University of Vita Vera

Political Economy and Influence of Wealth

Welfare for elders
But nothing for our children.
Who are we kidding?

Dissertation title: The Age of Welfare: Citizens, Clients and Generations in the Development of the Modern Welfare State (UC Berkeley, 2001)

Book title: Age in the Welfare State: The Origins of Social Spending on Pensioners, Workers and Children (Cambridge UP, 2006)

My dissertation examined why some countries allocate the lion’s share of their social welfare resources to the elderly, while others have a more balanced profile of spending on working-aged adults and children. Italy, Japan, and the United States are examples of the former; Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden are examples of the latter.

Title: Launching the DNS War: Dot-Com Privatization and the Rise of Global Internet Governance

Craig Simon University of Miami, School of International Studies.

A mid 1990s effort to create a new overseer for the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) sought to create a formal administrative apparatus operating at a world-wide level, independent of the sovereign state system. Institutional membership within the new structure was intended to confer participation rights and normative obligations, thereby establishing status relationships that resonated with the kinship, ingroup, and citizenship relationships of legacy social orders.

http://www.rkey.com/essays/diss.pdf

Right of copyright
Depends on nature of works
Otherwise: chaos.

Title: “The Metaphysics and Ethics of Copyright”

Darren Hudson Hick
University of Maryland
2008

Proposed dissertation on the cosmological effects of micro-regional variations in dark matter density and local expansion/contraction rates.

“Balancing Vectorized Query Execution with Bandwidth-Optimized Storage”

CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; September 2009

dept. of sociology
wayne state university
detroit, mi
2007 alum

What I do: Modernist/postmodern studies, D.H. Lawrence/Apocalypse studies

Dissertation:

Why do people fear
The apocalypse and the
Light it brings to things.

“Beauty, Bullets, and Ice Cream: Re-Imagining Daily Life in the ‘Nam”, Penn State University, 2004

J. Jacobsen, “Simulating the Detection of Muons and Neutrinos in Deep Antarctic Ice.” The University of Wisconsin – Madison (1996).

Biographical information (biodata) obtained from job applicant forms has been in use since
the turn of this century to predict future job success. It has been only relatively recently
that there has been a concerted effort to improve biodata’s reliability and validity. Two of
the major concerns are how to minimize the incidence of faking and how to reduce
inaccurate responses due to social desirability.

Title:
e-Learning 2.0: Emergence, social networks and the creation of shared knowledge

As learners in the workplace turn toward just-in-time answers, knowledge and support networks, it becomes more pressing to understand how knowledge can be harnessed in a new, anytime digital environment. This dissertation explored knowledge design via new emerging technologies that allow for better finding, creating and sharing of information.

Neuroethology, UT-Austin, 2009

My dissertation describes the process of selecting a mate in a tropical frog species. How such behaviour comes about in life, and how such a decision is executed in real time.

English and Culture: a sociolinguistic approach to plurilingual and multicultural situation in Canada, Australia and the United States (original title in French: L’anglais et les Cultures, analyse sociolinguistique des situation plurilingues et multiculturelles au Canada, en Australie et aux Etats-Unis) Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998

“English Liberty and Turkish Tyranny: Symbols of the East in Milton’s Poetry and Prose”

English Dept. NYU 2005.

This dissertation catalogs and interprets Milton’s use of Eastern imagery in his poetry and prose as a foil for his conception of a free English society.

Here’s my Haiku:

Cells in between cells,
make the retina’s magic
and keep its secrets.

Discipline: English

Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara

Title: Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

My dissertation surveyed text-based narrative games called interactive fiction (IF), 1975-2005. I developed two concepts for their interpretation — “implied code,” or the interactor’s mental model of an interactive work; and “frustration aesthetics”, or how constraints shape interactive experiences.