Transition to peace leaves children of the Northern Irish Troubles more vulnerable to suicide

Northern Ireland’s suicide rate has doubled since the Good Friday Agreement. Michael Tomlinson explains that the toxic mix of greater political stability and increasing social isolation is putting those born into the Troubles at much greater risk of suicide than their British or Irish counterparts

Investigating the relationship between career planning, proactivity and employability perceptions among higher education students in uncertain labour market conditions

© 2020, Springer Nature B.V. This paper addresses the limited empirical analysis of higher education students’ perceptions of contemporary labour market demands. It explores their perspectives on the health of the graduate labour market, what factors determine these and how their perceptions relate to self-perceived employability, career proactivity, career control and efforts to develop positional advantage. Further, the study examines determinants of students’ career planning, all in the context of a challenging graduate labour market and higher education systems that have become more market-driven. The paper draws on evidence from a survey among Australian and UK students (N = 433), from two institutions and across a range of disciplines. Data revealed a number of significant findings. Overall, students who reported more positive perceptions of the current labour market were more likely to develop higher self-perceptions of employability, believe they had a greater sense of control over their career yet were less engaged with proactive career behaviours. Students perceived employability, their sense of career control and their reported career proactivity positively determined their engagement in career planning. The study enhances our understanding of the impact of labour market demand-side factors on student approaches to careers. It raises significant implications for universities and their career practitioners in identifying ways of enhancing students’ career planning strategies within a more challenging labour market context

Career values and proactive career behaviour among contemporary higher education students

The paper draws on evidence from a survey of Australian and UK students (N = 433) on students’ career values and their relationship to their proactivity in career self-management. Much of the dominant approaches to careers have focused on career competencies and adaptability in the context of increased movement from traditional to more self-managed career trajectories. Limited attention has been given to the role of career values in shaping individuals’ approaches to career management, particularly among higher education students. This study reveals data on a range of career values among students on a continuum between intrinsic and extrinsic careers. It revealed a preponderance of intrinsic career values and a clear relationship emerged on the strength of career values and levels of proactivity towards career management. Further, higher levels of intrinsic and extrinsic career values were reported for certain student groups. The article discusses the implications of these data for enhancing students’ career planning and engagement

Breaking-down and parameterising wave energy converter costs using the CapEx and similitude methods

Wave energy converters (WECs) can play a significant role in the transition towards a more renewable-based energy mix as stable and unlimited energy resources. Financial analysis of these projects requires WECs cost and WEC capital expenditure (CapEx) information. However, (i) cost information is often limited due to confidentiality and (ii) the wave energy field lacks flexible methods for cost breakdown and parameterisation, whereas they are needed for rapid and optimised WEC configuration and worldwide site pairing. This study takes advantage of the information provided by Wavepiston to compare different costing methods. The work assesses the Froude-Law-similarities-based “Similitude method” for cost-scaling and introduces the more flexible and generic “CapEx method” divided into three steps: (1) distinguishing WEC’s elements from the wave energy farm (WEF)’s; (2) defining the parameters characterising the WECs, WEFs, and site locations; and (3) estimating elements that affect WEC and WEF elements’ cost and translate them into factors using the parameters defined in step (2). After validation from Wavepiston manual estimations, the CapEx method showed that the factors could represent up to 30% of the cost. The Similitude method provided slight cost-overestimations compared to the CapEx method for low WEC up-scaling, increasing exponentially with the scaling

Synthetic social relationships for computational entities

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-189).Humans and many other animals form long term social relationships with each other. These relationships confer a variety of benefits upon us, both as individuals and as groups. Computational systems that can form social relationships like those formed by animals could reap many of the benefits of sociality, both within their own groups and in their interactions with people. This dissertation explores two main questions: *What kinds of internal and external representations are necessary for computational entities to form social relationships like those formed by animals? *How can people participate in and direct the relationships of these entities? To explore these questions, I designed and implemented a system by which computational entities may form simple social relationships. In particular, these synthetic social relationships are modeled after the social behavior of the gray wolf (Canis lupus). The system comprises a novel combination of simple models of emotion, perception and learning in an emotional memory-based mechanism for social relationship formation. The system also includes supporting technologies through which people may participate in and direct the relationships. The system was presented as an interactive installation entitled AlphaWolf in the Emerging Technologies program at SIGGRAPH 2001. This installation featured a pack of six virtual wolves - three fully autonomous adults and three semi-autonomous pups whom people could direct by howling, growling, whining or barking into microphones.(cont.) In addition to observing the interactions of several hundred SIGGRAPH participants, I performed two main evaluations of the AlphaWolf system - a 32-subject human user study and a set of simulations of resource exploitation among the virtual wolves. Results from these evaluations support the hypothesis that the AlphaWolf system enables the formation of social relationships among groups of computational entities and people, and that these relationships are beneficial to both the inter-machine interactions and the human-machine interactions in a variety of ways. This research represents one of many possible steps towards synthetic social relationships with the complexity of the relationships found in real wolves, let alone in humans. Much further work will be necessary to create entities who can fully engage us in our own social terms. The system presented here provides a basic scaffolding on which such entities may be built, including an implemented, real-time example; new ideas in directable characters and character-based interactive installations; a simple, ethologically plausible model of computational social relationships; and statistically significant support for these claims.by William Michael Tomlinson, Jr.Ph.D

Critiques of student engagement

Student engagement initiatives at the national, institutional and classroom level have emerged against a backdrop of rising participation rates and the marketizsation of higher education. This context has informed the development of a literature that is heavily influenced by cause-effect framing and a focus on effectiveness. However, in recent years an alternative, critical literature has emerged that challenges some of the assumptions of the student engagement movement on the grounds of student rights and freedoms as learners. This review article identifies the following six critiques of student engagement based on an analysis of the literature and arguments stemming from analyses of the effects of neoliberalism, namely performativity, marketing, infantilisation, surveillance, gamification and opposition. It is concluded that at a policy and institutional governance level, there is a need to shift the emphasis from what and how questions concerning student engagement to consider its broader political, economic and ethical implications as a means of challenging the prevailingpolicy narrative