Ontological and Epistemological Reflexivity: A Core Skill for Therapists

This paper develops the argument that a core skill needed to be an effective therapist is to have acquired an awareness of one’s own ontological and epistemological position in relation to one’s work as a therapist. In the same way that researchers need to develop reflexive awareness of their assumptions about what there is to know (ontology) and how they can come to know about it (epistemology), therapists need to be aware of their fundamental assumptions about human beings and the world they live in (ontology) as well as their beliefs about how best to develop an understanding of their clients and the meaning(s) of their experiences (epistemology). Regardless of which particular therapeutic model is adopted, the language used to talk about (and in) therapy, the kinds of questions asked of clients and the comments/interpretations offered, all presuppose and reinforce particular versions of human being and experiencing which are themselves not usually questioned or challenged during the course of therapy. In this paper it will be argued that it is essential that therapists are aware of their own fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human, and that they recognise their ontological and epistemological positions as positions that they are taking (rather than perceiving them to be self-evident truths). This is important for two reasons: i) if clients do not share the therapist’s assumptions (ie. their ‘model of the person’), the therapeutic work cannot proceed and be effective; ii) without such an awareness, therapists are at risk of unwittingly imposing their own model of the person upon the client which raises ethical issues

Perfectly Secure Communication, based on Graph-Topological Addressing in Unique-Neighborhood Networks

We consider network graphs $G=(V,E)$ in which adjacent nodes share common secrets. In this setting, certain techniques for perfect end-to-end security (in the sense of confidentiality, authenticity (implying integrity) and availability, i.e., CIA+) can be made applicable without end-to-end shared secrets and without computational intractability assumptions. To this end, we introduce and study the concept of a unique-neighborhood network, in which nodes are uniquely identifiable upon their graph-topological neighborhood. While the concept is motivated by authentication, it may enjoy wider applicability as being a technology-agnostic (yet topology aware) form of addressing nodes in a network

Employers' policies for third age employment – the case for action and the rational for reaction

This paper reports on findings from a study which explores employers’ perceptions of the careers of those in third age employment and the extent to which these organisations have in place policies and practices to manage older worker careers. Drawing on interviews with UK HR managers and advisory bodies, the study finds that there was an absence of formal policies which addressed the career needs of older works despite employers being aware of the issue associated with an aging workforce. Instead employers responded to career related requests from older workers on an ad hoc basis as they felt that specific policies for this group of people would potentially create legal issues for the organisation. Employers also believed that the aged workforce had little impact on their business and as a result did not engage in collective dialogue with older workers about their requirements and instead made assumptions about their career needs

Humanizing psychotherapy

The essence of the humanistic and existential approaches to psychotherapy is a commitment to conceptualizing, and engaging with people in a deeply valuing and respectful way. Hence, within these approaches, there is an emphasis on viewing clients' behaviors as meaningful and freely chosen; and there is also a belief that clients have the capacity to become aware of the reasons for their thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Phenomenological exploration is thus a central element of many existential and humanistic psychotherapies, and this requires psychotherapists to put to one side their therapeutic techniques and interpretative assumptions and to listen to clients in an in-depth, non-analytical way. From an existential and humanistic standpoint, however, this valuing of human beings also extends to the psychotherapist's own humanity. Hence, within these approaches, there is an emphasis on the psychotherapists themselves being genuine in the psychotherapeutic encounter, and being willing to meet their clients at a level of "relational depth." Existential and humanistic practices may not be appropriate for all clients and all psychotherapists, but it is concluded that the principles underlying these approaches are of universal relevance to the practice of psychotherapy

Old hats and closet revisionists: reflections on Domokos Kosáry's latest work on the 1848 Hungarian revolution

The publication of Domokos Kosáry's Hungary and International Politics in 1848–1849 offers an opportunity to examine Hungarian historians' changing views, since the Second World War, about that brilliant apogee of their country's history: the 1848 revolution. This book offers an overview of the whole subject which no other book written on a wide scale has offered in recent years, rather more than what its title promises. Its author is fully aware of the extent to which history can be understood as historiography and he critically discusses other historians' works. Moreover, Kosáry, the eighty-eight-year-old Nestor of Hungarian historians and the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has over the years earned the reputation of being the arch-revisionist of nineteenth-century Hungarian history. A convenient way to account for Kosáry's revisionist views is to explore first some traditional assumptions and views held about the subject and also their modifications over the years, before discussing Kosáry's work and reporting on where the argument stands today. Kosáry's revisionism has preyed on (if that is not an unkind description) two (partly overlapping) vocabularies of interpretation. Again, for convenience sake (and treading in the steps of geologists) I shall start with the still visible, because more recent, Marxist Old Hat vocabulary which rests on some older inveterate Independentist Old Hat assumptions that I shall review subsequently

Asymptotic Mutual Information Statistics of Separately-Correlated Rician Fading MIMO Channels

Precise characterization of the mutual information of MIMO systems is required to assess the throughput of wireless communication channels in the presence of Rician fading and spatial correlation. Here, we present an asymptotic approach allowing to approximate the distribution of the mutual information as a Gaussian distribution in order to provide both the average achievable rate and the outage probability. More precisely, the mean and variance of the mutual information of the separatelycorrelated Rician fading MIMO channel are derived when the number of transmit and receive antennas grows asymptotically large and their ratio approaches a finite constant. The derivation is based on the replica method, an asymptotic technique widely used in theoretical physics and, more recently, in the performance analysis of communication (CDMA and MIMO) systems. The replica method allows to analyze very difficult system cases in a comparatively simple way though some authors pointed out that its assumptions are not always rigorous. Being aware of this, we underline the key assumptions made in this setting, quite similar to the assumptions made in the technical literature using the replica method in their asymptotic analyses. As far as concerns the convergence of the mutual information to the Gaussian distribution, it is shown that it holds under some mild technical conditions, which are tantamount to assuming that the spatial correlation structure has no asymptotically dominant eigenmodes. The accuracy of the asymptotic approach is assessed by providing a sizeable number of numerical results. It is shown that the approximation is very accurate in a wide variety of system settings even when the number of transmit and receive antennas is as small as a few units.Comment: - submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on Nov. 19, 2006 - revised and submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory on Dec. 19, 200

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page