The long and the short of it: negotiating the right space for Asian theatre in the university drama curriculum

This article compares two approaches to teaching Asian theatre at undergraduate level in the United Kingdom. One approach samples a variety of different traditions as a means to challenge students to produce performance for a combined audience of hearing and deaf, whereas the other focuses on the effect of exploring one geographical area intensively over the course of one academic year. The article seeks to highlight the merits and pitfalls of both approaches, and questions whether student work that actively questions ethnicity and identity, as well as the tension between innovation and tradition, might be considered diasporic in character.

Self-tuning property of state-space self tuners

The basic assumption from implicit self-tuning theory is that, for self tuning to occur, the control input obtained from the estimated system model converges to the value whic would be obtained if the system parameters were known. As as direct result of this, only certain control strategies are acceptable. Here a general rule for the self-tuning property of pole-placement self tuners is obtained, and previous strategies are shown to be special cases of this.

Visuotactile learning and body representation: an ERP study with rubber hands and rubber objects

We studied how the integration of seen and felt tactile stimulation modulates somatosensory processing, and investigated whether visuotactile integration depends on temporal contiguity of stimulation, and its coherence with a pre-existing body representation. During training, participants viewed a rubber hand or a rubber object that was tapped either synchronously with stimulation of their own hand, or in an uncorrelated fashion. In a subsequent test phase, somatosensory event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to tactile stimulation of the left or right hand, to assess how tactile processing was affected by previous visuotactile experience during training. An enhanced somatosensory N140 component was elicited after synchronous, compared with uncorrelated, visuotactile training, irrespective of whether participants viewed a rubber hand or rubber object. This early effect of visuotactile integration on somatosensory processing is interpreted as a candidate electrophysiological correlate of the rubber hand illusion that is determined by temporal contiguity, but not by pre-existing body representations. ERPmodulations were observed beyond 200msec post-stimulus, suggesting an attentional bias induced by visuotactile training. These late modulations were absent when the stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s own hand was uncorrelated during training, suggesting that pre-existing body representations may affect later stages of tactile processing.