Academic literature on the topic 'Work-Linked training schemes with integrative aims'

Flexible Subjects: Neo-liberal Rationalities and Education Policy. This article aims to examine training and employment programmes for the young (more specifically, the Spanish Social Guarantee Schemes—Programas de Garantía Social) in relation to neoliberal political rationalities. We believe the introduction of neoliberal policies to have been greater and faster precisely in the periphery of the educational system. To that end, we intend to make teachers' participation in the operation of the policies conceptually visible. The professionals’ discourse about the socio-labour integration of the young –a discourse that legitimises their daily work – will be analysed on the basis of qualitative materials from in-depth interviews. This analysis allows us to: 1) show the new ways of defining and valuing the teaching activity required and generated by these practical and institutional changes; 2) the analysis evidences some of the effects of the emerging discourses as well as the strategic roles they play in connection with neoliberal governance styles.

Entity resolution (ER) aims to identify entity records that refer to the same real-world entity, which is a critical problem in data cleaning and integration. Most of the existing models are attribute-centric, that is, matching entity pairs by comparing similarities of pre-aligned attributes, which require the schemas of records to be identical and are too coarse-grained to capture subtle key information within a single attribute. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based ER model GraphER. Our model is token-centric: the final matching results are generated by directly aggregating token-level comparison features, in which both the semantic and structural information has been softly embedded into token embeddings by training an Entity Record Graph Convolutional Network (ER-GCN). To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first effort to do token-centric entity resolution with the help of GCN in entity resolution task. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model stably outperforms state-of-the-art models.

The penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture and the emergence of digital cultural repositories and linked cultural data in particular are expected to enable new paths in humanities research and new approaches to cultural heritage. Success is contingent upon securing information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content. In this perspective, we review the use in the cultural heritage domain of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing penetration of ICT in the management and study of material culture, as well as in the Humanities at large. From collections management, to object documentation and domain modelling, to supporting the creative synthesis and re-interpretation of data, significant progress has been achieved in the development of relevant knowledge structures and software tools. As a consequence of this progress, digital repositories are being created that aim at serving as digital cultural memories, while a process of convergence among the different kinds of memory institutions, i.e., museums, archives, and libraries, in what concerns their information functions is already evolving. Yet the advantages offered by information management technology, mass storage, copying, and the ease of searching and quantitative analysis, are not enough to ensure the usefulness of those digital cultural memories unless information trustworthiness, long-term preservation, and the ability to re-use, re-combine and re-interpret digital content are ensured. Furthermore, the widely encountered need for integrating heterogeneous information becomes all the more pressing in the case of cultural heritage due to the specific traits of information in this domain. In view of the above fundamental requirements, in this presentation we briefly review the leveraging power of certain practices and approaches in realizing the potential of digital cultural memories. In particular, we review the use of digital curation and curation-aware repository systems; achieving semantic interoperability through ontologies; explicitly addressing contextual issues of cultural heritage and humanities information; and the services of digital research infrastructures. Digital curation is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry and practice, which brings together disciplinary traditions and practices from computer science, information science, and disciplines practicing collections-based or data-intensive research, such as history of art, archaeology, biology, space and earth sciences, and application areas 38 such as e-science repositories, organizational records management, and memory institutions (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). Digital curation aims at ensuring adequate representation of and long-term access to digital information as its context of use changes, and at mitigating the risk of repositories becoming “data mortuaries”. To this end a lifecycle approach to the representation of curated information objects is adopted; event-centric representations are used to capture information “life events”; the class of agents involved is extended to include knowledge producers and communicators in addition to information custodians; and context-specificity is explicitly addressed. Cultural heritage information comprises representations of actual cultural objects (texts, artefacts, historical records, etc.), their histories, agents (persons and organizations) operating on such objects, and their relationships. It also includes interpretations of and opinions about such objects. The recording of this knowledge is characterized by disciplinary diversity, representational complexity and heterogeneity, historical orientation, and textual bias. These characteristics of information are in line with the character of humanities research: hermeneutic and intertextual, rather than experimental; narrative, rather than formal; idiographic rather than nomothetic; and, conformant to a realist rather than positivist account of episteme (Dallas 1999). The primary use of this information has been to support knowledge-based access, while now it is gradually also being targeted at various synthetic and creative uses. A rich semantic structure, including subsumption, meronymic, temporal, spatial, and various other semantic relations, is inherent to cultural information. Complexity is compounded by terminological inconsistency, subjectivity, multiplicity of interpretation and missing information. From an information lifecycle perspective, digital curation involves a number of distinct processes: appraisal; ingesting; classification, indexing and cataloguing; knowledge enhancement; presentation, publication and dissemination; user experience; repository management; and preservation. These processes rely on three supporting processes, namely, goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. These processes effectively capture the context of digital curation and produce valuable resources which can themselves be seen as curated digital assets (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008; Constantopoulos et al. 2009). The field of cultural information presents itself as a privileged domain for digital curation. There is a relatively long history of developing library systems and museum systems, along with recent intense activity on interoperable, semantically rich cultural information systems, boosted by two important developments: the emergence of the CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127) 1 standard ontology for cultural documentation; and the movement for convergence of museum, library and archive systems, one manifestation of which is the CIDOC CRM compatible FRBR-oo model 2 . Advances such as those outlined above allow addressing old research questions in new ways, as well as putting new questions that were very hard or impossible to tackle without the means of digital technologies. Significant enablers towards this direc- 1 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/ 2 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html 39 tion are the so-called digital research infrastructures, which bear the promise of facilitating research through sharing tools and data. Several trends can be identified in the development of research infrastructures, which follow two main approaches: a) The normative approach, whereby normalized collections of data and tools are developed as common resources and managed centrally by the infrastructure. b) The regulative approach, whereby resources reside with individual organizations willing to contribute them, under specific terms, to the community. A set of interoperability conditions and mechanisms provide a regulatory function that lies at the heart of the infrastructure. Both approaches are being pursued in all disciplines, but the mix differs: in hard sciences building common normalized infrastructures appears to be a necessity, with a complementary, yet significant role to be played by a network of interoperable, disparate sources. In the humanities, on the other hand, long scholarly traditions have produced a formidable variety of information collections and formats, mostly offering interpreted, rather than raw material for publication and sharing. These conditions favour the development of regulated networks of interoperable sources, with centralized, normative infrastructures in a complementary capacity. By way of example, a recent such infrastructure is DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ 3 , one of the national constituents of DARIAH-EU 4 , the Europe-wide digital infrastructure in the arts and humanities. DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ is a hybrid -virtual distributed infrastructure, bringing together the strengths and capacities of leading research, academic, and collection custodian institutions through a carefully defined, lightweight layer of services, tools and activities complementing, rather than attempting to replicate, prior investments and capabilities. Arts and humanities data and content resources are as a rule thematically organized, widely distributed, under the custodianship and curation of diverse institutions, including government agencies and departments, public and private museums, archives and special libraries, as well as academic and research units, associations, research projects, and other actors, and displaying a diverse degree of digitization. The mission of the infrastructure is then to provide the research communities with effective, comprehensive and sustainable capability to discover, access, integrate, analyze, process, curate and disseminate arts and humanities data and information resources, through a concerted plan of virtual services and tools, and hybrid (combined virtual and physical) activities, integrating and running on top of existing primary information systems and leveraging integration and synergies with DARIAH- EU and other related infrastructures and aggregators (e.g. ARIADNE 5 , CARARE 6 , LoCloud 7 ). In its first stage of development, the DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ Research Infrastructure has offered the following groups of services: 3 http://www.dyas-net.gr/ 4 http://www.dariah.eu/ 5 http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu/ 6 http://www.carare.eu/ 7 http://www.locloud.eu/ 40 • Data sharing : comprehensive registries of digital resources; • Supporting the development of digital resources : tools and best practice guidelines for the development of digital resources; • Capacity building: workshops and training activities; and • Digital Humanities Observatory : evidence-based research on digital humanities, monitoring, outreach and dissemination activities. Key factor in the development of DARIAH- GR / ΔΥΑΣ, ARIADNE, CARARE and LoCloud resources alike has been a curation-oriented aggregator, the Metadata and Object Repository - MORe 8 (Gavrilis, Angelis & Dallas 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2013). This system supports the aggregation of metadata from multiple sources (OAI-PMH, Archive, SIP, Omeka, MINT) and heterogeneous systems in a single repository, the creation of unified indexes of normalized and enriched metadata, the creation of RDF databases, and the publication of aggregated records to multiple recipients (OAI- PMH, Archive, Elastic Search, RDF Stores). It enables the dynamic definition of validation and enrichment plans, supported by a number of micro-services, as well as the measurement of metadata quality. MORe can incorporate any XML/RDF metadata schema and can support several intermediate schemas in parallel. Its architecture is based on micro-services, a software development model according to which a complex application is composed of small, independent services communicating via a language-agnostic API, thus being highly reusable. MORe currently maintains access to 30 SKOS-encoded thesauri, totaling several hundred thousands of terms, as well as to copies of the Geo-names and Perio.do services, thus offering information enrichment on the basis of a wide array of sources. Metadata enrichment is a process of automatic generation of metadata through the linking of metadata elements with data sources and/or vocabularies. The enrichment process increases the volume of metadata, but it also considerably enhances their precision, therefore their quality. Performing metadata aggregation and enrichment carries several benefits: increase of repository / site traffic, better retrieval precision, concentration of indexes in one system, better performance of user services. To date MORe is used by 110 content provider institutions, and accommodates 23 different metadata schemas and about 20,800,000 records. The advent of digital infrastructures for arts and humanities research calls for a deeper understanding of how humanists work with digital resources, tools and services as they engage with different aspects of research activity: from capturing, encoding, and publishing scholarly data to analyzing, visualizing, interpreting and communicating data and research argumentation to co-workers and readers. Digitally enabled scholarly work and the integration of digital content, tools and methods present not only commonalities but also differences across disciplines, methodological traditions, and communities of researchers. A significant challenge in providing integrated access to disparate digital humanities resources and, more broadly, in supporting digitally-enabled humanities research, lies in empirically capturing the context of use of digital content, methods and tools. 8 http://more.dcu.gr/ 41 Several attempts have been made to develop a conceptual framework for DH in practice. In 2008, the AHRC ICT Methods Network 9 developed a taxonomy of digital methods in the arts and humanities. This was the basis for the classification of over 200 digital humanities projects funded by the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council in the online resource arts-humanities.net, as well as for the subsequent Digital Humanities at Oxford 10 taxonomy. Other initiatives to build a taxonomy of Digital Humanities include TADIRAH 11 and DH Commons 12 . From 2011 to 2015 the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities 13 (NeDiMAH) ran over 40 activities structured around key methodological areas in the humanities (digital representations of space and time; visualisation; linked data; creating and using large scale corpora; and creating editions). Through these activities, NeDiMAH gathered a snapshot of the practice of digital humanities in Europe, and the impact of digital methods on research. A key output of NeDiMAH is NeMO 14 : the NeDiMAH Ontology of Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities . This ontology of digital methods in the humanities has been built as a framework for understanding not just the use of digital methods, but also their relationship to digital content and tools. The development of an ontology, rather than a taxonomy, stands in recognition of the complexity of the digital humanities landscape, the interdisciplinarity of the field, and the dependencies that impact the use of digital methods in research. NeMO provides a conceptual framework capable of representing scholarly work in the humanities, addressing aspects of intentionality and capturing the diverse associations between research actors and their goals, activities undertaken, methods employed, resources and tools used, and outputs produced, with the aim of obtaining semantically rich structured representations of scholarly work (Angelis et al 2015; Hughes, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2016). It is grounded on earlier empirical research through semi-structured interviews with scholars from across Europe, which focused on analysing their research practices and capturing the resulting information requirements for research infrastructures (Benardou, Constantopoulos & Dallas 2013). The relevance of NeMO to the DH community was validated in a series of workshops through use cases contributed by researchers. A variety of complex associative queries articulated by researchers and encoded in SPARQL, demonstrated the potential of NeMO as an effective mechanism for information extraction and reasoning with regard to the use of digital resources in scholarly work and as a knowledge base schema for documenting scholarly practices. In a recent workshop in DH2016, researchers created their own NeMO-based descriptions of projects with an easy to use tool (Constantopoulos et al 2016). 9 http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/index.html 10 https://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/people-projects 11 http://tadirah.dariah.eu/vocab/index.php 12 http://dhcommons.org/ 13 http://nedimah.eu/ 14 http://nemo.dcu.gr/ 42 Knowledge bases documenting scholarly practice through NeMO can be useful to researchers by (a) helping them find information on earlier work relevant for their own research; (b) supporting goal-oriented organization of research work; (c) facilitating the discovery of new paths with regard to resources, tools and methods; and, (d) promoting networking among researchers with common interests. In addition research groups can get support for better project planning by explicitly exposing links between goals, actors, activities, methods, resources and tools, as well as assistance for discovering methodological trends, future directions and promising research ideas. Funding agencies, on the other hand, could benefit from the kind of systematic documentation and comparative overview of project work enabled by the ontology.

Fast evolution of modern society stimulates intense development of new materials with novel functionalities in energy and environmental applications. Due to rapid progress of computer science, computational design of materials with target properties has recently attracted lots of interests. Accurate and efficient calculation of fundamental thermodynamic properties, including redox potentials, acidity constants, and solvation free energies, is of great importance for selection and design of desirable materials. Free energy calculation based on ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) can predict these properties with high accuracy at complex environments, however being impeded by high computational costs. To address this issue, this work develops an automated scheme that combines iterative training of machine learning potentials (MLPs) and free energy calculation, and deomonstrates that these thermodynamic properties can be computed by ML accelerated MD with ab initio accuracy and much longer time scale at cheaper costs, improving poor statistics and convergence of numerical integration by AIMD. Our automated scheme lays the foundation for computational chemistry-assisted materials design.

EU migration policy aims to create a legal framework for legal labor migration, given the importance of integrating migrants into host communities. EU measures on legal immigration cover the conditions of entry and residence for certain categories of immigrants, such as highly skilled workers covered by the EU Blue Card Directive, as well as students and researches. A number of EU’s directives aimed at simplifying and harmonizing migration procedures, in particular the granting of clear employment rights to migrants, have been considered. The EU’s approaches to labor migration, which focus on addressing their integration into the community or the problem of illegal migration, such as the fight against trafficking of human beings and smugglers, are reveald. Although integration policy is defined and implemented mainly at national or subnational level, it is closely linked to the legal framework and EU provisions that grant certain rights to migrants living in the European Union (e.g. equal working conditions and equal access to goods and services). The European Union has adopted a number of EU non-discrimination laws that are important for the integration of third-country nationals, including Directive 2000/43/EU on racial equality and Directive 2000/78/EC on employment equality. The general principles of immigration integration policy are analyzed, such as: employment, education, access to institutions, goods and services and integration into society as a whole.The EU’s approaches to migration as «sustainable development» are considered, in particular, a comprehensive migration management agenda, which contains four items: better organization of legal migration and promotion of managed mobility; preventing and combating illegal migration and eradicating trafficking of human beings; promoting international protection and strengthening the external dimension of asylum; maximizing the impact of migration on sustainable development. It has been found out that the main directions of migration policy, which still needs to be improved in order to curb the scale of brain drain and skilled labor in the countries of origin, should include: concluding bilateral and multilateral agreements on ethical and balanced recruitment and training schemes; returning migration management for effective development in migrants’ countries of origin; promoting the transfer of skills, knowledge and remittances to diasporas (including social remittances). Summing up the content of the European Union’s migration policy towards immigrants from third countries, it is important to note that despite the large number of legal norms, the volume of labor migration is still regulated by each EU country, depending on its own needs and capabilities. Despite the fact that immigration mechanisms are standardized, the issue of admission to the sovereign territory remains in the competence of national governments. It is also important to emphasize that thereis a general prohibition of discrimination on the basis of nationality. Concerning third-country nationals, EU migration policy aims to create a legal framework for legal migration, taking full account of the importance of integrating migrant workers into host communities. EU measures on legal immigration cover the conditions of entry and residence for certain categories of immigrants, including highly skilled workers. It was found ound that immigrants from third countries have worse indicators in the labor market, in particular in terms of skills, quality of education, living conditions and so on. Most people born in the EU have the citizenship of the host country and use their right to vote in elections, which also affects the Union’s migration policy. In sum, EU policy of immigrants’ integration forsees target measures, in particular, in labor market, especially providing with proper educational, medical, social services, as well as their active participation in the cultural and political life of the host country.

Abstract In France protection & prevention of students' health in schools is taken care of by school-doctors, in partnership. They follow a specific training for a year before becoming civil servants in the Ministry of Education. Around 1000 school-doctors are currently in post; 20-30 new school-doctors are trained each year. The training alternates academic sessions & supervised medical work in schools, under the responsibility of experienced mentors. Since 15 years, this training has been revised to improve its relevance in a Public health perspective, mainly by adding a strong health promotion component. The current organisation aims at (1) individualising the training, capitalising on the knowledge & competencies of trainees, leading to an individual scheme defined with the national coordinators (a school-doctor and a pedagogical engineer) between 8 & 16 weeks of academic sessions given at the French school of Public health; (2) articulating academic contents with pragmatic & professional skills; (3) integrating pedagogical innovations to maximise the development of the 10 competencies identified as core to school-doctors; (4) giving school-doctors a broad Public health perspective, with research and health promotion expertise, while fostering their specific and particular medical practice in the global context of schools. Each year improvements are implemented to answer the feed-back from trainees and professionals involved in the training. A closer articulation between local heads of school-doctors and the national level of their training has been fostered to improve coherence between academic & technical content while meeting ministerial requirements. The overall involvement & satisfaction of trainees are monitored. There is still space to improve the training of qualified school-doctors to promote the health of school-students in a Public heath perspective, in a time in France where health inequalities need to be better addressed and where the medical demography is critical. Key messages In a time of lack of medical doctors, school-doctors are important public-health actors for children and adolescent, with a very crucial position at the articulation of the health and school systems. The training of school-doctors must meet the challenge to accommodate pedagogical requirements & changes in their practice due to vacant posts while fulfilling ministerial expectations.

Purpose The increasing need for student engagement and the wide availability of digital teaching resources are providing opportunities for careful consideration and planning of assignments within and among business management courses. This paper aims to examine implementation strategies for integrating multiple business simulations with gradually increased assignment weighting and coordinated implementation in a university business curriculum. Design/methodology/approach A case study research design with a pattern-matching logic is used to represent a critical test of formulated programmatic and learning theories that have a set of propositions and circumstances with which the proposals are believed to be true. Applied digital management education tools used in a graduated weighting scheme compare an empirically-based pattern with a predicted pattern. Findings Systemic program-wide implementation of teaching resources such as simulations, microsimulations and application-based activity role-playing assignments can deliver engaging internal course and coordinated management program experiential-type learning. Carefully planning graduated assignment weights can be a practical strategy for using a low-risk approach to enhance experiential learning. Practical implications The strategies proposed provide a practical approach for controlling the learning pace and facilitating low-risk experiential learning through the modern digital business education landscape. Originality/value This paper investigates innovative implementation ideas to strategically arrange simulation assignments that can enhance success and prepare students future management work-based training. It explores the value of incorporating different types of business simulations and advanced active learning activities to provide students with engaging experiential learning experiences.

Background: Ergonomics programmes addressed to children fit the health-promoting schools (HPS) framework. Beyond the integration of ergonomics in curricula, an important aspect is the effectiveness of the programme. This pilot study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme proposed to a sample of middle-school children (aged 10–13 years) of the metropolitan city of Cagliari. Methods: The programme was designed along the lines of the INAIL (Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work) scheme and proposed to 260 children. It consisted of three phases: 1) assessment of students’ background with a pre-intervention questionnaire (completed by 142 students); 2) teaching of the ergonomics training modules and evaluation of the weight of a sample of 160 backpacks, and of students’ perception to be able to sit by putting their feet on the ground; 3) evaluation of conceptual understanding of ergonomics concepts with a post-intervention questionnaire (completed by 107 students out of the 142 students who completed phase 1). Results: There was a substantial improvement in the percentage of correct responses post-intervention, confirmed by the chi-square test, regarding concepts about ergonomics, backpack weight and handling. Most of the backpacks exceeded the maximum allowed value, and 20% of students were perceived to be unable to sit putting their feet on the ground. Conclusions: The practical application of ergonomics pedagogy proved effective in the school setting and should be integrated into school curricula. The prevention technicians can offer a holistic approach, while the teachers are essential to implement the programme on a large scale. Effectiveness evaluation is necessary to guide resource allocation and implement and sustain the HPS approach. A tailored programme has a greater chance of reaching its target audience and maximizing effectiveness.

Geological subsurface storage is a promising strategy for large-scale, cost-efficient energy storage systems. Stress sensitivity has notably influence on the long-term stability and serviceability of subsurface reservoirs set for energy storage use. The evolution of the field stress of stress-sensitive reservoirs and the associated structural deformation, often a consequence of fluid production and injection, can cause significant changes to the reservoir stress-dependent properties [1]. These properties include pore and void compressibility, and porosity. For fractured and faulted reservoirs, field stress variation may also impact fracture conductivity, alter pre-existing fractures, and reactivate faults [4]. Current geomechanical reservoir simulators incorporate the evolution of the reservoir mechanical state by means of material constitutive modelling, typically within a Finite Element Modelling (FEM) framework. In efforts to honour the heterogeneity and multi-scale nature of subsurface reservoirs, multi-scale solution methods are commonly adopted. For a reservoir multi-scale simulation, the micro-scale problem must be iteratively solved for different input parameters, render-ing the solution method computationally exhaustive, particularly for two-way coupled problems. The combination of machine learning-based solution methods and FEM frameworks can address the computational inefficiency of conventional multi-scale reservoir modelling schemes. In principle, a machine learning algorithm trained to learn the constitutive behaviour of a material can replace in-built material constitutive models in a FEM framework. We resort to Thermodynamics-based Artificial Neural Networks (TANNs), a physics-based data-driven machine learning algorithm introduced in [5] for material constitutive modelling. TANNs have been shown to guarantee the thermodynamic consistency of learnt material constitutive models. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are directly encoded in the architecture of TANNs through the definition of two scalar functions, an energy potential and a dissipation function, and the computation of their differentials [3]. TANNs can be incorporated in FEM tools, in what is referred to as TANNxFEM in [6]. We present the application of the TANNxFEM framework to geomechanical reservoir modelling. This work aims to introduce a computationally efficient reservoir modelling framework, for which uncertainty quantification is possible. The proposed framework can maximise the use of information inherently contained in high-dimensional data, and significantly reduce computation demands necessary for accurate statistical evaluation, while warranting physical and geological realism. TANNs are first trained on analytical material data, computed by numerical integration of an incremental, thermodynamically consistent material model presented in [2]. The trained TANNs are then imported into a user material subroutine for the finite element package Abaqus. Through an input file, the parameters of the trained neural network are read as a set of material properties. The material subroutine then evaluates the incorporated trained neural network to construct the stress and elasticity tensors necessary for large-scale finite element reservoir simulation. The above proposed framework is validated against a large-scale finite element simulation with a user material subroutine implementing the constitutive model used to first generate the training data for TANNs. The free-energy, dissipation, and the stress-strain response of the two finite element simulations are compared for model verification.

On May 18, 2003, the Australian Minister for Education, Brendon Nelson, appeared on the Channel Nine Sunday programme. The Yoda of political journalism, Laurie Oakes, attacked him personally and professionally. He disclosed to viewers that the Minister for Education, Science and Training had suffered a false start in his education, enrolling in one semester of an economics degree that was never completed. The following year, he commenced a medical qualification and went on to become a practicing doctor. He did not pay fees for any of his University courses. When reminded of these events, Dr Nelson became agitated, and revealed information not included in the public presentation of the budget of that year, including a ‘cap’ on HECS-funded places of five years for each student. He justified such a decision with the cliché that Australia’s taxpayers do not want “professional students completing degree after degree.” The Minister confirmed that the primary – and perhaps the only – task for university academics was to ‘train’ young people for the workforce. The fact that nearly 50% of students in some Australian Universities are over the age of twenty five has not entered his vision. He wanted young people to complete a rapid degree and enter the workforce, to commence paying taxes and the debt or loan required to fund a full fee-paying place. Now – nearly two years after this interview and with the Howard government blessed with a new mandate – it is time to ask how this administration will order education and value teaching and learning. The curbing of the time available to complete undergraduate courses during their last term in office makes plain the Australian Liberal Government’s stance on formal, publicly-funded lifelong learning. The notion that a student/worker can attain all required competencies, skills, attributes, motivations and ambitions from a single degree is an assumption of the new funding model. It is also significant to note that while attention is placed on the changing sources of income for universities, there have also been major shifts in the pattern of expenditure within universities, focusing on branding, marketing, recruitment, ‘regional’ campuses and off-shore courses. Similarly, the short-term funding goals of university research agendas encourage projects required by industry, rather than socially inflected concerns. There is little inevitable about teaching, research and education in Australia, except that the Federal Government will not create a fully-funded model for lifelong learning. The task for those of us involved in – and committed to – education in this environment is to probe the form and rationale for a (post) publicly funded University. This short paper for the ‘order’ issue of M/C explores learning and teaching within our current political and economic order. Particularly, I place attention on the synergies to such an order via phrases like the knowledge economy and the creative industries. To move beyond the empty promises of just-in-time learning, on-the-job training, graduate attributes and generic skills, we must reorder our assumptions and ask difficult questions of those who frame the context in which education takes place. For the term of your natural life Learning is a big business. Whether discussing the University of the Third Age, personal development courses, self help bestsellers or hard-edged vocational qualifications, definitions of learning – let alone education – are expanding. Concurrent with this growth, governments are reducing centralized funding and promoting alternative revenue streams. The diversity of student interests – or to use the language of the time, client’s learning goals – is transforming higher education into more than the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The expansion of the student body beyond the 18-25 age group and the desire to ‘service industry’ has reordered the form and purpose of formal education. The number of potential students has expanded extraordinarily. As Lee Bash realized Today, some estimates suggest that as many as 47 percent of all students enrolled in higher education are over 25 years old. In the future, as lifelong learning becomes more integrated into the fabric of our culture, the proportion of adult students is expected to increase. And while we may not yet realize it, the academy is already being transformed as a result. (35) Lifelong learning is the major phrase and trope that initiates and justifies these changes. Such expansive economic opportunities trigger the entrepreneurial directives within universities. If lifelong learning is taken seriously, then the goals, entry standards, curriculum, information management policies and assessments need to be challenged and changed. Attention must be placed on words and phrases like ‘access’ and ‘alternative entry.’ Even more consideration must be placed on ‘outcomes’ and ‘accountability.’ Lifelong learning is a catchphrase for a change in purpose and agenda. Courses are developed from a wide range of education providers so that citizens can function in, or at least survive, the agitation of the post-work world. Both neo-liberal and third way models of capitalism require the labeling and development of an aspirational class, a group who desires to move ‘above’ their current context. Such an ambiguous economic and social goal always involves more than the vocational education and training sector or universities, with the aim being to seamlessly slot education into a ‘lifestyle.’ The difficulties with this discourse are two-fold. Firstly, how effectively can these aspirational notions be applied and translated into a real family and a real workplace? Secondly, does this scheme increase the information divide between rich and poor? There are many characteristics of an effective lifelong learner including great personal motivation, self esteem, confidence and intellectual curiosity. In a double shifting, change-fatigued population, the enthusiasm for perpetual learning may be difficult to summon. With the casualization of the post-Fordist workplace, it is no surprise that policy makers and employers are placing the economic and personal responsibility for retraining on individual workers. Instead of funding a training scheme in the workplace, there has been a devolving of skill acquisition and personal development. Through the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945, education was the track to social mobility. The difficulty now – with degree inflation and the loss of stable, secure, long-term employment – is that new modes of exclusion and disempowerment are being perpetuated through the education system. Field recognized that “the new adult education has been embraced most enthusiastically by those who are already relatively well qualified.” (105) This is a significant realization. Motivation, meta-learning skills and curiosity are increasingly being rewarded when found in the already credentialed, empowered workforce. Those already in work undertake lifelong learning. Adult education operates well for members of the middle class who are doing well and wish to do better. If success is individualized, then failure is also cast on the self, not the social system or policy. The disempowered are blamed for their own conditions and ‘failures.’ The concern, through the internationalization of the workforce, technological change and privatization of national assets, is that failure in formal education results in social exclusion and immobility. Besides being forced into classrooms, there are few options for those who do not wish to learn, in a learning society. Those who ‘choose’ not be a part of the national project of individual improvement, increased market share, company competitiveness and international standards are not relevant to the economy. But there is a personal benefit – that may have long term political consequences – from being ‘outside’ society. Perhaps the best theorist of the excluded is not sourced from a University, but from the realm of fictional writing. Irvine Welsh, author of the landmark Trainspotting, has stated that What we really need is freedom from choice … People who are in work have no time for anything else but work. They have no mental space to accommodate anything else but work. Whereas people who are outside the system will always find ways of amusing themselves. Even if they are materially disadvantaged they’ll still find ways of coping, getting by and making their own entertainment. (145-6) A blurring of work and learning, and work and leisure, may seem to create a borderless education, a learning framework uninhibited by curriculum, assessment or power structures. But lifelong learning aims to place as many (national) citizens as possible in ‘the system,’ striving for success or at least a pay increase which will facilitate the purchase of more consumer goods. Through any discussion of work-place training and vocationalism, it is important to remember those who choose not to choose life, who choose something else, who will not follow orders. Everybody wants to work The great imponderable for complex economic systems is how to manage fluctuations in labour and the market. The unstable relationship between need and supply necessitates flexibility in staffing solutions, and short-term supplementary labour options. When productivity and profit are the primary variables through which to judge successful management, then the alignments of education and employment are viewed and skewed through specific ideological imperatives. The library profession is an obvious occupation that has confronted these contradictions. It is ironic that the occupation that orders knowledge is experiencing a volatile and disordered workplace. In the past, it had been assumed that librarians hold a degree while technicians do not, and that technicians would not be asked to perform – unsupervised – the same duties as librarians. Obviously, such distinctions are increasingly redundant. Training packages, structured through competency-based training principles, have ensured technicians and librarians share knowledge systems which are taught through incremental stages. Mary Carroll recognized the primary questions raised through this change. If it is now the case that these distinctions have disappeared do we need to continue to draw them between professional and para-professional education? Does this mean that all sectors of the education community are in fact learning/teaching the same skills but at different levels so that no unique set of skills exist? (122) With education reduced to skills, thereby discrediting generalist degrees, the needs of industry have corroded the professional standards and stature of librarians. Certainly, the abilities of library technicians are finally being valued, but it is too convenient that one of the few professions dominated by women has suffered a demeaning of knowledge into competency. Lifelong learning, in this context, has collapsed high level abilities in information management into bite sized chunks of ‘skills.’ The ideology of lifelong learning – which is rarely discussed – is that it serves to devalue prior abilities and knowledges into an ever-expanding imperative for ‘new’ skills and software competencies. For example, ponder the consequences of Hitendra Pillay and Robert Elliott’s words: The expectations inherent in new roles, confounded by uncertainty of the environment and the explosion of information technology, now challenge us to reconceptualise human cognition and develop education and training in a way that resonates with current knowledge and skills. (95) Neophilliacal urges jut from their prose. The stress on ‘new roles,’ and ‘uncertain environments,’ the ‘explosion of information technology,’ ‘challenges,’ ‘reconceptualisations,’ and ‘current knowledge’ all affirms the present, the contemporary, and the now. Knowledge and expertise that have taken years to develop, nurture and apply are not validated through this educational brief. The demands of family, work, leisure, lifestyle, class and sexuality stretch the skin taut over economic and social contradictions. To ease these paradoxes, lifelong learning should stress pedagogy rather than applications, and context rather than content. Put another way, instead of stressing the link between (gee wizz) technological change and (inevitable) workplace restructuring and redundancies, emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between professional development and verifiable technological outcomes, rather than spruiks and promises. Short term vocationalism in educational policy speaks to the ordering of our public culture, requiring immediate profits and a tight dialogue between education and work. Furthering this logic, if education ‘creates’ employment, then it also ‘creates’ unemployment. Ironically, in an environment that focuses on the multiple identities and roles of citizens, students are reduced to one label – ‘future workers.’ Obviously education has always been marinated in the political directives of the day. The industrial revolution introduced a range of technical complexities to the workforce. Fordism necessitated that a worker complete a task with precision and speed, requiring a high tolerance of stress and boredom. Now, more skills are ‘assumed’ by employers at the time that workplaces are off-loading their training expectations to the post-compulsory education sector. Therefore ‘lifelong learning’ is a political mask to empower the already empowered and create a low-level skill base for low paid workers, with the promise of competency-based training. Such ideologies never need to be stated overtly. A celebration of ‘the new’ masks this task. Not surprisingly therefore, lifelong learning has a rich new life in ordering creative industries strategies and frameworks. Codifying the creative The last twenty years have witnessed an expanding jurisdiction and justification of the market. As part of Tony Blair’s third way, the creative industries and the knowledge economy became catchwords to demonstrate that cultural concerns are not only economically viable but a necessity in the digital, post-Fordist, information age. Concerns with intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, and ownership of creative productions predominate in such a discourse. Described by Charles Leadbeater as Living on Thin Air, this new economy is “driven by new actors of production and sources of competitive advantage – innovation, design, branding, know-how – which are at work on all industries.” (10) Such market imperatives offer both challenges and opportunity for educationalists and students. Lifelong learning is a necessary accoutrement to the creative industries project. Learning cities and communities are the foundations for design, music, architecture and journalism. In British policy, and increasingly in Queensland, attention is placed on industry-based research funding to address this changing environment. In 2000, Stuart Cunningham and others listed the eight trends that order education, teaching and learning in this new environment. The Changes to the Provision of Education Globalization The arrival of new information and communication technologies The development of a knowledge economy, shortening the time between the development of new ideas and their application. The formation of learning organizations User-pays education The distribution of knowledge through interactive communication technologies (ICT) Increasing demand for education and training Scarcity of an experienced and trained workforce Source: S. Cunningham, Y. Ryan, L. Stedman, S. Tapsall, K. Bagdon, T. Flew and P. Coaldrake. The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra: DETYA Evaluation and Investigations Program [EIP], 2000. This table reverberates with the current challenges confronting education. Mobilizing such changes requires the lubrication of lifelong learning tropes in university mission statements and the promotion of a learning culture, while also acknowledging the limited financial conditions in which the educational sector is placed. For university scholars facilitating the creative industries approach, education is “supplying high value-added inputs to other enterprises,” (Hartley and Cunningham 5) rather than having value or purpose beyond the immediately and applicably economic. The assumption behind this table is that the areas of expansion in the workforce are the creative and service industries. In fact, the creative industries are the new service sector. This new economy makes specific demands of education. Education in the ‘old economy’ and the ‘new economy’ Old Economy New Economy Four-year degree Forty-year degree Training as a cost Training as a source of competitive advantage Learner mobility Content mobility Distance education Distributed learning Correspondence materials with video Multimedia centre Fordist training – one size fits all Tailored programmes Geographically fixed institutions Brand named universities and celebrity professors Just-in-case Just-in-time Isolated learners Virtual learning communities Source: T. Flew. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 20. There are myriad assumptions lurking in Flew’s fascinating table. The imperative is short courses on the web, servicing the needs of industry. He described the product of this system as a “learner-earner.” (50) This ‘forty year degree’ is based on lifelong learning ideologies. However Flew’s ideas are undermined by the current government higher education agenda, through the capping – through time – of courses. The effect on the ‘learner-earner’ in having to earn more to privately fund a continuance of learning – to ensure that they keep on earning – needs to be addressed. There will be consequences to the housing market, family structures and leisure time. The costs of education will impact on other sectors of the economy and private lives. Also, there is little attention to the groups who are outside this taken-for-granted commitment to learning. Flew noted that barriers to greater participation in education and training at all levels, which is a fundamental requirement of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy, arise in part out of the lack of provision of quality technology-mediated learning, and also from inequalities of access to ICTs, or the ‘digital divide.’ (51) In such a statement, there is a misreading of teaching and learning. Such confusion is fuelled by the untheorised gap between ‘student’ and ‘consumer.’ The notion that technology (which in this context too often means computer-mediated platforms) is a barrier to education does not explain why conventional distance education courses, utilizing paper, ink and postage, were also unable to welcome or encourage groups disengaged from formal learning. Flew and others do not confront the issue of motivation, or the reason why citizens choose to add or remove the label of ‘student’ from their bag of identity labels. The stress on technology as both a panacea and problem for lifelong learning may justify theories of convergence and the integration of financial, retail, community, health and education provision into a services sector, but does not explain why students desire to learn, beyond economic necessity and employer expectations. Based on these assumptions of expanding creative industries and lifelong learning, the shape of education is warping. An ageing population requires educational expenditure to be reallocated from primary and secondary schooling and towards post-compulsory learning and training. This cost will also be privatized. When coupled with immigration flows, technological changes and alterations to market and labour structures, lifelong learning presents a profound and personal cost. An instrument for economic and social progress has been individualized, customized and privatized. The consequence of the ageing population in many nations including Australia is that there will be fewer young people in schools or employment. Such a shift will have consequences for the workplace and the taxation system. Similarly, those young workers who remain will be far more entrepreneurial and less loyal to their employers. Public education is now publically-assisted education. Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin realized the impact of this change. The 1980s ideological shift in economic and social policy thinking towards policies and programmes inspired by neo-liberalism provoked serious social strains, especially income polarization and persistent poverty. An increasing reliance on market forces and the family for generating life-chances, a discourse of ‘responsibility,’ an enthusiasm for off-loading to the voluntary sector and other altered visions of the welfare architecture inspired by neo-liberalism have prompted a reaction. There has been a wide-ranging conversation in the 1990s and the first years of the new century in policy communities in Europe as in Canada, among policy makers who fear the high political, social and economic costs of failing to tend to social cohesion. (78) There are dense social reorderings initiated by neo-liberalism and changing the notions of learning, teaching and education. There are yet to be tracked costs to citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is that all organizations must behave like businesses. In such an environment, there are problems establishing social cohesion, let alone social justice. To stress the product – and not the process – of education contradicts the point of lifelong learning. Compliance and complicity replace critique. (Post) learning The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. Most countries believe both in markets and in a necessary role for Government. There will be thunderous debates inside nations about the balance, but the struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone. What preoccupies decision-makers now is a different danger. It is extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. Tony Blair (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) Tony Blair, summoning his best Francis Fukuyama impersonation, signaled the triumph of liberal democracy over other political and economic systems. His third way is unrecognizable from the Labour party ideals of Clement Attlee. Probably his policies need to be. Yet in his second term, he is not focused on probing the specificities of the market-orientation of education, health and social welfare. Instead, decision makers are preoccupied with a war on terror. Such a conflict seemingly justifies large defense budgets which must be at the expense of social programmes. There is no recognition by Prime Ministers Blair or Howard that ‘high-tech’ armory and warfare is generally impotent to the terrorist’s weaponry of cars, bodies and bombs. This obvious lesson is present for them to see. After the rapid and successful ‘shock and awe’ tactics of Iraq War II, terrorism was neither annihilated nor slowed by the Coalition’s victory. Instead, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel snuck have through defenses, requiring little more than a car and explosives. More Americans have been killed since the war ended than during the conflict. Wars are useful when establishing a political order. They sort out good and evil, the just and the unjust. Education policy will never provide the ‘big win’ or the visible success of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. The victories of retraining, literacy, competency and knowledge can never succeed on this scale. As Blair offered, “these are new times. New threats need new measures.” (ht tp://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) These new measures include – by default – a user pays education system. In such an environment, lifelong learning cannot succeed. It requires a dense financial commitment in the long term. A learning society requires a new sort of war, using ideas not bullets. References Bash, Lee. “What Serving Adult Learners Can Teach Us: The Entrepreneurial Response.” Change January/February 2003: 32-7. Blair, Tony. “Full Text of the Prime Minister’s Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.” November 12, 2002. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp. Carroll, Mary. “The Well-Worn Path.” The Australian Library Journal May 2002: 117-22. Field, J. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flew, Terry. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 47-60. Hartley, John, and Cunningham, Stuart. “Creative Industries – from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes.” Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia (2002). Jenson, Jane, and Saint-Martin, Denis. “New Routes to Social Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.1 (2003): 77-99. Leadbeater, Charles. Living on Thin Air. London: Viking, 1999. Pillay, Hitendra, and Elliott, Robert. “Distributed Learning: Understanding the Emerging Workplace Knowledge.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 13.1-2 (2002): 93-107. Welsh, Irvine, from Redhead, Steve. “Post-Punk Junk.” Repetitive Beat Generation. Glasgow: Rebel Inc, 2000: 138-50. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara. "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T. (Jan. 2005) "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>.

Et si apprendre était autant une question de lien, que de temps et de lieux ?C’est à partir de cette idée que la présente recherche est née. Elle s’enracine dans le terrain des Maisons Familiales Rurales, incitées, comme nombre d’organisations de formation, à hybrider les formations. Après avoir exploré les évolutions de la formation professionnelle et situé l’hybridation de formation, la revue de littérature permet une première approche des dispositifs hybrides et de formation par alternance à visée intégrative.Cette exploration nous entraîne à considérer, non plus les dispositifs tels que pensés, mais tels que vécus, du point de vue du sujet qui se forme ; et nous conduit à repérer la manière dont les alternants sont mis en situation de créer des liens entre les expériences vécues. L’étude se centre sur ces situations en envisageant les processus contributifs à la construction de reliances (à soi, aux autres, aux mondes) dans les situations interface des environnements multiples de formation.Pour étudier ces processus de mise en capacité à relier chez les personnes en formation, nous adoptons une démarche multiméthode et nous appuyons sur l’étude de cas de deux dispositifs de formation hybrides et par alternance. Nous mobilisons différents cadres de lecture, sur ces dispositifs, les reliances vécues et les postures des alternants nous permettant d’étudier les processus de mises en capacités à l’aide de l’approche par les capabilités. Après avoir identifié les situations interface et les différentes postures des alternants vis-à-vis de la formation, l’étude analyse 6 de ces situations au regard des mises en capacité de reliances à soi, aux autres, aux mondes qui s’y jouent. La recherche montre ainsi comment les alternants sont effectivement mis en capacité de relier leurs expériences, en termes de ressources, d’opportunité et de choix.Mots-clefs :Dispositif de formation hybride et par alternance, Formation adultes, Alternance à visée intégrative, Reliance (à soi, aux autres, aux mondes), Déliance (à soi, aux autres, aux mondes), Capabilité, Hybridation, Système interface, Situation interface, Activité interface, Posture de formation
What if learning was as much a question of links as of time and place?It was from this idea that this research was born. It is rooted in the field of Maisons Familiales Rurales, which, like many training organisations, are encouraged to hybridise their training courses. After exploring developments in vocational training and situating training hybridisation, the literature review provides an initial approach to hybrid and sandwich training schemes with an integrative aim.This exploration leads us to consider the systems not as they are thought out, but as they are experienced, from the point of view of the person undergoing the training; and leads us to identify the way in which work-study students are put in a position to create links between the experiences they have undergone. The study focuses on these situations by looking at the processes that contribute to the construction of connections (to oneself, to others, to worlds) in the interface situations of multiple training environments.To study these processes of enabling trainees to relate, we are adopting a multi-method approach based on a case study of two hybrid and sandwich training schemes. We use different reading frameworks for these systems, the connections experienced and the postures of the alternating trainees, enabling us to study the processes of building capacity using the capability approach. After identifying the interface situations and the different postures adopted by the work-study students in relation to the training, the study analyses 6 of these situations in terms of the development of their ability to relate to themselves, to others and to the worlds in which they work. The research thus shows how work-study students are effectively enabled to relate their experiences, in terms of resources, opportunities and choices.Key words:Hybrid and work-linked training system, Adult training, Integrative work-linked training, Reliance (on oneself, on others, on worlds), Deliance (on oneself, on others, on worlds), Capability, Hybridization, Interface system, Interface situation, Interface activity, Training posture

The study is funded by Doha International Family Institute (DIFI), a member of Qatar Foundation, and is a collaboration between the Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration of London, Ontario; University of Guelph, Ontario; and University of Calgary, Alberta, all located in Canada; and the Doha International Family Institute, Qatar. The study received research ethics approval from the University of Guelph and the University of Calgary. This study aims to assess the impact of pre- and post-migration on marital relationships and family dynamics for Arab refugee families resettled in Canada. The study also examines the role of professional service providers in supporting these Arab refugee families. The unique experiences of Arab families displaced from their countries due to war and political conflict, and the various hardships experienced during their stay in transit countries, impact their family relations and interactions within the nuclear family context and their interconnectedness with their extended families. Furthermore, these families encounter various challenges within their resettlement process that interrupt their integration. Understanding the impact of traumatic experiences within the pre-migration journey as well as the impact of post-migration stressors on recently settled Arab refugee families in Canada provides insight into the shift in spousal and family relationships. Refugee research studies that focus on the impact of pre-migration trauma and displacement, the migration journey, and post-migration settlement on family relationships are scarce. Since the majority of global refugees in recent years come from Arab regions, mainly Syria, as a result of armed conflicts, this study is focused on the unique experiences of Arab refugee families fleeing conflict zones. The Canadian role in recently resettling a large influx of Arab refugees and assisting them to successfully integrate has not been without challenges. Traumatic pre-migration experiences as a result of being subjected to and/or witnessing violence, separation from and loss of family members, and loss of property and social status coupled with experiences of hardships in transit countries have a profound impact on families and their integration. Refugees are subjected to individual and collective traumatic experiences associated with cultural or ethnic disconnection, mental health struggles, and discrimination and racism. These experiences have been shown to impact family interactions. Arab refugee families have different definitions of “family” and “home” from Eurocentric conceptualizations which are grounded in individualistic worldviews. The discrepancy between collectivism and individualism is mainly recognized by collectivist newcomers as challenges in the areas of gender norms, expectations regarding parenting and the physical discipline of children, and diverse aspects of the family’s daily life. For this study, we interviewed 30 adults, all Arab refugees (14 Syrian and 16 Iraqi – 17 males, 13 females) residing in London, Ontario, Canada for a period of time ranging from six months to seven years. The study participants were married couples with and without children. During the semi-structured interviews, the participants were asked to reflect on their family life during pre-migration – in the country of origin before and during the war and in the transit country – and post-migration in Canada. The inter - views were conducted in Arabic, audio-recorded, and transcribed. We also conducted one focus group with seven service providers from diverse sectors in London, Ontario who work with Arab refugee families. The study used the underlying principles of constructivist grounded theory methodology to guide interviewing and a thematic analysis was performed. MAXQDA software was used to facilitate coding and the identification of key themes within the transcribed interviews. We also conducted a thematic analysis of the focus group transcription. The thematic analysis of the individual interviews identified four key themes: • Gender role changes influence spousal relationships; • Traumatic experiences bring suffering and resilience to family well-being; • Levels of marital conflict are higher following post-migration settlement; • Post-migration experiences challenge family values. The outcome of the thematic analysis of the service provider focus group identified three key themes: • The complex needs of newly arrived Arab refugee families; • Gaps in the services available to Arab refugee families; • Key aspects of training for cultural competencies. The key themes from the individual interviews demonstrate: (i) the dramatic sociocul - tural changes associated with migration that particularly emphasize different gender norms; (ii) the impact of trauma and the refugee experience itself on family relation - ships and personal well-being; (iii) the unique and complex aspects of the family journey; and (iv) how valued aspects of cultural and religious values and traditions are linked in complex ways for these Arab refugee families. These outcomes are consist - ent with previous studies. The study finds that women were strongly involved in supporting their spouses in every aspect of family life and tried to maintain their spouses’ tolerance towards stressors. The struggles of husbands to fulfill their roles as the providers and protec - tors throughout the migratory journey were evident. Some parents experienced role shifts that they understood to be due to the unstable conditions in which they were living but these changes were considered to be temporary. Despite the diversity of refugee family experiences, they shared some commonalities in how they experi - enced changes that were frightening for families, as well as some that enhanced safety and stability. These latter changes related to safety were welcomed by these fami - lies. Some of these families reported that they sought professional help, while others dealt with changes by becoming more distant in their marital relationship. The risk of violence increased as the result of trauma, integration stressors, and escalation in marital issues. These outcomes illustrate the importance of taking into consideration the complexity of the integration process in light of post-trauma and post-migration changes and the timespan each family needs to adjust and integrate. Moreover, these families expressed hope for a better future for their children and stated that they were willing to accept change for the sake of their children as well. At the same time, these parents voiced the significance of preserving their cultural and religious values and beliefs. The service providers identified gaps in service provision to refugee families in some key areas. These included the unpreparedness of professionals and insufficiency of the resources available for newcomer families from all levels of government. This was particularly relevant in the context of meeting the needs of the large influx of Syrian refugees who were resettled in Canada within the period of November 2015 to January 2017. Furthermore, language skills and addressing trauma needs were found to require more than one year to address. The service providers identified that a longer time span of government assistance for these families was necessary. In terms of training, the service providers pinpointed the value of learning more about culturally appropriate interventions and receiving professional development to enhance their work with refugee families. In light of these findings, we recommend an increased use of culturally integrative interventions and programs to provide both formal and informal support for families within their communities. Furthermore, future research that examines the impact of culturally-based training, cultural brokers, and various culturally integrative practices will contribute to understanding best practices. These findings with regard to refugee family relationships and experiences are exploratory in their nature and support future research that extends understanding in the area of spousal relationships, inter - generational stressors during adolescence, and parenting/gender role changes.

Cities around the world have different times that are articulated in the construction of their daily lives. This dialectic between speed and slowness can be perceived in several ways, including the careful observation of their modes of transport. They allow the operation of different regimes of movement of people and goods, and that, in the case of a city like Rio de Janeiro, cannot be understood without the contribution of vans and kombis to its transport system. These complementary modes reproduce even more clearly the dialectic between speed and slowness, especially due to an element that makes a difference: the combination of a series of illegalisms in their operationalization. In this sense, this paper aims to understand the tactics that enable the entanglement of a complementary transport "scheme" in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro – a region of the capital of Rio de Janeiro that encompasses dozens of neighborhoods geographically and symbolically distant from the "center" of the metropolis and its wealthier tourist neighborhoods. I seek to describe the operation of this market embedded in the borders of the legal/extralegal as a way of thinking about the different times that shape the illegalisms that cross Daniel's relationship (a van driver who aims to be a military policeman) with the city. This exercise allows us to shed light on some dimensions of the complementary transport market in Rio de Janeiro from the point of view of a possible future "policeman" who was already experiencing a daily work marked by precariousness and violence. This text presents part of the results of my doctoral thesis, built on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the environment of a "preparatory course" for the next competition of the Military Police of the State of Rio de Janeiro (PMERJ). My interlocutors are not "recruits" already enrolled in police training schools, but simple young people between the ages of 18 and 32 who aim, for various reasons, to join the PMERJ. Over the course of fifteen uninterrupted months (nine face-to-face and six "remote"), I tried to understand the motivations that lead these young people to want to pursue this profession before any formal contact with the military corporation. Thus, the structure of the text seeks to outline a leaner analytical approach to this problem, bringing the interests in the police career from the perspective of a van driver. The narrative develops through the accompaniment of an afternoon in Daniel's van, when I was designated his "ticket collector" within the route traveled by him daily within the scope of his work.

Several analysis tasks feature the propagation of large sets of trajectories, ranging from monitoring the space debris environment to assessing the compliance of space missions with planetary protection policies. The increasingly stringent accuracy requirements inevitably make high-fidelity analyses become more computationally intensive, easily reaching the need of propagating hundreds of thousands of trajectories for one single task. For this reason, high-performance computing (HPC) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) computing techniques become one of the enabling technologies that allow the execution of this kind of analyses. The latter, given its accessible cost and hardware implementation, has increasingly been adopted in the past decade: more modern and powerful graphic cards are launched in the market every year, and new GPU-dedicated algorithms are continuously built and adopted: for reference, GPUs are the technology which the training of the most known artificial intelligence models is made upon. Reference tools for the astrodynamics community are represented by SNAPPshot [1] and CUDAjectory [2]: they both aim at achieving efficient propagations, the former being a CPU-based software suited for planetary protection analyses, the latter being a high-fidelity and efficiency GPU ballistic propagator. Both software work on a traditional step-based logic, that takes initial states and studies their step-by-step evolution in time. The proposed work builds on previously obtained results [3], proposing an alternative algorithm logic specifically designed for HPC and GPU computing, in order to extract all the possible performance from these computational architectures. In contrast to traditional, step-based, numerical schemes, the Picard-Chebyshev (PC) method starts the integration process from samples of a trajectory guess, which are iteratively updated until the supplied dynamical model is matched. The core of this numerical scheme is, other than the evaluation of the dynamics function, a sequence of matrix multiplications: this feature makes the method, in principle, highly suitable for parallel and GPU computing. However, the limited number of trajectory nodes required to reach high accuracy levels (100-200) hinders the parallel efficiency of the algorithm. In other words, the parallel overhead outweighs the possible acceleration, for systems this small. In [3], an augmented version of the basic Picard-Chebyshev simulation scheme for the propagation of large sets of trajectories is proposed. Instead of integrating, either sequentially or in parallel, each trajectory individually, an augmented dynamical system collecting all the samples is built and fed to the PC scheme. This approach outperforms the individual simulations in any parallelisation case, and its GPU implementation is observed to run faster already on low-end graphics cards, compared to a 40-core CPU cluster. This work introduces and implements the latest updated version of the PC scheme, which features iteration error feedback and second-order dynamics adaptability for improved iteration efficiency [4]. These adaptations contribute to reduce the computational time by a factor four, because of the reduced number of iterations required to converge. In addition, the algorithm is adapted to the newest generation NVIDIA graphics card, also exploiting the novel Tensor Core architecture for double precision computation, building an updated GPU software that overall is 50-100 times faster than its original version. Finally, an interface for the proposed scheme for regularised formulations (e.g., [5]) is proposed, aiming at improving the software robustness in tackling near-singular and sets of divergent trajectories. Performance and accuracy comparisons, in terms of number of trajectory samples required by the PC scheme, against the standard Cartesian propagation case are presented. Regularized formulations require a lower amount of trajectory samples to reach a given relative error threshold, compared to the Cartesian case, resulting in turn to a notable decrease in computational runtime. These improved software capabilities are tested in several critical case scenarios, proposing a complete analysis of close encounters, encompassing deep, shallow, and impacting flybys, in the Circular Restricted Three Body problem. Here, a further advantage of regularized formulations comes into play: the impact singularity featuring the gravitational model is removed by construction, making it feasible to treat impacting trajectories and shallow encounters in a single common augmented propagation. [1]Colombo C., Letizia F., Van Der Eynde J., “SNAPPshot ESA planetary protection compliance verification software Final report V1.0, Technical Report ESA-IPL-POM-MB-LE-2015- 315,” University of Southampton, Tech. Rep., 2016 [2]Geda M., Noomen R., Renk F., “Massive Parallelization of Trajectory Propagations using GPUs”, 2019, Master’s thesis, Delft University of Technology, http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1db3f2d1-c2bb-4188-bd1e-dac67bfd9dab [3]Masat A., Colombo C., Boutonnet A., “GPU-based high-precision orbital propagation of large sets of initial conditions through Picard-Chebyshev augmentation”, 2023, Acta Astronautica, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2022.12.037 [4]Woollands R., Junkins J. L., “Nonlinear differential equation solvers via adaptive Picard-Chebyhsev iteration: application in astrodynamics”, 2019, Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, https://doi.org/10.2514/1.G003318 [5]Masat A., Colombo C., “Kustaanheimo-Stiefel variables for planetary protection compliance analysis”, 2022, Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, https://doi.org/10.2514/1.G006255