Localising urbanism

<p>This research began as a personal dissatisfaction with how the notion of indeterminacy very commonly gets used in contemporary landscape architectural design discourse and practice, most strongly associated with but not limited to what gets termed ‘landscape urbanism’. The dominant use of this notion is associated with design preoccupations such as change over time, bodily movement, the inability to predict, allowing for change and ecological growth or succession - and uses of representation related to these ideas. Peter Connolly has termed this conception the ‘abstract’ notion of indeterminacy. This notion was inspired by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, however Connolly’s examination of the literature, and my field studies and design investigations point to an alternative version, a ‘concrete’ notion of indeterminacy¹ as being more relevant to designers. The abstract version will only ever be indirectly relevant to the human involvement in landscape. The ‘concrete’ is affectual and intensive and is directly relevant to human spatiality and life. Instead of change in space or over time, the concrete version is, in contrast, about the liveliness and shiftiness of affect (the shiftiness of affects / affordances, / propensities / capabilities…)—the shiftiness of powers. This research attempts to move beyond the attractive ambiguity and confusion associated with the abstract version and engage with the concrete ‘indeterminacy-of-affect’ by focusing on a very restricted realm of small urban spaces, which might be considered incidental spaces, in Wellington city. Through this intentionally limited attempt to directly engage with concrete indeterminacy there emerged, a way to engage with a type of localness associated with these spaces. This process has involved the development of aesthetic and representational techniques and it is suggested that this work is not just relevant to the question of indeterminacy and the local, but is very relevant to the newly emergent interest by landscape architects in design aesthetics².</p>

Localising urbanism

<p>This research began as a personal dissatisfaction with how the notion of indeterminacy very commonly gets used in contemporary landscape architectural design discourse and practice, most strongly associated with but not limited to what gets termed ‘landscape urbanism’. The dominant use of this notion is associated with design preoccupations such as change over time, bodily movement, the inability to predict, allowing for change and ecological growth or succession - and uses of representation related to these ideas. Peter Connolly has termed this conception the ‘abstract’ notion of indeterminacy. This notion was inspired by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, however Connolly’s examination of the literature, and my field studies and design investigations point to an alternative version, a ‘concrete’ notion of indeterminacy¹ as being more relevant to designers. The abstract version will only ever be indirectly relevant to the human involvement in landscape. The ‘concrete’ is affectual and intensive and is directly relevant to human spatiality and life. Instead of change in space or over time, the concrete version is, in contrast, about the liveliness and shiftiness of affect (the shiftiness of affects / affordances, / propensities / capabilities…)—the shiftiness of powers. This research attempts to move beyond the attractive ambiguity and confusion associated with the abstract version and engage with the concrete ‘indeterminacy-of-affect’ by focusing on a very restricted realm of small urban spaces, which might be considered incidental spaces, in Wellington city. Through this intentionally limited attempt to directly engage with concrete indeterminacy there emerged, a way to engage with a type of localness associated with these spaces. This process has involved the development of aesthetic and representational techniques and it is suggested that this work is not just relevant to the question of indeterminacy and the local, but is very relevant to the newly emergent interest by landscape architects in design aesthetics².</p>

Shakespeare's ‘Lady Editors'

The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men – most of them white and financially privileged – ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations. What if this is not the whole story? A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that taking these women's work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history.

Recontextualizing Barstool Sports and Misogyny in Online US Sports Media

This critical qualitative case study interrogates the roles Barstool Sports and its founder, Dave Portnoy, serve in reaffirming the narrative power of conservative cultural ideology in mainstream US sports media. Portnoy’s targeted harassment of female journalists is analyzed as examples of how the outlet alienates critics of heteronormative, hypermasculine discourse within relevant cultural arenas in digital sports media. To examine how the company deflects criticisms of misogyny, we explore Barstool Chicks—an alternative version of the company’s website targeting female audiences. Resultantly, Barstool and Portnoy undermine the potential for feminist-driven narratives in sports media and contribute to the normalization of repressive conditions within cultural industries that perpetuates the continued dominance of conservative ideology.

TRANSCULTURAL ADAPTATION DESIGN OF MONTREAL COGNITIVE ASSESSMENT (MOCA) IN BRAZIL

Introduction: Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is the most common cognitive screening instrument for Mild Cognitive Impairment detection. Although the current Brazilian version (MoCA-BR) has been validated, in clinical practice, it is observed that adults with normal cognitive function, especially those less educated, rarely reaches the maximum score of 30 points on the test. Objective: Introduce a methodology to adjust the Brazilian version according to the Brazilian culture. A cross-se Methods: ctional observational study was conducted with 294 participants. In the Memory section, we used the free listing technique to replace words. In the Naming section, an epidemiological survey of the most pinpointed gures was conducted. Replication of Sentence section was modied based on meetings between researchers and Portuguese teachers uent in English. The alternative version of MoCA-BR was composed by: "az Results: ul" (blue), "braço" (arm), "orquídea" (orchid), "seda" (silk) and “igreja” (church) in Memory Section; giraffe, elephant, and lion in the Naming section; “Eu só sei que é João quem será ajudado hoje” and "O gato sempre se esconde embaixo do sofá quando o cachorro está na sala" in the Replication of Sentence section. Our Conclusions: data reinforce the need to adapt the MoCA-BR. We present an alternative version of MoCA-BR, which contemplates the linguistic and cultural requirements of the transcultural adaptation process. The next step is to apply this version to obtain its validation. We believe that this adaptation may allow a future better applicability of the MoCA-BR, especially in less educated people, without underestimating the scores of cognitively normal individuals

Estimation of Spatial Lag Model Under Random Missing Data in the Dependent Variable. Two Stage Estimator with Imputation

The main goal of this article is to propose estimators for the Spatial Lag Model (SLM) under missing data context. We present three alternatives estimators for the SLM based on Two Stage Least Squares estimation methodology. The estimators are eÿcient within their type and consistent under random missing data in the dependent variable. Unlike the IBG2SLS estimator presented in Wang and Lee (2013) which impute all missing data we only impute missing data in the spatial lag. Our first proposal is an alternative version of the IBG2SLS estimator, the second one is based on an approximation to the optimal instruments matrix and the third one is an alternative equivalent to the first. Thorough a Monte Carlo simulation we assess the estimators performance under finite samples. Results show a good performance for all estimators, moreover, results are quite similar to the IBG2SLS estimator suggesting that a complete imputation (as IBG2SLS does) does not add information.

How Reliable is the Give-a-Number task?

The Give-a-Number task has become a gold standard of children’s number word comprehension and has been increasingly used to organize debate in developmental psychology. In this task, the experimenter asks children to give specific numbers of objects (e.g., 1 to 6), and based on their pattern of responses, children are classified into stages that can be readily related to other developmental milestones. The increasing popularity of Give-a-Number raises the question of how reliable it is, since the size of a correlation between two different tasks cannot reliably exceed the test- retest reliability of either measure taken individually. In Experiment 1, 2- to 4-year-old children were tested twice in a single session with Wynn’s (1992) version of the Give-a- Number task, which features a titrated design. In Experiment 2, we tested a second group of children with an alternative version that uses a larger number of trials in a non-titrated design. We found that in both cases the task was highly reliable in differentiating children who could accurately count from those who could not, but that reliability differed for specific numbers, and was more reliable for very small numbers (i.e., “one” and “two”) than for slightly larger ones (i.e., “three” and “four”). We discuss practical implications of these results for researchers studying numeracy and discuss further directions to assess the validity of the task.

Institutionalisms in Economics: What are Behinds Their Variety?

The institutional approach in economic science arose, as is known, more than a century ago and is now called "the original institutional economics." In the middle of the last century, an alternative version of this approach emerged, called the "new institutional economics". Over the past forty years, in the institutional approach, it has been declared the creation of a significant number of new economic institutionalisms, such as cognitive, critical, monetary, “incomplete”, “new new”, generic, post-institutionalism, post-Keynesian, and legal institutionalisms. This article is devoted to the analysis of the main provisions of the listed above institutionalisms in economics, in order to answer the question whether they are alternatives to the previously created original and new institutional economics, or whether they clarify some details in these basic institutionalisms. The study showed that the most developed part of the institutionalisms that have arisen in recent decades expands the fields and methods of research within either the original institutionalism or the new institutional economics, without suggesting the grounds that would go beyond the foundations of the named "basic" institutionalisms. Based on this, the article concludes that the growth in the number of institutionalisms indicates the development of "basic" institutionalisms, and not that they have exhausted the research opportunities inherent in them.

Selling Authenticity: The Aesthetics of Design Boutiques in Montreal

This chapter considers how the practice of design takes place in a city like Montreal, where it has been widely promoted in the last decade. It focuses on designers who create everyday-life objects and, more specifically, on the visual environment that characterises the design boutiques in Montreal’s Mile End district. It shows that the aesthetics of these spaces are developed around a set of values, namely authenticity, materiality and hospitality. These aesthetics are crucial to distinguish design products and signal to potential clients that these products belong to an alternative version of the market economy. Yet, the aesthetics of these boutiques contribute to an aesthetics of gentrification, which raise questions about the local culture, the history of the neighbourhood, and its population.

A Mathematical Assessment of the Isolation Random Forest Method for Anomaly Detection in Big Data.

We present the mathematical analysis of the Isolation Random Forest Method (IRF Method) for anomaly detection, introduced in {\sc F.~T. Liu, K.~M. Ting, Z.-H. Zhou:}, {\it Isolation-based anomaly detection}, TKDD 6 (2012) 3:1–3:39. We prove that the IRF space can be endowed with a probability induced by the Isolation Tree algorithm (iTree). In this setting, the convergence of the IRF method is proved, using the Law of Large Numbers. A couple of counterexamples are presented to show that the method is inconclusive and no certificate of quality can be given, when using it as a means to detect anomalies. Hence, an alternative version of the method is proposed whose mathematical foundation is fully justified. Furthermore, a criterion for choosing the number of sampled trees needed to guarantee confidence intervals of the numerical results is presented. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to compare the performance of the classic method with the proposed one.