‘… The Agapanthi, Asphodels of the Negroes…’: Life-writing, landscape and race in the South African diaries and poetry of George Seferis

The Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971) spent 10 months in South Africa during WWII as a senior diplomatic official attached to the Greek government in exile. Drawing on his diary entries, correspondence and poetry this article challenges earlier interpretations of his work best described as a ‘synchronic panoptic vision’ (Bhabha). Beginning with an exploration of the troubled relationship between the ‘glory that was Greece’ and the failure of its early 20thcentury nationalist, expansionist and modernization projects, the article argues that Seferis tried to overcome alienation from landscape and a crisis of creativity in two ways: he transcribed and commented on Cavafy’s poetry, but was unable to resolve his relationship with the latter; by reaching down into the ruins of ancient Greece and back into its mythological past, through a process of negative displacement he transforms these crises into a descent to the world of the dead. Unlike Odysseus, he receives no guidance from its inhabitants, for they speak only the language of flowers and there are none. Accompanying Seferis’ dual purpose use of classical mythology as national heritage and ironic device is a more problematic aspect of modernism – the relegation of Africa and its sub- Saharan inhabitants to a primitive otherness that, he felt, limited his ability to express himself, and which generated some of his greatest poetry.Web of Scienc

The classics, African literature, and the critics

Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this privilege. Instead, students and lecturers alike may find value and relevance for these works if they explore a range of aesthetic, conceptual, cultural, and political issues that close readings may precipitate. After analysing a fictional demonstration of how not to teach The Odyssey, the article surveys a range of writers and cultural critics who identify as African or African-American, and whose work comments directly and indirectly on the history of the meaning, purpose and value of selected ancient and classical Greek texts. This spectrum stretches from defensive cultural nationalism to an open-ended combination of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. The article concludes that a combination of resistance and appropriation is the best way to make new and local these canonical texts

Timor leste collaborative project: a short report

This report discusses findings from a small-scale scoping study, which is part of a larger curriculum project—a collaborative venture between staff from the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa'e (UNTL) and a New Zealand university. The aim of the wider project is to develop a context-sensitive English language curriculum for students at UNTL who are undergoing pre-service training to be teachers of English as a foreign language in local secondary schools. (Details of the institutional and linguistic context are provided in the appendix.) According to Norton (2000), investment by learners is a key factor in the successful implementation of a new curriculum: "if learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will increase their value in the social world" (Norton, 2000, pp. 165-166). Thus, when designing the curriculum, it is important to ensure that the students will not only understand how to use the specific learning tasks but that it also expands their repertoire of skills and knowledge for application in their subsequent professional and social lives. The report begins by outlining the history and objectives of the project before explaining the specific research questions posed for the scoping study. The means of collecting data will be outlined and examples of the participants' attitudes will be presented based on open-ended questionnaire responses. These findings will be discussed in terms of how they might lead to the design of a curriculum which is internationally-framed and context-sensitive in terms both of its content and implementation. The report will conclude with the further steps that are being taken to move the project to its next phase

A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

Nuf, a Rab11 Effector, Maintains Cytokinetic Furrow Integrity by Promoting Local Actin Polymerization

Plasma membrane ingression during cytokinesis involves both actin remodeling and vesicle-mediated membrane addition. Vesicle-based membrane delivery from the recycling endosome (RE) has an essential but ill-defined involvement in cytokinesis. In the Drosophila melanogaster early embryo, Nuf (Nuclear fallout), a Rab11 effector which is essential for RE function, is required for F-actin and membrane integrity during furrow ingression. We find that in nuf mutant embryos, an initial loss of F-actin at the furrow is followed by loss of the associated furrow membrane. Wild-type embryos treated with Latrunculin A or Rho inhibitor display similar defects. Drug- or Rho-GTP–induced increase of actin polymerization or genetically mediated decrease of actin depolymerization suppresses the nuf mutant F-actin and membrane defects. We also find that RhoGEF2 does not properly localize at the furrow in nuf mutant embryos and that RhoGEF2–Rho1 pathway components show strong specific genetic interactions with Nuf. We propose a model in which RE-derived vesicles promote furrow integrity by regulating the rate of actin polymerization through the RhoGEF2–Rho1 pathway

Exploring gendered cycling behaviours within a large-scale behavioural data-set

Analysing over 10 million journeys made by members of London’s Cycle Hire Scheme, we find that female customers’ usage characteristics are demonstrably different from those of male customers. Usage at weekends and within London’s parks characterises women’s journeys, whereas for men, a commuting function is more clearly identified. Some of this variation is explained by geodemographic differences and by an atypical period of usage during the first 3 months after the scheme’s launch. Controlling for each of these variables brings some convergence between men and women. However, many differences are preserved. Studying the spatio-temporal context under which journeys are made, we find that women’s journeys are highly spatially structured. Even when making utilitarian cycle trips, routes that involve large, multi-lane roads are comparatively rare, and instead female cyclists preferentially select areas of the city associated with slower traffic streets and with cycle routes slightly offset from major roads

Dense and accurate motion and strain estimation in high resolution speckle images using an image-adaptive approach

Digital image processing methods represent a viable and well acknowledged alternative to strain gauges and interferometric techniques for determining full-field displacements and strains in materials under stress. This paper presents an image adaptive technique for dense motion and strain estimation using high-resolution speckle images that show the analyzed material in its original and deformed states. The algorithm starts by dividing the speckle image showing the original state into irregular cells taking into consideration both spatial and gradient image information present. Subsequently the Newton-Raphson digital image correlation technique is applied to calculate the corresponding motion for each cell. Adaptive spatial regularization in the form of the Geman-McClure robust spatial estimator is employed to increase the spatial consistency of the motion components of a cell with respect to the components of neighbouring cells. To obtain the final strain information, local least-squares fitting using a linear displacement model is performed on the horizontal and vertical displacement fields. To evaluate the presented image partitioning and strain estimation techniques two numerical and two real experiments are employed. The numerical experiments simulate the deformation of a specimen with constant strain across the surface as well as small rigid-body rotations present while real experiments consist specimens that undergo uniaxial stress. The results indicate very good accuracy of the recovered strains as well as better rotation insensitivity compared to classical techniques

Limitation of shipowners' liability

Consideration is given firstly to the origins of the principle of a shipowner being entitled to limit his liability to third parties who have suffered loss or injury as a result of the negligent navigation or management of his ship noting that the principle evolved as a matter of public policy designed to encourage shipping and trade. The various attempts at reaching international unity are then reviewed by way of reference to the 1924, 1957 and 1976 Conventions on Limitation of Shipowners' Liability including comment on the separate limitation regimes introduced by the Hague and Hague-Visby Rules in respect of the carriage of goods by sea. e the adoption of the principle of limitation into the South African law with the coming into force as at 1960 of the Merchant Shipping Act is then considered, it being noted here that the relevant provisions of No. 57 of 1951 reflect, rather than repeat the (then) corresponding provisions in the English law following on the adoption and enactment by that country of the 1957 Limitation Convention. The word reflect is used advisedly as South Africa is neither a signatory to nor has it adopted the 1957 Convention per se resulting in a measure of uncertainty and difficulty when it comes to the application of the relevant provisions of the Act. These provisions viz. s 261 et seq are then dealt with in some detail with consideration being given to such matters as to who may limit their liability, what ships are subject to limitation, the amounts of limitation and how these are. calculated with reference to a ship's tonnage etc. e Finally under this Part, the question of which claims are subject to limitation and which, by way of separate legislative enactment, are not subject to limitation, is examined. PART B: Pages 21 to 42 This Part is devoted to the loss of the right to limit liability with an in-depth look being taken at the meaning of the words "actual fault or privity". Here particular attention is paid to the interpretation of the personalised requirement of s 261 (whose actual fault or privity are we concerned with etc.?) and what degree of culpability the words connote. Given the dearth of reported South African cases, the approach of van Heerden Jin The "SAINT PADARN", 1986 ( being the only South African case to date dealing with the subject) is followed by way of having regard to a number of the leading English cases commencing with Lennard's case of 1915 through the well-known "LADY GWENDOLEN" case of 1965 and the "new approach" introduced. by it and beyond to the House of Lords decision in the "MARION", 1984