Cloth & Culture Now

Cloth & Culture Now investigates the links between contemporary textile practice, strong traditional practice and overlapping global influences, offering a framework for the study of contemporary textile practice within a cultural specific, trans-national and cross-cultural context. The exhibition brings together, for the first time, contemporary textile works from Estonia, Finland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania and United Kingdom. Exhibited two works, "The Perfect - Alex" and "The Perfect - Emilie, Annette, Marie, Cecile and Yvonne". The exhibition generated press including extensive previews in ‘Embroidery’ and ‘Textile Forum’ with reviews in ‘Crafts’ and ‘Modern, Carpets and Textiles for Interiors’. At the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester I delivered a public lecture and workshop

Art, academe and the language of knowledge

In this chapter I pursue the effects for knowledge, pedagogy and learning of practice led research in art and design education. I examine how postgraduate students of art, design and museology at the Institute of Education, University of London, explore and critically engage with the implications of art as a situated research practice. In particular, I foreground the complexities and antinomies surrounding methodology when students negotiate the practice of making in a studio context that encourages them to analyse their subject identities as teachers/lecturers, students, artists, academics and researchers. The expectation of academe and the position which language (written, spoken and visual) occupies is central to the formation of these identities, negotiations and dialogues. I will demonstrate, through discussion of work produced by students, that the traditional division between engagements with art making as a ‘sensory experience’ and with reading, writing and research as ‘rational activities’, presents a false dichotomy that needs to be reappraised in the debates surrounding practice-led research and its potential for pedagogy

Algebraic Topology

The chapter provides an introduction to the basic concepts of Algebraic Topology with an emphasis on motivation from applications in the physical sciences. It finishes with a brief review of computational work in algebraic topology, including persistent homology.Comment: This manuscript will be published as Chapter 5 in Wiley's textbook \emph{Mathematical Tools for Physicists}, 2nd edition, edited by Michael Grinfeld from the University of Strathclyd

Semiparametric theory

In this paper we give a brief review of semiparametric theory, using as a running example the common problem of estimating an average causal effect. Semiparametric models allow at least part of the data-generating process to be unspecified and unrestricted, and can often yield robust estimators that nonetheless behave similarly to those based on parametric likelihood assumptions, e.g., fast rates of convergence to normal limiting distributions. We discuss the basics of semiparametric theory, focusing on influence functions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.0474

Estimating the causal effect of a time-varying treatment on time-to-event using structural nested failure time models

In this paper we review an approach to estimating the causal effect of a time-varying treatment on time to some event of interest. This approach is designed for the situation where the treatment may have been repeatedly adapted to patient characteristics, which themselves may also be time-dependent. In this situation the effect of the treatment cannot simply be estimated by conditioning on the patient characteristics, as these may themselves be indicators of the treatment effect. This so-called time-dependent confounding is typical in observational studies. We discuss a new class of failure time models, structural nested failure time models, which can be used to estimate the causal effect of a time-varying treatment, and present methods for estimating and testing the parameters of these models

Study Buddy Tutoring Program: Partnership Leads to Students’ Academic Success

The Study Buddy tutoring program places college students with grade-school students who have been identified by their teacher or principal as struggling in school or unsuccessful in passing the ISTEP test. College students work with the grade-school students for one college semester. At Parkview Elementary School, the program has been particularly successful and standardized test scores have risen significantly. This project\u27s purpose is to record and study the success of the Study Buddy tutoring program at Parkview Elementary both in the classroom and in raising standardized test scores. The research includes both quantitative and qualitative research. The quantitative research is primarily composed of previously collected data (e.g. ISTEP scores) which I have synthesized to examine elements such as the number of students in the program passing the ELA and/or math standardized tests and a comparison of those students\u27 scores throughout their time in the program. The qualitative research has been conducted via focus sessions with the teachers of Parkview Elementary. The transcripts of these focus sessions will be analyzed for potential reasons for the success of the Study Buddy program at Parkview Elementary. These will be compared to associated research and literature written by professionals in the educational field

Information technology: futurism, corporations and the state

The significance of information technology (IT)' lies in the breadth of its potential impact on society: on work, communications, political processes, education and entertainment. It offers not just the possibility, in the current economic crisis, of restructuring work in order to gain greater control over that process the better to increase productivity, but also the possibility of a new cycle of growth in both capital and consumer goods, facilitating the restructuring of modes of consumption and the strengthening and recomposition of capital over patterns of leisure, communication and entertainment

Bounds for solid angles of lattices of rank three

We find sharp absolute constants $C_1$ and $C_2$ with the following property: every well-rounded lattice of rank 3 in a Euclidean space has a minimal basis so that the solid angle spanned by these basis vectors lies in the interval $[C_1,C_2]$. In fact, we show that these absolute bounds hold for a larger class of lattices than just well-rounded, and the upper bound holds for all. We state a technical condition on the lattice that may prevent it from satisfying the absolute lower bound on the solid angle, in which case we derive a lower bound in terms of the ratios of successive minima of the lattice. We use this result to show that among all spherical triangles on the unit sphere in $\mathbb R^N$ with vertices on the minimal vectors of a lattice, the smallest possible area is achieved by a configuration of minimal vectors of the (normalized) face centered cubic lattice in $\mathbb R^3$. Such spherical configurations come up in connection with the kissing number problem.Comment: 12 pages; to appear in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory