Threshold In School – As Event And Place For The Autism Spectrum Disorder Pupil

As architects and designers we have a responsibility to provide an inclusive built environment. For the Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) sufferer however, the built environment can be a frightening and confusing place, difficult to negotiate and tolerate. The challenge of integrating more fully into society is denied by an alienating built environment. This barrier can be magnified for ASD pupils in a poorly designed school, where their environment can further distance them from learning. Instead, if more at ease in their surroundings, in an ASD friendly environment, the ASD pupil stands a greater chance of doing better.

Whilst researchers have looked at the classroomenvironment, the transition of classroom to corridor andbeyond has so far been largely ignored. However, theneed for a well-considered threshold between class andcorridor needs to be considered. In this regard, threshold is much more than a doorway, but instead an event that demands a carefully considered place. The following paper firstly outlines why threshold as place andevent for the ASD pupil should be given consideration. It then goes onto highlight, through case studies in anIrish context, the opportunities for aiding the ASD pupil integrating in a mainstream school environment throughsensitive use of threshold. Finally it highlights inconclusion, some of the benefits for an enriched school environment for all pupils, if considering threshold as design generator.The objective is straightforward. By increasing awareness of the relationship between the ASD child and the built environment it will hopefully facilitate greater inclusion of the ASD pupil into mainstream education and society at large.

Exploring Innovative Methodologies in time and place to analyze child protection documents as elements of practice

This paper aims to demonstrate how a derived approach to case file analysis, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and Dorothy E.Smith, can offer innovative means by which to study the relations between discourse and practices in child welfare. The article explores text-based forms of organization in histories of child protection in Finland and in Northern Ireland. It is focused on case file records in different organizational child protection contexts in two jurisdictions. Building on a previous article (Author 1 & 2: 2011), we attempt to demonstrate the potential of how the relations between practices and discourses –a majorly important theme for understanding child welfare social work – can be effectively analysed using a combination of two approaches This article is based on three different empirical studies from our two jurisdictions Northern Ireland (UK) and Finland; one study used Foucault; the other Smith and the third study sought to combine the methods. This article seeks to report on ongoing work in developing, for child welfare studies, ‘a history that speaks back’ as we have described it.

Bridging Jeffrey's Rule, AGM Revision and Dempster Conditioning in the Theory of Evidence

Belief revision characterizes the process of revising an agent’s beliefs when receiving new evidence. In the field of artificial intelligence, revision strategies have been extensively studied in the context of logic-based formalisms and probability kinematics. However, so far there is not much literature on this topic in evidence theory. In contrast, combination rules proposed so far in the theory of evidence, especially Dempster rule, are symmetric. They rely on a basic assumption, that is, pieces of evidence being combined are considered to be on a par, i.e. play the same role. When one source of evidence is less reliable than another, it is possible to discount it and then a symmetric combination operation
is still used. In the case of revision, the idea is to let prior knowledge of an agent be altered by some input information. The change problem is thus intrinsically asymmetric. Assuming the input information is reliable, it should be retained whilst the prior information should be changed minimally to that effect. To deal with this issue, this paper defines the notion of revision for the theory of evidence in such a way as to bring together probabilistic and logical views. Several revision rules previously proposed are reviewed and we advocate one of them as better corresponding to the idea of revision. It is extended to cope with inconsistency between prior and input information. It reduces to Dempster
rule of combination, just like revision in the sense of Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson (AGM) reduces to expansion, when the input is strongly consistent with the prior belief function. Properties of this revision rule are also investigated and it is shown to generalize Jeffrey’s rule of updating, Dempster rule of conditioning and a form of AGM revision.