Intersectionality, rural criminology, and re-imaging the boundaries of critical criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands – feminist, cultural and green – has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

A high performance liquid chromatography and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry method for the analysis of the natural medicine, Forsythia suspensa

Samples of Forsythia suspensa from raw (Laoqiao) and ripe (Qingqiao) fruit were analyzed with the use of HPLC-DAD and the EIS-MS techniques. Seventeen peaks were detected, and of these, twelve were identified. Most were related to the glucopyranoside molecular fragment. Samples collected from three geographical areas (Shanxi, Henan and Shandong Provinces), were discriminated with the use of hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA), discriminant analysis (DA), and principal component analysis (PCA) models, but only PCA was able to provide further information about the relationships between objects and loadings; eight peaks were related to the provinces of sample origin. The supervised classification models-K-nearest neighbor (KNN), least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM), and counter propagation artificial neural network (CP-ANN) methods, indicated successful classification but KNN produced 100% classification rate. Thus, the fruit were discriminated on the basis of their places of origin.

Wide-band spectral power fluctuations characterize the response of simulated cortical networks to increasing stimulus intensity

The hippocampus is an anatomically distinct region of the medial temporal lobe that plays a critical role in the formation of declarative memories. Here we show that a computer simulation of simple compartmental cells organized with basic hippocampal connectivity is capable of producing stimulus intensity sensitive wide-band fluctuations of spectral power similar to that seen in real EEG. While previous computational models have been designed to assess the viability of the putative mechanisms of memory storage and retrieval, they have generally been too abstract to allow comparison with empirical data. Furthermore, while the anatomical connectivity and organization of the hippocampus is well defined, many questions regarding the mechanisms that mediate large-scale synaptic integration remain unanswered. For this reason we focus less on the specifics of changing synaptic weights and more on the population dynamics. Spectral power in four distinct frequency bands were derived from simulated field potentials of the computational model and found to depend on the intensity of a random input. The majority of power occurred in the lowest frequency band (3-6 Hz) and was greatest to the lowest intensity stimulus condition (1% maximal stimulus). In contrast, higher frequency bands ranging from 7-45 Hz show an increase in power directly related with an increase in stimulus intensity. This trend continues up to a stimulus level of 15% to 20% of the maximal input, above which power falls dramatically. These results suggest that the relative power of intrinsic network oscillations are dependent upon the level of activation and that above threshold levels all frequencies are damped, perhaps due to over activation of inhibitory interneurons.

On Randomizing Hash Functions to Strengthen the Security of Digital Signatures

Halevi and Krawczyk proposed a message randomization algorithm called RMX as a front-end tool to the hash-then-sign digital signature schemes such as DSS and RSA in order to free their reliance on the collision resistance property of the hash functions. They have shown that to forge a RMX-hash-then-sign signature scheme, one has to solve a cryptanalytical task which is related to finding second preimages for the hash function. In this article, we will show how to use Dean’s method of finding expandable messages for finding a second preimage in the Merkle-Damgård hash function to existentially forge a signature scheme based on a t-bit RMX-hash function which uses the Davies-Meyer compression functions (e.g., MD4, MD5, SHA family) in 2 t/2 chosen messages plus 2 t/2 + 1 off-line operations of the compression function and similar amount of memory. This forgery attack also works on the signature schemes that use Davies-Meyer schemes and a variant of RMX published by NIST in its Draft Special Publication (SP) 800-106. We discuss some important applications of our attack.

Protecting World Heritage sites from the adverse impacts of climate change : obligations for States Parties to the World Heritage Convention

Through its mandate to protect and preserve places of ‘outstanding universal value’, the World Heritage Convention provides an unlikely yet effective tool in global efforts to mitigate climate change. The practical efficacy of the Strategy to Assist States Parties to Implement Appropriate Management Responses (‘the Strategy’), which represents the World Heritage Committee’s primary response to the threats posed by climate change to World Heritage sites, is undermined by its weak stance on mitigation. This paper argues that the World Heritage Convention imposes stronger obligations on States Parties than those contained in the Strategy, including a duty on States Parties to commit to ‘deep cuts’ in greenhouse gas emissions. In order to ensure the continuing success of the World Heritage Convention States Parties must engage in extensive mitigation strategies without delay.

Green: Exploring the aestheticized use of chroma-key techniques and technologies in two intermedial productions

Peggy Shaw’s RUFF, (USA 2013) and Queensland Theatre Company’s collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, Total Dik!, (Australia 2013) overtly and evocatively draw on an aestheticized use of the cinematic techniques and technologies of Chroma Key to reveal the tensions in their production and add layers to their performances. In doing so they offer invaluable insight where the filmic and theatrical approaches overlap. This paper draws on Eckersall, Grehan and Scheer’s New Media Dramaturgy (2014) to reposition the frame as a contribution to intermedial theatre and performance practices in light of increasing convergence between seemingly disparate discourses. In RUFF, the scenic environment replicates a chroma-key ‘studio’ which facilitates the reconstruction of memory displaced after a stroke. RUFF uses the screen and projections to recall crooners, lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and an eclectic line of eccentric family members living inside Shaw. While the show pays tribute to those who have kept her company across decades of theatrical performance, use of non-composited chroma-key technique as a theatrical device and the work’s taciturn revelation of the production process during performance, play a central role in its exploration of the juxtaposition between its reconstructed form and content. In contrast Total Dik! uses real-time green screen compositing during performance as a scenic device. Actors manipulate scale models, refocus cameras and generate scenes within scenes in the construction of the work’s examination of an isolated Dictator. The ‘studio’ is again replicated as a site for (re)construction, only in this case Total Dik! actively seeks to reveal the process of production as the performance plays out. Building on RUFF, and other works such as By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, (2012) and Hotel Modern’s God’s Beard (2012), this work blends a convergence of mobile technologies, models, and green screen capture to explore aspects of transmedia storytelling in a theatrical environment (Jenkins, 2009, 2013). When a green screen is placed on stage, it reads at once as metaphor and challenge to the language of theatre. It becomes, or rather acts, as a ‘sign’ that alludes to the nature of the reconstructed, recomposited, manipulated and controlled. In RUFF and in Total Dik!, it is also a place where as a mode of production and subsequent reveal, it adds weight to performance. These works are informed by Auslander (1999) and Giesenkam (2007) and speak to and echo Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006). This paper’s consideration of the integration of studio technique and live performance as a dynamic approach to multi-layered theatrical production develops our understanding of their combinatory use in a live performance environment.

Indigenous cultural landscapes: Equitably defining the 'authenticity' of the intangible

Over hundreds of generations, indigenous groups around the world have passed down their traditional landscape associations, a number of which are intangible and therefore unquantifiable. Yet, these associative relationships with nature have been, and continue to be, pivotal in cultural evolution. Determining the authenticity of intangible landscape associations has caused much controversy, and in recent decades, indigenous groups have begun seeking protection of their places of significance. In response, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee (WHC) developed a criterion that intended to assist in the identification and protection of cultural landscapes. The WHC has therefore become the global authority responsible for determining the authenticity of cultural landscapes, including those with intangible associations rather than material cultural evidence. However, even with the support of the United Nations, UNESCO and the WHC, it is unlikely that every tangible cultural landscape will be sufficiently recognised and protected. Therefore, this research paper explores the effectiveness of current approaches to gauging authenticity in instances where multiple landscapes are valued according to similar characteristics. Further, this work studies the inherent relationship between the indigenous Maori population of the South Island of New Zealand, in particular Kai Tahi peoples, and their significant landscape features, as a means of considering the breadth and depth of historic intangible associations. In light of these findings, this research challenges the appropriateness of the term 'authenticity' when analysing not only the subjective, but more pressingly, the intangible. It therefore questions the role of empirical data in demonstrating authenticity, while recognising that a prolific list of such intangible cultural landscapes has the potential to diminish integrity. This, this paper addresses an urgent need for increased social research in this area, namely in identifying cultural landscape protection methods that empower all local indigenous communities, not just those which are the most critically acclaimed.

Targeting antigen to diverse APCs inactivates memory CD8+ T cells without eliciting tissue-destructive effector function

Memory T cells develop early during the preclinical stages of autoimmune diseases and have traditionally been considered resistant to tolerance induction. As such, they may represent a potent barrier to the successful immunotherapy of established autoimmune diseases. It was recently shown that memory CD8+ T cell responses are terminated when Ag is genetically targeted to steady-state dendritic cells. However, under these conditions, inactivation of memory CD8+ T cells is slow, allowing transiently expanded memory CD8+ T cells to exert tissue-destructive effector function. In this study, we compared different Ag-targeting strategies and show, using an MHC class II promoter to drive Ag expression in a diverse range of APCs, that CD8+ memory T cells can be rapidly inactivated by MHC class II+ hematopoietic APCs through a mechanism that involves a rapid and sustained downregulation of TCR, in which the effector response of CD8+ memory cells is rapidly truncated and Ag-expressing target tissue destruction is prevented. Our data provide the first demonstration that genetically targeting Ag to a broad range of MHC class II+ APC types is a highly efficient way to terminate memory CD8+ T cell responses to prevent tissue-destructive effector function and potentially established autoimmune diseases. Copyright © 2010 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc.

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900-1200

Review of Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 by Elizabeth van Houts (Toronto UP, 1999).

Open City, Rossellini and neorealism : sixty years on

For Bakhtin, it is always important to know from where one speaks. The place from which I speak is that of a person who grew up in Italy during the economic miracle (pre-1968) in a working class family, watching film matinees on television during school holidays. All sort of films and genres were shown: from film noir to westerns, to Jean Renoir's films, German expressionism, Italian neorealism and Italian comedy. Cinema has come to represent over time a sort of memory extension that supplements lived memory of events, and one which, especially, mediates the intersection of many cultural discourses. When later in life I moved to Australia and started teaching in film studies, my choice of a film that was emblematic of neorealism went naturally to Roma città aperta (Open city hereafter) by Roberto Rossellini (1945), and not to Paisan or Sciuscà or Bicycle Thieves. My choice was certainly grounded in my personal memory - especially those aspects transmitted to me by my parents, who lived through the war and maintained that Open City had truly made them cry. With a mother who voted for the Christian Democratic Party and a father who was a unionist, I thought that this was normal in Italian families and society. In the early 1960s, the Resistance still offered a narrative of suffering and redemption, shared by Catholics or Communists. This construction of psychological realism is what I believe Open City continues to offer in time.

Experimental methodology report

In architectural design and the construction industry, there is insufficient evidence about the way designers collaborate in their normal working environments using both traditional and digital media. It is this gap in empirical evidence that the CRC project, “Team Collaboration in High Bandwidth Virtual Environments” addresses. The project is primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with the conceptual stages of design carried out by professional designers working in different offices. The aim is to increase opportunities for communication and interaction between people in geographically distant locations in order to improve the quality of collaboration. In order to understand the practical implications of introducing new digital tools on working practices, research into how designers work collaboratively using both traditional and digital media is being undertaken. This will involve a series of empirical studies in the work places of the industry partners in the project. The studies of collaboration processes will provide empirical results that will lead to more effective use of virtual environments in design and construction processes. The report describes the research approach, the industry study, the methods for data collection and analysis and the foundation research methodologies. A distinctive aspect is that the research has been devised to enable field studies to be undertaken in a live industrial environment where the participant designers carry out real projects alongside their colleagues and in familiar locations. There are two basic research objectives: one is to obtain evidence about design practice that will inform the architecture and construction industries about the impact and potential benefit of using digital collaboration technologies; the second is to add to long term research knowledge of human cognitive and behavioural processes based on real world data. In order to achieve this, the research methods must be able to acquire a rich and heterogeneous set of data from design activities as they are carried out in the normal working environment. This places different demands upon the data collection and analysis methods to those of laboratory studies where controlled conditions are required. In order to address this, the research approach that has been adopted is ethnographic in nature and case study-based. The plan is to carry out a series of indepth studies in order to provide baseline results for future research across a wider community of user groups. An important objective has been to develop a methodology that will produce valid, significant and transferable results. The research will contribute to knowledge about how architectural design and the construction industry may benefit from the introduction of leading edge collaboration technologies. The outcomes will provide a sound foundation for the production of guidelines for the assessment of high bandwidth tools and their future deployment. The knowledge will form the basis for the specification of future collaboration products and collaboration processes. This project directly addresses the industry-identified focus on cultural change, image, e-project management, and innovative methods.

How does knowledge constrain sport performance? An ecological perspective

From an ecological perspective knowledge signifies the degree of fitness of a performer and his/her environment. From this viewpoint, the role of training is to enhance this degree of fit between a specific athlete and the performance environment, instead of the enrichment of memory in the performer. In this regard, ecological psychology distinguishes between perceptual knowledge or "knowledge of" the environment and symbolic knowledge or "knowledge about" the environment. This distinction elucidates how knowing how to act (knowing of) as well as knowing how to verbalise memorial representations (e.g., a verbal description of performance) (knowing about) are both rooted in perception. In this chapter we demonstrate these types of knowledge in decision-making behaviour and exemplify how they can be presented in 1 v 1 practice task contraints in basketball.

Vision-based topological mapping and localisation

Competent navigation in an environment is a major requirement for an autonomous mobile robot to accomplish its mission. Nowadays, many successful systems for navigating a mobile robot use an internal map which represents the environment in a detailed geometric manner. However, building, maintaining and using such environment maps for navigation is difficult because of perceptual aliasing and measurement noise. Moreover, geometric maps require the processing of huge amounts of data which is computationally expensive. This thesis addresses the problem of vision-based topological mapping and localisation for mobile robot navigation. Topological maps are concise and graphical representations of environments that are scalable and amenable to symbolic manipulation. Thus, they are well-suited for basic robot navigation applications, and also provide a representational basis for the procedural and semantic information needed for higher-level robotic tasks. In order to make vision-based topological navigation suitable for inexpensive mobile robots for the mass market we propose to characterise key places of the environment based on their visual appearance through colour histograms. The approach for representing places using visual appearance is based on the fact that colour histograms change slowly as the field of vision sweeps the scene when a robot moves through an environment. Hence, a place represents a region of the environment rather than a single position. We demonstrate in experiments using an indoor data set, that a topological map in which places are characterised using visual appearance augmented with metric clues provides sufficient information to perform continuous metric localisation which is robust to the kidnapped robot problem. Many topological mapping methods build a topological map by clustering visual observations to places. However, due to perceptual aliasing observations from different places may be mapped to the same place representative in the topological map. A main contribution of this thesis is a novel approach for dealing with the perceptual aliasing problem in topological mapping. We propose to incorporate neighbourhood relations for disambiguating places which otherwise are indistinguishable. We present a constraint based stochastic local search method which integrates the approach for place disambiguation in order to induce a topological map. Experiments show that the proposed method is capable of mapping environments with a high degree of perceptual aliasing, and that a small map is found quickly. Moreover, the method of using neighbourhood information for place disambiguation is integrated into a framework for topological off-line simultaneous localisation and mapping which does not require an initial categorisation of visual observations. Experiments on an indoor data set demonstrate the suitability of our method to reliably localise the robot while building a topological map.

Do warnings deter rather than produce more sophisticated malingering?

Following Youngjohn, Lees-Haley, and Binder's (1999) comment on Johnson and Lesniak-Karpiak's (1997) study that warnings lead to more subtle malingering, researchers have sought to better understand warning effects. However, such studies have been largely atheoretical and may have confounded warning and coaching. This study examined the effect on malingering of a warning that was based on criminological-sociological concepts derived from the rational choice model of deterrence theory. A total of 78 participants were randomly assigned to a control group, an unwarned simulator group, or one of two warned simulator groups. The warning groups comprised low- and high-level conditions depending on warning intensity. Simulator participants received no coaching about how to fake tests. Outcome variables were scores derived from the Test of Memory Malingering and Wechsler Memory Scale-III. When the rate of malingering was compared across the four groups, a high-level warning effect was found such that warned participants were significantly less likely to exaggerate than unwarned simulators. In an exploratory follow-up analysis, the warned groups were divided into those who reported malingering and those who did not report malingering, and the performance of these groups was compared to that of unwarned simulators and controls. Using this approach, results showed that participants who were deterred from malingering by warning performed no worse than controls. However, on a small number of tests, self-reported malingerers in the low-level warning group appeared less impaired than unwarned simulators. This pattern was not observed in the high-level warning condition. Although cautious interpretation of findings is necessitated by the exploratory nature of some analyses, overall results suggest that using a carefully designed warning may be useful for reducing the rate of malingering. The combination of some noteworthy effect sizes, despite low power and the small size of some groups, suggests that further investigation of the effects of warnings needs to continue to determine their effect more fully.

Remembering beliefs

Optimal decision-making requires us to accurately pinpoint the basis of our thoughts, e.g. whether they originate from our memory or our imagination. This paper argues that the phenomenal qualities of our subjective experience provide permissible evidence to revise beliefs, particularly as it pertains to memory. I look to the source monitoring literature to reconcile circumstances where mnemic beliefs and mnemic qualia conflict. By separating the experience of remembering from biological facts of memory, unusual cases make sense, such as memory qualia without memory (e.g. déjà vu, false memories) or a failure to have memory qualia with memory (e.g. functional amnesia, unintentional plagiarism). I argue that a pragmatic, probabilistic approach to belief revision is a way to rationally incorporate information from conscious experience, whilst acknowledging its inherent difficulties as an epistemic source. I conclude with a Bayesian defense of source monitoring based on C.I. Lewis’ coherence argument for memorial knowledge.