For Us by Us: Electronic Dance Music's Queer of Color Undercommons

Black, Blair Maya Imani University of California, Los Angeles ProQuest Dis 2023 해외박사(DDOD)

Electronic dance music (EDM) is a seven billion dollar global industry and its elements are core to mainstream popular music. However, the recognition and earnings elide the queer communities of color from which the genre originates. Therefore, this dissertation builds from Munoz's (2005) minoritarian knowledge production, to reveal how this queer of color EDM aesthetic allow them to not only reclaim agency through everyday politics, but also create lives of pleasure that decenter oppression through resistance narratives. And in doing so, it reveals how Black DJs from the early days of EDM and younger generations of queer DJs of color make sense of how this genre transitioned from brown and Black queer subgenre in American urban centers to a "supergenre" popular within the significantly whiter and heteronormative audiences throughout the world. Moreover, it addresses how the participation of queer DJs of color is relegated only to source material for creation narratives surrounding EDM genres, at the expense of contemporary queer and of color scenes. This dissertation project builds on their frustration to highlight how underground networks of queer people of color are significant loci for the circulation of talent, cultural norms, music aesthetics, and economic opportunities. This dissertation also traces the formation of inter-musical and inter-texutal aural cultures through the use of various popular Afro- Diasporic musical and cultural aesthetics in EDM production. Therefore, this work is guided by these key questions: (1) what is the relationship over time between the musical and cultural aesthetic of queer of color communities to mainstream dance music industries?; (2) how do the music and production styles within these networks act as expressive extensions of the queer of color identity/experience; and (3) how do networks of underground queer collectives of color engage in "world-making" (Buckland 2002) to create spaces and cultural norms through underground industries and tightly knit networks within and between urban centers?.

Creating a Qualified Cannabis Workforce: How Higher Education Can Support Cannabis Career Pathways

Black, Becky E Kansas State University ProQuest Dissertations & T 2020 해외박사(DDOD)

Background: Cannabis’s popularity is increasing as states legalize it for medicinal and recreational purposes increasing the need for a trained workforce. The purpose of this study is to examine the workforce needs of the cannabis industry from the perspective of cannabis industry experts. The findings will assist institutions that are providing or plan to offer cannabis academic courses and programs. To meet and respond to the dynamic evolution of the cannabis industry, colleges will need to be nimble or find ways to be nimble.Methods: This qualitative study utilized Heidegger's interpretative phenomenological research design to capture the essence of eight cannabis industry professionals’ (three females, five males) experience and interpretation of the workforce needs of the growing cannabis industry. Purposive sampling and snowball sampling determined the subjects for the remotely recorded, unstructured, six-question, in-depth interviews. The interviews ranged in length from 49 minutes to 126 minutes. The researcher transcribed the interviews verbatim, then coded and analyzed results for themes and implications for practice. The purpose of this methodology is to describe the essence of the research subjects’ lived experiences. The researcher did not bracket their biases.Results: Research subjects had from two months to 12 years of experience working in the legal cannabis industry; from three years being affiliated with the cannabis industry and up to 43 years being in the black or black and gray market. They held cannabis licenses in cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, and/or retail. Education ranged from post-secondary to master’s degree. All of the research subjects self-identified as being White, non-Hispanic, and ages ranged from 30 to 59. Coding methods included in vivo coding, eclectic coding, and third, focused coding. A top-10 list was used to transition between post-coding and prewriting. Eclectic Coding was used for Theming the Data. Abridged interviews yielded seven themes for higher education. The phenomenological essence of the interviewees lived experience was love and passion for the cannabis plant, growing it as well as its medicinal properties.Conclusion: Academia has the opportunity to support cannabis career pathways by providing cannabis classes and/or programs, thus helping to create a qualified cannabis workforce. The research findings within this study can assist in the design and implementation of these programs.

Learning styles of practicing accountants in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States: A cross cultural study

Black, William L New York University 2008 해외박사(DDOD)

This study explored the linkage between learning styles, the cultural dimensions of individualism and collectivism, gender, and age among practicing accountants in Shanghai, China, Hong Kong, China and the United States. The participants were audit seniors in a Big 4 accounting firm attending firm training in these locations. Learning styles were measured using the Kolb Learning Style Inventory, and cultural dimensions were measured using the Triandis and Gelfand Vertical and Horizontal Individualism and Collectivism Index. A demographic questionnaire collected data on gender, age, and citizenship. This study resulted in several significant findings regarding the influence of culture, gender, and age on the learning styles of practicing accountants in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the United States. Chinese accountants were shown to be significantly higher in vertical collectivism and lower in horizontal individualism than those in the United States. Chinese accountants were also significantly higher than those in the U.S. in vertical individualism; contrary to the prevailing literature. This study showed that Shanghai accountants were higher in horizontal collectivism and vertical collectivism than Hong Kong accountants, but that no significant differences were found in the individualism dimensions. In terms of learning styles, Chinese accountants were found to have significantly lower active-reflective learning style scores than the U.S., but no significant differences were found in the concrete-abstract dimension. Significant differences were found in the distribution of individual learning styles (assimilator, converger, accommodator, and diverger) between China and the United States. No significant learning style differences were found among accountants in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Looking at the correlation between cultural dimensions and learning styles this study found that three of the four cultural dimensions (horizontal individualism, horizontal collectivism, and vertical collectivism) correlated positively with the active-reflective learning style in Shanghai. In Hong Kong, horizontal individualism also correlated positively with the active-reflective learning style. The only correlation found in the U.S. was with regard to horizontal collectivism, which correlated positively concrete-abstract learning. No significant differences in learning styles were found between the genders in the populations studied, and the only significant age-learning style correlation was found in Shanghai, where age correlated positively with concrete/abstract learning.

The ethics of space, secrecy, and solitude: Domestic space in French sixteenth-century literature and visual culture

Black, Elizabeth Clare University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines the representation of domestic space in Gilles Corrozet's Blasons domestiques (1539), Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron (1549), and Michel de Montaigne's Essais (1580--1595), as well as attitudes towards the building of family homes expressed in architectural treatises by Leon Battista Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio, and Philibert de l'Orme. The study demonstrates how the changing use of domestic space in sixteenth-century France corresponds to the nascent individualism of the period and affects textual production, the ethics of personal behavior, and the notions of solitude and secrecy. Alberti, Serlio, and De l'Orme use their architectural treatises to both propose their ideal ways of building the family home and to present projects that they have completed on commission for noble property owners. Each architect incorporates rooms into his buildings that we would today call private. Corrozet's imaginary house in the Blasons domestiques is posited as a reaction to the dual nature of the home as a place of both business and family life, an overlap which the writer and bookseller finds incompatible with leading a moral life. For Corrozet, solitude is an essential means to protect family members from what he considers lascivious material such as the poetic images of the blasons anatomiques, but also to keep the female body from becoming the subject of poetry. The separation of the household from the outside therefore prevents the production and consumption of morally dangerous texts. In the Heptameron, solitude implies secrecy, one of the main driving forces behind narrative, since secrets are often made into tales. I argue that the collection exhibits a consistent condemnation of solitude, presenting it as antithetical to the idea that an ethical life can, and must, be examined out in the open. For Montaigne, solitude at home is an essential condition of self-exploration and therefore ii of writing about the self. But he also finds it almost impossible to find solitude, even at his family home to which he retires, and seclusion is condemnable if one can still be useful to society. His house cannot be isolated in space; neither can the essayist, and this tension between enforced presence in and desired absence from the world informs the writing of the Essais. Faced with two possible modes of representation, the essayist eventually favors writing over building as a means to depict the self in public, abandoning the conceit of building as a meaningful activity. Together the texts create a sixteenth-century imaginary of the home from both the user's and the builder's perspective. They contribute to our understanding of how domestic space was built, lived, perceived, used, dreamed, and subverted. The ethics of secrecy and of building the home become entangled with textual production in an ongoing debate between the desire to publish and the need to carve out time and space for the self within the home. This tension between the opposite movements of the physical self into the home and the textual self out of the printing press inform our twenty-first-century debates surrounding privacy and virtual space.

The experience of the high school adolescent whose sibling is a victim of homicide

Black Currie, Leslie New York University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

While the event of a sudden violent death by homicide for a high school aged adolescent has received increasing public attention, the experience of surviving a sibling's murder at this stage of adolescence and its impact on development is a relatively unknown process. A retrospective, qualitative study was done on twenty participants who had survived the homicide of a sibling during mid-adolescence. The findings suggested that the death of their sibling had seemingly little impact on some developmental tasks, although there was evidence of effects on intimacy formation. The discovery of chronic exposure to violence for a significant number of participants was an unexpected finding. Most had lost their assumptive worlds, suffered traumatic grief, and dealt with hypervigilance, fear, and PTSD, some of which remained part of their "new normal." Although reporting that the "murder was always there"; they were remarkably able to complete school, maintain successful employment, and have a positive focus on the future. They indicated having "someone always there"; whether a connection to a deceased sibling, a constant other, or school program as helpful. The implications for practice involve development of adolescent; specific theoretical constructs around sudden violent death, development of theoretically integrated interventional programs, and policy formulation with subsequent advocacy.

Success and failure of futures contracts : theory & empirical evidence

Black, Deborah Groves University Microfilms International 1986 국내박사

Cosmopoetics: Global imagination in contemporary writing (J. M. Coetzee, Charles Johnson, Amitav Ghosh, Ruth L. Ozeki)

Black, Shameem Stanford University 2004 해외박사(DDOD)

My project asks how the novel, once considered the voice of the nation, works to represent global communities. Focusing on contemporary postcolonial and ethnic American literature, I examine how novels imagine characters and communities across divides of nation, race, gender, class, and language. In many accounts, transcultural writing has been chastised for arrogantly asserting imperial authority and dismissed as the projection of cultural fantasy. My theory of cosmopolitan writing, or what I call cosmopoetics, suggests how fiction might avoid the tyranny of such imperialist knowledge. Although the problem of transcultural writing admits no perfect solution, the novels I examine wrestle valiantly with, and occasionally surmount, the challenge of speaking beyond their own cultural location. In my first chapter, I describe how cosmopoetics enables ethical dialogue across social borders. In many theories, a novel's representation of other cultures is read as a mask for its own aspirations and anxieties. I claim that novels ironically escape such endless cultural mirroring by first delving inward, probing the contours of their own cultural locations in order to consider the perspectives of others. More broadly, the strategies of cosmopoetics entail playful, precise interpretation, stress the renunciation of privilege, assert the power of shared visions, and posit fluid forms of culture that challenge the logic of private property. Such choices enable novels to speak with and to, rather than simply about, the worlds they recreate. My four subsequent chapters elucidate these narrative choices in the writings of J. M. Coetzee, Charles Johnson, Amitav Ghosh, and Ruth L. Ozeki. Coetzee reworks the eighteenth-century concept of sympathetic imagination to think across lines of gender, race, and species, while Johnson relies on Asian discourses to narrate African American history through a cosmopoetics of polyphony. Ghosh crafts family narratives to articulate polyglot communities of diaspora, and Ozeki imagines feminist solidarity in a world mediated by television and trade. Offering both the intimacy of close relationships and the possibility of global alliances, these cosmopoetical narratives invite their readers to share in the project of responsibly imagining global community.

Structural and Functional Biomedical Imaging Using Polarization-Based Optical Coherence Tomography

Black, Adam J ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Minn 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

Biomedical imaging has had an enormous impact in medicine and research. There are numerous imaging modalities covering a large range of spatial and temporal scales, penetration depths, along with indicators for function and disease. As these imaging technologies mature, the quality of the images they produce increases to resolve finer details with greater contrast at higher speeds which aids in a faster, more accurate diagnosis in the clinic. In this dissertation, polarization-based optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems are used and developed to image biological structure and function with greater speeds, signal-to-noise (SNR) and stability. OCT can image with spatial and temporal resolutions in the micro range. When imaging any sample, feedback is very important to verify the fidelity and desired location on the sample being imaged. To increase frame rates for display as well as data throughput, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) were used with custom algorithms to realize real-time display and streaming output for continuous acquisition of large datasets of swept-source OCT systems. For spectral domain (SD) OCT systems, significant increases in signal-to-noise ratios were achieved from a custom balanced detection (BD) OCT system. The BD system doubled measured signals while reducing common term. For functional imaging, a real-time directed scanner was introduced to visualize the 3D image of a sample to identify regions of interest prior to recording. Elucidating the characteristics of functional OCT signals with the aid of simulations, novel processing methods were also developed to stabilize samples being imaged and identify possible origins of functional signals being measured. Polarization-sensitive OCT was used to image cardiac tissue before and after clearing to identify the regions of vascular perfusion from a coronary artery. The resulting 3D image provides a visualization of the perfusion boundaries for the tissue that would be damaged from a myocardial infarction to possibly identity features that lead to fatal cardiac arrhythmias. 3D functional imaging was used to measure functional retinal activity from a light stimulus. In some cases, single trial responses were possible; measured at the outer segment of the photoreceptor layer. The morphology and time-course of these signals are similar to the intrinsic optical signals reported from phototransduction. Assessing function in the retina could aid in early detection of degenerative diseases of the retina, such as glaucoma and macular degeneration.

PATTERNED SELF-ASSEMBLED MONOLAYERS FOR THE FABRICATION OF MICRO- AND NANOSTRUCTURES (SILVER, ALKANETHIOLS, POLY(DIMETHYLSILOXANE))

BLACK, ANDREW JOHN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1999 해외박사(DDOD)

This thesis describes the use of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) for the fabrication of structures with dimensions ranging from 100 <math> <f> <g>m</g></f> </math>m to <100 nm. By controlling the properties of the surface on which they assemble, SAMs and in particular patterned SAMs, can act as resists against etching, or as templates on which selective adsorption or nucleation can occur. Two methods for patterning SAMs are discussed. Microcontact printing, and a new method that patterns regions of disorder in SAMs at abrupt changes in the topography of metal substrates that support them. Chapter 1 describes the fabrication of two layer structures of electrically isolated wires—crossed wire structures and a surface coil inductor. The fabrication process utilizes the tools of soft lithography and is based on two levels of self-assembly; (i) formation of patterned SAMs by <math> <f> <g>m</g></f> </math>CP (using molecular scale self-assembly), followed by (ii) preferential wetting of a prepolymer on the hydrophilic regions of the monolayer (using meso- or macroscopic self-assembly). The use of microcontact printing and patterned self-assembly of liquid polymers removes the need for registration in two steps that would, with conventional techniques, require registration. Chapter 2 describes the development of a new methodology for patterning SAMs that intentionally generates highly localized regions of disorder in SAMs at the edges of evaporated metal structures. We used this methodology (which we have named “topographically directed etching” or TODE) to fabricate 50 nm trenches specifically at the edges of topographically patterned films of Ag supporting SAMs of alkanethiols. The features generated by TODE are an order of magnitude smaller than those patterned originally in the material. Several variations of the basic methodology are described, the results of which include the fabrication of 100 nm trenches in SiO₂/Si and Al₂O₃/Al, 100 nm <italic>lines</italic> of silver, asymmetric structures in aluminum and silver, and 30 nm features in curved silver surfaces. Although the techniques can be combined with photolithography, the pattern transfer step is chemical, and is not limited therefore by diffraction or depth of focus. Chapter 3 describes the use of two new techniques—topographically directed etching (TODE) and photolithography in the near-field—to make structures having 100–300 nm feature sizes, and the use of these structures as masters against which to mold poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) to prepare stamps for microcontact printing (<math> <f> <g>m</g></f> </math>CP). Printing with these stamps can routinely produce positive and negative structures with 100–300 nm dimensions in silver. These procedures are limited in the generality of the patterns they can produce: they cannot, in general, make closely spaced features, and distortions and sagging in the mask place other types of limitations on the patterns that can be made. They do, however, provide ready access to a range of useful patterns without requiring access to high-resolution pattern-generating systems.

Mesh-free applications to fracture mechanics and an analysis of the Corrected Derivative Method

Black, Thomas Mark Northwestern University 1999 해외박사(DDOD)

Mesh-free methods and extensions of the finite element method for the solution of stress analysis problems, with an emphasis on crack problems, are developed and analyzed. Application of radial weighting functions to the numerical solution of differential equations is considered. It is shown that traditional numerical schemes using radial weighting functions may not converge. The Corrected Derivative Method (CD) and the Element-free Galerkin Method (EFG) are considered and analyzed as corrections to the radial weighting functions to ensure convergence and good approximation. A convergence theory for the Corrected Derivative Method is presented. This is a Petrov-Galerkin method using radial weighting functions to approximate the primary variable and corrects their derivatives to satisfy algebraic constraints. Under mild conditions relating nodal spacing and functional supports, this method converges with optimal order in the <italic>H</italic><super>1</super> norm. This method is used to model a two dimensional crack and compute stress intensity factors. A coupled FE-EFG method for three dimensional fracture mechanics is described. In this method, the solution in the region near the crack front is approximated by intrinsically enriched EFG shape functions and linear finite elements are used in the rest of the domain. The plane strain asymptotic crack tip fields are used to enrich in a tubular region surrounding the crack front where they are well defined. The diffraction method and visibility criterion are generalized to three dimensional geometries. Example computations for stress intensity factors and crack growth illustrate the method. An extension of the finite element method is developed for two dimensional crack problems. The crack is modeled variationally by using shape functions constructed so that they are discontinuous along the crack line. This method is applied to arbitrarily curved cracks. Examples determining stress intensity factors and crack growth are presented. More general extensions to three dimensional problems are described.