Which Medicine? Medicine-Taking and Changing Sherpa Lives

An increasing quantity of medicines, including medicines of different healing systems, have become available since the nineteen fifties to the mainly Sherpa inhabitants of the Mt. Everest region of Nepal. Considerable change and economic development has occurred in which this mountainous and remote area has become one of Nepal’s principal tourist destinations and people have gained access to education, health services, and modern means of communication. Many Sherpa travel regularly in Nepal and overseas, especially for work, education, or pilgrimage, or have migrated permanently. Focusing on oral histories, this article explores factors that have influenced people’s use of different medicines over time. It provides a wider understanding of the health-seeking process for Sherpa and emphasizes the importance of individual Sherpa life experiences, as well as collective changes. Many factors influence medicines use, but perceptions of efficacy and appropriateness continue to appear more important than ‘scientific’ knowledge underpinning ‘modern’ medicines. The source of medicines also matters. Over time people have become familiar with and generally trust Khunde Hospital, which was built in 1966 by New Zealand climber Sir Edmund Hillary. In contrast, Sherpa traveling to the capital Kathmandu have greater access to different types of medicines yet often face uncertainty about where to get medicines and issues of quality and cost. People prefer the ease of taking tablets, but some consider injections more powerful, if problematic, because of the influence of spirits. Cultural practices relating to health prevention, including taking religious medicines, remain important

Risk and rehabilitation in criminal records checking by employers: What employers are doing and why?

The use of criminal record checking has dramatically increased over the last 10-15 years, leading to concerns that ex-offenders are disadvantaged in seeking employment and therefore at greater risk of engaging in reoffending. In order to better understand why and how employers are using criminal record checks, a two-stage empirical research project was conducted involving a survey of and interviews with HR managers across a wide variety of industries. As indicated, a number of disadvantages to the wholesale use of criminal record checking in employment have been identified previously, such as obstructing the reintegration of ex-offenders and encouraging recidivism, limiting the labour pool, and exposing the organisation to discrimination claims and to the overreliance on a single type of risk assessment. This research, therefore, seeks to understand how these disadvantages are apparently outweighed from an employer's perspective by opposing factors in the recruitment process

When silence means acceptance: Understanding the right to silence as a linguistic phenomenon

This article presents a linguistic analysis of police-suspect interviews with a focus on the right to silence. The author, a linguist, seeks to introduce the legal community to a linguistic understanding of the way that a person might invoke their right to silence and explain how the rules of conversation will have a critical impact on the potential for adverse inference. Extracts from police interviews are analysed using a Conversation Analysis framework, drawing on the notion of 'preference' and adjacency pair structures in particular. The analysis finds that a preference for denials following accusations will problematise any attempts by the suspect to offer a non-response to a police accusation and that, in accordance with conversational rules governing preference, non-response will be interpreted by participants and future audiences as an acceptance of the accusation

Helping the police with their enquiries: Enhancing the investigative interview with linguistic research

Since the UK Police and Criminal Evidence Act introduced tape recorders to police interview rooms in 1984, the insights gained from audio- (and, more recently, video-) recorded police interview data have enabled forensic psychologists to analyse the cognitive and behavioural processes of interview participants, leading to sweeping changes in the way that interviewing is taught and practised by British police officers. However, less attention has been paid to the language of police interviewing and police interviewing methods practised in other parts of the world, such as the Reid Technique, which is ubiquitous in North America. This paper seeks to address both these deficiencies by introducing a linguistic perspective to the analysis of data drawn from an Australian corpus of recorded police interviews. This analysis examined the 'roles' that speakers take up when producing talk as a way of showing how the speaker aligns to the content of the talk. It finds that voluntary confessions by suspects differ in role alignments from police assertions. When evaluating the quality of evidential information obtained in an interview, it is critical to the robustness of the case that the brief is prepared on the basis of volunteered information and not police suggestions. Linguistic theory about role alignments provides a simple tool for distinguishing between talk that is initiated by the suspect and represents new intelligence in the interview, and information that is introduced by the polic

Sensitising green criminology to procedural environmental justice: a case study of First Nation consultation in the Canadian oil sands

Procedural environmental justice refers to fairness in processes of decision-making. It recognises that environmental victimisation, while an injustice in and of itself, is usually underpinned by unjust deliberation procedures. Although green criminology tends to focus on the former, distributional dimension of environmental justice, this article draws attention to its procedural counterpart. In doing so, it demonstrates how the notions of justice-as-recognition and justice-as-participation are jointly manifest within its conceptual boundaries. This is done by using the consultation process that occurs with indigenous peoples on proposed oil sands projects in Northern Alberta, Canada, as a case study. Drawing from ‘elite’ interviews, the article illustrates how indigenous voices have been marginalised, and their Treaty rights misrecognised, within this process. As such, in seeking to understand the procedural determinants of distributional injustice, the article aims to encourage broader green criminological scholarship to do the same

A Local Hubble Bubble from SNe Ia?

We analyze the monopole in the peculiar velocities of 44 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) to test for a local void. The sample extends from 20 to 300 Mpc/h, with distances, deduced from light-curve shapes, accurate to ~6%. Assuming Omega_m=1 and Omega_lambda=0, the most significant deviation we find from the Hubble law is an outwards flow of (6.6+/-2.2)% inside a sphere of radius 70 Mpc/h as would be produced by a void of ~20% underdensity surrounded by a dense shell. This shell roughly coincides with the local Great Walls. Monte Carlo analyses, using Gaussian errors or bootstrap resampling, show the probability for chance occurrence of this result out of a pure Hubble flow to be ~2%. The monopole could be contaminated by higher moments of the velocity field, especially a quadrupole, which are not properly probed by the current limited sky coverage. The void would be less significant if Omega_m is low and Omega_lambda is high. It would be more significant if one outlier is removed from the sample, or if the size of the void is constrained a-priori. This putative void is not in significant conflict with any of the standard cosmological scenarios. It suggests that the Hubble constant as determined within 70 Mpc/h could be overestimated by ~6% and the local value of Omega may be underestimated by ~20%. While the present evidence for a local void is marginal in this data set, the analysis shows that the accumulation of SNe Ia distances will soon provide useful constraints on elusive and important aspects of regional cosmic dynamics.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures. Slightly revised version. To appear in ApJ, 503, Aug. 20, 199

Quasar-galaxy and AGN-galaxy cross-correlations

We compute quasar-galaxy and AGN-galaxy cross-correlation functions for samples taken from the \cite{VCV98} catalog of quasars and active galaxies, using tracer galaxies taken from the Edinburgh/Durham Southern Catalog. The sample of active galaxy targets shows positive correlation at projected separations $r_p < 6 h^{-1} Mpc$ consistent with the usual power-law. On the other hand, we do not find a statistically significant positive quasar-galaxy correlation signal except in the range $3 h^{-1} Mpc < r_p < 6 h^{-1} Mpc$ where we find similar AGN-galaxy and quasar-galaxy correlation amplitudes. At separations $r_p<3 h^{-1} Mpc$ a strong decline of quasar-galaxy correlations is observed, suggesting a significant local influence of quasars in galaxy formation. In an attempt to reproduce the observed cross-correlation between quasars and galaxies, we have performed CDM cosmological hydrodynamical simulations and tested the viability of a scenario based on the model developed by \cite{silkrees98}. In this scheme a fraction of the energy released by quasars is considered to be transferred into the baryonic component of the intergalactic medium in the form of winds. The results of the simulations suggest that the shape of the observed quasar-galaxy cross-correlation function could be understood in a scenario where a substantial amount of energy is transferred to the medium at the redshift of maximum quasar activity.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Community Safety and the Night Time Economy: a report for Gloucestershire Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner

This report presents the findings from a three-year project that examined issues related to crime, crime reduction, and community safety in Gloucestershire’s Night Time Economy. ‘Night Time Economy’ (NTE) is the term used in this report to refer to economic activity that takes place between 6pm and 6am. The project was funded by the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire between September 2014 and December 2017, and was conducted by a research team from the school of Natural and Social Sciences at the University of Gloucestershire

A Quantitative Evaluation of the Galaxy Component of COSMOS and APM Catalogs

We have carried out an independent quantitative evaluation of the galaxy component of the "COSMOS/UKST Southern Sky Object Catalogue" (SSC) and the "APM/UKST J Catalogue" (APM). Using CCD observations our results corroborate the accuracy of the photometry of both catalogs, which have an overall dispersion of about 0.2 mag in the range 17 <= b_J <= 21.5. The SSC presents externally calibrated galaxy magnitudes that follow a linear relation, while the APM instrumental magnitudes of galaxies, only internally calibrated by the use of stellar profiles, require second-order corrections. The completeness of both catalogs in a general field falls rapidly fainter than b_J = 20.0, being slightly better for APM. The 90% completeness level of the SSC is reached between b_J = 19.5 and 20.0, while for APM this happens between b_J = 20.5 and 21.0. Both SSC and APM are found to be less complete in a galaxy cluster field. Galaxies misclassified as stars in the SSC receive an incorrect magnitude because the stellar ones take saturation into account besides using a different calibration curve. In both cases, the misclassified galaxies show a large diversity of colors that range from typical colors of early-types to those of blue star-forming galaxies. A possible explanation for this effect is that it results from the combination of low sampling resolutions with properties of the image classifier for objects with characteristic sizes close to the instrumental resolution. We find that the overall contamination by stars misclassified as galaxies is < 5% to b_J = 20.5, as originally estimated for both catalogs. Although our results come from small areas of the sky, they are extracted from two different plates and are based on the comparison with two independent datasets.Comment: 14 pages of text and tables, 8 figures; to be published in the Astronomical Journal; for a single postscript version file see ftp://danw.on.br/outgoing/caretta/caretta.p