Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology’s adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of socio-cultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy makers. Instead, socio-cultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education

Grappling with real property supremacy in US urban climate finance

In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential ‘climate-proofing,’ retrofitting efforts that bring climate finance ‘home’ to the building level. Building on the concept of ‘real property supremacy,’ we demonstrate how resourcing climate response is limited by the privileging of real property in the structure and distribution of low-carbon financial tools and incentives. We argue that this privileging reproduces hierarchies of protection for some, while exacerbating existing social inequalities, exclusions, and predations for others—ultimately, yielding greater control over climate futures to those with asymmetrical power over real property. This structurally unequal treatment risks locking-in extant social hierarchies embedded in US real property relationships instead of seizing opportunities to transform them via the historic urban investments required for climate change

Phylogenetic relationships of dasyuromorphian marsupials revisited

We reassessed the phylogenetic relationships of dasyuromorphians using a large molecular database comprising previously published and new sequences for both nuclear (nDNA) and mitochondrial (mtDNA) genes from the numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus), most living species of Dasyuridae, and the recently extinct marsupial wolf, Thylacinus cynocephalus. Our molecular tree suggests that Thylacinidae is sister to Myrmecobiidae + Dasyuridae. We show robust support for the dasyurid intrafamilial classification proposed by Krajewski & Westerman as well as for placement of most dasyurid genera, which suggests substantial homoplasy amongst craniodental characters presently used to generate morphology-based taxonomies. Molecular dating with relaxed molecular clocks suggests that dasyuromorphian cladogenesis began in the Eocene, and that all three dasyuromorphian families originated prior to the end of this epoch. Radiation within Thylacinidae and Dasyuridae had occurred by the middle to late Oligocene, consistent with recognition of primitive thylacinids (e.g. Badjcinus turnbulli) in the later Oligocene and of putative dasyurids (e.g. Barinya wangala) by the early Miocene. We propose that all four extant dasyurid tribes were in existence by the early Miocene and that most modern dasyurid genera/species were established before the later Miocene. This is in marked contrast to the popularly accepted advocation of their origins in the latest Miocene–early Pliocene

Governing Homo Subprimicus: Essays on the Financial Regulation of Poverty After the Subprime Crisis

This thesis explores the landscape of experimentation in non-prime financial products, services and institutions that has taken form since the financial crisis. Since the financial crisis, the premise that poor families can be made “self-sufficient” through the educated use of well-designed and regulated for-profit financial instruments has given rise to a variety of new financial practices that are reshaping the US financial landscape in ways that few geographers have studied. The thesis is composed of four primary chapters (chapters 2, 4, 6 and 8) with secondary linking chapters in between (chapters 3, 5 and 7). Chapter 2 challenges extant framings of the relationship between financially marginalized groups and the financial system as one of either discriminatory exclusion or usurious inclusion. It argues for a reframing of financial exclusion as a problem of financial government. From this perspective, financial exclusion is a problem of how to regulate the conduct of risky populations through the sale of financial products and services. It argues that apparatuses designed to overcome barriers to the extension of financial government have produced tiered processes of financial subject formation. Chapter 4 explores recent amendments of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, showing how the (re)production of financial relations at a national level can reshape financial relations at other scalar levels. It argues that the rescaling(s) that have attended the amendment of FCRA have reworked the relationship between individuals and their virtual financial selves (i.e. credit reports and scores) in ways that have created new tensions, contradictions and sites of struggle in the nascent post-crisis politics of financialization. Chapters 6 and 8 explore this nascent politics on the ground, drawing on interviews and 1.5 years of ethnographic work with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area. These chapters examine how informal financial practices are being repurposed and formalized to make the risks of financially excluded groups legible, tractable and priceable for “mainstream” financial service providers. I show that formalization is used to achieve a variety of often-contradictory ends, including the valorization of fallow stocks of social capital, the making of new markets, and a redistribution of calculative agency in the credit scoring process

Failure tolerance analysis of a small scale underwater sensor network with RF electromagnetic communications

A small scale wireless sensor network was designed using electromagnetic technology in order to provide an underwater coastal monitoring service. The sensor nodes were deployed manually, which formed a multi-hop static topology for the network. Data delivery was scheduled via daily cycles of sleeping and waking-up. Due to the unique features of the network, Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector was chosen as the routing protocol. Modeling and simulations were conducted to evaluate network performance in terms of failure recovery and network re-convergence. The results demonstrated a certain level of failure tolerance of the designated network for this and similar scenarios