Neoliberalism as a Prevailing Force on the Conditions of Teacher Education in Canada

This paper examines the impact of neoliberalist macro-policy and culture on the conditions and practice of teacher education in Canada. The origins and central features of neoliberalism are unpacked to show how the centrality of the nation state of liberalism has been replaced under neoliberalism by the distorted myth of a minimalist state that in reality reshapes social institutions along market lines and uses state regulation machinery to ensure that the market model is dominant to the point of diminishing the idea of the “public good.” This has made the world very unstable, leading to civil strife, political violence and an ongoing diasporization associated with trans-national migration. Within this unstable world, higher education and teacher education in Canada take place. I then turn to examining the impact of neoliberalist policy on higher education as a foreground to examining the impact of neoliberalist policy conditions on Canadian teacher education. Three themes are extrapolated to demonstrate this impact—the conflicted challenge between institutional legitimacy and professional identity that working in a higher education context presents to Canadian teacher educators; some unresolved issues of accessibility and accountability in Canadian teacher education programs; and the ways in which a commitment to social justice with its emphasis on inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism that Canadian teacher educators name as important are frustrated and sometimes impeded. My thesis is that neoliberalism is using audit conditions of accountability to re-frame teachers’ work as an occupational relationship. My claim is that if economic rationalist accountability ends up trumping professional judgment, then teaching will potentially lose its professional status. And, if that happens, there will likely be no place for university teacher education.Cet article porte sur l’impact de la macro-politique et la culture néolibérales sur les conditions et la pratique de la formation des enseignants au Canada. Les origines et les caractéristiques essentielles du néolibéralisme sont exposées afin de démontrer dans quelle mesure la centralité de l’état nation du libéralisme a été remplacée sous le néolibéralisme par le mythe déformé d’un état minimaliste qui, en réalité, remanie les institutions sociales selon les principes de la liberté du marché et utilise l’appareil de la réglementation étatique pour assurer que le modèle du marché domine jusqu’au point de diminuer l’idée du « bien public ». Le résultat en est un monde très instable caractérisé par des troubles civils, de la violence politique et des déplacements constants liés à la migration transnationale. C’est dans ce contexte instable que se déroulent les études supérieures et la formation des enseignants au Canada. L’examen de l’impact de la politique néolibérale sur les études supérieures sert de toile de fond pour l’étude de l’impact des politiques néolibérales sur la formation des enseignants au Canada. Trois thèmes démontrent bien cet impact : le défi que pose, pour les formateurs d’enseignants au Canada œuvrant dans les milieux des études supérieures, le conflit entre la légitimité institutionnelle et l’identité professionnelle; des problèmes non résolus dans les programmes de formation des enseignants et portant sur l’accessibilité et la responsabilité; et les entraves qui se dressent parfois devant un engagement envers la justice sociale visant l’inclusion, la diversité et le multiculturalisme, éléments que les formateurs d’enseignants indiquent comme étant importants. Ma thèse propose que le néolibéralisme emploie des conditions de vérification pour reformuler le travail des enseignants comme une relation professionnelle. J’affirme que si les notions économiques et rationalistes de la responsabilité finissent par l’emporter sur le jugement professionnel, l’enseignement pourrait perdre son statut professionnel. Si cela devait se produire, il est probable que la formation universitaire des enseignants n’aurait plus sa place au Canada.Mots clés : néolibéralisme, travail des enseignants, formation des enseignants, intellectuel publi

On a property of random-oriented percolation in a quadrant

Grimmett's random-orientation percolation is formulated as follows. The square lattice is used to generate an oriented graph such that each edge is oriented rightwards (resp. upwards) with probability $p$ and leftwards (resp. downwards) otherwise. We consider a variation of Grimmett's model proposed by Hegarty, in which edges are oriented away from the origin with probability $p$, and towards it with probability $1-p$, which implies rotational instead of translational symmetry. We show that both models could be considered as special cases of random-oriented percolation in the NE-quadrant, provided that the critical value for the latter is 1/2. As a corollary, we unconditionally obtain a non-trivial lower bound for the critical value of Hegarty's random-orientation model. The second part of the paper is devoted to higher dimensions and we show that the Grimmett model percolates in any slab of height at least 3 in $\mathbb{Z}^3$.Comment: The abstract has been updated, discussion has been added to the end of the articl

Dynamical Exchanges in Facilitated Models of Supercooled liquids

We investigate statistics of dynamical exchange events in coarse--grained models of supercooled liquids in spatial dimensions $d=1$, 2, and 3. The models, based upon the concept of dynamical facilitation, capture generic features of statistics of exchange times and persistence times. Here, distributions for both times are related, and calculated for cases of strong and fragile glass formers over a range of temperatures. Exchange time distributions are shown to be particularly sensitive to the model parameters and dimensions, and exhibit more structured and richer behavior than persistence time distributions. Mean exchange times are shown to be Arrhenius, regardless of models and spatial dimensions. Specifically, $\sim c^{-2}$, with $c$ being the excitation concentration. Different dynamical exchange processes are identified and characterized from the underlying trajectories. We discuss experimental possibilities to test some of our theoretical findings.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, minor corrections made, paper published in Journal of Chemical Physic

Directed percolation effects emerging from superadditivity of quantum networks

Entanglement indcued non--additivity of classical communication capacity in networks consisting of quantum channels is considered. Communication lattices consisiting of butterfly-type entanglement breaking channels augmented, with some probability, by identity channels are analyzed. The capacity superadditivity in the network is manifested in directed correlated bond percolation which we consider in two flavours: simply directed and randomly oriented. The obtained percolation properties show that high capacity information transfer sets in much faster in the regime of superadditive communication capacity than otherwise possible. As a byproduct, this sheds light on a new type of entanglement based quantum capacity percolation phenomenon.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Entanglement in the quantum Ising model

We study the asymptotic scaling of the entanglement of a block of spins for the ground state of the one-dimensional quantum Ising model with transverse field. When the field is sufficiently strong, the entanglement grows at most logarithmically in the number of spins. The proof utilises a transformation to a model of classical probability called the continuum random-cluster model, and is based on a property of the latter model termed ratio weak-mixing. Our proof applies equally to a large class of disordered interactions

Density classification on infinite lattices and trees

Consider an infinite graph with nodes initially labeled by independent Bernoulli random variables of parameter p. We address the density classification problem, that is, we want to design a (probabilistic or deterministic) cellular automaton or a finite-range interacting particle system that evolves on this graph and decides whether p is smaller or larger than 1/2. Precisely, the trajectories should converge to the uniform configuration with only 0's if p1/2. We present solutions to that problem on the d-dimensional lattice, for any d>1, and on the regular infinite trees. For Z, we propose some candidates that we back up with numerical simulations

FSA field test report, 1980 - 1982

Photovoltaic modules made of new and developing materials were tested in a continuing study of weatherability, compatibility, and corrosion protection. Over a two-year period, 365 two-cell submodules have been exposed for various intervals at three outdoor sites in Southern California or subjected to laboratory acceptance tests. Results to date show little loss of maximum power output, except in two types of modules. In the first of these, failure is due to cell fracture from the stresses that arise as water is regained from the surrounding air by a hardboard substrate, which shrank as it dried during its encapsulation in plastic film at 150 C in vacuo. In the second, the glass superstrate is sensitive to cracking, which also damages the cells electrostatically bonded to it; inadequate bonding of interconnects to the cells is also a problem in these modules. In a third type of module, a polyurethane pottant has begun to yellow, though as yet without significant effect on maximum power output

Risk-bounded formation of fuzzy coalitions among service agents.

Cooperative autonomous agents form coalitions in order ro share and combine resources and services to efficiently respond to market demands. With the variety of resources and services provided online today, there is a need for stable and flexible techniques to support the automation of agent coalition formation in this context. This paper describes an approach to the problem based on fuzzy coalitions. Compared with a classic cooperative game with crisp coalitions (where each agent is a full member of exactly one coalition), an agent can participate in multiple coalitions with varying degrees of involvement. This gives the agent more freedom and flexibility, allowing them to make full use of their resources, thus maximising utility, even if only comparatively small coalitions are formed. An important aspect of our approach is that the agents can control and bound the risk caused by the possible failure or default of some partner agents by spreading their involvement in diverse coalitions

Laplacian spectra of complex networks and random walks on them: Are scale-free architectures really important?

We study the Laplacian operator of an uncorrelated random network and, as an application, consider hopping processes (diffusion, random walks, signal propagation, etc.) on networks. We develop a strict approach to these problems. We derive an exact closed set of integral equations, which provide the averages of the Laplacian operator's resolvent. This enables us to describe the propagation of a signal and random walks on the network. We show that the determining parameter in this problem is the minimum degree $q_m$ of vertices in the network and that the high-degree part of the degree distribution is not that essential. The position of the lower edge of the Laplacian spectrum $\lambda_c$ appears to be the same as in the regular Bethe lattice with the coordination number $q_m$. Namely, $\lambda_c>0$ if $q_m>2$, and $\lambda_c=0$ if $q_m\leq2$. In both these cases the density of eigenvalues $\rho(\lambda)\to0$ as $\lambda\to\lambda_c+0$, but the limiting behaviors near $\lambda_c$ are very different. In terms of a distance from a starting vertex, the hopping propagator is a steady moving Gaussian, broadening with time. This picture qualitatively coincides with that for a regular Bethe lattice. Our analytical results include the spectral density $\rho(\lambda)$ near $\lambda_c$ and the long-time asymptotics of the autocorrelator and the propagator.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figure

Predicting Failure using Conditioning on Damage History: Demonstration on Percolation and Hierarchical Fiber Bundles

We formulate the problem of probabilistic predictions of global failure in the simplest possible model based on site percolation and on one of the simplest model of time-dependent rupture, a hierarchical fiber bundle model. We show that conditioning the predictions on the knowledge of the current degree of damage (occupancy density $p$ or number and size of cracks) and on some information on the largest cluster improves significantly the prediction accuracy, in particular by allowing to identify those realizations which have anomalously low or large clusters (cracks). We quantify the prediction gains using two measures, the relative specific information gain (which is the variation of entropy obtained by adding new information) and the root-mean-square of the prediction errors over a large ensemble of realizations. The bulk of our simulations have been obtained with the two-dimensional site percolation model on a lattice of size $L \times L=20 \times 20$ and hold true for other lattice sizes. For the hierarchical fiber bundle model, conditioning the measures of damage on the information of the location and size of the largest crack extends significantly the critical region and the prediction skills. These examples illustrate how on-going damage can be used as a revelation of both the realization-dependent pre-existing heterogeneity and the damage scenario undertaken by each specific sample.Comment: 7 pages + 11 figure