The Cyrenaican Prehistory Project 2011: Late-Holocene environments and human activity from a cave fill in Cyrenaica, Libya

Little is known about late Holocene environmental change in Cyrenaica. The late Holocene sequence in the Haua Fteah, the key regional site, is highly discontinuous and characterised by stable-burning deposits. The geoarchaeology of the late-Holocene cave fill of a small cave, CP1565, located close to the Haua Fteah, is described. The well-stratified sequence, dating from the fourth century AD to the present day, provides a glimpse of life at the bottom of the settlement hierarchy and of changing environments over the last 1600 years, with degraded vegetation and aridity in the ‘Little Ice Age’.

Refugees and Human Rights: The Future of International Protection in the UK

The global refugee crisis is raising profound questions for the future of international protection. This article, based on a talk given as part of Refugee Week 2015, offers reflections on the current debate. The need to internationalise the conversation is underlined. Although no one state can resolve the problems of the world, it is precisely in the response to the plight of the forcibly displaced that commitments to human rights and refugee protection are tested in practical terms. This article argues that the UK’s approach remains inadequate and problematic.

BOOK: Property Rights and Human Rights in a Global Context

Property as a human rights concern is manifested through its incorporation in international instruments and as a subject of the law through property-related cases considered by international human rights organs. Yet, for the most part, the relationship between property and human rights has been discussed in rather superficial terms, lacking a clear substantive connection or common language. That said, the currents of globalisation have witnessed a new era of interrelation between these two areas of the law, including the emergence of international intellectual property law and the recognition of indigenous claims, which, in fundamental ways, speak to an engagement with human rights law.

This collection starts the conversation between human rights lawyers and property lawyers and explores analytical approaches to the increasing relationship between property and human rights in a global context. The chapters engage with key theoretical and policy debates and range across three main themes: the re-evaluation of the public/private divide in the law; the tensions between the market and social justice in development and the balance between the rights of individuals and those of communities. The chapters adopt a global, comparative perspective and engage in case studies from countries including India, Philippines, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom and includes various regions of Africa and Europe.

Bouyid v Belgium: The “minimum level of severity” and Human Dignity's Role in Article 3 ECHR

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights recently delivered an important judgment on Article 3 ECHR in the case of Bouyid v Belgium. In Bouyid, the Grand Chamber was called upon to consider whether slaps inflicted on a minor and an adult in police custody were in breach of Article 3 ECHR, which provides that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. Overruling the Chamber judgment in the case, the Grand Chamber ruled by 14 votes to 3 that there had been a substantive violation of Article 3 in that the applicants had been subjected to degrading treatment by members of the Belgian police; it found that there had been a breach of the investigative duty under Article 3 also. In this comment, I focus on the fundamental basis of disagreement between the majority of the Grand Chamber and those who found themselves in dissent, on the question of whether there had been a substantive breach of Article 3. The crux of the disagreement lay in the understanding and application of the test of ‘minimum level of severity’, which the ECtHR has established as decisive of whether a particular form of ill-treatment crosses the Article 3 threshold, seen also in light of Article 3’s absolute character, which makes it non-displaceable – that is, immune to trade-offs of the type applicable in relation to qualified rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. I consider the way the majority of the Grand Chamber unpacked and applied the concept of dignity – or ‘human dignity’ – towards finding a substantive breach of Article 3, and briefly distil some of the principles underpinning the understanding of human dignity emerging in the Court’s analysis.

A prospective view of animal and human Fasciolosis

Fasciolosis, a food-borne trematodiasis, results following infection with the parasites, Fasciola hepatica and Fasciola gigantica. These trematodes greatly affect the global agricultural community, infecting millions of ruminants worldwide and causing annual economic losses in excess of US $3 billion. Fasciolosis, an important zoonosis, is classified by WHO as a neglected tropical disease with an estimated 17 million people infected and a further 180 million people at risk of infection. The significant impact on agriculture and human health together with the increasing demand for animal-derived food products to support global population growth demonstrate that fasciolosis is a major One Health problem. This review details the problematic issues surrounding fasciolosis control, including drug resistance, lack of diagnosis and the threat that hybridization of the Fasciola species poses to future animal and human health. We discuss how these parasites may mediate their long-term survival through regulation and modulation of the host immune system, by altering the host immune homeostasis and/or by influencing the intestinal microbiome particularly in respect to concurrent infections with other pathogens. Large genome, transcriptome and proteomic data sets are now available to support an integrated One Health approach to develop novel diagnostic and control strategies for both animal and human disease.

On-line Emotion Recognition in a 3-D Activation-Valence-Time Continuum using Acoustic and Linguistic Cues

For many applications of emotion recognition, such as virtual agents, the system must select responses while the user is speaking. This requires reliable on-line recognition of the user’s affect. However most emotion recognition systems are based on turnwise processing. We present a novel approach to on-line emotion recognition from speech using Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks. Emotion is recognised frame-wise in a two-dimensional valence-activation continuum. In contrast to current state-of-the-art approaches, recognition is performed on low-level signal frames, similar to those used for speech recognition. No statistical functionals are applied to low-level feature contours. Framing at a higher level is therefore unnecessary and regression outputs can be produced in real-time for every low-level input frame. We also investigate the benefits of including linguistic features on the signal frame level obtained by a keyword spotter.

Tracking Human Position and Lower Body Parts Using Kalman and Particle Filters Constrained by Human Biomechanics

In this paper, a novel framework for visual tracking of human body parts is introduced. The approach presented demonstrates the feasibility of recovering human poses with data from a single uncalibrated camera by using a limb-tracking system based on a 2-D articulated model and a double-tracking strategy. Its key contribution is that the 2-D model is only constrained by biomechanical knowledge about human bipedal motion, instead of relying on constraints that are linked to a specific activity or camera view. These characteristics make our approach suitable for real visual surveillance applications. Experiments on a set of indoor and outdoor sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on tracking human lower body parts. Moreover, a detail comparison with current tracking methods is presented.

Adaptive Fusion Of Particle Filtering And Spatio-Temporal Motion Energy For Human Tracking

Object tracking is an active research area nowadays due to its importance in human computer interface, teleconferencing and video surveillance. However, reliable tracking of objects in the presence of occlusions, pose and illumination changes is still a challenging topic. In this paper, we introduce a novel tracking approach that fuses two cues namely colour and spatio-temporal motion energy within a particle filter based framework. We conduct a measure of coherent motion over two image frames, which reveals the spatio-temporal dynamics of the target. At the same time, the importance of both colour and motion energy cues is determined in the stage of reliability evaluation. This determination helps maintain the performance of the tracking system against abrupt appearance changes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other state of the art techniques in the used test datasets.