Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging. Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 282 pages, ISBN: 978-1-108-72724-2 Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-108-48027-7 Hardback.

In her prize-winning Islam Translated (2011) Ronit Ricci treats versions in different languages of a single text, the Book of One Thousand Questions, as “lenses” through which she examines “the intricate relationships between Islamization and literary and linguistic transformation” (4) across languages and cultures in the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia over several centuries. In her new book, texts, translations, and movement of people and ideas through time and space are still..

Reintegration services for long-term dangerous offenders : a case study and discussion

Successfully reintegrating long-term prisoners back into the community often presents significant challenges for service providers. Ex-prisoners typically experience high levels of social stigma; present with multiple needs; and can struggle to find meaningful employment, stable accommodation, and to maintain supportive relationships. There have, however, been relatively few published evaluations of the outcomes achieved by postrelease services on managing the risk of reoffending and, as such, it is difficult for service providers to meet these multiple and complex levels of need in ways that might be considered to be evidence based. In this article we describe a specialized prerelease support, reentry, and reintegration service that is offered to long-term prisoners, many of whom have been legally labelled as &lsquo;&lsquo;dangerous.&rsquo;&rsquo; The current model of service delivery is reviewed and discussed in the context of current theories of offender rehabilitation and reintegration. These are then used to discuss the way in which services for this group of offenders might best be conceptualized.<br /

Organised crime and social media: detecting and corroborating weak signals of human trafficking online

This paper describes an approach for detecting the presence or emergence of Organised Crime (OC) signals on Social Media. It shows how words and phrases, used by members of the public in Social Media, can be treated as weak signals of OC, enabling information to be classified according to a taxonomy of OC. Formal Concept Analysis is used to group information sources, according to Crime and Location, thus providing a means of corroboration and creating OC Concepts that can be used to alert police analysts to the possible presence of OC. The analyst is able to `drill down' into an OC Concept of interest, discovering additional information that may be pertinent to the crime. The paper describes the implementation of this approach into a fully-functional prototype software system, incorporating a Social Media Scanning System and a map-based user interface. The approach and system are illustrated using the Trafficking of Human Beings as an example. Real data is used to obtain results that show that weak signals of OC have been detected and corroborated, thus alerting to the possible presence of OC. Keyword : organised crime, social media, formal concept analysis

Smart City, Citizen Engagement, and Information System Research

The paper highlights the importance of involvement of citizens in all the steps of smart city initiatives.Therefore, authors try to identify key factors and enablers for effective engagement and involvement of citizens and residents in any smart city project

A Retrospective Comparison between the PNST and other Paediatric Nutritional Screening Tools

Background: Although it is widely acknowledged that hospitalized children are at greater risk of malnutrition, the available paediatric Nutritional Risk Screening (NRS) tools have not yet become universally used to identify those children at greater risk. Furthermore, the utility of one NRS tool over another remains unclear.Materials and Methods: The utility of a recently developed tool, the Paediatric Nutritional Screening Tool (PNST), was evaluated using data previously collected in the assessment of three other NRS tools in 281 children from Iran and New Zealand. The sensitivity and specificity of each tool was then assessed based on the WHO criteria for malnutrition.Results: The PNST recognized about half of the malnourished patients while the other three tools identified at least 85% of these children. The sensitivity of PNST for moderate (BMI-z &lt; 2) and severe malnutrition (BMI-z &lt;-3) was 37% and 46% respectively, while the sensitivity for other three NRS tools ranged from 82-100%.Conclusion: In this data set, the PNST tool did not perform as well as the three more established NRS tools. Further work is required to provide optimal tools for the identification of hospitalized children at risk of malnutrition

Thai Menschenbild: a study of Chinese, Thai, and international students in a private Thai university as measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)

Thai Higher Education (Thai HE) is changing, due to international reform. This paper presents data collected in a longitudinal study carried out in Thailand during 2017–2018 using the US version of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and qualitative interviews. We offer a case study about the cultures and engagement of three groups of students found at an international private university in Thailand. The groups studied were international students, Chinese students in a mixed Thai/English curriculum and Thai students studying in Thai, all situated in a Thai HE institutional community. The (NSSE) was administered to 179 students: 89 in an International College, 54 Chinese students and 36 Thai students, as a control. Our results showed different attitudes toward studying, teachers, memorisation, participation, critical thinking, and empathy. This paper concludes with a discussion of how students in an international university in Thailand arrange themselves socially, and why this matters

Multicultural mosaic? Studying the cultural integration of international students in ‘Thai Higher Education 4.0'

The cultural integration of international students in Thai Higher Education (Thai HE) is spurred by a government initiative known as Thailand 4.0, and has raised the educational bar. It is a lucrative move; increased university costs and access to home countries' courses ensure capable international students now seek affordable degree education in Thailand. Thus, in this paper, we offer empirical findings based on a case study drawn across a longitudinal, year-long investigation. Using examples from a mixed-methods approach, we report a 'cultural mosaic' of multiculturalism resistant to cultural assimilation in our setting, which contrasts themes in Thai HE policy. This policy often embraces nationalist themes, found embedded in General Education (GE) courses and the habitus of Thai HE, which impacts the potential to integrate overseas students effectively into Thai culture and society. With this in mind, we question the nature of multiculturalism in the classroom, suggesting a changing phenomenon with implications for Thai HE's future. Meanwhile, we use this paper to establish the validity of tools needed for critical discussion about learning culture across the Thai HE community as we move towards Thailand 4.0. We aim to describe the cultural integration of a growing base of international students, hoping to inform the development of Thai HE, which could be a world-class and leading platform for education

Quantum dark solitons in Bose gas confined in a hard wall box

Schr\"odinger equation for Bose gas with repulsive contact interactions in one-dimensional space may be solved analytically with the help of the Bethe ansatz if we impose periodic boundary conditions. It was shown that in such a system there exist many-body eigenstates directly corresponding to dark soliton solutions of the mean-field equation. The system is still integrable if one switches from the periodic boundary conditions to an infinite square well potential. The corresponding eigenstates were constructed by M. Gaudin. We analyze weak interaction limit of Gaudin's solutions and identify parametrization of eigenstates strictly connected with single and multiple dark solitons. Numerical simulations of detection of particle's positions reveal dark solitons in the weak interaction regime and their quantum nature in the presence of strong interactions.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Transitions to Better Lives: offender readiness and rehabilitation

Transitions to Better Lives aims to describe, collate, and summarize a body of recent research "both theoretical and empirical" that explores the issue of treatment readiness in offender programming. It is divided into three sections. Part one unpacks a model of treatment readiness, and explains how it has been operationalized. Part two discusses how the construct has been applied to the treatment of different offender groups. Part three discusses some of the practice approaches that have been identified as holding promise in addressing low levels of offender readiness are discussed. Included within each section are contributions from a number of authors whose work, in recent years, has stimulated discussion and helped to inform practice in offender rehabilitation. This book is an ideal resource for those who study within the field of criminology, or who work in the criminal justice system, and have an interest in the delivery of rehabilitation and reintegration programmes for offenders. This includes psychologists, social workers, probation and parole officers, and prison officers

A Prescriptive Approach For Structured Information Extraction From Web Forums And Social Media

In this paper we present ongoing research into extracting highly structured data - such as authors, posts, the links between them, and the metadata about them - from social media and fora using a prescriptive approach, building upon simple observations and generalised rules. This method uses techniques designed around identifying content based on text features, such as text density, and combines it with simple rules derived from studying the common structures of the target web pages to infer and extract structure from structured data. We discuss observations made from studying a number of social media web sites and forums and present the simple rules for post, content and attribute identification developed from these observations. We also present the structured format used to store the extracted data and some of the benefits of this structure. Next, we give initial experimental results, showing that the proposed approach can achieve accuracies above 90% for identifying posts, 70% for extracting content from these posts, and 50-70% for extracting additional attributes about the posts and their authors. We highlight factors influencing these results, before finally detailing the next steps for this research. Our research shows that it is possible to achieve reasonable levels of accuracy for extracting structured data using an approach that requires no training and is transferable between different social media and web forums with no additional input necessary. This approach thus promises considerable efficiency gains compared to the training involved with current machine learning-based approaches, whilst maintaining reasonable performance