Social pedagogy and its relevance for Scottish social welfare

• Social pedagogy is an academic and professional discipline, which seeks to effect individual and social change through broadly educational means.• It does not offer a discrete approach or set of tools for practice but is a way of thinking, under which a range of different approaches might be situated• Across Europe, some form of social pedagogy or social education provides the theoretical and disciplinary basis for direct work with people across the life course• There is growing interest in social pedagogy in the UK; while initial interest focused on residential child care, its principles are increasingly recognised as being relevant across health,social care and education settings• Social pedagogy has a particular resonance for Scottish social welfare, where it chimes with Kilbrandon’s conception of social education, but also offers a suggestive framework within which to locate current policies• Evaluations of social pedagogy projects suggest that social pedagogic ideas can boost practitioners’ confidence and give them a language through which to better describe what they d

Inference by Minimizing Size, Divergence, or their Sum

We speed up marginal inference by ignoring factors that do not significantly contribute to overall accuracy. In order to pick a suitable subset of factors to ignore, we propose three schemes: minimizing the number of model factors under a bound on the KL divergence between pruned and full models; minimizing the KL divergence under a bound on factor count; and minimizing the weighted sum of KL divergence and factor count. All three problems are solved using an approximation of the KL divergence than can be calculated in terms of marginals computed on a simple seed graph. Applied to synthetic image denoising and to three different types of NLP parsing models, this technique performs marginal inference up to 11 times faster than loopy BP, with graph sizes reduced up to 98%-at comparable error in marginals and parsing accuracy. We also show that minimizing the weighted sum of divergence and size is substantially faster than minimizing either of the other objectives based on the approximation to divergence presented here.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2010

Gesture Typing on Virtual Tabletop: Effect of Input Dimensions on Performance

The association of tabletop interaction with gesture typing presents interaction potential for situationally or physically impaired users. In this work, we use depth cameras to create touch surfaces on regular tabletops. We describe our prototype system and report on a supervised learning approach to fingertips touch classification. We follow with a gesture typing study that compares our system with a control tablet scenario and explore the influence of input size and aspect ratio of the virtual surface on the text input performance. We show that novice users perform with the same error rate at half the input rate with our system as compared to the control condition, that an input size between A5 and A4 present the best tradeoff between performance and user preference and that users' indirect tracking ability seems to be the overall performance limiting factor

A simple model for the kinetics of packaging of DNA in to a capsid against an external force

We propose a simple model for the kinetics of packaging of viral DNA in to a capsid against an external force trying to prevent it. The model leads to a Butler-Volmer type dependence of the rate of packaging on the pulling force F

Dynamic Entity Representations in Neural Language Models

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and contextually generate their mentions. Our model is generative and flexible; it can model an arbitrary number of entities in context while generating each entity mention at an arbitrary length. In addition, it can be used for several different tasks such as language modeling, coreference resolution, and entity prediction. Experimental results with all these tasks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines and prior work.Comment: EMNLP 2017 camera-ready versio

Identification of mechanical parameters to be used as a firmness standard on quality evaluations of stored blueberry : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Plant Science at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

Blueberry firmness is considered a relevant quality variable influencing consumer acceptability of fresh blueberries. However, the blueberry supply chain and research community have not yet adopted a standard method to measure firmness on postharvest quality evaluations. This thesis has focused on characterising the mechanical properties of blueberry ‘Nui’ and ‘Rahi’ as influenced by different factors such as storage relative humidity (i.e., fruit water loss), controlled atmosphere and harvest maturity. The mechanical parameters were obtained by using the instrumental methods of texture profile analysis (TPA) equipped with a flat plate and the penetration test equipped with a 0.39 mm round tip diameter needle probe. Mechanical parameters of hardness slope (BHS, also known as chord stiffness) of TPA and displacement at skin break (DSk) of the penetration test can be used to track water loss changes in stored blueberries. The DSk and BHS can also accurately detect quality changes induced by controlled atmosphere storage. In addition, BHS can detect maturity differences in stored blueberries, but the force at skin break (FSk) provides better detection of maturity differences at harvest evaluations. To demonstrate the relevance of chord stiffness evaluations at a commercial level, sensory evaluation of texture of hand-touch firmness using a formal sensory panel setting and trained assessors was related to instrumental mechanical parameters. Chord stiffness measured as BHS using a flat plate compression and skin break slope (SSk) measured using a needle probe were strongly related to consumer sensory perception of hand-touch firmness. A blueberry batch with an average BHS ≤0.47 kN m⁻¹ or SSk ≤0.13 kN m⁻¹ was associated with a very high likelihood of unmarketable berries (i.e., berries are ‘soft’ or ‘very soft’). In summary, BHS was an informative parameter of blueberry quality across factors inducing the textural changes and providing commercially relevant information about consumer acceptability. These results can assist the development of a standard instrumental method to measure postharvest firmness on blueberry quality evaluations for research and commercial purposes. Further studies should focus on validating the feasibility of BHS to determine blueberry quality across other sources of textural variation, such as calcium and ethylene-related treatments. In addition, threshold values for mechanical parameters related to consumer acceptance (sensory analysis) may be identified across an extensive range of blueberry genotypes and using other sensory descriptors also relevant to the consumers, such as crispness. Finally, this research identifies alternative areas for further studies, such as the blueberry firming (an increase of firmness during storage) occurring consistently on blueberries ‘Nui’ stored under high RH in regular air or a controlled atmosphere of 5 kPa CO₂ + 4 kPa O₂

Personalising Vibrotactile Displays through Perceptual Sensitivity Adjustment

Haptic displays are commonly limited to transmitting a discrete set of tactile motives. In this paper, we explore the transmission of real-valued information through vibrotactile displays. We simulate spatial continuity with three perceptual models commonly used to create phantom sensations: the linear, logarithmic and power model. We show that these generic models lead to limited decoding precision, and propose a method for model personalization adjusting to idiosyncratic and spatial variations in perceptual sensitivity. We evaluate this approach using two haptic display layouts: circular, worn around the wrist and the upper arm, and straight, worn along the forearm. Results of a user study measuring continuous value decoding precision show that users were able to decode continuous values with relatively high accuracy (4.4% mean error), circular layouts performed particularly well, and personalisation through sensitivity adjustment increased decoding precision

Trauma-informed approaches:a critical overview of what they offer to social work and social care

Key points*Past experience can have an impact on present-day functioning (although the nature of this connection is rarely direct or inevitable). Increasingly, this relationship between past and present is understood through a lens of trauma.*The concept of trauma has become a major driver of Scottish public policy, with Scottish Government guidance stating that all social care and related practice should be understood and responded to through a trauma lens.*Although it has become such a dominant feature of policy, professional practice and everyday talk, the concept of trauma remains ill-defined.*Trauma-informed (TI) care offers little that any model of good social care should offer, and the evidence base for trauma-informed practice is, at best, inconclusive.*There is a risk that a predominant focus on trauma may construct the kind of psychological conditions it professes to respond to.*Social workers and social care workers need to demonstrate a sensitive appreciation of the possible impact of past experience on individuals, which requires a broad range of knowledge and dispositions. A primary focus on trauma in service delivery can limit alternative ways of thinking and practising