Wrapped fragments : Drapery, the eighteenth century portrait bust and the male subject

The depiction of drapery (generalised cloth as opposed to clothing) is a well-established convention of Neo-Classical sculpture and is often downplayed by art historians as of purely rhetorical value. It can be argued however that sculpted drapery has served a spectrum of expressive ends, the variety and complexity of which are well illustrated by a study of its use in portrait sculpture. For the Neo-Classical portrait bust, drapery had substantial iconographic and political meaning, signifying the new Enlightenment notions of masculine authority. Within the portrait bust, drapery also served highly strategic aesthetic purposes, alleviating the abruptness of the truncated format and the compromising visual consequences of the “cropped” body. With reference to Joseph Nollekens’ portraits of English statesman Charles James Fox and the author’s own sculptural practice, this paper analyses the Neo-Classical use of drapery to propose that rendered fabric, far from mere stylistic flourish, is a highly charged visual signifier with much scope for exploration in contemporary sculptural practice.

Gender

The OED informs us that “gender” has at its root the Latin genus, meaning “race, kind,” and emerges as early as the fifth century as a term for differentiating between types of (especially) people and words. In the following 1500 years, gender appears in linguistic and biological contexts to distinguish types of words and bodies from one another, as when words in Indo-European languages were identified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, and humans were identified as male or female. It is telling that gender has historically (whether overtly or covertly) been a tool of negotiation between our understandings of bodies, and meanings derived from and attributed to them. Within the field of children’s literature studies, as in other disciplines, gender in and of itself is rarely the object of critique. Rather, specific constructions of gender structure understandings of subjectivity; allow or disallow certain behaviors or experiences on the basis of biological sex; and dictate a specific vision of social relations and organization. Critical approaches to gender in children’s literature have included linguistic analysis (Turner-Bowker; Sunderland); analysis of visual representations (Bradford; Moebius); cultural images of females (Grauerholz and Pescosolido); consideration of gender and genre (Christian-Smith; Stephens); ideological (Nodelman and Reimer); psychoanalytic (Coats); discourse analysis (Stephens); and masculinity studies (Nodelman) among others. In the adjacent fields of education and literacy studies, gender has been a sustained point of investigation, often deriving from perceived gendering of pedagogical practices (Lehr) or of reading preferences and competencies, and in recent years, perceptions of boys as “reluctant readers” (Moss). The ideology of patriarchy has primarily come under critical scrutiny 2 because it has been used to locate characters and readers within the specific binary logic of gender relations that historically subordinated the feminine to the masculine. Just as feminism might be broadly defined as resistance to existing power structures, a gendered reading might be broadly defined as a “resistant reading” in that it most often reveals or contests that which a text assumes to be the norm.

Improving web database search incorporating users query information

The growing importance and need of data processing for information extraction is vital for Web databases. Due to the sheer size and volume of databases, retrieval of relevant information as needed by users has become a cumbersome process. Information seekers are faced by information overloading - too many result sets are returned for their queries. Moreover, too few or no results are returned if a specific query is asked. This paper proposes a ranking algorithm that gives higher preference to a user’s current search and also utilizes profile information in order to obtain the relevant results for a user’s query.

Transitions in taste in Vietnam and the diaspora

This paper argues that food and styles of eating have become the predominant markers of social change for the Vietnamese in both Vietnam and in the diaspora. In post-socialist Vietnam the transition to a market economy has allowed for a huge growth in the number of restaurants and cafes, and in the north, a return to an earlier style of cooking. The intense interest and emphasis on food as embodied pleasure has meant that it has come to stand for the transition away from a heavily state-controlled economy. The new configurations of family and friendship are being framed by newly available ways of ‘eating out’, which are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation-state struggling to define itself in a globalising world. At the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora enerationally changed its eating patterns. Although there as been a focus in the literature on food in the diaspora that emphasises the nostalgic and recuperative elements of ‘migrant food’, I argue that food is the prime mechanism of intercultural engagement for each diasporic generation. For older Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants and barbecues have been the sites of interplay between cultural tradition’ and innovation, and between Australianness and Vietnameseness, and these interstitial places continue to be important for younger Vietnamese. Within this established framework of cross-cultural interaction, for Vietnamese youth, the social settings of ‘ethnic food’, eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. This melding together of both invention and convention, of transgression and ordinariness provides the background against which young people from migrant backgrounds are reinvigorating the social spaces of food consumption and in the process both e-enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food.

Lapsen osallisuuden mahdollistaminen päiväkodin toimintakulttuurissa : Tilastollinen tutkimus osallisuuden tasomallista

Children s participation has been a subject in the international research since past ten years. This research has explored participation from the standpoint of the UN s Convention of the Rights of the Child and focused mainly on schoolchildren or on the working youth s chances in developing countries to have impact on their own lives (eg. Sinclair, 2004 and Thomas, 2002). In Finland there has been less research about the children s rights while the main focus has been on the customers of the child welfare system. This study examines children s participation in Helsinki metropolitan area via the views and the practices of the personnel of early childhood education. The adopted viewpoint is Shier s level model of participation (2001), in which the children s participation process is building in phases, is observed via the everyday actions of the kindergarten personnel. Attention has been paid on the special characteristics of the Finnish early childhood education. This study was part of VKK-Metro s research project. The inquiry in May 2010 was directed to all working teams in the kindergartens of the Helsinki metropolitan area. Of these 56.59 % (1116 teams) answered. The quantitative data analyzed by principal component analysis gave four principal components, from which three were named after Shier s participation model. The fourth component included variables about rules and power. The level model of participation fit well to assess early childhood education in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The professionalism of the personnel became emphasized in the area of everyday interactions between the personnel and the children. Important aspects of the children s participation are to become heard, to get support in the play and in interaction and to be able to share both power and responsibility with personnel of the early childhood education.

Captured by conventions : On objectivity and factuality in international news agency discourse

The thesis explores the discourse of two global news agencies, the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, which together with the French AFP are generally regarded as the world s leading news distributors. A glance at the guidelines given by AP and Reuters to their journalists shows that these two news agencies make a lot of effort to strive for objectivity the well-known journalistic ideal, which, however, is an almost indefinable concept. In journalism textbooks definitions of objectivity often contain various components: detachment, nonpartisanship, facticity, balance, etc. AP and Reuters, too, in their guidelines, present several other ideals besides objectivity , viz., reliability, accuracy, balance, freedom from bias, precise sourcing, reporting the truth, and so on. Other central concepts connected to objectivity are neutrality and impartiality. However, objectivity is, undoubtedly, the term that is most often mentioned when the ethics of journalism is discussed, acting as a kind of umbrella term for several related journalistic ideals. It can even encompass the other concept that is relevant for this study, that of factuality. These two intertwined concepts are extremely complex; paradoxically, it is easier to show evidence of the lack of objectivity or factuality than of their existence. I argue that when journalists conform to the deep-rooted conventions of objective news reporting, facts may be blurred, and the language becomes vague and ambiguous. As global distributors of news, AP and Reuters have had an influential role in creating and reinforcing conventions of (at least English-language) news writing. These conventions can be seen to work at various levels of news reporting: the ideological (e.g., defining what is regarded as newsworthy, or who is responsible), structural (e.g., the well-known inverted pyramid model), and stylistic (e.g., presupposing that in hard news reports, the journalist s voice should be backgrounded). On the basis of my case studies, I have found four central conventions to be worthy of closer examination: the conventional structure of news reports, the importance of newsworthiness, the tactics of impersonalisation which tends to blur news actors responsibility, and the routines of presenting emotions. My linguistic analyses draw mainly on M.A.K. Halliday s Systemic Functional Grammar, on notions of transitivity, ergativity, nominalisation and grammatical metaphor. The Appraisal framework, too, has provided useful tools for my analyses. The thesis includes six case studies dealing with the following topics: metaphors in political reporting, terrorism discourse, terrorism fears, emotions more generally, unnamed sources as rhetorical constructs, and responsibility in the convention of attribution.

Turvemaan männyn (Pinus sylvestris L.) ja kuusen (Picea abies [L.] Karst.) kanto- ja juuripuun ominaisuudet ja asetoniliukoisten uuteaineiden määrä

Tutkimus on osa Metsäklusteri Oy:n Future Biorefinery –tutkimusohjelmaa, jossa kartoitetaan mahdollisuuksia hyödyntää metsäteollisuuden raaka-aineita aiempaa tarkemmin ja uusissa tuotteissa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää männyn (Pinus sylvestris L.) ja kuusen (Picea abies [L.] Karst.) juurten ja kantopuun rakenne ja ominaisuudet. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään löytyykö männyn ja kuusen juurista reaktiopuuta ja määritetään asetoniliukoisten uuteaineiden osuus kantoja juuripuussa. Tutkimusaineistona oli viisi eri-ikäistä mäntyä ja viisi eri-ikäistä kuusta. Juuri- ja kantoaineisto kerättiin Metsäntutkimuslaitoksen toimesta Parkanon seudulta (62.017°N, 23.017°E) hakkuun jälkeen. Maanalaisista juurista otettiin näytteet kolmelta eri etäisyydeltä juurenniskaan nähden. Kummankaan lajin juurista ei löytynyt varsinaista reaktiopuuta, mutta joissakin näytteissä havaittiin lievää reaktiopuuta. Lievää reaktiopuuta löytyi enemmän männyn kuin kuusen juurista, eikä sitä löytynyt lainkaan kaikkein ohuimmista, noin 2 cm paksuisista juurenosista. Männyn kannoissa uuteaineprosentti oli korkeampi kuin kuusen. Männyn juurissa uuteaineprosentti kasvoi edettäessä kohti juuren kärkeä. Kuusella uuteaineprosentti laski aluksi, mutta lähellä juuren kärkeä taas kasvoi. Kuoren uuteainepitoisuus oli molemmilla puulajeilla korkeampi kuin puuaineen. Tutkimusaineisto oli suppea, eikä tutkimuksessa pyritty tilastolliseen yleistettävyyteen. Laajemmasta aineistosta tehdylle tutkimukselle on tarvetta, sillä turvekankailta saatavan puun tarjonta on Suomessa kasvussa, mutta juurten uuteaine- ja reaktiopuututkimuksia on tehty vain kivennäismailta kerätyistä aineistoista.

Soft classification based Sub-pixel allocation model

Land cover (LC) refers to what is actually present on the ground and provide insights into the underlying solution for improving the conditions of many issues, from water pollution to sustainable economic development. One of the greatest challenges of modeling LC changes using remotely sensed (RS) data is of scale-resolution mismatch: that the spatial resolution of detail is less than what is required, and that this sub-pixel level heterogeneity is important but not readily knowable. However, many pixels consist of a mixture of multiple classes. The solution to mixed pixel problem typically centers on soft classification techniques that are used to estimate the proportion of a certain class within each pixel. However, the spatial distribution of these class components within the pixel remains unknown. This study investigates Orthogonal Subspace Projection - an unmixing technique and uses pixel-swapping algorithm for predicting the spatial distribution of LC at sub-pixel resolution. Both the algorithms are applied on many simulated and actual satellite images for validation. The accuracy on the simulated images is ~100%, while IRS LISS-III and MODIS data show accuracy of 76.6% and 73.02% respectively. This demonstrates the relevance of these techniques for applications such as urban-nonurban, forest-nonforest classification studies etc.

Direitos de propriedade intelectual e saúde pública: das normas de regulação às práticas de exame de patentes na área farmacêutica no Brasil.

Este trabalho discute o patenteamento farmacêutico no Brasil por meio de análises dos exames de patentes propriamente ditos, com a entrada em vigor da atual lei da propriedade industrial (Lei 9.279/1996). Para a compreensão de como funciona o exame de patentes, parte-se da apresentação de conceitos basilares da propriedade industrial. É dado destaque à importância das patentes como fonte de informação tecnológica (pesquisa bibliográfica em bancos de patentes e para a recuperação das informações contidas nestes documentos). Neste ponto, apresenta-se um estudo sobre as patentes relacionadas ao efavirenz, por tratar-se de um caso excepcional na discussão sobre propriedade industrial e saúde pública; já que ele foi o primeiro medicamento licenciado compulsoriamente pelo Governo brasileiro (dentro da política de controle da epidemia da Aids). Em seguida, o problema da associação entre os direitos de propriedade industrial e o acesso a medicamentos é abordado em dois capítulos relevantes: i) as questões sobre a atenteabilidade de polimorfos de fármacos; e ii) os procedimentos técnicos adotados no exame de patentes farmacêuticas no âmbito da Coordenação de Propriedade Intelectual da ANVISA (COOPI-ANVISA) e do Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial (INPI). De fato, o primeiro tratado internacional relativo à propriedade industrial, a Convenção da União de Paris (CUP, de 1883), já propugnava o princípio da independência das patentes, ou seja, que cada país tem liberdade para decidir sobre a patenteabilidade ou não dos diferentes produtos e processos de invenção. Mais tarde, o Acordo TRIPS (de 1995) não vedará aos países a adoção de escopos de proteção distintos, visando o equilíbrio entre os interesses públicos e privados em diferentes domínios tecnológicos, nos diferentes países. Finalmente, a Declaração de Doha, de 2001, prevê dispositivos flexibilizadores de modo a favorecer precisamente políticas de saúde e acesso a medicamentos pela utilização de salvaguardas dos direitos de propriedade intelectual no exame de pedidos de patentes. Conclui-se, neste trabalho, que aspectos técnicos e jurídicos inerentes ao patenteamento aliados à capacidade política de decisão em favor da implementação de flexibilidades no exame de pedidos patentes de fármacos e medicamentos podem ser mais ou menos favoráveis à saúde pública.

Circulação de ideias em pesquisas com os cotidianos: os necessários contatos entre os praticantespensantes de currículos

O trabalho que desenvolvemos busca alargar os espaçostempos para narrativase análises de textos, a partir de imagens e textos produzidos com vista à circulação científica produzidos para congressos pela área de currículo e, mais especificamente, pela corrente denominada de pesquisas nos/dos/com os cotidianos. Entendemos que são nesses múltiplos e complexos encontros, nos quais são desenvolvidas formas diversas de conversas, entre pesquisadores e outros praticantespensantes dos cotidianos das redes educativas, que são reproduzidos, transmitidos e criados artefatos materiais (artigos) e imateriais (crenças pedagógicas, pensamentos pedagógicos e curriculares) e relações culturais e educativas, propiciando o encontro de múltiplos mundos culturais, fazendo circular ideias produzidas dentrofora das escolas, bem como dentrofora dos espaçostempos acadêmicos. Incorporando essas ideias, nesta pesquisa, entendemos que pelas necessidades de colocar em diálogo o que vai sendo descoberto em ciência no campo da educação se faz indispensável formas de contato ágeis entre a Universidade e aqueles que se encontram nas diversas redes cotidianas e, em especial, os praticantespensantes docentes nas múltiplas redes educativas em que atuam, já que sem isso não conseguiremos entender quais são os conhecimentos e as significações criados, cotidianamente, pelos mesmos nos contatos com as ideias criadas pelas pesquisas acadêmicas. Mais que isto, estas só podem se considerar completadas quando contarem com as respostas e ideias que são criadas nesses espaçostempos de contato. Com essa atitude que venho desenvolvendo desde o mestrado - continuo no doutorado, investigando o uso da troca científica como potência para pensar e praticar a circulação de conhecimentos e significações, compreendendo a descentralização necessária, na área da Educação, dos pólos de produção e emissão, e considerando a conversação científica, da qual todos podem/devem participar, como parte integrante e fundamental da produção de ciência, nesta área. Tudo isto vem permitindo transformações que se articulam com nossas múltiplas e diversificadas possibilidades de expressão, sensação, entendimento, pelas tantas redes que todos e todas formamos e nas quais aprendemosensinamos. Nesta tese, continuando o trabalho iniciado no mestrado, quando buscamos percorrer na internet os caminhos feitos por artigos de duas conhecidas pesquisadoras da primeira geração de pesquisadores com os cotidianos, em textos produzidos para o ENDIPE de 2010, no doutorado, buscamos acompanhar o trabalho de dois pesquisadores na segunda geração desta mesma corrente de pesquisa, nesta mesma rede, com textos produzidos para reuniões anuais da ANPEd, no Trabalho Encomendado do GT-12/Currículo. Traçamos algumas aproximamos quanto às possibilidades de trocas neste material produzido por dois encontros científicos com características bem diversas