The Academic Grind: A Critique of Creative and Collaborative Discourses Between Digital Games Industries and Post-Secondary Education in Canada

ABSTRACT Digital game development, seeking opportunities to extend its reach and augment its capabilities in a competitive global market, requires the institutions around it to respond and reconfigure to its needs. In Canada, collaborations between digital game industries and educational institutions coalesce around the need to identify and draw students into a tailored educational stream where narrowly defined forms of creativity and knowledge maintain a fluidity amenable to the needs of capital. Provincial and federal government endorsement, supplemented with targeted policy measures, presides over a repurposing of the relationship between post-secondary education, business, and society as a whole, translating monopolies of labour and knowledge into monopolies of power. For educational institutions however, this process of adaptation is necessarily an incomplete one. Using document data, along with interviews of administrators and professionals who negotiate the space between industry and education, the dissertation targets three regions of Canada with idiosyncratic industrial ecosystems, institutional networks, administrative imperatives, and specific demands for skilled game development labour. In Vancouver, Montréal, and Southern Ontario, the disciplining of students as ideal neoliberal subjects magnifies class divisions, unevenly addresses struggles around gendered working conditions in a male dominated industry, and exacerbates ongoing tensions regarding labour in digital media industries. This dissertation contends that the further intensification of the flexibility of educational institutions and their attempt to adapt to the speed of digital capital is a moment of high risk: in negotiating their adequacy and legitimacy in a neoliberal mode of capital, educational programs and their students are exposed to rapidly changing market conditions, competing agendas, and economic crises. The contingencies and contradictions present within administrative subjectivities generate spaces to establish the terms of a recomposition of post-secondary education that requires new arrangements of affinity within educational networks

HST followup observations of two bright z ~ 8 candidate galaxies from the BoRG pure-parallel survey

We present followup imaging of two bright (L > L*) galaxy candidates at z > 8 from the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey with the F098M filter on HST/WFC3. The F098M filter provides an additional constraint on the flux blueward of the spectral break, and the observations are designed to discriminate between low- and high-z photometric redshift solutions for these galaxies. Our results confirm one galaxy, BoRG 0116+1425 747, as a highly probable z ~ 8 source, but reveal that BoRG 0116+1425 630 - previously the brightest known z > 8 candidate (mAB = 24.5) - is likely to be a z ~ 2 interloper. As this source was substantially brighter than any other z > 8 candidate, removing it from the sample has a significant impact on the derived UV luminosity function in this epoch. We show that while previous BoRG results favored a shallow power-law decline in the bright end of the luminosity function prior to reionization, there is now no evidence for departure from a Schechter function form and therefore no evidence for a difference in galaxy formation processes before and after reionization.Comment: Accepted by ApJL, 7 pages, 4 figure

Cephalosporinases associated with outer membrane vesicles released by Bacteroides spp. protect gut pathogens and commensals against beta-lactam antibiotics

Objectives: To identify β-lactamase genes in gut commensal Bacteroides species and to assess the impact of these enzymes, when carried by outer membrane vesicles (OMVs), in protecting enteric pathogens and commensals. Methods: A deletion mutant of the putative class A β-lactamase gene (locus tag BT_4507) found in the genome of the human commensal Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron was constructed and a phenotypic analysis performed. A phylogenetic tree was built from an alignment of nine Bacteroides cephalosporinase protein sequences, using the maximum likelihood method. The rate of cefotaxime degradation after incubation with OMVs produced by different Bacteroides species was quantified using a disc susceptibility test. The resistance of Salmonella Typhimurium and Bifidobacterium breve to cefotaxime in liquid culture in the presence of B. thetaiotaomicron OMVs was evaluated by measuring bacterial growth. Results: The B. thetaiotaomicron BT_4507 gene encodes a β-lactamase related to the CepA cephalosporinase of Bacteroides fragilis. OMVs produced by B. thetaiotaomicron and several other Bacteroides species, except Bacteroides ovatus, carried surface-associated β-lactamases that could degrade cefotaxime. β-Lactamase-harbouring OMVs from B. thetaiotaomicron protected Salmonella Typhimurium and B. breve from an otherwise lethal dose of cefotaxime. Conclusions: The production of membrane vesicles carrying surface-associated β-lactamases by Bacteroides species, which constitute a major part of the human colonic microbiota, may protect commensal bacteria and enteric pathogens, such as Salmonella Typhimurium, against β-lactam antibiotics

Natural ventilation of multiple storey buildings: The use of stacks for secondary ventilation

The natural ventilation of buildings may be enhanced by the use of stacks. As well as increasing the buoyancy pressure available\ud to drive a flow, the stacks may also be used to drive ventilation in floors where there is little heat load. This is achieved by connecting\ud the floor with a relatively low heat load to a floor with a higher heat load through a common stack. The warm air expelled from the\ud warmer space into the stack thereby drives a flow through the floor with no heat load. This principle of ventilation has been adopted\ud in the basement archive library of the new SSEES building at UCL. In this paper a series of laboratory experiments and supporting\ud quantitative models are used to investigate such secondary ventilation of a low level floor driven by a heat source in a higher level\ud floor. The magnitude of the secondary ventilation within the lower floor is shown to increase with the ratio of the size of the\ud openings on the lower to the upper floor and also the height of the stack. The results also indicate that the secondary ventilation\ud leads to a reduction in the magnitude of the ventilation through the upper floor, especially if the lower floor has a large inlet area.\ud r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

The development and implementation of a peer support model for a specialist mental health service for older people: lessons learned

© 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: There has been a significant growth in the employment of peer workers over the past decade in youth and adult mental health settings. Peer work in mental health services for older people is less developed, and there are no existing peer work models for specialist mental health services for older people in Australia. The authors developed and implemented a peer work model for older consumers and carers of a specialist mental health service. The purpose of this paper is to describe the model, outline the implementation barriers experienced and lesson learned and comment on the acceptability of the model from the perspective of stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach: To ensure the development of the peer work model met the needs of key stakeholders, the authors adopted an evaluation process that occurred alongside the development of the model, informed by action research principles. To identify stakeholder preferences, implementation barriers and potential solutions, and gain insight into the acceptability and perceived effectiveness of the model, a range of methods were used, including focus groups with the peer workers, clinicians and steering committee, consumer and carer surveys, field notes and examination of project documentation. Findings: While the model was overall well received by stakeholders, the authors experienced a range of challenges and implementation barriers, in particular around governance, integrating the model into existing systems, and initial resistance to peer work from clinical staff. Originality/value: Older peer workers provide a valuable contribution to the mental health sector through the unique combination of lived experience and ageing. The authors recommend that models of care are developed prior to implementation so that there is clarity around governance, management, reporting lines and management of confidentiality issues

Social Work Advocacy: Professional Self-Interest and Social Justice

This study employed an analysis of the advocacy-related resources and materials available through the 50 NASW state chapter websites. Results revealed that a large number of states had no information about advocacy on their websites (42%). One third of the mission statements reviewed contained language indicating that advocacy was part of the chapter mission, while nearly as many included no content related to advocacy or social justice on their homepages. Nearly two thirds of the websites contained no resources, tools or links to help with advocacy practice, promotion or education. Thirteen advocacy themes emerged, which represented policy issues within the state advocacy agendas. Professional Self-Interest was the issue with the highest frequency (17%) across the 2010 state chapter agendas, but the 12 other social justice issues combined dominated the legislative agendas (83%). Professional selfinterest issues accounted for the highest rate of prevalence on state agendas, as it appeared on 86% of the chapter agendas analyzed

Full sphere hydrodynamic and dynamo benchmarks

Convection in planetary cores can generate fluid flow and magnetic fields, and a number of sophisticated codes exist to simulate the dynamic behaviour of such systems. We report on the first community activity to compare numerical results of computer codes designed to calculate fluid flow within a whole sphere. The flows are incompressible and rapidly rotating and the forcing of the flow is either due to thermal convection or due to moving boundaries. All problems defined have solutions that allow easy comparison, since they are either steady, slowly drifting or perfectly periodic. The first two benchmarks are defined based on uniform internal heating within the sphere under the Boussinesq approximation with boundary conditions that are uniform in temperature and stress-free for the flow. Benchmark 1 is purely hydrodynamic, and has a drifting solution. Benchmark 2 is a magnetohydrodynamic benchmark that can generate oscillatory, purely periodic, flows and magnetic fields. In contrast, Benchmark 3 is a hydrodynamic rotating bubble benchmark using no slip boundary conditions that has a stationary solution. Results from a variety of types of code are reported, including codes that are fully spectral (based on spherical harmonic expansions in angular coordinates and polynomial expansions in radius), mixed spectral and finite difference, finite volume, finite element and also a mixed Fourier–finite element code. There is good agreement between codes. It is found that in Benchmarks 1 and 2, the approximation of a whole sphere problem by a domain that is a spherical shell (a sphere possessing an inner core) does not represent an adequate approximation to the system, since the results differ from whole sphere results

Coulomb blockade of strongly coupled quantum dots studied via bosonization of a channel with a finite barrier

A pair of quantum dots, coupled through a point contact, can exhibit Coulomb blockade effects that reflect an oscillatory term in the dots' total energy whose value depends on whether the total number of electrons on the dots is even or odd. The effective energy associated with this even-odd alternation is reduced, relative to the bare Coulomb blockade energy for uncoupled dots, by a factor (1-f) that decreases as the interdot coupling is increased. When the transmission coefficient for interdot electronic motion is independent of energy and the same for all channels within the point contact (which are assumed uncoupled), the factor (1-f) takes on a universal value determined solely by the number of channels and the dimensionless conductance g of each individual channel. This paper studies corrections to the universal value of (1-f) that result when the transmission coefficent varies over energy scales of the size of the bare Coulomb blockade energy. We consider a model in which the point contact is described by a single orbital channel containing a parabolic barrier potential, and we calculate the leading correction to (1-f) for one-channel (spin-split) and two-channel (spin-degenerate) point contacts in the limit where the single orbital channel is almost completely open. By generalizing a previously used bosonization technique, we find that, for a given value of the dimensionless conductance g, the value of (1-f) is increased relative to its value for a zero-thickness barrier, but the absolute value of the increase is small in the region where our calculations apply.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Postscript figure