Doing voices: reading language as craft in black British poetry

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature published online 14 April 2014 DOI:10.1177/0021989414529121. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/11/0021989414529121This essay offers a detailed exploration and comparative reading of two poems published 20 years apart: John Agard’s “Listen Mr Oxford Don” (1985), and Daljit Nagra’s “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers…” (2007). The former poem is well-known, being regarded by a range of scholars as the acme of (and often, shorthand for) self-reflexively dialogic black British voice poetry, as it emerged in the 1980s, that plays off the friction between writing and speech. The latter is a complex and satirical take on poetic convention and canonicity – including the legacies of 1980s black British poetry – that exploits a tension between written poetic convention and artifice on the one hand, and the idea of the voiced poem as conveying “presence” or “authenticity” on the other. Both poems direct us towards a structuring paradox in which the embodied immediacy of human voice is mediated through the graphic conventions of written poetry. Reading these poems together, the essay considers on the one hand, how ideas about poetic form, language, and voice emerge out of particular historical junctures; and on the other, how such attentiveness to context can help us to develop techniques of a postcolonial “close reading”, eschewing totalizing formulae or summative evaluations of linguistic dissidence

Portable self-powered device detects internal flaws in tubular structures

Portable probe and eddy-current-sensitive circuitry detects internal flaws or hard spot impurities in an electrically conductive tubular channel by recording the conductivity change at the defect point

Regeneration King's Cross: the Central Saint Martin's College of Art relocation project

Central Saint Martin's move to a prestigious new site at King's Cross is part of the most significant redevelopment project in London in the last 150 years. The Library will inhabit a 19th-century grain store, the Granary building, designed by Lewis Cubitt. To date the process of planning the library has included work with base build architects Stanton Williams, the fit out architects Pringle Brandon, library consultants The Design Concept and Embervision, and suppliers Demco

Transistor circuit increases range of logarithmic current amplifier

Circuit increases the range of a logarithmic current amplifier by combining a commercially available amplifier with a silicon epitaxial transistor. A temperature compensating network is provided for the transistor

Molecular parameters of post impact cooling in the Boltysh impact structure

Impact events have the potential to generate a number of long-term sources of heat that can lead to the initiation of hydrothermal systems when the impact occurs on a water- or ice-rich target. Such hydrothermal systems have been postulated as promising locations to search for evidence of past biological processes on Mars due to the prevalence of impact cratering as a surface process in Mars’s early history. In this study, we have used molecular parameters of the thermal maturity of organic matter combined with palynology and carbon isotope stratigraphy to study the post impact thermal history of crater fill sediments from the Boltysh crater, Ukraine

Testing for lack of fit in blocked and split-plot response surface designs

Textbooks on response surface methodology emphasize the importance of lack-of-fit tests when fitting response surface models, and stress that, to be able to test for lack of fit, designed experiments should have replication and allow for pure-error estimation. In this paper, we show how to obtain pure-error estimates and how to carry out a lack-of-fit test when the experiment is not completely randomized, but a blocked experiment, a split-plot experiment, or any other multi-stratum experiment. Our approach to calculating pure-error estimates is based on residual maximum likelihood (REML) estimation of the variance components in a full treatment model. It generalizes the one suggested by Vining et al. (2005) in the sense that it works for a broader set of designs and for replicates other than center point replicates. Our lack-of-fit test also generalizes the test proposed by Khuri (1992) for data from blocked experiments because it exploits replicates other than center point replicates and works for split-plot and other multi-stratum designs as well. We provide analytical expressions for the test statistic and the corresponding degrees of freedom, and demonstrate how to perform the lack-of-fit test in the SAS procedure MIXED. We re-analyze several published data sets and discover a few instances in which the usual response surface model exhibits significant lack of fit

Distance Education in Engineering for Developing Countries

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Qualitative evaluation of the Mentors in Violence Prevention pilot in Scottish high schools

Objective The Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program originated in the US and adopts a bystander approach to gender-based violence prevention by harnessing group processes using a peer-learning model. This paper presents the first qualitative evaluation, within a European context, of a pilot application of MVP within a Scottish High School setting. Method The evaluation comprises a series of interviews and focus groups with school staff, and pupils (‘mentors’ and ‘mentees’) at three participating schools. The study’s research purposes are to explore: 1. Experiences of participating in MVP; 2. Participants’ perceived impact of MVP (with regards attitudinal and behavioral change with a particular emphasis upon social norms); and 3. Participants’ opinions on the relevance and sustainability of MVP. Results All three categories of participant reported generally positive experiences of MVP in terms of recruitment, training, and implementation. The peer-learning model was particularly useful in engaging mentees, and facilitating support networks outside the classroom. Moreover, positive attitudinal and behavioral change regarding gender-based violence was reported by all three participant categories, but was particularly prevalent amongst mentors. However, participants highlighted the importance of ensuring MVP is culturally relevant, and the need for integration into school life to ensure its sustainability. Conclusions An initial qualitative analysis of MVP within Scottish High Schools suggests the peer-learning program was experienced positively, with self-reported impact on gender-based violence attitudes and behaviors (including bystander intervention). A number of recommendations have been made to inform future implementation of MVP, and the need for robust, on-going evaluation.PostprintPeer reviewe

Ancient volcanic xenon in single glass grains from the D'Orbigny angrite

We present high-sensitivity xenon data for single glass grains from the D'Orbigny angrite. These grains contain the first sample of volcanic gas from a planetary body other than the Earth and excess Xe-129 detected for the first time in angrites