An Evening on Mars

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-246
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller

Chapter 35 begins with the Red Planet success of Pathfinder and the Mars rover Sojourner, and continues with Bradbury’s hosting of NASA’s 1998 Thomas O. Paine Memorial Award ceremony under the title “Witness & Celebrate: An Evening on Mars with Ray Bradbury.” Distinguished film actors, including Nichelle Nichols, John Rhys-Davies, and Charlton Heston, read from ten Bradbury works. The chapter also discusses “The Affluence of Despair,” Bradbury’s Jeremiad against America’s obsession with self-performance and extreme media reporting, which he likened to the world he had tried to prevent in Fahrenheit 451. The chapter closes with an analysis of Bradbury’s love for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, and what this love reveals about his ability to fend off the worst effects of fame.

2019 ◽  

The article is focused on the study of the sensual and conceptual component of the conceptual binary opposition human being – technology in Ray Bradbury’s works. The relevance of the research is based on the constant interest of the scientists in the study of binary opposition. The duality of world perception results in writers’ (including Ray Bradbury ) using binary oppositions as a means of conveying their own attitude to the spiritual values on mankind and the very sense of the world. The research identifies the theoretical prerequisites for the duality of human perception; reveals the methodology of frame analysis of concepts as members of binary oppositions; investigates the characteristics of concepts human being and technology as oppositions in Ray Bradbury’s works. The study shows that binary oppositions in the fictional text are preconditioned by the very nature of fiction. Binary oppositions in the fictional text have sensual and conceptual content, thus, the analysis of binary oppositions in the works of a writer gives the opportunity to identify the peculiarities of the writer’s worldview and to understand it in a more profound way. Binary oppositions are realized in the form of opposition of concepts as basic units of the cognitive code of humans with a relatively ordered internal structure. The study of concepts is carried out through the construction of frames as a means of generalized visual concept scheme. It is based and modeled on the relevant sources, collected in a single system of research and illustrative resources, and their graphical representation. This gives the possibility to identify the components of each concept and to analyze the parameters which the author considers to oppose the concepts. It is revealed that the binary opposition human being – technology in Ray Bradbury’s works is represented as an opposition of the key slots of these concept. Thus, it can be considered as a direct opposition of such slots as: animate – inanimate on the basis of functioning; feeling – insensibility on the basis of emotional capability of the world perception; interest – staticity on the basis of the cognitive abilities, and creativity – predation on the basis of the principle aim of a human being and technology.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Gidevaldo Novais Dos Santos

A Ciência da Computação é uma área de conhecimento que pode transitar com desenvoltura em muitas outras áreas, apresentando aplicações diversas para utilização no cotidiano de todos. As aplicações computacionais ficaram muito mais evidentes em um momento quando muitas pessoas precisaram ficar em casa, em meio a uma crise sanitária, numa tentativa de realizar trabalhos de forma remota, fazendo uso de interfaces que deveriam dar conta da interação humana e também da conexão, transmissão e compartilhamento de dados e/ou informações – estas pessoas eram, em sua maioria, trabalhadoras que lidavam/lidam com a informação e o conhecimento. Neste período também foi evidenciado que há necessidade também de confiabilidade no que é produzido e compartilhado, tendo por origem as respeitadas instituições que produzem conhecimento – as Universidades e os institutos de pesquisa. Em um período que o conhecimento, bem como aqueles que os produzem, sofrem ataques diversos, criando dúvidas onde a ciência já produziu sólidas pesquisas e testes confiáveis, é necessário reafirmar que mantemos a confiança na ciência, nos pesquisadores sérios, responsáveis e comprometidos com a divulgação de conhecimento que ajude as pessoas em diversas instâncias de atuação, para que não tenhamos a impressão de vivermos uma distopia como a que lemos em Fahrenheit 451, de Ray Bradbury. A comunicação em meio digital é, sem dúvida a grande protagonista nesse período da pandemia de covid-19 e neste sentido, a computação continua a transitar pelas diversas áreas de conhecimento, seja contribuindo para a infraestrutura onde serão realizados os trabalhos no formato remoto, seja na interface em que permitirá o uso dessa infraestrutura. Esta é uma edição com apenas 4 (quatro) artigos e que apresentam temas e objetos diversos de estudos, mas marcando a presença digital de mais uma edição da nossa ReCiC. O primeiro artigo desta edição, intitulado “Análise de metadados para inferência da qualidade de artigos da Wikipédia”, de autoria dos pesquisadores Rodrigo S. Nürmberg e Arlindo Amaral Neto, apresenta um estudo realizado a partir do uso de metadados de conteúdos da web, mais especificamente dos textos da Wikipédia, com o objetivo de inferir automaticamente sobre a qualidade destes, a partir de determinados critérios. O segundo artigo, com o título “Linear programming problems in High School using GeoGebra”, escrito por Gonçalo Cerqueira, Velton Pires e Daniel Campos, trazem um conteúdo matemático aplicado por meio de uma interface computacional, criando condições para um melhor entendimento da aplicabilidade da matemática para melhor compreensão de seu conteúdo na educação básica, no Ensino Médio. Já o terceiro artigo, cujo título é “Um sistema de baixo custo para redes inteligentes de transporte público”, traz os resultados do trabalho dos pesquisadores Marlos Marques, Cassio Silva e Jorge Correia que aborda um uso das tecnologias digitais móveis para prover informações úteis aos utilizadores dos serviços de transporte público. E fechando esta edição, o artigo dos pesquisadores da University of Yaounde I (Camarões), C. Nkuimi-Jugnia e P. Pankiti, intitulado “Finitary ideals of direct products in quantales”, aborda uma discussão teórica dentro da Matemática Discreta que embasa teoricamente a Computação, mais detidamente sobre algumas estruturas algébricas parcialmente ordenadas. Os temas abordados são diversos e como a computação, seja como ciência ou como técnica, aplicáveis em nossa realidade de estudos, também diversos. Deixo aqui um agradecimento a todos que contribuíram para que este conteúdo pudesse ser publicado. Uma boa leitura a toda a gente.   Gidevaldo Novais dos Santos Editor-Chefe da ReCiC  


Author(s):  
Marina Grakholskaya

The interaction of multi-aspect and multi-level features as well as their relationshas been the subject of a number of studies in the field of quantitative linguistics. However, these studies were conducted mainly on language material. It is interesting to apply a similar analysis aimed at establishing the ratio of the parameters characterizing one of the linguistic levels to the speech. For example, this article discusses the phonetic features of the verbs used in the novel «Fahrenheit 451» by Ray Bradbury. Each of the verbs is assigned a number of phonetic characteristics (syllabic, accent, phonological ones). The relations of the declared parameters at the phonetic level are revealed due to the application of statistical methods, viz. Cole’scorrelation coefficient and Jaccard’ssimilarity coefficient. The obtained data are compared with the corresponding parameters of high-frequency verbal vocabulary. As a result, it is noted that the verbs appearing in the novel, have their own characteristics in the space of phonetic features and it also shows their level of similarity with highfrequency lexical units in connection with the ratio of phonetic characteristics.


Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller

This chapter reflects on Ray Bradbury's career, describing him as a writer who never really fit the genres he was assigned to. It begins with a discussion of Fahrenheit 451, a novel that illustrates how the ideas in Bradbury's science fiction, often dark and occasionally hopeful, had become cautionary. For Bradbury, the future danger was not technology, but the humans who will control it. The nuclear war that closes both “The Fireman” and Fahrenheit 451 ran parallel to a number of mid-century Bradbury stories, such as “The Last Night of the World” and the last four tales in The Martian Chronicles. This chapter also considers Bradbury's strengths and shortcomings as a creative writer, one who could not resist the temptation of playing the storyteller with details of his own life, but also absolutely true to his public convictions; his desire to be true to his Muse, to write for himself with little regard for outside pressures, has been a constant hallmark of his writing career.


2020 ◽  
pp. 306-310
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller

Chapter 45 concludes Bradbury Beyond Apollo with an assessment of his legacy, prefaced by an account of the memorial to Bradbury staged by the Planetary Society as the Mars rover Curiosity landed in early August 2012. Chapter 45 wraps up the three-volume biography with a summary of the well-known early story collections and novels that anchor Bradbury’s twenty-first century reputation, and a parallel summation of the important achievements of the last forty years of his career. These include The Halloween Tree’s affirmation of life over death, the six-year run of Ray Bradbury Theater, the role of “The Toynbee Convector” as Bradbury’s settled view on human endeavor, his visionary but sometimes controversial articles, and his delicate but compelling Somewhere a Band Is Playing.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-622 ◽  

The year 2011 saw unprecedented waves of people occupying key locations around the world in a statement of public discontent. In Egypt, the protests which took place between 25 January and 11 February 2011 culminating in the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have now come to be known as the Egyptian Revolution. Media reporting of the revolution often portrayed it as a ‘spectacle’ playing out on the stage of Tahrir Square which was dubbed ‘the symbolic heart of the Egyptian revolution’. Tahrir Square quickly became a space serving various functions and layered with an array of meanings. This paper explores the relationship between the discourse of protest messages and the space of Tahrir Square during the January 25 revolution, demonstrating how the two were mutually reinforcing. The messages are drawn from a corpus of approximately 2000 protest messages captured in Tahrir Square between 25 January and 11 February 2011. The analysis is presented in the form of six conceptualising frames for the space of Tahrir Square which take into account both its geographical and social context. The conceptualisation draws from the field of geosemiotics, which posits that all discourses are ‘situated’ both in space and time (Scollon & Scollon 2003), and on the Lefebvrian principles of the production of space which provide a useful framework for interpreting urban space (Lefebvre 1991). Keywords: Linguistic landscapes; geosemiotics; discourse and space; Tahrir Square; January 25 revolution


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