Wealth, families and death: socio-legal perspectives on wills and inheritance: introduction

Inheritance as both a concept and a practice is of deep significance within all societies and jurisdictions. Located at the intersection between economics, family relations and the end of life, it offers a unique perspective on a variety of contemporary socio-legal debates. Yet the socio-legal phenomenon of inheritance has attracted relatively little scholastic attention. This special issue, which brings together eight papers coming from six different countries (and eight different jurisdictions): Belgium, England and Wales, Israel, Spain (Catalonia and the Basque Country), Switzerland and the USA, demonstrates the breadth of inheritance as a field of study in a number of ways and at the same time opens up important new lines of enquiry. This international breadth serves to foreground the significance of both national and regional political culture on inheritance law. Most significant in this respect is the fact that the authors are evenly split between those commentating on civil legal systems and those on common-law systems; for traditionally the two systems have adopted highly distinct responses to the principles of testamentary freedom and forced heirship. All the articles in this collection provide insight into this fundamental distinction but at the same time demonstrate its limits in practice

Two dimensional eye tracking: Sampling rate of forcing function

A study was conducted to determine the minimum update rate of a forcing function display required for the operator to approximate the tracking performance obtained on a continuous display. In this study, frequency analysis was used to determine whether there was an associated change in the transfer function characteristics of the operator. It was expected that as the forcing function display update rate was reduced, from 120 to 15 samples per second, the operator's response to the high frequency components of the forcing function would show a decrease in gain, an increase in phase lag, and a decrease in coherence

Head tracking at large angles from the straight ahead position

One of the big advantages of a helmet sight in a high performance aircraft is its off-boresight capability in aiming a fire control system. However, tracking data using a target that is moving rapidly and randomly for an extended period of time is missing. This study is intended to provide data in this area that will be of value to engineers in designing head control systems

A comparison of head and manual control for a position-control pursuit tracking task

Head control was compared with manual control in a pursuit tracking task involving proportional controlled-element dynamics. An integrated control/display system was used to explore tracking effectiveness in horizontal and vertical axes tracked singly and concurrently. Compared with manual tracking, head tracking resulted in a 50 percent greater rms error score, lower pilot gain, greater high-frequency phase lag and greater low-frequency remnant. These differences were statistically significant, but differences between horizontal- and vertical-axis tracking and between 1- and 2-axis tracking were generally small and not highly significant. Manual tracking results were matched with the optimal control model using pilot-related parameters typical of those found in previous manual control studies. Head tracking performance was predicted with good accuracy using the manual tracking model plus a model for head/neck response dynamics obtained from the literature

The Deviant Geographer

I’ve spent my life being a deviant. When I say that, I don’t necessarily mean in a delinquent sense (though that has been necessary at times). Rather, I mean I’ve always had to approach things differently. Things about your own life and background can help to shape and widen the ways in which we study, and how we see the world – even if you don’t realize it. For me, it was a combination of breaking my work-a-day upbringing cycle (I came from a working-class family and lived/grew-up in the Petersham suburb, west of downtown Sydney, Australia) and being the only female graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of Illinois where I pursued qualitative research during geography’s quantitative revolution. My life has been about that age-old geographical concept: find your own way

Rap Music: Gender Difference in Derogatory Word Use

Much of the literature relating to rap assumes such music contains violent and misogynic lyrics. Before exploring the possible deleterious effects of rap lyrics, it is critical to go back to the source and listen to the music. Our work examines the frequency of six profane words in randomly drawn rap music and how this differs between female and male artists. A content analysis of 180 randomly drawn songs from 18 randomly drawn artists was conducted. We expected that male artists would use more profane words compared to female artists. We also expected more profanity, by both male and female artists, to be directed at women. Our data show that the use of general profanity is most common in rap lyrics followed by profane words aimed at men. Male artists are significantly more likely than female artists to use profanity in their lyrics

Progress Towards Modeling the Ablation Response of NuSil-Coated PICA

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation (MEDLI) collected in-flight data largely used by the ablation community to verify and validate physics-based models for the response of the Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) material [1-4]. MEDLI data were recently used to guide the development of NASAs high-fidelity material response models for PICA, implemented in the Porous material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO) software [5-6]. A follow-up instrumentation suite, MEDLI2, is planned for the upcoming Mars 2020 mission [7] after the large scientific impact of MEDLI. Recent analyses performed as part of MEDLI2 development draw the attention to significant effects of a protective coating to the aerothermal response of PICA. NuSil, a silicone-based overcoat sprayed onto the MSL heatshield as contamination control, is currently neglected in PICA ablation models. To mitigate the spread of phenolic dust from PICA, NuSil was applied to the entire MSL heatshield, including the MEDLI plugs. NuSil is a space grade designation of the siloxane copolymer, primarily used to protect against atomic oxygen erosion in the Low Earth Orbit environment. Ground testing of PICA-NuSil (PICA-N) models all exhibited surface temperature jumps of the order of 200 K due to oxide scale formation and subsequent NuSil burn-off. It is therefore critical to include a model for the aerothermal response of the coating in ongoing code development and validation efforts

Developing a social justice agenda for counsellor education in New Zealand: a social constructionist perspective

Counselling and Counsellor education in the West have traditionally been dominated by a liberal-humanist premise which emphasises the universality of human experience and the independence of individuals. The effect of this orientation on counselling practice has been a focus on the capacity of individuals to make independent changes in their lives through the exercise of rational choice. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, feminists and some Maori have challenged this perspective. Indeed a growing literature in the helping professions acknowledges that Eurocentric and patriarchal interpretations have been imposed through psychological practices, most particularly on women and those of non-European origin. Such critiques must have significant implications for counsellor education. In 1991 as a counsellor educator with a concern for social justice, it seemed to me that critical theory discourse and some forms of feminism had developed the necessary conceptual underpinnings which would enable counselling practice to address these injustices. From a critical theory perspective, hegemonic practices of power maintained hierarchical social structures which systematically marginalise people. I sought to identify how these theories might be useful in reformulating counsellor education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In the belief that a social justice agenda was also important to the 12 counsellor educators in New Zealand universities, I wanted to further my understanding of the implications of such a commitment by interviewing my colleagues. The main focus of these interviews was to explore counsellor educators’ awareness of Eurocentrism and androcentrism in both the discourses of counselling and their subsequent impact on their professional practice. Data was generated by individual interviews and group discussions, and circulated among participants for comment. A hermeneutic-dialectic method of data collection was used. Many of the responses had a cautionary, vigilant, or even suspicious quality, suggesting some participants’ discomfort with my questioning. A deconstructive analysis of their responses revealed that the framing of my own thesis questions were characteristic of a rigid oppressor-oppressed binary. The underlying presumption of a single preferred path to social justice had, in effect, prejudged the defensibility of any other position. Manifesting a Eurocentric stance which I had set out to challenge, I had taken up a fundamentalist position. This was the antithesis of collaborative and respectful dialogue. The problematic of this thesis thus became how to engage with a transformative social justice agenda in counsellor education that was neither plagued by the presumptions of universality nor constrained by the rigidities of fundamentalist essentialism. I was forced to recognise that any social justice agenda is discursively produced although an account of this production often remains unarticulated. However, recognising the limitations of grand theory did not mean that I could avoid taking a position on how social justice could be addressed in counsellor education. Rather than adopting a fixed non-negotiable position, discursive analysis of a theoretical stance offers the space to claim a temporary, located essentialism from which the generation of new possibilities might be achieved. My task here was to situate my own knowledge, recognise its partiality and develop a social justice agenda from a social constructionist perspective. I began to view persons as being positioned by diverse discourses that are at times oppressive and at other times not. This led to the recognition that persons can be called into multiple subjectivities which affect the extent to which power and agency are available to them within particular interactions in particular settings. The conceptual tools of discourse, deconstruction, multiple subjectivity, agency, and capillary power (as distinct from commodity power) offer an alternative means by which androcentric and Eurocentric practices in counsellor education may be identified without taking up rigid or righteous positions. The thesis is an account of the theoretical moves which might accommodate and engage the contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes associated with a search for social justice in counsellor education in the 1990s. It considers a social justice agenda at the sites of gender and ethnicity in counsellor education and remarks on the possibility of attaining discursive empathy in culturally different environments