Influence of deceleration profiles on occupant velocity differential and injury potential

This paper compares two hypothetical and identical vehicle deceleration profiles mirrored in time, one linearly descending with time and the other linearly ascending with time. The differences of such profiles on occupant velocity differential and by implication, injury levels at the point of occupant impact are presented. An indifference point is established to assist in comparing which occupant body part will benefit from the altered crash pulse. It is shown that for occupant proximity distances below the indifference point, an ascending profile results in lower injury risk. Above the indifference point, the result is reversed.

Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity

One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the wining whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government's response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a 'social science' itself, deeply questionable.

Pathways to human experimentation, 1933-1945: Germany, Japan and the United States

The history of human experimentation in the twelve years between Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War is notorious in the annals of the twen- tieth century. The horrific experiments conducted at Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravens- brueck, Birkenau, and other National Socialist concentration camps reflected an extreme indifference to human life and human suffering. Unfortunately, they do not reflect the extent and complexity of the human experiments undertaken in the years between 1933 and 1945. Following the prosecution of twenty-three high-ranking National Socialist physicians and medical administrators for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Medical Trial (United States v. Karl Brandt et al.), scholars have rightly focused attention on the nightmarish researches con- ducted by a small group of investigators on concentration camp inmates. Less well known are alternative pathways that brought investigators to undertake human ex- perimentation in other laboratories, settings, and nations.