Social Class Myopia: The Case of Psychology and Labor Unions

This article explores the potential for a research agenda that includes scholarship on working class issues and organized labor. Such an agenda is consistent with the official mission of American Psychological Association—to advance knowledge that benefits society and improves people\u27s lives. I focus on our paucity of interest in the institution that gives the American working class a voice—the labor union. We know that work is one of the central focuses in the lives of most people and that the work experience is deeply implicated in satisfaction with life. The efforts of organized labor to achieve economic fairness and justice, and a healthy workplace environment, are intertwined with multiple corollary consequences that constitute a wide and complex spectrum—from physical job safety and economic security on one end, to the psychological benefits of heightened self-esteem, respect, dignity, empowerment, and affiliation on the other—all related to satisfaction with life. In addition, by advancing and protecting the rights of workers, unions are part of the larger movement for civil rights

Hyper-precarious lives : Migrants, work and forced labour in the Global North

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences

2-D inversions of gravity data for multi-sided polygons using particle swarm optimization

Since its introduction in 1995 particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been an area of great interest for many optimization problems, including geophysical inversions, as it does not use gradient information to find solutions. PSO is a global searching method, which, in principle, should avoid local minima, and find the global minima. PSO operates by moving a group of particles around the search space according to a simple mathematical formula which is dependent on particle positions and velocities. The particles movements are influenced by their own best known positions, pbest, and the overall best known position, gbest, which is updated each iteration. This thesis presents a method for inverting 2-D geophysical data using multisided polygons and PSO which has never been investigated in the literature. The first implementation of the algorithm presented below was designed to minimize several standard benchmark functions. The second implementation augmented the existing algorithm by including a forward modeling method, and model parameterization to invert 2-D gravity data. Investigations were then carried out to discover more robust methods of parameterization and constraint handling methods because unconstrained inversions tend to turn themselves inside-out, i.e., become infeasible or geologically implausible. A penalty function was found to be the best solution for constraint handling, with an appropriate penalty value. The algorithm was tested with ten-sided models and noisy data, and returned excellent inversion results for all obstacles presented to it

Seeds of Discord: Extraordinary Commands and Constitutional Thought in the Roman Republic

Extraordinary commands remain a controversial subject in the history of the Roman Republic, especially regarding whether (or how) such commands contributed to the ultimate collapse of Rome’s republican government. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the definition of extraordinary commands or the criteria for identifying them in modern scholarship, without which historians are unable to discern the true significance of these commands in Roman history. This dissertation argues that extraordinary commands are best understood as deviations from the Roman constitution, wherein the socio-political norms and laws intended to regulate Rome’s magistracies were subordinated, through either senatorial decree or popular vote, in order to accommodate the creation of an otherwise illegal military command. Starting with a historiographical survey of the modern discussion surrounding extraordinary commands, the early chapters of the dissertation also focus on analyzing the socio-political norms and rules that formed the basis of Rome’s republican constitution, as well as a detailed examination of Rome’s political institutions, especially the development of its executive magistracies. Next, a philological analysis of the terms extra ordinem, extraordinarium, and their Greek equivalents examines how Romans and Greeks themselves perceived extraordinary commands. The final chapters of this dissertation argue that the identification of extraordinary commands ultimately comes down to three analytical perspectives: the potential legal criteria of irregular magistracies, the magnitude of their occurrence, and whether they represented a deviation from Roman constitutional law. Finally, the dissertation concludes with an overview of all exceptional and extraordinary commands occurring over the course of the Roman Republic (509-31 BCE), along with a statistical analysis of the changing trends and evolution of extraordinary commands over time. In the end, a proper method of defining and identifying extraordinary commands helps modern historians truly understand the significance of such commands in Roman history. A well-known facet of Rome’s constitution was its flexibility, which allowed the Romans to find innovative solutions to crises facing the state over time, but extraordinary commands represented the breaking point of this flexibility

Open | SpeedShop: An Open Source Infrastructure for Parallel Performance Analysis

Over the last decades a large number of performance tools has been developed to analyze and optimize high performance applications. Their acceptance by end users, however, has been slow: each tool alone is often limited in scope and comes with widely varying interfaces and workflow constraints, requiring different changes in the often complex build and execution infrastructure of the target application. We started the Open | SpeedShop project about 3 years ago to overcome these limitations and provide efficient, easy to apply, and integrated performance analysis for parallel systems. Open | SpeedShop has two different faces: it provides an interoperable tool set covering the most common analysis steps as well as a comprehensive plugin infrastructure for building new tools. In both cases, the tools can be deployed to large scale parallel applications using DPCL/Dyninst for distributed binary instrumentation. Further, all tools developed within or on top of Open | SpeedShop are accessible through multiple fully equivalent interfaces including an easy-to-use GUI as well as an interactive command line interface reducing the usage threshold for those tools

Bone density distribution patterns in the rostrum of delphinids and beaked whales: evidence of family-specific evolutive traits.

Toothed whales have undergone a profound telescopic rearrangement of the skull, with elongation of facial bones and formation of a hollow rostrum, filled in vivo by the mesorostral cartilage. In most species of the family Ziphiidae, this latter cartilage becomes secondarily ossified, producing in some cases the densest bone existing in nature. Starting from this observation, we wanted to investigate the patterns of distribution of bone mineral density (BMD) in the rostrum of two families of toothed whales with different ecological and behavioral traits: Delphinidae and Ziphiidae. We analyzed BMD non invasively by means of the dual energy X-ray absorptiometry technology, and found two different density distribution patterns that distinctly set the two families apart. Namely, BMD values decrease from the proximal to the distal region of the rostrum in delphinids, whereas the beaked whales show a BMD peak in the central region. Possible functions such as ballast or protection against clashes might be likely, although more data about the species of both families is needed to give better evidence