A critical challenge: Developing student's critical abilities

The work of educators includes grappling with the challenges of bringing theoretical concepts and approaches into day-to-day physical education practice for quality programmes and the betterment of student learning. One of our most exciting challenges is in capturing the potential the Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 1999) and the New Zealand Curriculum (MoE, 2007) present to us as physical educators. The curriculum has encouraged the development of socio-critical perspectives and inquirybased approaches to teaching and learning programmes (Culpan & Bruce, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 2010; Gillespie & Culpan, 2000; Wright, 2004). We (the writers) have tackled the theory to practice challenge of the development of student’s critical abilities from a range of positions within education. Our involvement in initial teacher education, teacher professional development, secondary physical education teaching and physical education advisory roles has meant we have needed to not only develop our own practice as educators, but also consider how to successfully enable secondary school students, teacher education students and practicing physical education teachers to understand and implement a socio-critical physical education curriculum. This paper focuses on processes, knowledge and understandings that support the development of student’s critical abilities

Accelerated Neural Networks on OpenCL Devices Using SYCL-DNN

Over the past few years machine learning has seen a renewed explosion of interest, following a number of studies showing the effectiveness of neural networks in a range of tasks which had previously been considered incredibly hard. Neural networks' effectiveness in the fields of image recognition and natural language processing stems primarily from the vast amounts of data available to companies and researchers, coupled with the huge amounts of compute power available in modern accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. There are a number of approaches available to developers for utilizing GPGPU technologies such as SYCL, OpenCL and CUDA, however many applications require the same low level mathematical routines. Libraries dedicated to accelerating these common routines allow developers to easily make full use of the available hardware without requiring low level knowledge of the hardware themselves, however such libraries are often provided by hardware manufacturers for specific hardware such as cuDNN for Nvidia hardware or MIOpen for AMD hardware. SYCL-DNN is a new open-source library dedicated to providing accelerated routines for neural network operations which are hardware and vendor agnostic. Built on top of the SYCL open standard and written entirely in standard C++, SYCL-DNN allows a user to easily accelerate neural network code for a wide range of hardware using a modern C++ interface. The library is tested on AMD's OpenCL for GPU, Intel's OpenCL for CPU and GPU, ARM's OpenCL for Mali GPUs as well as ComputeAorta's OpenCL for R-Car CV engine and host CPU. In this talk we will present performance figures for SYCL-DNN on this range of hardware, and discuss how high performance was achieved on such a varied set of accelerators with such different hardware features.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. In International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL '19), May 13-15, 2019, Bosto

Caxton’s edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur: compositorial challenges and chapter divisions

The author presents here four findings drawn from close analysis of the chapter and book divisions in Caxton’s edition of Le Morte Darthur. The first three of these bear particular relevance to scholars interested in textual alterations that might have been made to Le Morte Darthur for copy-fitting purposes. In particular, these results suggest closer attention might usefully be paid to the text at interlinear chapter divisions, and in quires a-d and ee, as the extreme contraction of formatting at these points suggests that there may be associated textual contractions. The last finding provides circumstantial support for the view that Caxton revised the Roman War section, and further indicates that there is some probability that this section was set from a different exemplar to the rest of the edition. Most of all, though, it is hoped that this study has demonstrated how much we might still be able to learn about techniques of the early hand-press period, even from a text as persistently studied as Le Morte Darthur

On Skepticism about Case-Specific Intuitions

Moral theorizing is often characterized as beginning from our intuitions about ethical cases. Yet, while many applaud, and even demand, this methodology, there are those who reject such a methodology on the grounds that we cannot treat people’s intuitions about ethical cases as evidence for or against moral theories. Recently, Shelly Kagan has argued that the reliance upon case-specific intuitions in moral theorizing is problematic. Specifically, he maintains that the practice of using intuitions about cases lacks justification and, hence, we ought to be skeptical about the evidential weight of moral intuitions. This leads Kagan to conclude that we ought to accept an error theory that maintains most of our moral intuitions are mistaken. In this paper, I will look at the arguments Kagan presents in support of such skepticism – the failure of the intuition/observation analogy, the problem of intuitive disagreement, and the problem of kinds of cases. I will argue that each of these arguments is problematic given some features of the nature of intuitions and the nature of the analogy between intuition and observation. Thus, I hope to show that these arguments fail to support Kagan’s skepticism about the use of case-specific intuitions in moral theorizing

Moral Callings and the Duty to Have Children: A Response to Jeff Mitchell

Jeff Mitchell argues that the good reason for having children is that parenthood is a “moral calling” and that one should heed the call out of a sense of duty and responsibility for the good of society. I argue such a “moral calling” account is mistaken, first, in that Mitchell problematically assumes the “basic intuition” is mistaken and, second, it fails to provide the epistemic conditions for the warranted belief that one would probably make a good parent (a central consideration of Mitchell’s). Thus, such a “moral calling” rationale for the having of children is not superior to rationales that focus on the individual’s self-interest

Social indicators for use with multi-regional input-output analysis

Accounting for social impacts in supply chain analysis is of increasing importance. Global trade has increased significantly since 1970, as has inequality. As global supply chains have become more prevalent, the need to understand and analyse these supply chains has also grown. Excellent work on quantitative analysis of environmental impacts in supply chains has taken place in the past two decades. However, relatively few methodologies have been applied to quantitative analysis of social impacts in supply chains. This thesis considers how social indicators for supply chain analysis can be developed through the use of socially extended multi-regional input-output analysis. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and context. Chapter 2 considers the history of social accounting. Chapter 3 looks at quantitative accounting for social-economic indicators and the development of national accounts, particularly in reference to standardised collection of data for social-economic indicators and socially-extended input- output analysis. Chapter 4 presents a case study of coltan mining and methodological analysis using deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a social indicator for the electronics supply chain. Chapter 5 analyses the results of the same case study and considers how enumerating social impacts in upstream supply chains can influence environmental and social justice actions in downstream supply chains. Chapter 6 provides a review of input-output analysis used as a tool for analysing consumption since 2010. Chapter 7 proposes the use of a suite of quantitative social indicators for analysis in the form of a social footprint. Chapter 8 provides a conclusion. This thesis tracks the author’s interest in understanding social impacts in global supply chains and proposes a social footprint for supply chain analysis using the multi-regional input output methodology

Review of Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

Review of Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits by Nicholas Agar

Review of Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

Review of Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits by Nicholas Agar

The Moral Poker Face: Games, Deception, and the Morality of Bluffing

Bluffing is essentially nothing more than a type of deception. But, despite its morally questionable foundation, it is not only permissible in certain contexts, but sometimes encouraged and/or required (e.g., playing poker). Yet, the question remains as to whether it is permissible to bluff in other contexts – particularly everyday situations. In this paper, I will look at László Mérő’s argument – one based in game theory and Kantian ethics – to the end that bluffing is morally permissible in everyday contexts. I will argue that Mérő’s argument is mistaken on two grounds. First, it includes an epistemic feature (i.e., knowledge that bluffing is part of the game) that is lacking in everyday contexts. Second, even if we add a proviso to solve this epistemic problem, the resulting strategies fail to guarantee an equilibrium state. Thus, I hope to show that Mérő’s attempt to justify the use of bluffing in everyday contexts fails