realized how his work diminished the Bolshevik bogey and exposed the hysterical substratum of American life – there were witches in Salem, Miller protested, rather lamely. At any rate, such criticisms were part of a still-lingering McCarthyite tropic constellation mobilized to "un-man" the American left: "pinko" intellectuals were understood to be "soft" on communism, liable to seduction, overly emotional, explicitly effeminate, and implicitly homosexual. Under such conditions, it should come as no surprise that, contra the state's illegitimate claim to judge one's soul publicly, an internal interrogation of masculine anxiety formed the core of Miller's political vision, in The Crucible and elsewhere. The early Cold War was also the historical moment when Method acting (itself, ironically, a Russian import) was certified by Miller and his colleagues in film and theatre. The technique secured its popularity by deflecting the traditionally expansive mythic quest of the male hero/pioneer into an inner emotional journey: the landscape of duress in which the solitary adventurer tested, hardened, and so proved himself worthy was, in the 1950s, the unexplored frontier of his own psyche. The playwright's dramatic challenge, of course, was to expose the inner quest effectively on the public stage, and the structure, arguably, of every single play by Miller juxtaposes a fraudulent "public" inquest with a more tragic but ultimately honest and illuminating private one. Typically, the menaces of male sexuality (more dangerous to the hero and more populous in this new country than savages or wild beasts) are the hinge between private and public dramas. Consequently, if the great danger to human freedom was the incipient totalitarian state, the most proximate enemy was the temptress. Of course, there are always witches. Miller, in sum, was no run-of-the mill sexist; rather, his sexism was calibrated to his historical moment and essential to his theatrical project. The penultimate and most satisfying chapter of [End Page 502] Jeffrey Mason's The Stone Tower sizes up Miller's sexual politics flatly: "The women wait while the men shape events" (252). Women are the occasions of struggle but never its agents, and agon is a decidedly male privilege. "He defines Woman as Other, either a paper doll devoid of depth and true warmth, or a source of confusion and the locus of evil," Mason writes (258). Mason's book, nevertheless, is an effort to salvage and rejuvenate Miller's political theatre, heterosexist warts and all. As Mason observes, the drama in Miller involves the "struggle between the lonely individual and the society that rejects him" (6), and Mason's book works hard to situate the precise social landscape and more generalized political implications of that struggle. Mason's refreshing central claim locates Miller as a political dramatist primarily, and he notes that the term is double-edged: political or activist theatre "shapes information in order to raise consciousness and incite action; it is a means of activism" (2). "In a broader sense, political theater deals with issues of social power" where "politics becomes the topic, not the purpose" (3). If the latter description applies more aptly to Miller's work, it should be recognized that he nonetheless has a foot in the first camp as well, however traditional his means of delivery. It would be overstating the case to suggest that Miller's work has any direct bearing on the activist theatre of the...

Let Her Sleep…But How Much?

Let Her Sleep…But How Much?

Editor's Note

Editor's Note David Brakke This special issue, guest edited by Kim Haines-Eitzen and Georgia Frank, collects six essays on the theme "Bodies and Boundaries in Late Antiquity" in honor of Patricia Cox Miller. It is appropriate that JECS publish these essays, not only because Professor Miller's work has been so influential in the field, but also because she has made an important contribution to the success of the journal. Professor Miller has served as an Associate Editor since the founding of JECS; in this role she has provided me and my predecessors with invaluable advice and counsel on numerous issues, large and small. She has contributed many of her best essays to our pages. This issue expresses the gratitude of the journal's editorial team and of the North American Patristics Society for her scholarship and service. [End Page v] Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Body as/at the Boundary of Gnosis

This essay explores the poetics of the divine body in the so-called Untitled Treatise in the Bruce Codex and uses that body and its text to examine two boundaries, both boundaries of Gnosis. First, modern scholars debate whether and how to draw a boundary around the phenomenon that is sometimes called "Gnosticism." Such scholarly boundary-making can be productive, and here the Untitled Treatise belongs, along with On the Origin of the World , outside the boundary of Gnostic Christianity and dates most likely to the fourth century. Second, in his elaborate description of the Human Being or City, the author has drawn on several currents, especially in Valentinian thought, to use the human body as the guiding metaphor for what human beings can and cannot know of the divine. The Untitled Treatise participates in a wider late ancient conversation about the value and limits of knowing through the body, a conversation that Patricia Cox Miller's recent work has helped to bring vividly to life. The paper argues that, when it comes to Gnosis, boundaries can be productive and bodies can be productive means of thinking about boundaries.

Reading Miller’s “Numinous Cock”: Heterosexist Presumption and Queerings of the Censored Text

IN 1988, GORE VIDAL REVIEWED A NEW EDITION of the Durrell-Miller Letters, noting dust-jacket ... shows three protagonists sprawled in a shallow wine-dark sea--Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and Henry Miller's cock. Needless to say, it is the third that not only rivets attention, but commands nostalgia and, well, let us be honest, pity and awe (11). Whatever we might make of the nature of the phallus on the book cover, Miller's sexuality is on display as he and Durrell are photographed bathing in the Ionian Sea, and this display continues in his writing. Yet, the homoerotic nature of this dialogue is overlooked--Miller is not lounging with a woman nor is Durrell's wife Nancy, the photographer, visible. The third musketeer in Vidal's trinity mediates between Durrell and Miller and ostensibly for the book's forty-five-year correspondence. Censorship in critical scholarship of this role interests me, in particular due to the overtly erotic and sexual materials that brought both authors fame. In conjunction with this photograph, perhaps the most obvious invocation of the phallus in their works is the cover art to the three volumes of the Villa Seurat Series published by the Obelisk Press with its phallic logo. Are readers, when cradling the most famous Obelisk publication, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, unwittingly palming Miller's numinous cock via the obelisk on the spine? This is the first view for the reader when approaching Nin, Durrell, and Miller's books in this series. Whether approaching the spine on a shelf or a faced copy, the promise of the upright obelisk advertises the books' nature: erotic arousal of the reader's interests. The phallic stamp of the press negotiates the interaction between the largely male readership and the pornographic entertainment that allowed the press to fund unknown literary authors. The Obelisk was run by Jack Kahane and was an overtly pornographic business that published literary authors as well, later becoming the Olympia Press famous for publishing Sade, William S. Burroughs, and George Bataille. (1) Yet, its stamp exemplifies some queer problems that continue to plague Miller's works. With these problems left hanging as provocatively as Vidal's third musketeer, it seems reasonable to expect that some portion of the large body of scholarship on this text would have posed such questions by now, seventy years later. The absence of such discussion, a symbolic castration of scholarly enquiry, is the form of censorship with which I am concerned. Scholarly discomfort with the sexualities presented in Miller's works points to conflict in current theorizations of sexuality: Queer Theory versus Gay and Lesbian Studies here. The past decade has seen an acceleration in definitional excursions in theories of sexuality that generally exposes a tension between increasing inclusivity through the addition of definitions versus the deconstruction of the same stable categorizations, as in Queer Theory and Trans Studies. As Queer Theory challenges stable definitions, it has increasingly conflicted with the political and recuperative aims of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and the two fields increasingly divide from one another as theory alienates practice. Moreover, these definitional divisions are also visible between studies of sexualities based in the Humanities versus the Social Sciences. Hence, my terms here are loosely applied and point to scholarly trends more than to stable categories with agreed characteristics. In this context, Miller has been repeatedly portrayed as the epitome of stereotypical Western masculine heterosexuality and most forcefully so in queer readings of Tropic of Cancer. I contend something different. Despite scholarly failures to notice the overtly queer content of the novel and (even more provocatively) despite queerings of the text that oddly reinforce heterosexist presumption, Miller explicitly endorses and implicates himself in discourses of queerness. …

Visual Symphonies: Setting Intricate Images to Music

Although he began his career as a composer of modern concert music, Dennis Miller became interested in using electronic music as a medium and eventually extended his art into a mixed medium of sound and image. This article describes Miller's work and process.

Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution, and: Napoleon's Troublesome Americans: Franco-American Relations, 1804-1815 (review)

Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution. By Melanie Randolph Miller. (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. 284. Cloth, $30.00.)Napoleon's Troublesome Americans: Franco-American Relations, 1804-1815. By Peter P. Hill. (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005. Pp. 289. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Philipp ZiescheAs the most recent French-American quarrel subsides, the books under review offer wealth of material for revisiting the beginnings of the two nations' long-contentious relationship. Peter P. Hill's analysis of high-level diplomacy in the little-studied period between the Louisiana Purchase and the end of the Napoleonic Wars displays his profound knowledge of both American and French archival sources. Hill's former student Melanie Randolph Miller has mined Gouverneur Morris's remarkable diary and correspondence more thoroughly than anyone before to reconstruct his time in Paris from the first stirrings of the Revolution in 1789 to the height of the Terror in 1794. (She is now the editor of the new Gouverneur Morris Papers project.) Both books are deeply researched, persuasively argued, and clearly written; yet both miss the opportunity to place their respective subjects in the larger contexts of either the longer history of French-American relations or the age of transatlantic revolutions.Like her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2000, Miller's book straightforwardly declares her intention to rescue Morris from historical oblivion and reestablish his reputation as a great American statesman (xiv). Envoy to the Terror is particularly strong on Morris's tenure as American minister to from 1792 to 1794, when he patiently but determinedly struggled at great personal risk with French authorities for the release of imprisoned Americans and the restitution of seized property. Miller conclusively demonstrates that far from destroying the French-American alliance, as Alexander DeConde argued half century ago, Morris in fact prevented hostilities between the United States and France (240) by keeping open lines of communication during time when all other foreign representatives fled Paris.1However, Miller's book appears in historiographical context far different from the one in which she started her project. Over the past six years, no fewer than three adulatory biographies of Morris have appeared, including those by Richard Brookhiser, William Howard Adams (who acknowledged his extensive reliance on Miller's work), and James J. Kirschke, as well as biography for children.2 Miller provides richer account of Morris's efforts to influence the early French Revolution, his failed diplomatic mission to Britain, and his desperate attempts to preserve the constitutional monarchy in and help the royal family escape from Paris, than any of the other works. Yet the fact remains that Morris's reputation is no longer in dire need of rescuing, making Miller's tireless defense of him against both long-standing conventional wisdom (xiii) and detractors among Morris's contemporaries seem unnecessarily partisan. While Miller paints vivid portrait of Morris, those she calls his opponents or antagonists-from bigwigs Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine, to minor figures like William Short, William Stephens Smith, and Stephen Sayre-serve largely as foils for Morris's superior character, skills as diplomat, and prescience as observer of the French Revolution.This is particularly regrettable in the case of Paine, who like Morris has been the subject of several recent biographies. For all their ideological differences and personal animosity, the two men shared cosmopolitan mindset that increasingly placed both of them on the margins of both American and French nationalist politics. Their nonconformity to the conventional U.S.-centric narrative of the early republic explains their long scholarly neglect as well as the recent surge in interest. …

Risky Debt Dynamic, Jumps and Optimal Financial Policy

The model developed is a structural valuation model of risky debt which includes a dynamic of debt. The value of the firm follows a jump diffusion process. The default threshold like the recovery rate are endogenous. Consequently, the optimal default threshold changes as the firm's debt level evolves. The spread curves in terms of maturities have levels and forms that are closer to empirical observations. The problem of the dynamic optimal financial structure is reformulated within this framework. Under certain conditions, it is shown that the leverage ratio of the firm follows a double barrier process, one absorbent, the other reflective. But in a perfect financial market (without financial costs) there is no optimal capital structure when the default is predictive. With jumps we can obtain an optimal financial structure as in Modigliani and Miller works.

Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change (review)

Reviewed by: Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change Alan Ackerman Arthur Miller's America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Edited by Enoch Brater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005; pp. xi + 268. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. This collection of essays is the culminating work of a conference held at the University of Michigan in 2000 to mark the eighty-fifth birthday of Arthur Miller and his long association with the university where he had been an undergraduate in the 1930s. The book both describes and testifies to Miller's continuing importance in and beyond the theatre in America and abroad. Enoch Brater's eloquent introduction ("Early Days, Early Works") details ways in which Miller's formative experiences at the University of Michigan in particular contributed to his commitment to questions of social justice. And the rich appreciation bestowed upon Miller both in the conference proceedings and in the resulting book has been repaid by the playwright, who wrote of those early days in Echoes Down the Corridors, "It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life" (quoted in Brater 15). That warm sentiment is echoed in turn in an interview between Miller and Brater via satellite hookup to conclude both the conference and the book itself, though the book also includes a brief afterword by Mel Gussow praising Miller for being "timely and timeless" (259). Arthur Miller's America is an eclectic collection of essays on performance, theatre history, literary-cultural interpretation, pedagogy, and interviews with artists, most of which revolve around questions of historical specificity and boundary-crossing. At the center of the book are illuminating chapters by Laurence Goldstein ("The Misfits and American Culture") and Jonathan Freedman ("Miller, Monroe and the Remaking of Jewish Masculinity"), offering close readings of Miller's work and life as historical subjects. Goldstein self-consciously focuses on a movie that, unlike the plays, is never likely to be adapted or remade, writing that "the stubborn rootedness of The Misfits in all its forms in the soil of the late 1950s and early 1960s complicates our efforts to measure its continuing claims upon the public imagination in the early years of the twenty-first century" (110). In "Arthur Miller and the Drama of American Liberalism," Mike Sell's nuanced account of Miller's experiments in "moral form" in the context of crises in twentieth-century American Liberalism, asks just what kind of Liberal Miller is. Sell argues, in a manner that reflects smartly on this collection as a whole, that the tradition of Liberalism is "bound paradoxically both by concern for timeless values and by the abiding belief that such values can only be defined in the concrete political contexts and constraints of the moment" (25). Many of the contributions by theatre professionals and theatre historians describe the processes, challenges, and rewards of adapting Miller across diverse historical moments, national borders, genres, and media. Frank Gagliano describes a playwright's approach to adapting Miller's autobiography Timebends to the stage, though it concludes with a discouraging letter from Miller himself, and Peter Ferron gives an account of directing The American Clock. Revealing interviews with actor Patrick Stewart and composer William Bolscom address the interpretation of Miller onstage and in music. And Bolscom, who wrote an opera based on A View from the Bridge, notes the artistic-historical curiosity that so many have sought to adapt Miller's plays to music, though almost always against the playwright's wishes and with little box-office or artistic success, in spite of the musical nature of much of Miller's work. On the other hand, effective chapters by Ruby Cohn ("Manipulating Miller") and Deborah Geis ("In Willy Loman's Garden: Contemporary Re-visions of Death of a Salesman") show how adaptable Miller's dramas have been, whether, as Cohn shows, in making Death of a Salesman accessible to a Chinese audience or, as Geis demonstrates, in the diverse ways the play has been appropriated "as intertext for a surprising number of new theatrical works" (203). Toby Zinman...

“One Community's Total War Against Prejudice”: The Springfield Plan Revisited

This article examines one community's attempt to educate for democratic citizenship during World War II through a community-wide tolerance program known as “The Springfield Plan.” Through the advocacy of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Superintendent John Granrud, and Teachers College Associate Professor Clyde R. Miller, the Springfield Plan became the most well-publicized intercultural educational curriculum in the 1940s, talked about and emulated by school districts across the country and into Canada. I situate the ideological origins of the program in the work of Miller's Institute for Propaganda Analysis in the late 1930s, analyze the curriculum frameworks and the program's dissemination to other school districts in the 1940s, and chronicle its demise during the red-baiting of progressive and intercultural educators in the late 1940s. The rise and fall of the Springfield Plan provides a historical window into the role of the media and advocacy efforts in the implementation and dissemination of a citizenship curriculum as well as the impact of the changing local and national political context on the promotion (and suppression) of diversity work in the schools.

Technical and social innovation determinants of behaviour

AbstractTechnical and social innovations are relatively new in human history. These innovations appeared in the last two‐tenths of one per cent of the time that humans have lived on earth. Prior to innovations, human behaviours could be described and quantified in terms of the same determinants of behaviour as other living systems. A living system science has been developed that is equivalent to the other natural sciences for all, except humans that exhibit innovation behaviours. A brief description of that living systems science is given herein that provides a foundation for treating the technical and social determinants of recent human behaviours. This article treats technical and social determinants of human behaviour as they relate to that living systems science. The article also relates the science back to James G. Miller's seminal work in living systems theory. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.