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In our time: a timeline of adult education, from the Mechanics’ Movement to Birkbeck
Get PDFThis document has been compiled to clarify the historical origins of three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century that contributed to the experiment of their conflation at Birkbeck in two decades of the twentieth century, from 1988 when the University of London’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies joined the college, through to its finale in 2009, when Extra-Mural was integrated into the college, and its extensive outreach programme across London abandoned
The overlap of disordered eating, Autism and ADHD: future research priorities as identified by adults with lived experience
Get PDFThe focus of mental health research in emerging fields should be driven by the priorities of people with lived experience. Autism and ADHD are childhood-onset neurodevelopmental conditions that are associated with a range of health inequalities including increased risk for eating disorders. The evidence base for how best to support neurodivergent individuals who experience disordered eating is still in its infancy, but research suggests that existing clinical approaches are not currently fit for purpose. In this Position Paper, through community consultation with autistic people and people with ADHD who have experienced disordered eating, we present a comprehensive ranked list of research topics that those with lived experience prioritise. These priorities could be clustered into two overarching areas: ‘Improving Outcomes’ and ‘Identifying Causal Mechanisms’. Within the Improving Outcomes theme, topics focused on improving treatment, the need for neurodiversity training in clinical services and the identification and minimization of unintended adverse effects of psychological intervention. Within the Identifying Causal Mechanisms theme, topics focused on the identification of risk factors and better understanding of the impact of autistic/ADHD neurocognitive profiles as potential contributors to eating disorder vulnerability. The final Top 10 Research Priorities are contextualized, in terms of how they compare to the existing literature on the overlap between autism/ADHD and eating disorders, and concrete suggestions are given for how to implement these research priorities as testable hypotheses. Research informed by these priorities will build necessary understanding of the reasons behind the increased risk for eating disorders in neurodivergent people, and how to best support those affected to live positive and fulfilling lives
Managing inter-organizational dependencies operation for discovering digital business model innovation in corporate innovation ecosystem
Get PDFThe relevance of innovation ecosystems and digital technologies exerts pressures on the business operations management concerning inter-organizational collaboration and competition. Society pays great attention to digital business models while there is very little research bringing the fields of inter-organizational operations and digital business model innovation (BMI) together. To clarify how inter-organizational dependencies affect digital BMI in a corporate innovation ecosystem, this study conducted an empirical study of 210 companies from a corporate innovation ecosystem in China based on optimal distinctiveness theory. The results show that: (1) Joint dependence positively affects digital BMI, while asymmetry dependence negatively affects digital business model innovation; (2) Routine updating mediates the relationship between inter-organizational dependencies and digital BMI; (3) Cross-border management capabilities moderate the positive effect of routine updating on digital BMI. The study provides theoretical and practical guidelines for the management of inter-organizational dependencies operation between enterprises in the corporate innovation ecosystem
Voice actors show enhanced neural tracking of pitch, prosody perception, and music perception
Get PDFExperiences with sound that make strong demands on the precision of perception, such as musical training and experience speaking a tone language, can enhance auditory neural encoding. Are high demands on the precision of perception necessary for training to drive auditory neural plasticity? Voice actors are an ideal subject population for answering this question. Voice acting requires exaggerating prosodic cues to convey emotion, character, and linguistic structure, drawing upon attention to sound, memory for sound features, and accurate sound production, but not fine perceptual precision. Here we assessed neural encoding of pitch using the frequency-following response (FFR), as well as prosody, music, and sound perception, in voice actors and a matched group of non-actors. We find that the consistency of neural sound encoding, prosody perception, and musical phrase perception are all enhanced in voice actors, suggesting that a range of neural and behavioural auditory processing enhancements can result from training which lacks fine perceptual precision. However, fine discrimination was not enhanced in voice actors but was linked to degree of musical experience, suggesting that low-level auditory processing can only be enhanced by demanding perceptual training. These findings suggest that training which taxes attention, memory, and production but is not perceptually taxing may be a way to boost neural encoding of sound and auditory pattern detection in individuals with poor auditory skills
Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization
Get PDFSpeech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, that is, the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular dimension leads that dimension to attract attention. Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and nonmusicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to nonmusicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. Listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization, musicians upweighted pitch compared to nonmusicians. During phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration relative to nonmusicians. These results suggest that musical experience is linked with domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to certain acoustic dimensions in speech. As a result, musicians may place greater perceptual weight on a single primary dimension during prosodic categorization, while nonmusicians may be more likely to choose a perceptual strategy that integrates across multiple dimensions. These findings support attentional theories of cue weighting, which suggest attention influences listeners’ perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions during categorization
Towards constrained optimization of cloud applications: a hybrid approach
Get PDFA database system is one of the most common cloud applications where elasticity allows to dynamically allocate resources in response to changing workload demands. In such systems, users usually configure resources based on empirical decisions, for example by boosting computational resources with the expectation of improving database throughput. The latter also suggests that users manually scale resources and tune the database configurations offline to meet the application demands. However, this approach could rapidly increase infrastructure expenditures while this is also time consuming. In this paper, we propose SONA, a framework to support constrained performance optimization of cloud applications using a hybrid approach of artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms. The proposed framework monitors the source system to identify the optimal configurations that maximize application performance based on genuine workload executions. As a result, the experimental analysis presents a novel dataset collected from TPC-C runs on MySQL server. The optimization process is being constrained to satisfy user and application requirements including the cloud infrastructure expenditures, the cost-performance ratio, the baseline performance and the average percentage of idle CPU resources. Furthermore, SONA uses a cloned containerized environment that replicates the main application to avoid system overhead during the optimization process. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SONA framework to optimize the performance of OLTP applications deployed on cloud
Por una izquierda democrática e internacionalista: Contribución a la renovación y transformación de la izquierda
Get PDFCon horror vemos aumentar día tras día, semana tras semana, la cifra de civiles asesinados en Gaza. Estamos consternados e indignados por el castigo colectivo infligido a la población de Gaza por el ejército israelí, por la violencia creciente de los colonos en Cisjordania y por la opresión de los ciudadanos palestinos de Israel por el Gobierno y por grupos de extrema derecha. En los EEUU, en Europa, en la India y otras partes, el activismo a favor de los palestinos es demonizado por numerosos políticos, por muchos medios, y criminalizado por el Estado en algunos casos. Muchos análisis occidentales sobre el conflicto palestino-israelí están impregnados de racismo, que presenta a menudo a los israelíes como un pueblo occidental moderno y civilizado, cuyos sufrimientos son más profundos y, en cierto sentido, más reales que los padecidos por los palestinos. En un contexto como este, es comprensible que se focalice exclusivamente en el corto término. Se puede pensar que no es hora de hablar de lo que falla en el activismo en relación al conflicto Israel/Palestina y, en general, en el seno de las izquierdas. Pero pensamos que frente a esta crisis la reflexión es de suma importancia. Ahora, no más tarde, es cuando debemos demostrar espíritu crítico, a fin de decidir si los objetivos principales de nuestros movimientos son los adecuados para, realmente, obtener un cambio
Pour une gauche democratique et internationaliste: Contribution au renouveau et à la transformation de la gauche
Get PDFC’est avec horreur que nous voyons augmenter depuis des semaines, jour après jour, le nombre de civils tués à Gaza. Nous sommes consternés et indignés par la punition collective infl igée aux Gazaouis par l’armée israélienne, par la violence grandissante des colons en Cisjordanie et par l’oppression des citoyens palestiniens d’Israël par le gouvernement et les groupes d’extrême droite. Aux USA, en Europe, en Inde et ailleurs, l’activisme en faveur des Palestiniens est diabolisé par de nombreux politiciens, par un grand nombre de médias et criminalisé par l’État dans certains cas. Beaucoup d’analyses occidentales sur le confl it israélo-palestinien sont imprégnées de racisme, présentant souvent les Israéliens comme un peuple occidental moderne et civilisé dont les souffrances sont plus profondes et en quelque sorte plus réelles que celles endurées par les Palestiniens. Dans un tel contexte, il est compréhensible de se focaliser exclusivement sur le court terme. On pourrait penser que ce n’est pas le moment de parler de ce qui pèche dans l’activisme relatif au confl it Israël/ Palestine et plus généralement au sein des gauches. Mais nous pensons que face à cette crise, la réfl exion est d’une importance capitale. C’est maintenant, et non plus tard, que nous devons faire preuve d’esprit critique afi n de décider si les objectifs principaux de nos mouvements sont les bons pour réellement obtenir un changement
Working prisoners in the UK: laws, policies, and practical realities
Get PDFThis briefing describes the governance of prison work and prison labour in the United Kingdom. Recent years have seen a considerable focus on policies aiming to promote prisoner employment and employability and yet, as the briefing shows, this focus has been confined to small parts of the UK prison system. Reliable data describing prison work is difficult to obtain, and many of the long-standing contradictions and difficulties which have plagued efforts to turn prisons into productive, rehabilitative workplaces remain unresolved. Despite some impressive progress in some parts of the system, the nature and usefulness of prison work in the UK remain largely obscure. This briefing reviews the legal and policy landscape and what little published data exists to describe work done by people serving prison sentences, and summarises what can be said about the nature and extent of different kinds of work in practice
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