Series Of Reflections Research Articles

Calibration of an electroacoustic transducer without a primary standard.

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

Opening Up Opportunities: Trainee Teachers Experiences of Teaching Pupils with Visual Impairment

AbstractPostgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) secondary art and design trainees facilitated an art education project for pupils at a specialist school for visual impairment (VI) in the Northwest of England. This paper focuses on the ways in which the art education project was designed to better prepare PGCE trainees for working with pupils with VI. There is an exploration of a series of reflections at the end of the art education project and again upon completion of the PGCE course. Feedback provided by PGCE trainees indicated the ways they were able to transfer the skills learnt regarding teaching pupils with VI into practice, as they embark upon their careers. Existing literature highlights variation across initial teacher training (ITT) in relation to what is taught regarding special educational needs, this is generally due to time constraints on one year ITT courses. The findings indicate these experiences have implications for practice. through following their journey, initially PGCE trainees were apprehensive about working with pupils with VI. However, facilitating the art education project enabled PGCE trainees to become more confident working with pupils. PGCE trainees were able to develop as teachers.

What’s love got to do with it? A systemic view of agape

In this article, we explore what love feels like in systemic therapy, for us, as practitioners. The idea for writing this article as a personal set of reflections was born in our walking to work relationship. We both have the same part time visiting position in a systemic training programme in a Norwegian University. We leave our hotel at 8a.m. to walk up the hill, talking about training, supervision and therapy as we go along. Increasingly our attention turned to the experience of love in therapy – to what it looked like, to what it felt like, to what it meant, and to the inevitable challenges, risks and benefits of naming love in the therapy process. We soon discovered there was a relative silence on this topic in the systemic literature, and we wondered why. We open this article with a series of further reflections and questions to each other, following our first publication on therapeutic love as agape (Sheehan and Vetere, 2023). We identify agape as the best characterisation of the kind of love emergent in therapeutic relationships and conclude this article with a brief look at the existing systemic literature on the topic. In turn, we invite you, the reader, if you will, to respond.

On Metaphysics and Supersessionism

Abstract Scholars, theologians and lay people are in the midst of a wave of vital conversations about the nature of Christian supersessionism and the possibility of a post-supersessionist theology. This paper seeks to contribute to these conversations by drawing out the presuppositions about evental relationship that underly supersessionistic habits of thought and their alternatives. This effort will proceed primarily through a critique of Alain Badiou’s supersessionistic reading of the Jewish/Christian evental relationship while attempting to salvage his formal concept of evental recurrence as a potential resource for post-supersessionist theology. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to this critique and salvage project. However, it will close with a series of brief reflections on how a non-teleogical metaphysics of evental recurrence might displace some of the teleological thought patterns that drive the dilemmas of supersessionism

A simple model for the spatial correlation of turbulence-induced pressures.

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

The role of aromatase inhibitors in slim women with breast cancer-related lymphoedema: a reflective case series.

This case series follows the reflective processes undertaken, when five slim women presented with reactive oedemas of the forearm and hand, that did not respond to usual therapy. To raise awareness about Aromatase Inhibitor (AI), Letrozole. Possible causes, including Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) inhibitors, Ribociclib and Axillary Web Syndrome, were explored and reviewed, and potential effective treatment options were then sought. New cases presented, which discounted each theory, until Letrozole was suspected. Inflammatory oedemas were explained by the mechanisms-of-action relating to Aromatase Inhibitor Associated Musculoskeletal Syndrome (AIMSS), the severity of which, especially for slim women with oestrogen deprivation, causes almost 50% of women to cease treatment within 6 months; risking disease reoccurrence. Permissions were gained, a table was collated and sent to referring consultants, requesting risk/benefit analysis of Letrozole with a medication review. If non-responsive, inflammatory oedemas present in clinic, AIs should be considered as a trigger.

Well‐log integration and seismic‐to‐well tie off George V Land (Antarctica)

AbstractCenozoic sediments from the continental rise off the George V Land consist of silty/clayey facies variably rich in diatom ooze; these sediments hold a record of the glacial history of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin and are important for estimating the contribution of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to global sea level changes during past transition to warmer climates. This is fundamental to predict future scenarios related to the global warming. The petrophysical properties of Antarctic marine sediments are influenced by the ice sheet dynamics and may affect the amplitude of seismic reflections. Through a seismic‐to‐well tie procedure, we investigate the origin of high amplitude reflections from Miocene‐early Pliocene deposits identified in two seismic lines crossing at the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 318 drill site U1359. Downhole and core log measurements are preconditioned and merged to obtain complete velocity and density records from the sea floor to the bottom of the deepest of the four wells drilled at this site. We generate a synthetic trace by convolving the reflectivity series with the seismic wavelet obtained from the sea‐floor reflection and match the synthetic trace to the seismic data with a time variant cross‐correlation procedure. This procedure established a robust time‐depth relationship, not achievable from the available small‐offset seismic data. To our knowledge, this is the first seismic‐to‐well tying in the George V Land area. Based on results from synthetic data, the anomalous high amplitude seismic package can be linked to changes in density of sediments. Such changes are interpreted as representative for the alternation of diatom‐rich (warm climate) and silty‐clay layers with ice‐rafted debris (cold climate) inside the deposits. We suggest that the analysis of the characteristics and the distribution of similar seismic anomaly around Antarctica can give insight into the modality of past Antarctic ice sheet dynamics.

“My blood boiled”: Emotional metaphors and masculinity in Mexican men

The principal aim of this communication is to describe and analyze metaphor as a narrative resource of emotional vocabulary used by men. Beside the relationship with mandates of masculinity. A qualitative ethnographic approach was used with in-depth interviews on family life and work experiences of men between age from 20 to 49 years, living with a heterosexual couple, with at least one child, being unemployed or having a recent unemployment period of time and residents of the metropolitan area of ​​Guadalajara, Mexico. Men enunciated metaphors more frequently than emotional labels. The metaphor sense of pleasure or displeasure are described, their relation with family and/or work experiences, but also linkage with some mandates of masculinity. A series of reflections on methodological and empirical aspects and questions are presented to continue the research on emotions and masculinities as a promising field of studies on the gender of men.

The Work of Art in the Age of Transmedia Production (With Regards to Walter Benjamin)

This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a classic text in critical theory and media studies. Appropriating Benjamin’s sentence, paragraph, and essay structures, the essay presents a series of theoretical reflections on the status of art during the current age of transmedia production. The essay seeks to contribute to a theory of contemporary art that moves beyond capitalist, and increasingly fascist, ideologies. As in Benjamin’s essay, this work is an effort to think dialectically about the contradictions that structure our contemporary moment, and therefore to formulate a socialist aesthetics.

Trapping in acoustic standing waves: Effect of liquid drop compressibility.

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

Who is my Neighbour? Theological Education in the Global Village of the 21st Century (Responses)

Chukwuemeka Anthony Atansi’s keynote address offered a series of reflections on how the Igbo theological anthropology of the neighbour can enrich theological education in diverse contexts such as Montreal. The Igbo theological anthropology of the neighbour offers a relational understanding of the neighbour, a relationality which comprises a crucial component of Karen Finch’s response, one which argues that good pastoral education in today’s polarized world strongly resembles good ecumenical formation. For Finch, ecumenical formation is about relationality and the dialogues that this relationality provokes, and she argues that, when approached with openness and transparency, such dialogues can be truly generative for pastoral education.
 Alyson Huntly’s response offers a series of reflections about the state of theological education in Quebec, reflections which also highlight relationality, or, more precisely, the need for Western institutions, hitherto predominantly white, to re-evaluate and re-envision how they relate to – and thereby dialogue with and learn from – the “Others” who now represent a majority demographic in Quebec’s theological colleges, many of whom come from the Global South or formerly colonized nations. This, she argues, represents the path to renewal for theological education in twenty-first century Quebec.

An embodied theorisation: Arend Heyting's hypothesis about how the self separates from the outer world finds confirmation

AbstractAt the beginning of the twentieth century, among the foundational schools of mathematics appeared ‘intuitionism’ by Dutchman L. E. J. Brouwer, who based arithmetic on the intuition of time and all mental constructions that could be made out of it. His pupil Arend Heyting was the first populariser of intuitionism, and he repeatedly emphasised that no philosophy was required to practise intuitionism so that such mathematics could be shared by anyone. Still, stimulated by invitations to humanistic conferences, he wrote a series of notes, preserved in the State Archives, Haarlem, about solipsism. In them, he operated a series of theoretical reflections consisting of the stripping away of the patterns that are part of our consciousness and their subsequent progressive re‐introduction, in order to understand the formation of our Self as distinct from the natural world and other humans. In 1996, following a stroke, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor experienced the deprivation of certain abilities in her brain and their successive regaining. In her experience there are remarkable similarities with what Heyting had hypothesised about the formation of the self. The purpose of this article is to highlight them and point out how Heyting's theoretical construct was found to be embodied in the brain.

Midnight’s victims

ABSTRACT The last US drone strike during its occupation of Afghanistan took place in Kabul on 29 August 2021. The target was identified as an Islamic State–Khorosan (ISIS-K) cell preparing to attack Hamid Karzai International Airport while the United States and its allies conducted a large-scale non-combatant evacuation and the Taliban advanced into the capital. Although the strike was the culmination of intensive aerial surveillance, it killed only innocent civilians. In comparing the official account of events provided by the Pentagon to explain the catastrophic mistake with an alternative narrative established by investigative reporters, it becomes clear that the strike was prompted by a performative series of assumptions and inferences that fastened on every observed action as suspicious and ultimately hostile. A further comparison with a US airstrike in Uruzgan on 21 February 2010 shows that this chain of misinterpretation and miscalculation has been a constant in civilian casualty incidents for many years. This prompts a series of reflections on the architecture of aerial violence and its implications for civilians caught up in the battlespaces of later modern war.

Numerical simulations of musical instruments.

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

Lisette Model: Another Frankfurt School Photographer in New York

Abstract This essay examines the portrait work of the Austrian-American photographer Lisette Model, with a special focus on her representation of the American lumpenproletariat in the Reflections series, Model's first after coming to New York in 1938 as an Austrian-French Jewish émigré, and in her Bowery portrait series. Within the history of American postwar photography, Model stands as a salient figure, a pioneer who located and defined the issues, options, and contradictions of photography as an artistic practice in the “New York School of photography.” Model's rendering of her subjects as eccentric, fantastic, and spectacular in their expressions and emotions propelled the émigré photographer with meager experience into a central position in the making of mid-century American photography, both social-documentary and commercial. Moving beyond the localized context of postwar American photography in which Model's work has been largely investigated, this essay argues for an understanding of Model's New York portraits as being shaped and informed by the photographer's consideration of the crisis of history and the violence enacted by fascism in Europe, as well as the historical condition of exile. One of the essay's claims is that Model revitalized a kind of pleasurable violence, one that enacts a sense of excessive bodily dynamism, often to the point of self-destruction, on the bodies of the American lumpenproletariat at leisure, in order both to come to terms with the role of the lumpenproletariat as the central subject of fascist politics and aesthetics in the Old World and to put pressure on the conditions of the mass subject and mass politics in the New World.

Objects of mestizo memory

This visual essay explores the relationship of racialization and family archives based on an inquiry into my Guatemalan father’s collection of media artifacts. The media objects include VHS tapes, photographic prints, and legal documents. All of the images presented are from my father’s media archive, and they are presented in relation to a series of textual reflections. These reflections are drawn from my own experiences producing oral histories with my tía Marta in Guatemala, my father’s reflections on his archive of media objects, and a review of colonial texts that elaborated the descriptions of ethnoracial categories related to “mestizaje” in Central America. Taken together, this image-based and textual exploration presents the reader with an opportunity to reflect on the contingent, fraught, and open-ended process of racialization, as well as on moments of foreclosure where boundaries of ethnoracial identity are demarcated and reified. The essay meditates on ways that utterances and dialogue about family archives constitute sites of racialization. There is a corresponding video essay featuring my father’s narration along with his interaction with his archive at the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwPmMwBJc-k .

Demography as a Field: Where We Came From and Where We Are Headed

This essay provides a series of reflections on the current state of demography as seen by four early-career researchers who are actively engaged in aspects of the discipline as varied as research, teaching, mentorship, data collection efforts, policy making, and policy advising. Despite some claims that the discipline is weakening, we showcase the great potential of the field and outline promising pathways and novel directions for the future. In so doing, we critically assess recent innovations in data quality and availability, stressing the need to “revolutionize” the way that demographic methods are taught by adopting a viewpoint that more closely reflects the rapidly changing, or “fast,” nature of global social phenomena such as conflict-related displacements, environmental disasters, migration streams, pandemics, and evolving population policies. We conclude by discussing the relevance of careful demographic analyses for policy making, stressing three main points: (i) the need to make demography more visible and understandable to the public eye; (ii) the importance of engaging and co-creating with local communities to “break” the academic bubble; and (iii) the urge to counteract the spread of misinformation—a phenomenon that has become even more visible in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The final frontier? Mechanisms to stimulate investment in the commercial space travel industry

PurposeThe paper’s purpose is to consider, using a transaction cost economics (TCE) framework, the mechanisms used by space agencies to encourage private investment in the commercial spaceflight sector.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a content analysis of 554 pages of news articles, relating to issues pertaining to partnerships between national government-based space agencies and private space travel providers, published over a 20-year period. Leximancer was used to initially screen the data and then the authors manually analysed the content to identify themes.FindingsThe data analysis revealed three themes, relating to: the uncertainty of space travel; National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) stimulating innovation in the private sector; and risk, insurance and regulation. These themes informed by TCE reveal the “hierarchical” organisational forms used to achieve human spaceflight and then the “hybrids”, insurance and regulations used to stimulate private sector investment and innovation.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the accounting literature by answering the calls of Alewine (2020) and Tucker and Alewine (2022a, b) for more research into accounting in the space context. Specifically, the paper contributes by identifying mechanisms used by NASA to stimulate private investment in the space travel sector, as well as issues that have affected the implementation of these mechanisms. The paper also contributes to the literature by, based on the analysis, identifying a series of reflections designed to stimulate further management accounting research in the space context.

The quest for a damage risk criterion for hazardous noise exposure

The Reflections series takes a look back on historical articles from The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that have had a significant impact on the science and practice of acoustics.

The role of emotions in educational processes: the conceptions of teacher educators.

The research shows that a very important part of initial teacher education is to reformulate the beliefs that student teachers bring with them from their school experience. These beliefs, which are intuitive in nature, deal with different educational topics and one area that is currently of great importance, due to the emotional turn that the educational system is experiencing, are the beliefs that student teachers hold about the role of emotions in educational processes. In a world full of views that portray emotions as discrete states that are separate from cognitive processes, it is a priority for initial teacher development to train future teachers to hold conceptions that consider the deep emotional-cognitive integration that exists in the human brain. At the same time, this process requires teacher educators (hereafter referred to as TEs) who hold conceptions on this topic that are aligned with the most current scientific knowledge on the subject. However, we do not know how the conceptions that TEs maintain on this topic are, since, until now, research on conceptions has focused on other types of educational topics. Considering the foregoing, this study aimed to evaluate the conceptions that TEs have on this topic, using a questionnaire of dilemmas that was applied to 68 TEs from different universities. The results obtained show that the TEs maintain perspectives on the role of emotions in the teaching and learning processes that oscillate between dualism and emotional-cognitive integration. In addition, it was found that TEs' perspectives tend to be more integrative when considering attitudinal learning than when considering verbal learning. Finally, the study shows that maintaining integrative perspectives is more difficult when educational situations involve emotions of positive valence that may constitute an obstacle for teaching and learning. The results are discussed, and a series of reflections are elaborated in order to analyze to what extent the beliefs held by TEs are adequate as a cognitive basis for reformulating the conceptions held by student teachers on this issue.