Towards a Literary and Feminist Neo-Avant-Garde: Carla Vasio’s Experimental Fiction

Despite her active involvement in several of the Gruppo 63’s meetings and activities over the years, Carla Vasio (b. 1923) is rarely mentioned in critical discussions of the Italian neo-avant-garde, and very little attention has been devoted to her work. This is not an isolated oversight, but a part of a larger pattern of marginalizing women writers. Our reading of two of Vasio’s most interesting and innovative novels—L’orizzonte (1966) and La più grande anamorfosi del mondo (2009)–shows that this marginalization is unjustified, and that she is a writer who actively contributed to the aesthetic innovation of the Gruppo 63 while creating her own experimental narrative style. Vasio’s literary experimentation is an example of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, distinguished by its sophisticated feminist critique of both the dominant masculinist dynamic of the Gruppo 63 and the misogyny of postwar Italian culture and society.

Civil Procedure - Long-Arm Statute - Broad Interpretation

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court interpreted the scope of Section 331, which provides for service against non-resident owners of real estate, and concluded the word involved as used in the statute does not require a causal connection between the accident or injury and the real estate, but only the occurrence of the accident or injury on the real estate. Betcher v. Hay-Roe, 429 Pa. 371, 240 A.2d 501 (1968)

A mass conservative TR-BDF2 semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian DG discretization of the shallow water equations on general structured meshes of quadrilaterals

Abstract As an extension of a previous work considering a fully advective formulation on Cartesian meshes, a mass conservative discretization approach is presented here for the shallow water equations, based on discontinuous finite elements on general structured meshes of quadrilaterals. A semi-implicit time integration is performed by employing the TR-BDF2 scheme and is combined with the semi-Lagrangian technique for the momentum equation only. Indeed, in order to simplify the derivation of the discrete linear Helmoltz equation to be solved at each time-step, a non-conservative formulation of the momentum equation is employed. The Eulerian flux form is considered instead for the continuity equation in order to ensure mass conservation. Numerical results show that on distorted meshes and for relatively high polynomial degrees, the proposed numerical method fully conserves mass and presents a higher level of accuracy than a standard off-centered Crank Nicolson approach. This is achieved without any significant imprinting of the mesh distortion on the solution

Assessment of Teachers’ Core Beliefs Related to Key Features of Response to Intervention

The requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act require that schools are accountable for the outcomes of all students. Response to Intervention (RtI) provides a framework to assist in the actualization of this goal. This educational reform effort requires dramatically different functioning on the part of all school personnel, particularly teachers. In order for this model to be successful, researchers must acknowledge the primacy of teacher level factors, such as beliefs and attitudes related to core components of RtI. The purpose of this study was to examine the core beliefs of elementary-level teachers relative to foundational components of RtI, including service delivery, assessment practices, core instruction, intervention, and special education eligibility. A survey design was utilized to explore beliefs of teachers in districts implementing RtI, compared with those who are not implementing RtI. Results indicated that teachers in districts implementing RtI were more likely than teachers in Non-RtI districts, to agree that using student-based data to determine intervention effectiveness is more accurate than using only teacher judgment. Neither group felt that core instruction was effective enough to result in 80% of students achieving benchmark in reading and math. Additionally, both groups felt that students with high-incidence disabilities were not capable of achieving grade-level benchmarks. Limitations, implications for practice, and recommendations for future research are discussed

Becoming the Change Witnessed: Strategic Use of Empathy in Morgan Spurlock’s “Straight Man in a Gay World”

This essay examines the strategic use of empathic communication that fosters a loving struggle for Existenz in “Straight Man in a Gay World” (2005), an episode of Morgan Spurlock’s documentary-styled television program 30 Days. The show functions as a persuasive discourse designed to influence the heterosexual participant and, by extension, the implied audience. This essay offers an overview of key terms in the study of empathy and analyzes key moments of empathic communication in the episode

Provisioning urbanism: a comparative urban-rural zooarchaeology of ancient Southwest Asia

Historically, urban centres are seen as consumers that draw in labour and resources from their rural hinterlands. Zooarchaeological studies of key urban sites in Southwest Asia demonstrate the movement of livestock, but the region-wide application of these findings has not been tested and the logistics of urban provisioning remain poorly understood. Here, the authors analyse zooarchaeological data from 245 sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia to examine patterns of livestock production and consumption over a 5000-year period. They find that although preferences varied over time and space, urban sites consistently relied on rural satellites to overcome local limitations to support their large and diverse populations

Apps for developing pronunciation in English as an L2

The goal of pronunciation teaching should be to enable learners to develop intelligible pronunciation and, in order to do this, it is important to teach perception and production of the most relevant segmental and suprasegmental features of pronunciation, considering specific groups of learners (CELCE-MURCIA et al., 2010). Technology has played an important role in pronunciation teaching, and the applications developed for pronunciation instruction enable learners not only to engage in pronunciation activities, but to have access to a greater variety of input and immediate feedback. Having this in mind, this study aimed at analyzing the content, the pronunciation teaching steps, the features, and usability resources of pronunciation apps. In order to guide the analysis, a framework was developed based on literature related to the areas of pronunciation teaching and of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). The results showed that there is a tendency for the apps analyzed to focus more on segmentals. All of them offer description and analysis, listening discrimination, and controlled practice of the pronunciation features, as well as feedback. However, they were limited in terms of guided and communicative practice, of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), and of variety of input

O MÉTODO DE MARX. EM BUSCA DE SUA APREENSÃO

O artigo oferece uma contribuição para a apreensão do método de Marx, baseada nos principais textos do autor que tratam desse tema, à medida que busca traçar toda a envergadura de seu método, que seria composto de quatro caminhos, de tal maneira que os dois movimentos do meio correspondem ao método da crítica da economia política, que é parte do método marxiano. O primeiro, que vai de seus estudos iniciais na área do Direito à economia política, o qual demarca sua posição materialista; o segundo, que vai do patamar do “concreto idealizado” à mercadoria; o terceiro, que vai da mercadoria ao capital, no plano do “concreto pensado”; e o quarto, que vai do capital ao Direito. O texto finaliza com algumas considerações sobre o significado político do método marxiano e conclui que este método, O Capital e a estratégia revolucionária estão fundidos em uma única coisa: o método materialista histórico