Fathers and Other Clowns: Representations of Masculinity in Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades

This essay is an analysis of selected stories from Alice Munro’s first volume of fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) focusing on her representation of masculinity. It investigates the way in which the men in Munro’s stories participate in and relate to the discourse of “hegemonic masculinity” and how the stories outline moments of male crisis resulting from this. The essay pays heed to Munro’s careful location of her stories in a historical and geographical context, catering to masculinity studies’ insistence on the necessity of such contextualization. The present analysis understands itself as complementary to the already existing body of gender-based critical literature which focuses mainly on Munro’s rendition of women, suggesting that Munro understands gender as a process and a continual negotiation, and that she de-essentializes received definitions of masculinity and femininity. While concentrating on the depiction of the father figure in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Boys and Girls” and on the parody of the “manly modern” in “The Office,” the analysis also includes references to the re-appearance of certain kinds of male characters in Munro’s later stories, suggesting that the various embodiments of masculinity in Dance can be seen as part of what Robert Thacker calls “Munro’s reoccurrences.”Cet article analyse le thème de la représentation de la masculinité dans plusieurs nouvelles du volume Dance of the Happy Shades publié par Alice Munro en 1968. Nous nous intéressons à la manière dont les hommes représentés dans ces nouvelles, participent et sont liés au discours « hégémonique de la masculinité » tel que décrit par Connell. Ce faisant nous prendrons en compte la manière dont Munro place précisément ces histoires dans un contexte géographique et historique qui semble définitivement lié à l’inscription de ces discours de la masculinité, dans ce type d’environnement. Cette recherche est le pendant d’une série d’articles sur le sujet des figures féminines et de l’écriture de la féminité dans les nouvelles de Munro, sur lesquelles les chercheurs ont beaucoup glosé

Representativeness and Diversity in Photos via Crowd-Sourced Media Analysis

In this paper we present a hybrid three steps mechanism for automated-human media analysis employed for selecting a small number of representative and diverse images in the context of a noisy set of images. The first step consists in the automatic retrieval from web of a large database of candidate images. In the second step, a proposed image analysis method is employed with the goal of diminishing the time, pay and cognitive load and implicitly people’s work. This is done by automatically selecting a set of potentially relevant and diverse images. Considering the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics in images, the last step is necessary and consists in images being annotated and assessed by the crowd. The aim is to evaluate the level of representativeness and diversity of the selected set of images and providing images of highest quality. The method was validated in the context of the retrieval of images with monuments and using more than 30,000 images retrieved from various social image search platforms

Generalized parity measurements

Measurements play an important role in quantum computing (QC), by either providing the nonlinearity required for two-qubit gates (linear optics QC), or by implementing a quantum algorithm using single-qubit measurements on a highly entangled initial state (cluster state QC). Parity measurements can be used as building blocks for preparing arbitrary stabilizer states, and, together with 1-qubit gates are universal for quantum computing. Here we generalize parity gates by using a higher dimensional (qudit) ancilla. This enables us to go beyond the stabilizer/graph state formalism and prepare other types of multi-particle entangled states. The generalized parity module introduced here can prepare in one-shot, heralded by the outcome of the ancilla, a large class of entangled states, including GHZ_n, W_n, Dicke states D_{n,k}, and, more generally, certain sums of Dicke states, like G_n states used in secret sharing. For W_n states it provides an exponential gain compared to linear optics based methods.Comment: 7 pages, 1 fig; updated to the published versio

REFORMING PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EU SERVICES DIRECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION. A CASE STUDY ON THE BUSINESS REGISTRATION PROCESS IN ROMANIA

Romania is currently facing a lot of challanges in the public administration (PA) field. In this context probably one of the most pressing factors is the European Union integration process. Thus, starting with 2007, when Romania joined the European Union, it has become a necessity to build an European dimension of the PA reform process. In this paper, we are going to show how the European Union Services Directive implementation impacts on the PA reform process and also we are going to check if the outputs of the reform match the goals set by the Services Directive. Our whole approach is based on finding out the progresses and drawbacks associated with the business opening process, within the Romanian Trade Register Office.EU Services Directive, public administration reform, administrative procedures, administrative simplification, administrative modernisation, Point of Single Contact

IFRS Adoption in Romania: The Effects upon Financial Information and its Relevance

AbstractStarting from 2012, listed Romanian entities have to report their individual financial statements using International Financial Reporting Standards. This study is focusedon presenting the differences between Romanian Accounting Standards and IFRS when financial information is analysed. The research is conducted upon the companies that are listed on BSE and tries to demonstrate if statistically any significance in mean, median and variance was observed among several accounting measures and financial ratios. An analysis upon the entire market and its subsamples, considering companies specialisation, was conducted. The results reveal that no statistically significant differences at median and mean level were observed. The relevance could be identified at variance variation considering the solvency ratio and the return on equity one. Regarding the subsample analysis, the results are mixt