This article explores the history of Vodou from outlawed African dance to revolutionary magic depoliticized national Haitian religion and popular dance, its present reduction Diaspora interpersonal healing, a possible future. My first section, on Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits Law: Power in Haiti, reveals as sociopolitical construction racist legal oppression Africana dances rituals, artistic-politi...

When the method of constant stimuli is used to measure heterochromatic brightness matches, the resulting matches can be strongly biased toward the center of the range of test luminances used. In the present paper, we investigate the source of this centering bias. The stimuli were 2 degrees red squares presented in a gray surround. In the main experiments, two ranges of stimulus luminance were p...

In languages such as Japanese, the use of zeros, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in utterances that shift the topic involves a risk that the meaning intended by the speaker may not be transparent to the hearer. However, this potentially undesirable conversational strategy often occurs in the course of naturally-occurring discourse. In this chapter, I report on an empirical study of 250 utter...

This article describes an implemented system which uses centering theory for planning of coherent texts and choice of referring expressions. We argue that text and sentence planning need to be driven in part by the goal of maintaining referential continuity and thereby facilitating pronoun resolution: Obtaining a favorable ordering of clauses, and of arguments within clauses, is likely to incre...

Existing software systems for automated essay scoring can provide NLP researchers with opportunities to test certain theoretical hypotheses, including some derived from Centering Theory. In this study we employ the Educational Testing Service’s e-rater essay scoring system to examine whether local discourse coherence, as defined by a measure of Centering Theory’s Rough-Shift transitions, might ...

AIM One Shape Apical 1 (OSA 1) is a new file for preparing the apical aspect of the root canal after One Shape (OS, Micro Mega, Besançon, France). This study compared apical transportation and centering ratios in curved root canals, which were instrumented with ProTaper Next (PTN, Dentsply Tulsa Dental Specialties, Tulsa, OK) up to size X3 and with OS up to OSA 1. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-...

In the global fight against COVID-19, a “pandemic memory thesis” emerges. This thesis argues that nations with memories of past pandemics, such as East Asian countries SARS memories, can better control COVID-19 pandemic today. Yet, if this holds, why hadn’t helped China prevent outbreak COVID-19? Why, however, swiftly contain in its later stages by exploiting memory? To address contradiction, I...

This paper presents a family of methods for data translation in feature space, to be used in conjunction with kernel machines. The translations are performed using only kernel evaluations in input space. We use the methods to improve the numerical properties of kernel machines. Experiments with synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of data centering and highlight other interesti...

The experience of past prominent earthquakes establishes the fact that the structure’s catastrophes and casualties can be dramatically decreased through the use of self-centering systems. A promising post-tensioned self-centering yielding braced system (PT-SCYBS) has been developed, comprising of two main components, including the post-tensioned wires, exhibiting the desirable self-centering pr...