Flat Puppets on an Empty Screen, Stories in the Round Imagining Space in Wayang Kulit and the Worlds Beyond

The puppets are flat, the screen against which they are placed and moved is white and devoid of scenery. In what kinds of space do the stories of the classical shadow-play of Java, Bali, Lombok, and the Malay world unfold despite this double flatness? How do performers use not only puppets and screen but also music and language to bring space into being? What must spectators know and do to make sense of these storytelling techniques? As a contribution to the narratological study of the multimodal making of storyworlds, I demonstrate that wayang kulit caters for different degrees of interpretive competence, which yield different understandings of the space that wayang portrays. An expert way of apprehending space requires seeing beyond the screen, puppets, and silhouettes, or even looking away from them. At the same time the peculiar ways of narrating space in wayang point to a deeply felt spatiality in real-life contexts as well

New Species and Additional Records of Protura from Michigan

Three new species, Eosentomon antrimense, E. pinusbanksianum, and Berberentulus mcqueeni, and one new record, E. australicum Womersley are added to the known Protura fauna of Michigan. Further records of E. wheeleri Silvestri, Protentomon michiganense Bernard, Proturentomon iowaense Womersley, Acerentulus confinis (Berlese) and Amerentulus amencanus (Ewing) are listed from various parts of the state

Innovation and design change strategies for learning technologies at Warwick : towards a ‘design capabilities’ heuristic for guiding practice and evaluating change.

This report gives a narrative account of an investigation into design and design capability in teaching and learning in a research-intensive university. It begins, in the Introduction, with definitions of key concepts: design, designing, successful design (achieving fit, stick, spread and growth), design change and design capability (although this last term is only really fleshed­out in Reading the Case Studies and the Conclusion). These words are common currency, but rarely used with precision. When clearly defined they provide a lens through which we can attain more clarity and granularity in analysing attempts at enhancing practice. In the second part, on the Origins of the Investigation and Earlier Experiments, we examine the limitations of a techno­centric approach to understanding, predicting and supporting the uptake of technology enhanced learning. It is argued that a design capability approach is needed, in which the ability of all people (including students) to discover, create, adopt, adapt designs that fit, stick, spread and grow is of prime value. In part 3, the design of the investigation is explained, with its focus upon discovering, creating and using design patterns as a key facilitating aspect of design capability. In part 4, this is put to the test, with an attempt at creatively reading the 23 mini case studies produced in interviews with academics. However, design patterns do not emerge easily from the cases, and we see that design and designing in this setting is more diverse and complex than expected. It is argued that a design patterns based approach will be useful, but much more work needs to be done before design patterns can become the lingua franca of teaching and learning design and development. This leads to a more sophisticated view of design capability, presented in the Conclusion. Drawing upon the experiences of the academics interviewed in the case studies, especially experienced and confident senior academics, it is conjectured that we need to increase the intensity with which academics encounter and reflect upon design challenges, designerly approaches, suboptimal and successful designs and design patterns. An integrated combination of Design Thinking and the Higher Education Academy Fellowship framework is recommended as a way of achieving this

Foreign Owners and Plant Survival

In recent years, international capital flows of all types have increased dramatically and most governments have been actively encouraging inflows of direct investment. However, concerns remain that reliance on foreign multinationals may be a risky development strategy as foreign firms are likely to be less rooted in the local economy and may be quicker to close down production. This paper asks whether foreign owners are more likely to close plants than domestic owners. In Indonesia, plants with any foreign ownership are far less likely to close than wholly-owned domestic plants. However, the lower probability of shutdown is a result of the larger size of foreign plants rather than their nationality of ownership. Controlling for plant size and productivity, we find that foreign plants are significantly more likely to close than comparable domestic establishments.

Flipping the classroom : a design study of the adoption and adaption of new pedagogy in a higher education context

The Flipped Classroom idea is simple: the students consume lecture content as videos or audios individually in their own time, freeing­-up lecture time for more interactive and constructive pedagogies, with the students being more engaged and active in class. Does this fit with the Higher Education context? Specifically anywhere in Warwick (a research-intensive university in the English Midlands)? This paper reports on the initial phase of a Design Thinking investigation inspired by the basic Flipped Classroom idea, looking for ways in which it may be adopted and/or adapted to fit into existing or changing HE practices, in specific well defined contexts. In doing so, important lessons are learned concerning the diversity and specificity of the disciplines that are considered (english literature, medicine, psychology, teacher training, history, chemistry). The cases presented in the 7 design studies each illustrates how an academic teacher has designed new practice to address problems encountered in teaching, by applying pedagogy that stands out from the everyday pedagogies of their disciplines. They show how designerly practitioners can reflect upon teaching, identify "threshold concepts" and areas of difficulty (or even liminality), and respond with additional design and development work

Approximate Killing Vectors on S^2

We present a new method for computing the best approximation to a Killing vector on closed 2-surfaces that are topologically S^2. When solutions of Killing's equation do not exist, this method is shown to yield results superior to those produced by existing methods. In addition, this method appears to provide a new tool for studying the horizon geometry of distorted black holes.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Physical Review D, revtex