'Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry'

ABSTRACT Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. Not only in performance poetry and through the spoken word, but also on the page, black British poetry constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. In Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey (1988), David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole in order to linguistically render and thus commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, respectively, with the earlier collection providing annotated translations into Standard English. James Berry, Louise Bennett, and Valerie Bloom adapt Jamaican Patois to celebrate Jamaican folk culture and at times to represent and record experiences and linguistic interactions in the postcolonial metropolis. Grace Nichols and John Agard use modified forms of Guyanese Creole, with Nichols frequently constructing gendered voices whilst Agard often celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglish’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varieties, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness. © Book proposal (02/2016): The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing p. 27 of 4

A Conceptual Assessment Model (Cam) For Operationalizing Constructs In Technology-Augmented Assessments

The concept of the “construct” is essential and ubiquitous in the social and psychological sciences, but is often glossed over as being well understood by members of a single community of interest (COI) and not necessarily used uniformly across communities. With the explosive increase in digital augmentation technologies, there is an opportunity, even a necessity, to quantify and possibly standardize what is meant by particular constructs. The opportunity is especially apparent as constructs are “operationalized,” or made measurable through the specification of data elements. We use techniques borrowed from computer science, specifically the Unified Modeling Language (UML), to build a conceptual assessment model (CAM) that can aid in specifying a systematized process of operationalizing constructs. We examine several use cases that can benefit from this approach. We also discuss how we anticipate using the CAM in our program of research into human-machine teaming (HMT) assessments called UMMPIREE

Heterogeneous Duplications in Patients with Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease Suggest a Mechanism of Coupled Homologous and Nonhomologous Recombination

We describe genomic structures of 59 X-chromosome segmental duplications that include the proteolipid protein 1 gene (PLP1) in patients with Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease. We provide the first report of 13 junction sequences, which gives insight into underlying mechanisms. Although proximal breakpoints were highly variable, distal breakpoints tended to cluster around low-copy repeats (LCRs) (50% of distal breakpoints), and each duplication event appeared to be unique (100 kb to 4.6 Mb in size). Sequence analysis of the junctions revealed no large homologous regions between proximal and distal breakpoints. Most junctions had microhomology of 1–6 bases, and one had a 2-base insertion. Boundaries between single-copy and duplicated DNA were identical to the reference genomic sequence in all patients investigated. Taken together, these data suggest that the tandem duplications are formed by a coupled homologous and nonhomologous recombination mechanism. We suggest repair of a double-stranded break (DSB) by one-sided homologous strand invasion of a sister chromatid, followed by DNA synthesis and nonhomologous end joining with the other end of the break. This is in contrast to other genomic disorders that have recurrent rearrangements formed by nonallelic homologous recombination between LCRs. Interspersed repetitive elements (Alu elements, long interspersed nuclear elements, and long terminal repeats) were found at 18 of the 26 breakpoint sequences studied. No specific motif that may predispose to DSBs was revealed, but single or alternating tracts of purines and pyrimidines that may cause secondary structures were common. Analysis of the 2-Mb region susceptible to duplications identified proximal-specific repeats and distal LCRs in addition to the previously reported ones, suggesting that the unique genomic architecture may have a role in nonrecurrent rearrangements by promoting instability