The Gap Between Constitutional Text and Social Practice: The Role of the Press

This year these awards take place at a crucial moment in the development of our constitutional democracy. Such a democracy can flourish only where there exists a basic, shared normative framework upon which the practice of a constitution can be built. Expressed bluntly, where a community cannot establish the most rudimentary of overlapping consensus as to basic values, there can be no long-term future for a constitutional community. If we, as the citizenry, cannot agree about a core meaning of freedom, equality, dignity, democracy, accountability, transparency and integrity, then our constitution will remain a text with no more significance than a document of historical curiosity. John Rawls Political Liberalism (1993) understood this requirement well: he sought not the creation of firm agreements on a comprehensive conception of the good. Rather, he insisted that without agreement on a core set of principles of justice, liberal democracy was not possible

What Fifth-Grade Students Reveal About Their Literacies by Writing and Telling Narratives

Written and oral literacy narratives produced by seven fifth-grade students are examined to identify the literacy identities students construct when narrating their past and present experiences with reading and writing. The narrative analyses reveal four major findings: 1. The students who contributed to this study have experienced literacy in multiple modes and contexts indicative of relatively broad conceptions of what counts as literacy. 2. They primarily describe literacy experiences in positive or neutral terms; when literacy events are evaluated negatively, it is usually in response to literacy demands that diminished students’ feelings of autonomy. 3. Students in this study intuitively understand that literacy is a set of social practices that take place in interactions among multiple actors. 4. Students sometimes portray themselves as having power to control the direction of literacy events; other times, their agency is limited by authoritative actors who are portrayed as enforcers of reading rules rather than as collaborative supporters. These findings are relevant for instructional practice because they present personal narrative writing as a way of infusing student voices into the discourse of the classroom in hopes of creating a more culturally relevant instructional space. At Granny’s table, spread thick with food, this is where your story begins. You are sitting with an open spiral notebook in front of you, a pencil curled tightly in your fingers. Uncle Joe took you to the store that day in the back of his truck. Your brothers asked for candy bars and sodas; and so did you, at first. But then you saw the stack of notebooks, sitting on the shelf two aisles over beneath rows of Funyuns and hot fries and barbecue pork rinds. You held your breath. There was a reason for those notebooks. They were covered with a thin layer of dust, into which you instinctively inscribed your name with your index finger. Then you blew and watched your name soak into the air around you. And you knew that all the Zero bars and Gatorades in the world would not satisfy you the way that notebook would. So you marched up to the counter and watched Joe’s expression as he paid seventy-five cents for the raggedy orange spiral notebook that would change your life forever. So you are sitting with the spiral notebook in front of you. While everyone else around you eats, you stare at the dingy white pages, then at the point of your pencil which you found under Granny’s bed and sharpened with a kitchen knife. If you don’t eat now, don’t complain later about being hungry, Ma tells you. You hear her, but you continue to be mesmerized by the blankness of the paper in front of you. The preceding excerpt is from an autobiographical piece I wrote several years ago to share with my fifth-grade students. I included this here as a reminder of Soliday’s (1994) assertion that life stories are “dialogical account[s] of one’s experience rather than a chronological report of verifiable events” (p. 514). In narrativizing this event from my childhood, I went to great lengths to position myself as a certain kind of person (i.e., an eager writer). This narrative is not a verbatim reconstruction of the past. Yes, I enjoyed writing as a kid; and yes, my uncle once bought me a notebook; but the magnitude of the event is obviously overstated. My narrativized version of this event is a carefully plotted construction of how my adult self wants my child self to be portrayed. In the analysis that follows, student literacy narratives will be treated as storied retellings in which students seek to construct a particular reading/writing identity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). These narratives speak volumes about the way students position themselves in the context of school and out-of-school literacy events

Secondhand Blues

“Secondhand Blues” is the first part of a novel-in-progress of the same title. It is a work of realist fiction that tells the story of an aspiring rock & roll artist, exploring the nature of ambition and how it affects (and is affected by) personal relationships. It also seeks to depict the world as it exists on the fringes of fame and success through the eyes of several different characters whose talents and ambitions have led them to take up residence there. “Stealing Home” is a coming-of-age story that explores the sometimes elusive concepts of home and family through the eyes of its thirteen-year-old narrator. It was selected as the winner of the 2013 Margery McKinney Short Fiction Award

Dealing with corporate defaulters: curbing the unfettered exercise of criminal law

The 1973 Companies Act used the criminal law extensively to enforce numerous provisions of the Act. This process of criminalisation proved ineffective and many provisions of the Act were honoured in the breach rather than the compliance. The drafters of the 2008 Act, following comparative precedent, sought to decriminalise the enforcement mechanisms contained in the Act by introducing a complaint procedure to be investigated by a newly created Companies Commission or the Takeover Panel, as well as introducing compliance notices. This paper examines the international trend to remove criminal sanctions from company law and to introduce alternative means of enforcement. It then proceeds to evaluate the new measures contained in the 2008 Act

Judge Ackermann and the Jurisprudence of Mourning

This paper focuses on the manner, in which the Constitutional Court, in its early jurisprudence, set the foundations for the 'transformative' development of South African private law

Legal Realism, Transformation and the Legacy of Dugard

John Dugard’s courageous inaugural lecture drew on American realism, modern natural law and South Africa’s liberal tradition to argue that judges might better serve the ends of justice if they recognised their creative role, and replaced their subconscious prejudices and preferences with liberal values of the common law. This turn to legal realism to understand South Africa law was a significant intellectual development. However, its implications remain undeveloped within the theory and practice of law in South Africa. (Critical )legal realism raises significant questions about the nature of law and its role in sustaining public and private power. The lessons of legal realism in relation to the dominant legal method (formalism) and the nature of private law were not really taken up by lawyers and legal academics under apartheid. This meant that South African lawyers were ill-prepared for the challenges of transformation in the legal system, especially in relation to legal method, the form and content of private law and the development of law under ss 8 and 39(2) of the Constitution. Moreover, while progressive lawyers have always recognised the political nature of law – especially under apartheid – this has not always translated into a deeper understanding of how the form and content of our democratic Constitution is contested, and how law and politics seep into one another

Conformal Tracking For Virtual Environments

A virtual environment is a set of surroundings that appears to exist to a user through sensory stimuli provided by a computer. By virtual environment, we mean to include environments supporting the full range from VR to pure reality. A necessity for virtual environments is knowledge of the location of objects in the environment. This is referred to as the tracking problem, which points to the need for accurate and precise tracking in virtual environments. Marker-based tracking is a technique which employs fiduciary marks to determine the pose of a tracked object. A collection of markers arranged in a rigid configuration is called a tracking probe. The performance of marker-based tracking systems depends upon the fidelity of the pose estimates provided by tracking probes. The realization that tracking performance is linked to probe performance necessitates investigation into the design of tracking probes for proponents of marker-based tracking. The challenges involved with probe design include prediction of the accuracy and precision of a tracking probe, the creation of arbitrarily-shaped tracking probes, and the assessment of the newly created probes. To address these issues, we present a pioneer framework for designing conformal tracking probes. Conformal in this work means to adapt to the shape of the tracked objects and to the environmental constraints. As part of the framework, the accuracy in position and orientation of a given probe may be predicted given the system noise. The framework is a methodology for designing tracking probes based upon performance goals and environmental constraints. After presenting the conformal tracking framework, the elements used for completing the steps of the framework are discussed. We start with the application of optimization methods for determining the probe geometry. Two overall methods for mapping markers on tracking probes are presented, the Intermediary Algorithm and the Viewpoints Algorithm. Next, we examine the method used for pose estimation and present a mathematical model of error propagation used for predicting probe performance in pose estimation. The model uses a first-order error propagation, perturbing the simulated marker locations with Gaussian noise. The marker locations with error are then traced through the pose estimation process and the effects of the noise are analyzed. Moreover, the effects of changing the probe size or the number of markers are discussed. Finally, the conformal tracking framework is validated experimentally. The assessment methods are divided into simulation and post-fabrication methods. Under simulation, we discuss testing of the performance of each probe design. Then, post-fabrication assessment is performed, including accuracy measurements in orientation and position. The framework is validated with four tracking probes. The first probe is a six-marker planar probe. The predicted accuracy of the probe was 0.06 deg and the measured accuracy was 0.083 plus/minus 0.015 deg. The second probe was a pair of concentric, planar tracking probes mounted together. The smaller probe had a predicted accuracy of 0.206 deg and a measured accuracy of 0.282 plus/minus 0.03 deg. The larger probe had a predicted accuracy of 0.039 deg and a measured accuracy of 0.017 plus/minus 0.02 deg. The third tracking probe was a semi-spherical head tracking probe. The predicted accuracy in orientation and position was 0.54 plus/minus 0.24 deg and 0.24 plus/minus 0.1 mm, respectively. The experimental accuracy in orientation and position was 0.60 plus/minus 0.03 deg and 0.225 plus/minus 0.05 mm, respectively. The last probe was an integrated, head-mounted display probe, created using the conformal design process. The predicted accuracy of this probe was 0.032 plus/minus 0.02 degrees in orientation and 0.14 plus/minus 0.08 mm in position. The measured accuracy of the probe was 0.028 plus/minus 0.01 degrees in orientation and 0.11 plus/minus 0.01 mm in position. These results constitute an order of magnitude improvement over current marker-based tracking probes in orientation, indicating the benefits of a conformal tracking approach. Also, this result translates to a predicted positional overlay error of a virtual object presented at 1m of less than 0.5 mm, which is well above reported overlay performance in virtual environments

Fire Service - Management and Command of Major Incidents

This study has concentrated upon the decision-making processes used at major incidents by the fire service in the United Kingdom rather than the more routine decisions made on the fireground. This partly because major incidents are safety critical events, involving complex technical or communication issues involving large volumes of information and many agencies, and also because the decisions made and judgements exercised have to demonstrate a robustness in application that will withstand considerable external scrutiny, since often major incidents involve losses that are subject to insurance or legal investigations. The research undertaken indicates that improvements are possible. The research places the current decision system in context. It does this by considering the cultural traditions of the fire service together with the managerial and organisational arrangements that set the parameters within which judgements and decisions will be made. This approach provides an insight as to how the fire service functions at operations and importantly the relationship between those decisions and time pressured environment in which they are often reached. Practical case studies that were attended by the author as the senior fire service commander are used to illustrate these features and help provide useful learning outcomes. This foundation is then used to consider in detail the whole decision support system employed and to offer objective improvements. Explanation of the operational practice employed is assisted by the provision of a number of tables and figures that illustrate the critical parts of the decision system, such as information trees and components and observed inter-agency issues, which are summarised in a systethatic decision process. Having collated and reviewed these findings it is postulated that command competency and situational awareness, the essential pre-requisites, can be improved through use of a new paradigm that emphasises the better use of data derived from a wider range of sources than are currently used. To assist in gaining this improvement greater integration of technology is suggested and options that exploit technology, such as electronic data communications, sensing devices, robotics and visualisátion, explored. Additional to the main study a number of allied supportive areas of research have been undertaken. These have included issues like fire service culture, public reaction to a serious fire, emergency action procedures, and toxic plume modelling and fireball impacts together with brief commentaries on September 11th and the future fire service in the United Kingdom. This research contributes to a relatively new area of study, the fire service decision process used to command and control resources, at major incidents