Post-Occupancy Evaluation: Purpose, Benefits and Barriers

This paper explores the historical development of POE in order to provide a contextual backdrop to current discussions. This review provides a much needed discussion on the benefits and barriers facing POE which should enable designers, facility managers and building users to appreciate the value and purpose of this important building evaluation process. The paper will encourage architects and building owners to conduct POEs to benefit all stakeholders and future designs. This is an international peer reviewed journal.

Monitoring microbial sulfate reduction in porous media using multi-purpose electrodes

There is growing interest in the application of electrode-based measurements for monitoring microbial processes in the Earth using biogeophysical methods. In this study, reactive electrode measurements were combined to electrical geophysical measurements during microbial sulfate reduction occurring in a column of silica beads saturated with natural river water. Electrodic potential (EP), self potential (SP) and complex conductivity signals were recorded using a dual electrode design (Ag/AgCl metal as sensing/EP electrode, Ag/AgCl metal in KCl gel as reference/SP electrode). Open-circuit potentials, representing the tendency for electrochemical reactions to occur on the electrode surfaces, were recorded between sensing/EP electrode and reference/SP electrode and showed significant spatiotemporal variability associated with microbial activity. The dual electrode design isolates the microbial driven sulfide reactions to the sensing electrode and permits removal of any SP signal from the EP measurement. Based on the known sensitivity of a Ag electrode to dissolved sulfide, we interpret EP signals exceeding 550 mV recorded in this experiment in terms of bisulfide (HS-) concentration near multiple sensing electrodes. Complex conductivity measurements capture an imaginary conductivity (s?) signal interpreted as the response of microbial growth and biomass formation in the column. Our results suggest that the implementation of multipurpose electrodes, combining reactive measurements with electrical geophysical measurements, could improve efforts to monitor microbial processes in the Earth using electrodes.

The discursive turn in policy analysis and the validation of policy stories

This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how ‘readings’ of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N=20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000-2009. Following an identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis – with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence, or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also ‘see’ how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data.

Parallel Programming of General-Purpose Programs Using Task-Based Programming Models

The prevalence of multicore processors is bound to drive most kinds of software development towards parallel programming. To limit the difficulty and overhead of parallel software design and maintenance, it is crucial that parallel programming models allow an easy-to-understand, concise and dense representation of parallelism. Parallel programming models such as Cilk++ and Intel TBBs attempt to offer a better, higher-level abstraction for parallel programming than threads and locking synchronization. It is not straightforward, however, to express all patterns of parallelism in these models. Pipelines are an important parallel construct, although difficult to express in Cilk and TBBs in a straightfor- ward way, not without a verbose restructuring of the code. In this paper we demonstrate that pipeline parallelism can be easily and concisely expressed in a Cilk-like language, which we extend with input, output and input/output dependency types on procedure arguments, enforced at runtime by the scheduler. We evaluate our implementation on real applications and show that our Cilk-like scheduler, extended to track and enforce these dependencies has performance comparable to Cilk++.

Deconstructing national leadership: Politicians’ accounts of electoral success and failure in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the ‘settled will’
of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the ‘settled will’ repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose.

Discursive Control, Non-Domination and Hegelian Recognition Theory: Marrying Pettit’s Account(s) of Freedom with a Pippinian/Brandomian Reading of Hegelian Agency

The aim of this article is to combine Pettit’s account(s) of freedom, both his work on discursive control and on non-domination, with Pippin’s and Brandom’s reinterpretation of Hegelian rational agency and the role of recognition theory within it. The benefits of combining these two theories lie, as the article hopes to show, in three findings: first, re-examining Hegelian agency in the spirit of Brandom and Pippin in combination with Pettit’s views on freedom shows clearly why and in which way a Hegelian account of rational agency can ground an attractive socio-political account of freedom; second, the reconciling of discursive control and non-domination with Hegelian agency shows how the force and scope of recognition become finally tangible, without either falling into the trap of overburdening the concept, or merely reducing it to the idea of simple respect; third, the arguments from this article also highlight the importance of freedom as non-domination and how this notion is, indeed, as Pettit himself claims, an agency-freedom which aims at successfully securing the social, political, economic and even (some) psychological conditions for free and autonomous agency.