1,028 research outputs found
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
âA voice for the last and leastâ:Thirumavalavan and the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi in the Lok Sabha
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
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