Prospects for women's legislative representation in postsocialist Europe: the views of female politicians

Research on women’s political representation in post-socialist Europe has highlighted the role of cultural and political factors in obstructing women’s access to legislative power, such as the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes, electoral systems, and the absence of a feminist movement. Yet the role of women political elites in enhancing or hindering women’s access to political power in the region has so far remained uncharted. This article seeks to fill some of the existing gaps in this literature by examining the views of women politicians with regard to women’s political underrepresentation and their assessments of strategies for redressing this imbalance. Findings from the analysis reveal that although women politicians recognize gender inequalities in representation as a problem requiring intervention, how the problem is perceived, and the preferred measures to deal with it, is largely shaped by the social and cultural context in which these actors are embedded.

The text and the tale: differences between scientific reports and scientists’ reportings on the eruption of Mount Chance, Montserrat

This article looks at the difference between scientists’ written reports and their oral accounts, explanations and stories. The subject of these discourses is the eruption of Mount Chance on Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory in the Eastern Caribbean, and its continued monitoring and reporting. Scientific notions of risk and uncertainty which feature in these texts and tales will subsequently be examined and critiqued. Further to this, this article will end by pointing out that, ironically, the latter - the tale – can in some cases be a more effective and approximate mode of communication with the public than the former – the text.

Robust Extraction of Text from Camera Images using Colour and Spatial Information Simultaneously

The importance and use of text extraction from camera based coloured scene images is rapidly increasing with time. Text within a camera grabbed image can contain a huge amount of meta data about that scene. Such meta data can be useful for identification, indexing and retrieval purposes. While the segmentation and recognition of text from document images is quite successful, detection of coloured scene text is a new challenge for all camera based images. Common problems for text extraction from camera based images are the lack of prior knowledge of any kind of text features such as colour, font, size and orientation as well as the location of the probable text regions. In this paper, we document the development of a fully automatic and extremely robust text segmentation technique that can be used for any type of camera grabbed frame be it single image or video. A new algorithm is proposed which can overcome the current problems of text segmentation. The algorithm exploits text appearance in terms of colour and spatial distribution. When the new text extraction technique was tested on a variety of camera based images it was found to out perform existing techniques (or something similar). The proposed technique also overcomes any problems that can arise due to an unconstraint complex background. The novelty in the works arises from the fact that this is the first time that colour and spatial information are used simultaneously for the purpose of text extraction.

Discourse and Text

This article discusses tense and aspect in the context of attested forms of discourse and text. The emphasis is on the semantic, pragmatic, textual, and stylistic functions of tense in context, taking into account linguistic features in the surrounding discourse, as well as the importance of factors such as medium (spoken or written), register (degree of formality), text type (literary vs. journalistic vs. conversational etc.), and discourse mode (narrative vs. report vs. description, etc.). Thus, tense and aspect are analyzed not purely as part of a linguistic “system” as such, but in the context of particular texts or forms of discourse. The article also explores the concept of “markedness” through two case studies: the narrative present and the narrative imperfect. Finally, it assesses the roles played by tenses in conveying particular points of view in texts, including shifts and/or ambiguities in point of view; Segmented Discourse Representation Theory; internal focalization and the French imperfective past tense; and textual polyphony.

Annotating an Oral Corpus using the Text Encoding Initiative. Methodology, Problems, Solutions

The objective of this paper is to describe and evaluate the application of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines to a corpus of oral French, this being the first corpus of oral French where the TEI has been used. The paper explains the purpose of the corpus, both in creating a specialist corpus of néo-contage that will broaden the range of oral corpora available, and, more importantly, in creating a dataset to explore a variety of oral French that has a particularly interesting status in terms of factors such as conception orale/écrite, réalisation médiale and comportement communicatif (Koch and Oesterreicher 2001). The linguistic phenomena to be encoded are both stylistic (speech and thought presentation) and syntactic (negation, detachment, inversion), and all represent areas where previous research has highlighted the significance of factors such as medium, register and discourse type, as well as a host of linguistic factors (syntactic, phonetic, lexical). After a discussion of how a tagset can be designed and applied within the TEI to encode speech and thought presentation, negation, detachment and inversion, the final section of the paper evaluates the benefits and possible drawbacks of the methodology offered by the TEI when applied to a syntactic and stylistic markup of an oral corpus.

Experiences with mephedrone pre- and post-legislative controls: Perceptions of safety and sources of supply

Background: Drug scenes within several countries have changed in recent years to incorporate a range of licit psychoactive products, collectively known as “legal highs.” Hundreds of different legal high products have been described in the literature. Many of these products contain synthetic stimulants that allegedly
“mirror” the effects of some illicit drugs. In 2009–2010, growing concern by the UK and Irish governments focused on mephedrone, a synthetic stimulant that had become embedded within several drug scenes in Britain and Ireland. In April 2010, mephedrone and related cathinone derivatives were banned under
the UK’s Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Setting aside “worse case scenarios” that have been portrayed by UK and Irish media, little is known about mephedrone use from the consumer’s perspective. The purpose of this paper was to (1) explore respondents’ experiences with mephedrone, (2) examine users’ perceptions
about the safety of mephedrone, and primarily to (3) examine sources of mephedrone supply during the pre- and post-ban periods.
Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 adults who had used mephedrone during 2009–2010. Data collection occurred in May and June 2010, following the ban on mephedrone. A total of 20/23 respondents had used mephedrone during the post-ban period, and the vast majority had prior
experience with ecstasy or cocaine. Respondents’ ages ranged from 19 to 51, approximately half of the sample were female and the majority (19 of 23) were employed in full- or part-time work.
Results: Most respondents reported positive experiences with mephedrone, and for some, the substance emerged as a drug of choice. None of the respondents reported that the once-legal status of mephedrone implied that it was safe to use. Very few respondents reported purchasing mephedrone from street-based
or on-line headshops during the pre-ban period, and these decisions were guided in part by respondents’ attempts to avoid “drug user” identities. Most respondents purchased or obtained mephedrone from friends or dealers, and mephedrone was widely available during the 10-week period following the ban. Respondents reported a greater reliance on dealers and a change in mephedrone packaging following the criminalisation of mephedrone.
Conclusion: The findings are discussed in the context of what appears to be a rapidly changing mephedrone market. We discuss the possible implications of criminalising mephedrone, including the potential displacement effects and the development of an illicit market.