Memories of childhood in post-war Grimsby

This paper details the vivid memories of the author’s childhood in the fishing port of Grimsby, shortly after the Second World War. It was a time of shortages, overcrowding, improvisation and cannibalisation of anything that could be re-used. In time it became a period of reconstruction but not without its upheavals and difficulties. It begins in the ‘old town’ of workers’ small terrace houses, typically in a poor state of repair. Then it moves to the ‘new’ council estates. Similarly, the narrative also begins with a ‘Victorian’ technology of steam, coal and horses with very few petrol-engined vehicles and moves to the very beginnings of early consumer society. The principal analytic content of the paper concerns the status of what is clearly a ‘personal history’ – if that is not too great a contradiction – or as the author suggests: my story. The obvious ‘critical’ response – that it could have been otherwise – is contrasted against the suggestion that this story is a non-negotiable foundation of the author’s identity and that this ‘critical’ response is not appropriate. Some of the interdisciplinary options thrown up by this problem are considered

Constituting Citizenship Through the Emotions: Singaporean Transmigrants in London

10.1080/00045600903102857Annals of the Association of American Geographers994788-80

A Smart Peephole on the Cloud

This paper does not present a novel technique for biometric recognition, but rather a novel way to use it. The proposal is to exploit cloud computing in order to support everyday applications. These are not necessarily bound to security, but span a wide range of possible useful tasks. This work presents a smart peephole able to recognize the person at the door, possibly automatically allowing entrance according to rules decided by the home keeper. The novelty is that very little processing is carried out locally, and biometrics is implemented as a service. The system relies on Microsoft Cognitive Services, a suite of remote services included in Microsoft Azure platform. The single user has to install nothing but a camera with a sound capture facility in correspondence to the peephole, and a lightweight software. A movement detector module triggers the capture/recognition activity. The captured audio and video samples are sent to the service. Most processing and recognition are carried out via the remote suite, and a final result is sent back to possibly trigger a response action. The present prototype includes face, speech and emotion recognition. It does not completely cover all system aspects. The aim is to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach