The anti-didactic hypothesis

The teaching of Creative Writing often includes encouraging students to think about the premise of the work, which badly translated can mean "what is your work saying." Recent statements by the playwright and theorist Howard Barker might offer new routes for Creative Writing teaching and, more broadly, thinking about how the creative process works. Barker disavows rational knowledge of his work (though not skill in its construction) – rather positing that it is his job as a writer to use imagination in order to speculate around a hypothesis. Barker distrusts Brecht and the notion that writers have anything to teach an audience. Using approaches gleaned from Barker's own writing and interviews on his own practice, new approaches to stimulating student's imaginative writing might arise. This is especially important to emerging writers, for whom being told to write what they know and have something to say might not be the best method, given they know little and so it might be presumptuous if they were writing works designed to instruct

Adapting The Pilgrim's Progress for the stage (2)

In adapting Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress for the stage, the author discovered that the work contains many striking parallels with works of English drama from both before his time and after

Does Familiarity breed inattention? Why drivers crash on the roads they know best

This paper describes our research into the nature of everyday driving, with a particular emphasis on the processes that govern driver behaviour in familiar, well - practiced situations. The research examined the development and maintenance of proceduralised driving habits in a high-fidelity driving simulator by paying 29 participants to drive a simulated road regularly over three months of testing. A range of measures, including detection task performance and driving performance were collected over the course of 20 sessions. Performance from a yoked control group who experienced the same road scenarios in a single session was also measured. The data showed the development of stereotyped driving patterns and changes in what drivers noticed, indicative of in attentional blindness and “driving without awareness”. Extended practice also resulted in increased sensitivity for detecting changes to foveal road features associated with vehicle guidance and performance on an embedded vehicle detection task (detection of a specific vehicle type). The changes in attentional focus and driving performance resulting from extended practice help explain why drivers are at increased risk of crashing on roads they know well. Identifying the features of familiar roads that attract driver attention, even when they are driving without awareness, can inform new interventions and designs for safer roads. The data also provide new light on a range of previous driver behaviour research including a “Tandem Model” that includes both explicit and implicit processes involved in driving performance

If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing on public television – Joe Orton’s plays on television

An account of Joe Orton's work for and on television

Telling and retelling the tale. adapting the murder ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’ for the stage as past and future visions of a folk crime

In adapting the murder ballad Duncan and Brady for the stage as a one act play ‘Been on the Job Too Long, and setting the story within that adaptation in three different places and times periods, the playwright made a decision to stage a meditation on how the true murder story of Duncan and Brady is an ideal tale to be told and retold. Telling and retelling the tale in different times and places had its own rewards for the writer, and potentially for performers. In writing three versions of this tale, the playwright stretched, challenged and gave himself increased scope as a writer and researcher, as well as stretching, challenging and giving a showcase to actors who perform the piece . This paper explores some of the key decisions, techniques and discoveries made in the process of adapting the ballad for the stage. It tells how this process gave the writer increased clarity in terms of his writerly objectives and personal vision

Koalas use a novel vocal organ to produce unusually low-pitched mating calls

SummaryDuring the breeding season, male koalas produce ‘bellow’ vocalisations that are characterised by a continuous series of inhalation and exhalation sections, and an extremely low fundamental frequency (the main acoustic correlate of perceived pitch) [1]. Remarkably, the fundamental frequency (F0) of bellow inhalation sections averages 27.1 Hz (range: 9.8–61.5 Hz [1]), which is 20 times lower than would be expected for an animal weighing 8 kg [2] and more typical of an animal the size of an elephant (Supplemental figure S1A). Here, we demonstrate that koalas use a novel vocal organ to produce their unusually low-pitched mating calls

Dual-frequency GPS survey for validation of a regional DTM and for the generation of local DTM data for sea-level rise modelling in an estuarine salt marsh

Global average temperatures have risen by an average of 0.07°C per decade over the last 100 years, with a warming trend of 0.13°C per decade over the last 50 years. Temperatures are predicted to rise by 2°C - 4.4°C by 2100 leading to global average sealevel rise (SLR) of 2 – 6mm per year (20 – 60cms in total) up to 2100 (IPCC 2007) with impacts for protected coastal habitats in Ireland. Estuaries are predominantly sedimentary environments, and are characterised by shallow coastal slope gradients, making them sensitive to even modest changes in sea-level. The Shannon estuary is the largest river estuary in Ireland and is designated as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) under the EU Habitats Directive (EU 1992) providing protection for listed habitats within it, including estuarine salt marsh. Trends in Shannon estuary tidal data from 1877 – 2004 suggest an average upward SLR trend of 4 - 5mm/yr over this period. A simple linear extension of this historical trend would imply that local SLR will be in the region of 40 - 45cm by 2100. However, this may underestimate actual SLR for the estuary by 2100, since it takes no account of predicted climate-driven global SLR acceleration (IPCC 2007) up to 2100