Diversifying academic and professional identities in higher education: some management challenges

This paper draws on an international study of the management challenges arising from diversifying academic and professional identities in higher education. These challenges include, for instance, the introduction of practice-based disciplines with different traditions such as health and social care, the changing aspirations and expectations of younger generations of staff, a diffusion of management responsibilities and structures, and imperatives for a more holistic approach to the "employment package", including new forms of recognition and reward. It is suggested that while academic and professional identities have become increasingly dynamic and multi-faceted, change is occurring at different rates in different contexts. A model is offered, therefore, that relates approaches to "people management" to different organisational environments, against the general background of increasing resource constraint arising from the global economic downturn

Christopher Rowe's Plato and the art of philosophical writing

The review argues that Plato makes a valid distinction between inferior hypothetical and superior unhypothetical methods. Given the distinction, the book confuses the hypothetical for unhypothetical dialectic

Nondifferentiable functions of one-dimensional semimartingales

We consider decompositions of processes of the form $Y=f(t,X_t)$ where $X$ is a semimartingale. The function $f$ is not required to be differentiable, so It\^{o}'s lemma does not apply. In the case where $f(t,x)$ is independent of $t$, it is shown that requiring $f$ to be locally Lipschitz continuous in $x$ is enough for an It\^{o}-style decomposition to exist. In particular, $Y$ will be a Dirichlet process. We also look at the case where $f(t,x)$ can depend on $t$, possibly discontinuously. It is shown, under some additional mild constraints on $f$, that the same decomposition still holds. Both these results follow as special cases of a more general decomposition which we prove, and which applies to nondifferentiable functions of Dirichlet processes. Possible applications of these results to the theory of one-dimensional diffusions are briefly discussed.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOP476 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Appliance design for pervasive computing

The First International Conference on Appliance Design offered the opportunity for computer scientists, electronic engineers, designers, architects, and business strategists to discuss and to blend all the perspectives of design—physical, functional, interaction, graphical, and information—of pervasive computing systems and infrastructures