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This article examines one informant's approach to the relationship between ideological concepts and political power. I argue that ideological representation must be understood on its own terms, rather than within a larger theory of discourse. I point toward three key qualities of every encounter with ideological representation: subjectivity, discontinuity, and commitment. The fieldwork on which this article is based occurred in Berlin, Germany, during the fall 2014. During this period, my research focused on activists committed to overturning the sanctioning policy (Sanktionspolitik), which allows case managers to dock the unemployment benefits of their clients. [ideology, subjectivity, welfare state, Germany]

This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as ‘model societies’, with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights...

The original title for this work was “Mathematical Literacy, What Is It and Why You Need it”. The current title reflects that there can be no real learning in any subject, unless questions of who, what, when, where, why and how are raised in the minds of the learners. The book is not a mathematical text, and there are no assigned exercises or exams. It is written for reasonably intelligent and curious individuals, both those who value mathematics, aware of its many important applications and others who have been inappropriately exposed to mathematics, leading to indifference to the subject, fear and even loathing. These feelings are all consequences of meaningless presentations, drill, rote learning and being lost as the purpose of what is being studied. Mathematics education needs a radical reform. There is more than one way to accomplish this. Here the author presents his approach of wrapping mathematical ideas in a story. To learn one first must develop an interest in a problem and the curiosity to find how masters of mathematics have solved them. What is necessary to be mathematically literate? It’s not about solving algebraic equations or even making a geometric proof. These are valuable skills but not evidence of literacy. We often seek answers but learning to ask pertinent questions is the road to mathematical literacy. Here is the good news: new mathematical ideas have a way of finding applications. This is known as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.”

We introduce a novel application of feature ranking methods to the fault localization problem. We envision the problem of localizing causes of failures as instances of ranking program's elements where elements are conceptualized as features. In this paper, we define features as program's statements. However, in its fine-grained definition, the idea of program's features can refer to any traits of programs. This paper proposes feature ranking-based algorithms. The algorithms analyze execution traces of both passing and failing test cases, and extract the bug signatures from the failing test cases. The proposed procedure extracts possible combinations of program's elements when executed together from bug signatures. The feature ranking-based algorithms then order statements according to the suspiciousness of the combinations. When viewed as sequences, the combination of program's elements produced and traced in bug signatures can be utilized to reason about the common longest subsequence. The common longest subsequence of bug signatures represents the common statements executed by all failing test cases and thus provides a means for identifying statements that contain possible faults. Our evaluation indicates that the proposed feature-based fault localization outperforms existing fault localization ranking schemes. © 2017 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Vulnerabilities need to be detected and removed from software. Although previous studies demonstrated the usefulness of employing prediction techniques in deciding about vulnerabilities of software components, the improvement of effectiveness of these prediction techniques is still a grand challenging research question. This paper employed a technique based on a deep neural network with rectifier linear units trained with stochastic gradient descent method and batch normalization, for predicting vulnerable software components. The features are defined as continuous sequences of tokens in source code files. Besides, a statistical feature selection algorithm is then employed to reduce the feature and search space. We evaluated the proposed technique based on some Java Android applications, and the results demonstrated that the proposed technique could predict vulnerable classes, i.e., software components, with high precision, accuracy and recall.

Although research on substance use disorders (SUDs) largely focuses on the developed world, treatment programs from the developing world seldom get international attention. Focusing on India, this study was designed (1) to describe India’s treatment programs, and (2) to report Indian perspectives on critical factors related to treating SUDs. An online survey instrument was created, based on mixed-methods approach with concurrent strategies, to collect data. Participants were India’s clinicians (N = 112). Indian treatment approach suggests that SUDs must be treated by a multidisciplinary treatment team with a comprehensive plan that must include systemically focused clinical interventions in patients’/clients’ relevant relational systems. Findings may have relevance to clinicians, researchers, and policy makers globally. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

Parenting literature often focuses on parental strategies that promote positive behavioral outcomes for children, but ignores key aspects of parents’ own growth process. This article presents a critical review of current literature on parenting and highlights the importance of focusing on parents’ growth in therapy. A clinical framework to define parents’ growth is offered along with case vignettes and practical guidelines for clinicians in order to assess parents’ growth. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The balancing act of living between two cultures can have a significant impact on the development of adolescent Latinas living in the United States. Many adolescent Latinas, particularly second generation, live with two sets of cultural values that are often in conflict with one another. This case study illustrates the importance of understanding the impact of acculturation on the individual and the family. Issues of identity, biculturalism, and bilingualismspecifically the phenomenon of language switchingare dismantled in this case study to gain deeper insight into the unique experience that second-generation Latinas undergo when negotiating two cultural orientations. These findings are important to consider when working with the Latino population as they represent one of the largest immigrant groups and the most rapidly growing group in the United States.

Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock and Stanley Prusiner, help motivate the idea that sharing of models and specialised vocabulary fill the gap between discovery and scientific change by promoting the dispersal of important information throughout the scientific community. © 2017 Open Society Foundation.

Mechanistic accounts of explanation have recently found popularity within philosophy of science. Presently, we introduce the idea of an extended mechanistic explanation, which makes explicit room for the role of environment in explanation. After delineating Craver and Bechtel’s (2007) account, we argue this suggestion is not sufficiently robust when we take seriously the mechanistic environment and modeling practices involved in studying contemporary complex biological systems. Our goal is to extend the already profitable mechanistic picture by pointing out the importance of the mechanistic environment. It is our belief that extended mechanistic explanations, or mechanisms that take into consideration the temporal sequencing of the interplay between the mechanism and the environment, allow for mechanistic explanations regarding a broader group of scientific phenomena. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Community Arts have a long history within art and education, yet its practices continue to evolve. The issue of nomenclature when discussing such socially engaged practices raises the deeper questions of whether work in this area suggests the formalization of yet another new genre of art, or does it entail a more profound re-ordering of the discursive system that underlies most existing modes of artistic production? This chapter attends to individual differences and similarities in perception and practice through a careful consideration for how the field of art education might nurture new and diverse articulations of community-based practices that emphasize relational aesthetics, participatory pedagogy, and socially engaged artistic practices. This chapter will (re)frame the discourse as Socially Engaged Art Education (SEAE) to emphasize a new terrain of consciousness that is socially responsible and ethically sound, and goes beyond mere promotion of aesthetic quality to contribute to improved quality of life.

In this article, we derive the joint Laplace transform of the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) and the resulting stopped random walk process for the negative exponential model. The Laplace transform is derived by solving a related difference equation. This technique is novel because it only takes advantage of the Markov structure and does not rely on the typical martingale methods used for deriving the Laplace transform of other SPRTs. The joint Laplace transform provides the joint distribution of the SPRT and the associated stopped process, which is a new result. Even the marginal distributions were hitherto unknown. © 2017 Taylor & Francis.

The paper describes a pedagogical simulation that allows students to explore strategic goal conflict within the context of systems theory. Systems theory emphasizes, among other things, complexity, non-linear relationships, unintended consequences, time delays, and dynamics. Another important aspect of systems thinking is contextual thinking, where objects or relationships cannot be taken as standalone or absolute, but are critically dependent on system structure and the environment. And while strategic planning has long emphasized the importance of environment, it may be difficult for students to experience or appreciate its importance in the planning process. The simulation provides an experiential exercise for a strategy course. The paper provides a summary of systems thinking and strategic goal conflict, a description of the simulation, teaching notes, and experience with the exercise.