King Mob: Perceptions, Prescriptions and Presumptions About the Policing of England's Riots

As journalists and academics, politicians and other commentators struggled to make sense of the social unrest across England, they reached for theoretical understandings of the crowd that have long since been discredited. The powerful imagery of the madding crowd has always been a popular trope with journalists, but what concerned us was the way in which even sociological commentators echoed such ideas. This paper, therefore, draws on our past research, informal interviews with senior police officers and media accounts to offer an analysis of the riots, how they were policed, and contemporary understandings of crowd behaviour. In so doing we question whether current understandings of collective behaviour, deriving from socio-political expressions of anger or protest, are equipped to make sense of the English riots. Similarly, we ask whether police public order tactics need to change. We conclude that the residual attachment to myths of the madding crowd continues to hamper the search for flexible, graded and legitimate means of managing social unrest.Riots; Crowd Theory; Public Order Policing; Negotiated Management

'Pants to Poverty'? Making Poverty History, Edinburgh 2005

July 2005 saw 225,000 people march through Edinburgh in the city's largest ever demonstration. Their cause was the idealistic injunction to \'Make Poverty History\' (MPH). This paper presents an analysis of the MPH march, focusing particularly on the interplay between protestors, the police and the media. Drawing on ongoing research, it interrogates the disjunction between projected and actual outcomes, paying particular scrutiny to media speculation about possible violence. It also asks how MPH differed from previous G8 protests and what occurred on the day itself. The paper considers three key aspects: the composition and objectives of the marchers (who was on the march, why they were there and what they did?), the constituency that the protestors were trying to reach, and the media coverage accorded to the campaign. The intent underlying this threefold focus is an attempt to understand the protestors and what motivated them, but also to raise the question of how \'successful\' they were in communicating their message.Make Poverty History, Protest, Media, Policing, Social Movements

Duality properties of Gorringe-Leach equations

In the category of motions preserving the angular momentum's direction, Gorringe and Leach exhibited two classes of differential equations having elliptical orbits. After enlarging slightly these classes, we show that they are related by a duality correspondence of the Arnold-Vassiliev type. The specific associated conserved quantities (Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector and Fradkin-Jauch-Hill tensor) are then dual reflections one of the othe

Homology modelling of transferrin-binding protein A from Neisseria meningitidis

Neisseria meningitidis, a causative agent of bacterial meningitis, obtains transferrin-bound iron by expressing two outer membrane located transferrin-binding proteins, TbpA and TbpB. TbpA is thought to be an integral outer membrane pore that facilitates iron uptake. Evidence suggests that TbpA is a useful antigen for inclusion in a vaccine effective against meningococcal disease, hence the identification of regions involved in ligand binding is of paramount importance to design strategies to block uptake of iron. The protein shares sequence and functional similarities to the Escherichia coli siderophore receptors FepA and FhuA, whose structures have been determined. These receptors are composed of two domains, a 22-stranded b-barrel and an N-terminal plug region that sits within the barrel and occludes the transmembrane pore. A three-dimensional TbpA model was constructed using FepA and FhuA structural templates, hydrophobicity analysis and homology modelling. TbpA was found to possess a similar architecture to the siderophore receptors. In addition to providing insights into the highly immunogenic nature of TbpA and allowing the prediction of potentially important ligandbinding epitopes, the model also reveals a narrow channel through its entire length. The relevance of this channel and the spatial arrangement of external loops, to the mechanism of iron translocation employed by TbpA is discussed