Analysis

"Ruth Crawford Seeger’s first acknowledged compositions are the Five Preludes for Piano (1924-25), written while she was a master’s student in composition at the American Conservatory in Chicago. The preludes divide into two groups, the first two preludes having been written in the fall of 1924 and the last three in the spring of 1925. The preludes are dedicated to Djane Lavoie Herz, the Canadian-American pianist with whom Crawford began to study in the fall of 1924. Herz, a pupil of Scriabin during his Brussels period (1908-10), instilled a love for Scriabin’s music and for his mystical philosophy in her students. In early 1925, Herz introduced Crawford to the Franco-American composer, poet, philosopher and astrologer Dane Rudhyar who, along with Herz, was a devotee of Scriabin’s music and a student of theosophy. Rudhyar’s most important work of this period was a set of fifteen Moments (1924-25) which, like Crawford’s preludes, are dedicated to Djane Herz. The harmonically rich and intensely expressive style of Rudhyar’s Moments had a direct impact upon Crawford’s emerging style, resulting in greater harmonic and dramatic intensity in her Preludes 4 and 5 in comparison to the earlier members of the set.

This lecture-performance explores the historical and musical evidence supporting the influence of Scriabin and Rudhyar on the formation of Crawford’s musical style by comparing excerpts from Scriabin’s late preludes, Rudhyar’s Moments, and Crawford’s Five Preludes. The introductory comments are followed by a performance of short, representative works by all three composers."

""Purpose – This research aims to develop a framework for measuring readiness level of Business Intelligence (BI) implementation.
Design/methodology/approach –  We formulated our farmework by using Critical Success Factors (CSFs) of BI implementation. The weight of each dimension in the framework is determined by using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The validation of the model is performed by involving five (5) BI experts.
Findings – The proposed framework comprises of three categories: organizational, process and technology. The number of aspects for organizational, process and technology are nine, four, and five respectively. Among other aspects, strategic alignment, committed management support and sponsorship, clear vision and well-established business case, and business-centric championship and balanced team composition are considered the most important aspects to measure BI implementation readiness.
Practical implication – In order to gain success in BI implementation, it is necessary that organizations conduct assessment on its current condition to identify their weaknesses.
Originality/value – We proposed a framework for measuring BI implementation readiness, which is currently unavailable. Current researchs in BI mainly focus in the implementation aspects, whereas our research focuses on pre-implementation aspects.We hope by considering our proposed framework, organizetions can provide better BI services in its implementation, thus BI gives more value to help organization in decision making.   
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"Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985) was a prominent member of the ultramoderns, a group of American composers that also included Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford. Judith Tick and others have demonstrated the influence of Rudhyar on the development of Ruth Crawford’s early music.  In addition to its historical interest, however, Rudhyar’s music possesses considerable intrinsic merit. Despite its harmonic richness and structural coherence, there have as yet been no serious analytical studies of the music of this remarkable composer.

In his writings Rudhyar referred to the cycle of perfect fifths as a link between ancient and modern musical cultures. Natural fifths provided pitch materials for ancient music while tempered fifths became a source for modern harmonies. He described these modern harmonies, in which consonant and dissonant intervals coexist in free, non-hierarhical combinations, as “syntonic.” This paper examines examples of syntonic harmonies and their transformations in Rudhyar’s music, situated within the context of the music of some of his European predecessors and American contemporaries."

This paper explores a cross-disciplinary approach to Applied Drama/performance studies and creativity about their role in contemporary communities. Specifically, it discusses the possibilities of using the devising drama practice as a means of learning about ourselves and the world we live in. Drawing on observations and discussions conducted during an undergraduate Drama programme the authors experiment with ideas that connect drama to the students’ contexts and favourite social issues and examine the impact of teaching drama on student learning as both creative artists and citizens. From these accounts the authors explore how devising new dramatic characters and scenes can develop students’ powers of critical perception and contribution to the community. Practical work based on the plays of Shakespeare was used to generate examples of creative practice within the conventions of drama. The paper concludes that drama involves a pedagogy that aims to develop practitioner powers of individual imagination, collaborative creativity and social awareness.

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Abstract: This paper outlines a simple and effective model that can be used to evaluate and design digital games for learning. This model can also help in the formulation of strategies for using existing games in learning contexts. An overview of the general model is provided, followed by a new variant designed specifically for the analysis of educational games.  Several familiar games are then examined using this model as the lens. The implications that this model has for the design and use of games as instructional technologies are described.
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"This dissertation is concerned with the role material culture played in transformation and/or retention of Maya authority, just prior to and after Spanish contact (A.D. 1100-1800s). The primary research data used to discuss this transition was derived from the author's analysis of precolumbian and colonial artifacts from the Ciudadela Structure (YUC 2) in Tíhoo/Mérida, Yucatán-an assemblage originally collected by John Goggin in 1956 and 1957 and currently housed at the University of Florida-Florida Museum of Natural History. As one of the last standing structures in the Maya site of Tíhoo, now buried beneath the Spanish capital city Mérida, the Ciudadela collection represents a rare glimpse into a significant, yet understudied, Type 1 archaeological site. Included in this project are a general examination of Maya studies in the Northwestern Yucatán Corridor and the results of my preliminary classification and discussion of materials represented in the YUC 2 assemblage.
It is important to note that as a part of this project, I created the first comprehensive catalogs for the YUC 2 Ciudadela collection, entitled FMNH YUC 2: Catalog of Artifacts, FMNH YUC 2: Ceramic Stylistic Catalog and FMNH YUC 2: Non-Ceramic Catalog. Results of the archaeological component of this study illustrated that there was little change in production of indigenous pottery after the fall of Mayapan (ca. A.D. 1441-1461), as inhabitants of precolumbian Tíhoo continued to use preexisting wares from their former capital, particularly those within the Mayapan Red Ware and Mayapan Unslipped Ware classifications, well into the Colonial period. In the Post-Colonial period, a significant change in wares occurred as native inhabitants incorporated foreign ceramic types into their society. Ceramics from Spain, Italy, and England, and porcelains from China and Japan, combined with colonial Mexican Majolica and preexisting Mayapan wares, illustrate the interaction of native inhabitants with European immigrants and their import goods. Although the YUC 2 collection supported the transformation of material culture after Spanish contact, the Maya, through religious practices, militaristic resistance, and oral/written traditions, were able to retain significant aspects of their precolumbian power into the colonial era and beyond."

This dissertation project examines patterns of stance in essays written by high- and low-performing students in two upper-level undergraduate courses, one in political theory and the other in economics. It employs methods of linguistic discourse analysis, drawing largely on Appraisal Theory (a subset of Systemic Functional Linguistics), in combination with methods from corpus linguistics and theoretical insights from rhetorical genre studies. It examines how recurring patterns of stance in students' essays correspond to the goals and assessment criteria for writing in the courses, as revealed through interviews with the instructors and analysis of selected course material. Through this robust set of analytic approaches, the study aims to make explicit patterns of stance in student writing that correlate with high- and low-graded essays and with the disciplinary contexts. The broader aim is to render explicit patterns of interpersonal meanings constructed in students' texts that construe such abstract qualities as critical reasoning, complexity and nuance in argumentation, and control of the discourse—features identified by the instructors as valued in student writing. The study contributes to the field of composition and rhetoric by pinpointing discursive resources that enable some student writers to construct more discipline-congruent styles of argumentation than others. Specific findings show that, while the two essay assignments require different ways of using language to construct valued stances, the high-performing writers in both contexts more consistently construct a "novice academic" stance while the low-performing writers more consistently construct a "student" stance. The former is marked by the rhetorical qualities of contrastiveness, dialogic control, critical distance, and discoursal alignment, or assimilation of the disciplinary discourse. In contrast, the “student” stance is marked by frequent personalizing moves, repeated references to the classroom discourse, and comparatively infrequent use of discursive resources that construe the rhetorical qualities listed above. These findings have implications for instruction in writing in the disciplines (WID) contexts, specifically in terms of how instructors can refine their metalanguage about writing for discussing stance with students explicitly and in detail.