Lyotard and the postmodernity debate

Contemporary advanced Industrial societies are Increasingly computerised, and knowledge Is now a major stake In the worldwide competition for power. Jean-Françols Lyotard argues that such societies are postmodern, having rejected the principal doctrines of modern Ism. Lyotard's book, The Postmodern condition, proposes that social theory must change to reflect the arrival of postmodernity. This has generated a debate in social theory between advocates of modernity with Its liberalising potential, represented in this thesis by Jürgen Habermas, and the advocates of postmodernity, principally Lyotard, who argue In favour of an antifoundational approach to postmodern society. In this thesis, three main areas of Lyotard's Investigation of postmodern society are analysed in detail, and in the context of the debate between modernists and postmodernists. The three topics are culture, language and the organisation of society. The postmodernity debate highlights the options available to contemporary social theory, and the ways in which recent changes in social organisation have affected social theory

Examining assessor attributes at HARD 2005

The TREC HARD (High accuracy Retrieval from Documents) track was motivated to investigate techniques for personalised retrieval of documents. Through the use of a limited dialogue with the TREC assessors, the track facilitated the gathering and exploitation of information about the assessors' personal search context (e.g. knowledge of search topic) which could be used to improve document retrieval. In this paper we describe experiments, run within the context of the 2005 HARD track, which indicate that assessor attributes such as familiarity, interest and confidence when searching a topic can help determine when the utilisation of automatic query expansion improves retrieval over the original document ranking

An analysis of HCN observations of the Circumnuclear Disk at the galactic centre

The Circumnuclear Disk (CND) is a torus of dust and molecular gas rotating about the galactic centre and extending from approximately 1.6pc to 7pc from the central massive black hole, SgrA*. Large Velocity Gradient modelling of the intensities of the HCN 1-0, 3-2 and 4-3 transitions is used to infer hydrogen density and HCN optical depth. From HCN observations we find the molecular hydrogen density ranges from 0.1 to 2 $\times$ 10$^{6}$ cm$^{-3}$, about an order of magnitude less than inferred previously. The 1-0 line is weakly inverted with line-centre optical depth approx $-$0.1, in stark contrast to earlier estimates of 4. The estimated mass of the ring is approximately 3 $-$ 4 $\times$ 10$^{5}$M$_{\odot}$ consistent with estimates based on thermal dust emission. The tidal shear in the disk implies that star formation is not expected to occur without some significant triggering event.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables (including 3 landscape tables generated with 2 separate Latex files

Private Schools and Queue‐jumping: A reply to White

John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1), before evaluating White’s no-harm (§2) and meritocracy (§3) arguments

Exponential-family Random Network Models

Random graphs, where the connections between nodes are considered random variables, have wide applicability in the social sciences. Exponential-family Random Graph Models (ERGM) have shown themselves to be a useful class of models for representing com- plex social phenomena. We generalize ERGM by also modeling nodal attributes as random variates, thus creating a random model of the full network, which we call Exponential-family Random Network Models (ERNM). We demonstrate how this framework allows a new formu- lation for logistic regression in network data. We develop likelihood-based inference for the model and an MCMC algorithm to implement it. This new model formulation is used to analyze a peer social network from the National Lon- gitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. We model the relationship between substance use and friendship relations, and show how the results differ from the standard use of logistic regression on network data

Social pedagogy and inter-professional practice : evaluation of Orkney Islands training programme

From February to September 2011, a social pedagogy training programme was provided for 18 staff from across Orkney Islands Council education and social care services. The initiative was jointly funded by Orkney Islands Council and the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care (SIRCC), now the Centre for excellence for looked after children in Scotland (CELCIS). The Orkney initiative was the first instance in Scotland of an inter-agency group of participants undertaking the course together. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide systematic evidence of the impact that the social pedagogy training had on participants’ day-to-day practice and inter-agency or inter-professional working. The evaluation questions were: 1.What was the impact of the training on participants’ day-to-day practice? 2.What impact did the provision of social pedagogy training to multi-agency participants have on their inter-professional and inter-agency collaboration? 3.What helped and hindered the process of building inter-agency collaboration and what key challenges can be identified

Existence and convergence properties of physical measures for certain dynamical systems with holes

We study two classes of dynamical systems with holes: expanding maps of the interval and Collet-Eckmann maps with singularities. In both cases, we prove that there is a natural absolutely continuous conditionally invariant measure $\mu$ (a.c.c.i.m.) with the physical property that strictly positive H\"{o}lder continuous functions converge to the density of $\mu$ under the renormalized dynamics of the system. In addition, we construct an invariant measure $\nu$, supported on the Cantor set of points that never escape from the system, that is ergodic and enjoys exponential decay of correlations for H\"{o}lder observables. We show that $\nu$ satisfies an equilibrium principle which implies that the escape rate formula, familiar to the thermodynamic formalism, holds outside the usual setting. In particular, it holds for Collet-Eckmann maps with holes, which are not uniformly hyperbolic and do not admit a finite Markov partition. We use a general framework of Young towers with holes and first prove results about the \accim and the invariant measure on the tower. Then we show how to transfer results to the original dynamical system. This approach can be expected to generalize to other dynamical systems than the two above classes.Comment: 44 pages. Major addition: this paper now treats Collet-Eckmann maps with singularitie

Martingale approximations and anisotropic Banach spaces with an application to the time-one map of a Lorentz gas

In this paper, we show how the Gordin martingale approximation method fits into the anisotropic Banach space framework. In particular, for the time-one map of a finite horizon planar periodic Lorentz gas, we prove that Holder observables satisfy statistical limit laws such as the central limit theorem and associated invariance principles.Comment: Final version, to appear in Nonlinearity. Corrected some minor typos from previous versio