Signal specific electric potential sensors for operation in noisy environments

Limitations on the performance of electric potential sensors are due to saturation caused by environmental electromagnetic noise. The work described involves tailoring the response of the sensors to reject the main components of the noise, thereby enhancing both the effective dynamic range and signal to noise. We show that by using real-time analogue signal processing it is possible to detect a human heartbeat at a distance of 40 cm from the front of a subject in an unshielded laboratory. This result has significant implications both for security sensing and biometric measurements in addition to the more obvious safety related applications

Microscopic resolution broadband dielectric spectroscopy

Results are presented for a non-contact measurement system capable of micron level spatial resolution. It utilises the novel electric potential sensor (EPS) technology, invented at Sussex, to image the electric field above a simple composite dielectric material. EP sensors may be regarded as analogous to a magnetometer and require no adjustments or offsets during either setup or use. The sample consists of a standard glass/epoxy FR4 circuit board, with linear defects machined into the surface by a PCB milling machine. The sample is excited with an a.c. signal over a range of frequencies from 10 kHz to 10 MHz, from the reverse side, by placing it on a conducting sheet connected to the source. The single sensor is raster scanned over the surface at a constant working distance, consistent with the spatial resolution, in order to build up an image of the electric field, with respect to the reference potential. The results demonstrate that both the surface defects and the internal dielectric variations within the composite may be imaged in this way, with good contrast being observed between the glass mat and the epoxy resin

Noninvasive imaging of signals in digital circuits

In this article we describe the construction and use of a noninvasive (noncontact) electric potential probe to measure time delays of signals propagating through digital circuits. As we show, by incorporating such probes into a scanning microscope system we have been able to create time delay images of these signals.We suggest that future developments of this technique may lead to real time, high resolution imaging of digital pulses across complex very large scale integrated circuits

Marxist interventions into contemporary debates

This special issue responds to ongoing debates around what has been termed ‘identity politics’. We aim to intervene in what are make-or-break questions for the Left today. Specifically, we wish to provoke further interrogative but comradely conversation that works towards breaking-down the wedge between vulgar economism and vulgar culturalism. Critically, we maintain that just as all identity categories are spatially and temporally contingent – socially constructed, yet naturalised – so too is this current bifurcation between ‘class politics’ and ‘identity politics’. Ultimately, we call for an intellectual and organisational embracing of the complexity of identity as it figures in contemporary conditions; being a core organising-principle of capitalism as it functions today, a paradigm that Leftist struggle can be organised through and around – and yet all with a recognition of the necessity of historicising, and ultimately abolishing, these categories along with capitalism itself

Platforming Equality: Policy Challenges for the Digital Economy

This is the final version. Available from Autonomy via the link in this recordWelcome to Autonomy’s ‘Platforming Equality’ document: a collection of papers on the challenges that the digital economy poses to policymakers, activists and researchers. We’ve invited a range of contributors to probe deeper into under-examined topics in the digital economy and to shed light on how they operate. Another aim of the collection is to explore policy options for alleviating a range of new challenges that have emerged within the digital economy. Contributors move beyond theoretical discussion of the problems themselves and turn towards an analysis of responses that are open to activists, municipal authorities and government policy makers. Articles suggest a range of policy recommendations and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. Each contributor examines a specific issue based on their own research and an analysis of the existing literature. They then provide their own perspective on the policies and approaches that would be most suitable to tackling the issue

Dear British criminology: Where has all the race and racism gone?

In this article we use Emirbayer and Desmond’s institutional reflexivity framework to critically examine the production of racial knowledge in British criminology. Identifying weakness, neglect and marginalization in theorizing race and racism, we focus principally on the disciplinary unconscious element of their three-tier framework, identifying and interrogating aspects of criminology’s ‘obligatory problematics’, ‘habits of thought’ and ‘position-taking’ as well as its institutional structure and social relations that combine to render the discipline ‘institutionally white’. We also consider, briefly, aspects of criminology’s relationship to race, racism and whiteness in the USA. The final part of the article makes the case for British criminology to engage in telling and narrating racisms, urging it to understand the complexities of race in our subject matter, avoid its reduction to class and inequality, and to pay particular attention to reflexivity, history, sociology and language, turning to face race with postcolonial tools and resolve

Facilitating Collective Psychosocial Resilience in the Public in Emergencies: Twelve Recommendations Based on the Social Identity Approach

Accumulated evidence demonstrates the centrality of social psychology to the behavior of members of the public as immediate responders in emergencies. Such public behavior is a function of social psychological processes—in particular identities and norms. In addition, what the authorities and relevant professional groups assume about the social psychology of people in emergencies shapes policy and practice in preparedness, response, and recovery. These assumptions therefore have consequences for the public's ability to act as immediate responders. In this Policy and Practice Review, we will do three things. First, we will overview research on the behavior of survivors of emergencies and disasters, drawing out key factors known to explain the extent to which survivors cooperate in these events and contribute to safe collective outcomes. We will demonstrate the utility of the social identity approach as an overarching framework for explaining the major mechanisms of collective supportive behavior among survivors in emergencies. Second, we will critically review recent and current UK government agency guidance on emergency response, focusing particularly on what is stated about the role of survivors in emergencies and disasters. This review will suggest that the “community resilience” agenda has only been partly realized in practice, but that the social identity approach is progressing this. Third, we will derive from the research literature and from dialogue with groups involved in emergencies a set of 12 recommendations for both emergency managers and members of the public affected by emergencies and disasters. These focus on the crucial need to build shared identity and to communicate, and the connection between these two aims. Including our recommendations within emergency guidance and training will facilitate collective psychosocial resilience, which refers to the way a shared identity allows groups of survivors to express and expect solidarity and cohesion, and thereby to coordinate and draw upon collective sources of support. In sum, this evidence-base and the recommendations we derive from it will help professionals involved in emergency management to support public resilient behaviors and will help the public to develop and maintain their own capacity for such resilience

Racial platform capitalism: race, labour and the making of platform infrastructures

The critical platform studies literature has built a compelling picture of how techniques like worker (mis)classification, algorithmic management and workforce atomisation lie at the heart of how ‘work-on-demand via apps’ actively restructure labour. Much of this emerging scholarship identifies that platform workforces are predominantly comprised of migrant and racially minoritised workers. However, few studies theorise migration and race as structuring logics of the platform model and the precarity it engenders. This thesis uses multi-sited ethnography to develop a theory of ‘racial platform capitalism’ from the standpoint of on-demand app-based workers in London. Drawing on ethnographic interviews of over 100 workers on ride-hailing platform Uber and childcare platform Bubble, this thesis makes three distinct, original contributions: 1) to the platform labour literature, it takes the passing observation that workers on gig platforms are disproportionately migrants and racial minorities, and situates this as a central analytic category of the platform economy’s emergence in urban contexts; 2) to the racial capitalism literature, it pushes for scholars to consider how processes of social differentiation operate differently through data-driven systems; 3) to the platform urbanism literature, it unpacks how, given these two observations, platforms are (re)shaping how racialised surplus populations are moving through and producing urban socio-spatial relations, by organising them into the gaps of urban and social reproductive infrastructures. Additionally, this thesis develops an innovative methodological rubric for conducting platform work ethnographies. It calls for this emerging method to be reconceptualised as an ethnographic inquiry not into ‘workplaces’, but into ‘worlds-of-work’, with multiple temporal and spatial registers

Atoning for the past

Responding to Abhijit Sarkar’s “Rhodes Will Not Fall Alone” the authors argue that the aim of their campaign has been the opposite of “sanitising history.” The campaign wants to begin and sustain a long overdue conversation in Britain about its colonial past