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Alternative scenarios in Sophocles' Electra *

Alan H. Sommerstein

in The Tangled Ways of Zeus: And Other Studies In and Around Greek Tragedy

This chapter examines how Sophocles in Electra plants false clues about how the play's action will go. At first Electra seems to assume, as in Aeschylus, that an outsider will avenge Agamemnon's ... More

This chapter examines how Sophocles in Electra plants false clues about how the play's action will go. At first Electra seems to assume, as in Aeschylus, that an outsider will avenge Agamemnon's death (115–17; corrected at 303–4), while the chorus wish only for the death of Aegisthus, not Clytaemestra (126–7; this is not finally contradicted until Electra and Clytaemestra confront each other). Another false clue appears when Electra apparently wishes (603–5) that she could take revenge on her mother herself; she will decide to do so when she believes Orestes dead, and even when she enters the palace at 1383 we may well suppose she is going to participate in the murder (in fact she comes out again — but still participates in the murder, by remote control). The implications of these false clues, and of the process by which they are refuted, for our understanding of the play are discussed.Less

Mathematics and Narrative: Why Are Stories and Proofs Interesting?

Bernard Teissier

Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur (eds)

in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

This chapter examines why a story or proof is interesting by considering the relation between mathematics and narrative, with particular emphasis on clues. It first presents an early view of the ... More

This chapter examines why a story or proof is interesting by considering the relation between mathematics and narrative, with particular emphasis on clues. It first presents an early view of the “cognitive meaning” that may shed some light on the connection between mathematics and narrative. It then discusses the cognitive interpretation of mathematical objects, arguing that the meaning of the mathematical line is the protomathematical object obtained by identification of the visual line and the vestibular line. It also contends that what makes the narration or the mathematics interesting is the vivacity of the dialogue and of the meaning it evokes, as well as its coherence as a construction.Less

CLUE as a Framework for Cross-Cultural User Experience Research

Huatong Sun

in Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users

The CLUE framework advances cross-cultural user research as praxis—a dialogic design activity that has its ethical and political implications in local contexts as well. This chapter explores the ... More

The CLUE framework advances cross-cultural user research as praxis—a dialogic design activity that has its ethical and political implications in local contexts as well. This chapter explores the methodological consequence of the CLUE. The first part of the chapter introduces the case of the book, the comparative study of mobile messaging use in American and Chinese contexts between 2003 and 2006. It reviews the phenomenon of mobile messaging use in a larger context and investigates what challenges and implications this case has brought to the practices and research of cross-cultural design. The second part of the chapter discusses the analytical values and methodological potentials of the CLUE framework for cross-cultural user experience research with the case study as the example.Less

Culturally Localized User Experience as Situated and Constructed

Huatong Sun

in Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users

This chapter further develops the framework of CLUE with a consolidated discussion of five use cases presented earlier. It situates those cases on a broader horizon and reviews the trends of user ... More

This chapter further develops the framework of CLUE with a consolidated discussion of five use cases presented earlier. It situates those cases on a broader horizon and reviews the trends of user localization across the sites. Thereby it illuminates how a holistic view of user experience is both situated and constructed in local contexts: To explore the “situatedness,” the first section of the chapter looks at how a local use of mobile messaging technology is situated in the surrounding contexts as the outcome of the interactions of various cultural influences; to investigate the “constructiveness,” the second section demonstrates how user localization functions as cultural consumption and how “genius loci” is achieved. Based on this holistic view of user experience, the third section examines affordances as dialogic relation through a dual mediation process of messaging use and suggests designing beyond operational affordances and cultivating social affordances for local use.Less

Future Directions

Huatong Sun

in Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users

This concluding chapter suggests future directions for the research and practice of cross-cultural technology in a glocalization age. Centering on a dialogical approach, it analyzes what the ... More

This concluding chapter suggests future directions for the research and practice of cross-cultural technology in a glocalization age. Centering on a dialogical approach, it analyzes what the cross-cultural design community could learn from the user localization efforts to design for, invoke, nurture, encourage, support, and sustain culturally localized user experience —the consummate experience—for emerging technologies. It studies the characteristics and value as well as the role and functions of user localization in a technology’s whole design, production, and use cycle and discusses how to route those user efforts into the design process to better address user needs and expectations in this rising participatory culture. Real-world examples are supplemented to further the discussion beyond the case study when needed.Less

Weather Reports?: Adopting the Mythic View

J. David Pleins

in When the Great Abyss Opened: Classic and Contemporary Readings of Noah's Flood

When asked about what myths are, the first definition that would usually come to mind is that myths are stories that are aimed at explaining certain natural phenomena with a very unscientific point ... More

When asked about what myths are, the first definition that would usually come to mind is that myths are stories that are aimed at explaining certain natural phenomena with a very unscientific point of view. T. H. Huxley, an enthusiastic advocate of Darwinism, boldly took on the views of various religionists. Huxley's stern perspective was grounded on the following reasons: Huxley relied greatly on geology and evolutionary theory; Huxley categorized literature into those that are perfectly true, those that may be partially true, and those without any truth at all, and that he would only refer to the Bible for moral guidance; Huxley compared such stories with Near Eastern texts; and Huxley casted doubt on the Bible's authorship. While these views are presented, the chapter also looks into a study of the text's rhetoric that point out stylistic clues that may aid in understanding a different perspective of such stories.Less

Can the Mystery Be Solved?

Michael Maizels

in Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath

This chapter re-examines the period 1967-1972 but focuses on Le Va's powder works, which used materials such as flour, mineral oil, chalk and iron oxide powder. This chapter takes a closer look at Le ... More

This chapter re-examines the period 1967-1972 but focuses on Le Va's powder works, which used materials such as flour, mineral oil, chalk and iron oxide powder. This chapter takes a closer look at Le VaZ's often-cited model for analysing his work, that of Sherlock Holmes scrutinizing the aftermath of a crime scene in order to reconstruct the event and its perpetrator. After exploring the history of the clue paradigm and its relationship to information theory, this chapter discusses the intimate relationship between these ideas in the work of Le Va and Robert Smithson. It ultimately argues that while many of the tropes of Le Va's work derive from The Tales of Sherlock Holmes, it is the world of postmodern detective fiction, especially Alain Robbes-Grillet’s The Erasers, that best models the interpretative framework implicit in Le Va's work.Less

The Triggers of Jealousy: Suspicions and Evidence

Ruth Rothaus Caston

in The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy

Chapter 3 explores the role of the senses. Visual clues and hearing rumors are among the most common triggers of jealousy. The senses are crucial to the arousal of jealousy and provide an opportunity ... More

Chapter 3 explores the role of the senses. Visual clues and hearing rumors are among the most common triggers of jealousy. The senses are crucial to the arousal of jealousy and provide an opportunity for the poet to focus on the initial stages of the emotion. Yet there is a marked difference here between male and female characters. While women are portrayed as hesitating to believe the truth of something suspicious they have seen or heard, male lovers are depicted as already convinced of the mistress’ betrayal.Less

How Sherlock Holmes Got His Start

James O'Brien

in The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics

One can achieve somewhat of an understanding of how Sherlock Holmes came to exist by looking at the contributions of three people: Conan Doyle himself, Edgar Allan ... More

One can achieve somewhat of an understanding of how Sherlock Holmes came to exist by looking at the contributions of three people: Conan Doyle himself, Edgar Allan Poe, and Conan Doyle’s mentor in medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell. First we shall look at Conan Doyle, focusing on those aspects of his life that led to his writing of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was English and his mother, Mary Foley, was Irish. His father had a drinking problem and was consequently less a factor in Conan Doyle’s upbringing than was his mother. Charles would eventually end up in a lunatic asylum (Stashower 1999, 24). Mary Doyle instilled in her son a love of reading (Symons 1979, 37; Miller 2008, 25) that would later lead him to conceive of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s extensive reading had a great influence on the Sherlock Holmes stories (Edwards 1993). He was raised a Catholic and attended Jesuit schools at Hodder (1868–1870) and Stonyhurst (1870–1875), which he found to be quite harsh. Compassion and warmth were less favored than “the threat of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation” (Coren 1995, 15). Next he spent a year at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit college in Feldkirch, Austria (Miller 2008, 40). As Conan Doyle’s alcoholic father had little income, wealthy uncles paid for this education. By the end of his Catholic schooling, he is said to have rejected Christianity (Stashower 1999, 49). At the less strict Feldkirch school, his drift away from religion turned toward reason and science (Booth 1997, 60). At this time he also read the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, including his detective stories. So, although Sherlockians debate the “birthplace” of Holmes, a claim can be made that Holmes was conceived in Austria. In 1876, Conan Doyle began his medical studies at the highly respected University of Edinburgh. These years also played a large role in shaping the Holmes stories. One obvious factor was his continued exposure to science. Less

The Wizard of Cosme Velho

K. David Jackson

in Machado de Assis: A Literary Life

Readers are especially drawn to Machado’s fiction because of its conceptual challenges, self-conscious play, elusive narrative structure, dry humor, world of characters, and inventive imagination. A ... More

Readers are especially drawn to Machado’s fiction because of its conceptual challenges, self-conscious play, elusive narrative structure, dry humor, world of characters, and inventive imagination. A conservative, moralistic skepticism underlies Machado’s wry, ironic, satirical, and implacable analyses of the unchanging nature of the world and limits to the human condition. From his subtle, critical observations of Rio de Janeiro during the empire, he creates a human comedy and theater of the world in his fiction, drawing his themes from notable works of music, literature, and philosophy. In view of his radical stylistic invention, prodigious writings, humanistic learning, and intellectual acumen, Machado was rightfully called a wizard.Less

The linguistic tools for dealing with bribery

Roger W. Shuy

in The Language of Bribery Cases

The linguistic unit of the speech event is defined as a recurring occasion that has tacitly understood rules of preference and unspoken conventions as to what can and cannot count as valid. All ... More

The linguistic unit of the speech event is defined as a recurring occasion that has tacitly understood rules of preference and unspoken conventions as to what can and cannot count as valid. All relatively smaller language units, including the schemas, agendas (topics and responses), speech acts (such as agreeing, rejecting, promising, and others) are governed by the structure and intentionality revealed by the speech event in which they are situated. Court cases often focus primarily on the smallest language units where the alleged “smoking gun” comments are found, while ignoring the larger language context identified by the larger language units in which the smoking gun language takes place. The bribery speech event is then described in detail.Less

Facts about Crime

Samson Lim

in Siam's New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand

By the early twentieth century, the government and high-ranking police officers were beginning to see the kingdom’s crime problem as one of one of proof – what constitutes evidence and how to produce ... More

By the early twentieth century, the government and high-ranking police officers were beginning to see the kingdom’s crime problem as one of one of proof – what constitutes evidence and how to produce and evaluate it. In response, the police began a reform process that paralleled those that took place in many cities in the USA and Europe. This meant the introduction of new ways of representing the physical world including statistical tables, fingerprints, maps, and diagrams. These forms of representation had previously been unknown to the Thai police (and the public); what they were and how they looked had to be created and then taught. Thus, it was through a long, uneven process of trial and error that the Thai police began to shape the appearance of legal evidence and of Siam’s new criminal past.Less

Introduction

Huatong Sun

in Global Social Media Design: Bridging Differences Across Cultures

This chapter describes what motivated the author to write the book with a critical, cultural approach at the intersection of professional and technical communication, human–computer interaction, ... More

This chapter describes what motivated the author to write the book with a critical, cultural approach at the intersection of professional and technical communication, human–computer interaction, cultural and media studies, rhetoric and writing, and social informatics, guided by the question of how we should design usable, meaningful, and empowering social media technology for culturally diverse users in this increasingly globalized world. It explains the urgent call for a global approach to cross-cultural social media design at the crossroads of social media design; introduces a set of fundamental concepts for critical design used in the book for cross-disciplinary conversations; and previews the book structure. The critical, global design approach applies a macroscopic understanding and critical vision of culture and structure from the broader sociocultural context to drive microscopic design implementations in the immediate context. It is a new development of “culturally localized user experience” (CLUE) presented in the author’s 2012 book, but readers don’t need to read the former book to proceed with this book.Less

Understanding the Criticality of Differences in Cross-Cultural Design

Huatong Sun

in Global Social Media Design: Bridging Differences Across Cultures

This chapter articulates a practice-oriented critical vision of cultural differences to global design and explores how we should productively engage differences in global design practices. Cultural ... More

This chapter articulates a practice-oriented critical vision of cultural differences to global design and explores how we should productively engage differences in global design practices. Cultural differences in this book refer to the differences that emerge from various categorical identifications such as ethnicity, race, age, class, religion, gender, sexuality, and ability and manifests as ways of life. A practice-oriented critical vision sees cultural differences as dynamic, relational, emergent, contingent, and liminal, in contrast to a simplistic interpretation of cultural differences presented by multiculturalism and other theories. This chapter first reviews why cultural differences matters and then organizes the discussion around four sets of questions: First, how does difference come into being? Second, what is the nature of difference ontologically? Third, how should we treat difference methodologically and practically? Fourth, as designers, how can we turn differences into design resources? And how should we design with, across, and for cultural differences? Based on the articulation of a practice-oriented critical vision of differences that turns communication deficits into design resources, the culturally localized user experience (CLUE) approach is thus developed into the approach of culturally localized user engagement and empowerment (CLUEE), simplified as the CLUE2 (CLUE-squared) approach. Examples of race construction and social media design cases are provided to enrich the discussion.Less

Mining Word Meanings

Harvey S. Wiener

in Any Child Can Read Better

Quick now, what's your knee-jerk advice when your child is reading and he asks you the definition of a tough word he can't figure out? "Look it up in a dictionary," right? It's bad advice. It's ... More

Quick now, what's your knee-jerk advice when your child is reading and he asks you the definition of a tough word he can't figure out? "Look it up in a dictionary," right? It's bad advice. It's particularly bad advice for developing readers struggling through a thorny selection and trying to make sense of it. Don't get me wrong—I have nothing against dictionaries. I love dictionaries. They are indispensable language- learning, language-checking tools. Writers, always aiming for precision amid perplexing word choices, could not survive long without dictionaries. For readers, too, dictionaries are important, but not in the ways we typically advise children to use them. Certainly, researchers and very sophisticated readers do use dictionaries as side-by-side companions to books. Watch a thoughtful poetry student reading something by Milton or Housman or Browning and you'll see regular expeditions into a dictionary to check nuances and alternative meanings. For the most part, though, established readers will use a dictionary to check an unfamiliar word after they read a selection and can't figure out the word's meaning. Unfortunately, most classroom dictionary work focuses on having kids look up lists of words. Most often, those words are not connected to any reading exercise; and without a context for word exploration, the activity is an utter waste of time. When the words do relate to content, children are asked to look up the lists of words before reading. Sure, knowing definitions of potentially difficult words can remove some obstacles to comprehension, and I support telling youngsters in advance what a few really difficult or technical key words mean—words whose definitions cannot easily be derived from the context (more on this later) but whose meanings are essential for understanding. Still, you don't want your child slaving over a list of tough words, looking them up and writing definitions, as a necessary precursor to a reading activity. He'll be bored and exhausted by the time he starts the first sentence! In fact, most of us don't often take the advice we give freely to our children. Less

Technological Approaches to Screening and Case Finding for Depression

William H. Rogers and Debra Lerner

in Screening for Depression in Clinical Practice: An Evidence-Based Guide

What are the strengths and weaknesses of computer-based and other automated methods of detecting depression? Two promising technologies make use of the Internet and speech recognition. Whatever ... More

What are the strengths and weaknesses of computer-based and other automated methods of detecting depression? Two promising technologies make use of the Internet and speech recognition. Whatever technology is used, each method needs to be assessed rigorously using the same high standards that have been applied to pencil-and-paper tests. We are in the midst of a technological revolution that inevitably will transform psychiatric clinical practice. A consensus for routine depression screening is building, and at the same time methods by which it could be accomplished are emerging. The hope is that the right technology can provide an easy, inexpensive, valid, and reliable public health approach to depression screening. Computerized assessment is well accepted in diverse fields, and the use of Internet-based survey technology has grown exponentially. Issues regarding the strengths and limitations of computerized assessments are addressed regularly in the literature. For example, such assessments have been shown to improve data quality while at the same time reducing cost as well as the time to score, analyze, and report results. Increasingly, as depressive disorders have been recognized as highly prevalent with significant morbidity, multiple screeners using an array of technological advances have been developed (Table 8.1 lists selected studies). This chapter will review the technologies that are currently available for automated depression screening and will discuss them in terms of criteria that should dictate their adoption. The growing list of technologies can be classified on several dimensions. Perhaps themostimportant of these isadaptivevs.non-adaptive. Inanadaptive technology pioneered by the Educational Testing Service, a computer, using a preprogrammed algorithm, decides which question to ask next given the responses so far. Paper-and-pencil is the classical non-adaptive technology— everyone gets the same paper with the same questions in the same order. Technological modality is a second dimension. Currently available technologies include the phone, the Internet, and hand-held electronic devices. The phone can be split into several groups, including agent: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), speech recognition, and touch-tone. Phone can also be classified as inbound (the patient initiates the call to a toll-free number) or outbound (the system initiates the call). Less

Conspiracy Theory: The Nineteenth-Century Prehistory of a Twentieth-Century Concept

Andrew McKenzie-McHarg

in Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them

Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the ... More

Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories?Less