Chess endgame knowledge advances

This review of recent developments starts with the publication of Harold van der Heijden's Study Database Edition IV, John Nunn's second trilogy on the endgame, and a range of endgame tables (EGTs) to the DTC, DTZ and DTZ50 metrics. It then summarises data-mining work by Eiko Bleicher and Guy Haworth in 2010. This used CQL and pgn2fen to find some 3,000 EGT-faulted studies in the database above, and the Type A (value-critical) and Type B-DTM (DTM-depth-critical) zugzwangs in the mainlines of those studies. The same technique was used to mine Chessbase's BIG DATABASE 2010 to identify Type A/B zugzwangs, and to identify the pattern of value-concession and DTM-depth concession in sub-7-man play.

Amyloid formation: interface influence

The causes of pathological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases are becoming better understood. Proteins that misfold from their native structure to form aggregates of β-sheet fibrils — termed amyloid — are known1,2 to be implicated in these ‘amyloid diseases’. Understanding the early steps of fibril formation is critical, and the conditions, mechanism and kinetics of protein and peptide aggregation are being widely investigated through a variety of in vitro studies. Kinetic aspects of the dispersion of the protein or peptide in solution are thought to influence the fibrillization process by mass-transfer effects. In addition, mixing also leads to shear forces, which can influence fibril growth by perturbing the equilibrium between the isolated and aggregated proteins, causing existing fibrils to fragment and create new nuclei3. Writing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, David Talaga and co-workers have now highlighted4 an additional factor that can influence the fibrillization of amyloid-forming proteins — the presence of hydrophobic interfaces.

Laughter in the Dark: ethical aspects of drama education

This chapter considers two questions. Firstly, in what ways might drama be an effective medium through which to explore difficult and sensitive issues that concern teenagers? And secondly, what ethical questions surround the use of drama to explore such issues? A practical workshop on teenage suicide is used as a platform for a discussion on the use and implications of different drama strategies and the role of humour as a critical lens and distancing device. The work of actual teenagers is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the techniques in both raising awareness and facilitating both critical and creative responses to the delicate issue explored in the workshop.

Persistence of volatility in futures markets

This article examines the characteristics of key measures of volatility for different types of futures contracts to provide a better foundation for modeling volatility behavior and derivative values. Particular attention is focused on analyzing how different measures of volatility affect volatility persistence relationships. Intraday realized measures of volatility are found to be more persistent than daily measures, the type of GARCH procedure used for conditional volatility analysis is critical, and realized volatility persistence is not coherent with conditional volatility persistence. Specifically, although there is a good fit between the realized and conditional volatilities, no coherence exists between their degrees of persistence, a counterintuitive finding that shows realized and conditional volatility measures are not a substitute for one another

Public Art Commission Rung by Rung, Tina O'Connell

Research based on a significant public art commissions awarded through competition (peer reviewed) – Pearse Street Clinic Public Art Commission (€20K). Research was examining issues of the relationship between sculpture, exchange and communication, health and well-being. The research used an approach to question the aspirations and dreams of those who were visiting the health centre as part of a routine of daily life. Based on the aspirational concerns of individual visitors, and secondary research of positive effects of light, the final output draws on ideas based around the language of physical signage to occupy a space concerned with visitor health and wellbeing – a Health Clinic. The output has had an impact both at the site and more broadly in the context of examining sculpture and fine art as a social catalyst - based on work of socially-engaged historical practices. The installation at Pearse Street work in Dublin in Nov 09 has received critical and local acclaim. Further commissions within the public arena have been forthcoming despite difficult local economic landscape.

Backtracks: a devised performance

Backtracks aimed to investigate critical relationships between audio-visual technologies and live performance, emphasising technologies producing sound, contrasted with non-amplified bodily sound. Drawing on methodologies for studying avant garde theatre, live performance and the performing body, it was informed by work in critical and cultural theory by, for example, Steven Connor and Jonathan Rée, on the body's experience and interpretation of sound. The performance explored how shifting national boundaries, mobile workforces, complex family relationships, cultural pluralities and possibilities for bodily transformation have compelled a re-evaluation of what it means to feel 'at home' in modernity. Using montages of live and mediated images, disrupted narratives and sound, it evoked destablised identities which characterise contemporary lived experience, and enacted the displacement of certainties provided by family and nation, community and locality, body and selfhood. Homer's Odyssey framed the performance: elements could be traced in the mise-en-scène; in the physical presence of Athene, the narrator and Penelope weaving mementoes from the past into her loom; and in voice-overs from Homer's work. The performance drew on personal experiences and improvisations, structured around notions of journey. It presented incomplete narratives, memories, repressed anxieties and dreams through different combinations of sounds, music, mediated images, movement, voice and bodily sound. The theme of travel was intensified by performers carrying suitcases and umbrellas, by soundtracks incorporating travel effects, and by the distorted video images of forms of transport playing across 'screens' which proliferated across the space (sails, umbrellas, the loom, actors' bodies). The performance experimented with giving sound and silence performative dimensions, including presenting sound in visual and imagistic ways, for example by using signs from deaf sign language. Through-composed soundtracks of live and recorded song, music, voice-over, and noise exploited the viscerality of sound and disrupted cognitive interpretation by phenomenological, somatic experience, thereby displacing the impulse for closure/destination/home.

'The African Presence in Caribbean Literature' revisited: recovering the politics of imagined co-belonging 1930–2005

Working outward from Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s landmark 1974 essay, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” this article explores the fuller history of the idea of Africa in anglophone Caribbean critical and literary works from the 1930s to the 2000s. It demonstrates that earlier, now forgotten Caribbean critics drew on imperfect and incomplete Caribbean literary imaginings of Africa to frame a counter-colonial politics of identity. The essay also brings back into view writings by Una Marson, Victor Stafford Reid, and Derek Walcott that expressed a different politics of solidarity based on the shared experience of colonial violence. Readings of recent literary works by Charlotte Williams and Nalo Hopkinson reveal the contemporary crafting of this relation around a heightened awareness of both presence and loss, history and imagination. Importantly, this gathering of sources and perspectives allows for an appreciation of the role that a reach toward Africa has played in articulations of Caribbeanness and its complex patterning of cultural co-belonging.

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The reputation of The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen) as one of the major films of Swedish silent cinema is in some respects securely established. Yet the film has attracted surprisingly little detailed discussion. It may be that its most striking stylistic features have deflected or discouraged closer scrutiny. Tom Gunning, for instance, in making the case for Sjöström’s Masterman, argues that ‘Körkarlen wears its technique on its sleeve, overtly displays its unquestionable mastery of superimposition and complex narrative structure. Mästerman tucks its mastery of editing and composition up its sleeve, so to speak’. This article makes an argument for a different evaluation of The Phantom Carriage, bringing a critical and interpretative understanding of the film’s style into conversation with the historical accounts of film form which predominate in the scholarship around silent cinema. It suggests that the film achieves ‘mastery of editing and composition’ with a flexibility and fluidity in the construction of dramatic space that is in itself remarkable for its period, but that Sjöström’s achievements extend well beyond his handling of film space. Specifically, it discusses a segment which is in several respects at the heart of the film: the first meeting between the two central characters, David Holm (Victor Sjöström) and Sister Edit (Astrid Holm); it spans the film’s exact mid-point; and at almost twelve and a half minutes it is the longest uninterrupted passage to take place in a single setting. The chapter argues that the dramatic and structural centrality of the hostel segment is paralleled by its remarkably rich articulation of the relationships between action, character and space. We show how Sjöström’s creation of a three-dimensional filmic space - with no hint of frontality - becomes the basis for a reciprocal relationship between spatial naturalism and performance style, and for a mise-en-scene that can take on discrete interpretive force. The argument also places the hostel sequences within the film as a whole in order to show how relationships articulated through the detailed decisions in this section take on their full resonance within patterns and motifs that develop across the film.

Estudio comparativo de las actitudes hacia elmurciano.

The aim of this study is to measure and analyse the attitudes towards a linguisticvariety called murciano. This variety is a regional standard of Spanish, namely, theSpanish talked in Murcia, a city located in the South of Spain.There are two groups of informants in this study. The first group is composed of12 people from Murcia and the second group consists of 12 people who know thevariety of murciano but are not natives from the city of Murcia. The methodapplied is the indirect method matched guise. The informants listened to fourdifferent recordings of voices acting as either a Spanish speaking person or amurciano speaking person. Ten short questions related with the voices were askedto the informants, who gave their answers on a Likert attitude scale.The results show that the attitudes towards murciano and the standard Spanishdiffer in both groups of informants. The group of natives from Murcia show morepositive attitudes toward the variety murciano than the group of non-natives fromMurcia. However, when the results towards the variety murciano and the standardSpanish are compared with each other, it is the standard Spanish the one thatreceives more positive valuations. In addition, the observations show that thegroup of non-natives from Murcia are more critical and negative in their attitudestoward the different linguistic varieties than the group of natives from Murcia.

Om lärarskapets moraliska dimension : ett perspektiv och en studie av lärarstuderandes nätbaserade seminariesamtal

In this dissertation, an educational perspective called the moral dimension of teaching is developed. The work includes a theoretically informed discussion from a pragmatist point of view in which the concept of pedagogical rhythm is introduced. The concept captures the need for teachers to regularly shift their intentions and occasionally act in contradictory ways as a consequence of the moral which emerges from interaction in pedagogical situations. Using this perspective, criteria are developed for the characteristics of discussions of the work of teachers, which are desirable in order for students in pre-service teacher education to have opportunities to develop their teachership. Secondly, the educational perspective as it is conceptualised serves as a theoretical framework for a study of discussions taking place in net-based seminars among students in teacher education. The study consists of 14 recorded seminars in which discussions of the work of teachers are analysed in terms of content and direction for reflection. The result of the analysis is a construction of four different focal points for processes of making judgements: existential, performative, critical and professional. Mainly the performative, and to some extent the critical, focal points appear to be supported by the net-based environment, although potential for the professional focal point is found when available tools in net-based settings are used in deliberate ways. Finally, based on these four focal points, possible future predispositions among student teachers are deliberated. Student teachers’ future opportunities to develop a moral and epistemological authority are discussed, as well as teachers’ general opportunities to exercise professional responsibility. The conclusion emphasises that a perspective such as the one developed in the dissertation is important, as it creates an understanding for the need to educate student teachers to exercise a form of responsibility that goes beyond being accountable to society.

The politics of memory in Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes

The present work proposes an investigation of the treatment given to memory in Pinter’s latest play, Ashes to Ashes, and of its function in the development of Pinter’s work. In order to do that, different aspects of the construction of meaning in the theatre are analysed, so that the specificity of its reception is determined. A survey of techniques used to present information, time and space in the theatre is made. The analytical drama, the history drama, and the theatre of the absurd are defined. After that, the evolution of the author’s work is analysed to determine what characterises Pinter’s work, while at the same time determining how his treatment of themes like menace, memory, and political oppression of the individual has evolved. Finally, a detailed survey of the apparently disconnected elements that are mentioned in Ashes to Ashes is made. The intertextual analysis allied to a study of the analytical form as used in this play enables the discovery of several layers of meaning. Through the connection established between the Holocaust and man’s fall followed by expulsion from Eden, Pinter examines the use of memory as a way of dealing with personal and collective responsibility and guilt. It is through the recovery of memory (also through writing) that the present can establish a critical and responsible relation with the past.

Reflexões sobre o turismo cultural na "Cidade Maravilhosa"

A Organização Mundial do Turismo - OMT (2003) afirma que está surgindo uma nova etapa de turismo. No mundo pós-moderno, o movimento turístico tem procurado cada vez mais pelo "diferente", pelo "outro", surgindo, assim, uma motivação para o "turismo com base no legado cultural" (BARRETTO, 2000). Aliando-se ao exposto, o Ministério do Turismo criou, em 2006, uma tipologia do turismo, baseada nas motivações para a realização das viagens, ou na segmentação do mercado. O projeto, que objetiva "organizar o turismo para fins de planejamento, gestão e mercado" divide o turismo em cinco segmentos prioritários, sendo um deles o "cultural". Desta forma, a presente dissertação se propõe a realizar algumas reflexões acerca do turismo cultural no município do Rio de Janeiro - cidade que possui um papel central na história da vida política e cultural brasileira. Realizou-se primeiramente um levantamento dos diversos conceitos que se imbricam com o turismo cultural - cultura, patrimônio cultural, memória, autenticidade, identidades e consumo - para, de maneira ampla, discutir sobre a temática. Através de uma pesquisa de campo, buscou-se delinear a oferta turística, averiguando como o turismo cultural é atualmente trabalhado pelas principais operadoras turísticas da área, no intento de discutir o tema de forma crítica e dialética. A análise desse material possibilitou-nos uma visão crítica das práticas acerca do turismo cultural na "Cidade Maravilhosa", nos permitindo refletir de maneira mais contundente sobre o desenvolvimento eficaz da atividade turística na cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

Criatividade em educação escolar: estudo de caso

Este trabalho consiste em um estudo sobre a criatividade na escola, tendo como base teórica os estudos de Guilford, Torrance e Kneller, dentre outros, e em uma investigação prática realizada em um colégio particular localizado em são Luis (MA) , que se propõe a desenvolver as capacidades criativas dos alunos. O trabalho tem como objetivo verificar a importância que os professores atribuem às atividades que possibilitam a criação e analisar, através da metodologia adotada pelos professores, se os fatores facilitadores da criatividade, segundo Kneller, estão sendo desenvolvidos em sala de aula e, a partir daí, levantar subsídias para novos trabalhos de pesquisa. Foram realizadas entrevistas com professores de 1o grau (8a. série) e de 2o grau (la. e 2a. séries},além de observação de sua atuação em classe. Os dados coletados foram analisados segundo os componentes criativos de Guilford e os fatores facilitadores da criatividade de Kneller. Os resultados foram confrontados com a proposta do colégio. Concluiu-se que os professores estudados têm conhecimento teórico sobre a necessidade de tornar o ensino mais interessante e dinâmico, através de atividades consideradas por eles como capazes de desenvolver as capacidades criativas. Na prática, porém, observou-se que as aulas, em geral, eram expositivas, com predominância de informação unilateral por parte dos professores, que pareciam empenhados apenas em transmitir o conteúdo da disciplina que ensinavam, não criando oportunidade para desenvolver o pensamento criativo dos alunos. Verificou-se também que os professores encontram dificuldades para realizar sua prática pedagógica visando-a o processo ensino-aprendizagem-criatividade. Entre essas dificuldades, incluem-se o grande número de alunos nas turmas, a utilização de livros que contêm basicamente exercícios de fixação e a pouca aceitação pelos alunos de alguns dos livros adotados pelo colégio. Com base na análise dos resultados da aplicação dos instrumentos, levantou-se a hipótese de estar havendo problemas na relação professor-aluno, causados principalmente pela ação didática de alguns professores. Observou-se que o objetivo maior da escola - promover uma educação criativa e dinâmica, procurando desenvolver uma atitude criativa-critica-reflexiva - não está sendo seguido na prática. A conclusão é a de que, além de um ambiente que favoreça a criatividade, a escola precisa também de professores que permitam a livre manifestação do potencial criativo dos alunos e, para isso, torna-se necessário ao professor aceitar e valorizar o individuo criativo.

Importância da orientação educacional no processo educativo

Este trabalho sobre a importância da Orientação Educacional no processo educativo, teve como principal objetivo analisar aspectos fundamentais da orientação que justificassem a posição assumida. o problema de nosso estudo prende-se, sobremodo, a dois aspectos que consideramos fundamentais: 1º - a Orientação Educacional, como parte integrante do processo educativo; 2º - a Orientação Vocacional como sendo área da Orientação Educacional. Na Metodologia utilizamos o tratamento descritivo crítico dos dados da revisão bibliográfica dos assuntos mais importantes tratados nesta proposição. Procurou-se levantar dados, sobre a Orientação Educacional com o objetivo de não só realizar a nossa pesquisa, mas também, contribuir para subsidiar os orientadores educacionais com uma ampla revisão bibliográfica. A escolha dos tópicos, calcada nas hipóteses do trabalho, deve-se à importância dada a aqueles estudados, pelos autores consultados e, também, a própria experiência no campo da orientação. Objetivando o desenvolvimento da presente pesquisa, procuramos na evolução histórica da Orientação Educacional o marco inicial de nossos estudos. Visando a importância, para o trabalho do orientador de uma fundamentação teórica, selecionamos, segundo certos critérios os enfoques que mais tem influenciado os estudos e trabalhos sobre orientação educacional. Procuramos, também, mostrar à importância da orientação Educacional do ponto de vista da Lei 5.692 que a institui obrigatoriamente nas escolas de 19 e 29 graus. Partindo deste campo para o estudo do Serviço da Orientação Educacional, procuramos analisar a "praxis" dos fundamentos teóricos já assinalados. Neste estudo, a título de ilustração foram levantados elementos que esclarecessem a situação da Orientação no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Observa-se que o número de reinadores das escolas, cumprimento de uma exigência legal, longe ainda está de uma situação que favoreça totalmente à consecução de seus objetivos. No sentido de alcançar os objetivos da Orientação Educacional como nos parecem, particularmente relevantes, sugerimos uma visão integrada da práxis da Orientação Educacional nas escolas. Assim sendo, para satisfazer, não só o imperativo legal. como também, as necessidades da própria escola, torna-se mister que a Orientação Educacional assuma uma posição integrada - posição esta fundamental e imprescindível - para o resultado eficaz no processo educativo.