Infinite Ways Research Articles

Categorical Rhythms Are Shared between Songbirds and Humans

Rhythm is a prominent feature of music. Of the infinite possible ways of organizing events in time, musical rhythms are almost always distributed categorically. Such categories can facilitate the transmission of culture-a feature that songbirds and humans share. We compared rhythms of live performances of music to rhythms of wild thrush nightingale and domestic zebra finch songs. In nightingales, but not in zebra finches, we found universal rhythm categories, with patterns that were surprisingly similar to those of music. Isochronous 1:1 rhythms were similarly common. Interestingly, a bias toward small ratios (around 1:2 to 1:3), which is highly abundant in music, was observed also in thrush nightingale songs. Within that range, however, there was no statistically significant bias toward exact integer ratios (1:2 or 1:3) in the birds. High-ratio rhythms were abundant in the nightingale song and are structurally similar to fusion rhythms (ornaments) in music. In both species, preferred rhythms remained invariant over extended ranges of tempos, indicating natural categories. The number of rhythm categories decreased at higher tempos, with a threshold above which rhythm became highly stereotyped. In thrush nightingales, this threshold occurred at a tempo twice faster than in humans, indicating weaker structural constraints and a remarkable motor proficiency. Together, the results suggest that categorical rhythms reflect similar constraints on learning motor skills across species. The saliency of categorical rhythms across humans and thrush nightingales suggests that they promote, or emerge from, the cultural transmission of learned vocalizations. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

El cuerpo en la práctica psicoanalítica

¿En qué medida el cuerpo hace su aparición en la práctica del psicoanálisis? De las infinitas maneras en que lo hace, elegimos interrogar el problema del cuerpo a partir de dos situaciones: una de ellas, devenida de la situación analítica y la otra, a partir de un cuento de Cortázar. El sesgo decidido es la relación con la Medicina y la Ciencia y la inclusión del cuerpo en la política, a través de la biopolítica. En los intersticios: la angustia, alojada en la relación del sujeto con su cuerpo y la posibilidad de responder a la demanda de análisis con una práctica de discurso.

Uneasy Turns

Uneasy Turns Andrew Weinstein (bio) A Thousand Natural Shocks: Selected Stories Richard Burgin Goliad Press www.goliadreview.com/the-catalog 464 pages; Print, $14.99 Over four decades, Richard Burgin has published seventeen books, among them three novels and nine story collections. Five times he's won what's arguably the most distinguished award for the English-language short story, the Pushcart Prize—more than anyone else except Joyce Carol Oates, who also happens to have published several of Burgin's books through Ontario Press. In Poland and France readers celebrate his work. And yet, the larger American public still hasn't discovered this unique and visionary writer. That may finally change with the release of A Thousand Natural Shocks, a selection of twenty-five of the author's best stories written over nearly forty years. No one in American letters has conjured a world quite so disturbing and yet so familiar as Richard Burgin. It's as though Edgar Allen Poe had set loose his characters in a landscape of urban basketball courts, hotel bars, and garden apartments. Some of Burgin's stories might be called new American gothic, others social science fiction, while still others could pass as naturalist. Haunting them all is a disparate cast of men and women just as likely to be drug dealers, addicts, and prostitutes as bankers, artists, and professors, but all share a dark psychological state stained by raw emotional wounds, burning resentments, weird phobias, or grim obsessions. Theirs are the sort of psychic disturbances that grow like mold in the neglected corners of contemporary society, the isolated places in plain view where so many people lead lonely and desperate lives. No matter how hard they try, Burgin's characters almost always fail to form meaningful relationships. What turns so many of them tragic are the seemingly infinite ways they sabotage their own efforts for connection, sometimes for no better reason than that they doubt themselves. In Burgin's most chilling story, "'Do You Like This Room?'" a young woman enjoys the company of her date so well that she goes home with him, yet this troubled man cannot shake a growing suspicion that his choice of restaurant, dessert, home furnishings, etc. have secretly disappointed her. Her impotence in reassuring him intensifies his withering sense of failure, and he punishes her cruelly. This is classic Freudian castration theory, but there's nothing theoretical or didactic about Burgin's deeply felt and deftly rendered tale. (Two years ago, the author and his son Richard D. Burgin adapted this story as a short film called "All Ears," posted on YouTube.) Difficulties in relations between men and women can be a hackneyed theme, but Burgin's approach to the topic is as far from cliché as a ransom note from a Hallmark card. In "The Spirit of New York" an advertising designer, equally intimidated by prostitutes in provocative clothing as by young executives in power suits, fashions his own scary tough-guy costume and prowls at night, jumping out from behind parked cars to scare women and then pretending these ugly encounters are accidents. For him, this is not exactly a sexual thrill: his whole body apparently expands and hardens, making him feel like God, who, he points out, governs the whole world by frightening people. Even so, he thinks his terror games connect him more intensely with his victims than sex ever could: when he sees their panicked faces, he recognizes the vulnerability and fear he knows in himself. Rereading these stories, some after decades, I find myself admiring them more than ever. Burgin's compelling narratives simultaneously engage secondary themes in subtle but probing ways. Throughout his career, Burgin has buried small land mines within his stories that explode our assumptions of any gender binary. The most hypermasculine-presenting characters, for example the costumed advertising designer, find themselves strangely attracted to people of the same sex. Without any women on a particular street to scare, he takes pleasure in startling a young man whose hair is "long enough to be a girl's." Vexed male-female relations actually give some of Burgin's men the opportunity to share...

Regime de alternância na Licenciatura em Educação do Campo: uma experiência da Universidade Federal de Goiás / Regional Catalão

As Licenciaturas em Educação do Campo (LEdoC) funcionam em Regime de Alternância, com o desenvolvimento de ações que estimulam a relação sistemática da teoria-prática-teoria, através de tempos de formação que se alternam em Tempo Universidade (TU) e Tempo Comunidade (TC). O objetivo desse trabalho é apresentar e analisar uma experiência do TC da LEdoC da Universidade Federal de Goiás – Regional Catalão, realizado no Assentamento Vista Alegre em Cristalina (GO). No assentamento vivem cerca de 250 famílias. O que marca a vida desses sujeitos é um processo de luta e resistência em conquistarem e permanecerem nesses territórios e por políticas sociais que atendam suas necessidades. Com o TC os discentes da LEdoC passam a compreender melhor as estruturas que rodeiam a vida dos sujeitos do campo, com suas infinitas particularidade e modos de vida. Além disso, há mudanças de percepção e uma reflexão sobre as próprias teorias pedagógicas e dos pensamentos sócio-educativos. Podemos concluir então, que o TC se faz essencial no processo de formação dos futuros professores do campo.
 Palavras-chave: Licenciatura em Educação do Campo, Regime de Alternância, Tempo Comunidade.
 
 Alternation system in the teacher major course of Rural Education: an experience of the Federal University of Goiás/Regional Catalão 
 ABSTRACT. The Teacher Major Course of Rural Education (LEdoC) work in Alternation Regime, with the development of actions that stimulate the systematic relationship of theory-practice-theory, through alternating training times in University Time (TU) and Community Time (TC). The objective of this work is to analyses one experience of the TC at Federal University of Goiás - Regional Catalão, carried out in the Vista Alegre Settlement in Cristalina (GO). About 250 families live in the settlement. What marks the lives of these individuals is a process of struggle and resistance in conquering and remaining in these territories, always fighting for social policies that meet their social needs. With the TC, the students come to better understand the structures that surround the life of the subjects of the field, with their infinite particularity and ways of life. In addition, there are changes of perception and a reflection on the pedagogical theories themselves and the socio-educational thoughts. We can conclude then that TC is essential in the process of training future rural teachers.
 Keywords: Teacher Major Course in Rural Education, Alternation System, Community Time.
 
 Régimen de la alternancia en la Licenciatura en Educación del Campo: una experiencia de la Universidad Federal de Goiás/Regional Catalão
 RESUMEN. Las Licenciaturas en Educación del Campo (LEdoC) funcionan en Régimen de Alternancia, con el desarrollo de acciones que estimulen la relación sistemática de la teoría-práctica-teoría, a través de tiempos de formación que se alternan en Tiempo Universidad (TU) y Tiempo Comunidad (TC). El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar y analizar de una experiencia del Tiempo Comunidad de la LEdoC de la Universidad Federal de Goiás - Regional Catalão, realizado en el Asentamiento Vista Alegre en Cristalina (GO). En el asentamiento viven cerca de 250 familias. Lo que marca la vida de esos sujetos es un proceso de lucha y resistencia en conquistar y permanecer en esos territorios, luchando siempre por políticas sociales que atiendan sus necesidades sociales. Con el TC los estudiantes pasan a comprender mejor las estructuras que rodean la vida de los sujetos del campo, con sus infinitas particularidades y modos de vida. Además, hay cambios de percepción y una reflexión sobre las propias teorías pedagógicas y de los pensamientos socio-educativos. Podemos concluir entonces que el TC se hace esencial en el proceso de formación de los futuros profesores.
 Palabras clave: Licenciatura en Educación del Campo, Régimen de Alternancia, Tiempo de Comunidad.

Trajectory Optimization of a Redundant Serial Robot Using Cartesian via Points and Kinematic Decoupling

Moving from a given position to another with an industrial robot can be a challenging problem when the task is redundant around the tool axis. In this case, there are infinite ways of choosing both the starting and the ending configurations, so that the movement between the given points is not uniquely defined. In this paper, an algorithm that calculates the suboptimal movement between two positions is proposed, which automatically generates a cloud of safe via points around the workpiece and then by exploiting such points finds the suboptimal safe path between the two positions that minimizes movement time. The proposed method, in which the search of the suboptimal path is based on graph theory and the Dijkstra algorithm, can iteratively evaluate a high number of starting and ending configurations in low computational time, allowing performing a reasonably wide search of the suboptimal path within the infinite possible motions between the given points.

Challenges and opportunities for assessing global progress in reducing chemical accident risks

This paper gives the current outlook on assessing progress in reducing chemical accident risk from a global perspective. At the moment, there are very limited data collected for assessing the status of chemical accident risk globally. There are some sources of data on chemical accidents in government and industry that might be used to estimate the frequency and severity of some types of events, but they fall far short of providing a complete perspective that covers all chemical accidents occurring in industry and commerce globally. The paper includes a discussion of existing and potential measures for assessing this risk using accident loss data. It also argues for evaluation methods that estimate the prevalence of certain risk factors, for example, using patterns of causality or indicators of the strength of risk governance. The heterogeneous nature of chemicals, the infinite ways in which chemical engineering transforms chemicals into products, and the vast infrastructure of road, pipelines, ships and railways, facilitating product distribution, are intrinsic to the challenge of assessing global chemical accident risk and predicting the next catastrophe. The paper describes the data that are currently available and their limitations for obtaining a picture of risk from chemical accidents worldwide. It describes the various obstacles to measurement of chemical accident risk situation across industries and geographic areas and identifies ways in which policy makers could overcome them over time.

Assessing the extent of modifiable areal unit problem in modelling freight (trip) generation: Relationship between zone design and model estimation results

There is a growing interest in incorporating spatial indicators into freight demand model systems. The indicators are measured for different areal units (e.g., census tracts or block groups) and are often used as proxy variables or aggregation layers. Model estimation results vary according to the choice of these areal units and an analyst is thus confronted with a popular decision challenge termed as ‘modifiable areal unit problem’ (MAUP). The variability in results due to MAUP arises since areal units can be modified in theoretically infinite ways (in terms of shape, orientation and size) and magnitude of aggregation loss in information will vary for each alternative zoning system. In effect, how well the zonal (aggregated) characteristics can describe the establishment-level (disaggregated) observations is inversely related to MAUP effects. Little is known, however, about the extent of MAUP effects in freight generation (FG) models and freight trip generation (FTG) models. This study diagnoses the implications of MAUP effects in FG and FTG models by designing alternate zoning systems (by means of different zonal variables and clustering techniques) and assessing the sensitivity of model estimation results within a framework of comparative analysis (by means of hierarchical linear models). Study results assess the presence of MAUP as alternate zoning systems resulted in wide variation in the estimated coefficients for zonal characteristics (e.g., industrial area, land value, number of establishments, distance to primary arterial) in terms of magnitude, statistical significance, and even in the direction of association (sign of the coefficient). The implication of this finding is that an analyst may design different or even counterproductive policy instruments based on the way data is aggregated to capture the role of land-use, spatial effects and built-environment in influencing freight travel patterns. MAUP effects are also found to be dependent on the metric in which freight is measured (i.e., FG or FTG) and direction in which flow is measured (i.e., production or attraction). Overall, this research improves the understanding of the parameter sensitivity and performance sensitivity of freight demand model systems to alternative spatial representations of an establishment's relative location. The research findings strongly encourage analysts to acknowledge that the results of freight travel analyses with spatial indicators are sensitive to the definition of areal units.

Theoretical Rubber, Empirical Pavement

Theoretical Rubber, Empirical Pavement Graham M. Jones Jon Bialecki, Vineyard Movement, charismatic, Pentecostalism, Gilles Deleuze, Holy Spirit, necromancy, exorcism, Graham M. Jones One of the striking features of Jon Bialecki's bracing book is the scope and consistency of its theorization. A Diagram for Fire revolves around a fundamental question about continuity and change: how does Charismatic Christianity socially reproduce itself even as it exhibits surprising cultural plasticity? In exploring this question, Bialecki elaborates an extended analogy with topology, the branch of mathematics dealing with geometric properties that remain constant even as shapes undergo what appear to be radical deformations. Shapes-in-transformation are a fitting image for the kind of process Bialecki seeks to describe—the growth of a highly malleable religious movement—and he sustains and develops it over the course of the entire book. It is rare to encounter ethnographies so tightly organized around a single theoretical motif, and so resolutely committed to its extension. This alone makes for an exhilarating read, to say nothing of the rich insight the book offers into the flourishing of contemporary American Pentecostalism. Because this topological model of culture provides such a compelling analytic for Bialecki's ethnography, I want to spend some time examining how he develops and deploys it. What does this topological model make visible, and what might it obscure? To adequately conceptualize the kind of cultural form that the Vineyard represents, Bialecki says, we need to think of something that is topological and capable of being realized as different topographies. In essence this is to say that we need to think of some set of relations as if they were drawn on a piece of rubber or fabric that is capable of being folded, twisted, stretched or compressed in numerous and possibly infinite ways . . . And we need to do so in a way that says that this rubber sheet has no "natural" shape or tension that it desires to return to: this "theoretical" rubber is flexible, infinitely so, and is not prone to "snapping back" into any one shape. (66) [End Page 448] Such a view of cultural practices as pliable maps on theoretical rubber makes good sense ethnographically, given the task Bialecki has set for himself: explaining the vitality of a loosely structured religious movement that by, emphasizing the direct experience of God through miraculous charismata, has achieved meteoric growth throughout the U.S. and around the world. As he writes: "From Southern California and Midwestern megachurches to fellowships in the United Kingdom, Rome, South Africa, and Kathmandu, we are looking not only at something that is capable of being iterated but is also capable of being transplanted" (64–5). How can we understand all these heterogenous, far-flung churches to be—synchronically—somehow the same as one another and—diachronically—somehow the same as the Early Church from which they draw inspiration? Clearly the culture-as-topology model is doing some important work, highlighting change processes that a culture-as-text model (for instance) might occlude. It seems to me that there is an important connection between social structure and phenomenology here: the topological model works so well for describing this Charismatic religious movement because it reflects the dynamic relationship between organizational egalitarianism and an attunement to the subtle, emergent, and often highly individuated nature of God's miraculous intervention in human experience. For Vineyard Christians, God is both always absent and always present, communicating "in parts of the quotidian" and through "day-to-day material external to the person, as well as in aspects of . . . the sensorium or the psychic landscape" (71). This kind of miraculous but also "quotidian event . . . is one having a surprising saliency that cannot be accounted for. This saliency is usually framed as the statistically improbable, the physically impossible, the aesthetically striking, or the uncanny" (71). The problem is that miracles, if they occur regularly, are subject to standardization, routinization, or worse—fakery. Besides wham-bang gifts of the spirit—glossolalia, prophesy, healing, exorcism—Vineyard Christians undertake an "education of the senses" and a "pedagogy of the spirit" (101) that help them tune into novel manifestations of God in unexpected places, but which they also offset with a healthy dose...

On the Effects of Different Interpretations of Stochastic Differential Equations

This paper addresses the problem of the interpretation of the stochastic differential equations (SDE). Even if from a theoretical point of view, there are infinite ways of interpreting them, in practice only Stratonovich’s and Ito’s interpretations and the kinetic form are important. Restricting the attention to the first two, they give rise to two different Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equations for the transition probability density function (PDF) of the solution. According to Stratonovich’s interpretation, there is one more term in the drift, which is not present in the physical equation, the so-called spurious drift. This term is not present in Ito’s interpretation so that the transition PDF’s of the two interpretations are different. Several examples are shown in which the two solutions are strongly different. Thus, caution is needed when a physical phenomenon is modelled by a SDE. However, the meaning of the spurious drift remains unclear.

Intelligent character recognition using fully convolutional neural networks

The recognition of handwritten text is challenging as there are virtually infinite ways a human can write the same message. Deep learning approaches for handwriting analysis have recently demonstrated breakthrough performance using both lexicon-based architectures and recurrent neural networks. This paper presents a fully convolutional network architecture which outputs arbitrary length symbol streams from handwritten text. A preprocessing step normalizes input blocks to a canonical representation which negates the need for costly recurrent symbol alignment correction. When a lexicon is known, we further introduce a probabilistic character error rate to correct errant word blocks. Our multi-state convolutional method is the first to demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both lexicon-based and arbitrary symbol based handwriting recognition benchmarks.

The Language of Stones

ABSTRACTThis article examines works by the American-born, Paris-based artist Sheila Hicks and her sense of the universal communicability of thread. Hicks bridges cultures and resists simple identification with any single nationality, media, or art historical paradigm. For these reasons and others, it is timely to examine her work and its relevance for pluralistic, feminist thought. The article situates Hicks in relation to Sarah Ruhl’s 2008 play Eurydice, to Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and to ideas about identity, borders, loss, and language. Hicks’s textiles and soft sculptures fall within a modernist, Bauhaus-inflected framework, but her ongoing experiments with colored lines, weaving, and installation show the way toward a tactile and sensory conception of language. As an artist whose practice revolves around entanglement, she reminds us of the infinite ways in which lineages cross and intersect, and she alerts us to foundational, material commonalities we share in our reliance on threads as clothing and protection. Placing Hicks and Ruhl alongside one another for the first time, the article shows the degree to which two women from different generations challenge overly narrow and too-often patriarchal definitions of what it means to speak, to listen, to grieve, and to remember. Hicks, through her fiber works, and Ruhl, through her reimagining and voicing of Eurydice, invite us to experience language as something porous, precarious, and deeply embodied. Together they demonstrate the value of crossing lines and learning to listen for the unspoken or the unspeakable.

Fiction Unbound: The Contemporary Landscape of Narrative Theory

This review essay approaches the story-discourse dichotomy through the theory of unconventional narratives. Brian Richardson's Unnatural Narratives, Kent Puckett's Narrative Theory and Guido Mazzoni's Theory of the Novel discuss how the conventional narrative structure beginning-introduction-resolution, and the traditional narrator, are no longer valid in contemporary fiction. Richardson claims that contemporary fiction transgresses the mimetic conventions that, traditionally, have characterized narratives. Puckett revises the main theories in narratology and the way in which they have approached the story-discourse relationship. Finally, Mazzoni's interest lies in the evolution of the novel and its legitimacy as a genre. But the three of them come to the same conclusion: there are infinite ways to tell a story.

Soam Hyeon Junghwa’s Aesthetic liberty of ‘Enjoying the Way while Amusing with a Brush’

素菴 玄中和가 은거한 서귀포의 공간은 권력이나 名利 등, 外物에 얽매인 욕망의 공간이 아니다. 한가롭게 자연의 변화에 따라 소요하고 자연이 제공하여주는 넓은 바다의 즐거움을 누리면서 심성을 도야하고, 교육과 예술을 실현하는 공간이다. 제주도 서귀포는 소암 이전에도 많은 사람들이 살다간 공간이다. 하지만 서예술의 공간으로서 의미가 부여된 된 것은 소암이 그 곳에서 태어나 자리를 잡고 난 이후 부터이다. 소암의 서예미학세계는 物我合一하여 자연에 회귀하고자하는 심미적 즐거움의 세계이다. 따라서 소암의 ‘人天合一’사상은 서예미와 관련하여 일관되게 즐거움의 자유세계로 나타난다. 소암은 사람의 품격을 귀하게 여기면서 자연과의 자유로운 조화를 중시한다. 소암의 ‘遊筆’的 삶은 자신의 본성과 합치된 삶이었다. 그는 고향 서귀포에서 書作을 하면서 道를 즐겼다. 소암은 당시의 시대적 어려운 상황을 경험하면서, 자연스럽게 서예에 심취하여 스스로 樂道의 심미상태를 여백 속에 필묵으로 녹여내었다. 이러한 점은 외물에 구속되지 않는 은사들의 전형적인 삶이기도 하다. 소암의 ‘유필’은 무한의 道를 유한의 서예로 변화시키고, 유한의 서예를 무한의 道로 다시 전환시키고자 하는 생명의 여정이다. 이것은 소암의 심미적 자유정신이 깃들어 가는 과정이다. 본고는 서귀포에서 한 시대를 살다간 소암의 筆隱的 삶과 象德의 서예 품격미 추구라는 심미의식, 그리고 天理가 流行하는 遊心ㆍ遊筆의 생명정신이 ‘소암체’에 어떻게 체현되어 있는지를 살펴보았다.Jejudo Seogwipo where Soam Hyeon Junghwa has amused with a brush is not the space of desire that is bound by the outside things such as power or fame. It is the place to cultivate the mind and to realize education and art while leisurely wandering as nature changes and enjoying the pleasures of the wide sea that is provided by the nature. Jejudo Seogwipo is the space where many people have lived before Soam. However, it has been given meaning as the space of calligraphic art since Soam was born and settled as a calligrapher there. Soam’s aesthetic world of amusing with a brush is a world of aesthetic pleasure to return to nature in harmony with nature. Therefore, Soam’s thought of unity of man and nature’ is expressed as the unconstrained world of enjoyment in relation to the calligraphic beauty. Soam regarded human dignity as precious and emphasized the unconstrained harmony with nature. Soam’s life of ‘enjoying the Way while amusing with a brush’ in harmony with his own nature. He enjoyed the Way through working on calligraphy at home in Seogwipo. Soam experienced the difficult situation of the times and was naturally absorbed in the calligraphy. Therefore, he portrayed his aesthetic state of enjoying the Way with chinese ink painting on the space. It was the typical life style of a recluse who was not bound by the outside things. Soam’s life of ‘enjoying the Way while amusing with a brush’ was a journey of lives that tried to transform the infinity Way into a finite calligraphy and transform the finite calligraphy into the infinite Way again. It was the process that Soam’s aesthetic free spirit was indwelling. This paper examined how Soam’s life style of amusing with a brush, his aesthetic consciousness of calligraphy in pursuit of the beauty of calligraphic dignity of embodying virtue and his life spirit of wandering in the mind and the art that the natural principle spreaded realized in Soam’s style of calligraphic handwriting.

Globally Optimal Matching Networks With Lossy Passives and Efficiency Bounds

Impedance transformation is one of the central concepts in high-frequency circuits and systems and is used ubiquitously for optimal power matching, noise matching, and high-efficiency power delivery to the antenna by power amplifiers. The matching network can be generally expressed as a path on the Smith chart and given the load and source impedances, there are theoretically infinite ways to achieve the transformation. When losses are included, each path will encounter a different loss, and currently, no comprehensive theory exist for finding the most optimal matching network. Furthermore, the networks will also provide different bandwidths of operation. Due to the matching network losses, it is often not optimal to force conjugate matching for maximizing end-to-end power transfer efficiency. In this paper, we provide a method toward finding 1) the globally most efficient path between two arbitrary impedances with lossy passives; 2) given the source and the load impedances, the optimal (typically non-conjugate) impedance to match and the highest efficiency path to reach the impedance; and 3) upper bounds on achievable efficiencies under the various scenarios. This paper also proposes ways to combine this method with nonlinear load-pull simulations for optimal combiner and matching network for integrated power amplifiers. This analysis creates interesting ways to maximize efficiency and bandwidths simultaneously and the paper also discusses this joint optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of globally optimal impedance transformation networks between arbitrary impedances with lossy passives.

Pizza again? On the division of polygons into sections with a common origin

ABSTRACTThe paper explores the division of a polygon into equal-area pieces using line segments originating at a common point. The mathematical background of the proposed method is very simple and belongs to secondary school geometry. Simple examples dividing a square into two, four or eight congruent pieces provide a starting point to discovering how to divide a regular polygon into any number of equal-area pieces using line segments originating from the centre. Moreover, it turns out that there are infinite ways to do the division. Discovering the basic invariant involved allows application of the same procedure to divide any tangential polygon, as after suitable adjustment, it can be used also for rectangles and parallelograms. Further generalization offers many additional solutions of the problem, and some of them are presented for the case of an arbitrary triangle and a square. Links to dynamic demonstrations in GeoGebra serve to illustrate the main results.

A potencialidade edu(vo)cativa do cinema e os desafios à lei 13.006/14 na escola

Propomos pensar o cinema como dispositivo, que possibilita produzir aprendizagens, signos, afetos e problematizações, como potência pedagógica, articulando relações entre as artes visuais e as visualidades produzidas no âmbito educativo. A questão que move esta escrita tem como objetivo principal pensar o cinema a partir do conceito edu(vo)cativo e os desafios que encontramos no espaço escolar a partir da lei 13.006/14. Tratamos o cinema como uma experiência artística que possibilita infinitas formas de aprender e ensinar. Evocam novas conexões e recordam na memória possibilidades de tratar o cinema como artefato edu(vo)cativo. A película, incorpora além de tecnologias, diferentes discursos, e como docentes temos possibilidade em mediar. Enviado em: 06 de junho de 2017.Aprovado em: 13 de julho de 2017.

Tracing a Community of Practice: A Database of Early African American Race Film

Tracing a Community of Practice:A Database of Early African American Race Film Marika Cifor (bio), Hanna Girma (bio), William Lam (bio), Shanya Norman (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Karla Contreras (bio), and Aya Grace Yoshioka (bio) The definition of "race film," as many scholars have noted, is notoriously elusive. Any proposed criterion—an all-black cast, for example, or a black director, or an exclusively black audience—ultimately will fail as a singular defining factor, because, in reality, the race film industry was multifaceted, contentious, and ever changing. Filmmakers and audiences defined race film not by pronouncing criteria but by actively creating and negotiating the community. Historians of the race film industry have dealt with the difficulty of defining race film by discussing the problem at length, acknowledging that many films sit uneasily within any classification system. We discuss in this article the methodological, historical, and epistemological questions we faced as a research team in building a comprehensive database of the early African American race film industry, 1905–30. The database seeks to reconstruct a detailed history of silent films made for and by African Americans in the early twentieth century. Because of widespread racial discrimination, silent-era productions that fit the description of "race films"—that is, films designed for African American audiences—could be shown only in certain theaters or at certain times or in nontheatrical settings and were exhibited to racially segregated audiences. For these and other reasons, most of these race films received scant attention in the mainstream media. The actual film reels were not preserved in any systematic way, so few of these early race films have survived.1 Though scholarship on early race film thrives,2 until our project, a filmography of these early silent films had not been publicly available. Moreover, various spelling and orthographical errors have propagated through scholarship on early race film, so the creation of our database was an opportunity to verify the original spellings, dates, and—as far as possible—casts and production companies of these films. Race, as Stuart Hall and many others have shown, is a category that is both exceedingly fluid and unforgivingly rigid:3 fluid, because race functions in different ways in different places and times, and rigid, because, once applied, the label of a race ramifies through a person's life in infinite ways. The example of filmmaking in the first half of the twentieth century is no exception. Early-twentieth-century filmmakers experienced and articulated race in myriad ways, but the stark categories of black and white nevertheless had an undeniable role in shaping the film industry. This article demonstrates how a data-driven project should hold both realities in tension: the truth, on one hand, of people's varied and disparate lived experiences and the equal truth, on the other, of the real political, social, and legal implications of the way a person is classified. A database, no matter how well conceived, tolerates relatively little ambiguity. Therefore the media scholar who wishes to encode race must make and adhere to difficult, carefully considered decisions about how to classify people's lives. This project team, however, did not have this luxury. Because we were setting out to build the first publicly available, downloadable database of the race film industry, we had to decide if any given film was, in stark binary terms, simply in or out of our data set. The team discusses here how we dealt with this daunting challenge, linking our efforts to the broader question of how moving image data might be created and used with nuance and rigor by scholars, archivists, librarians, and students. In addition to the complexities of the subject matter itself, we faced a number of practical questions in our creation of this digital humanities (DH) project. We begin by discussing the details of the project and its specifications. In the next section, we turn to the difficulties posed by defining and classifying race films. Through film studies scholarship, we develop a definition of race film for the project and consider how that definition shaped our project. Finally, we turn to the many practical concerns we faced, including the selection of an [End Page 101] appropriate...

Supersymmetry of the solution to the master equation between two-level atom and laser channel

We propose a new Ket-Bra entangled state (KBES) method to solve the master equation of finite-level system. The KBES method can convert the master equation into Schrdinger-like equation which is easier to solve than the master equation, and Schrdinger equation in a certain form can also be used to solve the Schrdinger-like equation. Thus the KBES method has a wider application range. In the paper, we mainly study the master equation of the two-level atom. The corresponding master equation is solved by the KBES method, and for the first time we obtain the opera-sum solution of the atom. Furthermore, we compare this result with the well known solution that describes the laser channel. There is much analogousness between both opera-sum solutions, which show that there is some supersymmetry between Bose creation-annihilation operator and upper-down transition operators of atom. Finally, we further analyze the supersymmetry between the bose and atom system, and find that the spin-up and spin-down operator can be represented by the creation and annihilation operator repectively, which can be achieved in infinite ways. It is easy to understand that the bose operator is infinite-level while the spin operator is two-level, thus the creation-annihilation operator is super-complete for the spin operator. Thus the representation is not unique, and all of this directly shows and proves the supersymmetry.

Journey to the End of the World Map – How Edges of World Maps Shape the Spatial Mind

World maps are among the most widely used geomedia products for visualizing global phenomena. Since there are, theoretically, infinite ways to portray Earth’s spherical surface on a plane, the question of the most appropriate world map design has been widely discussed in recent decades. However, this discussion has focused mainly on different projections, while another basic characteristic of any map, i.e. the presence of map edges, has been largely ignored so far. In view of this gap in cartographic research, this article examines empirically whether spatial relations are memorized differently by learners when these are presented on maps that have differently positioned edges. Distance estimations between locations learnt on Eurocentric and Americentric world maps are compared for this purpose. In line with previous spatial cognition research on barrier effects, our results indicate that distances are memorized more exactly when relevant inter-object relations are not being cut by map edges. Hence, designing an appropriate world map does not seem to be a problem purely of map projection; the position of the map’s edges shapes the knowledge that users may acquire when reading a map.

FINITE DURATION TREATMENT OF CANCER BY USING VACCINE THERAPY AND OPTIMAL CHEMOTHERAPY: STATE-DEPENDENT RICCATI EQUATION CONTROL AND EXTENDED KALMAN FILTER

The main purpose of this paper is to propose an optimal finite duration treatment method for preventing tumor growth. The obtained results show that changing the dynamics of the cancer model is essential for a finite duration treatment. Therefore, vaccine therapy is used for changing the parameters of the system and chemotherapy is applied for pushing the system to the domain of attraction of the healthy state. The state-dependent Riccati equation (SDRE)-based optimal control method is used for optimal chemotherapy. In this method, the special conditions of the patients could be considered by choosing suitable weighting matrices in the cost function and restricting the drug dosage. Also, there are infinite ways to choose these state-dependent matrices. In this paper, these interesting features of this method are used for each patient. Since measuring the states of the system is impossible at each time for states feedback; an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is designed as an observer in the nonlinear system. So, the SDRE method is employed just by measuring the population of normal cells. Numerical simulations show the flexibility and effectiveness of this treatment method.