Catégorisation et stigmatisation policières á Sheffield au milieu du XIXe siècle [Numbering crimes and measuring space: policing Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century]

The city in the nineteenth century was often defined as a place of crime: yet from within, the its authorities sought to represent crime as something external to it. The presentation of the criminal statistical returns of the English city of Sheffield can be shown to be distorted in several ways, all of which were consistent with the project of rendering the criminal as firmly 'other'. The town's returns followed the national requirement of establishing numbers of 'resident criminals' and their haunts, but it also went beyond this. Information about residence, ethnicity and literacy was presented in a way that tried to set a boundary between the 'true' city and the people in it who were deemed to be committing the majority of crime. The tactic of labelling was pursued in an effort to symbolically isolate a discrete 'criminal class'. In addition, the mania for sub-division of certain sorts of crime replaced worryingly large numbers of total crimes committed with reassuringly small numbers of crimes that fell into small sub-categories. The returns were a conscious project to create an image of an incorruptible and professional police force successfully securing and thus separating the city from a crime threat that was mainly external, 'alien' or safely under surveillance

The dynamics of alternative pathways to compensatory substitution

The role of epistatic interactions among loci is a central question in evolutionary biology and is increasingly relevant in the genomic age. While the population genetics of compensatory substitution have received considerable attention, most studies have focused on the case when natural selection is very strong against deleterious intermediates. In the biologically-plausible scenario of weak to moderate selection there exist two alternate pathways for compensatory substitution. In one pathway, a deleterious mutation becomes fixed prior to occurrence of the compensatory mutation. In the other, the two loci are simultaneously polymorphic. The rates of compensatory substitution along these two pathways and their relative probabilities are functions of the population size, selection strength, mutation rate, and recombination rate. In this paper these rates and path probabilities are derived analytically and verified using population genetic simulations. The expected time durations of these two paths are similar when selection is moderate, but not when selection is weak. The effect of recombination on the dynamics of the substitution process are explored using simulation. Using the derived rates, a phylogenetic substitution model of the compensatory evolution process is presented that could be used for inference of population genetic parameters from interspecific data.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, 1 table. Accepted to RECOMB Comparative Genomics Meeting 2013, to be published in BMC Bioinformatic

Conserved Currents of Double Field Theory

We find the conserved current associated to invariance under generalised diffeomorphisms in double field theory. This can be used to define a generalised Komar integral. We comment on its applications to solutions, in particular to the fundamental string/pp-wave. We also discuss the current in the context of Scherk-Schwarz compactifications. We calculate the current for both the original double field theory action, corresponding to the NSNS sector alone, and for the RR sector.Comment: 30 pages + appendix, v2: belated update to match published version (typos + refs fixed, some minor comments added

Brussels blog round up for 6 October – 12 October: Merkel inGreece, the Catalonia debate rages on, and EU wins the NobelPeace Prize.

Reaction to the EU’s 2012 Nobel Peace Prize award has been mixed. Open Europe draws a comparison with the “once celebrated actor who just got a lif etime achievement award”, arguing that while European integration did play a signif icant role in ensuring peace af ter World War II, the EU’s recent record is less impressive. European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more positive. She calls the award “most welcome, unexpected, and important”