987 research outputs found
Normal forms approach to diffusion near hyperbolic equilibria
We consider the exit problem for small white noise perturbation of a smooth
dynamical system on the plane in the neighborhood of a hyperbolic critical
point. We show that if the distribution of the initial condition has a scaling
limit then the exit distribution and exit time also have a joint scaling limit
as the noise intensity goes to zero. The limiting law is computed explicitly.
The result completes the theory of noisy heteroclinic networks in two
dimensions. The analysis is based on normal forms theory.Comment: 21 page
To Act and Learn: A Bakhtinian Exploration of Action Learning
This paper considers the work of the Russian social philosopher and cultural theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin as a source of understanding for those involved in action learning. Drawing upon data gathered over two years during the evaluation of 20 action learning sets in the north of England, we will seek to work with the ideas of Bakhtin to consider their value for those involved in action learning. We consider key Bakhtin features such as Making Meaning, Participative Thinking, Theoreticism and Presence, Others and Outsideness, Voices and Carnival to highlight how Bakhtin's can enhance our understanding of the nature of action and learning
âI am Italian in the worldâ: A mobile studentâs story of language learning and ideological becoming
This article theorises the relationship between language and intercultural learning from a Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, based on the language learning story of Federica, a mobile student in UK higher education (HE). I first outline the context of UK HE and its internationalisation agenda, discussing how research in this field has conceptualised language, intercultural communication (IC), and international students in terms of a totalising boundary between self and other. I link this to current concerns in IC regarding the philosophical underpinnings of the field, specifically the aporia created as a result of the totalising self/other relation in prevailing IC discourse (MacDonald & OâRegan, 2013). I then present a means of addressing this aporia through a Bakhtinian theorisation of the relationship between language and intercultural learning. This theorisation offers a relational perspective on the self and the other in which intercultural learning is a process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) with the other, enacted in, with and through language, as illustrated in Federicaâs story of learning English. The article concludes with a call for language and communicative practices to be placed at the heart of HE internationalisation agendas and for HE practitioners to recognise shared responsibility for intercultural communication
A prosificação da cultura e o ensaio criativo do sĂ©culo XX: questĂ”es sobre um gĂȘnero literĂĄrio
Wide-range microspectrophotometer for monitoring the environmental hydrocarbon pollution
A measurement method and a portable microspectrophotometer are developed. The instrument enables to solve a problem of registering the optical transmission spectra in a wide range of optical-density variations with a guaranteed preassigned absolute error
Invariant densities for dynamical systems with random switching
We consider a non-autonomous ordinary differential equation on a smooth
manifold, with right-hand side that randomly switches between the elements of a
finite family of smooth vector fields. For the resulting random dynamical
system, we show that H\"ormander type hypoellipticity conditions are sufficient
for uniqueness and absolute continuity of an invariant measure.Comment: 16 pages; we replaced our original article to point out and close a
gap in the discussion of the Lorenz system in Section 7 (see Remark 2); this
gap is only present in the journal version of this article --- it wasn't
present in the previous arxiv versio
Midlands Cadences: Narrative Voices in the Work of Alan Sillitoe
This paper will examine excerpts from a range of Alan Sillitoeâs prose fiction, most notably Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and short stories from the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958), via a comparative exploration of the textsâ representations of Midlands English demotic. Both texts enact Bakhtinâs notion of novelistic dialogism and find much expressive capital in the tension between discourses: between the oral and the written. Indeed, it could be argued that much of Sillitoeâs work functions as a direct challenge to dominant notions of the literary. The narrative discourse attempts to trace a link between the quotidian experience of the Midlands English working classes represented and the demotic language which they speak. His technique also explores the link between language and sensibility; i.e. verbal articulacy need not be a limit to expression of a characterâs distinctive identity. In contrast to the more radical techniques of novelists like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, all instances of phonetically-rendered demotic remain imprisoned by what Joyce called âperverted commasâ â as direct speech. However, the diegetic narrative discourse itself is redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonistsâ consciousness through their own idiolect. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this is evidenced by the use of the second person âyouâ. It functions simultaneously as a representation of Seatonâs consciousness in the oral register which he might choose to articulate it, and as a dialogic âsideways glanceâ at the reader and assumed shared experience. The second is more redolent of internal monologue, using the first-person form (as seen in the homodiegetic narration of the second novel); crucially, though, it remains in Standard English, if explicitly orientated towards oral register.
Sillitoeâs is a novelistic discourse which refuses to normalise itself to accord with the conventions of classic realism, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral â asserting the right of a characterâs dialect/idiolect to be the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics. It aims to propose a model which can be used to analyse and explore any fiction which has been labelled as âworking classâ, and asserts that such an approach leads to a more principled characterisation of working class fiction (based on its use of language) than current literary-critical discussions based simply on cultural/social context and biography
Ambiguity and the dialogical self: In search for a dialogical psychology.
It is intuitively felt that ambiguity plays a crucial role in human beingsâ everyday life and in psychologistsâ theoretical and applied work. However, ambiguity remains essentially non-problematised in psychological science since its foundation. This article analyses positivist and social constructionist perspectives on ambiguity in the context of their epistemological and ontological fundamental assumptions. The relational thesis of social constructionism is further analysed and it is argued that it constitutes a âweak thesisâ concerning the relational constitution of human beings. In the second part, a dialogical alternative is elaborated. In this perspective, ambiguity is placed in the context of relationship and both are brought to an ontological ground. Therefore, it is argued, ambiguity is a fundamental property of human experience and plays a fundamental role in the consti tution of (inter)subjective processes. The impact of this thesis on dialogical perspective on self is elaborated
You had to be there: Anachronism and the limits of laughing at the Middle Ages
Comic medievalism is one of the most widespread but least examined forms of postmedieval response. Its combination of comic modality, modern sensibility and historical vision captures what postmedieval audiences have deemed amusing about medieval society. But some instances have been less successful. âYou had to be there,â the phrase marking the failure of a comic attempt, and the relationship of that failure to the loss of immediacy, is realized in comic medievalism through the temporal fragility of laughter, historical mediation and temporal paradox. This essay explores some limitpoints to the comic reception of the Middle Ages, focusing especially on its use of anachronism
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