Our side of the mirror : the (re)-construction of 1970s’ masculinity in David Peace’s Red Riding

David Peace and the late Gordon Burn are two British novelists who have used a mixture of fact and fiction in their works to explore the nature of fame, celebrity and the media representations of individuals caught up in events, including investigations into notorious murders. Both Peace and Burn have analysed the case of Peter Sutcliffe, who was found guilty in 1981 of the brutal murders of thirteen women in the North of England. Peace’s novels filmed as the Red Riding Trilogy are an excoriating portrayal of the failings of misogynist and corrupt police officers, which allowed Sutcliffe to escape arrest. Burn’s somebody’s Husband Somebody’ Son is a detailed factual portrait of the community where Sutcliffe spent his life. Peace’s technique combines reportage, stream of consciousness and changing points of views including the police and the victims to produce an episodic non linear narrative. The result has been termed Yorkshire noir. The overall effect is to render the paranoia and fear these crimes created against a backdrop of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Peace has termed his novels as “fictions of the facts”. This paper will examine the way that Peace uses his account of Sutcliffe’s crimes and the huge police manhunt to catch the killer to explore the society that produced the perpetrator, victims and the police. The police officers represent a form of “hegemonic masculinity” but one that is challenged by the extreme misogyny, brutality, misery and degradation that surround them. This deconstruction of the 1970s male police officer is contrasted with the enormously popular figure of Gene Hunt from the BBC TV series Life on Mars

Pricing Excess-of-loss Reinsurance Contracts Against Catastrophic Loss

This paper develops a pricing methodology and pricing estimates for the proposed Federal excess-of- loss (XOL) catastrophe reinsurance contracts. The contracts, proposed by the Clinton Administration, would provide per-occurrence excess-of-loss reinsurance coverage to private insurers and reinsurers, where both the coverage layer and the fixed payout of the contract are based on insurance industry losses, not company losses. In financial terms, the Federal government would be selling earthquake and hurricane catastrophe call options to the insurance industry to cover catastrophic losses in a loss layer above that currently available in the private reinsurance market. The contracts would be sold annually at auction, with a reservation price designed to avoid a government subsidy and ensure that the program would be self supporting in expected value. If a loss were to occur that resulted in payouts in excess of the premiums collected under the policies, the Federal government would use its ability to borrow at the risk-free rate to fund the losses. During periods when the accumulated premiums paid into the program exceed the losses paid, the buyers of the contracts implicitly would be lending money to the Treasury, reducing the costs of government debt. The expected interest on these "loans" offsets the expected financing (borrowing) costs of the program as long as the contracts are priced appropriately. By accessing the Federal government's superior ability to diversify risk inter-temporally, the contracts could be sold at a rate lower than would be required in conventional reinsurance markets, which would potentially require a high cost of capital due to the possibility that a major catastrophe could bankrupt some reinsurers. By pricing the contacts at least to break even, the program would provide for eventual private-market "crowding out" through catastrophe derivatives and other innovative catastrophic risk financing mechanisms. We develop prices for the contracts using two samples of catastrophe losses: (1) historical catastrophic loss experience over the period 1949-1994 as reported by Property Claim Services; and (2) simulated catastrophe losses based on an engineering simulation analysis conducted by Risk Management Solutions. We used maximum likelihood estimation techniques to fit frequency and severity probability distributions to the catastrophic loss data, and then used the distributions to estimate expected losses under the contracts. The reservation price would be determined by adding an administrative expense charge and a risk premium to the expected losses for the specified layer of coverage. We estimate the expected loss component of the government's reservation price for proposed XOL contracts covering the entire U.S., California, Florida, and the Southeast. We used a loss layer of $25-50 billion for illustrative purposes.

An Adaptation To Life In Acid Through A Novel Mevalonate Pathway.

Extreme acidophiles are capable of growth at pH values near zero. Sustaining life in acidic environments requires extensive adaptations of membranes, proton pumps, and DNA repair mechanisms. Here we describe an adaptation of a core biochemical pathway, the mevalonate pathway, in extreme acidophiles. Two previously known mevalonate pathways involve ATP dependent decarboxylation of either mevalonate 5-phosphate or mevalonate 5-pyrophosphate, in which a single enzyme carries out two essential steps: (1) phosphorylation of the mevalonate moiety at the 3-OH position and (2) subsequent decarboxylation. We now demonstrate that in extreme acidophiles, decarboxylation is carried out by two separate steps: previously identified enzymes generate mevalonate 3,5-bisphosphate and a new decarboxylase we describe here, mevalonate 3,5-bisphosphate decarboxylase, produces isopentenyl phosphate. Why use two enzymes in acidophiles when one enzyme provides both functionalities in all other organisms examined to date? We find that at low pH, the dual function enzyme, mevalonate 5-phosphate decarboxylase is unable to carry out the first phosphorylation step, yet retains its ability to perform decarboxylation. We therefore propose that extreme acidophiles had to replace the dual-purpose enzyme with two specialized enzymes to efficiently produce isoprenoids in extremely acidic environments

Accuracy of Perceived Self-Efficacy in Relation to Levels of Depression

In the investigation of the relationship between accuracy of perceived self-efficacy and levels of depression, conflicting results have been found. Some studies have shown that depressed subjects are more accurate at assessing their actual self-efficacy than nondepressed subjects, while other studies have shown that nondepressed subjects are more accurate than depressed subjects at assessing their actual self-efficacy. One common problem that exists in these studies is that their external validity is weak due to the uniqueness and random nature of the experimental designs. The present study attempts to address this problem by examining the relationship between levels of depression and perceived self-efficacy in a naturally occurring situation. In this experiment, a general format of the depression/perceived self-efficacy studies was used on an Abnormal Psychology class. The experimental data were collected from the subjects\u27 estimated performance on an exam that was given in an Abnormal Psychology course (i.e., a naturally occurring circumstance). Contrary to the present hypothesis, no relationship was found to exist between depression and perceived self- efficacy. Possible confounding variables and recommendations for further investigation are discussed

Multicultural competence and levels of effectiveness in adventure -based counseling

The current study explored the relationship between adventure based counselor multicultural competency and their levels of effectiveness as perceived by youth at risk. The sample consisted of 22 counselors (19 White and 3 ethnic minority) who competed the Multicultural Knowledge and Awareness Scale and 86 youth at risk participants (52 White and 34 ethnic minority) who completed the Counselor Effectiveness Rating Scale. Analysis of the data suggests a very small negative relationship between multicultural competence of adventure based counselors and their levels of effectiveness as rated by the ethnic minority and White youth at risk participants. Limitations of the study are addressed and recommendations are made for future investigation and the field of adventure therapy

Attitudes to old age and ageing in medieval society

The thesis begins by exploring the threshold of old age in the Middle Ages. The subjectivity of ageing is rehearsed and the difficulties of identifying the elderly by physical or mental traits. A discussion on fixing the starting point of old age using the aetates hominis and relevant medical and legislative sources follows. The thesis continues with an examination of attitudes towards biological ageing. Chapter Two adopts the physiology of Galen (129-199) in relation to ageing as a starting point and follows its development in the Middle Ages. Ancient and medieval attitudes to the fundamental question of whether ageing is natural or pathological are also considered. The pathologies which were associated with old age in the medieval period are identified and the various lines of treatment which were prescribed for them are assessed. The theological view on ageing in relation to sin is determined next. The attitude of spiritual physicians to elderly penitents is explored by examining the libri poenitentiales. Theological and physiological attitudes are then compared. The theme of wholeness and disintegration which is highlighted by that comparison is carried into the following chapter which considers images of old age in medieval literature. In particular, the old person's proximity to physical corruption is explored against the background of medieval society's fascination with death and the cadaver. Chapter Five attempts to mitigate the harsh view of life in old age in the literary sources by analysing notions of the debt which children owed to aged parents and considering the means of social security which were available to the elderly when the family failed to support them. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the knowledge of medieval society's understanding of how and why humans aged and the attitude of that society to its liminal members

Accuracy of Perceived Self-Efficacy in Relation to Levels of Depression

In the investigation of the relationship between accuracy of perceived self-efficacy and levels of depression, conflicting results have been found. Some studies have shown that depressed subjects are more accurate at assessing their actual self-efficacy than nondepressed subjects, while other studies have shown that nondepressed subjects are more accurate than depressed subjects at assessing their actual self-efficacy. One common problem that exists in these studies is that their external validity is weak due to the uniqueness and random nature of the experimental designs. The present study attempts to address this problem by examining the relationship between levels of depression and perceived self-efficacy in a naturally occurring situation. In this experiment, a general format of the depression/perceived self-efficacy studies was used on an Abnormal Psychology class. The experimental data were collected from the subjects\u27 estimated performance on an exam that was given in an Abnormal Psychology course (i.e., a naturally occurring circumstance). Contrary to the present hypothesis, no relationship was found to exist between depression and perceived self- efficacy. Possible confounding variables and recommendations for further investigation are discussed

Generating-function method for fusion rules

This is the second of two articles devoted to an exposition of the generating-function method for computing fusion rules in affine Lie algebras. The present paper focuses on fusion rules, using the machinery developed for tensor products in the companion article. Although the Kac-Walton algorithm provides a method for constructing a fusion generating function from the corresponding tensor-product generating function, we describe a more powerful approach which starts by first defining the set of fusion elementary couplings from a natural extension of the set of tensor-product elementary couplings. A set of inequalities involving the level are derived from this set using Farkas' lemma. These inequalities, taken in conjunction with the inequalities defining the tensor products, define what we call the fusion basis. Given this basis, the machinery of our previous paper may be applied to construct the fusion generating function. New generating functions for sp(4) and su(4), together with a closed form expression for their threshold levels are presented.Comment: Harvmac (b mode : 47 p) and Pictex; to appear in J. Math. Phy