Suchergebnisse

Chinese PUA (pickup artist) culture had its origins in the United States and was localized in China around the turn of century. Because of opportunities that derive from a rapidly developing consum...

The responsibilizing of civil society for security has been well analysed in recent years, but the place of the public inquiry as an important site of negotiations over issues of affect in security has been largely under-acknowledged. This article investigates the scope, recommendations, and forensic investigation of the Manchester Arena Inquiry, an inquiry established in the wake of the 2017 bombing and which prefigures the gaze of the UK's forthcoming 'Protect Duty'. Once formalized, this Duty will situate venue workers as crucial embodiments of national counter-terrorism priorities. The paper shows how contestations over affective embodiments of security are navigated across the Inquiry, with national security articulated as being produced exclusively in local spaces, and through a body divorced from its experience via sophisticated management techniques. We find how security is imagined through local workers becoming 'watchfully-anxious', with routinized tasks and training deployed to generate this necessary destabilization. Bodies of venue staff must be displaced and moved around, opening space for racialized encounters – where these encounters are rendered necessarily productive of security, regardless of their result. Workers are required to confess, defending their role in security failure and situating them within national priorities. Through close analysis of the Inquiry's reports, and drawing from interviews with UK disaster management experts, the discussion reveals how the Manchester Arena Inquiry positions national security as produced through low-paid workers defending the minutiae of their jobs in the context of the local venue. Through its forensic investigation and detail-oriented scope, the public inquiry is revealed as an important technology in the (re)production of localized forms of security knowledge, which in turn delegitimizes knowledge of disaster as structural or political.

A blind separation technique based on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is proposed for breast tumor delineation and pathologic diagnosis. Tissue morphology is determined by fitting local measures of tissue reflectance to a Mie theory approximation, parameterizing the scattering power, scattering amplitude and average scattering irradiance. ICA is applied on the scattering parameters by spatial analysis using the Fast ICA method to extract more determinant features for an accurate diagnostic. Neither training, nor comparisons with reference parameters are required. Tissue diagnosis is provided directly following ICA application to the scattering parameter images. Surgically resected breast tissues were imaged and identified by a pathologist. Three different tissue pathologies were identified in 29 samples and classified as not-malignant, malignant and adipose. Scatter plot analysis of both ICA results and optical parameters where obtained. ICA subtle ameliorates those cases where optical parameter's scatter plots were not linearly separable. Furthermore, observing the mixing matrix of the ICA, it can be decided when the optical parameters themselves are diagnostically powerful. Moreover, contrast maps provided by ICA correlate with the pathologic diagnosis. The time response of the diagnostic strategy is therefore enhanced comparing with complex classifiers, enabling near real-time assessment of pathology during breast-conserving surgery. ; This work has been supported by CYCIT projects DA2TOI (FIS2010-19860) and TFS (TEC2010-20224-C02-02), funded by the Spanish Government.

Immigration enforcement and policy making has increasingly devolved to the local level in the United States. American sheriffs present a unique opportunity to evaluate decisions made about immigration policies in the local context. In dealing with immigration concerns in their counties, sheriffs act both within the confines of federal and state mandates and as local policymakers. However, little research comprehensively assesses the role sheriffs play in immigration policy making. Using data from an original, national survey of more than five hundred elected sheriffs in the United States, we provide a broad account of sheriffs' roles in immigration enforcement and policy making. Our research demonstrates that sheriffs' ideology and personal characteristics shape their personal attitudes about immigrants. In turn, these attitudes play a key role in influencing local enforcement decisions. Sheriffs' immigration attitudes relate strongest to checks of the immigration status of witnesses and victims and those stopped for traffic violations or arrested for non-violent crimes. Our results demonstrate the important role of the sheriff in understanding local variation in immigration policy and the connection between the personal preferences of representatives and policy making that can emerge across policy environments and levels of government.

Environmental and human health issues associated with outdoor air pollution, such as ozone, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants in metropolitan regions, are an area of growing concern for both policy officials and the general public. Increasing attention from the news media, new health data, and public debate over the effectiveness of clean air regulations have raised the importance of air quality in the public consciousness. While public perceptions of air quality have been studied thoroughly dating back to the 1960s, little empirical research has been conducted to explain the spatial aspects of these perceptions, particularly at the local level. Although recent studies suggest characteristics of local setting are important in shaping perceptions of air quality, the roles of proximity, neighborhood characteristics, and location have not been clarified. This study seeks to improve understanding of the major factors shaping public perceptions of air quality by examining the spatial pattern of local risk perception, the role of socioeconomic characteristics in forming these perceptions, and the relationship between perceived and scientifically measured air pollution. First, we map the spatial pattern of local air quality perceptions using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) across the Dallas and Houston metropolitan areas. Next, we explain these perceptions through local contextual factors using both bivariate correlations and multivariate regression analysis. Results indicate that perceptions of air quality in the study areas are not significantly correlated with air quality based on readings of air monitoring stations. Instead, perceptions appear to be influenced by setting (urban vs. rural), state identification, access to information, and socioeconomic characteristics such as age, race, and political identification. We discuss the implications of the findings and provide direction on how further research can provide a deeper understanding of the local contextual factors influencing public perceptions.

From the late 1980s, the natural gas extraction in the Netherlands has experienced an increasing number of ever stronger gasquakes (induced earthquakes due to gas extraction). This paper offers a security analysis of the accompanying debate on the material consequences and organization of the gas extraction between the threatened local population, the knowledge institutes analyzing the gasquakes, and the government and extraction industry. This paper studies how these parties make sense of the gasquakes through a combination of securitization theory and the flat relationality offered by new materialism, which forces the two conflicting securitization claims to be analyzed in their local sociotechnical and material context. The resulting analysis shows how the gas debate is structured by a shared security of supply understanding. An understanding which for a long time has been questioned by the local population on its safety and cost implications. However, it took 25 years until their claims were accepted and the security of supply understanding shifted to a focus on minimal extraction volumes. An acceptance that can only be explained through a self-reinforcing combination of security claims, actual material events, increasing measurements (following security calls), shifting value judgements and increasing audience acceptance (creating additional speech actors). (C) 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.