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‘Undesirable and Unreturnable’ in the United Kingdom
Get PDFThe issue of migrants convicted or suspected of serious criminality is one that has been high on the media and political agenda in the UK in the last two decades. This paper focuses on three categories of (suspected) criminal migrants - foreign national offenders, individuals considered to pose a security risk and those excluded from refugee status under Article 1F of the Refugee Convention - outlining the scale and demographic of these groups in the UK, governmental measures taken to facilitate their removal and the consequences for those that nevertheless remain. This examination reveals that, despite the UK’s emphasis on removal, legal obstacles and administrative problems continue to frustrate many attempts to remove such persons. As a result, large numbers of individuals are released into the community or remain in detention for often prolonged periods of time. In the case of excluded asylum-seekers, these individuals are subject to an extremely precarious form of leave. The result is these ‘undesirable’ migrants remain in a form of ‘limbo’, with no firm legal status and the prospect of removal ever present. If the emphasis remains on removal rather than looking to alternative in-country solutions that are more than temporary in nature, a viable solution to this issue is likely to remain elusive
Persuasive Language in Cicero’s Pro Milone: A Close Reading and Commentary
Get PDFThis innovative approach to Cicero’s persuasive language analyses the style and structure of one of his important speeches in more details than has ever been done before.
It applies ideas from modern linguistics (sentential topic, lexical patterning, interactional discourse), and explores the possibilities and limitations of quantitative analysis, made easier by modern computing power, in the areas of syntax and vocabulary.
The result is a reading of the Pro Milone as a unified text, whether aimed at persuading the jury to acquit Milo or at persuading a wider audience that Milo should have been acquitted.
This reading not only contributes to our understanding of late republican discourse, but also suggests a new methodology for using the study of language and style to illuminate literary/historical aspects of texts
Guest Editorial – Key sources for international law research
No full textIn this Guest Editorial for a special issue of Legal Information Management, David Gee (Deputy Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies) summaries the aims and outputs of a national socio-legal training day on socio-legal sources and methods in International law organised by the British Library, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and the Socio-Legal Studies Association and held at IALS in November 2016
Content in Simple Signalling Systems
No full textOur understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational content, especially in contexts where false content is important. This article shows that this concept can be made precise by defining a notion of functional content that captures the degree to which different states of the world are involved in stabilizing senders’ and receivers’ use of a signal at equilibrium. A series of case studies is used to contrast functional content with informational content, and to illustrate the explanatory role and limitations of this definition of functional content
‘To avoide all envye, malys, grudge and displeasure’: sociability and social networking at the London wardmote inquest, c.1470-1540
Get PDFThis study considers the London wardmote inquest as a venue for social networking in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It uses a combination of social network analysis (SNA) of wills and a set of ordinances for the conduct of wardmotes written by the jurors of Aldersgate ward in 1540. Wardmotes were an important venue for men to accrue social capital and ‘respectability’ in the eyes of their neighbours and develop personal connections which were crucial for social and economic advancement in the pre-modern city. Such advancement is evidenced in the later office holding careers of jurors and their importance in parish social networks. The meeting of the inquest was a potentially fraught occasion of conflicting loyalties which required close policing in order to engender the sociability key to its role as a venue for networking
“Franglais Fops” and mocking the French in English Restoration Theatre
Get PDFIn the latter half of the seventeenth century, France was the dominant cultural force and England lay under its influence in terms of art and fashion. However, Restoration comedy found a means of turning the power structure on its head by overtly mocking those subjugated by all things French. The stock character commonly known as the “Frenchified fop”, but which I prefer to label a “Franglais fop” for reasons that shall become apparent, is one of Restoration comedy’s greatest comic inventions. In this essay, I wish to examine one case study of this type of fop: Monsieur de Paris in William Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1671). De Paris, like his more famous counterpart Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676), is English by birth but enamoured with French culture following a brief sojourn in France. Analysis of de Paris’s case will reveal how the Franglais fop provides the means to critique both gallants and to mock the French
Les scriptae régionales du moyen français : pour l’analyse transversale des sources du DMF
No full textLe lemmatiseur du DMF se prête efficacement à l’analyse transversale des variations phono- et morpho-graphématiques au sein de son corpus, et qu’il constitue un outil à fort potentiel pour la localisation de ses sources
KiloHertz Bandwidth, Dual-Stage Haptic Device Lets You Touch Brownian Motion
No full textThis paper describes a haptic interface that has a uniform response over the entire human tactile frequency range. Structural mechanics makes it very difficult to implement articulated mechanical systems that can transmit high frequency signals. Here, we separated the frequency range into two frequency bands. The lower band is within the first structural mode of the corresponding haptic device while the higher one can be transmitted accurately by a fast actuator operating from conservation of momentum, that is, without reaction forces to the ground. To couple the two systems, we adopted a channel separation approach akin to that employed in the design of acoustic reproduction systems. The two channels are recombined at the tip of the device to give a uniform frequency response from DC to one kHz. In terms of mechanical design, the high-frequency transducer was embedded inside the tip of the main stage so that during operation, the human operator has only to interact with a single finger interface. In order to exemplify the type of application that would benefit from this kind of interface, we applied it to the haptic exploration with microscopic scales objects which are known to behave with very fast dynamics. The novel haptic interface was bilaterally coupled with a micromanipulation platform to demonstrate its capabilities. Operators could feel interaction forces arising from contact as well as those resulting from Brownian motion and could manoeuvre a micro bead in the absence of vision
Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space
No full textProsopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor
Pages without borders: global networks and the settler press in Algeria, 1881-1914
Get PDFThis article traces processes of political and cultural identification in the settler press in Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century. These processes, the article argues, extended beyond the triangular dynamics of the settler colonial situation, to be shaped by the wider global networks which sustained the rapid growth of the settler press in this period. Press networks created inter-imperial connections which allowed Europeans in Algeria to compare themselves to other settler societies across the world, providing points of reference for their own debates about sovereignty. If historic and contemporary examples of rebellion set by Europeans in the USA, the Transvaal, and Cuba proved attractive to journalists who resented the political authority and cultural influence of the French state, they were also perceived as risky in a demographic context of settler diversity and minority. Instead, journalists drew upon their global networks to imagine a transnational model of ‘Latin’ community. Their claims to ‘Latin’ identity expressed a profound ambivalence towards French authority, allowing them to seek protection from the French state without abandoning their mixed European heritage to the assimilative projects of the ‘one and indivisible’ republican regime. While journalists’ promotion of an internally-differentiated ‘Latin’ cultural and racial community may have disrupted the ‘register of sameness’ amongst settlers, it ultimately reinforced the exclusion of Algerian Muslims and Jews as agents and subjects of news