887 research outputs found
Caring for justice in a neoliberal university
This article is based on a study on participatory parity in higher education in South Africa. Its purpose is to explore the nature of the relationship between care and social justice under conditions of neoliberalism. Using the lenses of Joan Tronto’s democratic ethics of care and Nancy Fraser’s work on social justice, I also reflect on my own practices as a social work lecturer in a university that has a high percentage of students who, by their own accounts, are poor. Based on the study’s findings and my reflections thereupon, I argue that the context of higher education in South Africa renders relationships between students and lecturers vulnerable to replicating and reinforcing prevailing injustices in the sector. However, in the face of such entanglement, to care emerges as subversive practice, apt to substitute some of the key conditions and processes at the root of the injustices afflicting the field. I conclude that a democratic ethics of care can be employed to further the ends of social justice against the odds of a neoliberal learning context. This will also contribute to enhancing the well-being and academic development of both students and staff
A POSTMODERN CRITIQUE OF THE SACSSP'S DRAFT CODE OF ETHICS
In the course of the past few years, social work academics have begun increasingly to explore the relevance of postmernism for social work in South Africa, thus beginning to reconsider fundamentally some of its constituting components, including its moral, ethical and values base (Sevenhuijsen, 2003: Sewpaul & Hölscher, 2004; Williams & Sewpaul, 2004). With regard to the latter, it appears that al least since Abraham Flexner's now famous 1915 assertions regardig the professional standing of social work, the profession has been at great pain to make its moral, ethical and value base, and thus its role and function in relation to broader society, explicit. Flexner, in his paper entitled "Is Social Work a Profession?" presented at the 1915 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, defined the professions as those occupations that "...engage in intellectual operations involving individual responsibility, derive their material from science and learning, work this material up to a practical end, and apply it using techniques that are educationally communicable, are self-organised, and are motivated by altruism" (Popple, 1985:561, author's emphasis) and found that social work at the time did not qualify as a profession
Thermal effects on atomic friction
We model friction acting on the tip of an atomic force microscope as it is
dragged across a surface at non-zero temperatures. We find that stick-slip
motion occurs and that the average frictional force follows ,
where is the tip velocity. This compares well to recent experimental work
(Gnecco et al, PRL 84, 1172), permitting the quantitative extraction of all
microscopic parameters. We calculate the scaled form of the average frictional
force's dependence on both temperature and tip speed as well as the form of the
friction-force distribution function.Comment: Accepted for publication, Physical Review Letter
Electromagnetic Simulation and Design of a Novel Waveguide RF Wien Filter for Electric Dipole Moment Measurements of Protons and Deuterons
The conventional Wien filter is a device with orthogonal static magnetic and
electric fields, often used for velocity separation of charged particles. Here
we describe the electromagnetic design calculations for a novel waveguide RF
Wien filter that will be employed to solely manipulate the spins of protons or
deuterons at frequencies of about 0.1 to 2 MHz at the COoler SYnchrotron COSY
at J\"ulich. The device will be used in a future experiment that aims at
measuring the proton and deuteron electric dipole moments, which are expected
to be very small. Their determination, however, would have a huge impact on our
understanding of the universe.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 4 table
Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful
emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters.
Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due
to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the
viability of shared 3D virtual environments as an experimental platform for
conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that
crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive 3D virtual
environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life
crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and
the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress
evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements
characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd
disasters. We describe the behavioral mechanisms at play under such extreme
conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur.
Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect
without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate
peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as
an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour
in high-risk situations with real human subjects.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure
You can't see what you can't see: Experimental evidence for how much relevant information may be missed due to Google's Web search personalisation
The influence of Web search personalisation on professional knowledge work is
an understudied area. Here we investigate how public sector officials
self-assess their dependency on the Google Web search engine, whether they are
aware of the potential impact of algorithmic biases on their ability to
retrieve all relevant information, and how much relevant information may
actually be missed due to Web search personalisation. We find that the majority
of participants in our experimental study are neither aware that there is a
potential problem nor do they have a strategy to mitigate the risk of missing
relevant information when performing online searches. Most significantly, we
provide empirical evidence that up to 20% of relevant information may be missed
due to Web search personalisation. This work has significant implications for
Web research by public sector professionals, who should be provided with
training about the potential algorithmic biases that may affect their judgments
and decision making, as well as clear guidelines how to minimise the risk of
missing relevant information.Comment: paper submitted to the 11th Intl. Conf. on Social Informatics;
revision corrects error in interpretation of parameter Psi/p in RBO resulting
from discrepancy between the documentation of the implementation in R
(https://rdrr.io/bioc/gespeR/man/rbo.html) and the original definition
(https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1852106) as per 20/05/201
Theory of band gap bowing of disordered substitutional II-VI and III-V semiconductor alloys
For a wide class of technologically relevant compound III-V and II-VI
semiconductor materials AC and BC mixed crystals (alloys) of the type
A(x)B(1-x)C can be realized. As the electronic properties like the bulk band
gap vary continuously with x, any band gap in between that of the pure AC and
BC systems can be obtained by choosing the appropriate concentration x, granted
that the respective ratio is miscible and thermodynamically stable. In most
cases the band gap does not vary linearly with x, but a pronounced bowing
behavior as a function of the concentration is observed. In this paper we show
that the electronic properties of such A(x)B(1-x)C semiconductors and, in
particular, the band gap bowing can well be described and understood starting
from empirical tight binding models for the pure AC and BC systems. The
electronic properties of the A(x)B(1-x)C system can be described by choosing
the tight-binding parameters of the AC or BC system with probabilities x and
1-x, respectively. We demonstrate this by exact diagonalization of finite but
large supercells and by means of calculations within the established coherent
potential approximation (CPA). We apply this treatment to the II-VI system
Cd(x)Zn(1-x)Se, to the III-V system In(x)Ga(1-x)As and to the III-nitride
system Ga(x)Al(1-x)N.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure
Unifying conceptual and spatial relationships between objects in HCI
To design interfaces which occupy a continuous space of interaction, the conceptual model of an interface needs to be transferred to a spatial model. To find mappings between conceptual and spatial structure which are natural to people, an experiment is undertaken in which participants organize objects in a semi-circle of shelves around their body. It is analyzed how conceptual rela-tionships between objects such as categorial relationships and sequential rela-tionships within task performance are represented in spatial configurations of objects as chosen by the participants. In these configurations, a strong correla-tion between conceptual and spatial relationships is observed between objects
Phase Transitions of an Oscillator Neural Network with a Standard Hebb Learning Rule
Studies have been made on the phase transition phenomena of an oscillator
network model based on a standard Hebb learning rule like the Hopfield model.
The relative phase informations---the in-phase and anti-phase, can be embedded
in the network. By self-consistent signal-to-noise analysis (SCSNA), it was
found that the storage capacity is given by , which is better
than that of Cook's model. However, the retrieval quality is worse. In
addition, an investigation was made into an acceleration effect caused by
asymmetry of the phase dynamics. Finally, it was numerically shown that the
storage capacity can be improved by modifying the shape of the coupling
function.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
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