Jean Vacher interview on 12 April 2011

Craft objects offer an excellent opportunity to study the transfer or recreation of memory through artefacts. For this exhibition curators Tessa Peters and Janice West invited artists Masie Broadhead, Steve Dixon, Laura Potter and Elaine Wilson to produce work in response to the Crafts Study Centre collections. The interview by Janice West explored Jean’s thoughts, as curator of the Crafts Study Centre Collections in relation to the meaning of working with archives and collections. She described what drew her to this type of work and some of the challenges that it presented. Jean was invited to select a group of exhibits for ‘Memoranda’ and to explain her reasons for doing so. The selection included textiles from the Balkan countries with associated archives, and centred on the significance of material culture in informing, and inspiring us to learn about other civilisations, and connecting to memories associated with travel

Bernard Leach: graphic artist

Bernard Leach was one of the first, great, donors to the emerging Crafts Study Centre. He donated a substantial body of his own ceramics, including rare early pieces; he also gifted his personal study collection of Oriental ceramics and early English pottery (inspirational pots 'that gave me joy'). His archive of prolific writings, diaries, photographs and extensive correspondence is an unrivalled source for research and study and is called on by scholars internationally. More recently, gifts have been made of new personal papers as well as the etching plates that Leach worked on between 1907-8 as a student and then in Japan until 1920. These etching plates remind us that Leach began his career intending to be a fine artist. Whilst he produced etchings in Japan during his first creative steps, he remained committed to drawing throughout his life and his skill as a painter of pots remains one of his distinguishing attributes. This new exhibition brings together archives. etchings and drawings together with his early ceramics to present a rounded portrait of an eminent artist discovering a life-long interest in and aptitude for ceramics, set in the context of his first love of drawing. The exhibition has been curated by Jean Vacher, Collections Manager of the Crafts Study Centre. Many of these etchings have rarely been seen in the museum environment, and the project, generously supported by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, is intended to stimulate a wider understanding of Leach's output as an etcher, and possibly to bring new etchings to light. The project is published in partnership with The Leach Pottery, St Ives

Acoustic damping in Li2_2O-2B2_2O3_3 glass observed by inelastic x-ray and optical Brillouin scattering

The dynamic structure factor of lithium-diborate glass has been measured at several values of the momentum transfer $Q$ using high resolution inelastic x-ray scattering. Much attention has been devoted to the low $Q$-range, below the observed Ioffe-Regel crossover \qco{}$\simeq$ 2.1 nm$^{-1}$. We find that below \qco{}, the linewidth of longitudinal acoustic waves increases with a high power of either $Q$, or of the frequency $\Omega$, up to the crossover frequency \OMco{} $\simeq$ 9 meV that nearly coincides with the center of the boson peak. This new finding strongly supports the view that resonance and hybridization of acoustic waves with a distribution of rather local low frequency modes forming the boson peak is responsible for the end of acoustic branches in strong glasses. Further, we present high resolution Brillouin light-scattering data obtained at much lower frequencies on the same sample. These clearly rule out a simple $\Omega^2$-dependence of the acoustic damping over the entire frequency range.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the proceedings of IDMRCS 2005, Lille, Franc

The Crafts Study Centre

The Crafts Study Centre is a specialist university museum open free to the public as well as a research centre of the University for the Creative Arts. The Centre's acclaimed collections include modern and contemporary calligraphy, ceramics, textiles, furniture and wood as well as makers' diaries, working notes and photographs dating from the 1920s. Inspiring exhibitions and gallery talks by leading artist-makers are held year round in our two galleries. We foster scholarship and writing about modern and contemporary craft through this website and publishing new books and monographs. We also host one academic symposium a year. The Centre's research library is available by appointment for those interested in learning more about our collections

Banking Sector Integration and Competition in CEMAC

This paper considers the extent of retail banking integration in the Communauté Economique et Monétaire d'Afrique Centrale (CEMAC) and the level of bank competition at the regional level. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative indicators, the paper finds some evidence of price convergence in average interest rate spreads. However, this observed fact is not supported by an increase in cross-border flows in retail loans and deposits, and price convergence may merely reflect excess liquidity in the region. Other data also indicate that bank competition within the CEMAC as a region is limited, complementing the findings on integration. Addressing shortfalls in legal and regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, and markets would facilitate integration.Central African Economic and Monetary Community; Banks; Competition; Bank soundness; Financial soundness indicators; Monetary unions; Economic cooperation; CEMAC

Uncovering latent structure in valued graphs: A variational approach

As more and more network-structured data sets are available, the statistical analysis of valued graphs has become common place. Looking for a latent structure is one of the many strategies used to better understand the behavior of a network. Several methods already exist for the binary case. We present a model-based strategy to uncover groups of nodes in valued graphs. This framework can be used for a wide span of parametric random graphs models and allows to include covariates. Variational tools allow us to achieve approximate maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of these models. We provide a simulation study showing that our estimation method performs well over a broad range of situations. We apply this method to analyze host--parasite interaction networks in forest ecosystems.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS361 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Society’s Influence on Gender Roles

The Civil War was a time of hardship for everyone regardless of gender. Louisa May Alcott and Stephen Crane embody the spirit and mood of the Civil War through their novels and the use of the gender lens.Through the protagonist of the novels we see the influence war has on their state of mind and on their home and social life. The novels Little Women and The Red Badge of Courage capture the essence of the Civil War era. Louisa Alcott and Stephen Crane reflect their own experiences and thoughts through their character\u27s mindset, personality and hardships. Gender roles and family values go hand in hand with the home and societal atmosphere in shaping the characters through the novels and altering their personalities and state of mind

A Twenty-Year Look at “Computational Geology,” an Evolving, In-Discipline Course in Quantitative Literacy at the University of South Florida

Since 1996, the Geology (GLY) program at the USF has offered “Computational Geology” as part of its commitment to prepare undergraduate majors for the quantitative aspects of their field. The course focuses on geological-mathematical problem solving. Over its twenty years, the course has evolved from a GATC (geometry-algebra-trigonometry-calculus) in-discipline capstone to a quantitative literacy (QL) course taught within a natural science major. With the formation of the new School of Geosciences in 2013, the merging departments re-examined their various curricular programs. An online survey of the Geology Alumni Society found that “express quantitative evidence in support of an argument” was more favorably viewed as a workplace skill (4th out of 69) than algebra (51st), trig (55th) and calculus 1 and 2 (59th and 60th). In that context, we decided to find out from successful alumni, “What did you get out of Computational Geology?” To that end, the first author carried out a formal, qualitative research study (narrative inquiry protocol), whereby he conducted, recorded, and transcribed semi-structured interviews of ten alumni selected from a list of 20 provided by the second author. In response to “Tell me what you remember from the course,” multiple alumni volunteered nine items: Excel (10 out of 10), Excel modules (8), Polya problem solving (5), “important” (4), unit conversions (4), back-of-the-envelope calculations (4), gender equality (3). In response to “Is there anything from the course that you used professionally or personally since graduating?” multiple alumni volunteered seven items: Excel (9 out of 10), QL/thinking (6), unit conversions (5), statistics (5), Excel modules (3), their notes (2). Outcome analysis from the open-ended comments arising from structured questions led to the identification of alumni takeaways in terms of elements of three values: (1) understanding and knowledge (facts such as conversion factors, and concepts such as proportions and log scales); (2) abilities and skills (communication, Excel, unit conversions); and (3) traits and dispositions (problem solving, confidence, and QL itself). The overriding conclusion of this case study is that QL education can have a place in geoscience education where the so-called context of the QL is interesting because it is in the students’ home major, and that such a course can be tailored to any level of program prerequisites

Biologically Inspired Dynamic Textures for Probing Motion Perception

Perception is often described as a predictive process based on an optimal inference with respect to a generative model. We study here the principled construction of a generative model specifically crafted to probe motion perception. In that context, we first provide an axiomatic, biologically-driven derivation of the model. This model synthesizes random dynamic textures which are defined by stationary Gaussian distributions obtained by the random aggregation of warped patterns. Importantly, we show that this model can equivalently be described as a stochastic partial differential equation. Using this characterization of motion in images, it allows us to recast motion-energy models into a principled Bayesian inference framework. Finally, we apply these textures in order to psychophysically probe speed perception in humans. In this framework, while the likelihood is derived from the generative model, the prior is estimated from the observed results and accounts for the perceptual bias in a principled fashion.Comment: Twenty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Dec 2015, Montreal, Canad