The House of Pretension: Space and Performance in Miguel Piñero's Theatre

Nuyorican poet and playwright Miguel Piñero sets his play Short Eyes and his collection Outrageous One-Act Plays in theatrical spaces that highlight confinement as an inescapable reality where identities are dictated by racial and social hierarchies. This emphasis on spatial limitation continues a particular tendency in Puerto Rican island essays and theatre toward representing identities marked by their defensive self-enclosing in domestic spaces. Piñero in turn transforms this isolation by highlighting the marginality of those who experience it and poses a performed element through which solidarity with other ethnic and social groups can be envisioned. By studying this aspect of Piñero’s theatre, Nuyorican drama can be reconnected with island culture in order to transcend a separation of both literary bodies that is common in criticism. (RI

Qualitative Assessment of Gene Expression in Affymetrix Genechip Arrays

Affymetrix Genechip microarrays are used widely to determine the simultaneous expression of genes in a given biological paradigm. Probes on the Genechip array are atomic entities which by definition are randomly distributed across the array and in turn govern the gene expression. In the present study, we make several interesting observations. We show that there is considerable correlation between the probe intensities across the array which defy the independence assumption. While the mechanism behind such correlations is unclear, we show that scaling behavior and the profiles of perfect match (PM) as well as mismatch (MM) probes are similar and immune to background subtraction. We believe that the observed correlations are possibly an outcome of inherent non-stationarities or patchiness in the array devoid of biological significance. This is demonstrated by inspecting their scaling behavior and profiles of the PM and MM probe intensities obtained from publicly available Genechip arrays from three eukaryotic genomes, namely: Drosophila Melanogaster, Homo Sapiens and Mus musculus across distinct biological paradigms and across laboratories, with and without background subtraction. The fluctuation functions were estimated using detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) with fourth order polynomial detrending. The results presented in this study provide new insights into correlation signatures of PM and MM probe intensities and suggests the choice of DFA as a tool for qualitative assessment of Affymetrix Genechip microarrays prior to their analysis. A more detailed investigation is necessary in order to understand the source of these correlations.Comment: 22 Pages, 7 Figures, 1 Tabl

La Importancia del diseñador instruccional en el diseño de cursos en línea

El número de ofrecimientos de educación a distancia (en la modalidad en línea) ha aumentando considerablemente en los últimos años. Este aumento requiere desarrollar estándares para la creación, aplicación e implementación de la enseñanza en línea. Para lograr este objetivo se requiere la participación de un diseñador instruccional con rol de consultor, diseñador, arquitecto y, en ocasiones, como consejero

Remixed Nations: Dominican-Puerto Rican Nationalism in Sietenueve's Hip-Hop

This essay studies Hip-Hop by Sietenueve, a Puerto Rican MC of Dominican descent, as a rewriting of Puerto Rican nationalism which makes room for a dual national identity. In doing so, the essay focuses on the emergent point of view of the second generation of the Dominican diaspora in Puerto Rico and on its novel articulations of national identity. Operating within broader aesthetic networks of Hip-Hop and the Caribbean, Sietenueve revisits Puerto Rican icons so as to counter the homogenizing cultural patterns resulting from neoliberalism and at the same time unmoor nationalism from traditional hierarchies and open it up to the Dominican diaspora. Moreover, Sietenueve imagines a poetic link to an ancestral Dominican homeland and thus replaces notions of rootedness with liberating motifs of mobility and creativity. In that sense, Sietenueve's Hip-Hop persona is emblematic of a Dominican second generation in Puerto Rico that is empowered by its double ability to remix and redefine both outmoded Puerto Rican icons and physically distant Dominican lands