Marquette University Slavic Institute Papers NO. 11

https://epublications.marquette.edu/mupress-book/1011/thumbnail.jp

Transforming fashion education to design with intent

Abstract: Two fundamental shifts are currently evident in design. Firstly, a growing call to integrate research and praxis is evident. Secondly, a call to move fashion design praxis to more relevant and value-adding environmental sustainable and user-centered design approaches is emerging. As such, fashion education should align itself to such shifts. Conventionally, fashion education at fourth year placed greater emphasis on design and the making of products to culminate in a collection. This teaching and learning approach presented a number of challenges. Firstly, the design of such collections predominately grounded itself in areas such as celebrity culture and fashion trends but with no value to fashion design praxis. Secondly, a disjuncture between research and praxis was evident even though they both focussed on a common theme. This presented a gap for the authors to decolonise fashion education by transforming teaching and learning approaches at fourth year to ensure that students are educated in a manner that contribute to more meaningful and value-adding fashion design praxis. In this paper, the authors reflectively report in a three-fold manner. Firstly, a report on the rationale for decolonising and transforming fashion education at a fourth year. Secondly, a discussion on a research foci aligning to the notion of design with intent. Thirdly, a reflective discussion on how such a research foci informs and is applied to student praxis in the educational context. The paper begins with arguments extracted from literature to support the two fundamental calls evident in design and fashion design discourse. The paper then shifts to contextualise the conventional scope of fashion education at fourth year and justify the reasons for transformation. The authors then move to contextualise the research foci, grounded in design with intent, and how research informs student praxis by drawing on student cases. The paper concludes with some delimitations and challenges of such a teaching and learning approach. In transforming fourth year fashion education, design with intent underpinned research, which in turn informed student praxis opposes the conventional teaching and learning strategy. As such, this paper contributes to the larger discourse to ensure fashion design praxis and education is more relevant and value adding to current situations

PPF - A Parallel Particle Filtering Library

We present the parallel particle filtering (PPF) software library, which enables hybrid shared-memory/distributed-memory parallelization of particle filtering (PF) algorithms combining the Message Passing Interface (MPI) with multithreading for multi-level parallelism. The library is implemented in Java and relies on OpenMPI's Java bindings for inter-process communication. It includes dynamic load balancing, multi-thread balancing, and several algorithmic improvements for PF, such as input-space domain decomposition. The PPF library hides the difficulties of efficient parallel programming of PF algorithms and provides application developers with the necessary tools for parallel implementation of PF methods. We demonstrate the capabilities of the PPF library using two distributed PF algorithms in two scenarios with different numbers of particles. The PPF library runs a 38 million particle problem, corresponding to more than 1.86 GB of particle data, on 192 cores with 67% parallel efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, the PPF library is the first open-source software that offers a parallel framework for PF applications.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures; will appear in the proceedings of the IET Data Fusion & Target Tracking Conference 201

Developing a discourse in fashion design : what is research for fashion design?

The concept of fashion has attracted a great deal of interest from a variety of academic disciplines such as history, culture, anthropology, sociology, psychology and semiotics to name a few. This has often resulted in tension between different approaches. At a conference held in England in 2009 concerning the future of fashion studies, a number of fashion scholars such Rebecca Arnold, Christopher Breward, Professor Stella Bruzzi and many others, deliberated on the methodologies and research agendas that have emerged in the growing research area of fashion studies. It was noted that although fashion studies has gained momentum over the last decade as an interdisciplinary field of research, fashion as an academic subject has remained weak. Research activities in the field of fashion studies include the contribution of authors from other fields of study that preserve their own disciplinary identities (Riello & McNeil 2010:7). In order to develop the area of fashion studies as an interdisciplinary field of study that is acknowledge by the academy, McNeil (2010) notes that key areas of concern need to be addressed. These areas include the development of research that combines theory and history with the development of material products resulting in a methodological richness. This poses a challenge for the development of fashion studies as a research area as students are required to have practical experience in the skills required in making a product as well as an understanding of historical and theoretical practices that encompass fashion as a broad and complex social phenomenon. In order to achieve this, an opportunity arises for fashion design education in South Africa to engage in a discourse that promotes research that emphasises issues of materiality combined with theoretical and historical constructs. Recent research activity in the department on masters and PhD level has emphasised the above. This paper is a discussion document by two lecturers from the department of Fashion Design, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, on the future and development of fashion design studies and suggests that design thinking provides an important basis on which further discussions on fashion design education may be pursued

Structural and functional characterization of a cold-adapted stand-alone TPM domain reveals a relationship between dynamics and phosphatase activity

The TPM domain constitutes a family of recently characterized protein domains that are present in most living organisms. Although some progress has been made in understanding the cellular role of TPM-containing proteins, the relationship between structure and function is not clear yet. We have recently solved the solution and crystal structure of one TPM domain (BA42) from the Antarctic bacterium Bizionia argentinensis. In this work, we demonstrate that BA42 has phosphoric-monoester hydrolase activity. The activity of BA42 is strictly dependent on the binding of divalent metals and retains nearly 70% of the maximum at 4 °C, a typical characteristic of cold-adapted enzymes. From HSQC, 15 N relaxation measurements, and molecular dynamics studies, we determine that the flexibility of the crossing loops was associated to the protein activity. Thermal unfolding experiments showed that the local increment in flexibility of Mg2+ -bound BA42, when compared with Ca2+ -bound BA42, is associated to a decrease in global protein stability. Finally, through mutagenesis experiments, we unambiguously demonstrate that the region comprising the metal-binding site participates in the catalytic mechanism. The results shown here contribute to the understanding of the relationship between structure and function of this new family of TPM domains providing important cues on the regulatory role of Mg2+ and Ca2+ and the molecular mechanism underlying enzyme activity at low temperatures.Fil: Pellizza, Leonardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Smal, Clara. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Ithuralde, Raúl Esteban. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Turjanski, Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Química Biológica de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Cicero, Daniel Oscar. Universita Tor Vergata; Italia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Aran, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires. Fundación Instituto Leloir. Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Psychological Peculiarities of the Conceptual Activity Model of the Future Informatics Lecturer Formation as One of the Projecting Stages

Статтю присвячено проблемі дослідження проектування концептуальної моделі діяльності викладача інформатики. Розглянуто поняття: «проектування», «моделювання», «концептуальна модель». Побудовано схему концептуальної моделі професійної діяльності майбутнього викладача інформатики, яка складається із сукупності оперативних образів. The article is devoted to the problem of projecting investigation of the conceptual activity model of informatics lecturer. The concepts «projecting», «modeling», «conceptual model» are reviewed. The scheme of the conceptual model of the future informatics lecturer’s professional activity, which consists of efficient images totality, is formed