‘Ghosts in the Head and Ghost Towns in the Field: Ethnography and the Experience of Presence and Absence’

This article is about an anthropologist coming to terms with the field and fieldwork. In 1995, I left – was evacuated from – my fieldsite as a volcanic eruption started just as my period of fieldwork drew to a close. These eruptions dramatically and instantaneously altered life on the island of Montserrat, a British colony in the Caribbean. While Montserrat the land, and Montserratians the people, migrated and moved on with their lives, Montserrat and Montserratians were preserved in my mind and in my anthropological writings as from “back home.” Revisiting Montserrat several years into the volcano crisis, I drove through the villages and roads leading to the former capital of the island, where I had worked from. My route to this modern-day Pompeii threw up a stark contrast between absence and presence, the imagined past and the experienced present. This is understood, in part, by examining the literary work of two other travelers through Montserrat, Henry Coleridge and Pete McCarthy, both of whom have a very different experience of the place and the people.

Multi-Dimensional Deprivation in Ireland Among 9-Year-Olds in Ireland:An Analysis of the Growing Up in Ireland Survey’

In this paper we make use of the 9-year old wave of the Growing Up in Ireland study to analyse multidimensional deprivation in Ireland. The Alkire and Foster adjusted head count ratio approach (AHCR; 2007, 2011a, 2011b) applied here constitutes a significant improvement on union and intersection approaches and allows for the decomposition of multidimensional poverty in terms of dimensions and sub-groups. The approach involves a censoring of data such that deprivations count only for those above the specified multidimensional threshold leading to a stronger set of interrelationships between deprivation dimensions. Our analysis shows that the composition of the adjusted head ratio is influenced by a range of socio-economic factors. For less-favoured socio-economic groups dimensions relating to material deprivation are disproportionately represented while for the more advantaged groups, those relating to behavioral and emotional issues and social interaction play a greater role. Notwithstanding such variation in composition, our analysis showed that the AHCR varied systematically across categories of household type, and the social class, education and age group of the primary care giver. Furthermore, these variables combined in a cumulative manner. The most systematic variation was in relation to the head count of those above the multidimensional threshold rather than intensity, conditional on being above that cut-off point. Without seeking to arbitrate on the relative value of composite indices versus disaggregated profiles, our analysis demonstrates that there is much to be gained from adopting an approach with clearly understood axiomatic properties. Doing so allows one to evaluate the consequences of the measurement strategy employed for the understanding of levels of multidimensional deprivation, the nature of such deprivation profiles and socio-economic risk patterns. Ultimately it permits an informed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the particular choices made.

A Prospective Cohort Study of Body Size and Risk of Head and Neck Cancers in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study

Background: The association between body size and head and neck cancers (HNCA) is unclear, partly because of the biases in case–control studies. Methods: In the prospective NIH–AARP cohort study, 218,854 participants (132,288 men and 86,566 women), aged 50 to 71 years, were cancer free at baseline (1995 and 1996), and had valid anthropometric data. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to examine the associations between body size and HNCA, adjusted for current and past smoking habits, alcohol intake, education, race, and fruit and vegetable consumption, and reported as HR and 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: Until December 31, 2006, 779 incident HNCAs occurred: 342 in the oral cavity, 120 in the oro- and hypopharynx, 265 in the larynx, 12 in the nasopharynx, and 40 at overlapping sites. There was an inverse association between HNCA and body mass index, which was almost exclusively among current smokers (HR = 0.76 per each 5 U increase; 95% CI, 0.63–0.93), and diminished as initial years of follow-up were excluded. We observed a direct association with waist-to-hip ratio (HR = 1.16 per 0.1 U increase; 95% CI, 1.03–1.31), particularly for cancers of the oral cavity (HR, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.17–1.67). Height was also directly associated with total HNCAs (P = 0.02), and oro- and hypopharyngeal cancers (P < 0.01). Conclusions: The risk of HNCAs was associated inversely with leanness among current smokers, and directly with abdominal obesity and height. Impact: Our study provides evidence that the association between leanness and risk of HNCAs may be due to effect modification by smoking. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 23(11); 2422–9. ©2014 AACR.

Deep Head Pose: Gaze-Direction Estimation in Multimodal Video

In this paper we present a convolutional neuralnetwork (CNN)-based model for human head pose estimation inlow-resolution multi-modal RGB-D data. We pose the problemas one of classification of human gazing direction. We furtherfine-tune a regressor based on the learned deep classifier. Next wecombine the two models (classification and regression) to estimateapproximate regression confidence. We present state-of-the-artresults in datasets that span the range of high-resolution humanrobot interaction (close up faces plus depth information) data tochallenging low resolution outdoor surveillance data. We buildupon our robust head-pose estimation and further introduce anew visual attention model to recover interaction with theenvironment. Using this probabilistic model, we show thatmany higher level scene understanding like human-human/sceneinteraction detection can be achieved. Our solution runs inreal-time on commercial hardware