Provincialism and the modern diaspora: T.S. Eliot and David Jones

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.

Back to the margins in search of the core: "Foreign Land"'s geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial center, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift which provides a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Rather than as a former empire, Portugal is defined by its situation at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of “core” or “center” are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogue combines Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

The world at one's fingertips: interactive interpretation of environmental data

This chapter introduces the latest practices and technologies in the interactive interpretation of environmental data. With environmental data becoming ever larger, more diverse and more complex, there is a need for a new generation of tools that provides new capabilities over and above those of the standard workhorses of science. These new tools aid the scientist in discovering interesting new features (and also problems) in large datasets by allowing the data to be explored interactively using simple, intuitive graphical tools. In this way, new discoveries are made that are commonly missed by automated batch data processing. This chapter discusses the characteristics of environmental science data, common current practice in data analysis and the supporting tools and infrastructure. New approaches are introduced and illustrated from the points of view of both the end user and the underlying technology. We conclude by speculating as to future developments in the field and what must be achieved to fulfil this vision.

Back to the margins in search of the core: foreign land's geography of exclusion

The crisis of the national project in the early 1990s, caused by a short-lived but disastrous government, led Brazilian art cinema, for the first time, to look at itself as periphery and re-approach the old colonial centre, Portugal. Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land (Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Brazil/Portugal, 1995), a film about Brazilian exiles in Portugal, is the best illustration of this perspective shift aimed at providing a new sense of Brazil’s scale and position within a global context. Shot mainly on location in São Paulo, Lisbon and Cape Verde, it promotes the encounter of Lusophone peoples who find a common ground in their marginal situation. Even Portugal is defined by its location at the edge of Europe and by beliefs such as Sebastianism, whose origins go back to the time when the country was dominated by Spain. As a result, notions of ‘core’ or ‘centre’ are devolved to the realm of myth. The film’s carefully crafted dialogues combine Brazilian, Portuguese and Creole linguistic peculiarities into a common dialect of exclusion, while language puns trigger visual rhymes which refer back to the Cinema Novo (the Brazilian New Wave) repertoire and restage the imaginary of the discovery turned into unfulfilled utopia. The main characters also acquire historical resonances, as they are depicted as descendants of Iberian conquistadors turned into smugglers of precious stones in the present. Their activities define a circuit of international exchange which resonates with that of globalized cinema, a realm in which Foreign Land, made up of citations and homage to other cinemas, tries to retrieve a sense of belonging.

Reflection iii: Transnationalisation, Television Formats and the Universal

This reflection argues that, despite various good reasons for approaching the notion of the ‘universal’ with caution, cultural theorists should give up their resistance to the universal. The prominence of formats in today’s television suggests that the time is ripe to do. Intentionally or not, accounts of difference implicitly also often reveal sameness; the more we probe heterogeneity, the more likely we are to encounter something that remains consistent and similar. Thus, it is time to collaborate with scholars from the numerous disciplines for which the universal has long had validity and pertinence.

“There’s something very familiar about all this”: generic play and performance in the Back to the Future trilogy (Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989, 1990)

The Back to the Future Trilogy incorporates several different generic elements, including aspects of the fifties teen movie, science fiction, comedy and the western. These different modes playfully intertwine with each other creating a complex world of repetitions, echoes and modulations. This essay seeks to interrogate the construction of generic elements and the play between them through a close analysis of a repeated performance. Genre is signalled through various strategies employed within the construction of mise-en-scène, a significant portion of this, as I would like to argue, is transmitted through performance. The material detail of a performance – incorporating gesture, movement, voice, and even surrounding elements such as costume – as well as the way it its presented within a film is key to the establishment, invocation and coherence of genre. Furthermore, attention to the complexity of performance details, particularly in the manner in which they reverberate across texts, demonstrates the intricacy of genre and its inherent mutability. The Back to the Future trilogy represents a specific interest in the flexibility of genre. Within each film, and especially across all three, aspects of various genres are interlaced through both visual and narrative detail, thus constructing a dense layer of references both within and without the texts. To explore this patterning in more detail I will interrogate the contribution of performance to generic play through close analysis of Thomas F. Wilson’s performance of Biff/Griff/Burford Tannen and his central encounter with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in each film. These moments take place in a fifties diner, a 1980s retro diner and a saloon respectively, each space contributing the similarities and differences in each repetition. Close attention to Wilson’s performance of each related character, which contains both modulations and repetitions used specifically to place each film’s central generic theme, demonstrates how embedded the play between genres and their flexibility is within the trilogy.

Meta-morphs: – being a mediator of the ‘thin’ place and ‘thin’ experience in the HE classroom. A paper on the experience of creating transformations in HE teaching and learning

The research which underpins this paper began as a doctoral project exploring archaic beliefs concerning Otherworlds and Thin Places in two particular landscapes - the West Coast of Wales and the West Coast of Ireland. A Thin Place is an ancient Celtic Christian term used to describe a marginal, liminal realm, beyond everyday human experience and perception, where mortals could pass into the Otherworld more readily, or make contact with those in the Otherworld more willingly. To encounter a Thin Place in ancient folklore was significant because it engendered a state of alertness, an awakening to what the theologian John O’ Donohue (2004: 49) called “the primal affection.” These complex notions and terms will be further explored in this paper in relation to Education. Thin Teaching is a pedagogical approach which offers students the space to ruminate on the possibility that their existence can be more and can mean more than the categories they believed they belonged to or felt they should inhabit. Central to the argument then, is that certain places and their inhabitants can become revitalised by sensitively considered teaching methodologies. This raises interesting questions about the role spirituality plays in teaching practice as a tool for healing in the twenty first century.

Reconnection at the high-latitude magnetopause during northward interplanetary magnetic field conditions

The Polar spacecraft had a prolonged encounter with the high-latitude dayside magnetopause on May 29, 1996. This encounter with the magnetopause occurred when the interplanetary magnetic field was directed northward. From the three-dimensional electron and ion distribution functions measured by the Hydra instrument, it has been possible to identify nearly all of the distinct boundary layer regions associated with high-latitude reconnection. The regions that have been identified are (1) the cusp; (2) the magnetopause current layer; (3) magnetosheath field lines that have interconnected in only the Northern Hemisphere; (4) magnetosheath field lines that have interconnected in only the Southern Hemisphere; (5) magnetosheath field lines that have interconnected in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; (6) magnetosheath that is disconnected from the terrestrial magnetic field; and (7) high-latitude plasma sheet field lines that are participating in magnetosheath reconnection. Reconnection over this time period was occurring at high latitudes over a broad local-time extent, interconnecting the magnetosheath and lobe and/or plasma sheet field lines in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Newly closed boundary layer field lines were observed as reconnection occur-red first at high latitudes in one hemisphere and then later in the other. These observations establish the location of magnetopause reconnection during these northward interplanetary magnetic field conditions as being at high latitudes, poleward of the cusp, and further reinforce the general interpretation of electron and ion phase space density signatures as indicators of magnetic reconnection and boundary layer formation.

Coordinated ground-based, low altitude satellite and Cluster observations on global and local scales during a transient post-noon sector excursion of the magnetospheric cusp

On 14 January 2001, the four Cluster spacecraft passed through the northern magnetospheric mantle in close conjunction to the EISCAT Svalbard Radar (ESR) and approached the post-noon dayside magnetopause over Greenland between 13:00 and 14:00 UT During that interval, a sudden reorganisation of the high-latitude dayside convection pattern accurred after 13:20 UT most likely caused by a direction change of the Solar wind magnetic field. The result was an eastward and poleward directed flow-channel, as monitored by the SuperDARN radar network and also by arrays of ground-based magnetometers in Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia. After an initial eastward and later poleward expansion of the flow-channel between 13:20 and 13:40 UT, the four Cluster spacecraft, and the field line footprints covered by the eastward looking scan cycle of the Sondre Stromfjord incoherent scatter radar were engulfed by cusp-like precipitation with transient magnetic and electric field signatures. In addition, the EISCAT Svalbard Radar detected strong transient effects of the convection reorganisation, a poleward moving precipitation, and a fast ion flow-channel in association with the auroral structures that suddenly formed to the west and north of the radar. From a detailed analysis of the coordinated Cluster and ground-based data, it was found that this extraordinary transient convection pattern, indeed, had moved the cusp precipitation from its former pre-noon position into the late post-noon sector, allowing for the first and quite unexpected encounter of the cusp by the Cluster spacecraft. Our findings illustrate the large amplitude of cusp dynamics even in response to moderate solar wind forcing. The global ground-based data proves to be an invaluable tool to monitor the dynamics and width of the affected magnetospheric regions.

The importance of accurate wind resource assessment for evaluating the economic viability of small wind turbines

The techno-economic performance of a small wind turbine is very sensitive to the available wind resource. However, due to financial and practical constraints installers rely on low resolution wind speed databases to assess a potential site. This study investigates whether the two site assessment tools currently used in the UK, NOABL or the Energy Saving Trust wind speed estimator, are accurate enough to estimate the techno-economic performance of a small wind turbine. Both the tools tend to overestimate the wind speed, with a mean error of 23% and 18% for the NOABL and Energy Saving Trust tool respectively. A techno-economic assessment of 33 small wind turbines at each site has shown that these errors can have a significant impact on the estimated load factor of an installation. Consequently, site/turbine combinations which are not economically viable can be predicted to be viable. Furthermore, both models tend to underestimate the wind resource at relatively high wind speed sites, this can lead to missed opportunities as economically viable turbine/site combinations are predicted to be non-viable. These results show that a better understanding of the local wind resource is a required to make small wind turbines a viable technology in the UK.

Behavioural responses of the seven-spot ladybird Coccinella septempunctata to plant headspace chemicals collected from four crop Brassicas and Arabidopsis thaliana, infested with Myzus persicae

1 Insects using olfactory stimuli to forage for prey/hosts are proposed to encounter a ‘reliability–detectability problem’, where the usability of a stimulus depends on its reliability as an indicator of herbivore presence and its detectability. 2 We investigated this theory using the responses of female seven-spot ladybirds Coccinella septempunctata (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) to plant headspace chemicals collected from the peach-potato aphid Myzus persicae and four commercially available Brassica cultivars; Brassica rapa L. cultivar ‘turnip purple top’, Brassica juncea L. cultivar ‘red giant mustard’, Brassica napus L. cultivar ‘Apex’, Brassica napus L. cultivar ‘Courage’ and Arabidopsis thaliana. For each cultivar/species, responses to plants that were undamaged, previously infested by M. persicae and infested with M. persicae, were investigated using dual-choice Petri dish bioassays and circular arenas. 3 There was no evidence that ladybirds responded to headspace chemicals from aphids alone. Ladybirds significantly preferred headspace chemicals from B. napus cv. Apex that were undamaged compared with those from plants infested with aphids. For the other four species/cultivars, there was a consistent trend of the predators being recorded more often in the half of the Petri dish containing plant headspace chemicals from previously damaged and infested plants compared with those from undamaged ones. Furthermore, the mean distance ladybirds walked to reach aphid-infested A. thaliana was significantly shorter than to reach undamaged plants. These results suggest that aphid-induced plant chemicals could act as an arrestment or possibly an attractant stimulus to C. septempunctata. However, it is also possible that C. septempunctata could have been responding to aphid products, such as honeydew, transferred to the previously damaged and infested plants. 4 The results provide evidence to support the ‘reliability–detectability’ theory and suggest that the effectiveness of C. septempunctata as a natural enemy of aphids may be strongly affected by which species and cultivar of Brassica are being grown.

Tracking the uncertainty in flood alerts driven by grand ensemble weather predictions

The incorporation of numerical weather predictions (NWP) into a flood warning system can increase forecast lead times from a few hours to a few days. A single NWP forecast from a single forecast centre, however, is insufficient as it involves considerable non-predictable uncertainties and can lead to a high number of false or missed warnings. Weather forecasts using multiple NWPs from various weather centres implemented on catchment hydrology can provide significantly improved early flood warning. The availability of global ensemble weather prediction systems through the ‘THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble’ (TIGGE) offers a new opportunity for the development of state-of-the-art early flood forecasting systems. This paper presents a case study using the TIGGE database for flood warning on a meso-scale catchment (4062 km2) located in the Midlands region of England. For the first time, a research attempt is made to set up a coupled atmospheric-hydrologic-hydraulic cascade system driven by the TIGGE ensemble forecasts. A probabilistic discharge and flood inundation forecast is provided as the end product to study the potential benefits of using the TIGGE database. The study shows that precipitation input uncertainties dominate and propagate through the cascade chain. The current NWPs fall short of representing the spatial precipitation variability on such a comparatively small catchment, which indicates need to improve NWPs resolution and/or disaggregating techniques to narrow down the spatial gap between meteorology and hydrology. The spread of discharge forecasts varies from centre to centre, but it is generally large and implies a significant level of uncertainties. Nevertheless, the results show the TIGGE database is a promising tool to forecast flood inundation, comparable with that driven by raingauge observation.

Conditioning of the weak-constraint variational data assimilation problem for numerical weather prediction

4-Dimensional Variational Data Assimilation (4DVAR) assimilates observations through the minimisation of a least-squares objective function, which is constrained by the model flow. We refer to 4DVAR as strong-constraint 4DVAR (sc4DVAR) in this thesis as it assumes the model is perfect. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to weak-constraint 4DVAR (wc4DVAR), leading to a different minimisation problem with more degrees of freedom. We consider two wc4DVAR formulations in this thesis, the model error formulation and state estimation formulation. The 4DVAR objective function is traditionally solved using gradient-based iterative methods. The principle method used in Numerical Weather Prediction today is the Gauss-Newton approach. This method introduces a linearised `inner-loop' objective function, which upon convergence, updates the solution of the non-linear `outer-loop' objective function. This requires many evaluations of the objective function and its gradient, which emphasises the importance of the Hessian. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Hessian provide insight into the degree of convexity of the objective function, while also indicating the difficulty one may encounter while iterative solving 4DVAR. The condition number of the Hessian is an appropriate measure for the sensitivity of the problem to input data. The condition number can also indicate the rate of convergence and solution accuracy of the minimisation algorithm. This thesis investigates the sensitivity of the solution process minimising both wc4DVAR objective functions to the internal assimilation parameters composing the problem. We gain insight into these sensitivities by bounding the condition number of the Hessians of both objective functions. We also precondition the model error objective function and show improved convergence. We show that both formulations' sensitivities are related to error variance balance, assimilation window length and correlation length-scales using the bounds. We further demonstrate this through numerical experiments on the condition number and data assimilation experiments using linear and non-linear chaotic toy models.

Missing out? Challenges to hearing the views of all children on the barriers and supports to learning

Children's views are essential to enabling schools to fulfil their duties under the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 and create inclusive learning environments. Arguably children are the best source of information about the ways in which schools support their learning and what barriers they encounter. Accessing this requires a deeper level of reflection than simply asking what children find difficult. It is also a challenge to ensure that the views of all children contribute including those who find communication difficult. Development work in five schools is drawn on to analyse the ways in which teachers used suggestions for three interview activities. The data reveals the strengths and limitations of different ways of supporting the communication process.