[Book reviews] Review of J. E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period and D. Sivan and Z. Cochavi-Rainey, West Semitic Vocabulary in Egyptian Script of the 14th to the 10th Centuries BCE

Reviews of: [1] James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period, (1994), Princeton University Press. [2] Daniel Sivan and Zipora Cochavi-Rainey, West Semitic Vocabulary in Egyptian Script of the 14th to the 10th Centuries BCE, (1992), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press.

The Jama legal narrative part I: The JAMA Model and narrative interpretation patterns

For the purposes of starting to tackle, within artificial intelligence (AI), the narrative aspects of legal narratives in a criminal evidence perspective, traditional AI models of narrative understanding can arguably supplement extant models of legal narratives from the scholarly literature of law, jury studies, or the semiotics of law. Not only: the literary (or cinematic) models prominent in a given culture impinge, with their poetic conventions, on the way members of the culture make sense of the world. This shows glaringly in the sample narrative from the Continent-the Jama murder, the inquiry, and the public outcry-we analyse in this paper. Apparently in the same racist crime category as the case of Stephen Lawrence's murder (in Greenwich on 22 April 1993) with the ensuing still current controversy in the UK, the Jama case (some 20 years ago) stood apart because of a very unusual element: the eyewitnesses identifying the suspects were a group of football referees and linesmen eating together at a restaurant, and seeing the sleeping man as he was set ablaze in a public park nearby. Professional background as witnesses-cum-factfinders in a mass sport, and public perceptions of their required characteristics, couldn't but feature prominently in the public perception of the case, even more so as the suspects were released by the magistrate conducting the inquiry. There are sides to this case that involve different expected effects in an inquisitorial criminal procedure system from the Continent, where an investigating magistrate leads the inquiry and prepares the prosecution case, as opposed to trial by jury under the Anglo-American adversarial system. In the JAMA prototype, we tried to approach the given case from the coign of vantage of narrative models from AI.

Absence makes the professional try harder? Meeting the needs of socially excluded young men who become fathers

Research on socially excluded young fathers has been minimally addressed in the literature (SEU 1999, 2004). Indeed, research on young parents which informs health and social care professionals is often presented ‘through the eyes of the mother’ (Reeves 2006). Young parents in general and young fathers in particular are notoriously difficult to gain access to and engage with (Tyrer et al 2005) particularly if they have had previous negative involvement with the statutory services. Moreover, as Daniel and Taylor (1999, 2001, 2003) point out, professionals working in the health and care services often have an intense ‘maternal’ focus and this often excludes fathers from discussion and decisions about their children. The focus of this paper, drawing on two narrative studies of young fathers aged between 15-24 from the US and USA, is to evaluate the features of professional relationships that young fathers describe as finding helpful. Indeed, the findings discuss moving away from a culture of parenting classes, which all the young men interviewed described as finding problematical and in some cases embarrassing, to a culture of support which actively draws on their strengths and helps them become providers for their new families.