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Redrawing the line: An exploration of how lay people construct child neglect
Get PDFWhile there has been an increasing professional and political focus on the prevalence and harmfulness of child neglect, little has been done to explore what child neglect means outside child protection circles. This qualitative study explores lay constructions of child neglect by thematically analyzing focus group discussions between 46 self-defined ‘lay’ people in England.
Participants viewed neglect as extremely damaging for children and as arising when children’s physical, emotional, training and supervisory needs were unmet due to abnormal parental behavior. Children with unmet needs were positioned as deprived, unloved, uncontrolled and escaping. They were only positioned as neglected when failure to meet their needs was attributable to a lack of parental knowledge and skill (clueless parents), a lack of appropriate parental disposition (underinvested parents) or both (unsuitable parents). ‘Normal’ parents – those with the appropriate parental disposition, skills and knowledge – who failed to meet their children’s needs were not seen as neglectful but rather as overburdened.
As ‘normal parenting’ has fragmented in late modernity, society wide consensus on child neglect was felt by participants to have retreated to child protection definitions, alienating lay understandings. If child neglect really is ‘everybody’s business’, then it is important that lay people are included in forging new definitions of and responses to meeting the needs of childre
Suburbanization and cultural change: the case of club cricket in Surrey, 1870–1939
No full textThis article examines the social, economic and political origins of what was a new, distinctly elitist, culture of ‘non-competitive’ sport, and how these values, which emerged from a small group of metropolitan elites, spread throughout the south-east of England. It argues that a long-term analysis of sport provides a valuable contextual tool for urban historians. In this case, how the gradual adoption of a distinctly ‘metropolitan’ culture throughout Surrey, and the associated changes in the social structure and purpose of cricket, may contribute towards a more nuanced assessment of that county's ‘suburbanization’, and how this region interacted with the urban cor
Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?
No full textThis article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to address accountability and learning, more specifically, truth commissions (TCs). We raise two overlapping, puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic TC: whilst Iceland established a TC at early stages of the crisis, Greece and Ireland did so much later. What accounts for ‘early’ versus ‘delayed’ truth seekers? The second concerns variations in learning outcomes. Iceland’s commission paved the way for learning institutional lessons, but TCs in Greece and Ireland became overtly politicised. What accounts for these divergences? The article compares truth commissions in Iceland, Greece and Ireland and identifies two types of political learning – institutional and instrumental – related to the establishment of a TC. It argues political elites in countries with higher pre-crisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic TCs quickly; this is the ‘institutional logic’ of learning. The ‘instrumental logic’ of learning, in contrast, leads governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to establish commission
Towards A Multi-tiered Knowledge-based System for Autonomous Cloud Security Auditing
No full textEvery cloud platform has a large number of software compo-nents, making it difficult to manage the security of the entire system. This paper discusses the requirement for an intelli-gent cloud security auditing solution, and an expert system architecture is presented. The solution can identify data confi-dentiality threats in the OpenStack cloud platform, as well as propose solutions to remove vulnerabilities before an attack occurs. Data confidentiality threats cover a wide range of se-curity risks where attackers usually try to steal/corrupt per-sonal data and are a major concern of users. For this reason, cloud infrastructures need frequent security auditing. The key features of the proposed expert system architecture include: acquisition of information detailing the latest cloud security threats and solutions, the conversion of acquired raw data into usable format, the application of a forward chaining inference algorithm, and the ability for the user to add/modify knowledge, which is then utilised to provide feasible solu-tions in ranked order. These components provide an automat-ed mechanism to generate human-readable audit reports, im-proving the overall security status without the need for expert knowledg
Mesoscopic structure of pectin in solution
Get PDFMesoscopic structure of pectin with different molecular characteristics was investigated by means of small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), electrokinetic measurements and data modelling. The influence of a broad range of pH (2-7) on chain conformation in the dilute and semi-diluted regime was investigated. Scattering data and concomitant analysis revealed two length scales at all environmental conditions studied. pH showed greater influence at acidic values (pH 2.0) enhancing the globular component of the structure due to association of galacturonic acid residues. Double logarithmic scattering intensity plots revealed fractal dimensions of 1.9 ±0.2 in the low-q regime and 1.5 ±0.2 in the high q-region, irrespectively of the specific environment. Increase in branching of RG-I regions of the polysaccharide chains enhanced the compact conformation irrespectively of the pH or concentration. The present work shows that radical changes in pectin conformation can be induced only under strongly acidic conditions a finding that has important consequences in tailoring the technological performance of these biopolymer
Wetland entrepreneurs: diversity in diversification in Zambian farming
No full textPurpose
This paper explores enterprise diversification amongst wetland farmers in Zambia as a way of reducing poverty and improving sustainability. It identifies ways in which such entrepreneurial activities can be supported and applied more widely.
Method
A qualitative study of Zambian farmers, based on a series of workshops and interviews held in Zambia with farmers and farm business advisers.
Findings
Despite adopting new technologies most farmers are restricted to the local market where their increased production holds down prices. However, a very small number of farmers are able to progress to production and marketing for markets in major urban centres hundreds of kilometres away, and considerably more are able to use the capital accumulated from wetland farming to diversify their household enterprises to reduce poverty and improve the sustainability and resilience of their livelihoods.
Prior work
No work has been undertaken in diversification strategies of Small scale farmers in Zambia
Examining applying high performance genetic data feature selection and classification algorithms for colon cancer diagnosis
Get PDFBackground and Objectives: This paper examines the accuracy and efficiency (time complexity) of high performance genetic data feature selection and classification algorithms for colon cancer diagnosis. The need for this research derives from the urgent and increasing need for accurate and efficient algorithms. Colon cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, hence it is vitally important for the cancer tissues to be expertly identified and classified in a rapid and timely manner, to assure both a fast detection of the disease and to expedite the drug discovery process.
Methods: In this research, a three-phase approach was proposed and implemented: Phases One and Two examined the feature selection algorithms and classification algorithms employed separately, and Phase Three examined the performance of the combination of these.
Results: It was found from Phase One that the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm performed best with the colon dataset as a feature selection (29 genes selected) and from Phase Two that the Sup- port Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm outperformed other classifications, with an accuracy of almost 86%. It was also found from Phase Three that the combined use of PSO and SVM surpassed other algorithms in accuracy and performance, and was faster in terms of time analysis (94%).
Conclusions: It is concluded that applying feature selection algorithms prior to classification algorithms results in better accuracy than when the latter are applied alone. This conclusion is important and significant to industry and society
The impact of housing features relative location on a turbocharger compressor flow
No full textThis work presents an investigation on a flow phenomenon marked by in-plane velocity non-uniformity associated with a ported shroud turbocharger compressor observed upstream of the compressor inlet at lower operating speeds. The effect of structural struts in the ported shroud (PS) cavity and the location of the volute tongue on velocity non-uniformity is studied in this paper by numerically modelling the complete compressor stage using a (Un)steady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS & URANS) approach. The results show that the amplitude of in-plane velocity non-uniformity is reduced by removing the struts from the PS cavity. Furthermore, the change in location of the volute tongue is shown to either substantially diminish or enhance the amplitude of velocity non-uniformity based on the relative position of the volute tongue and the struts. The study concludes that the velocity non-uniformity is dependent on the coupled effect of volute tongue and the strut position in the PS cavity
An iterative distortion compensation algorithm for camera calibration based on phase target
No full textCamera distortion is a critical factor affecting the accuracy of camera calibration. A conventional calibration approach cannot satisfy the requirement of a measurement system demanding high calibration accuracy due to the inaccurate distortion compensation. This paper presents a novel camera calibration method with an iterative distortion compensation algorithm. The initial parameters of the camera are calibrated by full-field camera pixels and the corresponding points on a phase target. An iterative algorithm is proposed to compensate for the distortion. A 2D fitting and interpolation method is also developed to enhance the accuracy of the phase target. Compared to the conventional calibration method, the proposed method does not rely on a distortion mathematical model, and is stable and effective in terms of complex distortion conditions. Both the simulation work and experimental results show that the proposed calibration method is more than 100% more accurate than the conventional calibration method
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