Return of the 'Angry Woman': authenticating female physical action in contemporary cinema

In 1999, Elizabeth Hills pointed up the challenges that physically active women on film still posed, in cultural terms, and in relation to certain branches of feminist theory . Since then, a remarkable number of emphatically active female heroes have appeared on screen, from 'Charlie’s Angels' to 'Resident Evil', 'Aeon Flux', and the 'Matrix' and 'X-Men' trilogies. Nevertheless, in a contemporary Western culture frequently characterised as postfeminist, these seem to be the ‘acceptable face’ – and body – of female empowerment: predominantly white, heterosexual, often scantily clad, with the traditional hero’s toughness and resolve re-imagined in terms of gender-biased notions of decorum: grace and dignity alongside perfect hair and make-up, and a body that does not display unsightly markers of physical exertion. The homogeneity of these representations is worth investigating in relation to critical claims that valorise such air-brushed, high-kicking 'action babes' for their combination of sexiness and strength, and the feminist and postfeminist discourses that are refracted through such readings. Indeed, this arguably ‘safe’ set of depictions, dovetailing so neatly with certain postfeminist notions of ‘having it all’, suppresses particular kinds of spectacles in relation to the active female body: images of physical stress and extension, biological consequences of violence and dangerous motivations are all absent. I argue that the untidy female exertions refused in popular “action babe” representations are now erupting into view in a number of other contemporaneous movies – 'Kill Bill' Vols 1 & 2, 'Monster', and 'Hard Candy' – that mark the return of that which is repressed in the mainstream vision of female power – that is, a more viscerally realistic physicality, rage and aggression. As such, these films engage directly with the issue of how to represent violent female agency. This chapter explores what is at stake at a representational level and in terms of spectatorial processes of identification in the return of this particularly visceral rendering of the female avenger.

An Examination of the factors that shape the subjectivities of female art students in Initial Teacher Training

The school subject of Art and the profession of the primary school teacher are gendered female and both are considered low status within the field of Education and other professional areas of society. A number of sociological studies have examined the impact of gendered socialisation and habitus on females’ career choices and various educational initiatives have been put in place over the years to encourage females to select subjects and/or pursue career paths normally associated with males. Yet Art and primary school teaching continue to be a popular choice with middle class girls. Based on a critical ethnographic study of female BAED Art students, who are training to be primary school teachers, this study is an examination of the many factors, historically and contemporaneously that have shaped and continue to shape the subjectivities of females and frame their aspirations and ambitions. Within this discourse significant aspects of the history of Art and Art Education that have contributed to and influenced the construction of the female artist, and their consequent impact on artistically talented females’ personal identity as artists, are also examined.

'Response and Responsibility: Theories of the Implied Reader in Children's Literature Criticism'

Reader Response Theory remains popular within Children's Literature Criticism. It seems to offer a sensible resolution to the question of whether meaning derives from text or reader. Through a close reading of one example of this criticism, I suggest that its dualisms are constantly collapsing into appeals to singular authority. at various stages the text or the reader is wholly responsible for meaning. I further suggest that the criticism bypasses the question of interpretation through claiming knowledge of a child reader whose opinions and reactions can be unproblematically accessed. We do not have to worry about reading texts, because we can, apparently, know the child's response to them with certainty. Anything other than this claim to certainty is taken to be a failure of responsibility, a wallowing in the subjective, obscure and perverse. My intention is to reinstate reading as the responsibility of criticism.

An overview of the use of neural networks for data mining tasks

In the recent years, the area of data mining has been experiencing considerable demand for technologies that extract knowledge from large and complex data sources. There has been substantial commercial interest as well as active research in the area that aim to develop new and improved approaches for extracting information, relationships, and patterns from large datasets. Artificial neural networks (NNs) are popular biologically-inspired intelligent methodologies, whose classification, prediction, and pattern recognition capabilities have been utilized successfully in many areas, including science, engineering, medicine, business, banking, telecommunication, and many other fields. This paper highlights from a data mining perspective the implementation of NN, using supervised and unsupervised learning, for pattern recognition, classification, prediction, and cluster analysis, and focuses the discussion on their usage in bioinformatics and financial data analysis tasks. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Student teachers’ perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading: the implications for teacher education

This article reports on research which identified perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading held by trainee teachers and the impact on my provision as a teacher educator. It found that students’ past and present experiences of learning to read and being a reader influenced their perceptions of what reading is and of what it means to teach reading. As a teacher educator, I am not able to give students long experience of seeing children becoming readers, but I am able to give them richer experiences of reading in personally and culturally relevant contexts. This has implications for the nature of subject knowledge required by a student teacher of reading and the curriculum and practice of teacher education.

Proceedings of the inaugural construction management and economics ‘Past, Present and Future’ conference CME25, 16-18 July 2007, University of Reading, UK

This conference was an unusual and interesting event. Celebrating 25 years of Construction Management and Economics provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the research that has been reported over the years, to consider where we are now, and to think about the future of academic research in this area. Hence the sub-title of this conference: “past, present and future”. Looking through these papers, some things are clear. First, the range of topics considered interesting has expanded hugely since the journal was first published. Second, the research methods are also more diverse. Third, the involvement of wider groups of stakeholder is evident. There is a danger that this might lead to dilution of the field. But my instinct has always been to argue against the notion that Construction Management and Economics represents a discipline, as such. Granted, there are plenty of university departments around the world that would justify the idea of a discipline. But the vast majority of academic departments who contribute to the life of this journal carry different names to this. Indeed, the range and breadth of methodological approaches to the research reported in Construction Management and Economics indicates that there are several different academic disciplines being brought to bear on the construction sector. Some papers are based on economics, some on psychology and others on operational research, sociology, law, statistics, information technology, and so on. This is why I maintain that construction management is not an academic discipline, but a field of study to which a range of academic disciplines are applied. This may be why it is so interesting to be involved in this journal. The problems to which the papers are applied develop and grow. But the broad topics of the earliest papers in the journal are still relevant today. What has changed a lot is our interpretation of the problems that confront the construction sector all over the world, and the methodological approaches to resolving them. There is a constant difficulty in dealing with topics as inherently practical as these. While the demands of the academic world are driven by the need for the rigorous application of sound methods, the demands of the practical world are quite different. It can be difficult to meet the needs of both sets of stakeholders at the same time. However, increasing numbers of postgraduate courses in our area result in larger numbers of practitioners with a deeper appreciation of what research is all about, and how to interpret and apply the lessons from research. It also seems that there are contributions coming not just from construction-related university departments, but also from departments with identifiable methodological traditions of their own. I like to think that our authors can publish in journals beyond the construction-related areas, to disseminate their theoretical insights into other disciplines, and to contribute to the strength of this journal by citing our articles in more mono-disciplinary journals. This would contribute to the future of the journal in a very strong and developmental way. The greatest danger we face is in excessive self-citation, i.e. referring only to sources within the CM&E literature or, worse, referring only to other articles in the same journal. The only way to ensure a strong and influential position for journals and university departments like ours is to be sure that our work is informing other academic disciplines. This is what I would see as the future, our logical next step. If, as a community of researchers, we are not producing papers that challenge and inform the fundamentals of research methods and analytical processes, then no matter how practically relevant our output is to the industry, it will remain derivative and secondary, based on the methodological insights of others. The balancing act between methodological rigour and practical relevance is a difficult one, but not, of course, a balance that has to be struck in every single paper.

MOOCs: a systematic study of the published literature 2008-2012

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a recent addition to the range of online learning options. Since 2008, MOOCs have been run by a variety of public and elite universities, especially in North America. Many academics have taken interest in MOOCs recognising the potential to deliver education around the globe on an unprecedented scale; some of these academics are taking a research-oriented perspective and academic papers describing their research are starting to appear in the traditional media of peer reviewed publications. This paper presents a systematic review of the published MOOC literature (2008-2012): Forty-five peer reviewed papers are identified through journals, database searches, searching the Web, and chaining from known sources to form the base for this review. We believe this is the first effort to systematically review literature relating to MOOCs, a fairly recent but massively popular phenomenon with a global reach. The review categorises the literature into eight different areas of interest, introductory, concept, case studies, educational theory, technology, participant focussed, provider focussed, and other, while also providing quantitative analysis of publications according to publication type, year of publication, and contributors. Future research directions guided by gaps in the literature are explored.

Terrorist transgressions: gendered representations of the terrorist in visual culture

The aim of Terrorist Transgressions is to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. In modern discourses on the terrorist the horror experienced in Western societies was the appearance of a new sense of the vulnerability of the body politic, and therefore of the modern self with its direct dependency on security and property. The terrorist has been constructed as the epitome of transgression against economic resources and moral, physical and political boundaries. Although terrorism has been the focus of intense academic activity, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. Yet terrorism is dependent on spectacle and the topic is subject to forceful exposure in popular media. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organisations since the late 19th century and in suicidal terrorist attacks since the 1980s. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The publication arises from an AHRC networking grant, 2011-12, with Birkbeck, and includes collaboration with the army at Sandhurst RMA. The project relates to a wider investigation into feminism, violence and contemporary art.

Non-orthogonal version of the arbitrary polygonal C-grid and a new diamond grid

Quasi-uniform grids of the sphere have become popular recently since they avoid parallel scaling bottle- necks associated with the poles of latitude–longitude grids. However quasi-uniform grids of the sphere are often non- orthogonal. A version of the C-grid for arbitrary non- orthogonal grids is presented which gives some of the mimetic properties of the orthogonal C-grid. Exact energy conservation is sacrificed for improved accuracy and the re- sulting scheme numerically conserves energy and potential enstrophy well. The non-orthogonal nature means that the scheme can be used on a cubed sphere. The advantage of the cubed sphere is that it does not admit the computa- tional modes of the hexagonal or triangular C-grids. On var- ious shallow-water test cases, the non-orthogonal scheme on a cubed sphere has accuracy less than or equal to the orthog- onal scheme on an orthogonal hexagonal icosahedron. A new diamond grid is presented consisting of quasi- uniform quadrilaterals which is more nearly orthogonal than the equal-angle cubed sphere but with otherwise similar properties. It performs better than the cubed sphere in ev- ery way and should be used instead in codes which allow a flexible grid structure.

Plasma free fatty acids do not provide the link between obesity and insulin resistance or β-cell dysfunction: results of the Reading, Imperial, Surrey, Cambridge, Kings (RISCK) study

Aims To investigate the relationship between adiposity and plasma free fatty acid levels and the influence of total plasma free fatty acid level on insulin sensitivity and β-cell function. Methods An insulin sensitivity index, acute insulin response to glucose and a disposition index, derived from i.v. glucose tolerance minimal model analysis and total fasting plasma free fatty acid levels were available for 533 participants in the Reading, Imperial, Surrey, Cambridge, Kings study. Bivariate correlations were made between insulin sensitivity index, acute insulin response to glucose and disposition index and both adiposity measures (BMI, waist circumference and body fat mass) and total plasma free fatty acid levels. Multivariate linear regression analysis was performed, controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and adiposity. Results After adjustment, all adiposity measures were inversely associated with insulin sensitivity index (BMI: β = −0.357; waist circumference: β = −0.380; body fat mass: β = −0.375) and disposition index (BMI: β = −0.215; waist circumference: β = −0.248; body fat mass: β = −0.221) and positively associated with acute insulin response to glucose [BMI: β = 0.200; waist circumference: β = 0.195; body fat mass β = 0.209 (P values <0.001)]. Adiposity explained 13, 4 and 5% of the variation in insulin sensitivity index, acute insulin response to glucose and disposition index, respectively. After adjustment, no adiposity measure was associated with free fatty acid level, but total plasma free fatty acid level was inversely associated with insulin sensitivity index (β = −0.133), acute insulin response to glucose (β = −0.148) and disposition index [β = −0.218 (P values <0.01)]. Plasma free fatty acid concentration accounted for 1.5, 2 and 4% of the variation in insulin sensitivity index, acute insulin response to glucose and disposition index, respectively. Conclusions Plasma free fatty acid levels have a modest negative association with insulin sensitivity, β-cell secretion and disposition index but no association with adiposity measures. It is unlikely that plasma free fatty acids are the primary mediators of obesity-related insulin resistance or β-cell dysfunction.