Clarifying creative nonfiction through the personal essay

In a recent issue of TEXT, Matthew Ricketson sought to clarify the &lsquo;boundaries between fiction and nonfiction&rsquo;.&nbsp;In his capacity as a teacher of the creative nonfiction form he writes, &lsquo;I have lost count of the number of times, in classes and in submitted work, that students have described a piece of nonfiction as a novel&rsquo;. The confusion thus highlighted is not restricted to Ricketson&rsquo;s journalism students. In our own university&rsquo;s creative writing cohort, students also struggle with difficulties in melding the research methodology of the journalist with the language and form of creative writing required to produce nonfiction stories for a 21st century readership.Currently in Australia creative nonfiction is enthusiastically embraced by publishers and teaching institutions. Works of memoir proliferate in the lists of mainstream publishers, as do anthologies of the essay form. During a time of increasing competition and desire for differentiation between institutions, when graduate outcomes form a basis for marketing university degrees, it is hardly surprising that, increasingly, tertiary writing teachers focus on this genre in their writing programs. A second tension has arisen in higher education more generally, which affects our writing students&rsquo; approaches to tertiary study. The student writers of the 21st century emerge from a digitally literate and socially collaborative generation: the NetGen(eration). From a learner-centric viewpoint, they could be described as time-poor, and motivated by work-integrated learning with its perceived close links to workplace contexts and to writing genres. They seek just-in-time learning to meet their immediate employment needs, which inhibits the development of their capacity to adapt their researching and writing to various genres and audiences. This article examines issues related to moving these NetGen student writers into the demanding and rapidly expanding creative nonfiction market. It is form rather than genre that denotes creative nonfiction and, we argue, it is the unique features of the personal essay, based as it is on doubt, discovery and the writer&rsquo;s personal voice that can be instrumental in teaching creative nonfiction writing to our digitally and socially literate cohort of students.<br /

New horizons for the methodology and physiology of training periodization: Block Periodization: New horizon or a false dawn?

It would appear premature to herald block periodization as a ‘new horizon’ in training planning, partly because of a fundamental lack of supporting evidence and clearly delineated rationale, and partly because contradictory evidence exists questioning its universal efficacy in elite contexts. What block periodization does positively contribute to current planning methodologies is a more formal description of a particular planning tactic that may be advantageously added to the elite coaches menu of potential planning options. Therefore, while blocked-training schemes may be useful ploys in specific training contexts, the claim that this framework represents a new departure in training planning may be somewhat overly enthusiastic. Hence, perhaps a more appropriate description of block periodization is ‘new variation’, rather than a ‘new horizon’, in sports training planning

Does divestiture matter : a framework for learning from experience

Transferring ownership and control of enterprises from the public to the private sector has recently attracted great interest around the world. Several developed and developing countries have already divested varying portions of their public enterprise (PE) sectors, and many others are planning to follow suit. This paper provides an analytical framework for assessing the arguments for divestiture and for evaluating the lessons of experience. Its aim is to provide researchers with a mechanism to analyze the divestiture phenomenon more rigorously than has been attempted thus far. Ultimately, the findings of such analysis will enable policymakers to form more realistic expectations about the results from undertaking divestiture decisions and the conditions necesssary for attaining the maximum benefits from the application of this instruments. This paper summarizes the rationale for divestiture, reviews the empirical evidence, and then proposes a framework for undertaking an empirical investigation ofthe performance of divested firms. The paper is confined to partial equilibrium analysis, even though it addresses the fiscal impact of divestiture. It assumes a small sample setting, thus precluding econometric analysis. The paper's overall objective is to construct a framework for assessing the advantages and disadvantages resulting from the sale of a single enterprise, not for assessing a country's overall disvestiture program.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Health Economics&Finance

The Possibility of Transfer(?): A Comprehensive Approach to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s Rule 11bis To Permit Transfer to Rwandan Domestic Courts

We present a learned image compression system based on GANs, operating at extremely low bitrates. Our proposed framework combines an encoder, decoder/generator and a multi-scale discriminator, which we train jointly for a generative learned compression objective. The model synthesizes details it cannot afford to store, obtaining visually pleasing results at bitrates where previous methods fail and show strong artifacts. Furthermore, if a semantic label map of the original image is available, our method can fully synthesize unimportant regions in the decoded image such as streets and trees from the label map, proportionally reducing the storage cost. A user study confirms that for low bitrates, our approach is preferred to state-of-the-art methods, even when they use more than double the bits.Comment: E. Agustsson, M. Tschannen, and F. Mentzer contributed equally to this work. ICCV 2019 camera ready versio

Pediatric Resuscitation: Evaluation of a Clinical Curriculum

Objective: To assess the impact of a 6-hour pediatric resuscitation curriculum on the comfort levels of resident physicians’ evaluation and treatment of critically ill pediatric patients. Methods: An evaluation instrument assessed resident comfort levels, measured on a seven digit Likert scale ranging from significantly uncomfortable to significantly comfortable, in 13 areas of pediatric resuscitation. To complete the curriculum, residents had to demonstrate proficiency in knowledge and procedural skills during mock resuscitation scenarios and on both written and oral examinations. Results: Thirty-one residents participated in the study: 51.6% were pediatric, 12.9% were medicine/pediatric and 35.5% were emergency medicine residents. Participants in the curriculum had little previous experience with pediatric resuscitation (83% had been involved in five or fewer pediatric resuscitations). In all 13 areas of pediatric resuscitation tested, residents reported improvement in comfort levels following the course (p<0.002; Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests). The most significant changes were observed for the following items: resuscitation of pulseless arrest, performance of cardioversion and defibrillation, performance of intraosseous needle insertion, and drug selection and dosing for rapid sequence intubation. Fewer than 48% of learners rated themselves as comfortable in these areas prior to training, but after completion, more than 80% rated themselves in the comfortable range. All residents but one received passing scores on their written examinations (97%). During the mock resuscitation scenarios and oral examination, 100% of the residents were assessed to have ‘completely’ met the learning objectives and critical actions Conclusion: Implementation of a pediatric resuscitation curriculum improves pediatric and emergency medicine residents’ comfort with the evaluation and treatment of critically ill pediatric patients. This curriculum can be used in residency training to document the acquisition of core competencies, knowledge and procedural skills needed for the evaluation and treatment of the critically ill child. The results reported in this study support using this model of instructional design to implement educational strategies, which will meet the requirements of graduate education

Computational aerodynamics and artificial intelligence

The general principles of artificial intelligence are reviewed and speculations are made concerning how knowledge based systems can accelerate the process of acquiring new knowledge in aerodynamics, how computational fluid dynamics may use expert systems, and how expert systems may speed the design and development process. In addition, the anatomy of an idealized expert system called AERODYNAMICIST is discussed. Resource requirements for using artificial intelligence in computational fluid dynamics and aerodynamics are examined. Three main conclusions are presented. First, there are two related aspects of computational aerodynamics: reasoning and calculating. Second, a substantial portion of reasoning can be achieved with artificial intelligence. It offers the opportunity of using computers as reasoning machines to set the stage for efficient calculating. Third, expert systems are likely to be new assets of institutions involved in aeronautics for various tasks of computational aerodynamics

Loneliness Literacy Scale: Development and Evaluation of an Early Indicator for Loneliness Prevention

To develop and evaluate the Loneliness Literacy Scale for the assessment of short-term outcomes of a loneliness prevention programme among Dutch elderly persons. Scale development was based on evidence from literature and experiences from local stakeholders and representatives of the target group. The scale was pre-tested among 303 elderly persons aged 65 years and over. Principal component analysis and internal consistency analysis were used to affirm the scale structure, reduce the number of items and assess the reliability of the constructs. Linear regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the association between the literacy constructs and loneliness. The four constructs “motivation”, “self-efficacy”, “perceived social support” and “subjective norm” derived from principal component analysis captured 56 % of the original variance. Cronbach’s coefficient α was above 0.7 for each construct. The constructs “self-efficacy” and “perceived social support” were positively and “subjective norm” was negatively associated with loneliness. To our knowledge this is the first study developing a short-term indicator for loneliness prevention. The indicator contributes to the need of evaluating public health interventions more close to the intervention activities. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11205-013-0322-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users