'Looking away': private writing techniques as a form of transformational text shaping in art & design and the natural sciences

Despite their long history and wide-spread use, the private writing techniques of journaling and freewriting remain largely underexploited in the field of academic writing instruction. They are seen only as forms of pre-writing, and are criticised by some for being under-theorised, vague and asocial. Contextualizing them within a writing-as-social-practice approach, and drawing on a conceptual framework including a notion of looking-away developed by Derrida, Vygotsky’s conception of learning development, and Ivanic’s notion of writer identity, this paper aims to throw new light on these private writing techniques and argues they can be transformational in developing students’ learning and identity, as well as written and non-written outputs. In this paper we theorise these practices through reflection on two instances of teaching in which they played an important part. The teaching interventions were in different disciplinary contexts (architectural design and Natural Sciences), with writers of different levels of expertise/competence (undergraduate and PhD), in both L1 and multilingual settings. In both interventions, we found that these private writing techniques were transformational due to the space they allowed writers to self-reflect, and to look away from their public-facing outputs. The techniques provided significant developmental benefits and moved the students along a continuum towards a more expert-like identity

Multiple-crystal X-ray topographic characterization of periodically domain-inverted KTiOPO4 crystal

A periodically domain-inverted KTiOPO4 crystal has been characterized for the first time by multiple-crystal multiple-reflection x-ray topography. The striation contrast within the domain- inverted regions has been revealed in high strain-sensitivity reflection topographs. The origin of formation of the striation contrast and the mechanism of domain inversion in KTiOPO4 are discussed in terms of the structural characteristics of KTiOPO4

Actors that Unify Threads and Events

There is an impedance mismatch between message-passing concurrency and virtual machines, such as the JVM. VMs usually map their threads to heavyweight OS processes. Without a lightweight process abstraction, users are often forced to write parts of concurrent applications in an event-driven style which obscures control flow, and increases the burden on the programmer. In this paper we show how thread-based and event-based programming can be unified under a single actor abstraction. Using advanced abstraction mechanisms of the Scala programming language, we implemented our approach on unmodified JVMs. Our programming model integrates well with the threading model of the underlying VM

The Mind, the Brain, and the Law

In this chapter, we explore the potential influence that advances in neuroscience may have on legal decision makers and present the findings from some recent studies that probe folk intuitions concerning the relationships among neuroscience, agency, responsibility, and mental illness. We first familiarize the reader with some of the early research in experimental philosophy on people\u27s intuitions about agency and responsibility. Then, we focus on a more specific issue—namely, whether people respond to explanations of human behavior framed in neuroscientific terms differently than they respond to explanations framed in more traditional folk psychological terms. Next, we discuss some new findings which suggest that explanations of criminal behavior that are couched in neural terms appear to make people less punitive than explanations couched in mental terms, especially in the context of mental illness. Finally, we offer what we take to be the best explanation of these differences in people\u27s intuitions—namely, when people are presented with neural explanations of human behavior, they tend to think that the agent\u27s “deep self” (the values and beliefs the agent identifies with) is somehow left out of the causal loop or bypassed, which in turn mitigates the agent\u27s responsibility

Einstein metrics in projective geometry

It is well known that pseudo-Riemannian metrics in the projective class of a given torsion free affine connection can be obtained from (and are equivalent to) the solutions of a certain overdetermined projectively invariant differential equation. This equation is a special case of a so-called first BGG equation. The general theory of such equations singles out a subclass of so-called normal solutions. We prove that non-degerate normal solutions are equivalent to pseudo-Riemannian Einstein metrics in the projective class and observe that this connects to natural projective extensions of the Einstein condition.Comment: 10 pages. Adapted to published version. In addition corrected a minor sign erro