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An unpredictable pendulum: UK electoral dynamics in the twenty-first century
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Post-war electoral dynamics were framed by a two-party system that usually provided single party governments with a legislative majority. These conditions promoted a pendulum-like swing of votes between two parties that alternated in office. The electorate responded ‘thermostatically’ to governments by moving in the opposite direction to policy and imposed the ‘costs of ruling.’ The major parties competed by moderating their positions and building reputations for competence. They vacated the centre in the 1970s and suffered a loss of their reputations for competence, leading to an increase in the centre-party vote. When the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed after 2010, niche parties, such as Reform UK, the Greens, and the Scottish National Party, picked up support. These developments have produced increasingly complicated dynamics. The major parties now risk losing votes to parties on their flanks. This reduces the appeal of moderation and causes uncertainty about strategy. Governments still suffer from thermostatic effects and the costs of ruling, creating opportunities for a wider range of opposition parties. These dynamics will produce volatility that the plurality electoral system will amplify to produce even more astonishing electoral turnarounds, and complicate strategic decision-making for parties.</jats:p
Transport mechanisms associated with non-integer wave numbers in a discontinuous nontwist map
Get PDFThe transport properties in two-dimensional, area-preserving mappings are deeply influenced by the phase space structures such as invariant tori, cantori, and manifold crossings. For nontwist maps, the presence or absence of the shearless invariant curve dictates whether the map exhibits global transport. In this paper, we investigate the extended standard nontwist map, which consists of the standard nontwist map perturbed by a secondary wavenumber m. We explore the transport and behavior of chaotic orbits for arbitrary real m. Our results confirm that the twin island chain scenario only holds for odd integer m, and reveal that the probability of chaotic orbits crossing the central island chain is highly sensitive to m. We demonstrate that for certain m, the manifold configuration is such that only unidirectional transport is achieved, either upward or downward, or heteroclinic orbits from the primary resonances are suppressed entirely, significantly reducing the transport. Additionally, we identify a narrow interval of m for which the shearless curve reemerges, preventing transport altogether. Our findings are supported by detailed and high-precision numerical analysis of the stable and unstable manifolds and their intra and intercrossing structures
Enhancement of eye socket recognition performance using inverse histogram fusion images and the Gabor transform
Get PDFAbstractThe eye socket is a cavity in the skull that encloses the eyeball and its surrounding muscles. It has unique shapes in individuals. This study proposes a new recognition method that relies on the eye socket shape and region. This method involves the utilization of an inverse histogram fusion image to generate Gabor features from the identified eye socket regions. These Gabor features are subsequently transformed into Gabor images and employed for recognition by utilizing both traditional methods and deep‐learning models. Four distinct benchmark datasets (Flickr30, BioID, Masked AT & T, and CK+) were used to evaluate the method's performance. These datasets encompass a range of perspectives, including variations in eye shape, covering, and angles. Experimental results and comparative studies indicate that the proposed method achieved a significantly (
) higher accuracy (average value greater than 92.18%) than that of the relevant identity recognition method and state‐of‐the‐art deep networks (average value less than 78%). We conclude that this improved generalization has significant implications for advancing the methodologies employed for identity recognition.</jats:p
Corporate Governance, Host Communities, Land Use and Petroleum Resource Management: A Context-Specific Corporate Sustainability Framework for Nigeria.
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Social capital and knowledge acquisition among new product development teams
Get PDFUsing survey data from 100 technology-intensive firms based in the United Kingdom, the paper analyses the effects of social capital on the process leading teams tasked with the development of new products (NDP teams) to acquire new knowledge from other teams. Drawing from the social capital theory as well as the relational view, the paper examines the impact of a number of dimensions of social capital on knowledge acquisition among NDP teams and it suggests that social capital facilitates external knowledge acquisition from key team(s) with which the NDP team develops a preferential relationship. We differentiate between types of knowledge that the NDP teams acquires from the other team. Product knowledge is related to the product specification and encompasses technology-related and market-related knowledge, while process knowledge is related to the procedures and techniques used to develop new products. Our results suggest that social interaction and network ties dimensions of social capital are associated with greater knowledge acquisition in the case of process knowledge, but in the case of product knowledge, trust is more important than the degree of social closeness. Further, our results provide evidence that when acquiring product knowledge, both absorptive capacity and cognitive ability play a positive mediating role; vice versa absorptive capacity does not facilitate the acquisition of process knowledge
‘Finding a room of one’s own’: exploring therapists’ understanding of adolescents’ experiences of beginning and settling into intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
Get PDFThis qualitative study uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore trainee psychoanalytic psychotherapists' understanding of adolescent patients' experiences at the beginning stages of intensive psychotherapy. Focusing on the conscious and unconscious expectations, anxieties, and phantasies that emerge, as well as the role of transference, countertransference, and the adolescent’s use of creative mediums such as the arts and dreams.
The findings reveal a complex atmosphere characterised by a flood of feelings, discomfort, and initial mismatches between therapist and patient as they navigate the beginnings of the therapeutic relationship. Adolescents bring fears of being overwhelmed and phantasies of the therapist as a passive receptacle, alongside hopes for containment and deeper self-understanding. Transference and countertransference dynamics are prominent, with early infantile transference re-emerging and challenges related to dependency and independence surfacing in the therapeutic dynamic.
The arts and dreams serve as vital tools for adolescents to express repressed aspects of their inner world, object relations, and anxieties about therapy. These creative modalities also provide a ‘transitional space’ for exploration within the therapy. The intensive frequency provides a space for confronting previously unbearable aspects of the self, fostering growth, and supporting processes of separation and individuation.
These findings highlight the non-linear nature of beginning psychotherapy with adolescents, marked by shifts in emotional states and unconscious dynamics. The research underscores the importance of frequency in therapy, enabling emergence of infantile transference and exploration of negative transference. The study emphasises the significant learning experience that intensive therapy offers for trainee therapists. Clinical implications suggest that the beginning stages are uniquely intense, requiring therapists to navigate oscillations between dependency and autonomy, which are crucial for the adolescents’ reworking of their internal psychic landscape. The study advocates for the continued availability of intensive therapy in the NHS, emphasising its value in addressing adolescents' unique therapeutic needs, particularly as resources increasingly shift toward shorter treatments
LEGOSim: A Unified Parallel Simulation Framework for Multi-chiplet Heterogeneous Integration
Get PDFThe rise of multi-chiplet integration challenges existing simulators like gem5 [ 45 ] and GPGPU-Sim [37 ] for efficiently simulating heterogeneous multiple-chiplet systems due to incapability to modularly integrate heterogenous chiplets, high synchronization overheads in parallel simulation, and high inter-chiplet communication modeling overhead. To address these limitations, this paper introduces LEGOSim, a unified parallel simulation framework capable of flexibly integrating various open-source and in-house designed chiplet simulators as processes in parallel simulation, referred to as "simlets" with minimal modifications needed. It introduces a three-stage simulation process that decouples chiplet simulation from inter-chiplet communication modeling to mitigate the communication modeling overhead. The framework also integrates Network-on-Interposer (NoI) simulator for modeling inter-chiplet communication, enabling accurate assessment of various interconnection architectures’ performance. Furthermore, it employs an on-demand synchronization protocol, ensuring synchronization only occurs when necessary, thus reducing overhead while maintaining correctness. Evaluated with diverse benchmarks, LEGOSim shows high accuracy in simulating multi-chiplet architectures like SIMBA [55 ] and a CiM-based accelerator [13 ], with average errors of 3.79% and 3.94%, respectively. It significantly reduces synchronization overhead by up to 99.9% compared to per-cycle synchronization and by 66.1% compared to time quantum synchronization, without synchronization errors. Five case studies show that LEGOSim also provides precise system performance metrics and stall cause reporting, simplifying tasks such as performance analysis and optimization, and can be used for design space exploration of various multi-chiplet systems
Massive-Scale Simulations of 2D Ising and Blume-Capel Models on Rack-Scale Multi-GPU Systems
Get PDFWe present high-performance implementations of the two-dimensional Ising and Blume-Capel models for large-scale, multi-GPU simulations. Our approach takes full advantage of the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system, which features up to 72 GPUs interconnected via high-bandwidth NVLink, enabling direct GPU-to-GPU memory access across multiple nodes. By utilizing Fabric Memory and an optimized Monte Carlo kernel for the Ising model, our implementation supports simulations of systems with linear sizes up to , corresponding to approximately 70 trillion spins. This allows for a peak processing rate of nearly lattice updates per nanosecond-setting a new performance benchmark for Ising model simulations. Additionally, we introduce a custom protocol for computing correlation functions, which strikes an optimal balance between computational efficiency and statistical accuracy. This protocol enables large-scale simulations without incurring prohibitive runtime costs. Benchmark results show near-perfect strong and weak scaling up to 64 GPUs, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach for large-scale statistical physics simulations
Cross-sectional survey on independent mobility of people with dementia: a caregivers’ perspective
Get PDFDementia significantly impairs cognitive function and severely affects daily living activities. To support independent mobility in older adults and individuals with dementia, home modification strategies, such as safety adaptations, have been identified as critical interventions.
Objective: To explore caregivers’ perspectives on the potentials of digital interventions in enhancing independent mobility for PwD in mild to moderate stages of the condition. The aim is to determine if digital intervention could help PwD to effectively use existing home safety interventions and to safely move around their environment.
Methods: A cross-sectional survey was used to gather insights from 121 professional caregivers and family members providing care for PwD. Participants aged 18 years and above were eligible for inclusion. Responses were analysed using R software, employing descriptive statistics, contingency tables, and graphical charts. χ2 tests (p<0.05) assessed the relationships between categorical variables, with Cramér’s V measuring association strength (weak relationship if ≤0.30). Cronbach’s alpha demonstrated reliability for mobility factors (0.87, 95%CI 0.810–0.908).
Results: The study revealed that PwD made limited use of existing home safety interventions, with statistically significant findings (p<0.05) across the four mobility factors evaluated. This indicates that the effectiveness of these interventions could be undermined particularly for individuals living alone.
Conclusion: The study found that digital interventions can support PwD in using existing home safety interventions and navigating their environments more independently. It could help the target population know when and how to these interventions thereby increasing the overall goal of their implementations