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Measuring the colocation of crime hotspots
Get PDFCrimes tend to concentrate in high-risk places known as crime hotspots. While the size and locations of such hotspots vary between different types of crime as would the underlying conditions that trigger each crime, the extent of overlaps between their hotspots is understudied. Using crime data from Chicago aggregated at the community-area and the census-tract levels, this paper investigates the patterns of overlapping hotspots between different crime types to see whether a specific group of crime types regularly form a joint cluster. Specifically, we identify statistically significant hotspots for each crime and, using the frequent-pattern-growth algorithm, analyse the frequency of each combination of crimes sharing their hotspot locations across the study area. Results suggest that crime hotspots form stable multi-layered colocations and that each area holds its subset: namely, the pervasive, primary colocations consisting of assault, battery and criminal damage to property, which are frequently joined by 7 additional (e.g. street robbery, motor vehicle theft, weapons violation) crimes to comprise secondary colocations, some of which evolving to an even larger, tertiary colocation of hotspots with up to 11 additional crime types (e.g. homicide, criminal sexual assault, narcotics) to form crime-riddled neighbourhoods. This multi-layered structure of colocations as well as the crime colocation diagrams that show the most representative crimes at each colocation size would improve our understanding of the association between different crime types and the crime indicators of other crimes
Bridging the gap between reformists and abolitionists: can non-reformist reforms guide the work of prison inspectorates?
No full textDr Sarah Lamble is a Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory at the School of Law, Birkbeck and researches issues of gender, sexuality and imprisonment, as well as alternative forms of justice. Sarah is an organiser with Abolitionist Futures (link is external)and a founding member of the Bent Bars Project(link is external), which coordinates a letter-writing programme for LGBTQ prisoners in Britain.
Here, Sarah reflects on Justice Edwin Cameron’s recent ICPR annual lecture, titled: 'Do prisons work? If not, do prisons inspectorates do more harm than good?’, applying the concept of ‘non-reformist’ reforms. This term, coined by Austrian philosopher André Gorz with reference to political economy, was further developed by prison abolitionists Thomas Mathieson and Angela Davis
Promoting global well-being through fairtrade food: the role of international exposure
Get PDFSocial preference theory highlights an alternative explanation for consumption choices that are not consistent with rational economic decision making. In the current research, social preference theorizing is advanced by highlighting consumers’ exposure to developing countries (international exposure) as a factor that increases disposition to support fairtrade. The study shows that internationally exposed consumers through direct and indirect means demonstrate social concern by engaging in fairtrade food purchasing behaviour. Managers employing social preference appeals could prioritise internationally exposed consumers and heighten perceptions of equality restoration for a global reference group. The results imply that fairtrade marketers and public policymakers should highlight the benefits of fairtrade products to promote global equity
First-order rewritability and complexity of two-dimensional temporal ontology-mediated queries
Get PDFAiming at ontology-based data access to temporal data, we design two-dimensional temporal ontology and query languages by combining logics from the (extended) DL-Lite family with linear temporal logic LTL over discrete time (Z, 1, and FO(RPR) that admits relational primitive recursion. In terms of circuit complexity, FO(<,≡)- and FO(RPR)- rewritability guarantee answering OMQs in uniform AC0 and NC1, respectively.
We proceed in three steps. First, we define a hierarchy of 2D DL-Lite/LTL ontology languages and investigate the FO-rewritability of OMQs with atomic queries by constructing projections onto 1D LTL OMQs and employing recent results on the FO-rewritability of propositional LTL OMQs. As the projections involve deciding consistency of ontologies and data, we also consider the consistency problem for our languages. While the undecidability of consistency for 2D ontology languages with expressive Boolean role inclusions might be expected, we also show that, rather surprisingly, the restriction to Krom and Horn role inclusions leads to decidability (and ExpSpace-completeness), even if one admits full Booleans on concepts. As a final step, we lift some of the rewritability results for atomic OMQs to OMQs with expressive positive temporal instance queries. The lifting results are based on an in-depth study of the canonical models and only concern Horn ontologies
Associations between emotion recognition and Autistic and Callous Unemotional Traits: differential effects of cueing to the eyes
Get PDFBackground: Although autism and callous-unemotional (CU) traits are distinct conditions, both are associated with difficulties in emotion recognition. However, it is unknown whether the emotion recognition difficulties characteristic of autism and CU traits are driven by comparable underpinning mechanisms.
Methods: We tested whether cueing to the eyes improved emotion recognition in relation to autistic and CU traits in a heterogeneous sample of children enhanced for social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Participants were 171 (n = 75 male) children aged 10–16 years with and without a diagnosis of autism (n = 99 autistic), who completed assessments of emotion recognition with and without cueing to the eyes. Parents completed the assessment of autistic and CU traits.
Results: Associations between autistic and CU traits and emotion recognition accuracy were dependent upon gaze cueing. CU traits were associated with an overall decrease in emotion recognition in the uncued condition, but better fear recognition when cued to the eyes. Conversely, autistic traits were associated with decreased emotion recognition in the cued condition only, and no interactions between autistic traits and emotion were found.
Conclusions: The differential effect of cueing to the eyes in autistic and CU traits suggests different mechanisms underpin emotion recognition abilities. Results suggest interventions designed to promote looking to the eyes may be beneficial for children with CU traits, but not for children with autistic characteristics. Future developmental studies of autism and CU characteristics are required to better understand how different pathways lead to overlapping socio-cognitive profiles
Deep transfer learning for DTI- and MRI- based early diagnosis of cognitive decline and dementia
Get PDFDiffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques have gained significant popularity in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders. Combining brain scans with deep learning is receiving increasing attention in medical diagnostic
applications. However, deep networks can learn powerful features and perform well only when a large amount of DTI or MRI image data are available. The paper attempts to reduce the dependence on massive training data by exploiting transfer learning of deep networks pretrained on ImageNet data for the diagnosis of dementia. Transfer learning can significantly reduce the length of the training, validation and testing process on a new dataset, and is based on the use of pretrained models which have demonstrated better performance than models trained from scratch in several applications. In this context, the paper investigates the potential of transfer learning, which is based on modifications of the AlexNet and VGG16 convolutional neural networks (CNNs), when MRI or DTI data are used for the classification of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), AD and normal patient. Experiments based on data from the ADNI database demonstrate the high performance of the transfer learning methods in the detection of early degenerative changes in the brain. The highest accuracy of 99.75% in the diagnosis of AD was achieved with transfer learning of VGG models using DTI scans. The prediction of early cognitive decline with an accuracy of 93% was reached by VGG models processing MRI data
Lost voices: on counteracting exclusion of women from histories of contemporary philosophy
Get PDFThis paper introduces a Special Issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy on women in philosophy 1880-1970. It argues that there are social, institutional and academic reasons why women philosophers have been excluded from the history of analytic philosophy in this period. There is still time to reverse those tendencies
Learning biases from fiction
Get PDFPhilosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this paper, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one’s prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that fictions are more likely to be a bad influence than a good on
Drug prohibition and the policing of warfare
Get PDFThis article examines the shifting dynamics between policing and warfare as reflected in the War on Drugs over the twentieth century. Despite the UN’s international drug control treaties being written in language of humanitarianism, the drug prohibition that emerged from these laws exemplifies the growth of ‘New War’. The drug war, with its violent methods of armed combat, lethal force, incarceration, asset seizure and land dispossession, was a continuation of familiar warfare. But it also marks a shift away from the traditional structure of war, providing a key, often overlooked early example of how contemporary warfare blurs the lines between surveillance, policing and military action. Through an analysis of prohibition, this article points to a broader trend of war mutating from conflicts between rival sovereign states to the collective assault upon a threat or poison within the universal
Single image haze removal based on a simple addtive model with haze smoothness prior
Get PDFSingle image haze removal, which is to recover the clear version of a hazy image, is a challenging trask in computer vision. In this paper, an additive haze model is proposed to approximate the hazy image formation process. In contrast with the traditional optical model, it regards the haze as an additive layer to a clean image. The model thus avoids estimating the medium transmission rate and the global atmospherical light. In addition, based on a critical observation that haze changes gradually and smoothly accross the image, a haze smoothness prior is proposed to constrain this model. This prior assumes that the haze layer is much smoother than the clear image. Benefiting from this prior, we can directly separate the clean image from a single hazy image. Experimental results and comparisons with synthetic images and real-world images demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single image haze removal algorithms
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