Space for Place

<p><b>The consequence of homogenised place is becoming a growing concern across New Zealand’s built environment (Najafi, 2011). In a time where placelessness, sameness and architectural standardization threaten the concept of spatial identity, there is an opportunity to research further into how we can design to maintain cultural and spatial differentiation within New Zealand’s cities.</b></p> <p>Wellington City is New Zealand’s capital, it is an old city with copious layers of topographic and environmental depth. With the harbour water and undulating terrain greatly contributing to the city’s identity, the somewhat disenfranchised population that occupy Wellingtons Streets are lacking this connection to place. This research is looking to defend the notion of a bounded place through reinterpreting our architectural identity. This research searches for continuity in the face of change, where takings from the environment’s past and present will come together to create one unified future identity.</p> <p>This thesis investigates design opportunities within Wellington’s Civic square, design explorations and interventions seek to encourage and foster a rich sense of attachment to place. Architectural qualities are used as tools, with which to think through and create connections around which people actively create identities. The final design outcome aims to facilitate discussion of those qualities of public space that encourage and sustain concern for Wellington’s social identity and its contribution to a sense of place.</p>

Space for Place

<p><b>The consequence of homogenised place is becoming a growing concern across New Zealand’s built environment (Najafi, 2011). In a time where placelessness, sameness and architectural standardization threaten the concept of spatial identity, there is an opportunity to research further into how we can design to maintain cultural and spatial differentiation within New Zealand’s cities.</b></p> <p>Wellington City is New Zealand’s capital, it is an old city with copious layers of topographic and environmental depth. With the harbour water and undulating terrain greatly contributing to the city’s identity, the somewhat disenfranchised population that occupy Wellingtons Streets are lacking this connection to place. This research is looking to defend the notion of a bounded place through reinterpreting our architectural identity. This research searches for continuity in the face of change, where takings from the environment’s past and present will come together to create one unified future identity.</p> <p>This thesis investigates design opportunities within Wellington’s Civic square, design explorations and interventions seek to encourage and foster a rich sense of attachment to place. Architectural qualities are used as tools, with which to think through and create connections around which people actively create identities. The final design outcome aims to facilitate discussion of those qualities of public space that encourage and sustain concern for Wellington’s social identity and its contribution to a sense of place.</p>

Tales of Trauma: The Return of the Past in Sue Grafton's Novels

This study approaches Sue Grafton's ‘Alphabet Series’ with attention to the concept of trauma and the repetition it entails. Trauma is linked to the past but the symptoms manifest themselves, repeatedly, in the present. The focus here is on the effects of this dynamic link between past and present for the detective, Kinsey Millhone, and selected characters, including serial killer Ned Lowe, the series’ final villain. At a novel's end, a reader closes the book, but endings and closure are not the same thing. Repetition is a powerful force pressing for continuation, moving to overcome closure, which takes two key, interwoven forms in Grafton's novels: seriality and trauma. Seriality features in the sequence of twenty-five Kinsey Millhone novels produced over time, as well as in the actions of a serial killer who bridges the gap between the series’ two final novels. Trauma is an expression of past pain or injury that manifests in the present, repeating the past experience in ways that unconsciously recreate the pain. Trauma is a deep-seated facet of Millhone's sense of identity, as well as a sign of the influence of crime and tragedy in the lives of many characters. This essay explores how seriality and trauma in the novels combine to create a rich sense of a past that is both always present and always under construction.

Experimentation, Innovation, and Economics

The experimental method not only helps identify causal relationships, but also provides economists with a rich sense of context, focuses research on specific practical questions, stimulates collaboration with practitioners and specialists from other fields, and allows for rapid iteration. In this lecture, I present a series of examples illustrating how together these features make the experimental approach a powerful tool for advancing scientific understanding, informing policy, and promoting innovation. I then discuss how institutions can be designed to accelerate innovation and direct it toward the world’s most pressing needs. (JEL B31, C90, I10, O15, O30, O43)

Introduction

The introduction asks what it might mean to read realism beside itself: infused with longing, ecstasy, and violence, and haunted by histories it never fully forgets. Situating realism within the affective life of Jim Crow secularism, the introduction argues that it is in part through its ecstatic sequences that realism naturalizes a hegemonic regime of white Protestantism that governs the sensible contours of the real. Yet it also theorizes ecstatic embodiment and the performance of being beside as a crucial displacement of narrative interiority; being beside marks the self as fundamentally social, necessarily constituted by what lies outside or beside it. By examining how realism’s investigations of sociality often depend on ecstatic forms of collectivity, the introduction argues that the realist production of social data is ex-static and performative, reliant on the very forms of collective practice that it would seem to describe from a secure (and secular) epistemological distance. If realism often aims to colonize and defuse such collective forms, it nevertheless remains indebted to them for its construction of an affectively rich sense of the real.

Structural Diversity of Sense and Antisense RNA Hexanucleotide Repeats Associated with ALS and FTLD

The hexanucleotide expansion GGGGCC located in C9orf72 gene represents the most common genetic cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar dementia (FTLD). Since the discovery one of the non-exclusive mechanisms of expanded hexanucleotide G4C2 repeats involved in ALS and FTLD is RNA toxicity, which involves accumulation of pathological sense and antisense RNA transcripts. Formed RNA foci sequester RNA-binding proteins, causing their mislocalization and, thus, diminishing their biological function. Therefore, structures adopted by pathological RNA transcripts could have a key role in pathogenesis of ALS and FTLD. Utilizing NMR spectroscopy and complementary methods, we examined structures adopted by both guanine-rich sense and cytosine-rich antisense RNA oligonucleotides with four hexanucleotide repeats. While both oligonucleotides tend to form dimers and hairpins, the equilibrium of these structures differs with antisense oligonucleotide being more sensitive to changes in pH and sense oligonucleotide to temperature. In the presence of K+ ions, guanine-rich sense RNA oligonucleotide also adopts secondary structures called G-quadruplexes. Here, we also observed, for the first time, that antisense RNA oligonucleotide forms i-motifs under specific conditions. Moreover, simultaneous presence of sense and antisense RNA oligonucleotides promotes formation of heterodimer. Studied structural diversity of sense and antisense RNA transcripts not only further depicts the complex nature of neurodegenerative diseases but also reveals potential targets for drug design in treatment of ALS and FTLD.

Subjective Obligation

This chapter offers an account of subjective obligation. Different accounts of rightness and wrongness meet different versions of a ‘responsibility constraint’. Subjective rightness meets a very strong version of the responsibility constraint, and correlates closely with praise- and blameworthiness. It also seems that subjective obligation must be accessible and action guiding. This chapter argues for some modifications to these starting points. First, subjective obligation should be action guiding, but not in the rich sense that people often intend when they say that subjective obligation should be action guiding. Second, it should be anchored in the true Morality, and so is accessible only to those in our moral community. Finally, we cannot formulate subjective obligation in terms of the agent’s beliefs about what ought to be done. Rather, we need to formulate subjective obligation in terms of trying: an agent is fulfilling her subjective obligation when she is trying to do well by Morality.

Perceptual Knowledge and Recognitional Abilities

Recognizing a thing as being some way from its appearance to some sense-modality is knowing that it is that way from that appearance. It is the exercise of a general ability to tell of things that are the way in question that they are that way from the way they appear. The ability is exercised only if the subject succeeds in that respect. Our fallibility in relation to those abilities consists in our not always exercising them whenever we make a judgement directed at recognition. For things to be recognized as being of some kind from their appearance, the environment has to be favourable to the exercise of the relevant ability. It will be so only if the appearance of things of the kind is distinctive of being of the kind. The view does not depend on the assumption that experiences have representational content in any rich sense.

Prospective Secondary Mathematics Teachers´ Development of Knowledge of Modelling for Teaching

Given the growing attention on modelling in school mathematics curriculum, prospective teachers are likely to need special help to develop a rich sense of mathematical modelling [MM] and effective classroom practices to support students’ development of MM competencies. This paper is based on a study involving the use of inquiry-based activities to engage prospective secondary mathematics teachers [PTs] in developing such knowledge of MM for teaching. Participants were students in a mathematics education course. Data sources included course work and field notes. We report findings related to the inquirybased activities and the learning they afforded in the participants’ understanding of specific components of problem-solving [PS] and MM knowledge for teaching and the relationship between them.