Mine Action in Cambodia

During the past five years, I have worked in four different mine awareness programs. The first was in 1990 with the Land Mine Awareness Programme (LMAP) whose mandate was to reach the Cambodian refugee camps on the Thai/Cambodian border. LMAP was the first mine awareness program to operate in the South East Asian region and was run through the International Rescue Committee (IRC) with funding by the Office of the U.N. Secretary General for the Coordination of Cambodian Humanitarian Assistance Programs

Duppying yoots in a dog eat dog world, kmt:determining the senses of slang terms for the Courts

I describe and discuss a series of court cases which focus upon on decoding the meaning of slang terms. Examples include sexual slang used in a description by a child and an Internet Relay Chat containing a conspiracy to murder. I consider the task presented by these cases for the forensic linguist and the roles the linguist may assume in determining the meaning of slang terms for the Courts. These roles are identified as linguist as naïve interpreter, lexicographer, case researcher and cultural mediator. Each of these roles is suggestive of different strategies that might be used from consulting formal slang dictionaries and less formal Internet sources, to collecting case specific corpora and examining all the extraneous material in a particular case. Each strategy is evaluated both in terms of the strength of evidence provided and its applicability to the forensic context

Photographing Tragedy: Landmines and Victims

Tim Grant recounts his experiences capturing the images of landmines and the stories of their victims on film. From buckets of AP mines to victims on the operating table, Grant sees and tells all about the images that have shaped him

Constraining the orbits of sub-stellar companions imaged over short orbital arcs

Imaging a star's companion at multiple epochs over a short orbital arc provides only four of the six coordinates required for a unique orbital solution. Probability distributions of possible solutions are commonly generated by Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis, but these are biased by priors and may not probe the full parameter space. We suggest alternative methods to characterise possible orbits, which compliment the MCMC technique. Firstly the allowed ranges of orbital elements are prior-independent, and we provide means to calculate these ranges without numerical analyses. Hence several interesting constraints (including whether a companion even can be bound, its minimum possible semi-major axis and its minimum eccentricity) may be quickly computed using our relations as soon as orbital motion is detected. We also suggest an alternative to posterior probability distributions as a means to present possible orbital elements, namely contour plots of elements as functions of line of sight coordinates. These plots are prior-independent, readily show degeneracies between elements and allow readers to extract orbital solutions themselves. This approach is particularly useful when there are other constraints on the geometry, for example if a companion's orbit is assumed to be aligned with a disc. As examples we apply our methods to several imaged sub-stellar companions including Fomalhaut b, and for the latter object we show how different origin hypotheses affect its possible orbital solutions. We also examine visual companions of A- and G-type main sequence stars in the Washington Double Star Catalogue, and show that $\gtrsim50$ per cent must be unbound.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

Dialectics of Routine Performance: A Framework for Investigating Technology Adoption as a Process of Routine Disruption and Renewal

Usage, though necessary for IT value generation, can be inappropriate, unexpected, changing, and often counter to the productive intentions that motivated its deployment. This paper introduces a rather novel conception of usage and adoption as a dialectic process of disruption and renewal that incorporates aspects of the IT artefact into new organizational routines. Fundamental to our contribution is the assertion that digital technology introduction disrupts established routines and that our understanding of the process through which such disruptions are resolved to produce renewed routines is not well understood. We present a dialectic framework through which to understand the interaction between organizational routine disruption and renewal processes. This works expands our ability to analyze the process through which IT effects on organizational effectiveness and performance can manifest

Possible roles for environmental Life Cycle Assessment in building specifications

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a systematic methodology for evaluating the envi­ronmental impacts of different product systems. It is a useful tool for comparing different alternative products or systems (including buildings. However, complex­ities of the built environment and limitations in current LCA data and methodol­ogy make implementation of LCA into decision making for building design and specification, very difficult. Streamlined LCA techniques and life cycle thinking are currently the easiest ways to introduce LCA to the building sector. However, in the future, with new developments in LCA. more rigorous tools should become available

Assuming identities online:experimental linguistics applied to the policing of online paedophile activity

This article uses a research project into the online conversations of sex offenders and the children they abuse to further the arguments for the acceptability of experimental work as a research tool for linguists. The research reported here contributes to the growing body of work within linguistics that has found experimental methods to be useful in answering questions about representation and constraints on linguistic expression (Hemforth 2013). The wider project examines online identity assumption in online paedophile activity and the policing of such activity, and involves dealing with the linguistic analysis of highly sensitive sexual grooming transcripts. Within the linguistics portion of the project, we examine theories of idiolect and identity through analysis of the ‘talk’ of perpetrators of online sexual abuse, and of the undercover officers that must assume alternative identities in order to investigate such crimes. The essential linguistic question in this article is methodological and concerns the applicability of experimental work to exploration of online identity and identity disguise. Although we touch on empirical questions, such as the sufficiency of linguistic description that will enable convincing identity disguise, we do not explore the experimental results in detail. In spite of the preference within a range of discourse analytical paradigms for ‘naturally occurring’ data, we argue that not only does the term prove conceptually problematic, but in certain contexts, and particularly in the applied forensic context described, a rejection of experimentally elicited data would limit the possible types and extent of analyses. Thus, it would restrict the contribution that academic linguistics can make in addressing a serious social problem

Whose Tweet? Authorship analysis of micro-blogs and other short-form messages

Approaches to authorship attribution have traditionally been constrained by the size of the message to which they can be successfully applied, making them unsuitable for analysing shorter messages such as SMS Text Messages, micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter) or Instant Messaging. Having many potential authors of a number of texts (as in, for example, an online context) has also proved problematic for traditional descriptive methods, which have tended to be successfully applied in cases where there is a small and closed set of possible authors. This paper reports the findings of a project which aimed to develop and automate techniques from forensic linguistics that have been successfully applied to the analysis of short message content in criminal cases. Using data drawn from UK-focused online groups within Twitter, the research extends the applicability of Grant’s (2007; 2010) stylistic and statistical techniques for the analysis of authorship of short texts into the online environment. Initial identification of distinctive textual features commonly found within short messages allows for the development of a taxonomy which can then be used when calculating the ‘distance’ between messages containing instances of these feature types. The end result is an automated process with a high level of success in assigning tweets to the correct author. The research has the potential to extend the scope of reliable and valid authorship analysis into hitherto unexplored contexts. Given the relative anonymity of the internet and the availability of cloaking technology, linguistic research of this nature represents a crucial contribution to the investigative toolkit