Unpredictable Aspects Research Articles

Staying attuned, keeping the flow – possibilities and obstacles in teachers’ tactful acting

ABSTRACT The standardised and instrumental view of teaching overshadows the unintentional spontaneous, unpredictable aspects of teaching captured by the notion of pedagogical tact. Pedagogical tact is grounded in teacher-pupil relations involving trust and care. This article illustrates how pedagogical tact can be used as an analytical tool in empirical educational research. The overall aim was to explore how tactful acting manifests itself in teachers’ pedagogical decision-making, and what can facilitate or impede teachers’ tactful acting. The author provides examples from two cases. The first case shows how the teacher balances freedom and constraint in making decisions about grading. The second case demonstrates how a beginning teacher handles a situation involving a student with special needs. The findings show that the conditions for tactful acting are determined by various aspects of the educational practice, such as the teacher’s freedom to make pedagogical decisions and the teacher’s obligations towards the students, principal, and parents.

Drama and Narration: The Architecture of Psychoanalytic Play

ABSTRACT Beginning with a fantasy interview with Donald Winnicott and William Shakespeare – one in which Winnicott espouses the essential nature of play in psychoanalysis – he then joins Shakespeare in finding a promising set of ideas for psychoanalytic play. These ideas arise out of Shakespeare’s theatrical, play-full world of drama and narrative. Both these sets of ideas then build upon an epistemology based on an information theory of change in psychoanalytic therapy – one which asserts that change is a constant in every living system, and therefore the field of every session of therapy. Thus, in every developing psychotherapy, there becomes an emerging, often unknown “architecture” involving what is ceaselessly changing. This quality of change preserves some basis of order in any treatment (e.g. 1st Order Change). In effect, it is responsible for “keeping the system the ‘same.’” 1st Order Change involves the often unwitting “premises” upon which aspects of both the treatment narrative and drama are organized. It contrasts to a different kind of change (2nd Order Change) which radically changes some of the organizing assumptions (“premises”) of the therapy. 2nd Order Change typically emerges in an unwitting, unpredictable manner, catching both analytic participants by surprise. In other articles over the past two decades, the author has described this in terms of theory about improvisation. Optimizing the creative genius of such moments of play, requires that therapists immerse themselves in the field, in a non-presumptive “bottom-up” phenomenological experiential manner in contrast to the historical “top-down” “prejudices” that the history of theory and practice – within psychoanalysis and from without – often dictate, in terms of what becomes searched for and interpreted. Two case illustrations examine what can emerge when unwitting, unpredictable, preconscious moments of improvising emerge, with unpredictable aspects in entities such as character, narrative, script and so forth. This broad coalescence of ideas leads to the creation of moments of the “heretofore unimaginable” rather than what seems more like the expectable and predictable 1st Order Change world orders most treatments.

Octopus: A Novel Approach for Health Data Masking and Retrieving Using Physical Unclonable Functions and Machine Learning.

Health equipment are used to keep track of significant health indicators, automate health interventions, and analyze health indicators. People have begun using mobile applications to track health characteristics and medical demands because devices are now linked to high-speed internet and mobile phones. Such a combination of smart devices, the internet, and mobile applications expands the usage of remote health monitoring through the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The accessibility and unpredictable aspects of IoMT create massive security and confidentiality threats in IoMT systems. In this paper, Octopus and Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are used to provide privacy to the healthcare device by masking the data, and machine learning (ML) techniques are used to retrieve the health data back and reduce security breaches on networks. This technique has exhibited 99.45% accuracy, which proves that this technique could be used to secure health data with masking.

East-West Relations: A New Cold War?

The Cold War bipolar order was characterized by two camps isolated from each other, competing along four dimensions: global governance, security, economics, and ideology. The end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Bloc collapsing, did not produce a U.S.-dominated unipolar but a multi-centered world. The Americans, losing power and influence and the Russians to restore their superpower status have been trying to reconstruct bipolarity. If reconstructed China, not Russia, would likely constitute the other pole, an outcome Russia does not want. Economic relations and Chinese disinterest currently prevent a bipolar world like the one we have left behind. We may be moving toward a multi-centered world with many unpredictable aspects, including armed conflicts such an order may entail.

A Robust Economic Framework for Integrated Energy Systems Based on Hybrid Shuffled Frog-Leaping and Local Search Algorithm

The safe and efficient operation of the integrated energy system is severely hampered by a number of unpredictable elements, such as the output of renewable energy sources, the cost of energy purchases, and full demand response (IES). The effectiveness and excellence of the integrated energy system scheduling method can be increased with advanced modeling of unpredictable aspects. Thus, the IES robust stochastic optimisation model is constructed and solved with the hybrid shuffled frog-leaping and local search (HSFLA–LS) algorithm. Finally, a simulation analysis considering the uncertainty of energy purchase price based on the hybrid SFLA–LS algorithm is reduced by USD 1.63 (0.64%) and USD 3.34 (1.3%), compared to PSO and GA, respectively. In addition, the time taken to execute the SFLA–LS algorithm for the program is reduced by 1.886 s (1.59%), and 3.117 s (2.7%), compared to PSO and GA, respectively. The findings demonstrate that the suggested approach can lower system running expenses, and achieve the coordination and optimization of economy and robustness.

Interface modeling in load transfer mechanisms of multi-leaf masonry panels

Masonry heterogeneity and manufacturing imperfections affect structural behaviour of constructions; these unpredictable aspects are amplified in multi-leaf masonry walls by interfaces which play a main role on load transfer mechanisms and on global behaviour. In this paper, the performances of multi-leaf masonry walls subjected to compressive loads are investigated using experimental and numerical approaches. 9 experimental tests were performed on three-leaf specimens constituted by external leaves made of a regular pattern of brick elements and mortar joints, and a disaggregate internal core made of brick potsherds and mortar. FE models were developed to assess the interface interaction among layers through model updating procedure based on dynamic parameters experimentally identified at incremental load conditions, keeping fixed the mechanical parameters of external layers. FE models were updated by 13 parameters: i) unidirectional stiffnesses of 12 springs located between external layers and core; ii) elastic modulus of core. Updated models were tested through non-linear static analysis and results were compared with structural performances of multi-leaf masonry panels. Interface effectiveness regulated by different stiffness hierarchies among layers and between bricks and mortar joints handles the load transfer mechanisms and failure scenario. Compressive load is transferred through out-of-plane mechanisms triggered by maximum tensile stresses by 20% of failure load. In the plane the load is transferred with maximum compressive stresses at the ends (30% of failure load) decreasing centrally. Tangential stresses among layers are maximum near to load application and are linearly distributed in the plane of panels.

Rethinking early Soviet nationality policies within the poststructuralist context: Marxist legacy, Soviet nation-building, and contingency

Early Soviet nationality policies determined the framework of the ethnicity regime of the Soviet state and largely continued within the same context until the collapse of the Soviet state. While reevaluating early nationality policies, this study argues that structural analysis is not sufficient to understand the social reality of the nationality policies in the Soviet context. Hence, there is an urgent need to add the conditional, unclear and unpredictable aspects to the structural analysis of Soviet nationality policies. By analyzing through the amorphous nationality legacy of the classical Marxist thought, which highly affected the contingent Bolshevik nationality policy orientation, this study shares the concept of Soviet nation-building against the conventional Cold War approach. While analyzing the foundational dynamics of the early Soviet nationality policies, this study attempts to further improve structural analysis through poststructuralist intervention taking into account contingent case study examples.

Tourism operator mental health and its relationship with SME organisational resilience during disasters

Crises have a negative, and often long-lasting impact on mental health. The stress of dealing with the ongoing and unpredictable aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented rise in mental health problems including low mood, depression and anxiety. Tourism businesses have faced ongoing challenges, with repeated lockdowns and drastically reduced tourist numbers and mental health challenges faced by operators may impact the resilience of tourism organisations and vice versa. Few studies have examined this. Our study in Victoria, Australia documents the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on owners and managers (operators) of small to medium tourism businesses and explores organisational factors that may impact or protect operator mental health during the crisis. Our findings show that the mental health of the cohort reached critically low levels over the course of the pandemic. We also identify positive associations between tourism organisational resilience and operator mental health.

Using machine learning to predict fire‐ignition occurrences from lightning forecasts

AbstractLightning‐caused wildfires are a significant contributor to burned areas, with lightning ignitions remaining one of the most unpredictable aspects of the fire environment. There is a clear connection between fuel moisture and the probability of ignition; however, the mechanisms are poorly understood and predictive methods are underdeveloped. Establishing a lightning–ignition relationship would be useful in developing a model that would complement early warning systems designed for fire control and prevention. A machine learning (ML) approach was used to define a predictive model for wildfire ignition based on lightning forecasts and environmental conditions. Three different binary classifiers were adopted: a decision tree, an AdaBoost and a Random Forest, showing promising results, with both ensemble methods (Random Forest and AdaBoost) exhibiting an out‐of‐sample accuracy of 78%. Data provided by a Western Australia wildfire database allowed a comprehensive verification on over 145 lightning‐ignited wildfires in regions of Australia during 2016. This highlighted that in a minimum of 71% of the cases the ML models correctly predicted the occurrence of an ignition when a fire was actually initiated. The super‐learner developed is planned to be used in an operational context to the enhance information connected to fire management.

Enhancing adaptive performance in emergency response: Empowerment practices and the moderating role of tempo balance

Fire departments, like other organizations that follow rigid hierarchical structures, face difficulties in being flexible or adaptive enough to address the needs generated by large and complex disaster environments. Research is lacking, however, on the ability of empowerment practices to enhance adaptive performance in emergency response organizations, which today face increasingly complex threats and growing responsibilities. The present study explores the relationships between the empowerment practices of career development opportunities, work autonomy, employee voice with two leadership levels, and department adaptive performance. Moreover, tempo balance and the empowerment practices are tested for interactive effects, a measure we developed to capture firefighter stress and fatigue from excessive mandatory overtime policies. Data were collected from 756 United States firefighters located on the west coast. The results show that the empowerment practices enhance adaptive performance by helping firefighters respond to unpredictable aspects of their work environment. In addition, tempo balance moderates career development opportunities, work autonomy, and adaptive performance, specifically. The findings show that firefighters are better able to overcome stress and fatigue during complex incidents by relying on their training and ability to improvise, meaning these empowerment practices help compensate for poor tempo balance in fire departments from ineffective scheduling.

The listening hermeneutic of public servants: building on the implicit

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of phenomenological or attuned listening and explore its implications for deliberative governance. Drawing on examples from urban planning and city administration, we make a case for listening as a hermeneutic phenomenological practice of crucial importance for public organizations.Design/methodology/approachThis research relies on interpretive phenomenology, critical reflection, and political theory. Through the examination of case studies, we show that attuned or phenomenological listening contributes to greater participatory processes in organizations and to democratic governance processes, more generally.FindingsBy enhancing both collaborative endeavors and discretionary action, phenomenological listening acknowledges the unpredictable, dynamic and political aspects of organizations. Finally, it helps transform the latter into spaces where democratic and accountable action can take place.Practical implicationsThis perspective encourages public deliberation and attentive listening for practitioners to make decisions on the spot that are sensitive to people’s needs.Originality/valueEmbodied and attuned listening fosters reflection-in-action, as well as a reasoned pathway toward public accountability and deliberative democracy.

Developmental constraints on fin diversity.

The fish fin is a breathtaking repository full of evolutionary diversity, novelty, and convergence. Over 500 million years, the adaptation to novel habitats has provided landscapes of fin diversity. Although comparative anatomy of evolutionarily divergent patterns over centuries has highlighted the fundamental architectures and evolutionary trends of fins, including convergent evolution, the developmental constraints on fin evolution, which bias the evolutionary trajectories of fin morphology, largely remain elusive. Here, we review the evolutionary history, developmental mechanisms, and evolutionary underpinnings of paired fins, illuminating possible developmental constraints on fin evolution. Our compilation of anatomical and genetic knowledge of fin development sheds light on the canalized and the unpredictable aspects of fin shape in evolution. Leveraged by an arsenal of genomic and genetic tools within the working arena of spectacular fin diversity, evolutionary developmental biology embarks on the establishment of conceptual framework for developmental constraints, previously enigmatic properties of evolution.

Undergoing repeated colonoscopies – experiences from patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Background: Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) undergo repeated colonoscopies to monitor their lifelong disease.Objective: To describe experiences from repeated colonoscopies in patients with IBD.Methods: Within a qualitative design 33 patients with IBD who had undergone at least three colonoscopies were interviewed by telephone. Hermeneutic interpretation served as the framework of the analysis.Results: The colonoscopy procedure was explained as strenuous to undergo and interfered with daily life. It reminded patients of a lifelong disease, but the necessity of the colonoscopy, being life-saving, was highlighted. The colonoscopies entailed several unpredictable aspects – no control over pain, potential blame and unpredictable care. Shame, inferiority and uncertainty enhanced the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable.Conclusion: Repeated colonoscopies can be perceived as both an assurance of life and a reminder of a lifelong illness. Healthcare professionals need to provide support in terms of awareness of patients’ vulnerability, despite extensive experience of the colonoscopy procedure. For example, person-centred care and continuity in care are potential interventions based on the results of this study. Another important aspect of care is to minimise interference in everyday life to prevent feelings of loss of the healthy self, for example by self-administrated outpatient booking systems.Summarize the established knowledge on this subject. • Previous research in quality related to colonoscopy has mainly focused on technical and medical aspects. • Knowledge based on the patients’ perspective is rare and the few existing studies included mainly persons included in screening programs.What are the significant and/or new findings of this study? • Patients with IBD undergoing repeated colonoscopies express specific needs in several aspects related to the colonoscopy procedure: • Continuity and a person-centered approach from healthcare professionals. • Support to cope with feelings of shame and inferiority as well as pain.

Constitutional and ethical medical points of view on the importance of hospitalization of a patient with emergency cardiovascular pathology

The article discusses the constitutional, ethical and medical aspects of hospitalization of patients with a life-threatening cardiovascular event. In itself, a medical condition is a complex biological event with many unpredictable aspects of its own course and adverse events and reactions in case of medical intervention. A doctor, as the central subject of medical care, faces four categories of difficulties: law, organizational, biomedical and ethical. Medical care is regulated by both article 41 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and departmental acts of the health care system. Actually, doctor as a part of the healthcare system implement this right. The article provides an example of delivered judgment regarding complicated course of acute coronary syndrome. It shows the complexity of the medical situation, that regards the issues of doctor’s legal liability.

Characterization of Chaotic Electro Optic Modulator with the Helpof Lyapunov Exponent and Bifurcation Analysis Technique.

Chaos is a fundamental property that comes out of nonlinearity and a sensitive dependence on initial condition. A nonlinear dynamic system that displays a chaotic steady state behaviour is purely deterministic, but its long-term behaviour cannot be predicted because of the property of sensitivity to initial conditions. One of the most promising applications of chaos theory, which exploits both the deterministic and unpredictable aspects of chaotic behaviour, is chaos-based secure communications. The sensitivity to initial condition is quantified with the help of the entropy named Lyapunov Exponent. Generation of chaos from nonlinear optical devices have been explored from several years. In this paper an EO modulator system of cos2 type of nonlinearity is selected as chaos producing device and characterized with the help of Lyapunov Exponent. The Lyapunov Exponent is computed here to determine the dependence of a chaotic signal on the initial conditions and also on the system parameters. The period doubling behaviour in this Electro optic modulator system have also been studied here. The transition from periodic to chaotic behaviours in this one-dimensional discrete dynamical system have been controlled through variation of a single parameter out of different system parameters. With the help of Lyapunov Exponent and bifurcation analysis technique an estimation of the system parameters has been carried out to predict the nature of the output generated at the terminal of the EO cell.

Brokering, buffering, and the rationalities of principal work

PurposeBrokering and buffering represent two ways in which principals may respond to hyperrational elements of policy demands in the current era of accountability. The purpose of this paper is to examine how some principals broker more efficient, measurable, and predictable evaluation practices for teachers and others buffer their teachers from inefficient, immeasurable, and unpredictable aspects of policy.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data were obtained from 37 school principals and 363 teachers across 12 districts participating in a new teacher evaluation policy in one state of the USA. Principal interviews and teacher focus groups were conducted at the beginning, middle, and end of 2012-2013. Transcripts were coded to identify hyperrational elements of the policy and principals’ brokering and buffering practices.FindingsAll principals described elements of the new evaluation policy as inefficient, incalculable, or unpredictable – hallmarks of hyperrationality. Principals brokered efficiency by designing schoolwide parent goals and centralizing procedures; brokered transparency of calculation methods and focused teacher attention on measuring effort, rather than outcomes; and encouraged collective sensemaking to facilitate predictable procedures and outcomes. Principals buffered teachers by de-emphasizing the parent-based component; minimizing the quantitative nature of the ratings; ceding responsibility over calculations to district leaders; and lowering expectations to make ratings controllable.Originality/valueThe paper provides new understanding of principals’ strategic leadership practices, which represented rational responses to hyperrational policy demands. Therefore, the paper includes recommendations for principal preparation, district support for policy implementation, and further research on principal practice.

Conceptual change within dyadic interactions: the dance of conceptual and material agency

We offer a new approach to emergent knowledge in processes of conceptual change in dyadic interaction by drawing on Pickering’s (The Mangle of Practice, The University of Chicago Press, London, 1995) Mangle of Practice theory, which theorizes the emergence of new scientific knowledge as occurring due to material resistance and human accommodations to such resistance. We use Commognition (Sfard in Thinking as communicating, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2008), which conceptualizes learning as a change in discourse, and conceptual change as change in meta-discursive rules, to examine the interaction between several dyads working on proportional reasoning tasks. These dyads were selected for close scrutiny based on a large previous experimental study designed to examine the most productive constellation for pairing students of different levels with or without a hypothesis testing device. The Mangle helps us theorize the emergent, unpredictable aspects of learning and conceptual change. We provide three criteria for examining the productivity of the interaction: Availability of an alternative discourse (proportional vs. additive), Resistance of material/disciplinary agency and Positioning of students to make meta-discursive shifts. We discuss this model as an aid for monitoring and designing learning situations that enhance conceptual change.

Towards Probabilistic Formal Analysis of SATS-Simultaneously Moving Aircraft (SATS-SMA)

The objective of NASA’s Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) Concept of Operations (ConOps) is to facilitate high volume operation of advanced small aircraft operating in non-towered, non-radar airports. This system can provide improved and accessible air travel at a lower cost. Given the safety-critical nature of SATS, its analysis accuracy is extremely important. However, the commonly used analysis techniques, like pilot/computer simulation and traditional model checking, do not ascertain an error-free and complete verification of SATS due to the wide range of possibilities involved in SATS or the inability to capture the randomized and unpredictable aspects of the SATS ConOps environment in their models. Another limitation of these studies is that a limited speed range was used in the analysis. To overcome these limitations, we propose to formulate the SATS ConOps as a fully synchronous and probabilistic model, i.e., SATS-SMA, that supports simultaneously moving aircraft. The distinguishing features of our work include the preservation of safety of aircraft while providing a precise timing model, which is closer to reality compared to the previous hybrid analyses. Important insights related to the aircraft take-off and landing operations during the instrument meteorological conditions are also presented.

Formulation, General Features and Global Calibration of a Bioenergetically-Constrained Fishery Model.

Human exploitation of marine resources is profoundly altering marine ecosystems, while climate change is expected to further impact commercially-harvested fish and other species. Although the global fishery is a highly complex system with many unpredictable aspects, the bioenergetic limits on fish production and the response of fishing effort to profit are both relatively tractable, and are sure to play important roles. Here we describe a generalized, coupled biological-economic model of the global marine fishery that represents both of these aspects in a unified framework, the BiOeconomic mArine Trophic Size-spectrum (BOATS) model. BOATS predicts fish production according to size spectra as a function of net primary production and temperature, and dynamically determines harvest spectra from the biomass density and interactive, prognostic fishing effort. Within this framework, the equilibrium fish biomass is determined by the economic forcings of catchability, ex-vessel price and cost per unit effort, while the peak harvest depends on the ecosystem parameters. Comparison of a large ensemble of idealized simulations with observational databases, focusing on historical biomass and peak harvests, allows us to narrow the range of several uncertain ecosystem parameters, rule out most parameter combinations, and select an optimal ensemble of model variants. Compared to the prior distributions, model variants with lower values of the mortality rate, trophic efficiency, and allometric constant agree better with observations. For most acceptable parameter combinations, natural mortality rates are more strongly affected by temperature than growth rates, suggesting different sensitivities of these processes to climate change. These results highlight the utility of adopting large-scale, aggregated data constraints to reduce model parameter uncertainties and to better predict the response of fisheries to human behaviour and climate change.

Youth participation in qualitative research: Challenges and possibilities

Research often excludes youth participants, omitting their social and psychological realities, undermining their rights to participate and benefit from research, and weakening the validity of research. Researchers may be discouraged from including youth due to logistical (e.g. gaining access) or ethical (e.g. coercion risks based on developmental level) concerns. Increased discussion is needed around appropriate methods to use with child and youth participants that manage challenges related to developmental capacities, legal status, power differentials, and unpredictable aspects of qualitative research. This paper pools experiences of six researchers, describing solutions we have developed in studies employing varied qualitative methodologies with varied vulnerable youth subpopulations. We detail successful approaches to access, compensation, consent, assent, and confidentiality. Social work researchers are wellsuited to navigate the challenges, and we share our examples with the aim of facilitating increased youth participation in research.