A Recipe For Wrongful Confessions: A Case Study Examining The Reid Technique And The Interrogation Of Indigenous Suspects

Article published in the Michigan State International Law Review

Information is provisional

Purpose - This paper aims to contribute to a transdisciplinary understanding of the nature of information. Design/methodology/approach - The work draws from previous work done on information in several disciplines and contexts, and proposes a new framework for describing and understanding information. It applies the framework to several different situations involving information, explores the insights revealed by the use of the framework and discusses some of the implications. Findings - Information is usefully described as a situated event that extracts or generates meaning, with the distinction between extracting or generating meaning corresponding to the distinction between semantic and environmental information. A diagrammatic convention based on communications theory and making use of hierarchies of levels is found to provide a powerful means of conveying many of the aspects of the nature of information, and of understanding the role of information in a wide range of applications. An additional specific finding of the work is that information is inherently provisional. Originality/value - The diagrammatic framework is a new way of presenting, describing and understanding information, and the suggestion that information is inherently provisional is believed to be new

Orientation cues for high-flying nocturnal insect migrants: do turbulence-induced temperature and velocity fluctuations indicate the mean wind flow?

Migratory insects flying at high altitude at night often show a degree of common alignment, sometimes with quite small angular dispersions around the mean. The observed orientation directions are often close to the downwind direction and this would seemingly be adaptive in that large insects could add their self-propelled speed to the wind speed, thus maximising their displacement in a given time. There are increasing indications that high-altitude orientation may be maintained by some intrinsic property of the wind rather than by visual perception of relative ground movement. Therefore, we first examined whether migrating insects could deduce the mean wind direction from the turbulent fluctuations in temperature. Within the atmospheric boundary-layer, temperature records show characteristic ramp-cliff structures, and insects flying downwind would move through these ramps whilst those flying crosswind would not. However, analysis of vertical-looking radar data on the common orientations of nocturnally migrating insects in the UK produced no evidence that the migrants actually use temperature ramps as orientation cues. This suggests that insects rely on turbulent velocity and acceleration cues, and refocuses attention on how these can be detected, especially as small-scale turbulence is usually held to be directionally invariant (isotropic). In the second part of the paper we present a theoretical analysis and simulations showing that velocity fluctuations and accelerations felt by an insect are predicted to be anisotropic even when the small-scale turbulence (measured at a fixed point or along the trajectory of a fluid-particle) is isotropic. Our results thus provide further evidence that insects do indeed use turbulent velocity and acceleration cues as indicators of the mean wind direction

Long-range seasonal migration in insects: mechanisms, evolutionary drivers and ecological consequences

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this recordMyriad tiny insect species take to the air to engage in windborne migration, but entomology also has its 'charismatic megafauna' of butterflies, large moths, dragonflies and locusts. The spectacular migrations of large day-flying insects have long fascinated humankind, and since the advent of radar entomology much has been revealed about high-altitude night-time insect migrations. Over the last decade, there have been significant advances in insect migration research, which we review here. In particular, we highlight: (1) notable improvements in our understanding of lepidopteran navigation strategies, including the hitherto unsuspected capabilities of high-altitude migrants to select favourable winds and orientate adaptively, (2) progress in unravelling the neuronal mechanisms underlying sun compass orientation and in identifying the genetic complex underpinning key traits associated with migration behaviour and performance in the monarch butterfly, and (3) improvements in our knowledge of the multifaceted interactions between disease agents and insect migrants, in terms of direct effects on migration success and pathogen spread, and indirect effects on the evolution of migratory systems. We conclude by highlighting the progress that can be made through inter-phyla comparisons, and identify future research areas that will enhance our understanding of insect migration strategies within an eco-evolutionary perspective.Rothamsted Research is a national institute of bioscience strategically funded by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). KW was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Royal Society Senior Research Fellowship

Measuring Impacts in Risk Management Education--The Beehive Master Beef Manager Program

The purpose of Extension risk management education is to assist clientele by helping them make better management decisions. The results of this effort can sometimes take months or years to be expressed. It is difficult for Extension faculty to wait for this interval because administrators and funding entities demand results for programs usually within the space of one year. Curriculum-based programming enables faculty member(s) to develop enough data about attitude changes and knowledge transfer over several workshops to demonstrate statistical changes, compared to single workshops. Using multiple evaluation instruments, Extension faculty can show implementation patterns that further demonstrate program value

Replicating landmine blast loading in cellular <i>in Vitro</i> models

Trauma arising from landmines and improvised explosive devices promotes heterotopic ossification, the formation of extra-skeletal bone in non-osseous tissue. To date, experimental platforms that can replicate the loading parameter space relevant to improvised explosive device and landmine blast wave exposure have not been available to study the effects of such non-physiological mechanical loading on cells. Here, we present the design and calibration of three distinct in vitro experimental loading platforms that allow us to replicate the spectrum of loading conditions recorded in near-field blast wave exposure. We subjected cells in suspension or in a three-dimensional hydrogel to strain rates up to 6000 s-1and pressure levels up to 45 MPa. Our results highlight that cellular activation is regulated in a non-linear fashion - not by a single mechanical parameter, it is the combined action of the applied mechanical pressure, rate of loading and loading impulse, along with the extracellular environment used to convey the pressure waves. Finally, our research indicates that PO MSCs are finely tuned to respond to mechanical stimuli that fall within defined ranges of loading