Residential ethnography, mixed loyalties, and religious power: ethical dilemmas in faith-based addiction treatment

The paper provides a platform for geographical reflection on the hidden struggles ethnographers face working in the area of religion, addiction and drug treatment. Specifically, it examines the complex ethical and practical dilemmas involved in residential ethnography inside a faith-based therapeutic community working in the area of addiction and rehabilitation. Residential ethnography provided valuable insights into social life in therapeutic community, and more broadly, offers an ethical and participatory approach to research in closed institutional settings. Residential immersion in faith-based therapeutic environments however raised significant challenges around identity management; access and consent; and the dilemma of ‘mixed loyalties’ – a term that describes a set of ethical practices characterised by ethical conflict, compromise and negotiation in which the researcher, by nature of their participation, is expected to conform to certain values, practices, and procedures that may contradict their own personal ethics. To ground discussion on the variegated and contested nature of mixed loyalties, this paper examines the exercise of religious power and the ways ethnographers become enrolled in, and must negotiate, a series of power-dynamics that are unclear, uncomfortable, and potentially exclusionary. By illustrating the difficult decisions ethnographers must make when negotiating pressures to uphold – or challenge – religious beliefs and practices in faith-based addiction treatment settings, this paper calls for greater critical reflection on the ways geographers are implicated in the field and the practical ethics of engagement used to navigate ethical tensions

Memristive excitable cellular automata

The memristor is a device whose resistance changes depending on the polarity and magnitude of a voltage applied to the device's terminals. We design a minimalistic model of a regular network of memristors using structurally-dynamic cellular automata. Each cell gets info about states of its closest neighbours via incoming links. A link can be one 'conductive' or 'non-conductive' states. States of every link are updated depending on states of cells the link connects. Every cell of a memristive automaton takes three states: resting, excited (analog of positive polarity) and refractory (analog of negative polarity). A cell updates its state depending on states of its closest neighbours which are connected to the cell via 'conductive' links. We study behaviour of memristive automata in response to point-wise and spatially extended perturbations, structure of localised excitations coupled with topological defects, interfacial mobile excitations and growth of information pathways.Comment: Accepted to Int J Bifurcation and Chaos (2011

Continuous phase amplification with a Sagnac interferometer

We describe a weak value inspired phase amplification technique in a Sagnac interferometer. We monitor the relative phase between two paths of a slightly misaligned interferometer by measuring the average position of a split-Gaussian mode in the dark port. Although we monitor only the dark port, we show that the signal varies linearly with phase and that we can obtain similar sensitivity to balanced homodyne detection. We derive the source of the amplification both with classical wave optics and as an inverse weak value.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, previously submitted for publicatio

The relationships between parental conditional regard and adolescents' self-critical and narcissistic perfectionism

Studies show that the development of perfectionism in adolescence is associated with psychologically controlling parenting. The current study extends research in this area by examining the relationship between a specific aspect of psychologically controlling parenting, parental conditional regard, and two dimensions of perfectionism, self-critical perfectionism and narcissistic perfectionism. Three hundred and sixteen adolescents (M age = 15.69 years, s = 1.23) completed a standardised questionnaire. Structural equation modelling revealed that both self-critical perfectionism and narcissistic perfectionism were positively predicted by parental conditional regard. Our findings are the first to suggest that parent socialization characterised by guilt inducement and love withdrawal may be common to the development of these two distinct dimensions of perfectionism

Do food banks help? Food insecurity in the UK.

Belgium Herbarium image of Meise Botanic Garden

Laser spot welding of laser textured steel to aluminium

Laser welding of dissimilar metals (steel and aluminium) was investigated with the aim to increase the maximum tensile shear load of the Fe-Al joints. The increase was achieved by texturing the surface of steel prior to the laser spot welding process which was performed in a lap-joint configuration with the steel positioned on top of the aluminium and with a texture faced down to the aluminium surface. This configuration enabled an increase of the bonding area of the joints, because the molten aluminium filled in the gaps of the texture, without the need of increasing the process energy which typically leads to the growth of the intermetallic compounds. Different textures (containing hexagonally arranged craters, parallel lines, grid and spiral patterns) were tested with different laser welding parameters. The Fe-Al joints obtained with the textured steel were found to have up to 25% higher maximum tensile-shear load than the joints obtained with the untextured steel

Does religion make a difference? : assessing the effects of Christian affiliation and practice on marital solidarity and divorce in Britain, 1985-2005

Marital breakdown rates were examined among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes dataset for 1985-2005. Separation and divorce peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of separation or divorce were compared between respondents who had no religious affiliation and (a) Christian affiliates who attended church at least once a month, (b) Christian affiliates who attended church, but less than once a month, and (c) Christian affiliates who never attended church. The results showed that active Christians were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than non-affiliates, but there was no difference between affiliates who never attended church and those of no religion. Christians who attended infrequently were 1.3 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown compared to non-affiliates, suggesting that even infrequent attendance at church may have some significance for predicting the persistence of martial solidarity