Reva Siegel and the Role of Religion in Constructing the Meaning of ‘Human Dignity

The “religious understanding” of dignity is a topic of considerable complexity and is the subject of extensive scholarship. In this paper, I consider understandings of dignity that are currently under discussion in Roman Catholic circles, not least because Catholic discussions of dignity are often seen as influential in public policy and legal interpretation, directly and indirectly. I shall focus on one relatively neglected issue in legal scholarship: how scholars go about the task of identifying what a particular religion’s understanding of human dignity involves.
To illustrate the methodological problems that such an enterprise raises, I shall take one attempt by a scholar writing in the field of secular legal scholarship to describe Catholic understandings of dignity in the context of abortion and same-sex marriage. The discussion is that of Reva Siegel, an academic lawyer at Yale University; her recent analysis of differing understandings of dignity illustrates some of the issues that arise when the secular scholarly community addresses religious understandings of dignity.

Young people exiting homelessness: An exploration of process, meaning and definition

In the past decade in particular, research attention has shifted from an almost exclusive focus on routes or pathways into homelessness towards the investigation of exits from homelessness. As well as demonstrating the multiple paths possible for young people who become homeless, recent research, and longitudinal studies in particular, has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the homeless pathways of young people. Nonetheless, knowledge and understanding of the nature of homeless exits, and of the mechanisms that facilitate the transition out of homelessness, is far from complete. This paper explores the processes surrounding the exit routes taken by young people out of homelessness and the meanings attached by them to these housing transitions based on selected findings from an ongoing qualitative longitudinal study of homeless youth in Dublin, Ireland. More broadly, the paper considers the utility of distinguishing between the types of routes that young people take out of homelessness, with particular attention to the notions of ‘independent’ and ‘dependent’ exits. The paper aims to further the discussion and debate on the conceptualisation of homeless exits and also discusses a number of policy implications arising from the study's findings.

The Meaning of Drug Use among Homeless Young People:A longitudinal pathways analysis

A strong link between drug use and homelessness has long since been documented in the international literature. However, much of the research has concentrated on the direction of the relationship between drug use and homelessness, seeking to establish drug use as a cause or consequence of homelessness, with far less attention to the intersection of drug and homeless ‘careers’. This paper examines the drug and homeless pathways of young people who are participants in a qualitative longitudinal study of homeless youth in Dublin, Ireland. The findings highlight downward drug transitions as associated with exiting homelessness and continued or escalated consumption as associated with remaining homeless. Analyses of the meanings young people attach to drug use over time reveal the importance of housing as an enabler to engaging with treatment and as assisting the process of becoming and remaining drug free. Young people who remained homeless did not accept their situations, as ‘acculturation’ accounts would suggest; rather, they aspired to changing their situations. However, they also face strong barriers to accessing housing which in turn hamper their efforts to address the matter of their drug use. The implications for how the homeless/drug use ‘nexus’ is conceptualised and understood, as well as implications for policy, are discussed.

Experiencing Youth Justice: Process, Meaning and Legitimacy

Reform of the youth justice system, including the wide incorporation of restorative justice approaches, was a central component of the Criminal Justice Review (2000). Following the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Assembly, the Youth Justice Review (2011) made a series of recommendations for further reforms. These included proposals for the introduction of a statutory time limit in youth cases to tackle avoidable delay. Strengthening legitimacy and advancing rights-based approaches are key themes underpinning the recommendations of Youth Justice Review (2011). Young people’s views of justice within the system are critical to our understanding of how such aims can be achieved. This presentation is based on findings from a longitudinal qualitative study exploring young people’s experiences of transitions into and from custody in the Juvenile Justice Centre. Using a life-history approach young people’s experiences of justice at various stages of the criminal justice process and in the wider context of their lives is explored. Key issues such as social contexts, legitimacy and perceptions of fairness are highlighted and the implications of this for system reform are critically examined.

Using Graph Components Derived from an Associative Concept Dictionary to Predict fMRI Neural Activation Patterns that Represent the Meaning of Nouns

In this study, we introduce an original distance definition for graphs, called the Markov-inverse-F measure (MiF). This measure enables the integration of classical graph theory indices with new knowledge pertaining to structural feature extraction from semantic networks. MiF improves the conventional Jaccard and/or Simpson indices, and reconciles both the geodesic information (random walk) and co-occurrence adjustment (degree balance and distribution). We measure the effectiveness of graph-based coefficients through the application of linguistic graph information for a neural activity recorded during conceptual processing in the human brain. Specifically, the MiF distance is computed between each of the nouns used in a previous neural experiment and each of the in-between words in a subgraph derived from the Edinburgh Word Association Thesaurus of English. From the MiF-based information matrix, a machine learning model can accurately obtain a scalar parameter that specifies the degree to which each voxel in (the MRI image of) the brain is activated by each word or each principal component of the intermediate semantic features. Furthermore, correlating the voxel information with the MiF-based principal components, a new computational neurolinguistics model with a network connectivity paradigm is created. This allows two dimensions of context space to be incorporated with both semantic and neural distributional representations.

Beyond Typologies: Foregrounding Meaning and Motive in Domestic Violence Perpetration

Within the study of domestic violence typological approaches have gained prominence in part as a response to the wider feminist canon that presumes perpetrators are all simply motivated by male power. In this article we use a single case study to query the presumption inherent in the most commonly used typological approaches that offender motivations remain largely static overtime and can be read off easily from self-reports or official records. We conclude by pointing to the need, both for academics and practitioners, to engage interpretively with the specific meanings acts of violence hold for domestic violence perpetrators - informed as they can be by sexist values, perceptions of entitlement and a specific history of conflict, suspicion or grievance – that can change who they are and the way they behave in the aftermath of assaults and breakups, as the foreground of crime is reincorporated into a background narrative.

Comparison of module detection algorithms in protein networks and investigation of the biological meaning of predicted modules

Background
It is generally acknowledged that a functional understanding of a biological system can only be obtained by an understanding of the collective of molecular interactions in form of biological networks. Protein networks are one particular network type of special importance, because proteins form the functional base units of every biological cell. On a mesoscopic level of protein networks, modules are of significant importance because these building blocks may be the next elementary functional level above individual proteins allowing to gain insight into fundamental organizational principles of biological cells.
Results
In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of five popular and four novel module detection algorithms. We study these module prediction methods for simulated benchmark networks as well as 10 biological protein interaction networks (PINs). A particular focus of our analysis is placed on the biological meaning of the predicted modules by utilizing the Gene Ontology (GO) database as gold standard for the definition of biological processes. Furthermore, we investigate the robustness of the results by perturbing the PINs simulating in this way our incomplete knowledge of protein networks.
Conclusions
Overall, our study reveals that there is a large heterogeneity among the different module prediction algorithms if one zooms-in the biological level of biological processes in the form of GO terms and all methods are severely affected by a slight perturbation of the networks. However, we also find pathways that are enriched in multiple modules, which could provide important information about the hierarchical organization of the system