Work aspirations, intellectual disability and ‘cruelling out’ the mark in the job club

This article uses ethnographic data to explore the relationship between a job club facilitator and a job seeker with an intellectual disability, to illuminate the gulf between employment activation and the multifaceted everyday reality experienced through employment preparation activities, at a job club established for people with intellectual disabilities who are in receipt of social care. The focus of this article is the micro-interactions apparent within the job club that aligns with Goffman’s ‘cooling the mark’ framework, which is unpacked and extended. The strategies at play here refute the broader, individualised ‘welfare-to-work’ neoliberal rhetoric of employment being available to anyone who works hard enough to attain it. Instead, job seekers are reoriented to accept volunteering roles or dubious unpaid work which are presented as employment-like alternatives. Yet, Goffman’s concept is not static as he envisaged: it fluctuates. For, within this reorientation process, strategies are deployed onto individuals to ensure they are kept interested enough to both accept a lowered employment status, while simultaneously still encouraged to strive for paid work one day. As such, this article teases out the tension and paradox between the clusters of promises attached to work as ‘the good life’ together with everyday disabling experiences of cruel optimism by encouraging job seekers to accept non-normative forms of employment.

Managing narratives, managing identities: Language and credibility in legal consultations with asylum seekers

This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

Glassforming Liquids, Amorphous and Semicrystalline Polymers: Exploring their Energy Landscape and Dynamical Heterogeneity by Multi-frequency High-Field EPR

We review past and recent work carried out on viscous liquids, amorphous and semicrystalline polymers by multifrequency high-field electron paramagnetic resonance (HF-EPR) facility in Pisa. The emphasis is on the enhanced ability to provide fine details of the reorientation process of the paramagnetic guest, the spin probe, revealing features driving the dynamics of the host system, including the energy-barrier distribution of glassy polymers, the dynamical heterogeneity of semicrystalline polymers, and the dynamical changes occurring at the critical temperature predicted by the ideal mode-coupling theory.

Nadziei Druckiej droga z Rosji do Polski. Studium przypadku akulturacji

This article is devoted to Nadzieja Drucka (1898–1986), a Polish writer and translator of Rus-sian literature of Russian origin on her father’s side. Drucka grew up in Russia, in an aristocratic family, thanks to her marriage to a Pole, Maurice O’Brien de Lacy. She found herself in Poland in 1918, where she made an effort to learn the Polish language and culture and to assimilate with Polish society. These attempts proved successful. In the 1920s, Drucka established numer-ous contacts with the Polish literary community and conducted intense literary and social activity. She continued it after World War II, in a new political reality, openly declaring her support for a new political system in Poland.The article traces, on the basis of the writer’s autobiography Three fourths... Memories, the subsequent stages of the cultural reorientation process, as a result of which Poland became Drucka’s second homeland.

Proper orthogonal decomposition analysis and modelling of large-scale flow reorientations in a cubic Rayleigh–Bénard cell

This paper investigates the large-scale flow reorientations of Rayleigh–Bénard convection in a cubic cell using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) analysis and modelling. A direct numerical simulation is performed for air at a Rayleigh number of $10^{7}$ and shows that the flow is characterized by four quasi-stable states, corresponding to a large-scale circulation lying in one of the two diagonal planes of the cube with a clockwise or anticlockwise motion, with occasional brief reorientations. Proper orthogonal decomposition is applied to the joint velocity and temperature fields of an enriched database which captures the statistical symmetries of the flow. We found that each quasi-stable state consists of a superposition of four spatial modes representing three types of structures: (i) a mean-flow mode consisting of two stacked counter-rotating torus-like structures; (ii) two large-scale two-dimensional rolls (pair of degenerated modes) which form large-scale diagonal rolls when combined together; and (iii) an eight-roll mode that transports fluid from one corner to the other and strengthens the circulation along the diagonal. In addition, we identified three other modes that play a role in the reorientation process: two boundary-layer modes (pair of degenerated modes) that connect the core region with the horizontal boundary layers and one mode associated with corner rolls. The symmetries of the different POD modes are discussed, as well as their temporal dynamics. A description of the reorientation process in terms of POD modes is provided and compared with other modal approaches available in the literature. Finally, Galerkin projection is used to derive a POD-based reduced-order model. Unresolved modes are accounted for in the model by an extra dissipation term and the addition of noise. A seven-mode model is able to reproduce the low-frequency dynamics of the large-scale reorientations as well as the high-frequency dynamics associated with the large-scale circulation rotation. Linear stability analysis and sensitivity analysis confirm the role of the boundary-layer modes and the corner-rolls mode in the reorientation process.

Simultaneous Thermal Stability and Ultrahigh Sensitivity of Heterojunction SERS Substrates

This paper reports the design of Ag-Al2O3-Ag heterojunctions based on Ag nanorods (AgNRs) and their applications as thermally stable and ultrasensitive substrates of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Specifically, an ultrathin Al2O3 capping layer of 10 nm on top of AgNRs serves to slow down the surface diffusion of Ag at high temperatures. Then, an additional Ag layer on top of the capping layer creates AgNRs-Al2O3-Ag heterojunctions, which lead to giant enhancement of electromagnetic fields within the Al2O3 gap regions that could boost the SERS enhancement. As a result of this design, the SERS substrates are thermally stable up to 200 °C, which has been increased by more than 100 °C compared with bare AgNRs, and their sensitivity is about 400% that of pure AgNRs. This easy yet effective capping approach offers a pathway to fabricate ultrasensitive, thermally stable and easily prepared SERS sensors, and to extend SERS applications for high-temperature detections, such as monitoring in situ the molecule reorientation process upon annealing. Such simultaneous achievement of thermal stability and SERS sensitivity represents a great advance in the design of SERS sensors and will inspire the fabrication of novel hetero-nanostructures.

Conceptions on pharmaceutical services in Brazilian primary health care

OBJECTIVE: To identify and discuss the conceptions of pharmaceutical services in Brazilian Primary Health Care, according to different subjects. METHODS: This study is part of the Pesquisa Nacional sobre Acesso, Utilização e Promoção do Uso Racional de Medicamentos – Serviços, 2015 (PNAUM – National Survey on Access, Use and Promotion of Rational Use of Medicines – Services, 2015), which is composed of an information survey in a representative sample of cities, stratified according to Brazilian regions, and a subsample of primary health care services. Municipal secretaries of health, those responsible for pharmaceutical services, and those responsible for medicine delivery in pharmacies/dispensing units of the selected services were interviewed. The questionnaires included one question about the understanding of the interviewee regarding pharmaceutical services. The content analysis technique was used to apprehend, in the statements, the meanings attributed to pharmaceutical services, which were subsequently classified into categories according to their main conceptions. RESULTS: Among the wide diversity of conceptions on pharmaceutical services (PS), we highlight the ones focused on 1) logistic control of medicines with activities concerning guidance or information on their use and 2) guidance or information to users on the use of medicine. The findings reveal a shifting tendency from a medicine-focused conception to one that considers the users and their needs as the final recipient of these actions. However, the lack of references to conceptions regarding care management and integrality point out the slowness of this change; after all, this is a social and historical process that comprises the production of meanings that transcend legal, logistic, and technical arrangements in pharmaceutical services. CONCLUSIONS: The diversity of conceptions expresses the several meanings attributed to pharmaceutical services; we also identified, in their reorientation process, a movement that reflects a gradual shift in the technical paradigm, from the focus on medicine logistics to a user-oriented approach of health services

Spin reorientation process in Tm2–xHoxFe14B – analysis of conical arrangement based on Mössbauer spectra

The spin reorientation process in the Tm2-xHoxFe14B series of compounds was studied using 57Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy over the temperature range 5.2-320 K with a focus on the analysis of conical spin arrangement. Each compound was studied by precise Mössbauer scanning in the vicinity of the transition and during the transition. By applying computer simulations based on the simplified Yamada-Kato model, as well as on some literature data for R2Fe14B (R = Tm, Ho) compounds, the above series was selected for studies as it contains compounds with different spin arrangements (axial, planar, conical). It was a crucial requirement for obtaining unambiguous angular dependences when applying a simultaneous fitting procedure of Mössbauer spectra. Such an extended procedure was applied which allowed the temperature dependence of the angle describing the position of the magnetization vector to be obtained. The results were compared with those from theoretical simulations. The spin arrangement diagram was constructed. A conical spin arrangement was confirmed over a wide temperature range.