On the periphery of hate crime: disability at the intersections of marginalisation, vulnerability and difference

This research explores the nature and impact of disability hate crime from the perspective of disabled people, victims and key informants from criminal justice and other agencies. The evidence base included two focus groups with disabled people, an online anonymous questionnaire with 83 disabled participants, narrative interviews with 12 victims of disability hate crimes and semi-structured interviews with 15 key informants. It draws on all forms of disability, impairment and conditions and contributes to the current research deficit in the field of disability hate crime. All of the participants spoke of a prevalence of targeted violence and harassment against disabled people that is cumulative and repetitive in nature. Victims reported a variety of abuse and hostility, from name-calling and verbal abuse to physical and sexual violence, harassment and damage to property. A significant minority reported experiencing a withdrawal of support or assistance from carers or family members, something which is unique to this strand of hate crime. The impact of this victimisation on disabled communities is both emotional and practical, and can include utilising avoidance or acceptance strategies that restrict living and working conditions for disabled people, thereby contributing to their isolation and Othering. Some participants reported suicidal ideation; others were resilient and described their experiences as normative. Victims recount inadequate, offensive and inappropriate responses from the criminal justice system generally, and a consequential lack of confidence in them as a result. Government policy on benefit claimants and concurrent negative media coverage of disabled people were factors in victims’ experiences of hate crimes, with participants advocating that recent cultural and social changes in how disabled people are perceived and framed have directly led to an increase in incidents and crimes. The research demonstrates how domination and subordination of a marginalised group in society has led to resignation and acceptance by them of disability hate crime as part of life. It makes recommendations to address this by establishing dedicated hate crime units within police forces, embedding hate crime awareness and training within safeguarding practices and improving third party reporting facilities

Learning by teaching: exploring the factors involved in successful learning and reflecting on good practice

A review of a selection of the literature surrounding learning and teaching in higher education outlines a number of factors pertinent to successful learning. The author examines each of these factors in turn and relates them to her own teaching experience. Consideration is first given to the contribution made by the teacher, and various theories of teaching are examined. Choice of theory of teaching carries consequences for the student’s learning experience, and the importance of teaching methods and techniques is emphasised. The relationship between learner and teacher is also crucial, as both need to engage in active dialogue and contribute to knowledge and understanding. Stimulating learning through emotions and actions is highlighted, in addition to the current emphasis on cognition. The author notes that the uses of emotion and action have, to some extent, been neglected in higher education. Critical thinking and the use of reflective dialogue are identified as two of the most significant factors; reflection allows the students to thoroughly engage and immerse themselves in their learning; whereas the very essence of what we understand as higher education is achieved by critical thinking. Transformation within the learner must also occur and involves the student actively engaging and performing within the learning process. Learner-oriented approaches touches on the current ‘deep versus surface’ debate in learning and some recent criticism of the term, and the learning environment itself must be recognised as an influential character. The responsibility of the learner themselves is also encouraged. Finally, the author reflects upon these factors in relation to contemporary higher educational settings and encourages teachers to constantly revisit and reflect upon their current teaching practice. The author concludes by recommending that teachers share examples of good practice to continue to improve student learning

Precession during merger 1: Strong polarization changes are observationally accessible features of strong-field gravity during binary black hole merger

The short gravitational wave signal from the merger of compact binaries encodes a surprising amount of information about the strong-field dynamics of merger into frequencies accessible to ground-based interferometers. In this paper we describe a previously-unknown "precession" of the peak emission direction with time, both before and after the merger, about the total angular momentum direction. We demonstrate the gravitational wave polarization encodes the orientation of this direction to the line of sight. We argue the effects of polarization can be estimated nonparametrically, directly from the gravitational wave signal as seen along one line of sight, as a slowly-varying feature on top of a rapidly-varying carrier. After merger, our results can be interpreted as a coherent excitation of quasinormal modes of different angular orders, a superposition which naturally "precesses" and modulates the line-of-sight amplitude. Recent analytic calculations have arrived at a similar geometric interpretation. We suspect the line-of-sight polarization content will be a convenient observable with which to define new high-precision tests of general relativity using gravitational waves. Additionally, as the nonlinear merger process seeds the initial coherent perturbation, we speculate the amplitude of this effect provides a new probe of the strong-field dynamics during merger. To demonstrate the ubiquity of the effects we describe, we summarize the post-merger evolution of 104 generic precessing binary mergers. Finally, we provide estimates for the detectable impacts of precession on the waveforms from high-mass sources. These expressions may identify new precessing binary parameters whose waveforms are dissimilar from the existing sample.Comment: 11 figures; v2 includes response to referee suggestion

Non-Parametric Extraction of Implied Asset Price Distributions

Extracting the risk neutral density (RND) function from option prices is well defined in principle, but is very sensitive to errors in practice. For risk management, knowledge of the entire RND provides more information for Value-at-Risk (VaR) calculations than implied volatility alone [1]. Typically, RNDs are deduced from option prices by making a distributional assumption, or relying on implied volatility [2]. We present a fully non-parametric method for extracting RNDs from observed option prices. The aim is to obtain a continuous, smooth, monotonic, and convex pricing function that is twice differentiable. Thus, irregularities such as negative probabilities that afflict many existing RND estimation techniques are reduced. Our method employs neural networks to obtain a smoothed pricing function, and a central finite difference approximation to the second derivative to extract the required gradients. This novel technique was successfully applied to a large set of FTSE 100 daily European exercise (ESX) put options data and as an Ansatz to the corresponding set of American exercise (SEI) put options. The results of paired t-tests showed significant differences between RNDs extracted from ESX and SEI option data, reflecting the distorting impact of early exercise possibility for the latter. In particular, the results for skewness and kurtosis suggested different shapes for the RNDs implied by the two types of put options. However, both ESX and SEI data gave an unbiased estimate of the realised FTSE 100 closing prices on the options' expiration date. We confirmed that estimates of volatility from the RNDs of both types of option were biased estimates of the realised volatility at expiration, but less so than the LIFFE tabulated at-the-money implied volatility.Comment: Paper based on Application of Physics in Financial Analysis,APFA5, Conference Presentation, Torino, Italy. 11.5 Page

Erodibility of hill peat

peer-reviewedThe project was funded by the European Union Structural Funds EAGGF distributed under the Department of Agriculture and Food Stimulus Fund.The energy necessary to entrain soil in water depends on the soil strength. Once entrained, the settling velocity of the eroded soil in water is of fundamental importance to the processes of sediment transport and deposition. In this paper, stream power theory and transport concepts coupled with the equation of continuity were used to derive a transport-limited peat concentration. The ratio of the log of the actual sediment concentration in surface run-off to the log of the transport-limited sediment concentration was the index of erosion used. The value of this index is a measure of the sensitivity of peat to erosion by sheet flow. Four peats were subjected to a range of overland flow rates under two slopes in a laboratory flume. The peats represented peat farmed in a sustainable manner (Leenane), overgrazed peat (Maam), peat undergoing erosion (Newport) and peat which had undergone weathering following exposure by a landslip (Croagh Patrick). Both in situ and surface damaged slabs were studied. The results indicate that shearing and remoulding of a wet peat surface (e.g., by animal treading) and weathering of exposed drained peat surfaces predispose peat to erosion. Defoliation by overgrazing is considered to be of secondary importance.Department of Agriculture, Food and the MarineEuropean Union Structural Funds EAGG

Prediction Markets: Alternative Mechanisms for Complex Environments with Few Traders

Double auction prediction markets have proven successful in large-scale applications such as elections and sporting events. Consequently, several large corporations have adopted these markets for smaller-scale internal applications where information may be complex and the number of traders is small. Using laboratory experiments, we test the performance of the double auction in complex environments with few traders and compare it to three alternative mechanisms. When information is complex we find that an iterated poll (or Delphi method) outperforms the double auction mechanism. We present five behavioral observations that may explain why the poll performs better in these settings

Intrinsic selection biases of ground-based gravitational wave searches for high-mass BH-BH mergers

The next generation of ground-based gravitational wave detectors may detect a few mergers of comparable-mass M\simeq 100-1000 Msun ("intermediate-mass'', or IMBH) spinning black holes. Black hole spin is known to have a significant impact on the orbit, merger signal, and post-merger ringdown of any binary with non-negligible spin. In particular, the detection volume for spinning binaries depends significantly on the component black hole spins. We provide a fit to the single-detector and isotropic-network detection volume versus (total) mass and arbitrary spin for equal-mass binaries. Our analysis assumes matched filtering to all significant available waveform power (up to l=6 available for fitting, but only l<= 4 significant) estimated by an array of 64 numerical simulations with component spins as large as S_{1,2}/M^2 <= 0.8. We provide a spin-dependent estimate of our uncertainty, up to S_{1,2}/M^2 <= 1. For the initial (advanced) LIGO detector, our fits are reliable for $M\in[100,500]M_\odot$ ($M\in[100,1600]M_\odot$). In the online version of this article, we also provide fits assuming incomplete information, such as the neglect of higher-order harmonics. We briefly discuss how a strong selection bias towards aligned spins influences the interpretation of future gravitational wave detections of IMBH-IMBH mergers.Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures, accepted by PRD. v2 is version accepted for publication, including minor changes in response to referee feedback and updated citation