Six English novels adapted for the cinema

This study examines the film adaptations of six English novels; Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Tess, Jude, A Room with a View and A Passage to India. Through textual analysis of both the films and the original novels it demonstrates that many of the changes which occur in the transition between media are explicable in terms of differences between film and literary genres. Most previous writing on adaptation has tended to explain such changes as a consequence of film and literature having different signifying or expressive capacities. Whilst this study does not argue that literary styles and devices have necessary or inevitable equivalents in film form, it does propose that filmmakers can find satisfying and comprehensible correlatives for written idioms, and that differences between novels and their adaptations are not therefore always best understood as arising from failures in the mechanics of translation. In its consideration of what each film alters and omits this study finds compelling evidence that they are reshaped in particularly genre-related ways. This takes the form both of alterations that place an adaptation more comfortably in a particular fihn genre than the original story materials might allow, and changes which diminish or elide the operation of a literary genre to which the original novel belongs or relates. Sense and Sensibility, Emma and A Room with a View are discussed in terms of how they become romantic comedies, while the Hardy adaptations are the occasion of most of the original melodrama being omitted. Other genres and modes which pose problems and questions in adaptation - including tragedy, the didactic and the modern - are also examined. Additionally, this study will consider the political contexts and conditions of production of the novels and their adaptations as well as examining the extent to which the films may be said to be authored

Minimal Circuits for Very Incompletely Specified Boolean Functions

In this report, asymptotic upper and lower bounds are given for the minimum number of gates required to compute a function which is only partially specified and for which we allow a certain amount of error. The upper and lower bounds match. Hence, the behavior of these minimum circuit sizes is completely (asymptotically) determined

The Impact of Induction and Mentoring Programs for Beginning Teachers: A Critical Review of the Research

This review critically examines 15 empirical studies, conducted since the mid 1980s, on the effects of support, guidance, and orientation programs— collectively known as induction — for beginning teachers. Most of the studies reviewed provide empirical support for the claim that support and assistance for beginning teachers have a positive impact on three sets of outcomes: teacher commitment and retention, teacher classroom instructional practices, and student achievement. Of the studies on commitment and retention, most showed that beginning teachers who participated in some kind of induction had higher job satisfaction, commitment, or retention. For classroom instructional practices, the majority of studies reviewed showed that beginning teachers who participated in some kind of induction performed better at various aspects of teaching, such as keeping students on task, developing workable lesson plans, using effective student questioning practices, adjusting classroom activities to meet students’ interests, maintaining a positive classroom atmosphere, and demonstrating successful classroom management. For student achievement, almost all of the studies showed that students of beginning teachers who participated in some kind of induction had higher scores, or gains, on academic achievement tests. There were, however, exceptions to this overall pattern – in particular a large randomized controlled trial of induction in a sample of large, urban, low-income schools — which found significant positive effects on student achievement, but no effects on either teacher retention or teachers’ classroom practices. Our review closes by attempting to reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings and also by identifying gaps in the research base, and relevant questions that have not been addressed and warrant further research

Situated Mediation and Technological Reflexivity: Smartphones, Extended Memory, and Limits of Cognitive Enhancement

The situated potentials for action between material things in the world and the interactional processes thereby afforded need to be seen as not only constituting the possibility of agency, but thereby also comprising it. Eo ipso, agency must be de-fused from any local, "contained" subject and be understood as a situational property in which subjects and objects can both participate. Any technological artifact should thus be understood as a complex of agential capacities that function relative to any number of social and material factors. Keeping in mind that we are co-constituted by webs of relations involving increasingly complex collections of artefacts, networks, niches, and communities of practice, our investigation will be guided by interrogating the functional potential of a thing that in the last fifteen years has seamlessly worked its way into the everyday life of millions of human agents. This "thing," the smartphone, is merely a nodal point in a highly complex network. Recognizing this massive "collective," we nevertheless want to show some of the ways in which something as seemingly mundane as a smartphone can reflexively alter the range of actions available to a cognitive agent (Latour 1994). Specifically, we hope to shed light on some of the social-cognitive consequences of technological mediation by looking at the complementary, if not mutually implied, domains of memory and knowledge

Strongly Refuting Random CSPs Below the Spectral Threshold

Random constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are known to exhibit threshold phenomena: given a uniformly random instance of a CSP with $n$ variables and $m$ clauses, there is a value of $m = \Omega(n)$ beyond which the CSP will be unsatisfiable with high probability. Strong refutation is the problem of certifying that no variable assignment satisfies more than a constant fraction of clauses; this is the natural algorithmic problem in the unsatisfiable regime (when $m/n = \omega(1)$). Intuitively, strong refutation should become easier as the clause density $m/n$ grows, because the contradictions introduced by the random clauses become more locally apparent. For CSPs such as $k$-SAT and $k$-XOR, there is a long-standing gap between the clause density at which efficient strong refutation algorithms are known, $m/n \ge \widetilde O(n^{k/2-1})$, and the clause density at which instances become unsatisfiable with high probability, $m/n = \omega (1)$. In this paper, we give spectral and sum-of-squares algorithms for strongly refuting random $k$-XOR instances with clause density $m/n \ge \widetilde O(n^{(k/2-1)(1-\delta)})$ in time $\exp(\widetilde O(n^{\delta}))$ or in $\widetilde O(n^{\delta})$ rounds of the sum-of-squares hierarchy, for any $\delta \in [0,1)$ and any integer $k \ge 3$. Our algorithms provide a smooth transition between the clause density at which polynomial-time algorithms are known at $\delta = 0$, and brute-force refutation at the satisfiability threshold when $\delta = 1$. We also leverage our $k$-XOR results to obtain strong refutation algorithms for SAT (or any other Boolean CSP) at similar clause densities. Our algorithms match the known sum-of-squares lower bounds due to Grigoriev and Schonebeck, up to logarithmic factors. Additionally, we extend our techniques to give new results for certifying upper bounds on the injective tensor norm of random tensors

Dimensions of Motion: Monocular Prediction through Flow Subspaces

We introduce a way to learn to estimate a scene representation from a single image by predicting a low-dimensional subspace of optical flow for each training example, which encompasses the variety of possible camera and object movement. Supervision is provided by a novel loss which measures the distance between this predicted flow subspace and an observed optical flow. This provides a new approach to learning scene representation tasks, such as monocular depth prediction or instance segmentation, in an unsupervised fashion using in-the-wild input videos without requiring camera poses, intrinsics, or an explicit multi-view stereo step. We evaluate our method in multiple settings, including an indoor depth prediction task where it achieves comparable performance to recent methods trained with more supervision.Comment: Project page at https://dimensions-of-motion.github.io

Motions in Motion: Teaching Advanced Legal Writing Through Collaboration

Legal education is at a crossroads. Practitioners, academics, and students agree that more experiential learning opportunities are needed in law school. In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report), called for law schools to provide apprentice experiences to better prepare prospective attorneys for the world of practice. That same year, the Best Practices in Legal Education advocated for “experiential education” and “encourage[d] law school[s] to expand its use.” More recently, in August 2011, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution sponsored by the New York Bar Association summoning law schools to “focus on making future lawyers practice ready.” This move was followed by the front-page New York Times article provocatively entitled What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering which criticized legal education for failing to provide students with “much practical training.” Many efforts are underway to create a learning environment in law school that will better prepare graduates for the practice of law. Not surprisingly, legal writing professors have led the way in designing courses to make students more practice-ready. One approach involves creating a course that replicates the law firm setting, so that students better understand what it is like to be a junior associate. Another approach involves legal writing professors collaborating with casebook or clinical professors. At our law school, upper level writing courses present an opportunity for legal writing professors to engage in experiential learning. With extensive experience in the civil litigation context, both in front of and behind the bench, we created a “trio” of upper level legal writing classes that simulate the three stages of motion practice: motion, opposition, and ruling. We collaborated to link three separate writing classes into an integrated course that requires students to step into the role either of counsel or judge and interact with one another on a professional level. \This article summarizes how we coordinated our trio of classes to create a simulated litigation experience. We first describe our various goals in designing such a course. We then explain the practical considerations involved in creating and coordinating the trio of classes, each of which assumes a different role in the litigation process. Finally, we assess the success of the course design, using both our self-evaluation as teachers and our students’ feedback

Motions In Motion: Teaching Advanced Legal Writing Through Collaboration

Legal education is at a crossroads. Practitioners, academics, and students agree that more experiential learning opportunities are needed in law school. In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report), called for law schools to provide apprentice experiences to better prepare prospective attorneys for the world of practice. That same year, the Best Practices in Legal Education advocated for “experiential education” and “encourage[d] law school[s] to expand its use.” More recently, in August 2011, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution sponsored by the New York Bar Association summoning law schools to “focus on making future lawyers practice ready.” This move was followed by the front-page New York Times article provocatively entitled What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering which criticized legal education for failing to provide students with “much practical training.” Many efforts are underway to create a learning environment in law school that will better prepare graduates for the practice of law. Not surprisingly, legal writing professors have led the way in designing courses to make students more practice-ready. One approach involves creating a course that replicates the law firm setting, so that students better understand what it is like to be a junior associate. Another approach involves legal writing professors collaborating with casebook or clinical professors. At our law school, upper level writing courses present an opportunity for legal writing professors to engage in experiential learning. With extensive experience in the civil litigation context, both in front of and behind the bench, we created a “trio” of upper level legal writing classes that simulate the three stages of motion practice: motion, opposition, and ruling. We collaborated to link three separate writing classes into an integrated course that requires students to step into the role either of counsel or judge and interact with one another on a professional level. This article summarizes how we coordinated our trio of classes to create a simulated litigation experience. We first describe our various goals in designing such a course. We then explain the practical considerations involved in creating and coordinating the trio of classes, each of which assumes a different role in the litigation process. Finally, we assess the success of the course design, using both our self-evaluation as teachers and our students’ feedback

The Joy of Collaboration: Reflections on Teaching with Others

Three legal writing professors who have worked collaboratively for several years describe why their experience collaborating with one another worked so well. In particular, this essay outlines the many personal benefits that can be experienced as part of a collaborative process. This essay also describes several benefits that students and law schools can experience. For those interested in collaborating with others, the essay concludes with some useful tips