Charging The Net: Social Activism in Women's Professional Tennis

This dissertation is an analysis of social activism within women’s professional tennis. In the 46 years since the women known as the Original 9 began protesting against the pay inequality between men’s and women’s tennis, subsequent cohorts of women have brought different issues and concerns to women’s tennis, expanding its scope and efforts.  Using qualitative research, including interviews with former players and press conference participation at tournaments to access current players, this study shows the lineage of social activism within women’s tennis and the issues, expressions, risks and effects of each cohort. Intersectionality theoretically frames this study, and analyses of performativity appears regularly. Each generational cohort is a chapter of this study. The Original 9 of the Movement Cohort fought for equal prize money. The Bridge Cohort, the era of Evert and Navratilova, continued the Movement Cohort’s push for equal prize money; however, they also ushered in identity politics (including gender, sexuality, and nationality, but with the notable exception of race). The Professional Cohort, the current era, followed the Bridge Cohort and is characterized by its focus on corporatization and mass-marketing. As such, there is a focus among the players on individualism which can seem like a lack of social activism is occurring. However, race, neglected during the Bridge Cohort, emerged during the Professional Cohort. The individualism of this cohort made space for Blackness to show unapologetically, though, within certain constraints. Finally, a few players are working on social justice issues in society at large, as well as trying to institute change within women’s tennis. These players make up the Post-Professional Cohort (or, as Pam Shriver from the Bridge Cohort calls them, “Bridge Throwbacks”).  This study shows the evolution of social activism within women’s tennis, as it reflects larger social change. Though bound together as one unified body, the social activism engaged in by each generation focused on different issues, making each generational cohort distinct from the whole of women’s professional tennis.

Place in Time: The Role of Architecture in Establishing an Emotional Connection between Man and Time

This thesis explores the role of architecture as a means of reconnecting humans to the passage of time. A neglect of the temporal in our built environment obscures understanding of the human condition in all of its sensory aspects. The exploration and design of a series of ritual engagements, both culturally, and architecturally, begin to offer a venue through which designers can engage human senses. Rituals act as a means of demarcating the passage of time. It is through the engagement with these moments that people can begin to gain a richer understanding of the ephemeral nature of their own existence. The Pritzker Architecture Prize serves as the selected ritual of exploration because of its celebration of humanity and the art of architecture. However, the notion of ritual is explored down to the level of detail of engagement with handrails and door handles.

Periodismo literario y conflicto social en México en las crónicas de Charles Bowden y Judith Torrea

La presente comunicación analiza las relaciones entre periodismo literario y conflicto social a partir de la visión que sobre la violencia, el narcotráfico, los asesinatos, el crimen, las desapariciones etc., tienen las crónicas de Charles Bowden y Judtih Torrea. Bowden es un periodista norteamericano, recientemente fallecido, que ha vivido en primera persona el problema de la violencia a un lado y a otro de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos. Por su parte, Judith Torrea, es una periodista española, Premio Ortega y Gasset 2010 de periodismo en Internet, afincada en Juárez y cuya obra se ha centrado en las desapariciones de mujeres en Juárez. La perspectiva de ambos profesionales, de procedencia y generación distinta, nos permite abordar el fenómeno del conflicto social mexicano no sólo desde el ángulo del análisis pormenorizado del problema, sino de la visión personal y en muchos casos subjetiva del periodista que se enfrenta in situ, y de manera personal a estas situaciones de conflicto. Nos centraremos para este doble análisis, de un lado La ciudad del crimen: Ciudad Juárez y los nuevos campos de exterminio de la economía global del periodista norteamericano Charles Bowden y Juárez en la sombra: Crónica de una ciudad que se resiste a morir de la periodista española Judith Torrea. Creemos poder contribuir de esta manera al estudio del periodismo literario a través de la crónica como género a partir de las adaptaciones que esta sufre en función del contexto del que trata. Centramos el caso en el estudio de Ciudad Juárez dada la importancia de este caso y su repercusión social y el eco internacional que tiene a lo que se añade el carácter fronterizo del problema y por tanto un fenómeno que posee una singularidad específica. This communication analyses the relationship between literary journalism and social conflict, from the point of view Charles Bowden and Judtih Torrea chronicles have about violence, drug trafficking, murders, crime, disappearances, etc. Bowden is an American journalist, recently deceased, who has experienced on the first hand the problem of violence on the border between Mexico and the United States. Meanwhile, Torrea is a Spanish journalist, awarded in 2010 with the Journalism on the Internet Ortega y Gasset Prize, settled in Juarez conflict and whose work is focused on the disappearances of women in Juarez. The perspectives of both professionals, who are from different origin and generation, allow us to deal with the situation of Mexican social conflict, from the angle of detailed analysis of the problem, and from the journalist’s personal view, often subjective, who had to cope with this reality. For this double analysis, we will focus, firstly, on Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by the American journalist Charles Bowden and, secondly, on City of Juarez: Under the Shadow of Drug Trafficking by the Spanish journalist Judith Torrea. Accordingly, we contribute to the study of literary journalism through the chronicle as genre with the adaptation it suffers depending on the context. Ciudad Juarez is the center of this investigation due to the importance of this case and its social impact and international repercussions. Besides, the border problem contributes to give a specific singularity to this.

The Visible and the Invisible Hilary Mantel

This talk addresses the scarcity of critical material on Hilary Mantel’s writing in the academy. It questions the suitability of the ‘origin’ paradigm within the criticism that is available, which closes off the excess of Mantel’s texts through attempts to ‘unite’ her corpus. The ambiguity of her writing, and its suspicions, suggest Jacques Derrida’s thought as a pertinent means to read the differences in her work differently. The proximity of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy with Derrida’s thought allows the significance of ellipsis to surface as a liberating catalyst for weaving the implications of Derrida’s thinking through the writing of Mantel. This synthesis constitutes an original combination because Mantel’s writing has not been closely studied, Derrida’s notion of ellipsis has been eclipsed by philosophy, and the combination of these two ‘invisibilities’ is seminal. The talk begins with an exploration of the mythologies I discovered and interrogated during the course of my thesis. It then considers the key points in Mantel’s writing career. In particular taking her from the difficulty and invisibility of 1979 when A Place of Greater Safety, her first novel, was rejected, to winning the Booker prize twice in succession in 2009 and 2012. It thereby traces the story of her shift from invisible to infamous, in terms of her treatment by the mainstream British media as well as her phenomenal post-millennium success.

A primeira tradução de o leão e a joia, de Wole Soyinka, para o português do Brasil : análise descritiva da oralidade

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Línguas Estrangeiras e Tradução, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução, 2016.

A novel latent factor model for recommender system

Matrix factorization (MF) has evolved as one of the better practice to handle sparse data in field of recommender systems. Funk singular value decomposition (SVD) is a variant of MF that exists as state-of-the-art method that enabled winning the Netflix prize competition. The method is widely used with modifications in present day research in field of recommender systems. With the potential of data points to grow at very high velocity, it is prudent to devise newer methods that can handle such data accurately as well as efficiently than Funk-SVD in the context of recommender system. In view of the growing data points, I propose a latent factor model that caters to both accuracy and efficiency by reducing the number of latent features of either users or items making it less complex than Funk-SVD, where latent features of both users and items are equal and often larger. A comprehensive empirical evaluation of accuracy on two publicly available, amazon and ml-100 k datasets reveals the comparable accuracy and lesser complexity of proposed methods than Funk-SVD.

Analysis of Transmission System Adequacy Considering the Constrained Fuzzy Power Flow

Power flow calculations are one of the most important tools for power system planning and operation. The need to account for uncertainties when performing power flow studies led, among others methods, to the development of the fuzzy power flow (FPF). This kind of models is especially interesting when a scarcity of information exists, which is a common situation in liberalized power systems (where generation and commercialization of electricity are market activities). In this framework, the symmetric/constrained fuzzy power flow (SFPF/CFPF) was proposed in order to avoid some of the problems of the original FPF model. The SFPF/CFPF models are suitable to quantify the adequacy of transmission network to satisfy “reasonable demands for the transmission of electricity” as defined, for instance, in the European Directive 2009/72/EC. In this work it is illustrated how the SFPF/CFPF may be used to evaluate the impact on the adequacy of a transmission system originated by specific investments on new network elements

The development of selective copying: children’s learning from an expert versus their mother

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N=50) found that 5- to 6-year-olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model’s superior capability. Experiment 2 (N=50) demonstrated a shift in 7-to 8-year-olds towards copying the expert. Children aged 9- to 10-years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow-up study (N=30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own – partially flawed – causal understanding of the puzzle box.

Espiritualidad y política: una propuesta tibetana para la transformación del orden mundial

La Revolución Espiritual promovida por el Dalai Lama plantea una unión entre espiritualidad y política. El proyecto de una ética universal, que se inscribe dentro de dicha Revolución, busca impactar la manera en que las relaciones internacionales se desarrollan, dándole prevalencia a los valores humanos. Sin embargo, esa proposición se encuentra ligada al contexto de exilio en el marco del conflicto sino-tibetano que afecta al continente asiático. Por esto, en la presente monografía, haciendo uso de los conceptos de marco de acción colectiva e identidad inscritos en la corriente de los movimientos sociales en la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales, se pretende determinar la relación entre identidad tibetana, marco de acción colectiva y la propuesta de una ética universal. Para ello se recurre, metodológicamente, a textos y a trabajo de campo en Bogotá. Así, se pretende establecer la relación entre espiritualidad y política como propuesta tibetana atravesada por el conflicto sino-tibetano.

Combination of product quality management and exports: The case of Colombian fruits companies

Quality management provides to companies a framework to improve quality in overall systems, reduction of costs, reallocation of resources efficiently, correct planning of strategies, prevent or correct errors in the right time and increase the performance of companies. In this text, we discuss the different theories in this field, their obligatory or non-obligatory compliance, the importance of quality management for exporting companies and a case study of a Colombian firm that its main objective is to manage quality. In conclusion, we find out that there is different types of quality management systems such as Juran’s trilogy, Deming 14 points, Six sigma, HACCP, and so on; also that companies have to manage suppliers and that quality has a positive influence on exports volume; in the case of Colombian small and medium enterprises, it can be mentioned that the majority has implemented tools regarding quality management but is not enough.

THE GATHERING, OF ANNE ENRIGHT: A READING FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE NEW HISTORICISM

After winning The Man Booker Prize, a prestigious English literary prize, with The Gathering, the Irish writer Anne Enright has achieved a considerable international prominence as a writer in the contemporary literary scene. The book tells the history of Veronica Hegarty, narrator and protagonist, who, after her brother’s suicide, goes through a difficult period in order to deal with the event. During this period, she reveals the history and conflicts of three generations of her family. This paper aims to present an analysis of this novel in the light of New Historicism as an introduction to its interpretation.

Literatura, Fronteiras e Margens: Poéticas Fronteiriças na Fronteira Brasil-Paraguai

RESUMO O artigo busca refletir sobre a intrincada relação entre literatura, fronteira(s) e margens como signos que acrescem renovados sentidos à leitura e à abordagem críticas de obras e de artefatos artístico-literários que emergem de/em contextos fronteiriços. Ressalta, dentre outros aspectos, o crescente interesse por experiências literárias e textualidades contemporâneas várias, cuja marca se traduz no atravessamento e na superação das fronteiras que tornavam em outros tempos, mais ou menos, identificáveis os diferentes campos da atuação artística, seus meios de produção e as ferramentas de abordagem teórico-críticas. Destaca, ainda, a flagrante eclosão de hermenêuticas fronteiriças, que atuam não só no sentido de ampliar as possibilidades de leitura e abordagem críticas, mas, também, de reacender as discussões e o interesse sobre as fronteiras e os limites da literatura e do literário, de modo a abrigar um conjunto de novíssimas textualidades que desafiam, por assim dizer, as concepções normativas destas noções, tornando evidente o aspecto reducionista de que estão cercadas. O trabalho se volta para uma fronteira bem específica: a do Brasil com o Paraguai; para o portunhol selvagem, de Douglas Diegues, como uma experiência literária paradigmática, no contexto da literatura contemporânea, ao assumir como projeto estético-político a superação das fronteiras geográficas, linguísticas e as da própria literatura, além de lançar luzes sobre expressões literárias outras, também circunscritas a esse espaço fronteiriço, como é o caso de Selva trágica (1956), por exemplo. A reflexão se dará com base nas teorias pós-coloniais e na crítica decolonial.Palavras-chave: Literatura de fronteira; Poéticas selvagens; textualidades fronteiriças.