'Letting it breathe': writing and performing the words of others

Since 2004, I have written three plays whose central focus has been the personal narratives of real people. For each play I conducted the interviews that source the plays' content. I wrote the subsequent plays, and in some cases directed and performed in them. This article examines some of the challenges that arose when resituating personal narratives into performance. I examine challenges encountered during writing, rehearsal and performance, especially regarding representation and responsibility (in, for example, the issue of third-party representation). I discuss my method of ‘punctuating’ the transcribed material dialogue as a kind of free verse in order to try to ‘let it breathe’ in performance. The aim: to help actors in their delivery of verbatim text. The article draws on a final set of interviews, formal and informal, with the actors themselves—in order further to illuminate my process

Messy methods: Making sense of participatory research with young people in PE and sport

Participatory research with young people has become an approach increasingly adopted by researchers within PE and sport. In this paper, we draw on our research diaries to collectively reflect on our experiences of attempting to work in participatory ways. Although we each work with different young people and have adopted differing participatory approaches, there are similarities in our research experiences. This includes recurring accounts of ‘muddling through’ and messiness occupying our reflections. We are also struck by the absence of concern within the literature to reveal the messiness of research. In light of our shared musings about participatory research with different young people, this paper offers some preliminary thoughts about our experiences of dealing with this messiness. We take as our focus the increasing concerns to support rights-based research that advocates inclusion, participation and empowerment, and draw on our research to explore how these features were worked towards. In these discussions we are open about the limitations of the research, challenges encountered and the resultant messiness arising. Our conclusion turns to what it might mean if researchers were more transparent about the usually unpredictable, messy and confusing situations that arise in the practice of doing participatory research with young people

Defining forgiveness: Christian clergy and general population perspectives.

The lack of any consensual definition of forgiveness is a serious weakness in the research literature (McCullough, Pargament &amp; Thoresen, 2000). As forgiveness is at the core of Christianity, this study returns to the Christian source of the concept to explore the meaning of forgiveness for practicing Christian clergy. Comparisons are made with a general population sample and social science definitions of forgiveness to ensure that a shared meaning of forgiveness is articulated. Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy (N = 209) and a general population sample (N = 159) completed a postal questionnaire about forgiveness. There is agreement on the existence of individual differences in forgiveness. Clergy and the general population perceive reconciliation as necessary for forgiveness while there is no consensus within psychology. The clergy suggests that forgiveness is limitless and that repentance is unnecessary while the general population suggests that there are limits and that repentance is necessary. Psychological definitions do not conceptualize repentance as necessary for forgiveness and the question of limits has not been addressed although within therapy the implicit assumption is that forgiveness is limitless.</p

Phenotypic variation and differentiated gene expression of Australian plants in response to declining rainfall

Declining rainfall is projected to have negative impacts on the demographic performance of plant species. Little is known about the adaptive capacity of species to respond to drying climates, and whether adaptation can keep pace with climate change. In fire-prone ecosystems, episodic recruitment of perennial plant species in the first year postfire imposes a specific selection environment, offering a unique opportunity to quantify the scope for adaptive response to climate change. We examined the growth of seedlings of four fire-killed species under control and drought conditions for seeds from populations established in years following fire receiving average-to-above-average winter rainfall, or well-below-average winter rainfall. We show that offspring of plants that had established under drought had more efficient water uptake, and/or stored more water per unit biomass, or developed denser leaves, and all maintained higher survival in simulated drought than did offspring of plants established in average annual rainfall years. Adaptive phenotypic responses were not consistent across all traits and species, while plants that had established under severe drought or established in years with average-to-above-average rainfall had an overall different physiological response when growing either with or without water constraints. Seedlings descended from plants established under severe drought also had elevated gene expression in key pathways relating to stress response. Our results demonstrate the capacity for rapid adaptation to climate change through phenotypic variation and regulation of gene expression. However, effective and rapid adaptation to climate change may vary among species depending on their capacity to maintain robust populations under multiple stresses

Superconvergant interpolants for the collocation solution of boundary value ordinary differential equations

Publisher's version/PDFA long-standing open question associated with the use of collocation methods for boundary value ordinary differential equations is concerned with the development of a high order continuous solution approximation to augment the high order discrete solution approximation, obtained at the mesh points which subdivide the problem interval. It is well known that the use of collocation at Gauss points leads to solution approximations at the mesh points for which the global error is O(h[superscript 2k]), where k is the number of collocation points used per subinterval and h is the subinterval size. This discrete solution is said to be superconvergent. The collocation solution also yields a C[superscript 0] continuous solution approximation that has a global error of O(h[supercript k+1]). In this paper, we show how to efficiently augment the superconvergent discrete collocation solution to obtain C[superscript 1] continuous "superconvergent" interpolants whose global errors are O(h[superscript 2k]). The key ideas are to use the theoretical framework of continuous Runge-Kutta schemes and to augment the collocation solution with inexpensive monoimplicit Runge-Kutta stages. Specific schemes are derived for k = 1, 2, 3, and 4. Numerical results are provided to support the theoretical analysis

Application of Random Matrix Theory to Biological Networks

We show that spectral fluctuation of interaction matrices of yeast a core protein interaction network and a metabolic network follows the description of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) of random matrix theory (RMT). Furthermore, we demonstrate that while the global biological networks evaluated belong to GOE, removal of interactions between constituents transitions the networks to systems of isolated modules described by the Poisson statistics of RMT. Our results indicate that although biological networks are very different from other complex systems at the molecular level, they display the same statistical properties at large scale. The transition point provides a new objective approach for the identification of functional modules.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure

Multi-netclust: an efficient tool for finding connected clusters in multi-parametric networks

Summary: Multi-netclust is a simple tool that allows users to extract connected clusters of data represented by different networks given in the form of matrices. The tool uses user-defined threshold values to combine the matrices, and uses a straightforward, memory-efficient graph algorithm to find clusters that are connected in all or in either of the networks. The tool is written in C/C++ and is available either as a form-based or as a command-line-based program running on Linux platforms. The algorithm is fast, processing a network of > 106 nodes and 108 edges takes only a few minutes on an ordinary computer

Infinite dimensional Lie algebras in 4D conformal quantum field theory

The concept of global conformal invariance (GCI) opens the way of applying algebraic techniques, developed in the context of 2-dimensional chiral conformal field theory, to a higher (even) dimensional space-time. In particular, a system of GCI scalar fields of conformal dimension two gives rise to a Lie algebra of harmonic bilocal fields, V_m(x,y), where the m span a finite dimensional real matrix algebra M closed under transposition. The associative algebra M is irreducible iff its commutant M' coincides with one of the three real division rings. The Lie algebra of (the modes of) the bilocal fields is in each case an infinite dimensional Lie algebra: a central extension of sp(infty,R) corresponding to the field R of reals, of u(infty,infty) associated to the field C of complex numbers, and of so*(4 infty) related to the algebra H of quaternions. They give rise to quantum field theory models with superselection sectors governed by the (global) gauge groups O(N), U(N), and U(N,H)=Sp(2N), respectively.Comment: 16 pages, with minor improvements as to appear in J. Phys.

Invariant Differential Operators for Non-Compact Lie Groups: the Sp(n,R) Case

In the present paper we continue the project of systematic construction of invariant differential operators on the example of the non-compact algebras sp(n,R), in detail for n=6. Our choice of these algebras is motivated by the fact that they belong to a narrow class of algebras, which we call 'conformal Lie algebras', which have very similar properties to the conformal algebras of Minkowski space-time. We give the main multiplets and the main reduced multiplets of indecomposable elementary representations for n=6, including the necessary data for all relevant invariant differential operators. In fact, this gives by reduction also the cases for n<6, since the main multiplet for fixed n coincides with one reduced case for n+1.Comment: Latex2e, 27 pages, 8 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0812.2690, arXiv:0812.265