83,740 research outputs found
Sexual diversity in the judiciary in England and Wales; research on barriers to judicial careers
Debates about the diversity of the judiciary in the UK have been dominated by gender, race and ethnicity. Sexuality is notable by its absence and is perceived to pose particular challenges. It is usually missing from the list of diversity categories. When present, its appearance is nominal. One effect of this has been a total lack of official data on the sexual composition of the judiciary. Another is the gap in research on the barriers to the goal of a more sexually diverse judiciary. In 2008 the Judicial Appointment Commission (JAC) for England and Wales undertook research to better understand the challenges limiting progress towards judicial diversity. A central gaol of the project was to investigate barriers to application for judicial appointment across different groups defined by “sex, ethnicity and employment status”. Sexual orientation was again noticeable by its absence. Its absence was yet another missed opportunity to recognise and take seriously this strand of diversity. This study is based on a response to that absence. A stakeholder organisation, InterLaw Diversity Forum for lesbian gay bisexual and transgender networks in the legal services sector, with the JAC’s approval, used their questionnaire and for the first time asked lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lawyers about the perceptions and experiences of barriers to judicial appointment. This paper examines the findings of that unique research and considers them in the light of the initial research on barriers to judicial appointment and subsequent developments
Simple and Optimal Randomized Fault-Tolerant Rumor Spreading
We revisit the classic problem of spreading a piece of information in a group
of fully connected processors. By suitably adding a small dose of
randomness to the protocol of Gasienic and Pelc (1996), we derive for the first
time protocols that (i) use a linear number of messages, (ii) are correct even
when an arbitrary number of adversarially chosen processors does not
participate in the process, and (iii) with high probability have the
asymptotically optimal runtime of when at least an arbitrarily
small constant fraction of the processors are working. In addition, our
protocols do not require that the system is synchronized nor that all
processors are simultaneously woken up at time zero, they are fully based on
push-operations, and they do not need an a priori estimate on the number of
failed nodes.
Our protocols thus overcome the typical disadvantages of the two known
approaches, algorithms based on random gossip (typically needing a large number
of messages due to their unorganized nature) and algorithms based on fair
workload splitting (which are either not {time-efficient} or require intricate
preprocessing steps plus synchronization).Comment: This is the author-generated version of a paper which is to appear in
Distributed Computing, Springer, DOI: 10.1007/s00446-014-0238-z It is
available online from
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00446-014-0238-z This version
contains some new results (Section 6
Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the “Double Sensation”
The chapter titled “The Body” in Being and Nothingness offers a groundbreaking, if somewhat neglected, philosophical analysis of embodiment. As part of his “es- say on phenomenological ontology,” he is proposing a new multi-dimensional ontological approach to the body. Sartre’s chapter offers a radical approach to the body and to the ‘flesh’. However, it has not been fully appreciated. Sartre offers three ontological dimensions to embodiment. The first “ontological dimension” addresses the way, as Sartre puts it, “I exist my body.” The second dimension is the manner in which my body is experienced and utilized by the other. This includes my ready-to-hand equipmental engagement with the world and my body as the “tool of tools.” The third dimension is the manner in which “I exist for myself as a body known by the other.” In this paper, I explore Sartre’s original analysis and suggest comparisons with Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. I shall suggest that Sartre offers more discussion on intercorporeality than Merleau-Ponty
Yingjin Zhang, ed. China in a polycentric world : essays in Chinese comparative literature
This article reviews the book China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature edited by Yingjin Zhang
The American Nightmare: The Ford Edsel Flop and Sputnik Terror
During the late 1950s, it seemed everyone was pelting Ford Motor Company’s ill-fated Edsel. What was supposed to be the car of the future and an emblem of American prestige had turned into a symbol of America’s sharp decline. Two years earlier, Ford promised consumers riding on the waves of economic good times that they would no longer have to settle for their old entry-level Ford’s. Instead of allowing middle-class Ford customers to defect to General Motor’s flashy medium-price brands that showed personality and prestige, in 1957 Ford launched the Edsel as the perfect car for these “professional...famil[ies].” Yet soon after the Edsel launched, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite made the good times come to a grinding halt. The triumphant America that Ford designed the Edsel for ceased to exist once the Soviets seemingly conquered outer space, and the failed Edsel only fueled America’s fears that they were slipping behind the Russians. Ultimately Ford tried selling excess, American technological prowess, and the American Dream when the Edsel and Sputnik were proof that all three were in jeopardy
Book review: campaign communication and political marketing
James Moran reviews an extensively well-researched and thorough book dealing with every level and stage of political campaigning
Book review: climate policy after Copenhagen
Karsten Neuhoff’s compact contribution aims to scope the role of and recent experience with carbon pricing, and provides all the reasons why a global carbon pricing scheme is a truly formidable undertaking, finds Dominic Mora
How to change the world: tales of Marx and Marxism
James Moran takes a closer look at Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the relevance of Marxism for the 21st century. This is a serious, detailed and lucidly written collection, which gives the reader a rigorous account of Marxism. Though not, perhaps, a text for someone approaching Marxism for the first time, Hobsbawm’s experience certainly impresses one already familiar with Marxism’s central ideas. How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism. Eric Hobsbawm. January 2011. Little, Brown
Narcissistic Traits of Police Officers in America
The narcissistic traits of police officers aged 17 to 78 in the United States affect American citizens in various degrees. Improvements made to pre-employment psychological evaluations, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), the L (Lie) Scale, and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), may detect and screen out police officer candidates with underlying Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). It is important that candidates with NPD be screened out as, if they become officers, they may commit acts of police misconduct, which greatly affect the safety and trust of the American people
Maximizing Symmetric Submodular Functions
Symmetric submodular functions are an important family of submodular
functions capturing many interesting cases including cut functions of graphs
and hypergraphs. Maximization of such functions subject to various constraints
receives little attention by current research, unlike similar minimization
problems which have been widely studied. In this work, we identify a few
submodular maximization problems for which one can get a better approximation
for symmetric objectives than the state of the art approximation for general
submodular functions.
We first consider the problem of maximizing a non-negative symmetric
submodular function subject to a
down-monotone solvable polytope . For
this problem we describe an algorithm producing a fractional solution of value
at least , where is the optimal integral solution.
Our second result considers the problem for a
non-negative symmetric submodular function . For this problem, we give an approximation ratio that depends on
the value and is always at least . Our method can
also be applied to non-negative non-symmetric submodular functions, in which
case it produces approximation, improving over the best known
result for this problem. For unconstrained maximization of a non-negative
symmetric submodular function we describe a deterministic linear-time
-approximation algorithm. Finally, we give a -approximation algorithm for Submodular Welfare with players having
identical non-negative submodular utility functions, and show that this is the
best possible approximation ratio for the problem.Comment: 31 pages, an extended abstract appeared in ESA 201
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