Partnership and the development of trust in British workplaces

This article examines the alleged links between 'partnership' forms of managing workplace relationships in Britain and the development of intra-organisational 'trust'. The potential for mutually complementary linkages between the two are clear, in theory at least. Partnership should produce, nurture and enhance levels of interpersonal trust inside organisations, while trust legitimates and helps reinforce an organisation's 'partnership'. Qualitative evidence drawn from the self-reports of key participants in three unionised partnership organisations provides some support for the claimed linkages. But it also highlights weaknesses, discrepancies and pitfalls inherent in the process of pursuing trust through partnership. These offer insights into the process for managers, trade union officials, employee representatives and policy-makers, as well as suggesting avenues for future research using trust as a theoretical framework

Frameless Representation and Manipulation of Image Data

Most image sensors mimic film, integrating light during an exposure interval and then reading the latent image as a complete frame. In contrast, frameless image capture attempts to construct a continuous waveform for each sensel describing how the Ev (exposure value required at each pixel) changes over time. This allows great flexibility in computationally extracting frames after exposure. An overview of how this could be accomplished was presented at EI2014, with an emphasis on frameless sensor technology. In contrast, the current work centers on deriving frameless data from sequences of conventionally captured frames

Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory

This volume explores, from a variety of perspectives, the political theory of the man who is arguably the greatest English political thinker. It is the first substantial collection of new, critical essays on Thomas Hobbes by leading scholars in over a decade. Hobbes’s writings stirred debate in his own lifetime, for two centuries thereafter, and continue to do so in ours. They emerged in a period of intense political turmoil—a time of civil war and regicide, of puritanical rule and royal restoration. “They were motivated,” Dietz argues, “by concrete political problems and a practical concern, namely, to secure political order, absolute sovereignty, and civil peace.” The contributors emphasize and answer a series of expressly political questions that, to date, have not been fully addressed in the Hobbes literature. They contend that Hobbes’s writings are not mere static artifacts of a particular historical milieu, but rather rich sources of a variety of interpretations and criticisms that spur discussion and debate in their turn. Description Mary G. Dietz is John Evans Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics and Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. With a New Preface by the Author. This Kansas Open Books title is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/kansas_open_books/1016/thumbnail.jp

Meta-State conversion

In MIMD (Multiple Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream) execution, each processor has its own state. Although these states are generally considered to be independent entities, it is also possible to view the set of processor states at a particular time as single, aggregate, Meta State. Once a program has been converted into a single finite automaton based on Meta States, only a single proram counter is needed. Hence, it is possible to duplicate the MIMD execution using SIMD (Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream) hardware without the ovehead of interpretation or even of having each processing element keep a copy of the MIMD code. In this paper, we present an algorithm for Meta-State Conversion (MSC) and explore some properties of the technique

Trust repair after organization-level failure

We propose a systemic, multilevel framework for understanding trust repair at the organizational level. Drawing on systems theory, we theorize how each component of an organization's system shapes employees’ perceptions of the organization's trustworthiness and can contribute to failures and effective trust repair. We distinguish the framework from prior work grounded in dyadic assumptions and propose underlying principles and a four-stage process for organizational trust repair. Finally, we explore the implications for research and practice

Non-Hamiltonian dynamics in optical microcavities resulting from wave-inspired corrections to geometric optics

We introduce and investigate billiard systems with an adjusted ray dynamics that accounts for modifications of the conventional reflection of rays due to universal wave effects. We show that even small modifications of the specular reflection law have dramatic consequences on the phase space of classical billiards. These include the creation of regions of non-Hamiltonian dynamics, the breakdown of symmetries, and changes in the stability and morphology of periodic orbits. Focusing on optical microcavities, we show that our adjusted dynamics provides the missing ray counterpart to previously observed wave phenomena and we describe how to observe its signatures in experiments. Our findings also apply to acoustic and ultrasound waves and are important in all situations where wavelengths are comparable to system sizes, an increasingly likely situation considering the systematic reduction of the size of electronic and photonic devices.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, final published versio

Land use and tenure: entitlement rights for community-based wildlife and forest conservation in Taita Taveta, Kenya

This paper, discusses land use and tenure in terms of entitlement rights. Land is viewed as the basic resource through which other biological resources - in this case, wildlife and forests - are owned, used managed and contested. In this regard, key issues in the concept of entitlement rights are highlighted. In this context the paper then discusses briefly land, land use and tenure in Kenya. It narrows down to analyse land use and tenure in Taita Taveta District, describing the present tenure status with the aim of identifying 'who owns which land and what use they make of it'. The rationale for the establishment and subsequent demarcation of the conservation areas (Tsavo National Park, existing and planned sanctuaries and various forest reserves) is also reviewed, with a focus on entitlement rights. Finally, the paper demonstrates that there is competition for land between the local communities, and between them and wildlife and forest conservation. This competition is viewed as the main reason for biodiversity loss and human-wildlife conflict Therefore, clear entidement rights to land -ownership, use and interventionism - would lead to fewer contestations and competition, ameliorate loss of biodiversity, human-wildlife conflict and facilitate socio-economic development

A symmetry invariant integral on kappa-deformed spacetime

In this note we present an approach using both constructive and Hopf algebraic methods to contribute to the not yet fully satisfactory definition of an integral on kappa-deformed spacetime. The integral presented here is based on the inner product of differential forms and it is shown that this integral is explicitly invariant under the deformed symmetry structure.Comment: 16 page

Extending Static Synchronization Beyond SIMD and VLIW

A key advantage of SIMD (Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data stream) architectures is that synchronization is effected statically at compile-time, hence the execution-time cost of synchronization between “processes” is essentially zero. VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) machines are successful in large part because they preserve this property while providing more flexibility in terms of what kinds of operations can be parallelized. In this paper, we propose a new kind of architecture —- the “static barrier MIMD” or SBM — which can be viewed as a further generalization of the parallel execution abilities of static synchronization machines. Barrier MIMDs are asynchronous Multiple Instruction stream Multiple Data stream architectures capable of parallel execution of loops, subprogram calls, and variable execution- time instructions; however, little or no run-time synchronization is needed. When a group of processors within a barrier MIMD has just encountered a barrier, any conceptual synchronizations between the processors are statically accomplished with zero cost — as in a SIMD or VLIW and using similar compiler technology. Unlike these machines, however, as execution continues the relative timing of processors may become less precisely knowable as a static, compile-time, quantity. Where this imprecision becomes too large, the compiler simply inserts a synchronization barrier to insure that timing imprecision at that point is zero, and again employs purely static, implicit, synchronization. Both the architecture and the supporting compiler technology are discussed in detail

Single joint perturbation during gait: neuronal control of movement trajectory

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of single joint displacement on the pattern of leg muscle electromyographic (EMG) activity during locomotion. For the first time, unilateral rotational hip or knee joint displacements were applied by a driven orthotic device at three phases of swing during locomotion on a treadmill. The response pattern of bilateral leg muscle activation with respect to the timing and selection of muscles was almost identical for displacements of upper (hip joint) or lower (knee joint) leg. The leg muscle EMG responses were much stronger when the displacement was directed against the physiological movement trajectory, compared with when the displacement was reinforcing, especially during mid swing. It is suggested that these response patterns are designed to restore physiological movement trajectory rather than to correct a single joint position. Displacements released at initial or terminal swing, assisting or resisting the physiological movement trajectory, were followed by similar and rather unspecific response patterns. This was interpreted as being directed to stabilise body equilibriu