3,371 research outputs found

    Making the third mission possible: investigating academic staff experiences of community-engaged learning

    Get PDF
    Community-engaged Learning (CEL) is an intentional and structured pedagogical approach, which links learning objectives with community needs. Most of the existing literature is centred on Service-learning practice in the United States. To date, there have been no in-depth studies on the experiences and perspectives of practitioners who engage with CEL in a UK or more specifically, a Scottish Higher Education context. The thesis presents data collected from a qualitative study utilising documentary analysis of government and institutional literature and 23 in-depth interviews with University practitioners, managers and leaders. I explored factors which influence the perspectives and experiences of CEL practitioners at one Scottish, research-intensive Russell Group university. Adopting a research ontology informed by Margaret Archer’s Morphogenetic, Critical Realist approach, I analyse the data collected through the lens of an emancipatory Neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics framework and argue that CEL practice at this university contributes to, what the evidence suggests is, its ultimate purpose: promoting and cultivating individual flourishing and emancipatory critical thinking for the common good. Focussing on university-community engagement, the findings suggest that there are some inconsistencies between how the University is portrayed in public-facing literature compared to the level of institutional support individual practitioners of CEL report receiving. I conclude that failure to adequately support CEL activity in the future could negatively impact the sustainability and quality of community engagement at Alba University

    The Impact of WWII and Changes Brought by the War on a Small Kentucky Community

    Get PDF
    War is a regular tool that brings changes and new opportunities for people. For the people of Logan County, life was rather stagnated between the American Civil War and WWII. During the Civil War Logan County played a very important role in the pro-Confederate movement in Kentucky, even housing multiple meetings and a convention with the goal of Kentucky joining the Confederacy. While this did not happen, this movement continued in the years that followed the war, as a massive Confederate hangover reigned over the county. This hangover, which can be associated with the “lost cause” dominated the way of life for decades. Many people in Logan County did not want change. They desired their pre-Civil War life, and ideas such as industrialization and acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment were ideas that wany in Logan County did not support. The period was filled with violence and aggression, much of which dated back to the days of the war, and this continued until the WWII Era. It is during WWII that the people at home and those that served were so impacted by the war that they wanted to change. They now wanted new industries, they wanted more news, and they wanted more opportunities. Each of these are routed in WWII, and in the years that followed more changes occurred in the county than in the decades before the war. WWII brought Logan County into the 20th Century and changed the lives of the people in the county, in a way that did not happen before the war. Thus, making the WWII Era the most important event in the county’s history by bringing changes like factories, hospitals, a radio station and others after the war ended

    Natural and Technological Hazards in Urban Areas

    Get PDF
    Natural hazard events and technological accidents are separate causes of environmental impacts. Natural hazards are physical phenomena active in geological times, whereas technological hazards result from actions or facilities created by humans. In our time, combined natural and man-made hazards have been induced. Overpopulation and urban development in areas prone to natural hazards increase the impact of natural disasters worldwide. Additionally, urban areas are frequently characterized by intense industrial activity and rapid, poorly planned growth that threatens the environment and degrades the quality of life. Therefore, proper urban planning is crucial to minimize fatalities and reduce the environmental and economic impacts that accompany both natural and technological hazardous events

    Blockchain Agency Theory

    Get PDF
    Longstanding assumptions underlying strategic alliances, such as agency theory, are actively being revoked by dynamics in the new economy. The mechanism of inter-firm cooperation is increasingly being altered by radical developments in blockchains and artificial intelligence among other technologies. To capture and address this shift, this review takes a problematisation approach and focuses wholly on the pertinence of agency theory. First, it begins by acknowledging the established corpus in the area before, second, appraising the seven long-held assumptions in the principal-agent relationship encompassing (1) self-interest, (2) conflicting goals, (3) bounded rationality, (4) information asymmetry, (5) pre-eminence of efficiency, (6) risk aversion and (7) information as a commodity. Third, to add a fresh perspective, the review proceeds to proffer seven assumptions to advance a novel ‘Blockchain Agency Theory’ that would better describe new attributes and relaxed agency behaviour in blockchain alliances. These counter assumptions are (1) common interests, (2) congruent goals, (3) unbounded rationality, (4) information symmetry, (5) smart contracts, (6) mean risk and (7) information availability. In the fourth part, the prior audience of principals and agents is appraised and this culminates into, fifth, a consideration of a new audience of blockchain agency in algocratic environments. Altogether, the seven new assumptions extend and provoke new agency thinking among scholars and blockchain practitioners alike

    Neuro Symbolic Reasoning for Planning: Counterexample Guided Inductive Synthesis using Large Language Models and Satisfiability Solving

    Full text link
    Generative large language models (LLMs) with instruct training such as GPT-4 can follow human-provided instruction prompts and generate human-like responses to these prompts. Apart from natural language responses, they have also been found to be effective at generating formal artifacts such as code, plans, and logical specifications from natural language prompts. Despite their remarkably improved accuracy, these models are still known to produce factually incorrect or contextually inappropriate results despite their syntactic coherence - a phenomenon often referred to as hallucination. This limitation makes it difficult to use these models to synthesize formal artifacts that are used in safety-critical applications. Unlike tasks such as text summarization and question-answering, bugs in code, plan, and other formal artifacts produced by LLMs can be catastrophic. We posit that we can use the satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solvers as deductive reasoning engines to analyze the generated solutions from the LLMs, produce counterexamples when the solutions are incorrect, and provide that feedback to the LLMs exploiting the dialog capability of instruct-trained LLMs. This interaction between inductive LLMs and deductive SMT solvers can iteratively steer the LLM to generate the correct response. In our experiments, we use planning over the domain of blocks as our synthesis task for evaluating our approach. We use GPT-4, GPT3.5 Turbo, Davinci, Curie, Babbage, and Ada as the LLMs and Z3 as the SMT solver. Our method allows the user to communicate the planning problem in natural language; even the formulation of queries to SMT solvers is automatically generated from natural language. Thus, the proposed technique can enable non-expert users to describe their problems in natural language, and the combination of LLMs and SMT solvers can produce provably correct solutions.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figure

    Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons

    Get PDF
    This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions

    Expansive learning in a self-managed organization:an example of a software company from the healthcare sector

    Get PDF
    Abstract. This is the first study applying cultural-historical activity theory to the study of a self-managed organization. The study presents an analysis of Oima, a self-managed organization. The theory of expansive learning and previous literature on self-managed organizations are used as the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this study. A self-managed organization is one where authority has been radically decentralized in a formal and systematic way throughout the organization. The aim of the study is to identify the features of Oima as a self-managed organization, the elements of its overall activity, and the indications of expansive learning taking place in this organization. To achieve this, in-depth interviews were conducted with seven employees, who together make up 20% of the company workforce, with various functional specializations. The data were analyzed using thematic abductive analysis and by applying analytical tools derived from cultural-historical activity theory. The results of this study show that the object of Oima’s activity is multifaceted, facilitating flexible updating of the company’s objects, rules, and practices. Furthermore, the practices used by the company turn every decision made into a potentially expansive micro-cycle of expansive learning. Altogether, the findings indicate that expansive micro-cycles are continuously taking place in the studied organization. However, their activity is not without tension and contradictions. This provides evidence that self-managed organizations are able to constantly turn contradictions into drivers for change and development, and to bridge discontinuities in expansive learning, leading to expansion of the object of their collective activity on an ongoing basis
    corecore