Occupational disability on psychiatric grounds in South African school-teachers

Objective: School-teachers are exposed to high levels of stress and have high rates of premature retirement on psychiatric grounds. This study investigated factors associated with occupational disability due to psychiatric disorders in teachers in South Africa. Method: This retrospective study investigated 81 school-teachers in the Cape Town area who had been declared permanently medically disabled as a consequence of psychiatric disorders. Results: Patients were relatively young (44±6.1 yrs), had experienced symptoms for 5.2±3.8 yrs, and had been treated for 4±3.5 yrs. Almost half had a family history of psychiatric disorder, and the majority (N = 66. 81%) cited work-related stress as a significant contributing factor. Major depressive disorder was the commonest diagnosis (83%), and 56% had co-morbid Axis-I diagnoses. Thirty percent had prominent underlying obsessive-compulsive personality traits, and 46% displayed classroom phobia. Conclusion: Work-related stress is a major factor in South African teachers with occupational disability on psychiatric grounds

El ejercito, la policia y el mantenimiento del orden publico en Inglaterra (c.1750-1950)

There is an assumption that the society of mainland Britain, and particularly England proper, was essentially non-violent during the nineteenth century and at least up until the end of the Second World War. Part of the assumption focuses on the development of an unarmed, civilian police institution that took responsibility for dealing with public order and obviated the need for summoning the military. There were no nrevolutions, civil wars, and no pronunciamentos in England during this period, though there remains doubt about the extent to which this was the result of accident or good sense on the part of the people and the government. The question of what constitutes a violent society and the extent to which recurrent public and political violence is the result of contingency or design are central here; and they are of continuing fascination for historians and social and political scientists. Thjis essay does not address these questions directly, rather it aims to present a brief chronological narrative of the related and equally important issue of the shifting public order roles of the military and the police in England

El Ejército, la Policía y el mantenimiento del Orden Público en Inglaterra (1750-1950)

There is an assumption that the society of mainland Britain, and particularly England itself, was essentially non-violent during the nineteenth century and at least up until the end of the Second World War. Part of the assumption focuses on the development of an unarmed, civilian police institution that took responsibility for dealing with public order and obviated the need for summoning the military. There were no revolutions, no civil wars, and no pronunciamentos in England during this period and there is debate about the extent to which this was the result of accident or good sense on the part of the people and the government. The question of what constitutes a violent society and the extent to which violence is the result of contingency or design are central here and of continuing fascination for historians and social and political scientists. This essay, however, will present a chronological narrative of the related and equally important issue of the shifting public order roles of the military and the police in England.Se suele asumir que, durante el siglo XIX, la sociedad de las islas británicas, y en particular la de la propia Inglaterra, era en esencia poco violenta, y que siguió siéndolo, al menos, hasta después de la II Guerra Mundial. En parte, esta suposición usa como referente el desarrollo de la institución policial inglesa, civil y desarmada, que al ocuparse de los desórdenes públicos hizo innecesaria la intervención del Ejército. No hubo revoluciones, guerras civiles ni pronunciamientos en la Inglaterra de ese periodo, aunque es objeto de controversia la delimitación de hasta qué punto esta situación era accidental, o si, por el contrario, resultaba del sentido común de su población y del gobierno. La interrogación sobre qué constituye una sociedad violenta y sobre la medida en que la violencia pública y política continuadas resultan de la contingencia o del diseño sigue fascinando a historiadores, científicos sociales y politólogos. Este ensayo no aborda estas cuestiones directamente, sino que presenta una breve narración cronológica de un aspecto próximo e igualmente importante: el cambio, en Inglaterra, de los roles en el mantenimiento del orden público por parte del Ejército y la policía

Exploring the interface effect in distant sonification

I introduce ongoing research into the method that I am calling distant sonification as a response to understanding abstractions created through computational reading. My aim is to explore the interface effect and situate it in sonification and media theory. Discussing existing prototypes, I contextualise the visible interfaces within the wider design models, such as patterns, and computational materiality. Reflecting on experiments in media specific analysis, I suggest that there are different models with their own specificities that are brought together to create the interface. They might exist separately or are combined to create a wider effect that I explore through models and grammars. I suggest that there are different models with their own specificities that are brought together by humans and machines through layers

Causality, poetics, and grammatology: the role of computation in machine seeing

Digitised collections and born digital items, such as photos or video, exist beyond the scale of human viewing. New methods are required to read, understand and work with the data, resulting in computation becoming increasingly central to both creation of a cultural reality and as the interpretative tool and practice. If artists’ look, then how might a machine see as a critical tool? Developing work on computational culture and the Next Rembrandt project as unstable digital object, this paper considers how the medium affects computational critical practice. Drawing on Heidegger’s view of causality and Derrida’s grammatology, this paper explores how the medium acts a locus between the human and machine readings and the remediations that occur within the reading. This is developed as through a reading of how the interface translates the signs and symbols and how this affects the reading. By reconsidering the critical assemblage and using it to think with, the human and the machine are seen as critical partners. Attending to the materialities of the reading through a playful approach that decentres potential meaning encourages us to glimpse beneath the surface and gestures towards a critical practice as understanding both computation and its materiality

Iteracies of feeling

Computational readings of culture allow us to pose new questions or create new cultural forms supporting new forms of critical thinking and reading. Yet the machine may not be able to identify some of the qualities, such as emotion, that might be central to the question raised. Using the Next Rembrandt project as a case study, this paper suggests an approach to consider the medium as the site of meaning making in digital culture and how this affects critical practice using Raymond Williams, David Berry and Jacques Derrida. In the first part, I consider the idea of reading with machines and how this might be considered within the medium. The second part uses iteracy to find meaning in the models and how this might reveal new critical paths through readings of the image. The final part presents a reading of the digital object itself and how these can be used to create a space for meaning to come into being. Through this, the article raises questions about critical techniques for understanding the material object in distant reading methodologies as ongoing research

Heather Shore, London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 – c. 1930. A Social and Cultural History, Houndmills Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 286 p., ISBN 978-0-230-3404-8

The ‘underworld’, ‘criminal class’, ‘organised crime’ are popular terms in the media. They suggest an alien ‘other’, that claims many of the attributes of ordinary society and ordinary members of society, but that has its own, alternative structures and norms following an alternative life style and the expense of everyone else. Some criminologists and historians of crime have provided definitions of such terms. The problem with providing a definition in such an instance is that, if the author..