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Channelling (in)security:governing movement and ordinary life in ‘imagined geographies’
Get PDFThis article is led by a specific ethnographic encounter on a public bus from Amman towards Zaatari village in northern Jordan. I use this moment on a bus as an entry point from which to examine how Syrian urban refugees and their security are constituted by everyday encounters in seemingly banal spaces. From the vantage point of a bus journey, this article explores how urban refugees in northern Jordan are channelled in specific and violent ways by the Government of Jordan (GoJ) in relation to the geographies where they reside. Drawing on fieldwork with urban refugees living in Zaatari village, the article is shaped by three main points: (1) Refugees are not static, or fixed in spaces of the camp, but rather on-the-move. The journey taken depicts a particular precarity constituting the everyday insecurity of refugees living outside of camps. (2) Their movement is embedded in the wider mechanisms of state and humanitarian governance which increases the precarity of urban refugee mobility. (3) The precarity surrounding urban refugees is further compounded by the geographies they reside in. This article opens new lines of enquiry into urban refugee security and how experiences of (in)security may be better understood
Experience-based Investigation and Co-design of Psychosis Centred Integrated Care Services for Ethnically Diverse People with Multimorbidity (CoPICS):study protocol
Get PDFEvidence and Ideology in the Independent Review of Prevent
Get PDFA key part of the United Kingdom’s counter-terrorism framework, the Prevent Strategy is designed to operate ‘upstream’ to stop people becoming or supporting terrorists. In February 2023 the long-awaited independent review of Prevent reported, evaluating the Strategy against its core objectives. Led by Sir William Shawcross, the report claimed that Prevent’s overarching rationale remains good because the UK continues to face a genuine terrorist threat, but lamented its diversion toward safeguarding and its downplaying of Islamist extremism as the purportedly most pressing source of radicalisation within the UK today. To declare the reception to Shawcross’ report mixed would be generous, with some observers even demanding that the Government withdraw the review. We share many concerns raised by civil society groups and practitioners, and in this piece argue that the Review is fundamentally flawed because of its partial –in the sense of both limited and biased –engagement with the relevant (and extensive) knowledge base that exists around radicalisation, counter radicalisation, and Prevent. More specifically –and with particular attention to the report’s emphasis on ‘ideology’ –we show: (i) that the report suffers from a selective, and problematic, engagement with relevant academic research that poorly represents established knowledge in this area; (ii) that this selective engagement leads to a questionable, and highly contestable, conceptual framing of the report’s core terms and parameters; and, (iii) that this contestable framing has implications for operationalisation of the report’s findings. In doing this, the article makes three core contributions in:(i) situating the Shawcross review in relevant historical and policy contexts; (ii) offering original analytical critique of the review’s methodological and political assumptions and findings; and, (iii) extending research on the mechanisms of counter-terrorism review via this new –and underexplored –case study.<br/
Unravelling controls on multi-source-to-sink systems:A stratigraphic forward model of the early–middle Cenozoic of the SW Barents Sea
Get PDFSource-to-sink dynamics are subjected to complex interactions between erosion, sediment transfer and deposition, particularly in an evolving tectonic and climatic setting. Here we use stratigraphic forward modelling (SFM) to predict the basin-fill architecture of a multi-source-to-sink system based on a state-of-the-art numerical approach. The modelling processes consider key source-to-sink parameters such as water discharge, sediment load and grain size to simulate various sedimentary processes and transport mechanisms reflecting the dynamic interplay between erosion in the catchment area, subsidence, deposition and filling of the basin. The Cenozoic succession along the SW Barents Shelf margin provides a key area to examine controls on source-to-sink systems along a transform margin that developed during the opening of the North Atlantic when Greenland and Eurasian plates were separated (ca. 55 Ma onwards). Moreover, the gradual cooling which culminated in major glaciations in the northern hemisphere during the Quaternary (ca. 2.7 Ma), has affected the spatio-temporal evolution of the sediment routing along the western Barents Shelf margin. This study aims to characterize the relative importance of different source areas within the source-to-sink framework through SFM. In the early Eocene, the SW Barents Shelf experienced a relatively equal sediment delivery from three principal source areas: (i) Greenland to the north, (ii) the Stappen High to the east, representing a local source terrain, and (iii) a major southern source (Fennoscandia). In the middle Eocene, our best-fit modelling scenario suggests that the northern and the local eastern sources dominated over the southern source, collectively supplying large amounts of sand into the basin as evidenced by the submarine fans in Sørvestsnaget Basin. In the Oligocene (ca. 33 Ma) and Miocene (ca. 23 Ma), significant amounts of sediments were sourced from the east due to shelf-wide uplift. Finally, this study highlights the dynamic nature and controls of sediment transfer in multi-source-to-sink systems and demonstrates the potential of SFM to unravel tectonic and climatic signals in the stratigraphic record
The interplay between teachers’ value-related educational goals and their value-related school climate over time
Get PDFValues education within the school context is, among other elements, shaped by a value-related school climate as well as teachers’ value-related educational goals. This longitudinal study investigated the interplay between these two elements over fifteen months, starting in March 2021, and including four points of measurement (t1 − t4). The sample consisted of 118 primary school teachers (years 1 and 2) from primary schools in Switzerland. Teachers’ value-related educational goals were measured with the Portrait Values Questionnaire, and teachers’ perception of their school climate was measured with the 12-Item School Climate Measure Scale. Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Models along with Multiple Imputation for missing data were used to investigate the reciprocal relationships along the four dimensions of value-related educational goals represented by Schwartz’s Higher-Order Value Types: Openness to Change, Conservation, Self-Enhancement, and Self-Transcendence and their corresponding dimensions of a perceived value-related school climate of Innovation, Stability, Performance, and Support. For the dimensions “Innovation and Openness to Change,” the analyses revealed that the perceived value-related school climate of Innovation predicted teachers’ value-related educational goals of Openness to Change significantly from t1 to t2, while an effect in the opposite direction from t2 to t3 and from t3 to t4 was found. For the dimension “Stability and Conservation,” the analyses revealed that the perceived value-related school climate of Stability predicted teachers’ value-related educational goals of Conservation from t3 to t4. These findings are discussed in light of the dynamic processes of values education within the school environment as well as in the context of environmental and societal developments
Language Modeling on a SpiNNaker2 Neuromorphic Chip
Get PDFAs large language models continue to scale in size rapidly, so too does the computational power required to run them. Event-based networks on neuromorphic devices offer a potential way to reduce energy consumption for inference significantly. However, to date, most event-based networks that can run on neuromorphic hardware, including spiking neural networks (SNNs), have not achieved task performance even on par with LSTM models for language modeling. As a result, language modeling on neuromorphic devices has seemed a distant prospect. In this work, we demonstrate the first-ever implementation of a language model on a neuromorphic device – specifically the SpiNNaker2 chip – based on a recently published event-based architecture called the EGRU. SpiNNaker2 is a many-core neuromorphic chip designed for large-scale asynchronous processing, and the EGRU is architected to leverage such hardware efficiently while maintaining competitive task performance. This implementation marks the first time a neuromorphic language model matches LSTMs, setting the stage for taking task performance to the level of large language models. We also demonstrate results on a gesture recognition task based on inputs from a DVS camera. Overall, our results showcase the feasibility of this neuro-inspired neural network in hardware, highlighting significant gains versus conventional hardware in energy efficiency for the common use case of single batch inference.<br/
A Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network with Spatial Feature Fusion for Environmental Sound Classification
Get PDFThis research proposes a new Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model with spatial feature fusion for environmental sound classification. Besides data preprocessing such as spectrogram transformation and data augmentation, customized deep networks, i.e. VGG19, ResNet152, and EfficientNetB0, with additional layers, are also proposed for audio classification. Specifically, the proposed CRNN model embeds ResNet152 and EfficientNetB0 in the encoder where spatial features extracted by both networks are concatenated. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) component is used as the decoder in the proposed CRNN for temporal feature extraction. Evaluated using the ESC-50 dataset, the proposed CRNN model with a multi-channel spatial feature fusion, outperforms the customized VGG19, ResNet152, EfficientNetB0 networks as well as existing studies, significantly. The spatial feature fusion in conjunction with LSTM-based sequential feature extraction accounts for the superiority of the proposed CRNN model for environmental sound classification
Karanis Tax Rolls database (The Oxford Roman Economy Project)
No full textThis database presents the papyrological evidence of the Karanis tax rolls archive (TM Arch ID 63), documenting over 17,000 transactions that represent payments from over 1,000 individuals to the Karanis taxman. These range from poll-taxes to taxes on pigeon-houses and private olive orchards and vineyards. Information is recorded on the date and value of the payment, the identity of the payer and the recipient, and the type of tax.The database in its present form (Version 2.0) is the work of Ellis Cuffe, augmenting an original basic compilation by Alan Bowman and Justin Dombrowski (Version 1.0, 2010).To cite this database please use the following reference:Cuffe, E., Bowman, A. K., and Dombrowski, J. (2024). Karanis Tax Rolls database, Version 2.0 (OxREP databases). Accessed [date]: https://oxrep.web.ox.ac.uk/karanis-tax-databas
Distribution-aware fairness test generation
Get PDFEnsuring that all classes of objects are detected with equal accuracy is essential in AI systems. For instance, being unable to identify any one class of objects could have fatal consequences in autonomous driving systems. Hence, ensuring the reliability of image recognition systems is crucial. This work addresses how to validate group fairness in image recognition software. We propose a distribution-aware fairness testing approach (called DISTROFAIR) that systematically exposes class-level fairness violations in image classifiers via a synergistic combination of out-of-distribution (OOD) testing and semantic-preserving image mutation. DISTROFAIR automatically learns the distribution (e.g., number/orientation) of objects in a set of images. Then it systematically mutates objects in the images to become OOD using three semantic-preserving image mutations – object deletion, object insertion and object rotation. We evaluate DISTROFAIR using two well-known datasets (CityScapes and MS-COCO) and three major, commercial image recognition software (namely, Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud Vision and Azure Computer Vision). Results show that about 21% of images generated by DISTROFAIR reveal class-level fairness violations using either ground truth or metamorphic oracles. DISTROFAIR is up to 2.3× more effective than two main baselines, i.e., (a) an approach which focuses on generating images only within the distribution (ID) and (b) fairness analysis using only the original image dataset. We further observed that DISTROFAIR is efficient, it generates 460 images per hour, on average. Finally, we evaluate the semantic validity of our approach via a user study with 81 participants, using 30 real images and 30 corresponding mutated images generated by DISTROFAIR. We found that images generated by DISTROFAIR are 80% as realistic as real-world images
Wishful perceiving:A value-based bias for perception of close others
Get PDFWhy do people not perceive their close others accurately, although they have ample information about them? We propose that one reason for such errors may be bias based on personal values. Personal values may serve as schemas defining what people see as positive, and thus affect perceptions of others' behavior, values, and traits. We propose that, in close relationships, people see others as sharing their own values.Six studies (N = 2,225; 4 pre-registered analyses and one pre-registered study) tested this bias. Perceivers reported their personal values and the perceived values, behaviors, or traits of a close other (target), while the target also reported on the same values, behaviors or traits. Personal values significantly and positively related to perception of close others' values and behaviors, while controlling for the real targets' value/behavior. Results were replicated for spouses, romantic partners, children, parents, and friends. Some evidence also supports the idea that the bias is stronger for relationships of better quality. Implications for relationship quality are discussed, as well as implications for the adaptive properties of this bias.<br/
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