The Canadian Constitutional Experiment

Amidst the staggering array of possible foci for an essay on the Canadian constitutional experiment I have chosen to stress the recent tumultuous struggles for identity and community which have engaged citizens and governments. My perspective is primarily from the bottom up, not because the recent constitutional exercise shows the Canadian peoples as masters of their fate, which it does not, but because who we are and to whom we relate as fellow citizens are important subjects in themselves. Further, the contemporary democratic state cannot function successfully in a vacuum. Its weight and its pressure are such, and its purposes are so intrusive of society, that what we now have is a state-society fusion in which a positive symbiosis between the two is a functional necessity. Otherwise the state will fall into disrepute and disrepair as it faces an indifferent populace. State purposes now require so much popular support and participation if they are to succeed that we have no alternative but to move in the direction of a more participant citizenry, which shares on a day to day basis in the task of governing itself. Thus the community towards which we work is a political community which simultaneously links us with each other and reduces the distance and the differentiation between the governors and the governed

Reflections on Commission Research

This paper explores the role of research in royal commissions. It is based primarily on my experience as one of three research directors for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, popularly known as the Macdonald Commission. Since royal commissions appear in many guises, much of what I say may not apply to other commissions. In general, my remarks are more applicable to those commissions that give advice on significant public policy matters than to more narrowly investigative commissions set up in response to allegations of corruption or scandal in government or to determine the causes of serious accidents. In these latter, essentially judicial, commissions, there is little need for the extensive social science research used in such policy inquiries as the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (Rowell-Sirois), the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Laurendeau-Dunton) and the Macdonald Commission

Exercise Beliefs and Behaviours of Individuals with Joint Hypermobility Syndrome/ Ehlers Danlos Syndrome-Hypermobility Type

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Disability & Rehabilitation on 10 November 2017, available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2017.1398278. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupPurpose: To explore exercise beliefs and behaviours of individuals with Joint Hypermobility syndrome/Ehlers–Danlos syndrome – hypermobility type and to explore patient experiences of physiotherapy.Methods: A cross sectional questionnaire survey design was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from adult members of the Hypermobility Syndromes Association and Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome Support UK. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. Qualitative data was analysed thematically.Results: 946 questionnaires were returned and analysed. Participants who received exercise advice from a physiotherapist were 1.75 more likely to report high volumes of weekly exercise (odds ratio [OR] = 1.75, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.30–2.36, p < 0.001) than those with no advice. Participants who believed that exercise is important for long-term management were 2.76 times more likely to report a high volume of weekly exercise compared to the participants who did not hold this belief (OR = 2.76, 95% CI = 1.38–5.50, p = 0.004). Three themes emerged regarding experience of physiotherapy; physiotherapist as a partner, communication – knowledge, experience and safety.Conclusion: Pain, fatigue and fear are common barriers to exercise. Advice from a physiotherapist and beliefs about the benefits of exercise influenced the reported exercise behaviours of individuals with Ehlers–Danlos syndrome – hypermobility type in this survey.Peer reviewe

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

Social marketing and social influences: Using social ecology as a theoretical framework

Social marketing has traditionally been dominated by an individualistic model of design. In this work, the authors apply a social ecology model to the theory and practice of social marketing, demonstrating that a multilevel framework is required to fully expose and account for the complexity of sociocultural and environmental effects. The authors have generated a diagnostic tool for this use. The paper then provides a detailed demonstration of the potential power of the tool by applying it to three illustrative case studies: one on encouraging safer driving, the second promoting sustainable travel, and the third increasing early detection of lung cancer. © 2010 Westburn Publishers Ltd

Plasma Dynamics

Contains reports on five research projects.U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientifc Research (Contract AFOSR 84-0026)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS 85-14517)Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Subcontract 6264005)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS 85-15032)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78-ET-51013)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-ET-51013

Maser radiation from collisionless shocks

Funding: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant Nos. EP/N014472/1, EP/R004773/1 and EP/N013298/1) and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council of the United Kingdom. F.C. and L.O.S. acknowledge support from the European Research Council (InPairs ERC-2015-AdG 695088) and FCT Portugal (grant No. PD/BD/114307/2016).This paper describes a model of electron energization and cyclotron-maser emission applicable to astrophysical magnetized collisionless shocks. It is motivated by the work of Begelman, Ergun and Rees [Astrophys. J. 625 , 51 (2005)] who argued that the cyclotron-maser instability occurs in localized magnetized collisionless shocks such as those expected in blazar jets. We report on recent research carried out to investigate electron acceleration at collisionless shocks and maser radiation associated with the accelerated electrons. We describe how electrons accelerated by lower-hybrid,waves at collisionless shocks generate cyclotron-maser radiation when the accelerated electrons move into regions of stronger magnetic fields. The electrons are accelerated along the magnetic field and magnetically compressed leading to the formation of an electron velocity distribution having a horseshoe shape due to conservation of the electron magnetic moment. Under certain conditions the horseshoe electron velocity distribution function is unstable to the cyclotron-maser instability [Bingham and Cairns, Phys. Plasmas 7, 3089 (2000); Melrose, Rev. Mod. Plasma Phys. 1 , 5 (2017)].Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The Murchison Widefield Array: The Square Kilometre Array Precursor at Low Radio Frequencies

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference. The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80–300 MHz, with a processed bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128 aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3-km diameter area. Novel hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper, the as-built MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument are summarised

Plasma Dynamics

Contains reports on four research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant ECS82-13485)University of Maryland (Subcontract A200728)U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR-84-0026B)U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-ACO2-78-ET-51013)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS82-13430