The technologies of isolation: apocalypse and self in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Kairo

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom

Strategies E-Commerce Entrepreneurs Use to Achieve and Maintain Sustainability Beyond the First 5 Years of Operations

E-commerce entrepreneurs who fail to develop and implement strategies to sustain business operations beyond the first 5 years face high business failure rates. Grounded in Porter’s five forces model, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies used by e-commerce entrepreneurs to achieve and maintain sustainability beyond the first 5 years of operations. Participants were e-commerce entrepreneurs from five companies in Texas who implemented successful strategies to achieve and maintain sustainability for more than 5 years. Data were collected from semistructured interviews and reviews of company documents and were analyzed using thematic analysis. Five themes emerged: best practices for consistency, relationship building with customers, networking, risk tolerance, and education. A key recommendation is for e-commerce entrepreneurs to seek ways to create processes that enable replicability of results and customer experiences. The implications for positive social change include the potential of survivability of e-commerce businesses beyond the first 5 years of operations with improved local cash circulation and added taxes improving programs and infrastructure for local schools and other public facilities

Locating and measuring marine aquaculture production from space: a computer vision approach in the French Mediterranean

Aquaculture production -- the cultivation of aquatic plants and animals -- has grown rapidly since the 1990s, but sparse, self-reported and aggregate production data limits the effective understanding and monitoring of the industry's trends and potential risks. Building on a manual survey of aquaculture production from remote sensing imagery, we train a computer vision model to identify marine aquaculture cages from aerial and satellite imagery, and generate a spatially explicit dataset of finfish production locations in the French Mediterranean from 2000-2021 that includes 4,010 cages (69m2 average cage area). We demonstrate the value of our method as an easily adaptable, cost-effective approach that can improve the speed and reliability of aquaculture surveys, and enables downstream analyses relevant to researchers and regulators. We illustrate its use to compute independent estimates of production, and develop a flexible framework to quantify uncertainty in these estimates. Overall, our study presents an efficient, scalable and highly adaptable method for monitoring aquaculture production from remote sensing imagery

A Scoping Review of Home Produced Heroin and Amphetamine Type Stimulant Substitutes: Implications for Prevention, Treatment and Policy

Several home-produced substances such as krokodil and boltushka are prevalent in many Eastern European countries. Anecdotal reports of its use have been circulating in Germany and Norway; however, this has not been confirmed. Its use has also been reported by the media in the USA, although only one confirmed report of its use exists. Home-produced drugs are associated with high levels of morbidity and a number of complex health issues such as the spread of blood borne viruses, gangrene, and internal organ damage. The high incidence of HIV rates amongst people who inject home-produced substances is a public health concern. The resulting physical health consequences of injecting these crude substances are very severe in comparison to heroin or amphetamine acquired in black markets. Due to this fact and the increased mortality associated with these substances, professionals in the area of prevention, treatment, and policy development need to be cognisant of the presentation, harms, and the dangers associated with home-produced substances globally. This scoping review aimed to examine existing literature on the subject of home-produced heroin and amphetamine-type stimulant substitutes. The review discussed the many implications such research may have in the areas of policy and practice. Data were gathered through the use of qualitative secondary resources such as journal articles, reports, reviews, case studies, and media reports. The home production of these substances relies on the utilisation of precursor drugs such as less potent stimulants, tranquillizers, analgesics, and sedatives or natural plant ingredients. The Internet underpins the facilitation of this practice as recipes, and diverted pharmaceutical sales are available widely online, and currently, ease of access to the Internet is evident worldwide. This review highlights the necessity of prevention, education, and also harm reduction related to home-produced drugs and also recommends consistent monitoring of online drug fora, online drug marketplaces, and unregulated pharmacies

Probing the Links between Political Economy and Non-Traditional Security: Themes, Approaches, and Instruments

This is a pre-print of an article published in International Politics. The definitive publisher-authenticated version of: Hameiri, Shahar, and Lee Jones. "Probing the links between political economy and non-traditional security: Themes, approaches and instruments." International Politics (2015), is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/ip.2015.1In recent decades, the security agenda for states and international organisations has expanded dramatically to include a range of ‘non-traditional’, transnational security issues. It is often suggested that globalisation has been a key driver for the emergence or intensification of these problems, but, surprisingly, little sustained scholarly effort has been made to examine the link between responses to the new security agenda and the changing political economy. This curious neglect largely reflects the mutual blind-spots of the sub-disciplines of International Security Studies and International Political Economy, coupled with the dominance of approaches that tend to neglect economic factors. This special issue, which this article introduces, aims to overcome this significant gap. In particular, it focuses on three key themes: the broad relationship between security and the political economy; what is being secured in the name of security, and how this has changed; and how things are being secured – what modes of governance have emerged to manage security problems. In all of these areas, the contributions point to the crucial role of the state in translating shifting state-economy relations to new security definitions and practices