Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

CCTV: a technology under the radar?

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras have become a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in the UK over the last thirty years. In this thesis I undertake an examination of the historical, political, social, economic, and technological factors, influencing the development, usage, and widespread dissemination of CCTV in the UK. I focus on the issue of why the UK has become so camera-surveilled, and especially the specific role that the public has played in relation to the development and use of the technology. I examine the historical factors through an analysis of the development of surveillance, policing, and political change, during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and early and contemporary uses of CCTV, situating this in the wider context of a history of the criminal justice system. I also look at the media and policy context in which CCTV has developed and become widespread, with this element of the thesis particularly informed by an analysis of the way in which the public are constructed. Next, I carry out an empirical study exploring public engagement and consultation in relation to, and feelings towards, the installation of CCTV onto two estates in East London as part of a project to expand access to digital services in London. Finally, I give an overview of international experiences of CCTV providing a broader context for the final analysis. I argue that the lack of legislation and regulation at the time of the inception of CCTV allowed its subsequent and rapid proliferation. The initial growth of CCTV also occurred at a time when public debate and engagement in science and technology policy did not take place. Its use as a tool for crime prevention was cemented by a police force looking for a shoulder to share the burden of fighting crime. This coupled with an availability of public money for the installation of CCTV systems, the need for a political solution to rising levels of crime, and an apparently passive public, formed the ideal environment for the rise of CCTV

Semiotic machines : software in discourse

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-259).This study develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of software as a medium of communication. This study analyses voting software, educational software, search engines, and combat and narrative in digital games. In each case it investigates how proprietary software affords discourse, and suggests a way of characterising users’ experience of this discourse. These affordances constitute the rules of communication, or ‘rules of speaking’, ‘rules of seeing’, and ‘writing-rights’ which proprietary software makes available to users, situating them within specific power-relations in the process

Media’s influence on the 21st century society: A global criminological systematic review

This investigation assumes that the media can reduce or spread criminal activities and tendencies based on how the concerned parties apply the policies and community standards that guide these platforms’ use. In total, 254 materials were gathered across several search systems between October 2021 and September 2022. Qualitative data were used from the selected materials to synthesise and summarise the content on the examined 21st-century events and media’s influence on crime. It is not possible to reject the premise that the media influences opinions on crime and the legal system. Nevertheless, the data reveals that no causal media effect can be directly established. However, the same data uncovers how media portrays an activity affects how people perceive it. Advances in technology, media, and criminology may have affected the analysis of records, including the time and quality of resources. More accurate and fair media coverage of crime would lead to a more informed and aware population. On the other hand, media houses that promote and reward good behaviour should be applauded. These two steps ensure the media cannot be ignored when assessing crime and how the public perceives it, as it can encourage crime and shift perceptions. Therefore, further research, stricter laws and policies, and community education on crime prevention and media screening are needed. The fact that unfavourable media coverage of crime can ruin a business, either directly or indirectly (consumer behaviour changes due to crime), makes this paper of utmost importance for businessmen, politicians, and local agencies.Esta dissertação presume que os media podem ser utilizados para reduzir ou difundir atividades ou tendências criminosas, dependendo da aplicação de políticas e padrões comunitários que influenciam tais plataformas. Foram utilizados 254 materiais reunidos em diversos sistemas de pesquisa entre outubro de 2021 e setembro de 2022. Estes compreendem publicações do século XXI que examinam a influência dos media nas práticas criminais e suas perceções. Apesar deste estudo não possibilitar estabelecer uma relação causal, não é, ainda assim, possível rejeitar a premissa de que os media influenciam as perceções face ao crime. Determina, contudo, que o modo como os media divulgam uma atividade afeta a perceção social face à mesma. Uma população mais informada e consciente depende de uma cobertura mediática mais fatual. Os media que promovem e recompensam o bom comportamento devem ser louvados. Os media não podem ser ignorados na avaliação do crime e da sua perceção, tendo o poder de incentivar a criminalidade e potenciar alterações nas perceções sociais. Consequentemente, é necessário investigar mais, aplicar leis e políticas mais rigorosas, e investir em programas de educação comunitária de prevenção à criminalidade e interpretação dos media. Esta dissertação é de elevada importância a empresários, políticos e outros órgãos locais, pelo fato de a cobertura desfavorável do crime pelos media poder arruinar um indivíduo, organização ou até um negócio, seja de forma direta (críticas ao estabelecimento) ou indireta (mudanças no comportamento do consumidor devido à ocorrência de crimes numa região)

The 'War on Terror' metaframe in film and television

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, the government of the United States of America declared a ‘War on Terror’. This was targeted not only at the ostensible culprits – al-Qaeda - but at ‘terror’ itself. The ‘War on Terror’ acted as a rhetorical ‘metaframe’, which was sufficiently flexible to incorporate a broad array of nominally-related policies, events, phenomena and declarations, from the Iraq war to issues of immigration. The War on Terror is strategically limitless, and therefore incorporates not only actual wars, but potential wars. For example, the bellicose rhetoric towards those countries labelled the ‘Axis of Evil’ or ‘Outposts of Tyranny’ is as much a manifestation of the metaframe as the ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad. As a rhetorical frame, it is created through all of its utterances; its narrative may have been initially scripted by the Bush administration, but it is reified and naturalised by the news media and other commentators, who adopt the frame’s language even when critical of its content. Moreover, film and television texts participate in this process, with fiction-based War on Terror narratives sharing and supporting – co-constituting – the War on Terror discourse’s ‘reality’. This thesis argues that the War on Terror metaframe manifests itself in multiple interconnected narrative forms, and these forms both transcode and affect its politics. I propose a congruency between the frame’s expansiveness and its associational interconnections, and a corresponding cinematic plot-structure I term the Global Network Narrative. Elsewhere, an emphasis on the pressures of clock-time is evoked by the real-time sequential-series 24, while the authenticity and authority implied by the embedded ‘witness’ is shown to be codified and performed in multiple film and television fiction texts. Throughout, additional contextual influences – social, historical, and technological – are introduced where appropriate, so as not to adopt the metaframe’s claims of limitlessness and uniqueness, while efforts are made to address film and television not as mutually exclusive areas of study, but as suggestively responsive to one another

Heroes gone Psycho: interrogational torture in post-9/11 Television Fiction

277 p.This dissertation analyzes the recurrent presence of ¿torturer-heroes¿ in post-9/11 television series and tries to ascertain whether these shows serve the agenda of legitimizing the use of interrogational torture that was (and probably still is) used against terrorist suspects in the War on Terror. ¿Torturer-heroes¿ are heroes who engage in torture and remain heroic because their actions serve a greater good. They often operate under the narrative framework of the Ticking Time Bomb scenario: there is a bomb about to go off and the terrorist that can stop it does not cooperate. Under this sense of urgency, torture seems either excused or justified. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Ticking Time Bomb case was often invoked as an argument for the legitimization of torture in exceptional circumstances and to justify the abuses committed by the U.S. in the War on Terror. Therefore, this dissertation contrasts political, legal, philosophical and historical discourses on interrogational torture with their fictional representations, analyzing a corpus of fourteen television series, from 24 to Homeland, that feature at least one instance of interrogational torture carried out by the ¿good guys (and girls)¿ and trying to elucidate the extent to which they disseminate or contest contemporary power discourses

Where Truth Lies

"This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that ideological rifts inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the “fake news” debates of 2016. “Looking at a unique and intriguing set of ‘hybrid media,’ Fallon convincingly makes a claim about a change in the form of new media, one linking politics, aesthetics, and technology.” ALEXANDRA JUHASZ, Brooklyn College, CUNY “Where Truth Lies does the difficult and much-needed work of unpacking how the documentary impulse is shifting in the digital age, both through the profound influence of digital aesthetics and computational thinking and through the ways traditional documentary is infusing digital expression.” JENNIFER MALKOWSKI, author of Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary KRIS FALLON is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of California, Davis.

The Stylometric Processing of Sensory Open Source Data

This research project’s end goal is on the Lone Wolf Terrorist. The project uses an exploratory approach to the self-radicalisation problem by creating a stylistic fingerprint of a person's personality, or self, from subtle characteristics hidden in a person's writing style. It separates the identity of one person from another based on their writing style. It also separates the writings of suicide attackers from ‘normal' bloggers by critical slowing down; a dynamical property used to develop early warning signs of tipping points. It identifies changes in a person's moods, or shifts from one state to another, that might indicate a tipping point for self-radicalisation. Research into authorship identity using personality is a relatively new area in the field of neurolinguistics. There are very few methods that model how an individual's cognitive functions present themselves in writing. Here, we develop a novel algorithm, RPAS, which draws on cognitive functions such as aging, sensory processing, abstract or concrete thinking through referential activity emotional experiences, and a person's internal gender for identity. We use well-known techniques such as Principal Component Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the Vector Space Method to cluster multiple anonymous-authored works. Here we use a new approach, using seriation with noise to separate subtle features in individuals. We conduct time series analysis using modified variants of 1-lag autocorrelation and the coefficient of skewness, two statistical metrics that change near a tipping point, to track serious life events in an individual through cognitive linguistic markers. In our journey of discovery, we uncover secrets about the Elizabethan playwrights hidden for over 400 years. We uncover markers for depression and anxiety in modern-day writers and identify linguistic cues for Alzheimer's disease much earlier than other studies using sensory processing. In using these techniques on the Lone Wolf, we can separate their writing style used before their attacks that differs from other writing