Vice in a vicious society : crime and the community in mid-nineteenth century New South Wales

As a receptacle for British convicts, New South Wales was popularly portrayed as a 'vicious' society. Crime and vice were considered the inevitable concomitants of a transported 'criminal class' and convict 'contamination'. The following study, focussing on the mid-nineteenth century, argues that the impact of convictism on colonial crime and mores was greatly exaggerated. Official criminal statistics, reportage in the press, as well as other contemporary evidence, all present in some ways a distorted view of crime. Crime was not simply grafted on to the colony, but reflected various concerns and interests, the conditions of a relatively affluent frontier community, and perhaps most importantly, an intense concern with respectability. The community's transformation from a penal colony was marked not only by a decreasing proportion of convicts in the population, but a reorientation in standards of public conduct, new fears concerning public order, and an obsessional interest in repudiating the convict stain

Service robotics: do you know your new companion? Framing an interdisciplinary technology assessment

Service-Robotic—mainly defined as “non-industrial robotics”—is identified as the next economical success story to be expected after robots have been ubiquitously implemented into industrial production lines. Under the heading of service-robotic, we found a widespread area of applications reaching from robotics in agriculture and in the public transportation system to service robots applied in private homes. We propose for our interdisciplinary perspective of technology assessment to take the human user/worker as common focus. In some cases, the user/worker is the effective subject acting by means of and in cooperation with a service robot; in other cases, the user/worker might become a pure object of the respective robotic system, for example, as a patient in a hospital. In this paper, we present a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework, which allows us to scrutinize some of the most relevant applications of service robotics; we propose to combine technical, economical, legal, philosophical/ethical, and psychological perspectives in order to design a thorough and comprehensive expert-based technology assessment. This allows us to understand the potentials as well as the limits and even the threats connected with the ongoing and the planned implementation of service robots into human lifeworld—particularly of those technical systems displaying increasing grades of autonomy

Broadband Prosthetic Interfaces: Combining Nerve Transfers and Implantable Multichannel EMG Technology to Decode Spinal Motor Neuron Activity

Modern robotic hands/upper limbs may replace multiple degrees of freedom of extremity function. However, their intuitive use requires a high number of control signals, which current man-machine interfaces do not provide. Here, we discuss a broadband control interface that combines targeted muscle reinnervation, implantable multichannel electromyographic sensors, and advanced decoding to address the increasing capabilities of modern robotic limbs. With targeted muscle reinnervation, nerves that have lost their targets due to an amputation are surgically transferred to residual stump muscles to increase the number of intuitive prosthetic control signals. This surgery re-establishes a nerve-muscle connection that is used for sensing nerve activity with myoelectric interfaces. Moreover, the nerve transfer determines neurophysiological effects, such as muscular hyper-reinnervation and cortical reafferentation that can be exploited by the myoelectric interface. Modern implantable multichannel EMG sensors provide signals from which it is possible to disentangle the behavior of single motor neurons. Recent studies have shown that the neural drive to muscles can be decoded from these signals and thereby the user’s intention can be reliably estimated. By combining these concepts in chronic implants and embedded electronics, we believe that it is in principle possible to establish a broadband man-machine interface, with specific applications in prosthesis control. This perspective illustrates this concept, based on combining advanced surgical techniques with recording hardware and processing algorithms. Here we describe the scientific evidence for this concept, current state of investigations, challenges, and alternative approaches to improve current prosthetic interfaces.peerReviewe