Skilled Actors Research Articles

Children as agents in early childhood education

Abstract The aim of this article is to foreground the concept of young children as agents through an exploration of the strategies they use to gain control and produce social life in early childhood centres. In order to be sensitive to the subjective contents of young children's lives, a qualitative approach with observation as the key method of data production was used. Children between the ages of three and four years in two early childhood centres in KwaZulu-Natal participated in the study. The findings suggest that young children are knowledgeable, intentional and skilled actors who deploy influential strategies to assert autonomy and contribute to life at the centres. The strategies of resistance, avoidance, ignoring and collaboration are discussed to illuminate the resources the children actively used. In the context of valuing young children as agents, the concluding remarks highlight the need for practice and research to be informed by an empowerment approach in early childhood education.

Why Did Universities Start Patenting?

This paper draws on institutional theory to explain the rise of university patenting in the USA. While observers have traditionally attributed this development to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, recent research has shown that university patenting was increasing throughout the 1970s and argued that the Act's impact was less than has generally been assumed. This paper attempts to reconcile these opposing positions by explaining the rise of university patenting as a process of institution-building. Beginning in the 1960s, a skilled actor within the federal bureaucracy created a proto-institution that simplified university patenting and encouraged the development of a community of university patent administrators. In the 1970s, that community in turn allied itself with government proponents of patent policy liberalization and representatives of small business in a successful effort to pass the Bayh-Dole Act. The Act itself should be seen not as creating modern technology transfer, but rather as a final step in a state-driven process of institutionalization that was already well under way by 1980. The case is used to discuss how an institutional approach, which is infrequently seen in STS, can sometimes be useful to it.

The politics of constitutional review in France and Europe

To the question “ Is constitutional review by a Constitutional Court law or politics? ” this article responds with a survey of various notions of the “ political, ” providing illustrations drawn from France and Europe and assessing Louis Favoreu’s role in French debates on the legitimacy of review. The article elaborates a basic model of constitutional politics, defi ned as lawmaking processes — legislative, administrative, judicial — that are mediated by constitutional norms and jurisprudence. Such politics register the extent to which constitutional courts have accrued agency in the world of government. Today, constitutional judges function as “ positive legislators, ” with transformative effects on parliamentary governance. Louis Favoreu is the most important fi gure in French public law for the whole of the Fifth Republic (1958 to the present). Professor Favoreu was an exceptionally skilled actor in constitutional politics. During the critical, foundational period of the Conseil Constitutionnel’s history — 1971 to 1990 — he built the scholarly infrastructure of contemporary French constitutionalism. 1 He founded, among other enduring institutions, the constitutionalist’s bible, Grandes decisions du Conseil constitutionnel (with Loic Philip); the dominant center for advanced teaching, research, and publishing in constitutional law, located at his university in Aix-en-Provence; an annual international gathering of judges and scholars for the discussion of comparative constitutional law (proceedings published yearly, in the Annuaire international de Justice constitutionnelle (International Annals of Constitutional Justice)); and a new journal, the Revue francaise de droit constitutionnel (French Review of Constitutional Law), devoted to the style of research he perfected and instilled in his many students. When the left was in power, Favoreu attacked the Socialists’ legislative agenda, drafting many of the Senate’s references ( les saisines ) to the Conseil Constituti onnel. And, for the general public, he wrote regular commentaries on Conseil decisions, in Le Figaro (a center-right daily of record) and other newspapers. *Leitner Professor of Law, Politics, and International Studies, Yale Law School. Louis Favoreu was my friend.

The interlink between resources and capabilities: towards a theoretical frame for the development of dynamic capabilities

In order to untangle the sources of heterogeneity among firms, this study reviews the last 20 years' works related to the resource-based view of the firm, the knowledge-based perspectives on competitive advantage sustainability, and the dynamic capability view. We reach three important conclusions that provide a more granular understanding of resource heterogeneity and its development. First, dynamic capabilities leading to competitive advantage are knowledge-based processes characterised by functional specialisation. Second, their design is based on a weighted organisational mix, made up of skilled actors, incentive systems, dedicated organisational structure and idiosyncratic culture. Third, their development and management require a specific division of labour between senior and middle managers. We conclude our work by addressing future research on the topic and by highlighting core implications for practitioners.

Much Ado About Nothing (review)

Reviewed by: Much Ado About Nothing Yu Jin Ko Much Ado About Nothing Presented by the African-American Shakespeare Company at the African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco, California. May 27–June 5, 2005. Directed by Sherri Young. Set by Michelle Pierce. Lighting by Kevin Myrick. Choreography by Patrick Gallineaux. With Christine Odera (Beatrice), G. Randall Wright (Leonato), Beverly McGriff (Hero), E. "Alx" Alexander (Don Pedro), Peter Temple (Benedick), Pierre Johnson, Jr. (Don John), Deontay Wilson (Claudio), Huey Fortson (Borachio), Perry Aliado (Watchman), and Lawrence Mitchell (Friar Francis). The African-American Shakespeare Company's motto is "Envisioning the classics with color." More narrowly, this means staging plays "within the perspective and cultural dynamic of African-American culture." It's not only that the cast is always African-American, or that the target audience is mainly so; as its website and press material inform us, past productions have included a hip-hop Macbeth as well as a gospel Antigone. The "concept" that drives this company's productions is always rooted in contemporary black culture. For its 2005 production of Much Ado About Nothing, however, health issues forced the original director to withdraw at the last minute, which led the new director (and Founder), Sherri Young, to try—rather reluctantly and uneasily—something that was new to the company: "straight Shakespeare." In fact, Ms. Young went so far as to say to me in an interview that during the rehearsal process, she found herself "missing" what she self-deprecatingly referred to as "the trick" that defined the company's past productions. The resulting production thus inadvertently became an interesting study in what "straight"—as opposed to "concept"—Shakespeare might mean in this particular cultural context. Truth be told, the cast was highly uneven, and thus gave the production a community-theatre feel. Yet this unevenness was precisely what made it interesting as a cultural performance. Beatrice and Benedick were performed by highly skilled actors with great flourish and aplomb; with the exception of Borachio, however, these roles were also the only ones performed with a visibly African-American touch. Indeed, Beatrice was performed by an émigré from Kenya (Christine Odera) who spoke the lines with the full force of her thick, resonant, and sinewy Kenyan accent. The remaining roles, played mostly by less talented (though sometimes quite experienced) actors, were defined as "straight" principally by means of a phony English accent. What was most surprising in all this was that for Ms. Young, the capacity to perform in this accent signaled [End Page 108] how "seasoned" the actor was and thus also marked the degree of cultural legitimacy or bona fides that the actor possessed. She even found herself apologetically explaining Borachio's "street" speech as though it were something regrettable. The reason behind this surprising assessment is nonetheless understandable; as Ms. Young explained, despite early misgivings and fear of failure, she came to embrace the project as an opportunity for her company to leave the ghetto temporarily, as it were, and aspire to the status of a color-less classical repertory company. Still, the dynamic between English straightness and a more colorful playfulness defined the production in ways that resisted, happily, the unusual controls that the company placed on itself for this play. The opening scene set this dynamic in motion with Leonato running through some exposition in what could charitably be called a feeble English accent (which wasn't at all helped by the fact that Leonato was played by a youngish man as a geriatric with all the requisite bent-over trembling and similar trappings). Then suddenly, into this dispiriting soundscape, came a rich, vibrant voice that was as alive as Leonato's was dead: the voice of Christine Odera's Beatrice. This voice was clearly marked as that of an immigrant, but was no more foreign than the surrounding British accents; in fact, in the opening moments, and continuing throughout the show, this particular foreignness came across as authentic—not merely in being so literally African-American, but in belonging so clearly to the actor—while the British voices rang hollow. The voice also had the effect of setting off Beatrice the character as exceptional, and even...

Dynamical stability in the acquisition and performance of rhythmic ball manipulation: theoretical insights with a clinical slant.

Three experiments illustrate how a task-based approach and dynamical modeling of a perceptual-motor task can provide a useful framework for understanding functional and dysfunctional behavior. In the chosen task, subjects held a racket and bounced a ball rhythmically in the air with invariant ball amplitude. As such, the task could be cast into a mechanical model that encompassed the movements of the actor (racket) and the manipulandum (ball). In this form, the movement task is a dynamical system that displays dynamical stability, i.e., performance where perturbations die out by themselves. The hypothesis is that skilled actors seek to perform with this "passive" stability as it alleviates the control demands because perturbations do not require explicit corrections. In the experimental data, this strategy could be characterized by a single parameter, the acceleration of the racket at impact, which provided quantitative predictions. Experiment 1 established that subjects with normal sensorimotor functions indeed performed with racket acceleration values that were predicted to provide passive stability. Experiment 2 showed that subjects improved their skill over a course of 40 practice trials, as evidenced in decreased variability and accompanied by a change in racket acceleration toward values that provided optimal stability. In experiment 3, perturbations were applied and the subjects' adaptability was tested. When perturbations were large enough, subjects altered their racket timing to resume contact that provided stability. The results are discussed with their relevance to clinical contexts: How can such a task-based approach provide insights into the control of functional and dysfunctional movements? Can such behavioral results serve as a diagnostic tool? How can this approach to sensorimotor behavior stimulate physicians and therapists to progress therapeutic measures?

Sights Unseen: Withholding Information in the Plays of Thomas Bernhard

Sights Unseen: Withholding Information in the Plays ofThomas Bernhard William E. Gruber We have found to our cost, once for all, that the regions of fancy and the boards of Covent Garden are not the same thing. All that was fine in the play, was lost in the representation....' Thus William Hazlitt in 1816 on a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Nowadays not too many people take Hazlitt's ideas on tiieater seriously; reading drama from the skewedviewpoint ofEnglish Romanticism, he reacts both to the excesses ofscenery and special effects ofthe nineteenth-century stage as well as to the difficulties of credibly staging "moonshine." But in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Hazlitt again takes up the subject ofstage representations , and in that later work it seems clear that he finds fault not just with unsatisfactory performances but with the medium ofdrama itself. "The idea," he writes, "can have no place upon the stage, which is a picture without perspective; everything there is in the foreground. That which was merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality."2 The present essay is concerned with dramatic representation in the plays ofThomas Bernhard. In particular I am interested to discoverwhy certain events remain unseen and why important pieces ofinformation are sometimes withheld. My concern is with those events which are absent from the stage, whether because they are undramatized or because they are represented only by narrative. The argument turns on a paradox : in a theater like Bernhard's which gives primacy, in Hazlitt's phrase, to the idea rather than to direct action, things which are not seen are in some way likely to be central to the dramatization. 91 92Comparative Drama I. Direct Scenic Presentation vs. Narrative Mediation Common wisdom generally holds that actual pictorial representation is superior to narrative report—"the mind," says Horace, " is much less stirred by hearing things described than it is by actually seeing them, with one's own eyes."3 In writing about Bernhard's theater, however, I want to start by taking seriously Hazlitt's odd notion that any theatrical representation results in a loss. It will be useful to begin by distinguishing between two modes of dramatic representation and to dispel the common notion that narrated events in drama are ipso facto less adequate than actual enactments. In any given drama the events always consist oftwo kinds ofrepresentations, what Manfred Pfister calls direct scenic presentation, on the one hand, and"narrative mediations" on the other.4 The death ofHamlet, for example, is open; it occurs onstage, and a skilled actor can hold the audience in thrall simplybyoffering his body to view. The murder ofJason's bride and her father in Euripides' Medea, in contrast, takes place behind the closed doors of the palace. Those deaths, unlike Hamlet's, are made up entirely ofsentences, and the problem for Euripides then is how to represent dying without recourse to scenic enactment. Euripides solves this problem first by forecasting the action as it will soon occur offstage so that spectators are encouraged to imagine the impending horrors. But the real work of representation in this case is performed conventionally in retrospective narrative, when a messenger recounts in graphic detail the disaster. The messenger's speech situates the audience emotionally with respect to the characters and events. It is less a representation of the event than a representation of his thinking after witnessing the event. His memory allows the audience to feel for and with the dying father and daughter; his words are in effect an optical instrument by means ofwhich spectators can identifywith their suffering even though they cannot see it. Many people still believe thatAthenian tragedians were not permitted to stage death or that Euripides used a messenger to report Medea's murder ofJason's new bride because he lacked the means to show a head melting. What was not represented, in other words, was hidden either because of technological shortcomings or because of cultural timidity. This line of thinking over many years generated an aesthetic theory of William E. Gruber93 dramaturgy according to which "showing" is opposed to "telling," as if narrative and...

Acoustic characteristics of vocal emotions simulated by actors.

This paper reports on a set of acoustic measures of vocal emotions simulated by a skilled actor and actress who read 12 short sentences. The emotions simulated were Neutral, Cold Anger, Hot Anger, Happiness, Sadness, Interest, and Elation. Acoustic measures were examined for digitised samples of the 168 sentences (2 speakers x 12 sentences x 7 emotions). These measures included the over-all mean energy, standard deviations of energy, mean fundamental frequency, mean values of the first six formant frequencies and their corresponding frequency bandwidths, mean durations of utterance, and mean articulation rate. Results displayed both similarities and differences in the acoustic measures of the two actors' simulations of the different emotions. These are presented and discussed.

Social skills and the perception of interaction episodes

Accurate and well‐differentiated cognitive representations about the social world are an important prerequisite of skilled social behaviour. The aim of this study was to demonstrate empirically that a significant relationship exists between social skill and the way an actor perceives and interprets various interaction episodes. Based on a free‐response diary study, the most typical and common interaction episodes in a subcultural milieu were established. A second sample from the same milieu were asked (a) to indicate their perception of these episodes, and (b) to complete a battery of social skill assessment scales as well as personality scales. The episode judgements data were analysed using an Individual Differences Multidimensional Scaling (INDSCAL) procedure, identifying three episode dimensions (social anxiety, evaluation and perceived intensity). Subjects falling within the top and the bottom quartiles of the distribution on the social skills measures had significantly different cognitive representations about these episodes, with low skilled actors relying on the social anxiety dimension, and high skilled actors on the evaluation and intensity dimensions most heavily. The nature of these differences was further explicated by a canonical correlation analysis, showing that sex and personality variables were also related to episode cognition. The results are interpreted as indicating the important role episode representations play in social skills, and the implications of the findings for social skills assessment and therapy are discussed.

能面創作の心理

That masks are regularly worn is one et the chief charcteristics of the Noh. But as to the reason why they were devised there goes round a traditional fallacy-that they are employed to keep back the actor's emotional mood, corresponding to the general spirit of the Noh.I maintain an opposite view. In my opinion, human faces are not so expressive as they are usually believed to be. For even the most skilled actors can show only a few kinds 01 expression in their faces: Sometimes it is impossible for us to detect any difference between their smiling faces and tearful ones. To our great inconvenience, we have each one face only, and so a certain actor can not take the part of Falstaff, though he may boast of his Hamlet. To make up for the inconvenience of faces the Noh mask was invented, by which we may be sure to remove the limit of race, sex, and age.If the Noh mask has any defect it must be the impossibility of moving the eyes and lips.But we have a compensation for that, that is vacantlooking eyes and half-opened lips. If an actor wishes to gaze at something on the stage he needs only to give , his mask a little motion to impress us with an idea that the eyes are staring fixedly at, that Very thing. And the half-opened lips are so dexterously contrived that, when the mask is faced downwards, the lips may seem to be shut and when faced upwards to be opened amiably.This invention came from the necessity of applying one mask to every case, and the art of Noh mask carving was completed when it reached this invention which I call the non-expressionism of the Noh mask, because it seems very plain when the special motions are not given to it.We find such non-expressionism in almost all types of masks representing young women (Zoh, Ko-omotc, Shakumi, Fukai, etc.) and those representing young men (Kantan-otoko, Sumlyoshi-otoko, Chujoh , Ima-waka, Dohji,fidoh, Kasshiki, Herta, etc,). However there are other types of Noll masks-God masks (Tobide, Tenjin, Mikazuki, etc.), and Demon masks (Beshimi, Shikami, Shishi-guchi, Hannya, fa, etc.). These are, generally speaking, imitation of the ancient Gigaku masks and and Bugaku masks, in which we can trace the influence of the masks of the Western Regions, especially Babylonia and Assyria. These imitation masks represent each a momentary and exaggerated emotion and are invented to give superhuman dignity and terror to the expression. They can scarcely be called genenuin Japanese masks. In short, when the Noh mask thought of its long-forgotten purpose, it gave up an attempt to make itself a chef d'oeuvre and was contented itself with its lot as a theatrical medium, whence its essential beauty developed.