Recent data suggest no further recovery in North Sea Large Fish Indicator

We detail the calculations of North Sea Large Fish Indicator values for 2009-2011, demonstrating an apparent stall in recovery. Therefore, recovery to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive's good environmental status of 0.3 by the 2020 deadline now looks less certain and may take longer than was expected using data from 2006 to 2008.

An Inconvenient Truth: Barriers to Truth Recovery in the Aftermath of Institutional Child Abuse in Ireland

Contemporary settled democracies, including the United States, England and Wales and Ireland, have witnessed a string of high profile cases of institutional child abuse in both church and state settings. Set against the broader literature on transitional justice, this analysis argues that there are significant barriers to truth recovery within the particular context of historical institutional abuse by the clergy in the Republic of Ireland. In the main, I argue that the frameworks of the inquiries and commissions into historical institutional child abuse are not conducive to truth recovery or the search for justice in dealing with the legacy of an abusive past. It is the church-state relationship which makes the Irish situation noteworthy and unique. The Catholic Church and child care institutions are especially self-protective, secretive and closed by nature and strongly discourage the drawing of attention to any deficiencies in organisational procedures. The nature of the public inquiry process also means that there is often a rather linear focus on accountability and apportioning blame. Collectively, such difficulties inhibit fuller systemic investigation of the veracity of what actually happened and, in turn, meaningful modification of child care policies. The article concludes by offering some thoughts on implications for transitional justice discourses more broadly as well as the residual issues for Ireland and other settled democracies in terms of moving on from the legacy of institutional child abuse.

A spatio-temporal 2D-models framework for human pose recovery in monocular sequences

This paper addresses the pose recovery problem of a particular articulated object: the human body. In this model-based approach, the 2D-shape is associated to the corresponding stick figure allowing the joint segmentation and pose recovery of the subject observed in the scene. The main disadvantage of 2D-models is their restriction to the viewpoint. To cope with this limitation, local spatio-temporal 2D-models corresponding to many views of the same sequences are trained, concatenated and sorted in a global framework. Temporal and spatial constraints are then considered to build the probabilistic transition matrix (PTM) that gives a frame to frame estimation of the most probable local models to use during the fitting procedure, thus limiting the feature space. This approach takes advantage of 3D information avoiding the use of a complex 3D human model. The experiments carried out on both indoor and outdoor sequences have demonstrated the ability of this approach to adequately segment pedestrians and estimate their poses independently of the direction of motion during the sequence. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland

There has been considerable and protracted debate on whether a formal truth recovery process should be established in Northern Ireland. Some of the strongest opposition to the creation of such a body has been from unionist political elites and the security forces. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this article argues that the dynamics of denial and silence have been instrumental in shaping their concerns. It explores how questions of memory, identity and denial have created a ‘myth of blamelessness’ in unionist discourse that is at odds with the reasons for a truth process being established. It also examines how three interlocking manifestations of silence – ‘silence as passivity,’ ‘silence as loyalty’ and ‘silence as pragmatism’ – have furthered unionists’ opposition to dealing with the past. This article argues that making peace with the past requires an active deconstruction of these practices.

Service user involvement in drug treatment programs: Barriers to implementation and potential benefits for client recovery

Service user forums have the potential for improving awareness of services, empowering service users and strengthening community partnerships within an inclusive treatment and rehabilitation framework. The research aimed to investigate perspectives about service user involvement in order to inform the development of effective service user forum(s) in west Ireland. A total of 30 interviews with key service providers and 12 interviews with service users were conducted, with interview questions focusing on: (1) awareness of the Service User Support Team and (2) barriers to service user involvement and the development of service user forums in the region. An integrated data collection and thematic analysis was undertaken. Current levels of service user involvement were low, restricted by one-way communication and appeared grounded in user-provider power differentials and stigma relating to drug dependency. Service providers queried the actual terms of reference, capacity and training that would be needed for service user forums to advocate and lobby for service users. The use of existing support groups, creation of internet user forums and rotation of rural meetings were recommended to promote engagement among service users. The research underscores the need for transparency, resources and a framework for good practice that reflects a participatory approach


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