Mediating punitiveness: understanding public attitudes towards work-related fatality cases

This paper concerns an empirical investigation into public attitudes towards work-related fatality cases, where organizational offenders cause the death of workers or members of the public. This issue is particularly relevant following the introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 into UK law. Here, as elsewhere, the use of criminal law against companies reflects governmental concerns over public confidence in the law’s ability to regulate risk. The empirical findings demonstrate that high levels of public concern over these cases do not translate into punitive attitudes. Such cases are viewed rationally and constructively, and lead to instrumental rather than purely expressive enforcement preferences

Molecular flexibility of citrus pectins by combined sedimentation and viscosity analysis

The flexibility/rigidity of pectins plays an important part in their structure-function relationship and therefore on their commercial applications in the food and biomedical industries. Earlier studies based on sedimentation analysis in the ultracentrifuge have focused on molecular weight distributions and qualitative and semi-quantitative descriptions based on power law and Wales-van Holde treatments of conformation in terms of "extended" conformations [Harding, S. E., Berth, G., Ball, A., Mitchell, J.R., & Garcìa de la Torre, J. (1991). The molecular weight distribution and conformation of citrus pectins in solution studied by hydrodynamics. Carbohydrate Polymers, 168, 1-15; Morris, G. A., Foster, T. J., & Harding, S.E. (2000). The effect of degree of esterification on the hydrodynamic properties of citrus pectin. Food Hydrocolloids, 14, 227-235]. In the present study, four pectins of low degree of esterification 17-27% and one of high degree of esterification (70%) were characterised in aqueous solution (0.1 M NaCl) in terms of intrinsic viscosity [η], sedimentation coefficient (s°20,w) and weight average molar mass (Mw). Solution conformation/flexibility was estimated qualitatively using the conformation zoning method [Pavlov, G.M., Rowe, A.J., & Harding, S.E. (1997). Conformation zoning of large molecules using the analytical ultracentrifuge. Trends in Analytical Chemistry, 16, 401-405] and quantitatively (persistence length Lp) using the traditional Bohdanecky and Yamakawa-Fujii relations combined together by minimisation of a target function. Sedimentation conformation zoning showed an extended coil (Type C) conformation and persistence lengths all within the range Lp=10-13 nm (for a fixed mass per unit length)

Volunteering in the care of people with severe mental illness: a systematic review

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

A tale of two capitalisms: preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA

This article examines comparative homicide rates in the United States and Western Europe in an era of increasingly globalized neoliberal economics. The main finding of this preliminary analysis is that historical and spatial correlations between distinct forms of political economy and homicide rates are consistent enough to suggest that social democratic regimes are more successful at fostering the socio-cultural conditions necessary for reduced homicide rates. Thus Western Europe and all continents and nations should approach the importation of American neo-liberal economic policies with extreme caution. The article concludes by suggesting that the indirect but crucial causal connection between political economy and homicide rates, prematurely pushed into the background of criminological thought during the ‘cultural turn’, should be returned to the foreground

'Prove me the bam!': victimization and agency in the lives of young women who commit violent offences

This article reviews the evidence regarding young women’s involvement in violent crime and, drawing on recent research carried out in HMPYOI Cornton Vale in Scotland, provides an overview of the characteristics, needs and deeds of young women sentenced to imprisonment for violent offending. Through the use of direct quotations, the article suggests that young women’s anger and aggression is often related to their experiences of family violence and abuse, and the acquisition of a negative worldview in which other people are considered as being 'out to get you' or ready to 'put one over on you'. The young women survived in these circumstances, not by adopting discourses that cast them as exploited victims, but by drawing on (sub)cultural norms and values which promote pre-emptive violence and the defence of respect. The implications of these findings for those who work with such young women are also discussed

Autoimmunity to tetraspanin-7 in type 1 diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease whereby components of insulin-secreting pancreatic beta cells are targeted by the adaptive immune system leading to the destruction of these cells and insulin deficiency. There is much interest in the development of antigen-specific immune intervention as an approach to prevent disease development in individuals identified as being at risk of disease. It is now recognised that there are multiple targets of the autoimmune response in type 1 diabetes, the most recently identified being a member of the tetraspanin family, tetraspanin-7. The heterogeneity of autoimmune responses to different target antigens complicates the assessment of diabetes risk by the detection of autoantibodies, as well as creating challenges for the design of strategies to intervene in the immune response to these autoantigens. This review describes the discovery of tetraspanin-7 as a target of autoantibodies in type 1 diabetes and how the detection of autoantibodies to the protein provides a valuable marker for future loss of pancreatic beta-cell function

Micromotion-enabled improvement of quantum logic gates with trapped ions

The micromotion of ion crystals confined in Paul traps is usually considered an inconvenient nuisance, and is thus typically minimised in high-precision experiments such as high-fidelity quantum gates for quantum infor- mation processing. In this work, we introduce a particular scheme where this behavior can be reversed, making micromotion beneficial for quantum information processing. We show that using laser-driven micromotion side- bands, it is possible to engineer state-dependent dipole forces with a reduced effect of off-resonant couplings to the carrier transition. This allows one, in a certain parameter regime, to devise entangling gate schemes based on geometric phase gates with both a higher speed and a lower error, which is attractive in light of current efforts towards fault-tolerant quantum information processing. We discuss the prospects of reaching the parameters required to observe this micromotion-enabled improvement in experiments with current and future trap designs

Are Normalizing Flows the Key to Unlocking the Exponential Mechanism?

The Exponential Mechanism (ExpM), designed for private optimization, has been historically sidelined from use on continuous sample spaces, as it requires sampling from a generally intractable density, and, to a lesser extent, bounding the sensitivity of the objective function. Any differential privacy (DP) mechanism can be instantiated as ExpM, and ExpM poses an elegant solution for private machine learning (ML) that bypasses inherent inefficiencies of DPSGD. This paper seeks to operationalize ExpM for private optimization and ML by using an auxiliary Normalizing Flow (NF), an expressive deep network for density learning, to approximately sample from ExpM density. The method, ExpM+NF is an alternative to SGD methods for model training. We prove a sensitivity bound for the $\ell^2$ loss permitting ExpM use with any sampling method. To test feasibility, we present results on MIMIC-III health data comparing (non-private) SGD, DPSGD, and ExpM+NF training methods' accuracy and training time. We find that a model sampled from ExpM+NF is nearly as accurate as non-private SGD, more accurate than DPSGD, and ExpM+NF trains faster than Opacus' DPSGD implementation. Unable to provide a privacy proof for the NF approximation, we present empirical results to investigate privacy including the LiRA membership inference attack of Carlini et al. and the recent privacy auditing lower bound method of Steinke et al. Our findings suggest ExpM+NF provides more privacy than non-private SGD, but not as much as DPSGD, although many attacks are impotent against any model. Ancillary benefits of this work include pushing the SOTA of privacy and accuracy on MIMIC-III healthcare data, exhibiting the use of ExpM+NF for Bayesian inference, showing the limitations of empirical privacy auditing in practice, and providing several privacy theorems applicable to distribution learning

Infusing tribal reciprocity into service research: towards an integrated and dynamic view of repayment, retaliation and restorative justice for regenerative service ecosystem wellbeing

Service exchange among actors and the notion of reciprocity have gained momentum in service research. However, reciprocity’s underlying facets and nature have been neglected. Drawing on a tribal notion of dynamic reciprocity facilitates the understanding of contemporary service interactions in service ecosystems. We explore reciprocity’s tribal elements of repayment, retaliation and restorative justice. This tribal view of reciprocity is also linked to relational and regenerative wellbeing. We derive a conceptual framework for service ecosystems research and practice. An expanded view of reciprocity for service exchanges within and across system levels is required to facilitate regenerative service ecosystem wellbeing

The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption

Academic scholarship addressing transnational cult fandom, particularly Western cult fans forming attachments to films outside their cultures, has frequently addressed the issue of exoticism. Much attention has been paid to how Western fans are problematically drawn to artefacts outside of their own cultures because of exotic qualities, resulting in a shallow and often condescending appreciation of such films. In this article, I critique a number of such articles for merely assuming such processes without proffering sufficient supporting evidence. In fact, I argue that a number of such exotic-oriented critiques of transnational cultism are actually guilty of practising what they preach against: an insufficient contextualization of fandom and a tendency to downplay the messiness of empirical data in favour of generalized abstractions. Further, I argue that the constant critique of fans as avoiding contextualization has not only been overstated but stringently used as a yardstick to denigrate fan engagements with texts as improper. As such, fans are often ‘othered’ within such articles, a process mirroring the ways they are accused of othering distant cultural artefacts