On Behalf of the Nation: A Sociological Study of the Wootton Bassett Repatriations

With the Wootton Bassett rituals, a new landmark was set for British war commemoration. After six years of quiet military repatriations of fallen soldiers through another airbase, the flights had to be rerouted to RAF Lyneham and the hearses carrying the flag-draped coffins now passed through the heart of the nearby Wootton Bassett on their 50-mile journey to a military hospital in Oxford. Unexpectedly, this contingency triggered a series of events that gave birth to a community-led, local ritual that had remarkable national impact. This thesis is based on an in-depth ethnographic study that tells the story of the start, the consolidation and the end of this unusual and unprecedented ritual practice to commemorate the fallen and pay respect to them and their families. It takes advantage of this highly unusual opportunity to follow a process of ritualisation from its beginning, and explores how in this case ritual was employed to make sense of an unexpected and hitherto unexperienced situation, and to manage the emotional charge of that situation. In addition, the study also analyses the effect of this phenomenon and locates it within its social, cultural, historical and political context

What Might Democratic Self-Governance in a Complex Social World Look Like?

The crisis facing democratic self-government is first and foremost a crisis of self-governance, not of democracy. Section II reviews the nature of complex systems and why our contemporary social and economic order qualifies as technically complexindeed, increasingly so—and why explicit overall, directed reform of our social world is hopeless. But hope is not easily abandoned: Section III critically looks at two continuing sources of hope. Section IV then turns to a critical issue: If not by central direction, how do such complex systems achieve orderliness and functionality? Section V turns to the heart of the matter: is democratic self-governance viable in our increasingly complex systems—or, more subtly, what form of self-governance seems the most viable? Section VI argues that effective self-governance is not a freestanding exercise of a general will but must be embedded in the deontic principles of a liberal order

Locke v. Davey: Discretion, Discrimination, and the New Free Exercise

This is the published version

Jeder nach seinen Möglichkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen. Gerechtigkeitskonzepte und schulische Inklusion

Im Frühsommer des Jahres 2014 ging der Fall des 11-jährigen Henri durch die Schlagzeilen. Henri ist mit dem Down-Syndrom geboren und durch geistige Behinderung beeinträchtigt. Seine Eltern wollten für ihn den Besuch des Gymnasiums im Baden-Württembergischen Walldorf durchsetzen. Ihre Begründung: ihr Sohn möchte seine Freunde, welche er aus früheren Lebensjahren kennt, nicht verlieren und weiterhin gemeinsam mit ihnen seine Zeit verbringen. Dieser Wunsch wurde ihnen verwehrt. Die Öffentlichkeit in Baden-Württemberg war in Aufruhr, hatte doch die grün-rote Landesregierung versprochen, das freie Elternwahlrecht ebenso durch- wie inklusive Beschulung umzusetzen. [In diesem Beitrag] sollen die grundlegenden gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Vorstellungen gegliedert werden, welche hinter solchen Auseinandersetzungen stehen. Hinweise auf die Verzweigungen der Inklusionsdebatte werden nur eingeführt, wo sie dem Verständnis der Grundfrage aufhelfen. Auf der Basis der gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Einordnung soll erläutert werden, vor welchen grundlegenden Paradoxien und Dilemmata das Schulsystem in Bezug auf das Problem einer inkludierenden Teilhabeorientierung steht. Plädiert wird für ein vorsichtiges Teilhabeverständnis im Sinne einer Teilhabe "an" Schule. (DIPF/Orig.

Leader's guide for 4-H vegetable projects

"12/66/2,500.

A More Porous Postmodernity: Absurdity, Politics, Consumerism and the Cultural Authority of Spongebob Squarepants

In the wake of the recent election, there\u27s been some talk of healing, but until today no single figure has emerged with the capacity to repair the deep fissures in the body politic. We are so hung up on blue states and red states that our only hope may lie in the primary color that has been left off the map. We need something-or someone-yellow, and also absorbent and porous enough to soak up the ill will and scrub away the lingering bad feelings...Now more than ever, the country needs Spongebob Squarepants. In his New York Times film review of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, A.O. Scott delivers this message with a touch of humor, ascribing a messiah-like authority to the unwitting cartoon hero Spongebob Squarepants who, at face value, bears no relation to the political atmosphere of the fall of 2004. Yet Mr. Scott\u27s words now (a short few months later) resonate with a new irony in the wake of Rev. James Dobson\u27s so-called gay warning, which targeted Spongebob as promoting homosexuality for his appearance in a video about diversity and respect that included sexual identity as a characteristic deserving of tolerance. In the tradition of Tinky Winky, the Teletubby accused of being gay for his preference for purses, Spongebob\u27s alleged sexual identity has become fodder for humorists as well as participants in debates on gender politics. While Rev. Dobson\u27s words do not seem to have generated the alarm he presumably would have liked-conversely, they have been met with more disbelief and even ridicule in mainstream media than defense-underlying his warning is the seemingly improbable cultural authority of Spongebob Squarepants, the star of the #1 children\u27s show on television. Even for those disconnected from the world of children\u27s entertainment, it would be difficult not to notice the ubiquity of the wide-eyed, gaptoothed, ever-cheerful yellow sponge in America today. Spongebob, a Nickelodeon franchise, has been an unprecedented creative and capitalist success, attracting over 50 million viewers monthly, an estimated 20 million of whom are adults? Considering the widespread appeal of this franchise, it is not surprising that Dobson would detect a threat in Spongebob\u27s alliance with what he calls pro-homosexual values, or the radical notion that respect should be extended even to persons whose personal lives are distasteful to Christian right-wingers

On Theorizing about Public Reason

This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the idea of moral truth in OPR: when it comes to social morality, moral truth is necessarily a function of what can be endorsed by some collectivity. This leads to a fundamental worry about theories of public reason: why is the endorsement of the public so important? And if some sort of public endorsement is really so terribly important, how can a theory of public reason withstand the fact that it advances its own controversial claims that cannot be publicly endorsed? After considering when public endorsement is necessary, and when public reason theories can make controversial claims, I close by considering in what way OPR does, and in what way it does not, employ a thought experiment, and the complexities of that experiment

Automatic affective dimension recognition from naturalistic facial expressions based on wavelet filtering and PLS regression

Automatic affective dimension recognition from facial expression continuously in naturalistic contexts is a very challenging research topic but very important in human-computer interaction. In this paper, an automatic recognition system was proposed to predict the affective dimensions such as Arousal, Valence and Dominance continuously in naturalistic facial expression videos. Firstly, visual and vocal features are extracted from image frames and audio segments in facial expression videos. Secondly, a wavelet transform based digital filtering method is applied to remove the irrelevant noise information in the feature space. Thirdly, Partial Least Squares regression is used to predict the affective dimensions from both video and audio modalities. Finally, two modalities are combined to boost overall performance in the decision fusion process. The proposed method is tested in the fourth international Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition Challenge (AVEC2014) dataset and compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the affect recognition sub-challenge with a good performance

Physical and geochemical modelling (SWIFT-PHREEQC) of British aquifers for aquifer storage and recovery purposes. Part 2 : geochemical modelling

This report describes the progress that has been made in developing models simulating both the physical and geochemical aspects of Aquifer Storage Recovery (ASR) schemes. This work is part of a 30 month project, entitled ASR-UK, which started in April 1999. This report follows on from the work reported in Gaus et al., BGS report WD/00/08, published in March 2000. The aim of this report is to explore and to assess the chemical limitations or benefits in applying ASR in the major UK aquifers: the Chalk, the Lower Greensand, the Triassic Sandstone and the Jurassic Limestone. The implications for the quality of the recovered water using different types of injection water and different types of native water are assessed using two types of modelling: mixing modelling and cycle modelling. A total of 13 different combinations were developed. An example of more detailed geochemical modelling based on observations from an ASR-site in the Chalk is also included. More complex modelling requires detailed knowledge, particularly on the solid phases in the aquifer, but such data are generally limited. To assess the likely chemical quality of the recovered water when planning an ASR-scheme three components have to be taken into account: • chemical aspects of the injected water; • chemical aspects of the native water in the aquifer; • geochemistry of the aquifer and the chemical interaction with the injected water (e.g. dissolution of pyrite). Major chemical changes to the quality of the injected water during recovery are expected when one or more of the following conditions are met: • there is a large difference in chemical condition between the injected and the native water; this can cause large differences in pH or redox condition. • the native water or the sediment do not possess a sufficient pH buffering capacity (e.g. in the case of acidic waters where no calcite is present for dissolution) • there is a large difference in elemental concentrations between the injection and the native water (e.g. fluoride) and significant mixing occurs (e.g. in dual porosity aquifers) • a change in chemical condition of the water having contact with the sediment is able to trigger major (e.g. dissolution of gypsum) or minor (e.g. dissolution of heavy metals) reactions. The conclusions are based on the modelled cases only, and highlight the main chemical reactions likely to occur when implementing an ASR-scheme. Other chemical interactions may determine the quality of the recovered water when other injection waters are used, the native water has a different quality, or the geochemistry of the aquifer is different from the one assumed here. Also minor reactions and elemental concentrations are in general not modelled. Within this study it was also clearly illustrated that the geochemical model can be used at different levels when planning an ASR-scheme. At the initial desk-study level, geochemical modelling can be used as a crude assessment of the chemical viability of the scheme. In subsequent stages of the ASR-scheme trial and implementation, geochemical modelling can be supported by the observed data, used to assess the impact of specific geochemical reactions as illustrated for fluoride in the ASR-trial in the Chalk