Expectancy violation and perceptions of rape victim credibility

Purpose. Rape victims have been found to have a heightened risk of secondary victimization in the legal system through biased perceptions of their credibility. In this study, participants observed a video of a rape victim reporting the crime and evaluated her credibility, to establish the influence of victim emotional expressiveness on evaluations of victim credibility. Methods. The nonverbal (eye-contact, crying) and paralinguistic (tone of voice) behaviour of the rape victim was manipulated such that the emotional presentation viewed by observers was either expressive, or not expressive. One hundred and thirty seven participants were randomly allocated to observe a videotape of either an expressive or a non-expressive victim. Participants' specific expectations about the emotional expressiveness of rape victims in general were also measured. Results. Results revealed no significant main effect of emotional expressiveness on perceptions of credibility. However, among participants with a strong expectation of emotional expressiveness, a rape victim who was emotionally expressive was perceived to be significantly more credible than a victim who was not emotionally expressive. Conclusions. It appears to be expectancy violation rather than emotional expressiveness per se that biases observers' perceptions of rape victim credibility.

An epidemic model based temporal violation prediction strategy for large batch of parallel business cloud workflows

Temporal violations often take place during the running of large batch of parallel business cloud workflow, which have a serious impact on the on-time completion of massive concurrent user requests. Existing studies have shown that local temporal violations (namely the delays of workflow activities) occurring during cloud workflow execution are the fundamental causes for failed on-time completion. Therefore, accurate prediction of temporal violations is a very important yet challenging task for business cloud workflows. In this paper, based on an epidemic model, a novel temporal violation prediction strategy is proposed to estimate the number of local temporal violations and the number of violations that must be handled so as to achieve a certain on-time completion rate before the execution of workflows. The prediction result can be served as an important reference for temporal violation prevention and handling strategies such as static resource reservation and dynamic provision. Specifically, we first analyze the queuing process of the parallel workflow activities, then we predict the number of potential temporal violations based on a novel temporal violation transmission model inspired by an epidemic model. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our strategy can achieve very high prediction accuracy under different situations.

Do we need to handle every temporal violation in scientific workflow systems?

Scientific processes are usually time constrained with overall deadlines and local milestones. In scientific workflow systems, due to the dynamic nature of the underlying computing infrastructures such as grid and cloud, execution delays often take place and result in a large number of temporal violations. Temporal violation handling is to execute violation handling strategies which can compensate for the occurring time deficit but would impose some additional cost. Generally speaking, the two fundamental requirements for delivering satisfactory temporal QoS in scientific workflow systems are temporal conformance and cost effectiveness. Every task for workflow temporal management incurs some cost. Take a single temporal violation handling as an example, its cost can be primarily referred to monetary costs and time overheads of violation handling strategies which are normally nontrivial in scientific workflow systems.

Veiled threats : recurrent cultural anxieties in Australia

At the end of the nineteenth century, white Australians found themselves in a turbulent and rapidly changing world. As British settlers in a vast, often-perplexing and under-populated continent, they were increasingly aware that they lived in a crowded and predominantly Asian neighbourhood. Their supposedly empty spaces seemed to invite the unwanted attention of hostile outsiders, fertile soil for speculation about vulnerable borders, invasion and violation. It was commonplace of the period for white females to be considered at once particularly vulnerable and also innocent symbols of the new nation. They needed to be protected against Asian males allegedly bent on conquest and violation. It does not follow that these “invasion narratives”, however persistent, meant that the entire population was disabled by fear and dread, but there is convincing evidence of a deeply embedded cultural anxiety about the destructive possibilities and hostile intentions of Asian outsiders. In this article, the authors examine recent representations of Muslims as hostile outsiders in Australia, focusing in particular on the veil as a marker of female oppression under Islam and a sign of the threat attributed to the Islamic community in Australia. While it would be misleading to propose a simple line of progression from late nineteenth century apprehensions to those a century or more later, there are nonetheless intriguing parallels and recurrent expressions of survivalist anxiety across the period examined in this article.

Where the home in valley meets the damp dirty prison : a human rights perspective on therapeutic jurisprudence and the rule of forensic psychologists in correctional settings

The roles of forensic psychologists in coerced environments such as corrections include that of treatment provider (for the offender) and that of organizational consultant (for the community). This dual role raises ethical issues between offender rights and community rights; an imbalance results in the violation of human rights. A timely reminder of a slippery ethical slope that can arise is the failure of the American Psychological Association to manage this balance regarding interrogation and torture of detainees under the Bush administration. To establish a “bright-line position” regarding ethical practice, forensic psychologists need to be cognizant of international human rights law. In this endeavor, international covenants and a universal ethical code ought to guide practice, although seemingly unresolveable conflicts between the law and ethics codes may arise. A solution to this problem is to devise an ethical framework that is based on enforceable universally shared human values regarding dignity and rights. To this end, the legal theory of therapeutic jurisprudence can assist psychologists to understand the law, the legal system, and their role in applying the law therapeutically to support offender dignity, freedom, and well-being. In this way, a moral stance is taken and the forensic role of treatment provider and/or organizational consultant is not expected to trump the prescriptions and the proscriptions of the law.

Fast mining of non-derivable episode rules in complex sequences

Researchers have been endeavoring to discover concise sets of episode rules instead of complete sets in sequences. Existing approaches, however, are not able to process complex sequences and can not guarantee the accuracy of resulting sets due to the violation of anti-monotonicity of the frequency metric. In some real applications, episode rules need to be extracted from complex sequences in which multiple items may appear in a time slot. This paper investigates the discovery of concise episode rules in complex sequences. We define a concise representation called non-derivable episode rules and formularize the mining problem. Adopting a novel anti-monotonic frequency metric, we then develop a fast approach to discover non-derivable episode rules in complex sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that the utility of the proposed approach substantially reduces the number of rules and achieves fast processing.

Hybrid cloud resource provisioning policy in the presence of resource failures

Resource provisiomng is an important and challenging problem in the large-scale distributed systems such as Cloud computing environments. Resource management issues such as Quality of Service (QoS) further exacerbate the resource provisioning problem. Furthermore, with the increasing functionality and complexity of Cloud computing, resource failures are inevitable. Therefore, the question we address in this paper is how to provision resources to applications in the presence of resource failures in a hybrid Cloud computing environment. To this end, we propose three Cloud resource provisioning policies where we utilize workflow applications to drive the system workload. The proposed strategies take into account the workload model and the failure correlations to redirect requests to appropriate Cloud providers. Using real failure traces and workload models, we evaluated the performance and monetary cost of the proposed policies. The results of our experiments show that we can decrease the deadline violation rate of users' requests to as low as 20% with a limited cost on Amazon public Cloud.

How long should we ignore imperfect detection of species in the marine environment when modelling their distribution?

The application of the 'ecosystem approach' to marine conservation management demands knowledge of the distribution patterns of the target species or communities. This information is commonly obtained from species distribution models (SDMs). This article explores an important but rarely acknowledged assumption in these models: almost all species may be present, but simply not detected by the particular survey method. However, nearly all of these SDM approaches neglect this important characteristic. This leads to the violation of a fundamental assumption of these models, which presuppose the detection of a species is equal to one (i.e. at each survey locality, a species is perfectly detected). In this article, the concept of imperfect detection is discussed, how it potentially influences the prediction of species' distributions is examined, and some statistical methods that could be used to incorporate the detection probability of species in estimates of their distribution are suggested. The approaches discussed here could improve the collection and interpretation of marine biological survey data and provide a coherent way to incorporate detection probability estimates in the modelling of species distributions. This will ultimately lead to an unbiased and more rigorous understanding of the distribution of species in the marine environment.

'Satan finds some mischief'?: Drinkers' responses to the six o'clock closing of pubs in Australia, 1910s-1930s

Historians have typically focused on the ‘six o'clock swill’ as the pub drinker's principal response to the introduction of the early closing of pubs in most Australian states during World War I. While this focus has enhanced our understanding of gendered pub drinking practices during trading hours it has circumscribed our knowledge of the range of responses to six o'clock closing. Less frequently analysed is what the pub drinker did after the hour of six o'clock. In this article I explore how ‘habit memory’, especially people's everyday drinking habits persisted despite the best efforts to regulate them. I consider how factors such as class, leisure and gender were implicated in drinking habits, and why there was an increase in what were defined as illegal drinking practices such as sly-grogging and after-hours trading. This article suggests that the pub drinker resented the violation of familiar customs and was prepared to engage in illegal activities in order to obtain alcohol.

Editorial : Surveillance and sport

Sports represent an ideal field to explore the importance of everyday surveillance practices. The routines of preparation associated with conducting or participating in a sports mega event at international level highlight unique facets of surveillance as everyday and normalised elements of elite international or professional sports performance. While these routines do have potential individual or social costs, or are open to various forms of subversion by athletes willing to challenge the broader objectives of fair play, other forces, such as the media or formal governance reactions to a detected rule violation, provide fuel for more rigorous forms of surveillance. This spiral of surveillance permeates downwards to impact on prospective elite athletes, and outwards to impact on other forms of behaviour considered to compromise integrity or fair play. How these values mirror and intersect with norms of surveillance in everyday life is a fruitful site for on-going research and theorisation.

Psychological contract development: An integration of existing knowledge to form a temporal model

The psychological contract has received substantial theoretical attention over the past two decades as a popular framework within which to examine contemporary employment relationships. Previous research mostly examines breach and violation of the psychological contract and its impact on employee organization outcomes. Few studies have employed longitudinal, prospective research designs to investigate the psychological contract and as a result, psychological contract content and formation are incompletely understood. It is argued that employment relationships may be better proactively managed with greater understanding of formation and changes in the psychological contract. We examine existing psychological contract literature to identify five key factors proposed to contribute to the formation of psychological contracts. We extend the current research by integrating these factors for the first time into a temporal model of psychological contract development.

Firm compliance with social insurance obligations where there is a weak surveillance and enforcement mechanism: empirical evidence from Shanghai

This article examines why firms in Shanghai comply or over-comply with social insurance obligations in a regulatory environment where the expected punishment for non-compliance is low. Our first finding is that firms found to be in non-compliance in the first audit in 2001 were moved into a separate violation category and the probability of being reaudited in 2002 was significantly higher if the firm was in that category. Our second main result is that, across the board, firms which were reaudited continued to underpay in 2002 but the extent of underpayment was significantly reduced. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Panel cointegration and the neutrality of money

Most econometric methods for testing the proposition of long-run monetary neutrality rely on the assumption that money and real output do not cointegrate, a result that is usually supported by the data. This paper argues that these results can be attributed in part to the low power of univariate tests, and that a violation of the noncointegration assumption is likely to result in a nonrejection of the neutrality proposition. To alleviate this problem, two new and more powerful panel cointegration tests are proposed that can be used under quite general conditions. The empirical results obtained from applying these tests to a panel covering ten countries between 1870 and 1986 suggest money and real output are cointegrated, and hence that the neutrality proposition must be rejected. © Springer-Verlag 2007.

Female genital mutilation: cultural and psychological implications

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is widely practised in several regions of the world. It is often associated with physical, psychological, sexual and social sequelae. Migration of persons from cultures that actively practice FGM to the UK and other Western countries increases the chances that clinicians will be faced with patients who have undergone this procedure. Clinical presentations often occur against a background of differences in culture and social identity, which may pose a challenge to any form of intervention. Perceptions of normalcy, human rights violation and gender roles may also differ. This paper discusses historical, cultural, gender and identity issues associated with FGM and its psychological and sexual implications.