Chase over the Nile: The Social Evolution of Riverine Landscape in Urban Egypt

Throughout its history, Cairo evolved as a regional metropolis that sprawls along the banks of the Nile accumulating narratives of evolving social landscape. Overlooking the Nile reflected a privileged social position and place for the urban elite. In spatial terms, the urban bourgeoisie tend to develop living havens in enclaves that are distant from the populace’s everyday life. Ironically, exclusive settlements only attract urban growth further in their direction. This chapter offers an analytical reading of the socio-spatial structure of Cairo following the emergence and decline of a series bourgeoisie quarters along the shores of the Nile. It reports urban narratives based on archival records, documents and investigation of historical texts and travelers’ accounts. This essay argues that cities are essentially social constructs in which hierarchy and connectivity are fundamental aspects of its economic and spatial logic. Through social ambition and desire for upgrade, middle class infiltrate into bourgeoisie havens and sometimes encircle it, seeking better living condition inscribed by social mobility and connectivity to centres of wealth and power. Being both natural barrier and cohesive spine, the Nile helped Cairo to develop successive nucleuses of highly crafted urban experiences that have left their imprints on the contemporary urban scene.

Free Improvisation in Europe:Lecture and Hands-on Workshop, given at 5 different universities in Brazil during February - June 2014

The lecture traces the beginnings of the free improvisation scene in Europe, commencing in the 1960. I present a multitude of video and audio examples of some of the most prominent improvisers of the time.
I focus specifically on the scene that developed around John Stevens and his SME (Spontaneous Music Ensemble). The work of Derek Bailey, specifically his writings in “Improvisation: its nature and practice in music” (1980), will feature.

The practical workshop invites improvisers (beginners to advanced with any instruments) to work with me on several listening and improvisation exercises.
Many of the exercises will be based on the innovative methods as developed by John Stevens in his work “Search and Reflect”. Participants will be able to experiment with a few essential ‘sound/listening’ exercises, guided by myself.
It is envisaged that a small ensemble is formed which will explore several improvisatory strategies. This part is open to all skill levels, all ages and any instrumental groupings.

Rosetta arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Alan Fitzsimmons reports on the long-awaited liaison and sets the scene for comet and spacecraft to approach perihelion together.

Spatial Distribution of Soil Geochemistry in Geoforensics

Two common scenarios in Geoforensics (definition in text) are considered: the provenance, or localization of unknown samples and the question of sample variability at scenes of crime/alibi locations. Both have been discussed in forensic and soil science publications, but mostly within a theoretical or non-forensic context. These previous publications provide context for the two case study scenarios (one actual, one based on a range of criminal casework) that consider provenance and variability. A challenging scientific question in geoforensics is the provenance question: ‘where may this sample have come from?’ A question the Tellus data can assist in answering. The question of variation between samples maybe less of a challenge, yet variation between a suspect sample within a scene of crime requires detailed sampling. Variation on a larger (tens to hundreds of kilometres) scale may provide useful intelligence on where a sample came from. To summarise, databases such as Tellus and TellusBorder may be used as effective tools to assist in the search for the origin of displaced soil and sediment

Forensic analysis of wooden safety matches - A case study

In this case, an individual was suspected of attempting to burn materials potentially relating to a murder case. A number of spent and unspent matches were seized at the scene by police for forensic examination. Coincidentally, a police raid at the suspect's house revealed a number of matchboxes, all of the same brand, containing matches that had a visual similarity to those recovered at the scene. Stable Isotope Profiling (SIP) was used to assess whether matches could either be distinguished or shown to be indistinguishable by 13C and 2H isotopic composition. These results were then compared to those from the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis of match heads and microscopy of the wood. SIP showed the scene matches and seized matches to be different, which was confirmed by XRD and microscopy analyses.

Series Introduction: Centenary Classics

The Centenary Classics contains six titles in this special edition series. The year 2016 marks the beginning of the centenary period of the Irish Free State's establishment. This beautifully produced limited edition series examines the fascinating time of change and evolution in the Ireland of 100 years ago. Each volume is a first-hand account of individuals or events during the 1913-23 revolutionary period. They are each introduced by leading experts and academics in the field - giving a contemporary analysis of the original text - while a general series introduction by Fearghal McGarry sets the scene of the period. The complete series collectively tells the story of the birth of the Irish nation and consist of the following six titles: A Chronicle of Jails - Darrell Figgis; Civil War in Ulster - Joseph Johnston; Free State or Republic? - Padraig de Burca and John F. Boyle; Rising Out - Ernie O'Malley; Victory and Woe - Mossie Harnett and The Victory of Sinn Fein - P. S. O'Hegarty.

Navigating the Borderlands: Brian McGilloway as Contemporary Cartographer of the Liminal in the Ulster Landscape

Set in the borderlands between Letterkenny and Derry-Londonderry, a landscape scarred by geological fold, river and cartographer’s pen, the Ulster crime novelist Brian McGilloway chronicles the hopes and fears of a contemporary society unable to escape a complicated history, redolent and entwined with the voices of its ‘ghosts of its past.’ Through his choice of chief protagonist, An Garda Síochána officer Benedict Devlin, McGilloway turns detective to critically investigate the both the seemingly straightforward and the unseen dwelling in the rural Ulster landscape. Following in the footsteps of Nordic and Tartan Noir in making commentary on current societ,y McGilloway recognises the importance of the past in trying to reach an understanding of the present. His critique however goes beyond criminal behaviour motivated primarily by politics or religion, allowing a deeper and more meaningful diagnosis of the ‘state of the nation’. Place, name and event become especially important in contextualising the liminality of McGilloway’s real rural border settings. In doing so, McGilloway continues in the rich tradition of Ulster poet such as Heaney, MacNiece, Muldoon and Hewitt in trying to rationalise the man-made amidst the elemental in the land of both the ‘Planter & The Gael.’ History, language, tradition and the sacral are all instruments of investigation in helping McGilloway present a revealing pathology and atlas of our times to his readers. Turning literary investigator, the author contends that there is much to learn from this physiography, not just for the borderlands region, but for the wider countryside and society beyond. Keywords Cultural Atlas, Crime Fiction, Place, Poetry, Rural.

Partial Palmprint Matching Using Invariant Local Minutiae Descriptors

In forensic investigations, it is common for forensic investigators to obtain a photograph of evidence left at the scene of crimes to aid them catch the culprit(s). Although, fingerprints are the most popular evidence that can be used, scene of crime officers claim that more than 30% of the evidence recovered from crime scenes originate from palms. Usually, palmprints evidence left at crime scenes are partial since very rarely full palmprints are obtained. In particular, partial palmprints do not exhibit a structured shape and often do not contain a reference point that can be used for their alignment to achieve efficient matching. This makes conventional matching methods based on alignment and minutiae pairing, as used in fingerprint recognition, to fail in partial palmprint recognition problems. In this paper a new partial-to-full palmprint recognition based on invariant minutiae descriptors is proposed where the partial palmprint’s minutiae are extracted and considered as the distinctive and discriminating features for each palmprint image. This is achieved by assigning to each minutiae a feature descriptor formed using the values of all the orientation histograms of the minutiae at hand. This allows for the descriptors to be rotation invariant and as such do not require any image alignment at the matching stage. The results obtained show that the proposed technique yields a recognition rate of 99.2%. The solution does give a high confidence to the judicial jury in their deliberations and decision.

In the Shadows of the Old Town: Thomas Anna and 19th-century Glasgow

In 1858, a volume entitled Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs – being sketches of life in the streets, wynds and dens of the city of Glasgow was published under the pseudonym of ‘Shadow’ by Alexander Brown, a Glaswegian flâneur and reformer. Its frontispiece is an etching which depicts a theatre-like proscenium arch whose curtains have been withdrawn to reveal to the audience all the poverty, destitution and disorder that one was likely to find after dark in the insalubrious quarters of the city. At the extreme left-hand side, partly obscured by the curtain a silhouetted figure stands behind an unwieldy camera perched on a tripod. Distinctly unaffected by the mêlée, an arm is calmly raised and a finger precisely arched in the moment before the shutter is clicked and the scene committed to record. The volume, however, relies exclusively on textual descriptions to evoke the underside of the city and contains no photographs at all. Instead, the use of the word photograph in the title can be understood as a metaphor for detached scientific objectivity, a quality much celebrated by nineteenth-century reformers and investigators of social ills. As it happened, a decade after Shadow disappeared into the labyrinthine back-lands of Old Town Glasgow, he was followed there by a real photographer. In 1868, Thomas Annan was commissioned by the City Improvements Trust to take photographs of the Old Town in its last moments of existence before it was pulled down under a series of legislative acts. But perhaps paradoxically, given Shadow’s faith in the analytical properties of photography, Annan’s work seems to refute much of the material contained in Midnight Scenes and other similar tracts. Instead of the dens, shebeens, labyrinths and rowdy crowds described by Shadow, Annan’s depictions of the Old Town convey a static, calm environment, one which is often sparsely inhabited by a curious but apparently orderly population.

Taking account of the sensational tendencies of many reformists’ texts, this paper investigates the discrepancies between the two representations, focussing in particular on the constraints which operated on Annan during his commission. It argues that Annan’s compositions – which became very influential on other 19th century photographers of everyday life such as John Thomson or Jacob Riis – far from being dispassionate analytical works, emerged as a result of a matrix of factors which included: photographic and artistic precedents; Annan’s own predilections as a photographer; technological limitations; the nature of the commission from the City Improvements Trust and political climate in which it was given; the medieval urban fabric in which he had to operate; and, perhaps, most importantly, the identity of the Old Towns inhabitants themselves.

Traffic gap judgment in people with significant peripheral field loss.

PURPOSE: Subjects with significant peripheral field loss (PFL) self report difficulty in street crossing. In this study, we compared the traffic gap judgment ability of fully sighted and PFL subjects to determine whether accuracy in identifying crossable gaps was adversely affected because of field loss. Moreover, we explored the contribution of visual and nonvisual factors to traffic gap judgment ability. METHODS: Eight subjects with significant PFL as a result of advanced retinitis pigmentosa or glaucoma with binocular visual field <20 degrees and five age-matched normals (NV) were recruited. All subjects were required to judge when they perceived it was safe to cross at a 2-way 4-lane street while they stood on the curb. Eye movements were recorded by an eye tracker as the subjects performed the decision task. Movies of the eye-on-scene were made offline and fixation patterns were classified into either relevant or irrelevant. Subjects' street-crossing behavior, habitual approach to street crossing, and perceived difficulties were assessed. RESULTS: Compared with normal vision (NV) subjects, the PFL subjects identified 12% fewer crossable gaps while making 23% more errors by identifying a gap as crossable when it was too short (p < 0.05). The differences in traffic gap judgment ability of the PFL subjects might be explained by the significantly smaller fixation area (p = 0.006) and fewer fixations distributed to the relevant tasks (p = 0.001). The subjects' habitual approach to street crossing and perceived difficulties in street crossing (r > 0.60) were significantly correlated with traffic gap judgment performance. CONCLUSIONS: As a consequence of significant field loss, limited visual information about the traffic environment can be acquired, resulting in significantly reduced performance in judging safe crossable gaps. This poor traffic gap judgment ability in the PFL subjects raises important concerns for their safety when attempting to cross the street.

Can publicly available webcameras and mechanical Turks be used to evaluate physical activity policy and built environment change?

Introduction: Fewer than 50% of adults and 40% of youth meet US CDC guidelines for physical activity (PA) with the built environment (BE) a culprit for limited PA. A challenge in evaluating policy and BE change is the forethought to capture a priori PA behaviors and the ability to eliminate bias in post-change environments. The present objective was to analyze existing public data feeds to quantify effectiveness of BE interventions. The Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS) has collected 135 million images of outdoor environments from 12,000 webcams since 2006. Many of these environments have experienced BE change. Methods: One example of BE change is the addition of protected bike lanes and a bike share program in Washington, DC.Weselected an AMOS webcam that captured this change. AMOS captures a photograph from eachwebcamevery half hour.AMOScaptured the 120 webcam photographs between 0700 and 1900 during the first work week of June 2009 and the 120 photographs from the same week in 2010. We used the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website to crowd-source the image annotation. MTurk workers were paid US$0.01 to mark each pedestrian, cyclist and vehicle in a photograph. Each image was coded 5 unique times (n=1200). The data, counts of transportation mode, was downloaded to SPSS for analysis. Results: The number of cyclists per scene increased four-fold between 2009 and 2010 (F=36.72, p=0.002). There was no significant increase in pedestrians between the two years, however there was a significant increase in number of vehicles per scene (F=16.81, p