In the early days of the twentieth century when vaudeville was the most popular theatrical entertainment in America, there were a number of female singers who became its star performers. In the process of conducting preliminary research for a dissertation topic on female singers of this era, it quickly became evident that while much has been written about opera singers of that era, only limited material was available on female vaudeville singers. Furthermore, the small amount of information which was available was so randomly scattered among various sources that it was difficult to perceive a composite picture of these performers.The purpose of this investigation into the musical styles and repertoire of three great female singer-comediennes of early vaudeville--Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker--is to determine what the reasons were for their tremendous popularity. Because vaudeville was the prime source of entertainment before the days of mass media, the American public was quick to make stars of many of its performers. This study seeks to ascertain what it was about thesewomen's particular musical styles, repertoire and personalities which made them so interesting and caused the public to make them vaudeville stars. Though there are certainly other female singers of this period which are also of interest:, these three were chosen because they were unique.This study is presented as a series of articles with separate chapters devoted to Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker as individuals. These chapters include biographical material, especially from books about vaudeville performers, and also explore critical reviews and other reports on their work from such sources as "Variety," "Theatre Magazine," and various newspaper accounts. Analysis of these sources on each individual within the chapters is included as well. The final chapter contains a summary of the research and a discussion of what conclusions were reached about the musical styles and repertoire of Eva Tanguay, Nora Bayes and Sophie Tucker as a result of this investigation.In addition to discovering the reasons for these performers' popularity and appeal, it is hoped that a viable by-product of this research has been to arouse renewed public interest in these three fascinating ladies of early vaudeville.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains x, 223 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-223). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

<p>Numera Nette Wermeld Enström.</p>

This paper aims to contribute to knowledge of stereotypization mechanisms, bringing in the case of PR consultants. Using lenses of the key cultural form - film and television series - the project analyses a way of representing PR profession, as depicted on TV screen both in Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, during 2000-2017 time period. Theoretical frame is drawing on key ideas on stereotype, narrowed by film usage, as seen in the work of Walter Lippmann and others. Main hypothesis is based on assumption that negative media portrayal might interfere with professional reputation. Analytical part employs qualitative, thematical analysis that focuses on interpretation of personal features, behavioral characteristics and depiction of reocurring key themes. The final outcome then presents a professional portrayal of Public Relations on Czech and British television scene, builded up on prominent steretypes, accompanied by relevant quotes to illustrate the point. Key findings show undestanding communication as means of persuasion, leading to egoism, a lack of ethical values and dominant attitude in relation to clients and journalists. To prove the contribution argument that these negative attributes will further affect the future professional status of PR, the final insight illustrates such impact by...

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Strongly correlated systems have been a major challenge for a long time in the field of theoretical chemistry. For such systems, the relevant portion of the Hilbert space scales exponentially, preventing efficient simulation on large systems. However, in many cases, the Hilbert space can be partitioned into clusters on the basis of strong and weak interactions. In this work, we mainly focus on an approach where we partition the system into smaller orbital clusters in which we can define many-particle cluster states and use traditional many-body methods to capture the rest of the inter-cluster correlations. This dissertation can be mainly divided into two parts. In the first part of this dissertation, the clustered ansatz, termed as tensor product states (TPS), is used to study large strongly correlated systems. In the second part, we study a particular type of strongly correlated system, correlated triplet pair states that arise in singlet fission. The many-body expansion (MBE) is an efficient tool that has a long history of use for calculating interaction energies, binding energies, lattice energies, and so on. We extend the incremental full configuration interaction originally proposed for a Slater determinant to a tensor product state (TPS) based wavefunction. By partitioning the active space into smaller orbital clusters, our approach starts from a cluster mean-field reference TPS configuration and includes the correlation contribution of the excited TPSs using a many-body expansion. This method, named cluster many-body expansion (cMBE), improves the convergence of MBE at lower orders compared to directly doing a block-based MBE from an RHF reference. The performance of the cMBE method is also tested on a graphene nano-sheet with a very large active space of 114 electrons in 114 orbitals, which would require 1066 determinants for the exact FCI solution. Selected CI (SCI) using determinants becomes intractable for large systems with strong correlation. We introduce a method for SCI algorithms using tensor product states which exploits local molecular structure to significantly reduce the number of SCI variables. We demonstrate the potential of this method, called tensor product selected configuration interaction (TPSCI), using a few model Hamiltonians and molecular examples. These numerical results show that TPSCI can be used to significantly reduce the number of SCI variables in the variational space, and thus paving a path for extending these deterministic and variational SCI approaches to a wider range of physical systems. The extension of the TPSCI algorithm for excited states is also investigated. TPSCI with perturbative corrections provides accurate excitation energies for low-lying triplet states with respect to extrapolated results. In the case of traditional SCI methods, accurate excitation energies are obtained only after extrapolating calculations with large variational dimensions compared to TPSCI. We provide an intuitive connection between lower triplet energy mani- folds with Hückel molecular orbital theory, providing a many-body version of Hückel theory for excited triplet states. The n-body Tucker ansatz (which is a truncated TPS wavefunction) developed in our group provides a good approximation to the low-lying states of a clusterable spin system. In this approach, a Tucker decomposition is used to obtain local cluster states which can be truncated to prune the full Hilbert space of the system. As a truncated variational approach, it has been observed that the self-consistently optimized n-body Tucker method is not size- extensive, a property important for many-body methods. We explore the use of perturbation theory and linearized coupled-cluster methods to obtain a robust yet efficient approximation. Perturbative corrections to the n-body Tucker method have been implemented for the Heisenberg Hamiltonian and numerical data for various lattices and molecular systems has been presented to show the applicability of the method. In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on studying a particular type of strongly correlated states that occurs in singlet fission material. The correlated triplet pair state 1(TT) is a key intermediate in the singlet fission process, and understanding the mechanism by which it separates into two independent triplet states is critical for leveraging singlet fission for improving solar cell efficiency. This separation mechanism is dominated by two key interactions: (i) the exchange interaction (K) between the triplets which leads to the spin splitting of the biexciton state into 1(TT),3(TT) and 5(TT) states, and (ii) the triplet-triplet energy transfer integral (t) which enables the formation of the spatially separated (but still spin entangled) state 1(T...T). We develop a simple ab initio technique to compute both the triplet-triplet exchange (K) and triplet-triplet energy transfer coupling (t). Our key findings reveal new conditions for successful correlated triplet pair state dissociation. The biexciton exchange interaction needs to be ferromagnetic or negligible compared to the triplet energy transfer for favorable dissociation. We also explore the effect of chromophore packing to reveal geometries where these conditions are achieved for tetracene. We also provide a simple connectivity rule to predict whether the through-bond coupling will be stabilizing or destabilizing for the (TT) state in covalently linked singlet fission chromophores. By drawing an analogy between the chemical system and a simple spin-lattice, one is able to determine the ordering of the multi-exciton spin state via a generalized usage of Ovchinnikov's rule. In the case of meta connectivity, we predict 5(TT) to be formed and this is later confirmed by experimental techniques like time-resolved electron spin resonance (TR-ESR). / Doctor of Philosophy / The study of the correlated motion of electrons in molecules and materials allows scientists to gain useful insights into many physical processes like photosynthesis, enzyme catalysis, superconductivity, chemical reactions and so on. Theoretical quantum chemistry tries to study the electronic properties of chemical species. The exact solution of the electron correlation problem is exponentially complex and can only be computed for small systems. Therefore, approximations are introduced for practical calculations that provide good results for ground state properties like energy, dipole moment, etc. Sometimes, more accurate calculations are required to study the properties of a system, because the system may not adhere to the as- sumptions that are made in the methods used. One such case arises in the study of strongly correlated molecules. In this dissertation, we present methods which can handle strongly correlated cases. We partition the system into smaller parts, then solve the problem in the basis of these smaller parts. We refer to this block-based wavefunction as tensor product states and they provide accurate results while avoiding the exponential scaling of the full solution. We present accurate energies for a wide variety of challenging cases, including bond breaking, excited states and π conjugated molecules. Additionally, we also investigate molecular systems that can be used to increase the efficiency of solar cells. We predict improved solar efficiency for a chromophore dimer, a result which is later experimentally verified.

本篇論文主要討論在死亡率改善不確定性之下的避險策略。當保險公司負債面的人壽保單是比年金商品來得多的時候，公司會處於死亡率的風險之下。我們假設死亡率和利率都是隨機的情況，部分的死亡率風險可以經由自然避險而消除，而剩下的死亡率風險和利率風險則由零息債券和保單貼現商品來達到最適避險效果。我們考慮mean variance、VaR和CTE當成目標函數時的避險策略，其中在mean variance的最適避險策略可以導出公式解。由數值結果我們可以得知保單貼現的確是死亡率風險的有效避險工具。 / This paper proposes hedging strategies to deal with the uncertainty of mortality improvement. When insurance company has more life insurance contracts than annuities in the liability, it will be under the exposure of mortality risk. We assume both mortality and interest rate risk are stochastic. Part of mortality risk is eliminated by natural hedging and the remaining mortality risk and interest rate risk will be optimally hedged by zero coupon bond and life settlement contract. We consider the hedging strategies with objective functions of mean variance, value at risk and conditional tail expectation. The closed-form optimal hedging formula for mean variance assumption is derived, and the numerical result show the life settlement is indeed a effective hedging instrument against mortality risk.

Definitions of celebrity authorship and material textuality at the turn of the twenty-first century have predominantly emphasised the implicitly negative aspects of contemporary developments in the literary marketplace. Particularly prominent are arguments that the practice of authorship has become subject to homogenisation by the matrix of celebrity in which successful writers are now expected to function; and, further, that the changing nature of texts themselves and the ways in which they are marketed is eroding the implicitly superior position traditionally held by literature in the cultural marketplace. This thesis views such readings as pessimistic, and offers an alternative, seeking to formulate a new critical approach to literary value in the contemporary sphere which would appreciate notions of celebrity, populism, and digital mediation as integral and productive aspects of how literary value is formed today. Through in-depth focus on the cases of a number of unconventional contemporary American authors whose work demonstrates differing, innovative approaches to the process of authorship, this thesis exposes the ways in which contemporary, atypically ‘literary’ instances of writing can and do work within and develop beyond traditional conceptualisations of authorship and literary value. Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, largely critically considered prototypical ‘celebrity’ authors, are in the first chapter reconsidered as writers whose understanding of their position within the literary marketplace affords them a self-conscious, critical perspective on the notion of celebrity in their work and public personae. The productively self-conscious author-figure is reconsidered in the second chapter, which reads the individual and joint works of author Paul Auster and visual artist Sophie Calle as foregrounding the process of creative collaboration as uniquely illuminating and transformative within the contemporary literary sphere. The notion of dual authorship is revisited and reconceptualised in the third chapter, which considers JT LeRoy and the practice of hoax authorship, outlining how this process forces the reformulation of literary value, particularly in a contemporary setting in which authors are accountable for their work in newer, more visible ways. The final chapter expands these previously-introduced themes to consider bloggers-turned-authors, particularly Tucker Max and Julie Powell, and the impact of the merging of old and new textualities on both the orientation of the figure of the writer and the way in which value is attached to his texts by readers. Ultimately, the unconventional nature of these examples is shown to belie the universality of the representations of value they enact, contributing to a full and salient account of how literary value is determined at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Cette thèse porte sur l'étude et la modélisation de l'orientation de fibres de verre dans des thermoplastiques renforcés. Dans une optique de maîtrise et de compréhension du comportement des composites renforcés de fibres longues, nous proposons dans ce travail d'étudier les phénomènes d'orientation et la rhéologie de ces suspensions. Une approche expérimentale a permis de caractériser l'orientation et la structure des fibres dans des pièces injectées. L'analyse de la distribution de longueur des fibres dans une pièce a mis en évidence que la casse des fibres se faisait préférentiellement durant la phase de la plastification de la matière. Les mesures d'orientation, réalisées avec des techniques de mesure 2D et 3D montrent que la concentration en fibres est un paramètre déterminant sur la formation et les caractéristiques de la structure coeur-peau. Une approche numérique de modélisation de l'orientation des fibres dans des pièces injectées, basée sur le calcul direct du mouvement d'orientation d'une population de fibres en écoulement, a permis d'accéder à la physique intrinsèque de la suspension. Ce modèle repose sur une formulation éléments finis multi- domaine développée dans le cadre du logiciel Rem3D. La principale originalité du modèle est qu'il n'est pas nécessaire d'exprimer de manière explicite l'ensemble des forces et interactions hydrodynamiques régissant le système. Lorsqu'on applique un cisaillement simple à un volume élémentaire représentatif, le calcul de simulation directe nous permet d'étudier les phénomènes d'interaction entre particules en fonction de la concentration et du rapport de forme des fibres. Ainsi, nous proposons une méthode d'identification du coefficient d'interaction Ci , paramètre déterminant du modèle statistique de Folgar & Tucker. Les valeurs de Ci sont fonction du rapport de forme et de la concentration des particules. On s'intéresse d'autre part à la validité des approximations de fermeture. On montre que l'approximation hybride est satisfaisante dans le cas d'un écoulement de cisaillement simple. Enfin, ce modèle est appliqué à l'étude rhéologique d'une suspension de fibres.