'Othello' Re-read

Rereading is all the rage. Since Peter Widdowson edited a collection of essays in 1982, entitled Re-Reading English, the verb 'to reread' seems in some critical circles to have replaced completely the more ordinary 'to read' and, moreover, to have been appropriated for the exclusive use of those critics who, applying contemporary critical theory to the standard works of English literature, want to offer what they feel are radical reappraisals, reinterpretations, revaluations. There is nothing new in that, as the familiar ring of such words indicates. There are several series; the rereading of Chaucer or Shakespeare or Donne or Pope, or whatever revered figure happens to come into the sights of the rereader, goes on apace. The stated aim is usually to demystify or deconstruct or dismantle or problematize the work, or the canon, or the author. They are an active lot, the contemporary critics, unlike the passive liberal humanists, whom they so bitterly oppose, and a very verbal lot as well, claiming to liberate reading from the constrictions imposed on it for centuries by the literary establishment. Yet rereading has been going on for as long as words have been written down, and every work of literature that has any claim to merit has been reread millions of times, by millions of readers. Each of those readings has been what is now called a rereading, the creation of a new version of the text, in the individual consciousness, by an interaction between the words on the page and the perceiving mind of the reader, a process close to that which the notorious liberal humanist William Wordsworth described in 'Tintern Abbey' as half creation and half perception

‘My favourite things to do’ and ‘my favourite people’: Exploring salient aspects of children’s self-concept

This study explores the potential of the ‘draw-and-write’ method for inviting children to communicate salient aspects of their self-concept. Irish primary school children aged 10–13 years drew and wrote about their favourite people and things to do (social and active self). Children drew and described many salient activities (39 in total) and people – including pets. Results suggest that widely used, adult-constructed self-esteem scales for children, while multidimensional, are limited, and that ‘draw-and-write’ is an effective multimodal method with which children can express their social and active self-concepts

Charge, geometry, and effective mass in the Kerr-Newman solution to the Einstein field equations

It has been shown that for the Reissner-Nordstrom solution to the vacuum Einstein field equations charge, like mass, has a unique space-time signature [Found. Phys. 38, 293-300 (2008)]. The presence of charge results in a negative curvature. This work, which includes a discussion of effective mass, is extended here to the Kerr-Newman solution.Comment: To appear in Foundations of Physics. Misprints have been corrected. 14 pages, 4 figure

Diffraction Symmetry in Crystalline, Close-Packed C60

We have grown crystals of the carbon structure C60 by sublimation. In contrast to solution-grown crystals, the sublimed crystals have long range order with no evidence of solvent inclusions. Sublimed C60 forms three dimensional, faceted crystals with a close-packed, face-centered cubic unit cell. We have refined a crystal structure using the "soccer ball" model of the C60 molecule. The results indicate that the C60 molecule has the expected spherical shape, however the data are not sufficiently accurate to unambiguously determine atomic positions