This essay analyzes Antígona (2008) by Yerandy Fleites to show how the author tackles the current Cuban political situation by rewriting the Sophoclean tragedy. Fleites adjusts the Greek myth to the Cuban context by means of parody and an intertextual dialogue with both Jean Anouilh’s Antígona (1944) and Peruvian poet José Watanabe’s Antígona (2000). The study then unpacks the idea of dirtiness and Fleites’ depiction of the female heroine to demonstrate how the dramatist proposes hybris as the main psychological driver behind the Cuban Antigone (and that, to an extent, of the generation she represents) to suggest possible avenues for sociopolitical change. At the same time, this study considers the interpretations of Fleites’ Antígona that Cuban directors Pedro Franco and Julio César Ramírez respectively brought to the stage in 2013 and 2020. Ramírez’s reading in particular provides an understanding of Antígona in the context of the protests that occurred on November 27, 2020, when intellectuals, writers, and artists demanded that the Cuban Ministry of Culture recognize their rights and their freedom as citizens.

Data is showing that student reading outcomes have been negatively impacted by the pandemic and corresponding disrupted learning. These findings highlight the need for an acceleration in evidence-based learning to foster stronger reading. The Science of Reading (SoR) provides a solution for effective and efficient pedagogy that is proven to produce significant gains in reading. Educational legislation is shifting to support the use of evidence-based approaches based on the SoR through policy changes including funding, professional development, and certification requirements. Districts are exploring innovative programs, such as 1:1 tutoring utilizing pre-service teachers and summer programming, to try to further accelerate learning gains. We recommend a concerted approach for stakeholders involving legislation, higher education, and districts to ensure that evidence-aligned instruction is being effectively used. Only with a unified approach incorporating all of these elements will we be able to counter the impact that the pandemic has had on the reading ability of our students.

Today, the comparison of male homosexuality to bestiality is unfortunately too well-known from homophobic polemics. Yet this comparison has a history in the Anglophone world, and it emerged in the early European Middle Ages seemingly not in order to dehumanize men who had sex with men but in order to make bestiality appear serious by comparing it to male-male sexual acts. The eighth-century Paenitentiale Theodori—which collects the judgments of the Byzantine-born Archbishop Theodore—is the earliest extant English text to connect male-male sexual acts with bestiality. This comparison does not occur in the previous penitentials, but, after its appearance in the Paenitentiale, this comparison traveled throughout Western Europe. No scholarship to date examines the global origins of such a comparison. This paper argues that later medieval views of bestiality as perverse and as a serious sexual offense emerged from bestiality’s early comparison to same-sex acts (rather than vice-versa). Prior to the Paenitentiale Theodori, European theologians described bestiality as a minor sin akin to masturbation. Theodore borrowed the comparison of bestiality and male-male sex acts from a Latin mistranslation of the 314 Greek Council of Ancyra and from the Byzantine theologian St. Basil the Great. Since the early penitentials accorded male-male sexual acts some of the most serious penances, the comparison of bestiality to these acts elevated bestiality for the first time in Western Europe to the status of a serious and unnatural sin. Through connection to effeminizing male-male sexual acts, bestiality gained a reputation as a serious, boundary-violating sin in its own right.

Since body-worn cameras (BWCs) were catapulted into mainstream discourse, they have diffused rapidly across police agencies in the United States. Research followed swiftly, providing a wealth of information about how the police and citizens make sense of these technologies. Moreover, we have learned how these technologies have impacted important policing outcomes, such as citizen complaints and the use of coercive force during citizen encounters. However, despite the growing body of research, very little is known about how police stakeholders make sense of the implementation of BWCs and about their decision-making throughout the implementation process. Therefore, this research examines the decision to implement BWCs in one mid-sized municipal police department in the United States through the lens of Rogers (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theoretical framework. We rely on semi-structured interviews and observations with 17 stakeholders to address this question. Our findings show that BWC technology generally posed little uncertainty for stakeholders in terms of what it could offer conceptually. However, because the agency was an early adopter, decision-makers were confronted with significant uncertainty about practical matters such as the financial and logistical costs of implementing the technology, in addition to policy creation. These findings have important implications for scholars and practitioners.

This study applies the technical/rational model of organisations to help explain the effects of body-worn cameras on police organisation and practice in a single police agency in the United States. Consistent with the technical/rational model, cameras had enhanced those people processing and environment-changing features of the police organisation which had tangible goals and well understood means for their accomplishment. In comparison, body-worn cameras were less successful in changing supervision and training, which were not well developed technically. We posit that improvements in these people changing aspects of police work will likely require public pressure for higher levels of police professionalism, rigorous evidence on how these cameras can make training and supervision more effective, and police agencies willing to experiment with their strategic implementation.

Autonomous driving and e-mobility are swiftly becoming not only the work of science fiction or popular science, but a reality. A key focus of manufacturers and suppliers in the automotive domain is of course to specify systems that implement this reality. Often, scenarios at type-level are used throughout the development process to specify system behavior and interaction within the car, as scenario models are comparatively easy to understand and can easily be subjected to manual validation. However, autonomous driving and e-mobility require interaction not just of systems within the same car, but collaboration between multiple cars as well as between cars and miscellaneous road infrastructure (e.g., smart road signs). The car becomes a Cyber-Physical System that dynamically forms collaborating networks at runtime with other Cyber-Physical System to create functionality that goes beyond the scope of the individual vehicle (e.g., resolve a traffic jam). Consequently, a plethora of possible compositions of such a network exist and must be specified and validated completely to assure their adequate and safe execution at runtime. Doing this at type-level with scenario models becomes prohibitively tedious, error prone, and likely results in unrealistic development cost. To combat this issue, we investigate the use of multi-level Message Sequence Charts to allow for specifying interaction scenarios between collaborative Cyber-Physical System in a network of collaborating automotive Cyber-Physical System. To assist the developer in systematically defining multi-level Message Sequence Charts, we propose two processes. The resulting diagrams use a mixture of type and instance-level abstractions within one conceptual diagram. This allows reducing the required effort to manually validate the adequacy of scenarios to a manageable amount because information within the scenarios can be validated in batches. At the same time, instance-level defects become more obvious. Evaluation results from a controlled experiment show that multi-level Message Sequence Charts contribute to effectiveness and efficiency of manual validation for collaborative automotive Cyber-Physical System.

Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or budget-overspending of software development projects. It is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. To this date, there exists no central concept of what RE education shall comprise. To lay a foundation, we report on a systematic literature review of the feld and provide a systematic map describing the current state of RE education. Doing so allows us to describe how the educational landscape has changed over the last decade. Results show that only a few established author collaborations exist and that RE education research is predominantly published in venues other than the top RE research venues (i.e., in venues other than the RE conference and journal). Key trends in RE instruction of the past decade include involvement of real or realistic stakeholders, teaching predominantly elicitation as an RE activity, and increasing student factors such as motivation or communication skills. Finally, we discuss open opportunities in RE education, such as training for security requirements and supply chain risk management, as well as developing a pedagogical foundation grounded in evidence of efective instructional approaches.

In this short survey, we review recent results dealing with algebraic structures (quandles, psyquandles, and singquandles) related to singular knot theory. We first explore the singquandles counting invariant and then consider several recent enhancements to this invariant. These enhancements include a singquandle cocycle invariant and several polynomial invariants of singular knots obtained from the singquandle structure. We then explore psyquandles which can be thought of as generalizations of oriented singquandles, and review recent developments regarding invariants of singular knots obtained from psyquandles.