‘For recuperation’: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) is British fiction's predominant attempt to embrace aleatorism and to subvert linear causality: the chapters are unbound, and the text invites the reader to shuffle them before reading. Narrative can be understood as a means of containing the ever-present risk of death, of disease, of loss, and has as its impetus a curative trajectory: recuperation is, perhaps, implicit in narrative. The Unfortunates, however, defiantly refuses such comfort. Johnson, this essay asserts, uses his form to cancel the consolations of narrative construction, taking the infectious chains of narrative and repudiating any doctorial/authorial urge to trace the spread of disease/narrative. The anti-linear narrative is inextricable from the type of mourning it enacts, and from the aetiology of the disease that it displays, but declines to track: a type of mourning that refuses movement through time, and the story of a disease that refuses to certify its own development. These refusals, I suggest, are embedded in the grammar and syntax of Johnson's prose. In The Unfortunates the full stops are nodal points of anxiety and loss, an expression of the novel's mortal anxiety. Johnson's final, missing full stop, the novel's aterminal terminus, offers a defiant refusal of recuperation of any kind

Human Rights Through the ATS After Kiobel: Partial Extraterritoriality, Misconceptions, and Elusive and Problematic Judicially-Created Criteria

The purpose of this study has been to examine what approach and experience pedagogues at pre-schools, with a limited amount of nationalities, have regarding cultural promoting work in pre-schools. The concept ”cultural promoting” mainly regards the children's cultural backgrounds. The first question formulation focussed on the what the concepts ”cultural promoting” and ”cultural diversity” meant to the pedagogues. The second question focussed on the interpretation and knowledge of what the syllabus says about cultural promoting work.Earlier research has shown that there exists an insecurity among the pedagogues regarding how they should work in a culturally promoting way, however, Swedish research in this area is very limited. The method used in this study has been qualitative interviews and a total of six pedagogues from four different pre-schools have been interviewed. The result gave a varied view regarding what can be looked upon as cultural promoting work. All the pedagogues agreed that working with other native languages than Swedish was considered cultural promoting. The knowledge about the contents of the syllabus varied greatly among the pedagogues.The conclusion shows a positive attitude among the pedagogues towards cultural promoting work, however, they were insecure about how to shape, develop and perform the actual work, which can be linked back to their amount of knowledge about the syllabus

Task scheduling for a real time multiprocessor

Algorithm for scheduling real time tasks in multiprocessing syste

Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature

Research on science fiction (sci-fi) in scientific publications has indicated the usage of sci-fi stories, movies or shows to inspire novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Yet no studies have analysed sci-fi in a top-ranked computer science conference at present. For that reason, we examine the CHI main track for the presence and nature of sci-fi referrals in relationship to HCI research. We search for six sci-fi terms in a dataset of 5812 CHI main proceedings and code the context of 175 sci-fi referrals in 83 papers indexed in the CHI main track. In our results, we categorize these papers into five contemporary HCI research themes wherein sci-fi and HCI interconnect: 1) Theoretical Design Research; 2) New Interactions; 3) Human-Body Modification or Extension; 4) Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence; and 5) Visions of Computing and HCI. In conclusion, we discuss results and implications located in the promising arena of sci-fi and HCI research.Comment: v1: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, HCI International 2018 accepted submission v2: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, added link/doi for Springer proceedin

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model