Saved by Dissections. The Popularity of Jigsaw Puzzles in Times of Calm and of Crisis. Are Librarians Dissectologists and What Might We Learn from the Bigger Picture?

AbstractIn the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.

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Unexpectedness

Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies ◽

10.15367/kf.v6i1.235 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

Author(s):

John-Carlos Perea ◽

Jacob E. Perea

Keyword(s):

American Indian ◽

San Francisco ◽

Interdisciplinary Research ◽

Ethnic Studies ◽

College Of Education ◽

Present Moment ◽

State University ◽

Research Projects ◽

Short Survey ◽

Wide Range

The concepts of expectation, anomaly, and unexpectedness that Philip J. Deloria developed in Indians in Unexpected Places (2004) have shaped a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects. In the process, those terms have changed the ways it is possible to think about American Indian representation, cosmopolitanism, and agency. This article revisits my own work in this area and provides a short survey of related scholarship in order to reassess the concept of unexpectedness in the present moment and to consider the ways my deployment of it might change in order to better meet the needs of my students. To begin a process of engaging intergenerational perspectives on this subject, the article concludes with an interview with Dr. Jacob E. Perea, dean emeritus of the Graduate College of Education at San Francisco State University and a veteran of the 1969 student strikes that founded the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

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Dehn Functions

Office Hours with a Geometric Group Theorist ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691158662.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Timothy Riley

Keyword(s):

Word Problem ◽

Riemannian Manifolds ◽

Isoperimetric Problem ◽

Complexity Measure ◽

Research Projects ◽

Dehn Function ◽

Continuous Version ◽

Dehn Functions ◽

Jigsaw Puzzles ◽

Combinatorial Space

This chapter is concerned with Dehn functions. It begins by presenting jigsaw puzzles that are somewhat different from the conventional kind and explains how to solve them. It then considers a complexity measure for the word problem and shows that, for a word w, the problem of finding a sequence of free reductions, free expansions, and applications of defining relators that carries it to the empty word is equivalent to solving the puzzle where, starting from some vertex υ‎, one reads w around the initial circle of rods. The chapter also explains how the Dehn function corresponds to an isoperimetric problem in a combinatorial space, the Cayley 2-complex, and describes a continuous version of this, via group actions, along with the isoperimetry in Riemannian manifolds. Finally, it defines the Dehn function as a quasi-isometry invariant. The discussion includes exercises and research projects.

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