Verbal Agency in the Speech of Cremutius Cordus (Tacitus Annals 4.34-5)

This article analyzes the agency (or lack thereof) in the verbs of the speech of Cremutius Cordus at Tacitus Annals 4.34-5. Cordus divests himself of agency in order to grant it to written works of literature, which can carry an author’s legacy and authority into posterity even if the author himself is punished with death. By their very existence, such works, imbued with agency and power by their authors, stymie the efforts of book-burners and the authors’ enemies to efface cultural memory

Tereus, Procne, and Philomela: speech, silence, and the voice of gender

This dissertation investigates speech, silence, and power in the Tereus, Procne, and Philomela myth in four sources: Sophocles’ Tereus, Aristophanes’ Birds, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Pervigilium Veneris. I pose three questions about each work: 1. Whom does the author allow to speak, and whom does he silence? 2. How do speech and silence influence characterization, authority, and power? 3. How does the author’s socio-cultural environment influence the construction of those power hierarchies? Each author constructs a hierarchy of agency determined by communicative and silent roles. Sophocles’ Procne, Aristophanes’ Tereus, Ovid’s Philomela and Procne, and the Pervigilium’s Venus and swallow possess a heightened level of narrative agency that cannot be taken away, even if the ability to speak disappears; on the other hand, conspicuous silencing by the author reduces the narrative agency of characters like Aristophanes’ Procne, Ovid’s Tereus, or the Pervigilium’s narrator. These authorial decisions regarding speech and silence evince shifting engagements with each author’s socio-cultural environment and opportunities for artistic output. Moreover, these four authors also engage in an escalating series of mythic reversals and re-appropriations as they mold the details of the Tereus, Procne, and Philomela story into their narratives. First, Aristophanes reverses Sophocles’ empowerment of Procne and Philomela by effacing the violence of Sophocles’ tragedy; he mutes and objectifies Procne, erases Philomela entirely, and elevates Tereus into the bird-man-ruler paradigm that Peisetaerus hopes to emulate, thereby presenting a normative relationship of vocal man with silent woman in service of the movement of his plot. Then, in Augustan Rome, Ovid comments on the princeps’ increasing control over artistic output by acting as an arbiter of speech and silence, as he affords Philomela and Procne eloquent voices while conspicuously silencing Tereus; he “corrects” the Aristophanic “correction” of Sophocles. Finally, in Late Antiquity, the narrator of the Pervigilium laments his silence caused by constraints within panegyric, a genre that lacks a personal voice, such as that possessed by the swallow. He “corrects” Ovid’s presentation of the swallow’s song as the result of Philomela’s brutalization by casting it as a positive exemplum for his own poetry

Lector Intende, Laetaberis: A Research-Based Approach to Introductory Latin

In the 2019-20 academic year, we undertook a full redesign of our introductory Latin curriculum at the College of the Holy Cross in order to provide students with a more meaningful encounter with the Latin language. We primed our students to work with real, unedited Latin texts within their first year of study by highlighting Latin grammatical concepts that were frequent, complex, and unfamiliar to English speakers, which meant introducing topics like the passive voice, the subjunctive, third-declension adjectives, and indirect statement that are foundational to the Latin language much earlier than we had previously

Empowering women to manage watsan technologies

Empowering women to manage watsan technologie

Engaging empowered fisher-folk and local communities : engineering, science and humanities students in a lake aquaculture service-learning environment

We report an ongoing multi-year engagement by a multidisciplinary team of engineering, science and humanities students, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, in a lake aquaculture environment with a local fisherfolk community. The genesis of the partnership, the effectiveness of the technology intervention and its influence on the community’s ability to plan and manage the lake resource, as well as an assessment (based on interviews) of the impact of the service learning opportunity on the involved students will be discussed. The geographical focus of the case study is the 1 km diameter Lake Palakpakin in the famous 7 Lakes area near San Pablo City, Laguna, Philippines, where a network of wirelessly connected water quality sensors – such as dissolved oxygen, temperature, turbidity – floating sensor platforms and solar powered fishpen aerators are being designed, deployed and maintained by a team of University researchers, government partners (ICTO-DOST), local fisherfolk and partners from Japan and Thailand. Other enabling technologies in use that require science-based research students include imaging by unmanned aerial vehicles, optical engineering, chemistry, aquaculture, environmental impact assessment tools and information technology – offering many opportunities for contribution and engagement by government and university teams. In addition, the site offered engagement opportunities for students and faculty from the humanities such as those interested in development studies and strategies for sustainable communities, even fine arts students interested in information design for effective communication. On the side of the local community, partnership with government and universities provide fisherfolk with heretofore unavailable lake resource management tools and a renewed confidence to contribute successful technology reference designs and their own experiences and self-developed best practices to other lakeside aquaculture communities grappling with similar water resource usage and management issues. The paper will describe this rich multi-stakeholder multi-disciplinary context of engagement and qualitatively describe its ongoing impact, the insights gained and the lessons learned

Towards Laparoscopic Visual AI: Development of a Visual Guidance System for Laparoscopic Surgical Palpation

Currently, there are numerous obstacles to performing palpation during laparoscopic surgery. The laparoscopic interface does not allow access into a patient’s body anything other than the tools that are inserted through the trocars. Palpation is usually done with the surgeon’s hands to detect lumps and certain anomalies underneath the skin, muscle, or tissues. It can be useful technique for augmenting surgical decision-making during laparoscopic surgery, especially when discerning operations involving cancerous tumors. Previous research demonstrated the use of tactile sensors and mechanical sensors placed at the end-effectors for palpating laparoscopically. In this study, a visual guidance system is proposed for use during laparoscopic palpation, specifically engineered to be part of a motion-based laparoscopic palpation system. In particular, the YOLACT++ model is used to localize a target organ, the gall bladder, on a custom dataset of laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Our experiments showed an AP score of 90.10 for bounding boxes and 87.20 on masks. In terms of the speed performance, the model achieved a playback speed of approximately 20 fps, which translates to approximately 48 ms video latency. The palpation path guides are guidelines that are computer-generated within the identified organ, and they show potential in helping the surgeon implement the palpation more accurately. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of deep learning-based real-time image processing models to complete our motion-based laparoscopic palpation system, and to realize the promising role of artificial intelligence in surgical decision-making. Visual presentation of our results can be seen on our project page: https://kerwincaballas.github.io/lap-palpation

Design and Deployment of a Mobile Learning Cloud Network to Facilitate Open Educational Resources for Asynchronous Learning

This paper describes the design and deployment of a mobile cloud network that facilitates open educational resource content distribution. The setup utilized clustered single board computers as content, communication and monitoring servers. It was installed in a Public High School where stakeholders, using their mobile devices, were given access to preloaded content via wireless local area network. Initial tests of the mobile cloud showed good network performance. Teachers were randomly selected to evaluate the content validity and delivery of the OER content. Results show that the quality of the network’s OER content is very satisfactory. This implementation shows the advantage of mobile cloud computing in the delivery of learning content in remote learning modalities