Catégorisation et stigmatisation policières á Sheffield au milieu du XIXe siècle [Numbering crimes and measuring space: policing Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century]

The city in the nineteenth century was often defined as a place of crime: yet from within, the its authorities sought to represent crime as something external to it. The presentation of the criminal statistical returns of the English city of Sheffield can be shown to be distorted in several ways, all of which were consistent with the project of rendering the criminal as firmly 'other'. The town's returns followed the national requirement of establishing numbers of 'resident criminals' and their haunts, but it also went beyond this. Information about residence, ethnicity and literacy was presented in a way that tried to set a boundary between the 'true' city and the people in it who were deemed to be committing the majority of crime. The tactic of labelling was pursued in an effort to symbolically isolate a discrete 'criminal class'. In addition, the mania for sub-division of certain sorts of crime replaced worryingly large numbers of total crimes committed with reassuringly small numbers of crimes that fell into small sub-categories. The returns were a conscious project to create an image of an incorruptible and professional police force successfully securing and thus separating the city from a crime threat that was mainly external, 'alien' or safely under surveillance

Social Sensing of Floods in the UK

"Social sensing" is a form of crowd-sourcing that involves systematic analysis of digital communications to detect real-world events. Here we consider the use of social sensing for observing natural hazards. In particular, we present a case study that uses data from a popular social media platform (Twitter) to detect and locate flood events in the UK. In order to improve data quality we apply a number of filters (timezone, simple text filters and a naive Bayes `relevance' filter) to the data. We then use place names in the user profile and message text to infer the location of the tweets. These two steps remove most of the irrelevant tweets and yield orders of magnitude more located tweets than we have by relying on geo-tagged data. We demonstrate that high resolution social sensing of floods is feasible and we can produce high-quality historical and real-time maps of floods using Twitter.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figure

Analysis of self-oscillating DC-DC resonant power converters using a hysteretic relay

The paper presents a technique for exciting resonant DC-DC converters in a self-oscillating manner. The analysis necessary to predict the behaviour of such converters is also given. The oscillation is based on the behaviour of a hysteretic relay with a negative hysteresis transition. Self-oscillating converters benefit from higher efficiency/higher power density than their non-self-oscillating counterparts as they can be operated closer to the tank resonant frequency. The self-oscillating mechanism presented here is also simple and cost effective to implement. A prototype converter is presented in order to verify the theoretical claims

Asynchronous Event-Triggered Control for Non-Linear Systems

With the increasing ubiquity of networked control systems, various strategies for sampling constituent subsystems' outputs have emerged. In contrast with periodic sampling, event-triggered control provides a way to efficiently sample a subsystem and conserve network resource usage, by triggering an update only when a state-dependent error threshold is satisfied. Herein we describe a scheme for asynchronous event-triggered control (ETC) of a nonlinear plant using sampler subsystems with hybrid dynamics. By exploiting inherent differences in the plant and controllers time scales, the proposed scheme permits independent sampling of plant and controller states. We extend existing ETC literature by adopting a more general representation of the sampler subsystem dynamics, thus accommodating different sampling schemes for both synchronous and asynchronous ETC applications. We present a numerical example in order to illustrate important operational considerations for the proposed scheme

Data assmilation tests using NISE10 Storm Surge Model

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Broadening Responsibilities: Consideration Of The Potential To Broaden The Role Of Uniformed Fire Service Employees

What is this report about? This report, commissioned by the National Joint Council for Local Authority Fire and Rescue Services (NJC), aims to identify what impact, if any, firefighters can have on the delivery of emergency medical response and wider community health interventions in the UK. What are the overall conclusions? Appropriately trained and equipped firefighters co-responding1 to targeted, specific time critical medical events, such as cardiac arrest, can improve patient survival rates. The data also indicate that there is support from fire service staff – and a potential need from members of the public, particularly the elderly, isolated or vulnerable – to expand ‘wider work’. This includes winter warmth assessments, Safe and Well checks, community defibrillator training and client referrals when staff believe someone may have dementia, are vulnerable or even, for example, have substance dependencies such as an alcohol addiction. However, there is currently insufficient data to estimate the net benefit of this work

Barrie David G., Police in the Age of Improvement : Police development and the civic tradition in Scotland, 1775-1865

Scotland has long exercised a brooding off-stage presence in the evolution of the police institutions of the British Isles. England and Wales, as a coherent and relatively uniform administrative unit, have received the majority of the attention devoted to describing the history of the new police. In recent years, though, enough research has been done on Scotland for it to be possible to write this important book. Much of this has been done by David Barrie, and he had made an excellent job of ..

Counting crimes or counting people : some implications of mid-nineteenth century British police returns

Police returns for the city of Sheffield, 1844-1862, underpin the case that the arrest is a better base for analysis than the ’crime’. The number of convictions for indictable offences is less than 5 % of the total of arrests, which are dominated by offences related to disorder rather than to property, violence, or regulation. Age profiles of those convicted on indictment are different from those arrested. Treatment through the criminal justice process - itself capable of constructing some measurements by retrospective labelling - differed markedly by gender, which was also differentially affected by the extension of summary jurisdiction in the 1840s and 1850s. Modelling the cumulative impact of arrests leads to the conclusion that by the 1860s, a surprisingly large number of men would have had experience of arrest.Les statistiques de police de la ville de Sheffield pour la période 1844-1862 montrent que, pour l'analyse, l'arrestation est un meilleur indicateur que l'infraction. Le nombre de condamnations pour des délits représente moins de 5 % du total des arrestations, où dominent les infractions relatives à l'ordre public, plutôt qu'aux biens, à la violence ou aux règlements. Le profil des âges des condamnés diffère de celui des interpellés. L'intervention de la justice pénale - qui reconstruit certains indicateurs par le biais de catégorisations rétrospectives - varie beaucoup suivant le sexe, variable également affectée de façon spécifique par l'extension de la procédure simplifiée de jugement dans les années 1840-1850. En modélisant l'impact cumulé des arrestations on est amené à conclure que dans les années 1860, un nombre étonnamment important d'hommes auront fait l'expérience de l'arrestation

Ideologies, structures, and contingencies: writing the history of British criminal justice since 1975

The history of British criminal justice has been characterised by a massive increase in output since 1975. This article explores four key interventions and examines their impact. Foucault's view of the birth of the prison, though not confirmed by research, has led to better knowledge of cultures of control. Similarly, the Warwick School's treatment of the eighteenth-century criminal law has sparked an interest in a wide variety of court records. Storch's work on the new police has led to the rehabilitation of the old police. Work on criminal statistics has not reliably defined trends in crime, but has served to map the effort of the criminal justice system. Overall, despite a trend towards more complex explanations, the initial promise of criminal justice history – as a vehicle for 'total history' – is being fulfilled.L’histoire de la justice criminelle britannique a été caractérisée par une augmentation massive de la production depuis 1975. Cet article se penche sur quatre apports majeurs et étudie leur impact. La vision de Foucauld de la naissance de la prison, quoiqu’elle n’ait pas été confirmée par la recherche, a permis de mieux connaître les cultures de contrôle. De la même façon, le traitement réservé par l’école de Warwick à la législation criminelle au XVIIIe siècle a suscité un intérêt pour une grande variété d’archives judiciaires. Le travail de Storch sur la nouvelle police a conduit à la réhabilitation de l’ancienne. Le travail sur les statitisques de la criminalité n’a pas permis de définir des tendances fiables, mais a servi à préciser les efforts du système de justice criminelle. Dans l’ensemble, malgré une tendance vers des explications plus complexes, la promesse initiale d’une histoire de la justice criminelle – comme véhicule d’une « histoire totale » – est en train d’être tenue