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Border Penality as Antagonistic Politics
Get PDFThis article examines the socio-political implications of using criminal law to address migration issues in Italy. It delves into the polarised political debate characterised by crimmigration, on the one hand, and calls to criminalise border violence to protect migrants, on the other hand. It argues that both uses of penality reflect and foster penal antagonism, whereby both sides of the debate seek to impose their views using punishment. Penal antagonism leads to more migrants being incarcerated and forecloses possibilities for more political changes to the prevailing anti-immigration paradigm. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work, the article proposes agonistic politics as an alternative approach: a political confrontation to assert one's vision about migration, but where the opponent is an adversary to engage politically rather than an enemy to be delegitimised through penality. Moving from penal antagonism to political agonism could help decouple migration from penality and remove a central source of harm for migrants
Non-Euclidean Video Games:Exploring Player Perceptions and Experiences inside Impossible Spaces
Get PDFNon-Euclidean geometry has the potential to be used for novel interactions in video games and create virtual spaces that are not physically possible in the real world. To explore how players perceive and experience them in video games, we have adapted two well-known 2-D games, Snake and Asteroids to create two versions in addition to the conventional virtual space—with hyperbolic and spherical environments—and conducted a within-subject design user study on all three versions of these games. The results show that experienced mastery and control are lower when playing the two non-Euclidean versions while perceived immersion and challenge do not differ significantly between these three conditions. We also report on the qualitative findings from our participants, which provide further insights into the perception and experiences of these environments
Vigilant Melody: On DPRK Film Music
No full textThis chapter traces the evolution of film music composition in North Korea during
the first four decades of the DPRK, and explores the relationship between song, film,
and drama. Orchestral scores for several key films -- including My Hometown
(1949), Young Partisans (1951), an episode of Unknown Heroes (1978) and Wolmi
Island (1982) are analyzed. North Korean film composers’ interrelationship with art
song and political mobilization is discussed alongside ideological imperatives. The
chapter also endeavors to open up new pathways for writing about North Korean
cultural production which encompass some limited use of composer biographies, as
well as the harmonic and orchestration techniques that interweave with and
undergird the dramatic and ideological content of the films
James Joyce and appeal: between law and ethics
No full textThis essay will consider the legal, ethical and psychological value of concepts of “appeal” in the Irish modernist author James Joyce’s work. I explore Joyce’s complex sense of law as a standard that can be appealed to, but which might also be appealed against in specific miscarriages of justice, as well as in general terms. As Jonathan Goldman comments, “the law is a set of languages that can create a world, an intricate system that acts as a shaper of events, absorbed and deployed by the godlike author whose godlike presence it mirrors,” reflecting on places “where ethical matters of literature are in dialogue with legal doctrine” and on connections between scholarship in law and literature with activism. Throughout Joyce’s life and career, a person’s legal right to appeal was being gradually developed in response to activist campaigns and changing social and legal norms. In situations of miscarriages of justice where legal and political reform might be necessary, I analyze in turn Joyce’s early journalism, the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, and, finally, subsequent developments of similar ideas in Jacques Derrida’s legal thought. I aim to show that Joyce turns towards an ethics of justice in his writing, in which the power of appeal implies a claim about what would be more just and gestures to an imagined more adequate law
The Animal That Remembers: History, Hauntology, and Animality in Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers and Ian McGuire's The North Water
No full textThis essay compares two historical novels, one set in the Victorian period that suggests connections between the Victorian and contemporary eras and the other written in the Victorian period but looking back to a similarly unfinished past. The novels in question, Ian McGuire's The North Water (2016) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), are both whaling narratives of a kind, but whales feature only infrequently in them: they are largely absent presences—if also important vehicles for memory—in the texts. The essay takes a hauntological approach to explore how the figure of the spectral animal forces readers to reflect on the systematic violence that the human world has historically inflicted on the nonhuman; the texts also open up a colloquy with the dead, both human and nonhuman, that is as much a reckoning with the present as a confrontation with the past
Multi-task learning with cross-task consistency for improved depth estimation in colonoscopy
Get PDFColonoscopy screening is the gold standard procedure for assessing abnormalities in the colon and rectum, such as ulcers and cancerous polyps. Measuring the abnormal mucosal area and its 3D reconstruction can help quantify the surveyed area and objectively evaluate disease burden. However, due to the complex topology of these organs and variable physical conditions, for example, lighting, large homogeneous texture, and image modality estimating distance from the camera (aka depth) is highly challenging. Moreover, most colonoscopic video acquisition is monocular, making the depth estimation a non-trivial problem. While methods in computer vision for depth estimation have been proposed and advanced on natural scene datasets, the efficacy of these techniques has not been widely quantified on colonoscopy datasets. As the colonic mucosa has several low-texture regions that are not well pronounced, learning representations from an auxiliary task can improve salient feature extraction, allowing estimation of accurate camera depths. In this work, we propose to develop a novel multi-task learning (MTL) approach with a shared encoder and two decoders, namely a surface normal decoder and a depth estimator decoder. Our depth estimator incorporates attention mechanisms to enhance global context awareness. We leverage the surface normal prediction to improve geometric feature extraction. Also, we apply a cross-task consistency loss among the two geometrically related tasks, surface normal and camera depth. We demonstrate an improvement of 15.75% on relative error and 10.7% improvement on δ1.25 accuracy over the most accurate baseline state-of-the-art Big-to-Small (BTS) approach. All experiments are conducted on a recently released C3VD dataset, and thus, we provide a first benchmark of state-of-the-art methods on this dataset
Measuring religious evil: examining the use of single-item measures in religious research
Get PDFMultiple-item indexes are ubiquitous within the sociology of religion. However, there are a growing number of articles in other disciplines that have advocated the use of single-item measures in specific circumstances. Using quantitative survey data taken from the United Kingdom, this paper contributes to this literature by exploring the impact of single and multiple item measures of religious evil on a series of social and political attitudes. The findings suggest that belief in the devil is the most consistent predictor within a multiple-item measure of religious evil and the multiple-item measure does not significantly outperform single-item measures. Indeed, the item “most evil in the world is caused by the devil” could be a more efficient measure of religious evil, particularly where it is combined with religious attendance. While further cross-cultural research on the impact of belief in religious evil remains necessary, the paper also finds some evidence to suggest that exploration of more secular beliefs in evil might be advantageous
Genetic testing for monogenic forms of motor neuron disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in unaffected family members
Get PDFMotor neuron disease (MND), also referred to as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is a monogenic disease in a minority of cases, with autosomal dominant inheritance. Increasing numbers of people with MND are requesting genetic testing, and indeed receiving a genetic diagnosis. Consequently, requests for genetic counselling and predictive testing (i.e. of unaffected family members) are similarly expected to rise, alongside pre-symptomatic clinical trials. Despite this, there is no evidence-based guideline for predictive genetic testing in MND. This paper provides an overview of the genomic basis of MND, focusing specifically on the most common monogenic causes of MND. It then lays out the complexities of MND predictive testing, including the genetic landscape characterised by incomplete penetrance, clinical and genetic heterogeneity, and an oligogenic mechanism of pathogenesis in some cases. Additionally, there is limited research on the psychosocial impact of predictive genetic testing for MND, with studies suggesting potential difficulty in adjusting to the news, in part due to a lack of support and follow-up. This underscores a case for evidence-based, disease-specific guidance for predictive testing in MND
Corporate anti-corruption disclosure and corporate sustainability performance in the United Kingdom: does sustainability governance matter?
Get PDFThis research investigates the potential effects of companies' commitments to disclose their anti-corruption efforts on their sustainability performance. Additionally, we aim to analyze whether the existence of a sustainability committee influences this relationship. To achieve these objectives, we gathered data from 5344 firm-year observations of companies listed on the FTSE 350 index from 2008 to 2023. Our findings provide strong empirical support for a positive relationship between companies' anti-corruption disclosures and their sustainability performance. Furthermore, our evidence suggests that the presence of a sustainability committee acts as a viable complement to anti-corruption disclosures, driving improved sustainability performance. Our study highlights practical implications for organizations, regulators, and policymakers, and it opens avenues for future research
Mapping the Slippery Slope:The Growth of Predatory Financial Services Markets across the UK
Get PDFThis study examines two-tier financial services markets. These markets are characterised by new alternative financial services providers (AFSPs) entering local financial services markets after bank branch closure and undertaking high levels of financial misconduct. We examine this description of local financial services markets using the regulatory status and location of the UK population of AFSPs between 2002-2015. We report significantly higher numbers of AFSPs undertake financial misconduct in areas of high bank branch closure, with the most severe offending occurring within urban and deprived areas. AFSPs operating in these areas are not just new entrants, they also include new and established firms. We propose that the current scope of regulation applied to assess bank branch closures in the UK is too narrow. By only considering the effect of bank branch closure on the access to cash, current UK regulation overlooks multiple outcomes arising from bank branch closure, not least the behaviour of AFSPs examined in this work
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