Attributions of Responsibility for Terrorist Attacks: The Role of Group Membership and Identification

Three studies examine how people’s attributions of responsibility for terrorist attacks depend on their group membership and their identification with the victim (study 1) or their identification with the victim’s or perpetrator’s ingroup (studies 2 and 3). We observe that people’s group membership (perpetrator group versus victim group) determines the judgments of responsibility for recent terrorist attacks. Members of the perpetrator group hold the direct perpetrators responsible, while members of the victim group perceive the perpetrator world as a whole as relatively responsible as well. Identification with the victim (study 1) or victim group (studies 2 and 3) strengthens attributions of responsibility to the whole perpetrator group, and this relationship is partially mediated by the perceived typicality of the perpetrator for the whole group. We discuss possible explanations for this pattern, and indicate the implications of these results in terms of improving intergroup relations.

Associations between prefrontal γ-aminobutyric acid concentration and the tryptophan hydroxylase isoform 2 gene, a panic disorder risk allele in women

Associations between the central serotonergic and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) systems play key roles in the prefrontal cortical regulation of emotion and cognition and in the pathophysiology and pharmacotherapy of highly prevalent psychiatric disorders. The goal of this study was to test the effects of common variants of the tryptophan hydroxylase isoform 2 (TPH2) gene on GABA concentration in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. In this study involving 64 individuals, we examined the associations between prefrontal cortical GABA concentration and 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) spanning the TPH2 gene, including rs4570625 (−703 G/T SNP), a potentially functional TPH2 polymorphism that has been associated with decreased TPH2 mRNA expression and panic disorder. Our results revealed a significant association between increased GABA concentration in the PFC and the T-allele frequencies of two TPH2 SNPs, namely rs4570625 (−703 G/T) and rs2129575 (p≤0.0004) and the C-allele frequency of one TPH2 SNP, namely rs1386491 (p = 0.0003) in female subjects. We concluded that rs4570625 (−703 G/T), rs2129575 and rs1386491 play a significant role in GABAergic neurotransmission and may contribute to the sex-specific dysfunction of the GABAergic system in the PFC.

Judaism defended against the attacks of T. J. C. of Oxford : a reply to 2 letters on the Damascus question, in "The Times" newspaper of the 20th and 27th oct., 1840

by Morris J. Raphall

"Attacks" or "Whistling": Impact of Questionnaire Wording on Wheeze Prevalence Estimates.

BACKGROUND Estimates of prevalence of wheeze depend on questionnaires. However, wording of questions may vary between studies. We investigated effects of alternative wording on estimates of prevalence and severity of wheeze, and associations with risk factors. METHODS White and South Asian children from a population-based cohort (UK) were randomly assigned to two groups and followed up at one, four and six years (1998, 2001, 2003). Parents were asked either if their child ever had "attacks of wheeze" (attack group, N=535), or "wheezing or whistling in the chest" (whistling group, N=2859). All other study aspects were identical, including questions about other respiratory symptoms. RESULTS Prevalence of wheeze ever was lower in the attack group than in the whistling group for all surveys (32 vs. 40% in white children aged one year, p<0.001). Prevalence of other respiratory symptoms did not differ between groups. Wheeze tended to be more severe in the attack group. The strength of association with risk factors was comparable in the two groups. CONCLUSIONS The wording of questions on wheeze can affect estimates of prevalence, but has less impact on measured associations with risk factors. Question wording is a potential source of between-study-heterogeneity in meta-analyses.

The Right to Die Debate: The Demonization of Dr. Kevorkian and the Creation of a Moral Panic Surrounding Physician-Assisted Suicide in the United States

The Right to Die Debate is a recent but highly controversial moral matter. In particular, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is an issue that has been evaded by the medical community for years. As of 1990, most states had never encountered the issue before and therefore did not have any laws in place to prohibit PAS (Strate et. al, 2005). Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak Michigan was the first to publicly address PAS. He brought the issue into the limelight through a bizarre and crude series of assisted deaths that had a lasting impact on not only the Right to Die Debate as whole, but on public policy and both federal and state governmental agendas. This study focuses on the way in which the media, in particular the New York Times (NYT) has portrayed Dr. Jack Kevorkian as incompetent, morally culpable and in an overall negative light in the past twenty years. Applying Stanley Cohen’s 1972 theory of moral panic, a content analysis of NYT media publications between 1990 and 1999 supports Cohen’s theory and reveals that the media has created a moral panic surrounding Kevorkian. This has in turn led to public policy that prevents both terminally ill individuals and their doctors from having a desirable choice; that of voluntary euthanasia and PAS.

Detecting unknown attacks in wireless sensor networks that contain mobile nodes

As wireless sensor networks are usually deployed in unattended areas, security policies cannot be updated in a timely fashion upon identification of new attacks. This gives enough time for attackers to cause significant damage. Thus, it is of great importance to provide protection from unknown attacks. However, existing solutions are mostly concentrated on known attacks. On the other hand, mobility can make the sensor network more resilient to failures, reactive to events, and able to support disparate missions with a common set of sensors, yet the problem of security becomes more complicated. In order to address the issue of security in networks with mobile nodes, we propose a machine learning solution for anomaly detection along with the feature extraction process that tries to detect temporal and spatial inconsistencies in the sequences of sensed values and the routing paths used to forward these values to the base station. We also propose a special way to treat mobile nodes, which is the main novelty of this work. The data produced in the presence of an attacker are treated as outliers, and detected using clustering techniques. These techniques are further coupled with a reputation system, in this way isolating compromised nodes in timely fashion. The proposal exhibits good performances at detecting and confining previously unseen attacks, including the cases when mobile nodes are compromised.

An Interleaved EPE-Immune PA-DPL Structure for Resisting Concentrated EM Side Channel Attacks on FPGA Implementation

Early propagation effect (EPE) is a critical problem in conventional dual-rail logic implementations against Side Channel Attacks (SCAs). Among previous EPE-resistant architectures, PA-DPL logic offers EPE-free capability at relatively low cost. However, its separate dual core structure is a weakness when facing concentrated EM attacks where a tiny EM probe can be precisely positioned closer to one of the two cores. In this paper, we present an PA-DPL dual-core interleaved structure to strengthen resistance against sophisticated EM attacks on Xilinx FPGA implementations. The main merit of the proposed structure is that every two routing in each signal pair are kept identical even the dual cores are interleaved together. By minimizing the distance between the complementary routings and instances of both cores, even the concentrated EM measurement cannot easily distinguish the minor EM field unbalance. In PA- DPL, EPE is avoided by compressing the evaluation phase to a small portion of the clock period, therefore, the speed is inevitably limited. Regarding this, we made an improvement to extend the duty cycle of evaluation phase to more than 40 percent, yielding a larger maximum working frequency. The detailed design flow is also presented. We validate the security improvement against EM attack by implementing a simplified AES co-processor in Virtex-5 FPGA.

Communicating strategically in the face of terrorism: The Spanish government’s response to the 2004 Madrid bombing attacks

With the re-emergence of insurgency tied to terrorism, governments need to strategically manage their communications. This paper analyzes the effect of the Spanish government’s messaging in the face of the Madrid bombing of March 11, 2004: unlike what happened with the 9/11 bombings in the USA and the 7/07 London attacks, the Spanish media did not support the government’s framing of the events. Taking framing as a strategic action in a discursive form (Pan & Kosicki, 2003), and in the context of the attribution theory of responsibilities, this research uses the “cascading activation” model (Entman, 2003, 2004) to explore how a framing contest was generated in the press. Analysis of the coverage shows that the intended government frame triggered a battle among the different major newspapers, leading editorials to shift their frame over the four days prior to the national elections. This research analyzes strategic contests in framing processes and contributes insight into the interactions among the different sides (government, parties, media, and citizens) to help bring about an understanding of the rebuttal effect of the government’s intended frame. It also helps to develop an understanding of the role of the media and the influence of citizens’ frames on media content.

La justification des atteintes aux libertés de circulation : cadre méthodologique et spécificités matérielles = Justification of attacks on freedom of movement: methodological framework and specific hardware. Research Paper in Law 01/2013

No abstract.