SWINGBY - A low thrust interplanetary swingby trajectory optimization program, volume 2 Final report

Segmented two-body low thrust interplanetary swingby trajectory and performance optimization progra

Measuring New Zealand students' international capabilities: an exploratory study

Executive summary: This exploratory study considers the feasibility of measuring New Zealand senior secondary (Years 12/13) students’ \u27international capabilities\u27. Building on background work undertaken by the Ministry’s International Division, the methodology had three components. An analysis of New Zealand and international literature pertinent to assessment of international capabilities was undertaken. Small-group workshops were conducted with 13 secondary school staff, 21 senior secondary students, and 10 adults with relevant expertise and perspectives about expression of international capabilities in post-school life. The third component was a visit to the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to discuss similar assessment challenges in their work. What are international capabilities and why measure them? Broadly speaking, international capabilities can be described as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that enable people to live, work, and learn across international and intercultural contexts. These capabilities, or aspects of them, are described by a range of terms in the literature, including international knowledge and skills, global competence, global/international citizenship, global/international mindedness, and intercultural competence. The Ministry’s background work suggests international capabilities can be seen as “the international and intercultural facet of the key competencies”. Focusing on development of New Zealand students’ international capabilities could, among other things: help make more explicit what the key competencies look like when they’re applied in intercultural or international situations provide a way to open a conversation with schools about internationalisation of education support New Zealand schools to better understand, analyse, and talk about the intercultural/internationalising learning activities they already do  open conversations about cultural diversity in New Zealand schools and communities and the opportunities this can provide for intercultural learning  create an opportunity for schools to revisit parts of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) vision, including the notion of students being “international citizens”  encourage schools to connect with businesses and the wider community to develop learning opportunities that help students to develop innovation and entrepreneurial capabilities and connect these capabilities with intercultural and international contexts. Measuring New Zealand students’ international capabilities could help us to better understand how the schooling system helps to “increase New Zealanders’ knowledge and skills to operate effectively across cultures.” It could feed into ongoing developments within educational policy and practice to better align curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy with the high-level goals of The New Zealand Curriculum. Looking further into the future, knowledge about how our schools support the development of students’ international capabilities could assist with longer-term redesign of educational policy, curriculum, assessment, and qualifications to keep pace as demands and pressures on learning and schooling continue to change through the 21st century

'Whore-ocracy’: show girls, the beauty trade-off, and mainstream oppositional discourse in contemporary Italy

Women on Italian television are objectified more frequently than on other European television networks. However, a moral panic in contemporary Italian culture about the figure of the ‘velina’, or television showgirl, perceived as dangerously akin to the scapegoated prostitute, has become shorthand for debates about Silvio Berlusconi, his media empire and political corruption. In this article I will begin by showing how a preoccupation with female performance and prostitution has in fact defined Italian culture since the Second World War. I will refer to the idea of ‘the beauty myth’ (Wolf, 1990), and how this has been used to keep women in a certain place in Italian society, showing how it has been further inflected in the Italian context by a beauty trade-off, namely the equation between female beauty, stupidity and sexual incontinence. I will then show how this history has informed the debate about the ‘velina’, ‘velinismo’, and women in public spaces to a point that seriously undermines criticism in the mainstream media, due to the terms used in the debate, the splitting of women, the beauty trade-off and problematic visual representations. I will suggest that in order to introduce some nuance into the ‘velina’ debate certain theoretical models require further development in the Italian context. These models stem from feminist media studies and the work of Rosalind Gill in particular, including postfeminist theory and subtler understandings of female subjectivity, pleasure and spectatorship

Lost in The Art(ifice) of Male Language: Finding the Female Author in Paola Capriolo's Il doppio regno

With its self-conscious intertextuality and thirty-year-old female narrator, Capriolo's Il doppio regno invites interpretation as a form of `fictitious autobiography'. This reading emphasizes the novel's importance as an exploration of female authorial anxiety in relation to a predominantly male-authored canon. Focusing upon Capriolo's admiration for Gottfried Benn and his privileging of art as absolute, the article shows how women's alienation from language is dramatized through the depiction of a fantastic space. The protagonist's encounter with a labyrinthine hotel is also the author's encounter with a language that claims to speak for the universal subject, but in fact excludes the female

Paola Cortellesi: Fragmenting the Latin Lover in Italian Romantic Comedy

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Società Editrice il Mulino via the DOI in this recordExamining the popular comic star, Paola Cortellesi, and her recent appearances in high-grossing romantic comedies, I will show how her comic performance and roles challenge and undo the construction of the "latin lover". I argue that the tension between being object of desire and comic agent has enabled her to develop a "star persona" that lends itself strongly to romantic comedy, marking a promising turn for women in the overwhelmingly male domination of Italian film comedy and challenging the configuration of the "latin lover". Her roles point towards both the desire for and difficulty in imagining an adequate male counterpart

Medical Information Management System (MIMS): A generalized interactive information system

An interactive information system is described. It is a general purpose, free format system which offers immediate assistance where manipulation of large data bases is required. The medical area is a prime area of application. Examples of the system's operation, commentary on the examples, and a complete listing of the system program are included

Nonlinear and adaptive estimation techniques in reentry

The development and testing of nonlinear and adaptive estimators for reentry (e.g. space shuttle) navigation and model parameter estimation or identification are reported. Of particular interest is the identifcation of vehicle lift and drag characteristics in real time. Several nonlinear filters were developed and simulated. Adaptive filters for the real time identification of vehicle lift and drag characteristics, and unmodelable acceleration, were also developed and tested by simulation. The simulations feature an uncertain system environment with rather arbitrary model errors, thus providing a definitive test of estimator performance. It was found that nonlinear effects are indeed significant in reentry trajectory estimation and a nonlinear filter is demonstrated which successfully tracks through nonlinearities without degrading the information content of the data. Under the same conditions the usual extended Kalman filter diverges and is useless. The J-adaptive filter is shown to successfully track errors in the modeled vehicle lift and drag characteristics. The same filter concept is also shown to track successfully through rather arbitrary model errors, including lift and drag errors, vehicle mass errors, atmospheric density errors, and wind gust errors

Unmanned territories : contemporary Italian women writers and the intertextual space of fantastic fiction

Thethesis examines how somewomen writers of fiction relate to the question of literary tradition in the 1980sand 1990s. Contemporary literary practice appears to be dominated by postmodern anxiety about a state of 'late arrival' as writers. I wish to explore how womenwriters' experience of the weight of literary predecessors is affected by their different subject position. I chooseto site this study within the area of fantastic fiction for several reasons. The fantastic tradition in Italy was largely overlooked by the critics until the 1980s- a factor which has exacerbated the neglect ofwomen's contribution to it. More importantly the fantastic is now vaunted by contemporary criticism as an area conducive to transgressive challenges to traditional literary practice, particularly for women writers. At the same time, however, the traditional tropes ofthe predominantly male-authored canon of fantastic literature offer a problematic and challenging range of gender stereotypes for female authors to 'rewrite'. I choose to focus on the notion of space both literally and metaphorically in the development ofthis thesis. In the opening chapter I tease out the threads which connect space, Italianwomenwriters and the fantastic. I beginby showing that the fantastic itselfis often construed spatially as a genre and offers potential for spatial innovation. This suggests a subtler way of looking at womenwriters' use of literary models, which avoids falling into simplistic analyses of gender portrayal. I then outline the position of womenwriters in Italy in relation to the genre ofthe fantastic. I suggest that the missing sense of a womenwriters' tradition in this genre maybe one reason whythe fantastic is used to explore self-consciously the relation betweenthe female writer and the male authored text. Finally I showhow the fantastic offerswomen a space in which to re-write, namely through their manipulation ofthe literal and metaphorical spaces ofthe text. The following two chapters execute this study with close reference to texts by four authors. The second chapter is dedicated to the early fiction ofPaola Capriolo whoseexperience ofliterary tradition as a particularly claustrophobic space inspired this thesis. I agree with the widely held viewthat her use of a Gothic-oriented fantastic, which privileges a world of enclosure in labyrinthine interiors, reflects a typically postmodern anxiety about the end ofliterature. I argue howeverthat the anxiety ofthe writer's relation to literature is more closely linked to her identification with a predominantly male literary tradition. This gives her writingsome interesting links with muchearlier examples ofwomen's writing. It also provides an interesting springboard from whichto look at the treatmentof similar themes of enclosure in work by other women writers. The final chapter follows the emergence of new models ofthe fantastic in the work ofthe writers FrancescaDuranti, RossanaOmbres and Laura Mancinelli. I suggestthat in their work we see a contemporary use ofthe fantastic 'al femminile' which juxtaposes the external space with the internal space, giving rise to the recurrent motifoftravel. I argue that this use of the fantastic genre pushes the genre in a new direction, towards a space in which the internal fantasy and dialogue co-exist