On the Perturbation of Self-Organized Urban Street Networks

We investigate urban street networks as a whole within the frameworks of information physics and statistical physics. Urban street networks are envisaged as evolving social systems subject to a Boltzmann-mesoscopic entropy conservation. For self-organized urban street networks, our paradigm has already allowed us to recover the effectively observed scale-free distribution of roads and to foresee the distribution of junctions. The entropy conservation is interpreted as the conservation of the surprisal of the city-dwellers for their urban street network. In view to extend our investigations to other urban street networks, we consider to perturb our model for self-organized urban street networks by adding an external surprisal drift. We obtain the statistics for slightly drifted self-organized urban street networks. Besides being practical and manageable, this statistics separates the macroscopic evolution scale parameter from the mesoscopic social parameters. This opens the door to observational investigations on the universality of the evolution scale parameter. Ultimately, we argue that the strength of the external surprisal drift might be an indicator for the disengagement of the city-dwellers for their city.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures + 1 table, LaTeX2e+BMCArt+AmSLaTeX+enote

Educational change in Scotland: Policy, context and biography

The poor success rate of policy for curriculum change has been widely noted in the educational change literature. Part of the problem lies in the complexity of schools, as policymakers have proven unable to micromanage the multifarious range of factors that impact upon the implementation of policy. This paper draws upon empirical data from a local authority-led initiative to implement Scotland’s new national curriculum. It offers a set of conceptual tools derived from critical realism (particularly the work of Margaret Archer), which offer significant potential in allowing us to develop greater understanding of the complexities of educational change. Archer’s social theory developed as a means of explaining change and continuity in social settings. As schools and other educational institutions are complex social organisations, critical realism offers us epistemological tools for tracking the ebbs and flows of change cycles over time, presenting the means for mapping the multifarious networks and assemblages that form their basis

The Lattice structure of Chip Firing Games and Related Models

In this paper, we study a famous discrete dynamical system, the Chip Firing Game, used as a model in physics, economics and computer science. We use order theory and show that the set of reachable states (i.e. the configuration space) of such a system started in any configuration is a lattice, which implies strong structural properties. The lattice structure of the configuration space of a dynamical system is of great interest since it implies convergence (and more) if the configuration space is finite. If it is infinite, this property implies another kind of convergence: all the configurations reachable from two given configurations are reachable from their infimum. In other words, there is a unique first configuration which is reachable from two given configurations. Moreover, the Chip Firing Game is a very general model, and we show how known models can be encoded as Chip Firing Games, and how some results about them can be deduced from this paper. Finally, we define a new model, which is a generalization of the Chip Firing Game, and about which many interesting questions arise.Comment: See http://www.liafa.jussieu.fr/~latap

Critical Identity Pedagogy : Bridging the dialectics of Social Justice and Inclusion

Peer reviewe

Categories of Residuated Lattices

We present dual variants of two algebraic constructions of certain classes of residuated lattices: The Galatos-Raftery construction of Sugihara monoids and their bounded expansions, and the Aguzzoli-Flaminio-Ugolini quadruples construction of srDL-algebras. Our dual presentation of these constructions is facilitated by both new algebraic results, and new duality-theoretic tools. On the algebraic front, we provide a complete description of implications among nontrivial distribution properties in the context of lattice-ordered structures equipped with a residuated binary operation. We also offer some new results about forbidden configurations in lattices endowed with an order-reversing involution. On the duality-theoretic front, we present new results on extended Priestley duality in which the ternary relation dualizing a residuated multiplication may be viewed as the graph of a partial function. We also present a new Esakia-like duality for Sugihara monoids in the spirit of Dunn\u27s binary Kripke-style semantics for the relevance logic R-mingle

A case study of teachers in an innovative professional collaborative and the evolution of their curricular conceptions, practices, and agency.

In this study, I explore the curricular conceptions and practices of seven diverse secondary teachers in an urban, public school district who were involved in a year-long innovative professional collaborative. I also examine the types of ecological influences, including the influence of the collaborative, that played a role in the development of their sense of agency, or lack thereof, focusing especially on their exercise of structurally transformative, or innovative, agency. I examine the following questions in this study: 1. How do teachers perceive curriculum and their roles in curriculum? In what ways do they perceive their curricular conceptions and practices to be influenced by: their past teaching experience? their teacher education program? their perceived professional space in the workplace (culturally, structurally, and materially)? their short-term and long-term objectives for their students? 2. How do teachers view their participation in the innovative professional collaborative as contributive to their conceptualizations about and relationship with curriculum: with regard to their beliefs? with regard to their written plans? with regard to their classroom practice? Approaching the ‘contact zone’ of the collaborative through the lens of Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogic thinking, and with an ecological understanding of agency informed by his concepts of ideological becoming and internally persuasive discourses, I utilized qualitative case study methods, as well as life history interview methods, to answer my research questions, garnering teachers’ perspectives by way of surveys, interviews, video diaries, and innovative artifacts. I analyzed the data through processes of open and focused coding, coding using pre-established codes, and cross-case analysis. Results from this study suggest that teachers’ exercise of structurally transformative agency is impacted by the ecological influences of their past experiences, present contexts, and future goals, but that it is also—and to an even greater degree—highly influenced by their core perspectives toward these influences, regardless of whether the influences are supportive or constrictive in nature. This research also suggests that teacher preparation programs, schools, and teachers may benefit from cultivating spaces and relationships that encourage vulnerability, the production of new knowledge, trust for teachers, organic teacher leadership opportunities, reflective conversations, and occasions on which teachers can “get outside of the profession,” all of which promote teacher innovation and growth in structurally transformative agency

Aging and Disability: The Paradoxical Positions of the Chronological Life Course

This paper explores aging and disability, problematizing the paradoxical tendency to separate and conflate these social locations in chronological understandings of the life course. Exploring how such thinking has shaped assumptions, responses, knowledge, policy and practice, we conclude with suggestions to reconsider disability across the life course and into late life