פרסומים

A major challenge of contemporary neuroscience is to unravel the structure of the connectome, the ensemble of neural connections that link between different functional units of the brain, and to reveal how this structure relates to brain function. This thriving area of research largely follows the general tradition in biology of reverse-engineering, which consists of first observing and characterizing a biological system or process, and then deconstructing it into its fundamental building blocks in order to infer its modes of operation. However, a complementary form of biology has emerged, synthetic biology, which emphasizes construction-based forward-engineering. The synthetic biology approach comprises the assembly of new biological systems out of elementary biological parts. The rationale is that the act of building a system can be a powerful method for gaining deep understanding of how that system works. As the fields of connectomics and synthetic biology are independently growing, I propose to consider the benefits of combining the two, to create synthetic connectomics, a new form of neuroscience and a new form of synthetic biology. The goal of synthetic connectomics would be to artificially design and construct the connectomes of live behaving organisms. Synthetic connectomics could serve as a unifying platform for unraveling the complexities of brain operation and perhaps also for generating new forms of artificial life, and, in general, could provide a valuable opportunity for empirically exploring theoretical predictions about network function. What would a synthetic connectome look like? What purposes would it serve? How could it be constructed? This review delineates the novel notion of a synthetic connectome and aims to lay out the initial steps towards its implementation, contemplating its impact on science and society.

DOI

The article offers a discussion of two Latin American fictional historiographies: the short story “Guayaquil,” by Jorge Luis Borges (1970), and The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2011). Both these fictional historiographies are intertextually related to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and both may be read as inscriptions of a Postmodernist sensibility, but their respective engagements with the earlier fictional historiography offer very different versions of the relations of story, history, and historiography, highlighting some significant, albeit often-overlooked aspect of their hetero-text.

May 2019: Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is Professor of English, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Haifa University Press and Academic Head of the Haifa University Library. She is the author of Graham Greene's Childless Fathers (Macmillan 1988) Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (OUP 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (1999), Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2013), and numerous articles on literary modernism and continental philosophy. Her recent research project is provisionally titled "Hetero-biographies."

This chapter focuses on bridging the gap between policy and practice in Israeli schools, in the context of implementing a national innovative policy in the area of teaching higher-order thinking (HOT) across the curriculum. The chapter elaborates on capacity building of senior instructional leaders who were national subject superintendents (NSSs), responsible for the quality of teaching, learning and assessment in specific school subjects. The model of implementation had three main features: (a) deep and long-term (3 years long) capacity building and the formation of a community of learners; (b) a balanced blend of tightness (in terms of defining the overall goal—developing students’ HOT) and looseness (in terms of autonomy as to whether and how to engage in the change process); and (c) tailoring the change process to multiple, specific educational contexts. The workshop was part of a detailed plan of a top-down implementation process addressing changes in assessment, curriculum and learning materials and professional development. It made prominent contributions to the web of interactive changes that took place in learning and instruction of many school subjects, matching an ecological model of change. The analysis shows how a top-down implementation, together with a substantial degree of autonomy, can result in rich and diverse bottom-up initiatives. The NSS workshop thus demonstrated how long-term capacity building of a group of senior educational leaders can be used as a leverage for implementing an innovative instructional change on a large, national scale.

Starting from an interest in witnessing as a set of conceptual and narrative operations that also involve comparison as a fundamental cognitive practice, this essay examines the work of the witness at two historically entangled moments. In the “multi-directional memory” (Rothberg) of the British Jewish writer and political activist Leonard Woolf early 20^th-century colonial trauma connects with the rise in racial persecution and absolute power in Europe of the 1930s. Woolf’s experience as a colonial administrator in Ceylon is given fictional form in his 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle; an analysis of the condition of colonialism that is enabled by his complex and contingent position as a witness. Strikingly, the novel’s comparative operations and conceptual tropes reappear in his historiography of “the origins of totalitarianism” in Barbarians at the Gate (1939). For Woolf, the extreme events of the 1930s spur an almost compulsive historicism that leads back to the history of European imperialism and to his own colonial encounter, bringing together different temporal and spatial coordinates in a manner that is at once prescient and familiar. Not only is this an anticipation of Hannah Arendt’s famous “boomerang thesis” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); more generally Woolf’s narrative offers a historical perspective on recent transnational and global approaches to comparison where network- or other horizontal and lateral models dominate and where connections among coordinates can only appear tentative and fractured. Like Arendt’s, Woolf’s grand narrative was composed with the urgency of the witness to extreme events, illuminating the potential, as well as the risks, of cross-temporal comparison.

May 2019: Randi Koppen, professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, has published on various aspects of modernist literature and culture, including fashion and body culture, popular science, sound technologies and broadcasting. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as New Literary History and Modern Drama, and with international publishers such as Edinburgh University Press and Bloomsbury Academic. Her book Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), explores the modern fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice, demonstrating how Woolf’s work provides illuminating examples of all of these aspects. Professor Koppen’s current research centres on the interwar writing and activism of Leonard Woolf, especially its advancement of international collaboration, solidarity and justice.