Streetwise Provocations: The Global Justice Movement's take on sustainable development

An examination of the role of the global justice movement in advancing core elements of the sustainable development agenda.

Prising open the black box: Critical realism, action research and social work

There is a growing interest in critical realism and its application to social work. This article makes a case for adopting this philosophical position in qualitative social work research. More specifically, it suggests that there is a concordance between critical realist premises and action research with its cyclical inquiry and advancement of social change. This combination of philosophy and method, it is argued, promotes anti-oppressive social work research and illuminates the processes shaping outcomes in programme evaluations. Overall, the article underscores the importance of 'depth' in qualitative inquiry by conceiving the social world in terms of five interlacing, social domains.

Influence of the Graphical Levels of Detail of a Virtual Thrower on the Perception of the Movement

Virtual reality has a number of advantages for analyzing sports interactions such as the standardization of experimental conditions, stereoscopic vision, and complete control of animated humanoid movement. Nevertheless, in order to be useful for sports applications, accurate perception of simulated movement in the virtual sports environment is essential. This perception depends on parameters of the synthetic character such as the number of degrees of freedom of its skeleton or the levels of detail (LOD) of its graphical representation. This study focuses on the influence of this latter parameter on the perception of the movement. In order to evaluate it, this study analyzes the judgments of immersed handball goalkeepers that play against a graphically modified virtual thrower. Five graphical representations of the throwing action were defined: a textured reference level (L0), a nontextured level (L1), a wire-frame level (L2), a moving point light display (MLD) level with a normal-sized ball (L3), and a MLD level where the ball is represented by a point of light (L4). The results show that judgments made by goalkeepers in the L4 condition are significantly less accurate than in all the other conditions (p

"That a black twisty divil could be hiding under such comeliness": Woman vs woman in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre

This essay investigates representations of womanhood in early twentieth-century Irish theatre, particularly in terms of the disjunction between woman as a physical, social being and the symbolic Woman as an ideological construction promoted by both church and state. It uses Lacanian theory in conjunction with Irish women’s studies scholarship to inform the analyses of plays by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife, and Mother, and how this situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Discussion on: Sivakumar, V., Glynn, D., Cairns, P. & Black, J.A. (2009). A new method of measuring plastic limit of fine materials. Géotechnique 59, No. 10, 813-823. by Brendan C. O'Kelly

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Forensic Geology in Environmental Crime: Illegal Waste Movement Burial in Northern Ireland

The illegal burial of waste often occurs in locations where loose, transferable material is abundant, allowing covert pits to be dug or filled. The transfer of waste material onto suspects and their vehicles during loading, unloading, and burial is common, as is the case during other criminal activities such as the burial of murder victims. We use two case studies to show that the established principles of using geological materials in excluding or linking suspects can be applied to illegal waste disposal. In the first case, the layering of different geological materials on the tailgate of a container used to transport toxic waste demonstrated where the vehicle had been and denied the owner's alibi, associating him with an illegal dumpsite. In the second case, an unusual suite of minerals, recovered from a suspect's trousers, provided the intelligence that led environmental law enforcement officers to an illegal waste burial site.