Designing a Microcontroller Training Platform for Active Distance Learning Engineering and Technology Students

This is an active distance-learning project that addresses the hands-on microprocessor/ mi-crocontroller-related courses. A research team designed a low-cost training system with supporting instructional materials to assist the teaching of these concepts. Individual laboratory activities are being developed to reinforce student learning and skill development in programming concepts. This basic system format eventually will support an array of engineering and technology courses. This project involves two community colleges, Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC) and Olympic College (OC), and a four-year university, Old Dominion University (ODU), in a collaborative research team to design and develop a specific PIC microcontroller training system with custom-designed software and curriculum materials to support related engineering technology courses. The functions of the hardware and software cover different areas of engineering technology courses and majors to maximize the use of the microcon- troller training system

Putting into Question the Imaginary of Recovery: A Dialectical Reading of the Global Financial Crisis and its Aftermath

In this article we put into question the discourses that emerged during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and that coalesced around a particular socio-economic imaginary of ?recovery? over the period 2009-2012. Our reading of these discourses is very much guided by the notion of the dialectic as developed by Fredric Jameson, and as such this paper can be read as attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. Through our dialectical reading we aim to create a certain estrangement effect that makes the imaginary of recovery seem very odd and unnatural. In order to achieve such an effect we postulate four theses which are deliberately antagonistic: first, that there has been no ?crisis of capitalism?; second, that we must change the valence of the GFC from negative to positive; third, that the relationship between finance capitalism and ?free markets? is deeply contradictory; and fourth, that we must resist the regulation discourse

Towards a Critique of Educative Violence: Walter Benjamin and ‘Second Education’

Although modern systems of mass education are typically defined in their opposition to violence, it has been argued that it is only through an insistent and critical focus upon violence that radical thought can be sustained. This article seeks to take up this challenge in relation to Walter Benjamin’s lesser-known writings on education. Benjamin retained throughout his life a deep suspicion about academic institutions and about the pedagogic, social and economic violence implicated in the idea of cultural transmission. He nonetheless remained committed to the possibility of another kind of revolutionary potential inherent to true education and, when he comes to speak of this in his Critique of Violence, it is remarkable that he describes it as manifesting an educative violence. This article argues that Benjamin’s philosophy works toward a critique of educative violence that results in a distinction between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ kind of education and asks whether destruction might have a positive role to play within pedagogical theories in contrast to current valorisations of creativity and productivity

Adorno?s Grey, Taussig?s Blue: Colour, Organization and Critical Affect

In this article we seek to open up the study of affect and organization to colour. Often simply taken for granted in organizational life and usually neglected in organizational thought, colour is an affective force by default. Deploying and interweaving the languages of affect theory, critical theory, and organization studies, we discuss colour as a primary phenomenon for the study of ?critical affect?. We then trace colour?s affect in conditioning the unfolding of organization in two particular ?colour/spaces? ? Adorno?s grey and Taussig?s blue of our title ? and discuss both its ambiguity and critical potential. Finally, we ponder what colour might do to the style of an organizational scholarship attuned to affect, where sentences blur with things and forces more than they seek to represent them

Shadows and light: diversity management as phantasmagoria

 Within the field of critical diversity studies increasing reference is made to the need for more critically informed research into the practice and implementation of diversity management. This article draws on an action research project that involved diversity practitioners from within the UK voluntary sector. In their accounts of resistance, reluctance and a lack of effective organizational engagement, participants shared a perception of diversity management as something difficult to concretize and envisage; and as something that organizational members associated with fear and anxiety; and with an inability to act. We draw on the metaphor of the phantasmagoria as a means to investigate this representation. We conclude with some tentative suggestions for alternative ways of doing diversity.

2019 update of the WSES guidelines for management of Clostridioides (Clostridium) difficile infection in surgical patients

In the last three decades, Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has increased in incidence and severity in many countries worldwide. The increase in CDI incidence has been particularly apparent among surgical patients. Therefore, prevention of CDI and optimization of management in the surgical patient are paramount. An international multidisciplinary panel of experts from the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES) updated its guidelines for management of CDI in surgical patients according to the most recent available literature. The update includes recent changes introduced in the management of this infection.Peer reviewe