scholarly journals Gene Editing, Sexual Reproduction, and the Arts: The Present, the Future, and the Imagined

Author(s):  
Roberta Buiani
Author(s):  
R. A. Earnshaw

AbstractWhere do new ideas come from and how are they generated? Which of these ideas will be potentially useful immediately, and which will be more ‘blue sky’? For the latter, their significance may not be known for a number of years, perhaps even generations. The progress of computing and digital media is a relevant and useful case study in this respect. Which visions of the future in the early days of computing have stood the test of time, and which have vanished without trace? Can this be used as guide for current and future areas of research and development? If one Internet year is equivalent to seven calendar years, are virtual worlds being utilized as an effective accelerator for these new ideas and their implementation and evaluation? The nature of digital media and its constituent parts such as electronic devices, sensors, images, audio, games, web pages, social media, e-books, and Internet of Things, provides a diverse environment which can be viewed as a testbed for current and future ideas. Individual disciplines utilise virtual worlds in different ways. As collaboration is often involved in such research environments, does the technology make these collaborations effective? Have the limits of disciplinary approaches been reached? The importance of interdisciplinary collaborations for the future is proposed and evaluated. The current enablers for progressing interdisciplinary collaborations are presented. The possibility for a new Renaissance between technology and the arts is discussed.


Author(s):  
Martin Kerby ◽  
Linda Lorenza ◽  
Julie Dyson ◽  
Robyn Ewing ◽  
Margaret Baguley

2017 ◽  
pp. 479
Author(s):  
LUIS SANCHEZ-TOCINO ◽  
ANTONIO DE LA LINDE RUBIO ◽  
M SOL LIZANA ROSAS ◽  
TEODORO PÉREZ GUERRA ◽  
JOSE MANUEL TIERNO DE FIGUEROA

 In the present paper, the results of a four-year conservation study on the giant gorgonian Ellisella paraplexauroides in the Chafarinas Islands are reported. This species, currently protected in Spain, is present as isolated colonies or as a low number of them, except in the Chafarinas Islands, where higher densities can be found below a depth of 20 m. Nevertheless, as revealed by a previous study, a great number of colonies are partially covered by epibionts or totally dead. As a first objective of the present work, seven transects were performed in 2013 and 2014 to evaluate the percentage of colonies affected in areas that had not been previously sampled. Approximately between 35% and 95% of the colonies had different degrees of epibiosis or were dead. In 2015, ten transects were performed to specifically locate young colonies smaller than 15 cm, which could be indicative of population regeneration by sexual reproduction. The high number of dead colonies as well as the colonies covered by epibionts, together with the inexistence of young colonies, indicated a progressive decline of the study population. The last aim of the study consisted of testing a restoration action by means of pruning the affected colonies between 2015 and 2016. The results of this restoration action showed a substantial improvement of the colonies (growth of branches, production of new branches and a general increase in the health status of the colonies). Our results recommend the employment of this technique for the future conservation of this species in the Chafarinas Islands. Nevertheless, this is a pilot study, and further experiments with a large number of samples should be performed to truly understand the significance of this technique.


CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corby

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-267
Author(s):  
Tatiana Bularga

Abstract The present article describes purposes, learning content and requirements of an educational academic and postgraduate (internships for teachers) process, focused on teacher training in respect of the most subtle and valuable framework for education, the achievement of the individual potential of each pupil, qualified as a unique personality. Therefore, it is proposed a synthesis on the formative program geared towards the assimilation of the future and current teachers of artistic disciplines (music, choreography, painting) of the action and behavioral models appropriate to the domain, to the effectively organization of individualized educational process.


2019 ◽  
pp. 287-336
Author(s):  
Max Saunders

This chapter investigates the two-way traffic between To-Day and To-Morrow and modern literature and the arts. The preliminary section considers three outstanding volumes: Scheherazade; or, The Future of the English Novel (1927) by ‘John Carruthers’; Geoffrey West’s Deucalion; or, The Future of Literary Criticism (1930), which contrasts John Middleton Murry with I. A. Richards; and John Rodker’s The Future of Futurism (1926), which discusses Anglo-American literature. It argues that the series’ largely undervalues modernism, and barely attends to the visual arts or to modern music. It surveys the volumes dealing with English, poetry, drama, music, and censorship. The major section is devoted to other ways in which the series is relevant to modern and modernist literature, looking at how other writers responded to it. It turns out the series was followed by a surprising number of important literary figures. The key case studies here are Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Joyce, Eliot, Lewis; and Waugh.


1947 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Maynard Geiger

Between 1769 and 1853, one hundred and twenty-eight Fernandinos or Franciscan missionaries from the College of San Fernando in Mexico City founded in Upper California twenty-one missions, christianized close to 100,000 Indians, developed the agriculture, the arts and crafts of its earliest civilization, thus effecting the spiritual and in part the temporal conquest of the land. These Fernandinos, with very few exceptions, were natives of Spain. They represented a cross section of practically all the Spanish provinces from Galicia to Catalonia and from Cantabria to Andalucia. Not to be forgotten are the Balearic Islands. Sixteen of California’s missionaries came from Mallorca and thus formed eight percent of the total missionary personnel. Some of these sixteen were among California’s greatest. Before touching on the spiritual and scientific contribution of the Mallorcan group, it will be well to insist on the fact that the very establishment of apostolic colleges in America antedating the California conquest, thus making possible the future Mallorcan contribution, was due to a Mallorcan, himself an outstanding missionary organizer both in Spain and the Indies, Fray Antonio de Jesús Llinás.


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