Journeys to Others and Lessons of Self: Carlos Castaneda in \u3cem\u3eCamposcape\u3c/em\u3e

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this article examines the importance of place and gender within constructions of race politics in Carlos Castaneda’s series on shamanism. Championing a “separate reality” predicated on an indigenous worldview, Castaneda’s lessons invited transnational middle-class youth to journey alongside him to camposcape—an anachronistic and idealized countryside—as a means to escape the bourgeois values of their homelands and find spiritual fulfillment in a timeless and authentic Mexico. Castaneda’s work proposed new viable spaces of difference in Mexico, yet inscribed these spaces with a masculinist discourse that served to neutralize the gender trouble within the counterculture movement in both Mexico and the US

Notes on the Margins of Metadata; Concerning the Undecidability of the Digital Image

This paper considers the significance of metadata in relation to the image economy of the web. Social practices such as keywording, tagging, rating and viewing increasingly influence the modes of navigation and hence the utility of images in online environments. To a user faced with an avalanche of images, metadata promises to make photographs machine-readable in order to mobilize new knowledge, in a continuation of the archival paradigm. At the same time, metadata enables new topologies of the image, new temporalities and multiplicities which present a challenge to historical models of representation. As photography becomes an encoded discourse, we suggest that the turning away from the visual towards the mathematical and the algorithmic establishes undecidability as a key property of the networked image

A Test for Differential Flatness by Reduction to Single Input Systems

For nonlinear control systems (p inputs), we present a test for flatness. The method consists of making an initial guess for p-1 of the flat outputs, which may involve parameters still to be determined. A choice of functions of time for the p-1 outputs reduce the system to one with a single input. For single input systems the problem of flatness has been solved and thus leads to the identification of the last flat output, or to obstructions to flatness under the hypotheses. We demonstrate the method for a coupled rigid body in ℝ2 and for a single rigid body in ℝ3

Corn Producer Practices and Insect Resistance Management Requirements

We document the degree to which corn producers in South Dakota follow Insect Resistance Management requirements administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Our findings are based a survey held among a sample of 317 corn producers in South Dakota in July of 2004. Detailed results are forthcoming.Farm Management,

Cheap versus expensive trades: Assessing the determinants of market impact costs

This paper assesses the determinants of market impact costs of institutional equity trades, using unique data from the world's second largest pension fund. We allow the impact of trade characteristics and market conditions on trading costs to depend on the level of trading costs itself and establish significant differences in the responses of cheaper and more expensive trades. We explain the distinct responses from differences in information content and demand for liquidity between trades with high and low trading costs. Finally, to illustrate the practical relevance of the approach, we use our method to forecast future trading costs

Designing a flexible support system in dialogue with students to meet their needs

A more stringent financial climate, alongside technological and lifestyle changes, have diversified student needs and promoted the use of inclusive learning and support strategies. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of academic skills centres at an English Higher Education Institution and considers ways in which the service is able to benefit users and providers, it goes on to argue that, by fostering a dialogue with students and using a range of delivery models, the provision has been made flexible, diversified and student centred and thereby addresses issues of current significance within the institution and sector more broadly

U.S. Agricultural Labor Out-migration Determinants, 1939-2004

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/01/06.Labor and Human Capital,

The AISB’08 Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2008)

Welcome to Aberdeen at the Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2008)! In this volume the papers presented at the MOG 2008 international symposium are collected

Market Timing: A Decomposition of Mutual Fund Returns

We decompose the conditional expected mutual fund return in ve parts.Two parts, selectivity and expert market timing, can be attributed to manager skill, and three to variation in market exposure that can be achieved by private investors as well.The dynamic model that we use to estimate the relative importance of the components in the decomposition is a generalization of the performance evaluation models by Lockwood and Kadiyala (1988) and Ferson and Schadt (1996).We nd that the restrictions imposed in existing models may lead to di¤erent inferences about manager selectivity and timing skill.The results from our sample of 78 asset allocation mutual funds indicate that several funds exhibit significant expert market timing, but for most funds variation in market exposures does not yield any economically signi cant return.Funds with high turnover and expense ratios are associated with managers with better skills.mutual funds;performance evaluation;markets;models

Projecting Pornography and Mapping Modernity in Mexico City

Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz’s and Doreen Massey’s insights that place and gender are mutually constitutive, this article examines the articulation among the embodied city, sexual desire, and changing gender norms in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. At this time, a newly governing revolutionary elite sought to reinvigorate and “civilize” Mexico City through a series of urban reforms and public works, partly in response to their concern over women in public as a social problem. By analyzing depictions of female nudity as conversant with urban landscapes in the banned magazine Vea, the author argues that pornography connected Mexico City to transnational ideas of the early twentieth century that held that sexually liberated women were part and parcel of cosmopolitan modernity. Vea exemplified and fueled concerns over “public women” and helps scholars understand larger debates on the gendered effects of revolution, urbanization, and transnational currents of global modernity