The Right to a Fair Fight: Sporting Lessons on Consensual Harm

This article critically assesses the criminal law on consensual harm through an examination of the legality of fighting sports. The article begins by considering fighting sports such as bare-fisted prize fighting (dominant in the nineteenth century). It then, in historical chronology, examines the legality of professional boxing with gloves (dominant in the twentieth century). Doctrinally, the article reviews why and how, in a position adopted by the leading common law jurisdictions, fighting sports benefit from an application of the “well-established” category-based exceptions to the usual bodily harm threshold of consent in the criminal law. Centrally, fighting sports and doctrinal law on offenses against the person are juxtaposed against the theoretical boundaries of consent in the criminal law to examine whether and where the limit of the “right to be hurt” might lie. In sum, this article uses fighting sports as a case study to assess whether the criminal law generally can or should accommodate the notion of a fair fight, sporting or otherwise, predicated on the consent of the participants to the point that the individuals involved might be said, pithily, to have extended an open invite to harm.

Estimation of contribution of changes in classic risk factors to trends in coronary-event rates across the WHO MONICA Project populations

Background. From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, the WHO MONICA Project monitored coronary events and classic risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD) in 38 populations from 21 countries. We assessed the extent to which changes in these risk factors explain the variation in the trends in coronary-event rates, across the populations. Methods. In men and women aged 35-64 years, non-fatal myocardial infarction and coronary deaths were registered continuously to assess trends in rates of coronary events. We carried out population surveys to estimate trends in risk factors. Trends in event rates were regressed on trends in risk score and in individual risk factors. Findings. Smoking rates decreased in most male populations but trends were mixed in women; mean blood pressures and cholesterol concentrations decreased, body-mass index increased, and overall risk scores and coronary-event rates decreased. The model of trends in 10-year coronary-event rates against risk scores and single risk factors showed a poor fit, but this was improved with a 4-year time lag for coronary events. The explanatory power of the analyses was limited by imprecision of the estimates and homogeneity of trends in the study populations. Interpretation. Changes in the classic risk factors seem to partly explain the variation in population trends in CHD. Residual variance is attributable to difficulties in measurement and analysis, including time lag, and to factors that were not included, such as medical interventions. The results support prevention policies based on the classic risk factors but suggest potential for prevention beyond these.

Model selection for prognostic time-to-event gene signature discovery with applications in early breast cancer data

Model selection between competing models is a key consideration in the discovery of prognostic multigene signatures. The use of appropriate statistical performance measures as well as verification of biological significance of the signatures is imperative to maximise the chance of external validation of the generated signatures. Current approaches in time-to-event studies often use only a single measure of performance in model selection, such as logrank test p-values, or dichotomise the follow-up times at some phase of the study to facilitate signature discovery. In this study we improve the prognostic signature discovery process through the application of the multivariate partial Cox model combined with the concordance index, hazard ratio of predictions, independence from available clinical covariates and biological enrichment as measures of signature performance. The proposed framework was applied to discover prognostic multigene signatures from early breast cancer data. The partial Cox model combined with the multiple performance measures were used in both guiding the selection of the optimal panel of prognostic genes and prediction of risk within cross validation without dichotomising the follow-up times at any stage. The signatures were successfully externally cross validated in independent breast cancer datasets, yielding a hazard ratio of 2.55 [1.44, 4.51] for the top ranking signature.

North Atlantic marine radiocarbon reservoir ages through Heinrich event H4: A new method for marine age model construction

Cooling and sinking of dense saline water in the Norwegian–Greenland Sea is essential for the formation of North Atlantic Deep Water. The convection in the Norwegian–Greenland Sea allows for a northward flow of warm surface water and southward transport of cold saline water. This circulation system is highly sensitive to climate change and has been shown to operate in different modes. In ice cores the last glacial period is characterized by millennial-scale Dansgaard–Oeschger (D–O) events of warm interstadials and cold stadials. Similar millennial-scale variability (linked to D–O events) is evident from oceanic cores, suggesting a strong coupling of the atmospheric and oceanic circulations system. Particularly long-lasting cold stadials correlate with North Atlantic Heinrich events, where icebergs released from the continents caused a spread of meltwater over the northern North Atlantic and Nordic seas. The meltwater layer is believed to have caused a stop or near-stop in the deep convection, leading to cold climate. The spreading of meltwater and changes in oceanic circulation have a large influence on the carbon exchange between atmosphere and the deep ocean and lead to profound changes in the 14C activity of the surface ocean. Here we demonstrate marine 14C reservoir ages (R) of up to c. 2000 years for Heinrich event H4. Our R estimates are based on a new method for age model construction using identified tephra layers and tie-points based on abrupt interstadial warmings.

Hydroclimatic changes during the 8.2 ka event inferred from Irish subfossil pines

A significant cold event, derived from the Greenland ice cores, took place between 8200 and 8000 cal. BP. Modeling of the event suggests that higher northern latitudes would have experienced considerable decreases in precipitation and that Ireland would have witnessed one of the greatest depressions. However, no well-dated proxy record exists from the British Isles to test the model results. Here we present independent evidence for a phase of major pine recruitment on Irish bogs at around 8150 cal. BP. Dendrochronological dating of subfossil trees from three sites reveal synchronicity in germination across the region, indicative of a regional forcing, and allows for high-precision radiocarbon based dates. The inner-rings of 40% of all samples from the north of Ireland dating to the period 8,500-7,500 cal. BP fall within a 25-year window. The concurrent colonization of pine on peatland is interpreted as drier conditions in the region and provide the first substantive proxy data in support of a significant hydrological change in the north of Ireland accompanying the 8.2 ka event. Our results also indicate that the apparent temporal asynchrony between anomalies in proxy records at the time could be a result of differences in dating methods.

Hydroclimatic changes during the 8.2 ka event revealed by Irish pines

A pivotal cold event, deduced from the Greenland ice cores, took place between 8200 and 8000 cal. BP. Modelling of this climatic episode suggests that higher northern latitudes would have also experienced substantial reduction in rainfall and that Ireland would have observed a notable decline. No well-dated proxy record exists from the British Isles to test the model results. We present significant independent data for a phase of increased Scots pine initiation on Irish bogs at around 8150 cal. BP. Dendrochronological dating of sub-fossil Scots pine trees from three locations reveals synchronicity in germination across the area, indicative of a regional forcing, and allows for high-precision radiocarbon based dates. The starting rings of 40% of all samples from the north of Ireland dating to the period 8500-7500 cal. BP fall within a period of 25 years. The present colonisation model of Scots pine on peatland is interpreted as increasing drier conditions in the region and provides the first meaningful proxy data in support of a significant hydrological change in the north of Ireland accompanying the 8.2 ka event. The dating uncertainties associated with the Irish Scots pine record and the Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2005 (GICC05) do not allow for any overlap between the two. The results indicate that the discrepancy could be a result of dating inaccuracy that could have affected analysis of prior proxy alignments.

An Enchanted Tool? Humanitarian Assistance and the ILC Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters

Despite previous attempts at codification of international law regarding international responses to natural and human-made disasters, there is currently no binding international legal framework to regulate the provision of humanitarian assistance outside armed conflicts. Nevertheless, since the International Law Commission (ILC) included the protection of persons in the event of disasters on its programme of work in 2006, it has provisionally adopted eleven draft articles that have the potential to create binding obligations on states and humanitarian actors in disaster settings. Draft articles adopted include the definition of ‘a disaster’, the relationship of the draft articles to the international humanitarian law of armed conflict, recognition of the inherent dignity of the human person, and the duty of international cooperation. However, the final form of the draft articles has not been agreed. The Codification Division of the UN Office of Legal Affairs has proposed a framework convention format, which has seen support in the ILC and the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee. The overall aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the potential forms of international regulation open to the ILC and states in the context of humanitarian responses to disasters. However to avoid enchanting the ILC draft articles with unwarranted power, any examination of form requires an understanding of the substantive subject matter of the planned international regulation. The article therefore provides an overview of the international legal regulation of humanitarian assistance following natural and human-made disasters, and the ILC’s work to date on the topic. It then examines two key issues that remain to be addressed by the ILC and representatives of states in the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee. Drawing on the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the development and implications of binding and non-binding international texts are examined, followed by an analysis of the suggested framework convention approach identified by the Special Rapporteur as a potential outcome of the ILC work.

Challenging the SD benefits attributed to sport Mega-Events hosting

Sport Mega-event hosting faces opposition that is manifested with different intensity during the different phases of the event, from its inception as an idea to its delivery and legacy. Some Social Movements Organisations (SMOs) have acted as indefatigable monitors of the Sustainable Development (SD) dimension of sporting events in general and, in some of the most recent sport mega-events, in particular the Olympics, they have served as important advisors and facilitators. Nevertheless, in many cases we see enthusiastic supporters turning to vehemently challenging whatever positives have been associated with hosting the event. In addition, there is opposition to sport Mega-events in their entirety. That type of opposition tends to employ a holistic prism that manages to identify multiple interconnected negative aspects of hosting a sport mega-event and incorporate them into an anti-systemic discourse. It is important to bear in mind that irrespective of many proclamations to the opposite as far as megas are concerned (projects and/or events), a number of studies have demonstrated that citizen participation and democratic accountability in decision-making have been notoriously absent. After all, the idea of citizen participation in the planning of sport mega-event is essentially the public response to a plan conceived by others. There were, of course, some notable cases of democratic consultation at the early stages of bidding to host a sport mega-event but these more democratic approaches resulted in the failure of the bid (for e.g. Toronto 1996). The knowledge of this by the groups that initiated the hosting idea and the bidding process has led to discouraging in depth public consultation that may fit perfectly to the democratic process but not to the tight schedules of associated projects completion. That produces ‘autocracy against which opposition may arise’ (Hiller, 2000, p. 198). It is this democratic deficit that has led to important instances of social contestation and protest mobilizations by citizen groups as well as the more regular corps of social activists. From a perspective borrowed from the sociology of protest and social movements, sport mega-events hosting can operate as an issue that stimulates protest activities by an existing protest milieu and new actors as well as an important mobilizing resource. In fact, some scholars have also argued that the Olympic Games were an important frame for the transnational activism that was marked by anti-globalization protest in Seattle in 1999 (Cottrell & Nelson, 201; Lenskyj, 2008). In addition, it’s important not to lose sight of other acts dissent that take place in relatively close proximity, about a year before the event when most infrastructural and societal changes brought by hosting the event and impact start to become apparent by the host communities, like the rioting of August 2011 in the London Olympic Boroughs and the 2012 riots of June 2013 in Sao Paulo and other Brazilian cities. This paper starts by outlining the SD claims made in the bidding to host the summer Olympic Games by five prospective hosts (Sydney; Athens; Beijing; London and Rio) proceeds towards examining the opposition and challenges that was manifested in relation to these claims. In Particular it provides an assessment of protest-events over the aforementioned different phases of sport mega-events hosting. A different picture emerges for each of the host nation that is partly explained by local, national and global configuration of protest politics. Whereas the post-event legacy of the first two hosts of the Games can be assessed and that way see the validity of claims made by challengers in the other phases, in the other three cases, the implementation of Olympic Games Impact (OGI) studies offers the tool for discussing the post-event phase for Beijing and London and engage in a speculative exercise for the case of Rio. Judging by available findings, the paper concludes that the SD aspiration made in the bid documents are unlikely to be met and social contestation based on the same issues is likely to increase due to the current global economic crisis and BRICS, like China and Brazil, having entered the process of becoming global economic hegemons.

Tephrochronology and the extended intimate (integration of ice‐core, marine and terrestrial records) event stratigraphy 8-128kab2k

The comparison of palaeoclimate records on their own independent timescales is central to the work of the INTIMATE (INTegrating Ice core, MArine and TErrestrial records) network. For the North Atlantic region, an event stratigraphy has been established from the high-precision Greenland ice-core records and the integrated GICC05 chronology. This stratotype provides a palaeoclimate signal to which the timing and nature of palaeoenvironmental change recorded in marine and terrestrial archives can be compared. To facilitate this wider comparison, without assuming synchroneity of climatic change/proxy response, INTIMATE has also focussed on the development of tools to achieve this. In particular the use of time-parallel marker horizons e.g. tephra layers (volcanic ash). Coupled with the recent temporal extension of the Greenland stratotype, as part of this special issue, we present an updated INTIMATE event stratigraphy highlighting key tephra horizons used for correlation across Europe and the North Atlantic. We discuss the advantages of such an approach, and the key challenges for the further integration of terrestrial palaeoenvironmental records with those from ice cores and the marine realm.

An Extended Event Reasoning Framework for Decision Support under Uncertainty

To provide in-time reactions to a large volume of surveil- lance data, uncertainty-enabled event reasoning frameworks for CCTV and sensor based intelligent surveillance system have been integrated to model and infer events of interest. However, most of the existing works do not consider decision making under uncertainty which is important for surveillance operators. In this paper, we extend an event reasoning framework for decision support, which enables our framework to predict, rank and alarm threats from multiple heterogeneous sources.

An Event Driven Fusion Approach for Enjoyment Recognition in Real-time

Social signals and interpretation of carried information is of high importance in Human Computer Interaction. Often used for affect recognition, the cues within these signals are displayed in various modalities. Fusion of multi-modal signals is a natural and interesting way to improve automatic classification of emotions transported in social signals. Throughout most present studies, uni-modal affect recognition as well as multi-modal fusion, decisions are forced for fixed annotation segments across all modalities. In this paper, we investigate the less prevalent approach of event driven fusion, which indirectly accumulates asynchronous events in all modalities for final predictions. We present a fusion approach, handling short-timed events in a vector space, which is of special interest for real-time applications. We compare results of segmentation based uni-modal classification and fusion schemes to the event driven fusion approach. The evaluation is carried out via detection of enjoyment-episodes within the audiovisual Belfast Story-Telling Corpus.