How can we promote co-creation in communities? The perspective of health promoting professionals in four European countries

PurposeThe aim was to identify the competencies professionals need to promote co-creation engagement within communities.Design/methodology/approachCo-creation could contribute to building community capacity to promote health. Professional development is key to support co-creative practices. Participants were professionals in a position to promote co-creation processes in health-promoting welfare settings across Denmark, Portugal, France and United Kingdom. An overarching unstructured topic guide was used within interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and creative activities.FindingsThe need to develop competencies to promote co-creation was high across all countries. Creating a common understanding of co-creation and the processes involved to increase inclusivity, engagement and shared understanding was also necessary. Competencies included: How to run co-creation from the beginning of the process right through to evaluation, using feedback and communication throughout using an open action-oriented approach; initiating a perspective change and committing to the transformation of co-creation into a real-life process.Practical implicationsOverall, learning about underlying principles, process initiation, implementation and facilitation of co-creation were areas identified to be included within a co-creation training programme. This can be applied through the framework of enabling change, advocating for co-creative processes, mediating through partnership, communication, leadership, assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, ethical values and knowledge of co-creative processes.Originality/valueThis study provides novel findings on the competencies needed for health promoting professionals to embed co-creative processes within their practice, and the key concerns that professionals with a position to mediate co-creation have in transferring the abstract term of co-creation into a real-world practice.

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. Exploiting this feature, we demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We illustrate how this symbolic system improves numerical computing tasks by showcasing an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

Changing the Traditional Education of Igbo Females

Over the years, education has been defined by different people, according to their perceptual values. Education has also been perceived by many scholars as an abstract term. In the Nigerian pre colonial era, in Igbo-Nigerian Culture, people consulted and worshiped multiple deities or entities. This belief system (higher power) is often referred to as Oracle; for answers or consultations in difficult areas such as in higher education towards achieving their goals and objectives. Some cultures in Igbo land presently, maintain this practice of education.Often in life, people pursue and attain education in many ways. Hence, many adopted whatever notion the culture they were born into teaches about life's processes. This is true especially in disciplines such as education and language. Ultimately, the outcome of culture and education as well as the part female gender plays are inevitable in the long run and is the focus of discussion in this chapter.

The Concept of Law and Justice

From the views and changes that have followed the dynamism of our society, undoubtedly, law and justice have played a crucial role as a very abstract term that has been consumed almost from the first beginnings of human society to our modern days. Beyond the events and circumstances that societies in the past have had and organized by defining and choosing the way of life, and often times the right has been personalized by a certain group of people, or by a military division that has given rights and has created justice, in certain interests and for personal and charismatic purposes it has been denied a certain part of society, and has often been deformed in scandalous ways by reflecting, on the fact that the giver of this right has often been pointed out to be the man, but this convulsion in no case has lasted long, and often this theory has remained unrealized, reflecting that right is something natural and that the individual gains at the moment of birth and enjoys it to death, this divergence and complexity of the way of perceiving the law has often resulted in wars and the acquisition of this vital right. Through this paper we will draw philosophical and legal paradigms, analyzing from a retrospective way of the application of law and the applicability of justice, as an important mechanism of regulation of social relations. Law and justice have a common path of development, one by regulating the way of life of the people, that is, by issuing norms and the other by giving justice to the relative complexity and cohesion of interpersonal relations.

Browning’s and Serembe’s Love Poems

Browning’s and Serembe’s love poems will be analyzed in this research paper in order to illustrate how they reflected their efforts to present the idea of love in their poetry. In the ‘By the Fire-Side’, one of the major poems of Robert Browning during the thesaurus of the British Victorian period and Zef Serembe’s ‘Song for Longing’, considered by many to rank among the best love poems of Rilindja (Renaissance) poets in the nineteenth century Albania. The two poets, do not consider the idea of love in the abstract term. They include love by referring to the specific details, Browning, to his love relationship with a famous poetess Elizabeth Barrett, their elopement and union in Italy, and Serembe to his love for a girl from his native village, who immigrated to Brazil and subsequently died. In these poems, both poets explore the intimate atmosphere they tried to establish for their beloved women, by describing the places that witnessed the birth and growth of their love. ‘By the Fire-Side’ and ‘Song for Longing’ comprise a common element; they are personal love poems that describe their ideal love, personal feelings, and passion of their love. While Robert Browning in his poem writes about a peaceful and satisfied married life, full of sweet memories and images of his wife, Zef Serembe’s poem is a picture of his sentiment, primarily of solitude and disillusionment. The comparative and descriptive research methods have been helpful while conducting this research paper.

Sensing the Social

Social is not an abstract term. It is one that is experienced through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. People talk about the social as if it is something that they can experience. How can we make sense of this character of the social? In what sense could the social be real in such a way that it can be experienced? This chapter discusses many examples of how the social is accessed through these senses and how they repeatedly occur in caste experiences. The chapter goes on to discuss the experience of the social through vision, smell, sound and touch: especially bringing in how we socialize our perceptions of ‘social touch’.

Δημοκράτης‎ the Democrat?

This paper discusses the name Δημοκράτης‎ as an interesting case of a name whose connotation was fluid according to context and to changes over time in language and political culture. The earliest occurrence of the name at Athens, for the father of Lysis of the eponymous Platonic dialogue, is conventionally taken as very early evidence for the emergence of the language of ‘democracy’. Pointing out that, in ancient Greek, there is no word δημοκρατής‎, cognate with ‘democrat’ and its equivalents in English and other modern European languages, the paper argues that that the primary connotation of Δημοκράτης‎, a name which existed before the word ‘δημοκρατία‎’, was someone who ‘possessed power over or among the People’. It also argues, however, that, once the abstract term δημοκρατία‎ and its cognate verb δημοκρατέομαι‎ existed, ‘Δημοκράτης‎’ could not, to be sure, mean ‘democrat’, but, according to context, could connote democracy in a much looser way.

Semiotics of architectural: Detail between rationalisation and representation

The aim of this paper is to discuss the realm of values upon which thoughts on architecture have been conceived, through the drawings of architectural detail. Although modernism, which opposes technical detail and ornament, is still regarded as influential theoretical position, it neglects to address a broader meaning of a detail in architecture. The research disputes the opposition between an ornament and a technical detail, claiming that a detail in architecture is the more abstract term, which represents a certain level of design thought besides utility and embellishment. It is argued that both modern and traditional values from different aspects of societal and cultural activities, as for their changes were being referenced to the micro level of architecture, transforming the way of their presence through different visual representations of detail along the history and theory of profession. In this paper, the small-scale drawings are used as a medium a medium which reflects transdisciplinarity of the profession and its entanglement with the knowledge and dynamics of other fields of human activity such as philosophy, economy, religion, engineering, and arts.

Changing the Traditional Education of Igbo Females

Over the years, education has been defined by different people, according to their perceptual values. Education has also been perceived by many scholars as an abstract term. In the Nigerian pre colonial era, in Igbo-Nigerian Culture, people consulted and worshiped multiple deities or entities. This belief system (higher power) is often referred to as Oracle; for answers or consultations in difficult areas such as in higher education towards achieving their goals and objectives. Some cultures in Igbo land presently, maintain this practice of education.Often in life, people pursue and attain education in many ways. Hence, many adopted whatever notion the culture they were born into teaches about life's processes. This is true especially in disciplines such as education and language. Ultimately, the outcome of culture and education as well as the part female gender plays are inevitable in the long run and is the focus of discussion in this chapter.

On Decontextualization and Recontextualization in East Asian Cultural Interactions: Some Methodological Reflections

In the history of cultural interaction in East Asia, decontextualization and recontextualization can readily be observed in the exchanges of texts, people, and ideas among the different regions. When a text, person, or idea is transmitted from its home country into another country, it is first decontextualized and then recontextualized into the new cultural environment. These processes of decontextualization and recontextualization I refer to as “a contextual turn.” The present paper discusses methodological problems involved in the study of decontextualization and recontextualization. Section 1 introduces the paper. Section 2 then clarifies that “East Asia” is not an abstract term ranging over the countries of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but rather refers to the dynamic, real process of concrete cultural interactions among these living cultures. On the dramatic stage of these interactions, China plays the role of the significant other to the many other actors. China is certainly not the sole conductor of the symphony of East Asia. Section 3 shows that the methodology of the history of ideas can be used when studying the phenomena of decontextualization. But one can easily become ensnared in what I call “the blind spot of textualism.” Section 4 provides an analytic discussion of an effective methodology for studying recontextualization that involves looking at the concrete exchange of texts, people, and ideas against a specific historical background, and then highlighting the subjective emotions of the intermediate agents in these cultural exchanges as the agents navigate the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. This paper concludes by stressing that East Asian cultural interactions are dynamic processes and not static structures. Therefore, in our study of the history of cultural interactions in East Asia, we must seek a dynamic equilibrium between textualism and contextualism, as well as between fact and value or emotion.