Judgements of attributional responsibility, social dominance orientation, and the insanity defense.

Issues of race, law, and mental health meet at a cross-section when it comes to cases involving the not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) plea in which the defendant is a member of a marginalized group. Although the duty of a juror is to reach a fair and unbiased verdict, the reality is that there are many ways that a person’s thoughts can be biased without them being aware of this (Bargh, 2001). This mock juror experiment (the first of its kind), investigated the role that Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and attributional responsibility has in the success of NGRI pleas among African American and white defendants diagnosed with schizophrenia. Participants read a police report, a trial summary, and saw a photo where only skin color varied between conditions, with either a white or African American defendant. Measures of SDO, attitudes about NGRI, attitudes about mental illness, and perceptions of attributional responsibility were taken. Results from (N = 320) participants suggest negative attitudes about the insanity plea reduces the likelihood of a juror assigning NGRI, R2 = .09, F(1,318) = 31.75, b* = -.30, p \u3c .001. Also, higher SDO-D may be related to greater assignment of attributional responsibility to the defendant. Results revealed that as SDO-D rose, attributional responsibility rose R2 = .10, F(1,318) = 38.86, b* = .33, p \u3c .001. Although race did not moderate guilt, other factors such as a holding negative attitudes toward the insanity plea itself, and toward mentally ill individuals did make a difference

Some lessons learned from engaging in WaSH participatory action research in Melanesian informal settlements

In Melanesian countries there has been a large flux of people from rural to urban and peri-urban areas, resulting an in increased number living in informal settlements. These settlements often lack connections to mains water and sewerage lines and formal solid waste collection. Our project used a participatory action research (PAR) approach to work in partnership with informal settlement communities and enabling actors to achieve the self-determined WaSH conditions which participants felt would improve the well-being of those living in informal settlements. Because the PAR approach encourages reflection and adaptation, we learned lessons that were incorporated into the design of ongoing and future processes, and this paper presents five such lessons which we judge to be of practical use for WaSH enabling actors

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based mapping in engineering geological surveys : considerations for optimum results

UAVs have been used in engineering for at least two decades, mainly focusing on structural health monitoring, geological surveys and site inspections, especially at cases where a rapid assessment is required, for example after a natural disaster. While there is a wide range of recognition algorithms for the automatic identification of structural damage, structural geological features etc. from the acquired images, the parameters affecting the resolution of these images are often overlooked. As a result, the UAV technology is not used at its full potential and at times, it is even regarded as leading to poor outcomes. This paper discusses the main parameters affecting the resolution of the images acquired by a UAV. We present a case study of the structural geological mapping of a coastal area carried out using two types of UAVs: a fixed wing and a hexacopter. A comparison between the structural geological maps based on the orthophotos and one produced using conventional techniques shows that the level of detail is the same and the time spent is at least 5 times less when using a UAV. The fixed wing is faster and therefore, can cover large areas while the copter gives better resolution images as it can fly at lower heights. The latter is cost and time effective only if it is used for surveys limited to small areas. The characterization of some structural geological features has not been possible based solely on the orthophotos. We show that in order to achieve the desired accuracy, a ground sample distance of at least half that value is required. We discuss technical aspects, such as the effect of topography and UAV orientation on the overlap value, the camera calibration, number of control points and lighting conditions, that should be taken into account prior to flying a UAV and provide recommendations on how to obtain optimum results, i.e. orthophotos that suit the needs of the project

Present Day Kinematics of the Eastern California Shear Zone from a Geodetically Constrained Block Model

We use Global Positioning System (GPS) data from 1993–2000 to determine horizontal velocities of 65 stations in eastern California and western Nevada between 35° and 37° N. We relate the geodetic velocities to fault slip rates using a block model that enforces path integral constraints over geologic and geodetic time scales and that includes the effects of elastic strain accumulation on faults locked to a depth of 15 km. The velocity of the Sierra Nevada block with respect to Nevada is 11.1±0.3 mm/yr, with slip partitioned across the Death Valley, (2.8±0.5 mm/yr), Panamint Valley (2.5±0.8 mm/yr), and Airport Lake/Owens Valley (5.3±0.7/4.6±0.5 mm/yr) faults. The western Mojave block rotates at 2.1±0.8°/My clockwise, with 3.7±0.7 mm/yr of left lateral motion across the western Garlock Fault. We infer 11±2 mm/yr of right lateral motion across the Mojave region of the Eastern California Shear Zone

Achieving Development Outcomes by Building Practical Authority in WASH Participatory Collectives in Melanesia

The strength of the ‘enabling environment’ for development is often considered to be one of the key elements in whether development initiatives fail or succeed. Attempts to strengthen the enabling environment have resulted in a series of checklists and frameworks that imagine it largely to be fixed, static, and separated from ‘beneficiaries’. In the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector, there is a preoccupation with fostering an optimal enabling environment that will result naturally in ‘ideal’ and formalised user participation, which will in turn lead to universal access to water and sanitation. In this paper, we challenge this simplistic and linear view of an enabling environment that is perpetuated by checklists and frameworks. We conducted a three-and-a-half-year transdisciplinary participatory action research (PAR) project which sought to foster WASH solutions in impoverished informal settlements in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In a critical reflection on this project, we analyse the ways in which we both perpetuated problematic checklists and worked collaboratively with our participants to reimagine the enabling environment. We show how individuals challenged the expert-beneficiary dichotomy as they built ‘practical authority’ from their peers through taking action. Our study demonstrates that conceptualising the enabling environment as a dynamic ecology of actors, relationships and processes that includes the users of WASH as active participants was essential to supporting progress towards universal WASH access. We argue that working within the politics of development rather than seeking to render problems as technical was crucial to fostering WASH improvements that were determined by residents themselves and supported by stakeholders. Such an inclusive approach is essential to fully leveraging the co-productive possibilities of participation. If development practitioners and scholars are to achieve development outcomes in an equitable and participatory manner, they must shift their conceptualisation of the enabling environment as being a checklist of things ‘out there’ to one where they work to find their place within an ecology of participatory collectives

A comparative evaluation of modern English corpus grammatical annotation schemes

Many English Corpus Linguistics projects reported in ICAME Journal and elsewhere involve grammatical analysis or tagging of English texts (eg Atwell 1983, Leech et al 1983, Booth 1985, Owen 1987, Souter 1989a, O’Donoghue 1991, Belmore 1991, Kytö and Voutilainen 1995, Aarts 1996, Qiao and Huang 1998). Each new project has to review existing tagging schemes, and decide which to adopt and/or adapt. The AMALGAM project can help in this decision, by providing descriptions and analyses of a range of tagging schemes, and an internet-based service for researchers to try out the range of tagging schemes on their own data. The project AMALGAM (Automatic Mapping Among Lexico-Grammatical Annotation Models) explored a range of Part-of-Speech tagsets and phrase structure parsing schemes used in modern English corpus-based research. The PoS-tagging schemes include: Brown (Greene and Rubin 1981), LOB (Atwell 1982, Johansson et al 1986), Parts (man 1986), SEC (Taylor and Knowles 1988), POW (Souter 1989b), UPenn (Santorini 1990), LLC (Eeg-Olofsson 1991), ICE (Greenbaum 1993), and BNC (Garside 1996). The parsing schemes include some which have been used for hand annotation of corpora or manual post-editing of automatic parsers, and others which are unedited output of a parsing program. Project deliverables include: – a detailed description of each PoS-tagging scheme, at a comparable level of detail. This includes a list of PoS-tags with descriptions and example uses from the source Corpus. The description of the use of PoS-tags is also illustrated in a multi-tagged corpus: a set of sample texts PoS-tagged in parallel with each PoS-tagset (and proofread by experts), for comparative studies – an analysis of the different lexical tokenization rules used in the source Corpora, to arrive at a ‘Corpus-neutral’ tokenization scheme (and consequent adjustments to the PoS-tagsets in our study to accept modified tokenization) – an implementation of each PoS-tagset in conjunction with our standardised tokenizer, as a family of PoS-taggers, one for each PoS-tagset – a method for ‘PoS-tagset conversion’, taking a text tagged according to one PoS-tagset and outputting the text annotated with another PoS-tagset – a sample of texts parsed according to a range a parsing schemes: a Multi-Treebank resource for comparative studies – an Internet service allowing researchers worldwide free access to the above resources, including a simple email-based method for PoS-tagging any English text with any or all PoS-tagset(s)