Book Review: Paul Michael Garrett, Social work and social theory: Making connections. The Policy Press: Bristol, 2013, ISBN 9781847429605

It is important to state at the outset that I enjoyed this book, or at least large sections of it, but I also found it rather frustrating. The book is made up of 11 chapters and following an introductory chapter, is split into two parts. The first is concerned with ‘debating modernity’ made up of four chapters which critically analyse some of the most high-profile social theorists of recent times and their approaches to understanding contemporary society and recent social change – Giddens, Beck and Bauman in particular – together with some of the social work writers who have drawn on this body of work. The remaining two chapters in part one are then concerned with drawing on Marx, particularly Das Capital, for making sense of modernity and convincingly argues for replacing the concept of modernity with an explicit use of

Social Work, Child Protection and Politics: Some Critical and Constructive Reflections

This Critical Commentary reflects on how the author's personal and professional experiences have both mirrored and fed into the changing policy and practice contexts in England over the last forty years. A central part of the argument is that the way public and political debates have been constructed has meant there is a very intimate relationship between social work and child protection such that the former almost fails to have an existence outside of the parameters of the latter; social work has been reduced to a very narrow concern with child protection. The Commentary considers how this has come about and concludes by arguing that the two need to be clearly disaggregated such that each has a clear existence separate from the other so that more progressive policies and practices can be developed

Spin(9) and almost complex structures on 16-dimensional manifolds

For a Spin(9)-structure on a Riemannian manifold M^16 we write explicitly the matrix psi of its K\"ahler 2-forms and the canonical 8-form Phi. We then prove that Phi coincides up to a constant with the fourth coefficient of the characteristic polynomial of psi. This is inspired by lower dimensional situations, related to Hopf fibrations and to Spin(7). As applications, formulas are deduced for Pontrjagin classes and integrals of Phi and Phi^2 in the special case of holonomy Spin(9).Comment: 18 page

Almost complex structures on spheres

In this paper we review the well-known fact that the only spheres admitting an almost complex structure are S^2 and S^6. The proof described here uses characteristic classes and the Bott periodicity theorem in topological K-theory. This paper originates from the talk "Almost Complex Structures on Spheres" given by the second author at the MAM1 workshop "(Non)-existence of complex structures on S^6", held in Marburg from March 27th to March 30th, 2017. It is a review paper, and as such no result is intended to be original. We tried to produce a clear, motivated and as much as possible self-contained exposition

Agricultural Decision Analysis: The Causal Challenge

The paper sets out the agenda for reviewing models of decision making in the context of farmers’ use of seasonal climate forecasting. Such forecasts have been framed in terms of shifts in cumulative distribution functions of yields or gross margins. Typically they have been applied to choices about crop variety, crop type, time of planting or level of fertiliser application. Fundamental questions are: how do farmers conceptualise and make use of the information contained in seasonal climate forecasts? Do our models of decision making represent well the way in which these decisions are made?decision making, farmers, seasonal climate forecasts, conceptualisation, review,

Clifford systems in octonionic geometry

We give an inductive construction for irreducible Clifford systems on Euclidean vector spaces. We then discuss how this notion can be adapted to Riemannian manifolds, and outline some developments in octonionic geometry.Comment: Added the new Paragraph 3. Proofs of Theorems 6.2 e 8.1 have been simplified. To be published in Rend. Sem. Mat. Torino, volume in memory of Sergio Consol