The investigation of crime:the myths and the reality

Initially the study focussed on the factors affecting the ability of the police to solve crimes. An analysts of over twenty thousand police deployments revealed the proportion of time spent investigating crime contrasted to its perceived importance and the time spent on other activities. The fictional portrayal of skills believed important in successful crime investigation were identified and compared to the professional training and 'taught skills’ given to police and detectives. Police practitioners and middle management provided views on the skills needed to solve crimes. The relative importance of the forensic science role. fingerprint examination and interrogation skills were contrasted with changes in police methods resulting from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act and its effect on confessions. The study revealed that existing police systems for investigating crime excluding specifically cases of murder and other serious offences, were unsystematic, uncoordinated, unsupervised and unproductive in using police resources. The study examined relevant and contemporary research in the United States and United Kingdom and with organisational support introduced an experimental system of data capture and initial investigation with features of case screening and management. Preliminary results indicated increases in the collection of essential information and more effective use of investigative resources. In the managerial framework within which this study has been conducted, research has been undertaken in the knowledge elicitation area as a basis for an expert system of crime investigation and the potential organisational benefits of utilising the Lap computer in the first stages of data gathering and investigation. The conclusions demonstrate the need for a totally integrated system of criminal investigation with emphasis on an organisational rather than individual response. In some areas the evidence produced is sufficient to warrant replication, in others additional research is needed to further explore other concepts and proposed systems pioneered by this study.

Sustainability, epistemology, ecocentric business and marketing strategy:ideology, reality and vision

This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species' well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Multimodal Man-machine Interface and Virtual Reality for Assistive Medical Systems

The results of research the intelligence multimodal man-machine interface and virtual reality means for assistive medical systems including computers and mechatronic systems (robots) are discussed. The gesture translation for disability peoples, the learning-by-showing technology and virtual operating room with 3D visualization are presented in this report and were announced at International exhibition "Intelligent and Adaptive Robots–2005".

Virtual Reality and Legal Education

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2014

Transformative realism: reflections of reality in political avant-garde and contemporary fine art film - Spanish Labyrinth, south from Granada

A turn towards documentary modes of practice amongst contemporary fine art video and filmmakers towards the end of the 20th Century, led to moving image works that represent current social realities. This drew some comparisons of these forms of art to journalism and industrial documentary. The practical research is embodied in a single screen film that responds to recent political and ecological realities in Spain. These include the mass demonstrations that led to the occupation of Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and Spain’s in 2011 and largest recorded forest fires that spread through Andalusia in August of the following year. The film, titled Spanish Labyrinth, South from Granada, is a response to these events and also relates to political avant-garde film of the 1930’s by re-tracing a journey undertaken by three revolutionary filmmakers, Yves Allegret, René Naville and Eli Lotar, in 1931. The theoretical research for this project establishes an historical root of artists’ film that responds to current social realities, in contrast to news media, in the Soviet and European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this method is to argue the status of the works that I identify, both avant-garde and contemporary, as a form of art that preceded a Griersonian definition of documentary film.

Language, Logos, and Social Ontology: Naturalist and Post-Naturalist Narratives of Human Rationality and Social Reality

I distinguish two ways that philosophers have approached and explained the reality and status of human social institutions. I call these approaches “naturalist” and “post-naturalist”. Common to both approaches is an understanding that the status of mind and its relation to the world or “nature” has implications on a conception of the status of institutional reality. Naturalists hold that mind is explicable within a scientific frame that conceives of mind as a fundamentally material process. By proxy, social reality is also materially explicable. Post-naturalists critique this view, holding instead that naturalism is parasitic on contemporary science—it therefore is non-compulsory and distorts how we ought to understand mind and social reality. A comparison of naturalism and post-naturalism will comprise the content of the first chapter. The second chapter turns to tracing out the dimensions of a post-naturalist narrative of mind and social reality. Post-naturalists conceive of mind and its activity of thought as sui generis, and it transpires from this that social institutions are better understood as a rational mind’s mode of the expression in the world. Post-naturalism conceives of social reality as a necessary dimension of thought. Thought requires a second person and thereby a tradition or context of norms that come to both structure its expression and become the products of expression. This is in contrast to the idea that social reality is a production of minds, and thereby derivative. Social reality, self-conscious thought, and thought of the second person are therefore three dimensions of a greater unity.

What Heraclitus and Parmenides have in common on Reality and Deception

It is usually assumed that Heraclitus is, exclusively, the philosopher of flux, diversity and opposition while Parmenides puts the case for unity and changelessness. However, there is a significant common understanding of things (though in differing contexts), not simply an accidental similarity of understanding. Both philosophers, critically, distinguish two realms: on the one hand, there is the one, common realm, identical for all, which is grasped by the ‘logos that is common’(Heraclitus) or the steady nous (Parmenides) that follows a right method in order to interpret the real. On the other hand, the realm of multiplicity seen and heard by the senses, when interpreted by ‘barbarian souls’, is not understood in its common unity. Analogously, when grasped by the wandering weak nous it does not comprehend the real’s basic unity. In this paper I attempt to defend the thesis that both thinkers claim that the common logos (to put it in Heraclitean terms) or the steady intellect (to say it with Parmenides) grasp and affirm the unity of the real.