Distant Horizon Research Articles

When Caddy's Went Viral

With the sun losing its glare and now appearing as a beautiful orange orb just above the distant horizon where the sky meets the sea, Barry O’Connor thought to himself, “This is as close to paradise as you can get.” Yet, the vast empty sea of white sand surrounding him told a very different story. It was July 17, 2020, and this beautiful area should have been overrun with college students and young families as they enjoyed their summer vacation. Instead, the executive order that came as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic four months earlier forced him to immediately close his four bars and six Caddy’s Waterfront Dining restaurants, laying off 600 employees and dashing his dreams of another lucrative season. Barry gazed at the beautiful sunset one more time before turning his thoughts to the monumental problem that faced him. While he agreed that the health and safety of his employees and loyal customers was paramount, he couldn’t help but feel the pang that losing a few million dollars a month brings. Now, as businesses began to reopen their doors in the face of new restrictions brought about by COVID, Barry was left to figure out how to navigate the uncharted landscape of new in-house capacity restrictions, everyone’s fear of contracting the virus, and the unknown of when this pandemic would end. All the while, Barry’s bar business was in shambles due to a second government shutdown of bars, which only added pressure on the Caddy’s brand to drive revenue and keep the other half of the business afloat. A potential solution loomed on the horizon, however. This Caddy’s location in Treasure Island had an extensive beach immediately outside its doors, which could expand its footprint, allowing an additional 450-500 customers to enjoy the Caddy’s experience in the safety of an outdoor arena. However, due to local government zoning restrictions, Caddy’s was not legally allowed to treat this area as a traditional restaurant setting. But Barry had become a self-made man because he understood that the nature of business was never static. He knew that the best way forward was to disregard the inconvenience of circumstances beyond his control, and instead pour his efforts into a search for the opportunities that always accompanied such impacts. But just what opportunities did the pandemic create? How could he best leverage technology to exploit them? How would he manage the impact of the changes on his customers and employees?

La «tuera» como fruto amargo de sufrimiento amoroso: entre el Cancionero General (1511) y El rayo que no cesa de Miguel Hernández (1936)

El Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo (Valencia, 1511) presenta una canción de Pedro Fajardo, Adelantado de Murcia, con un encabezado que remite a unas «tueras» (una especie de pequeña calabaza silvestre), como invención o empresa. El sabor de la «tuera» es muy amargo y por ello, en las escasas ocasiones en que aparece el término en literatura, las «tueras» se asocian con la amargura del sufrimiento amoroso (y a veces tal vez con la gravedad y los pesares del embarazo y la crianza). Encontraremos una nueva utilización poética de la «tuera» solamente cuatro siglos después, en uno de los sonetos de Miguel Hernández, «Fuera menos penado», incluido en su libro El rayo que no cesa (1936). Tratamos de analizar y contestar algunos interrogantes en torno al mantenimiento, rescate o resurrección del término «tuera» y sus significados en los mismos contextos poéticos, si bien en horizontes de expectativas muy alejados en el tiempo.

From Distant Horizon to the ‘Uncoercive Rearrangement of Desire’: Institutional Pedagogy and Collaborative Learning in an Instance of Arts and Curatorial Education

AbstractIn politics and philosophy, the question of horizons, the vanishing point that is always out of reach, but provides direction and guidance, underpins utopic thinking. This is a strange phenomenon since, as Jodi Dean suggests, horizons are ‘real’ insofar as they exist both spatially and temporally. Dean invokes the Lacanian concept of the real to demonstrate how horizons are omnipresent, even when we are unable to see them. Here, we disagree with Dean. Rather than view them as a fixed and constant entity, with Deleuze & Guattari we agree that horizons, understood as spaces of possibility, must be constructed through communal enunciations of desire. Following Dean's (re)formulation of horizons alongside of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of desire, we propose that Foucault's idea of ‘heterotopia’, a real, but inverted and potentially uncomfortable counter‐site, is a better schema for thinking the possibilities of arts education's horizon. This article thinks through the construction of other, emancipated, spaces of learning in arts education through the methodological approach of institutional analysis and the work done by the Institutional Pedagogy movement in post‐war France. Drawing from this movement, the work of Fernand Oury and Aïda Vasquez and Félix Guattari, ‘institution’ here is understood loosely as anything that institutes forms of sociability. As such, institutional analysis seeks to radically transform institutions from within and without by creating spaces to facilitate the reconfiguration of desire. Our analysis will be grounded in our own pedagogical practices in universities where we have made use of the techniques of Institutional Pedagogy.

Instead of a Novel

This article focuses on the life and literary strategies of Sophia Yablonska (1907–1971), a self-identified Ukrainian camerawoman, photographer, and writer. While working for a French documentary production company, traveling around the world, and living in Morocco and China, Yablonska published three books of travelogues supported by hundreds of photos (The Charm of Morocco, 1932; From the Country of Rice and Opium, 1936; and Distant Horizons, 1939) that combine autobiographical and anthropological approaches and transgress poetic and narrative conventions. In her travelogues, Yablonska examines the contradictions between traditional and modern culture and expresses them in verbal and visual forms. Abandoning the genre of the novel for that of the travelogue, Sophia Yablonska transgressed literary and life norms in terms of genre, gender, anthropology, autobiography, perception, media, culture, and discourse. Her writings not only reveal other countries, but also show the formation of a modern personality in the process of writing.

The distant Horizon: Investigating the relationship between social sciences academic research and game development

Research in the social sciences devotes a great amount of attention to investigating the impact of video games on the individual and on society. However, results generated by this research often fail to inform game development. The present study investigated the outreach of research conducted by the academic community by interviewing 30 game developers and 14 researchers, highlighting critical aspects in the relationship between game research and game industry. Specifically, we found that the difference in priorities, speed cycles, and dissemination practices between these two contexts hinder communication. Subsequently, we carried out a focus group for a set of developers and researchers (N = 6) with the aim of eliciting recommendation for improving communication between academics and developers. Among the recommendations to emerge were calls to diversify dissemination channels, promote joint conferences and develop research-production partnerships. It was felt such measures could strengthen the influence of research results outside the academic community.

What Is the Time of Literature?

Abstract Two recent books, Ted Underwood’s Distant Horizons (2019) and Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager’s edited volume, Timelines of American Literature (2019), offer new ways of thinking about how literary scholars and institutions use concepts of time. Underwood’s book argues that the tendency to think of literary history as composed of large stylistic shifts between schools is undermined by an approach focused on computational analysis of stylistic features. Marrs and Hager’s volume showcases a wide variety of periodizing and temporal experiments designed to help us rethink the nature of American literature.

Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change, by Ted Underwood

Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change, by Ted Underwood

Capturing Long-Range Dependence and Harmonic Phenomena in 24-Hour Solar Irradiance Forecasting: A Quantile Regression Robustification via Forecasts Combination Approach

The global horizontal irradiance data recorded at the earth’s horizontal surface is a mixture of deterministic (extra-terrestrially) and stochastic components due to the ever-changing atmospheric conditions. The Box-Jenkins short memory stochastic models and their hybrid versions have been used successfully to forecast solar irradiance data. However, these models lack robustness and faulter for distant horizon forecasting such as more than 2 hours in the hourly case. Using a quantile regression model as both a robust benchmark and robustification model, we remedy this drawback by using long memory models and their hybrid versions in 24 hour ahead irradiance forecasting at three sites in South Africa (RVD, UPR and SUN). Results show that the inherent long memory is anti-persistent in all models but one that shows persistence. The forecasts from these long memory-based models are generally within the prediction interval of the benchmark model forecasts for two sites. Based on the RMSE, rRMSE, MAE, rMAE and the pinball loss function at the central quantile level and two extreme quantile levels, forecasts obtained through robustification via forecasts combinations with the quantile regression yield the best performance. The predictive ability of the best model before forecasts combination against the quantile regression model combined (robustified) model based Diebold-Mariano test rejected the null hypothesis of the same accuracy. As a follow up to distinguish which has a superior predictive accuracy, “murphy diagrams” were used. For the RVD and UPR sites, the model based on forecast combination has the best predictive accuracy while the quantile regression based benchmark model has the best accuracy for the SUN data.

Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. Ted Underwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+206.

In itself, that claim, or something close to it, has a venerable history in literary criticism, resonating for example with Percy Lubbock’s Craft of Fiction (1921) and F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (1950). Yet the thesis of Heuser and Le-Khac, Underwood argues, sounds “more familiar than it is” (13). In the older critical literature, this transition was “traced through … examples: writers like Flaubert and James, Conrad and Woolf, who experiment with point of view. By shifting attention from narrative perspective to a looser index of physical description, Heuser and Le-Khac profoundly change the meaning of their theme…. [T]hey also create a broader, longer story: the transformation they are tracing is already well under way in 1800” (13). That last claim is worth dwelling on because it is certainly feels like something that might inspire a literary critic—perhaps a specialist in Flaubert or James—to respond, even if only to object. But the fact that such questions arise from Underwood’s book shows that it (like Heuser and Le-Khac’s pamphlet) is landing exactly where the computational humanities should be—not on the distant horizon of humanities work but right in the mix.

Reseña de Underwood, Ted: “Distant Horizons. Digital evidence and literary change”

Esta reseña evalúa el trabajo más reciente de Ted Underwood: “Distant Horizons. Digital evidence and literary change”, publicado en 2019 por la Universidad de Chicago. El autor aborda en él diferentes cuestiones de la historia de la literatura a partir de la aplicación de métodos cuantitativos.

Sport for Social Change With Aotearoa New Zealand Youth: Navigating the Theory–Practice Nexus Through Indigenous Principles

Indigenous worldviews and scholarship are underrepresented and underdeveloped in sport for development and wider sport management spaces. Given many sport for social change initiatives target Indigenous populations, this is concerning. By adopting a Kaupapa Māori approach, a strengths-based stance, and working together with two plus-sport and sport-plus cases from provincial and national New Zealand rugby settings: the Taranaki Rugby Football Union’s and Feats’ Pae Tawhiti (seek distant horizons) Māori and Pasifika Rugby Academy and the E Tū Toa (stand strong), hei tū he rangatira (become a leader) Māori Rugby Development camps, the authors provide an illustration of Indigenous theory–practice. They argue sport for social change practices that focus on Indigenous peoples would be greatly improved if underpinned by the principles of perspective, privilege, politics, protection, and people. Thus, any sport for social change praxis seeking to partner with Indigenous communities ought to be informed by Indigenous philosophical viewpoints.

Restrictions on Asset-Price Movements Under Rational Expectations: Theory and Evidence

How restrictive is the assumption of rational expectations in asset markets? We provide two contributions to address this question. First, we derive restrictions on the admissible variation in asset prices in a general class of rational-expectations equilibria. The challenge in this task is that asset prices reflect both beliefs and preferences. We gain traction by considering market-implied, or risk-neutral, probabilities of future outcomes, and we provide a mapping between the variation in these probabilities and the minimum curvature of utility — or, more generally, the slope of the stochastic discount factor — required to rationalize the marginal investor’s beliefs. Second, we implement these bounds empirically using S&P 500 index options. We find that very high utility curvature is required to rationalize the behavior of risk-neutral beliefs, and in some cases, no stochastic discount factor in the class we consider is capable of rationalizing these beliefs. This provides evidence of overreaction to new information relative to the rational benchmark. We show further that this overreaction is strongest for beliefs over prices at distant horizons, and that our findings cannot be explained by factors specific to the option market.

Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. Andrew Piper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+243.

<i>Enumerations: Data and Literary Study</i>. Andrew Piper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+243.

La incompetencia de Derrida. Pistas de la "trace" derridiana a la "aisthesis" ranciereana

El presente texto está quizá más presente que otros textos por la praxis de escritura que adopta, pero no es quizá un texto. Son pistas, ora rigurosas, ora provocativas o insolentes, sobre una incomodidad que he sentido cuando he leído, traducido, analizado, pensado la relación entre Derrida y el arte, el pensamiento de la trace y las artes. Estas pistas tienen un horizonte lejano, todavía por venir, y se articulan a partir de tres hipótesis: “Derrida es un incompetente”, “En Derrida, no hay relación entre arte y política”, “En arte, al pensamiento de Derrida le concierne el pensamiento de Rancière”.

Behavior Analysis of Minarets at the Destructive Factors Actions

Abstract Etymological minaret comes from the Arabian “manarat”, meaning “illumination place”, “lighthouse”, the term was taken in Turkish (minaret) and French. The minaret is a particularly important component of a mosque, which is the object of study of this article, analyzing environmental factors, especially water, which acts on minaret materials located in the Black Sea area. The minaret is a high tower built into the actual construction, from which muezin calls his believers to work. Due to its visibility from distant horizons, it provides important information to visitors in the region, namely the presence of Muslim believers in that area.

On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page

On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page

Readers' Advisory: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Fiction: Suggesting New Titles to Make All Readers Feel Like They Belong

Epochs of transition keep us on the alert. They ask us to keep our eyes open upon the distant horizons, our minds listening to seize every indication that can enlighten us: reading, reflection, searching, must never stop; the mind must keep flexible in order to lose nothing, to acquire any knowledge that can aid our mission. . . . Immobility and arrested development bring decadence; a beauty, fully unfolded, is ready to perish. So, let us not rest on our beautiful past.—Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ, 1914The above quote from Janet Erskine Stuart of the Society of the Sacred Heart, fondly referred to as Mother Stuart, was written in 1914, at a time when the world was in turmoil. A religious congregation that has included many remarkable and forward-thinking women, the Society has a reputation for persevering and growing stronger during times of change. Born out of the French Revolution, the society was formed in France to educate children in a time when a new world was emerging. Education endures as a core value of the Society—and most importantly, the concept of educating the whole person. Indeed, the goals that guide the Society of the Sacred Heart include a deep respect for intellectual values, social awareness, and personal growth in an atmosphere of wise freedom.

Distant horizons: Marital expectations may be dampened by economic circumstances.

Distant horizons: Marital expectations may be dampened by economic circumstances.

Modelling Lunar Extremes

Claims first made over half a century ago that certain prehistoric monuments utilised high-precision alignments on the horizon risings and settings of the Sun and the Moon have recently resurfaced. While archaeoastronomy early on retreated from these claims, as a way to preserve the discipline in an academic boundary dispute, it did so without a rigorous examination of Thom’s concept of a “lunar standstill”. Gough’s uncritical resurrection of Thom’s usage of the term provides a long-overdue opportunity for the discipline to correct this slippage. Gough (2013), in keeping with Thom (1971), claims that certain standing stones and short stone rows point to distant horizon features which allow high-precision alignments on the risings and settings of the Sun and the Moon dating from about 1700 BC. To assist archaeoastronomy in breaking out of its interpretive rut and from “going round in circles” (Ruggles 2011), this paper evaluates the validity of this claim. Through computer modelling, the celestial mechanics of horizon alignments are here explored in their landscape context with a view to testing the very possibility of high-precision alignments to the lunar extremes. It is found that, due to the motion of the Moon on the horizon, only low-precision alignments are feasible, which would seem to indicate that the properties of lunar standstills could not have included high-precision markers for prehistoric megalith builders.

The output effects of tax changes: narrative evidence from Spain

This paper estimates the GDP impact of legislated tax changes in Spain using a newly constructed narrative record for the period 1986–2015. Our baseline estimates suggest that a 1% of GDP increase in exogenous taxes depresses output by around 1.3% after 1 year, this negative effect fading away at more distant horizons. We also find that the effects of changes in indirect taxes are larger and that, following a tax increase, investment reacts more than consumption. Overall, our set of estimates is consistent with negative output effects triggered by tax increases, yet the quantitative effects are subject to non-negligible uncertainty that is reflected in wide confidence bands, in line with the extant literature for other countries.