Troubling children's families: who's troubled and why? Approaches to inter-cultural dialogue

This article draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be ‘troubling’. Starting from the premise that ‘troubles’ are a ‘normal’ part of children’s family lives, we consider the boundary between ‘normal’ troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an intervention to prevent harm to less powerful family members (notably children). On what basis can such decisions be made in children’s family lives, how can this question be answered across diverse cultural contexts, and are all answers inevitably subject to uncertainty? Such questions arguably re-frame and broaden existing debates about ‘child maltreatment’ across diverse cultural contexts. Beyond recognizing power dynamics, material inequalities, and historical and contemporary colonialism, we argue that attempts to answer the question on an empirical basis risk a form of neo-colonialism, since values inevitably permeate research and knowledge claims. We briefly exemplify such difficulties, examining psychological studies of childrearing in China, and the application of neuroscience to early childhood interventions in the UK. Turning to issues of values and moral relativism, we also question the possibility of an objective moral standard that avoids cultural imperialism, but ask whether cultural relativism is the only alternative position available. Here we briefly explore other possibilities in the space between ‘facile’ universalism and ‘lazy’ relativism (Jullien, 2008/2014). Such approaches bring into focus core philosophical and cultural questions about the possibilities for ‘happiness’, and for what it means to be a ‘person’, living in the social world. Throughout, we centralize theoretical and conceptual issues, drawing on the work of Jullien (2008/2014) to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue entails in terms of language and communication

Caring after death: issues of embodiment and relationality

Death most fundamentally would seem to concern the absence of presence, and the loss of the living embodied other is the apparently hard inescapable truth to be faced. This brings sharply into relief the part that bodies play in our relationships and in caring for others. In this chapter I explore the significance of the absence and presence of material bodies for care practices, and for the understandings of relationality that may underpin caring after death. At the same time I also consider the bodies of the living and the ways in which grief and loss may be experienced as physical pain in one's own body. Drawing on published autobiographical materials, I suggest that the relationality of caring - even in contemporary US and European societies - may incorporate an embodied relational self in which threats to the physical wellbeing of another may be experienced directly as implicating one's own physical wellbeing. Such 'embodied relationality' highlights one of the deep paradoxes in the costs and benefits of care, which arise when we recognise how individual well-being and flourishing may be bound up with that of others

ReSHAPE: A Framework for Dynamic Resizing and Scheduling of Homogeneous Applications in a Parallel Environment

Applications in science and engineering often require huge computational resources for solving problems within a reasonable time frame. Parallel supercomputers provide the computational infrastructure for solving such problems. A traditional application scheduler running on a parallel cluster only supports static scheduling where the number of processors allocated to an application remains fixed throughout the lifetime of execution of the job. Due to the unpredictability in job arrival times and varying resource requirements, static scheduling can result in idle system resources thereby decreasing the overall system throughput. In this paper we present a prototype framework called ReSHAPE, which supports dynamic resizing of parallel MPI applications executed on distributed memory platforms. The framework includes a scheduler that supports resizing of applications, an API to enable applications to interact with the scheduler, and a library that makes resizing viable. Applications executed using the ReSHAPE scheduler framework can expand to take advantage of additional free processors or can shrink to accommodate a high priority application, without getting suspended. In our research, we have mainly focused on structured applications that have two-dimensional data arrays distributed across a two-dimensional processor grid. The resize library includes algorithms for processor selection and processor mapping. Experimental results show that the ReSHAPE framework can improve individual job turn-around time and overall system throughput.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables Submitted to International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'07

Key Concepts in Family Studies

Taken from the book to be published by Sage in December 2010, this document provides the Introduction to the book, in which the authors discuss issues in Family Studies as a contemporary field of academic and professional work. Their discussion includes: some of the different positions adopted by researchers towards the use of the language of 'family'; the broad themes generally included in this field of study; and dilemmas in evaluations of, and interventions in, family lives

A Library for Pattern-based Sparse Matrix Vector Multiply

Pattern-based Representation (PBR) is a novel approach to improving the performance of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiply (SMVM) numerical kernels. Motivated by our observation that many matrices can be divided into blocks that share a small number of distinct patterns, we generate custom multiplication kernels for frequently recurring block patterns. The resulting reduction in index overhead significantly reduces memory bandwidth requirements and improves performance. Unlike existing methods, PBR requires neither detection of dense blocks nor zero filling, making it particularly advantageous for matrices that lack dense nonzero concentrations. SMVM kernels for PBR can benefit from explicit prefetching and vectorization, and are amenable to parallelization. The analysis and format conversion to PBR is implemented as a library, making it suitable for applications that generate matrices dynamically at runtime. We present sequential and parallel performance results for PBR on two current multicore architectures, which show that PBR outperforms available alternatives for the matrices to which it is applicable, and that the analysis and conversion overhead is amortized in realistic application scenarios

Priority-enabled Scheduling for Resizable Parallel Applications

In this paper, we illustrate the impact of dynamic resizability on parallel scheduling. Our ReSHAPE framework includes an application scheduler that supports dynamic resizing of parallel applications. We propose and evaluate new scheduling policies made possible by our ReSHAPE framework. The framework also provides a platform to experiment with more interesting and sophisticated scheduling policies and scenarios for resizable parallel applications. The proposed policies support scheduling of parallel applications with and without user assigned priorities. Experimental results show that these scheduling policies significantly improve individual application turn around time as well as overall cluster utilization

The Digital Archiving of Historical Political Cartoons: An Introduction

Political (editorial) cartoons often capture the Zeitgeist of society and convey a message. Increasingly, historians study them to understand commentaries of past events or personalities. Visual culture as an academic subject could be greatly enhanced if this information can be digitally archived. We employ crowdsourcing to obtain valuable metadata by guiding volunteers' feedback using an online survey with 31 targeted questions. We provide intellectual access to a set of about 300 cartoons of a single creator spanning over multiple years in a highly interactive search engine.

Hypnotised by Gutenberg? A report on the reading habits of some learners in academia

Against a background of poor levels of literacy throughout the education system, the dual purpose of this study was to identify reading practices of successful students at tertiary level and to report on sound reading practices that need to be implemented to improve the comprehension of learners in academia. The article reports on the culture of reading of some undergraduate Linguistics students at Unisa, an Open Distance Learning (ODL) institution. Specific text-processing skills were examined within the sociocultural context in which reading takes place. To fully understandreading behaviour at tertiary level, reading practices at primary school in South Africa, as reported on in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Baer et al., 2007), are also mentioned. To provide background to the literacy problem in South Africa, reading practices observed at schools in South Africa are reported on. The findings indicate that individuals, who read more and are aware of what they do when they read, perform better academically