Grand Scale Research Articles

Tox and Detox

Tox and Detox

Criminological characteristics of participants in organized crime

This article is devoted to the issues of criminological characteristics of a participant in organized crime. The study of the personality of the offender is one of the central elements of the system of counteraction to a specific type of crime. The correct definition of the key criminological features of a criminal's personality is the basis for effective counteraction to criminal offenses committed by persons with these characteristics. In the article, the authors reveal the issues of classification of organized criminals, signs inherent in the main types of organized criminals, issues of sources of moral formation of the individual, the main features inherent in modern leaders of organized criminal associations. The authors believe that persons who carry out criminal activities on an ongoing basis as part of an organized criminal group pose an increased public danger to society. Moreover, in view of their inherent personality traits, it becomes possible for them to actively influence other members of society with their subsequent involvement in the organized crime system. In turn, the ideology of impunity and life "on a grand scale" spread by the leaders of organized criminal groups acts as a destructive element in the formation of the personality of minors. Key words: organized crime, personality, criminal, organized criminal group, criminological characteristics.

‘The most remarkable man’: James Croll, Quaternary scientist

ABSTRACTThe year 2021 marked the bicentenary of the birth of James Croll (1821–1890), the self‐educated son of a crofter‐stonemason, whose life was characterised by a dizzying range of occupations and homes, poor health and financial concerns, and yet he became a pioneer of orbital dynamics and ice age climate change with an impressive record of publication. Drawing upon archival information and recently published observations, this paper explores selected aspects of Croll's biography, his scientific connections and controversies, and that area of his life relevant to Quaternary science. He was a 19th century polymath whose multifaceted contributions have been a catalyst for subsequent systems‐based climate science on the grand scale, including the foundations for the seminal work of Milutin Milankovitch on the rhythms of Quaternary environmental change.

Ephemeral by design

Between the months of September and October, Kolkata celebrates the Hindu religious festival of Durgapuja on a grand scale. Organised by local clubs and neighbourhood voluntary associations, approximately 2,500 temporary structures – pandals – are built for the worship or puja of the goddess Durga and her entourage. Of these about two thousand occupy the city’s public spaces: streets, parks, green islands, and vacant lots. A large number of the pandals are finely engineered structures that are fabulously decorated and attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each day of the festivities. It takes anywhere between three months to three days to build these pavilions. After five days of festivities the pandals are dismantled and the clay deities destroyed by immersing them in the Hooghly River or another nearby body of water.

The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?

There have been five Mass Extinction events in the history of Earth's biodiversity, all caused by dramatic but natural phenomena. It has been claimed that the Sixth Mass Extinction may be underway, this time caused entirely by humans. Although considerable evidence indicates that there is a biodiversity crisis of increasing extinctions and plummeting abundances, some do not accept that this amounts to a Sixth Mass Extinction. Often, they use the IUCN Red List to support their stance, arguing that the rate of species loss does not differ from the background rate. However, the Red List is heavily biased: almost all birds and mammals but only a minute fraction of invertebrates have been evaluated against conservation criteria. Incorporating estimates of the true number of invertebrate extinctions leads to the conclusion that the rate vastly exceeds the background rate and that we may indeed be witnessing the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction. As an example, we focus on molluscs, the second largest phylum in numbers of known species, and, extrapolating boldly, estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5-13% (150,000-260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List. We review differences in extinction rates according to realms: marine species face significant threats but, although previous mass extinctions were largely defined by marine invertebrates, there is no evidence that the marine biota has reached the same crisis as the non-marine biota. Island species have suffered far greater rates than continental ones. Plants face similar conservation biases as do invertebrates, although there are hints they may have suffered lower extinction rates. There are also those who do not deny an extinction crisis but accept it as a new trajectory of evolution, because humans are part of the natural world; some even embrace it, with a desire to manipulate it for human benefit. We take issue with these stances. Humans are the only species able to manipulate the Earth on a grand scale, and they have allowed the current crisis to happen. Despite multiple conservation initiatives at various levels, most are not species oriented (certain charismatic vertebrates excepted) and specific actions to protect every living species individually are simply unfeasible because of the tyranny of numbers. As systematic biologists, we encourage the nurturing of the innate human appreciation of biodiversity, but we reaffirm the message that the biodiversity that makes our world so fascinating, beautiful and functional is vanishing unnoticed at an unprecedented rate. In the face of a mounting crisis, scientists must adopt the practices of preventive archaeology, and collect and document as many species as possible before they disappear. All this depends on reviving the venerable study of natural history and taxonomy. Denying the crisis, simply accepting it and doing nothing, or even embracing it for the ostensible benefit of humanity, are not appropriate options and pave the way for the Earth to continue on its sad trajectory towards a Sixth Mass Extinction.

An Ecological Sailing Towards Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy: A Historical Perspective

This paper is an ecocritical reading of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy which comprises of three historical fictions, Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). It is a documentary of the opium trade between India and China and the trafficking of people as indentured labors by the East India Company during the mid-nineteenth century. The paper will examine the ecocentric dimensions in the work of Ghosh. Ecocriticism is a rapidly emerging field of literary study that considers the relationship which human beings share with the environment. The main issues that become very prominent in these novels are Ecological Imperialism and Ecocide. These terms are portrayed by Ghosh in his Ibis Trilogy in a very realistic manner with the grand scale of opium war. Opium war is one of the greatest incidents in the colonial history of India. This paper will analyse the issue of environmental degradation as found in the Ibis Trilogy in the light of ecocriticism.

Sonic Visualiser: Visualisation, Analysis, and Annotation of Music Audio Recordings

Sonic Visualiser: Visualisation, Analysis, and Annotation of Music Audio Recordings

Collectivized Discretion: Seeking Explanations for Decreased Asylum Recognition Rates in Finland After Europe's 2015 “Refugee Crisis”

In 2015, during the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe, Finland was among the European countries receiving exceptionally large numbers of asylum applications. As the volume of asylum applications surged, however, the percentage of positive asylum decisions in Finland declined substantially. In this article, we explore reasons for this dramatic drop in recognitions rates and examine Finnish immigration control authorities’ use of discretion in asylum credibility assessment. Our approach is unique in its application of mixed methods to examine asylum decisions in pre- and post-crisis situations. We found that asylum caseworkers’ inconsistent assessment of similar facts and lack of faith in the veracity of applicants’ claims were essential to the mass denial of young Iraqi asylum applicants in Finland. This finding is important because it illustrates how asylum officers are able to “shift the border,” or generate a shift in asylum decision-making on a grand scale, without meaningful changes in law. Asylum officers, we show, are able to bring about such a shift via what we call collectivized discretion, or large-scale use of discretion, in asylum status determinations to control migration. Prior research on discretion in asylum decision-making highlights the individual decision-maker. This article expands discretion research by offering new insights on large-scale, collective discretionary shifts in the application of asylum law. We conclude that it is crucial that asylum status determinations be anchored in the individual assessment of each applicant's case, as collectivized discretion can lead to arbitrary results in the application of asylum law, potentially forcing those in need of refugee protection to face deportation.

Importance, Fame, and Death

AbstractSome people want their lives to possess importance on a large scale. Some crave fame, or at least wide recognition. And some even desire glory that will only be realised after their death. Such desires are either ignored or disparaged by many philosophers. However, although few of us have a real shot at importance and fame on any grand scale, these can be genuine personal goods when they meet certain further conditions. Importance that relates to positive impact and reflects our agency answers a distinctive existential concern for one's life to matter. And since what is important merits wide appreciation, the step from wanting to be significant and wanting that significance widely appreciated is small. Still, desires for importance and fame can take a more vicious character when they are not properly structured, and when they are not dominated by more impartial aims. If we accept the personal value of importance and fame, it is hard to see why that value cannot extend beyond our death. The temporal distribution of glory is actually irrelevant to its value. But it is also a mistake to identify a concern with posthumous glory with the wish to leave a trace after our death.

Impact of Public Consumption on Economic Growth

Faced with the financial crisis and global economic recessions, Africa governments have rediscovered the importance of economic policy instruments. They use it to rescue the bankrupt banks, and to make more economic activity to carry back recession. But now there's a backlash demanding that the deficits used to create the stimulus must be reduced by cutting public consumption spending on a grand scale. Hence the target of this study is to explore the role of public consumption expenditure on economic process in East African geographic region. The study will use panel ordinary least square estimation technique to attain the study objective. The study has identified consumption expenditure to be negatively associated with growth. This study recommends few funds should be channeled to public consumption programmes and sectors.

Permission to Say “Capitalism”: Principles for Critical Social Science Engagement With GGR Research

The grand scale of GGR deployment now necessary to avoid dangerous climate change warrants the use of grand interpretive theories of how the global economy operates. We argue that critical social science should be able to name the global economy as “capitalism”; and instead of speaking about “transforming the global economy” as a necessary precondition for limiting climate change, instead speak about transforming, or even transcending,capitalism. We propose three principles are helpful for critical social science researchers willing to name and analyse the structural features of capitalism and their relation to greenhouse gas removal technology, policy, and governance. These principles are: (1)Greenhouse Gas Removal technologies are likely to emerge within capitalism, which is crisis prone, growth dependent, market expanding, We use a broad Marxist corpus to justify this principle. (2)There are different varieties of capitalism and this will affect the feasibility of different GGR policies and supports in different nations. We draw on varieties of capitalism and comparative political economy literature to justify this principle. (3)Capitalism is more than an economic system, it is ideologically and culturally maintained. Globally-significant issues such as fundamentalism, institutional mistrust, precarity, and populism, cannot be divorced from our thinking about globally significant deployment of greenhouse gas removal technologies. We use a broad Critical Theory body of work to explore the ideational project of maintaining capitalism and its relation to GGR governance and policy.

Wooden Sculpture Inspired Islamic Calligraphy Character as to Show Dynamism, Interlocking, Cultural Symbol in Public Space

This study aims to investigate in greater depth the application of Islamic calligraphy and to create sculptures. It is hoped that the sculptures created will help explain Islamic calligraphy, which has been transformed into dynamic elements that interact with physical space and is twisted, interlocked, intertwined, and represent cultural symbols. The sculpture created is also intended to distinguish crafts and fine art on a grander scale. In addition, the concept of intertextuality will assist this project in providing a clear context for the artwork. Indeed, the addition to formalistic studies leads to the development of form and appearance. The emphasis should be placed on the content and meaning of the work produced.

Artificial Intelligence applied on the basis of powering of vessel and its operational and management aspects

Oceans are consequential provenance of resources, transportation and bio-diversity on a grand scale. Humankind uses oceans for various motives such as haulage, victuals, trade, mineral extraction, power generation, warfare, sustention and leisure. Many of these activities fabricate marine pollution and straining in sustaining aquatic life, despite several protection barriers.

Importance, Value, and Causal Impact

Abstract Many believe that because we are so small, we must be utterly insignificant on the cosmic scale. But whether this is so depends on what it takes to be important. On one view, what matters for importance is the difference to value that something makes. On this view, what determines our cosmic importance is not our size, but what else of value is out there. But a rival view also seems plausible: that importance requires sufficient causal impact on the relevant scale; since we have no such impact on the grand scale, that would entail our cosmic insignificance. I argue that despite appearances, causal impact is neither necessary nor sufficient for importance. All that matters is impact on value. Since parts can have non-causal impact on the value of the wholes that contain them, this means that we might have great impact on the grandest scale without ever leaving our little planet.

Negotiating Multiple Identities of Brazilian Paralympians

In this article, I draw on the personal narratives of 41 Brazilian Paralympic athletes who competed in the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games to explore their multiple identities shaped within and outside sport and how they negotiated those self-representations. Parathletes’ narratives gave a sense of who they are, how they live their lives, and what their struggles, hopes, and aspirations are within and outside sport. The available studies in disability sport and the representation of disabled athletes have largely failed to examine the stories of these individuals and address their unique realities and perspectives. Five major themes emerged from the interview analysis regarding the parathletes’ self-representation: athletic identity, gender identity, disability identity, national identity, and activist identity. These accounts also revealed how these individuals negotiated their multiple identities in different settings and the tensions they experienced in their social interactions. The Rio Paralympics presented such a new interaction setting for the Brazilian parathletes who competed on such a grand scale at home for the first time and provided multiple examples in the athletes’ accounts of their identities.

Rudolf Virchow, poverty and global health: from “politics as medicine on a grand scale” to “health in all policies”

The German pathologist and politician Rudolf Virchow proposed the concept of sociomedical causation, emphasising the role of social and environmental factors in the aetiology and prevention of diseases. Virchow's achievements are threefold: he was a founder of scientific biomedicine, he characterised medicine as a social science as much as a biological science and he promoted and improved public health. In his landmark report of a typhus epidemic in mid-19th century Germany, Virchow drew a connection between the epidemic and poverty and living conditions. He proposed radical social reform and stated that, “medicine is social science and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale”. The task of medicine was therefore not merely to treat disease but also to contribute to the health of the entire population. Virchow realised that, in order to improve the health of the public, medicine must attend to both its biological and social underpinnings. His work has had far-reaching consequences for the development of public health and medical sociology. As in Virchow's times, poverty, deprived living conditions, malnutrition, crowding and economic insecurity determine to a high degree the prevalence of disease and life expectancy in low- and middle-income countries today. Sociomedical causation is not limited to infectious diseases but also extends to the contemporary pandemics of non-communicable diseases. Obesity and other non-communicable diseases cannot be addressed effectively without considering and acting on the social determinants of health. The concept of “health in all policies” has emerged with the goal of promoting political action addressing the social determinants of health. This concept concerns prevention of disease, promotion of a healthy lifestyle and improvement of factors potentially harmful to the health of entire populations. The current “health-in-all-policies” reforms in China may advance the global evidence base for the prevention of chronic disease in low-, middle- and high-income countries.

Impact of formal vocational training on the earnings of self-employed individuals in rural India

The study examines the impact of participation in formal vocational training on the earnings of rural self-employed individuals in India, based on both descriptive statistics and 2SLS based econometric analysis. The results show that even though formal vocational training helps self-employed individuals earn a higher income and that a great initiative has been taken by the government to promote skill development in recent times, a meagre proportion of rural self-employed has received formal vocational training. Therefore, there is a need for an appropriate policy attention towards enhancing the participation of rural self-employed individuals in the formal vocational training programmes on a grander scale. Moreover, a substantial heterogeneity is observed in terms of the duration of training programmes. A longer duration (12 months or more) training helps enhance the mean earnings significantly as compared to a relatively shorter duration training. Considering that a shorter duration training is cost-effective from the supply-side and entails a lesser opportunity cost for self-employed when it comes to participation, policy should revisit the course structure and curriculum of shorter duration training programmes in order to ensure that these become more effective in terms of fetching higher earnings.

The early detection of immunoglobulins via optical-based lateral flow immunoassay platform in COVID-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is the global public health challenge currently persisting at a grand scale. A method that meets the rapid quantitative detection of antibodies to assess the body’s immune response from natural COVID-19 illness or vaccines’ effects is urgently needed. In the present study, an attempt was made to integrate a newly designed spectrometer to the COVID-19 test strip procedure; this augmentation provides the quantitative capacity to a lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA). Optical interpretation of results by quantitative α index, rather than visual qualification, can be done quickly, in 5–10 minutes. The developed product was compared with several other serological IgM/IgG antibody reagents on the market by recruiting 111 participants suspected of having COVID-19 infection from March to May 2020 in a hospital. Taking RT-PCR as the diagnostic gold standard, the quantitative spectral LIFA platform could correctly detect all 12 COVID-19 patients. Concerning RT-PCR negative patients, all three antibody testing methods found positive cases. The optical-based platform exhibited the ability of early detection of immunoglobulins of RT-PCR negative patients. There was an apparent trend that elevation of IgM levels in the acute phase of infection; then IgG levels rose later. It exhibited the risk of a false-negative diagnosis of RT-PCR in COVID-19 testing. The significant detection ability of this new optical-based platform demonstrated clinical potential.

Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, by Regenia Gagnier

Reviewed by: Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century by Regenia Gagnier Daniel M. Stout (bio) Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century, by Regenia Gagnier; pp. xiv + 247. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, $89.99, $59.99 paper, $69.99 ebook. The praise arrayed on the first pages and back cover of Regenia Gagnier's Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century uniformly portrays it as a sweeping methodological renovation: "a compelling new method" (Amanda Anderson qtd. in Gagnier xi), "a major methodological reconfiguration" (David Amigoni qtd. in Gagnier xi), "a completely new beginning, world-shaped and world-scaled, for Victorian studies" (Steven Connor qtd. in Gagnier). It is therefore on the question of method that I will concentrate our attention. Some of the assembled opinions refer to Gagnier's method in terms to which she herself gives prominent place, like "transculturation" (4) and "symbiology" (xii). Others use terms that are more marginal ("bibliomigrancy" [B. Venkat Mani qtd. in Gagnier 115]) or that do not appear in her study at all, like "differential reading" (Colin MacCabe qtd. in Gagnier). But in all cases the effort is to capture the expansive quality of the approach. Across seven chapters and a coda, Literatures of Liberalization moves through a vast set of geographies, political histories, and literary traditions. Chapter 1, "The Transcultural Transformation of a Field," offers the most explicit description of the project's methodology: "I bring together British, colonial, semi- post- and neocolonial, and settler literatures to take stock of one interconnected economic development of nationalisms and international competition that includes [Charles] Dickens's industrial revolution as well as [José] Martí's revolutionary Cuba" (8). It is a startlingly broad remit, and under its permissive scope subsequent chapters canvass a highly diverse set of authors and national traditions. Chapter 2, "Global Circulation and Some Problems in Liberalism, Liberalization, and Neoliberalism," looks at the impact of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) on early twentieth-century modernizers in China and India. It also surveys intersections of liberal individualism and Indigenous collectivism in East and South Asia, Central and South America, and the Arab world. Chapter 3, "Dialogical Imaginations: European Ideas of Plasticity, Freedom, and Choice in the Long Nineteenth Century," takes up Johann Gottfried Herder, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and D. H. Lawrence in order to consider "how imaginative literature has understood individual and collective freedom and choice" (62). Chapter 4 examines Anthony Trollope's reception history in England, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Russia; chapter 5 does the same for Dickens, measuring his cultural impact in Australasia, China, India, and Russia. Chapter 6 proposes that Decadence should be understood as a global and historically mobile (rather than European and fin de siècle) phenomenon. Chapter 7, "Crossed Histories: Social Formations in Friction 1783–Present," is a collection of disparate subsections: Little Dorrit (1855–57) as a "total environment" (168); the tractor in Norwegian and Indian literature; global commodities in literature (Gabriel García Márquez: bananas; Miguel Asturias: maize; John Williams: buffalo; Cormac McCarthy: cattle); and possible correspondences between Martí's revolutionary writing and George Gissing's novels. Chapter 8, "Coda on Processes of Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Anthropocene," dives into topics not previously central, arguing that sex and [End Page 284] gender are ontological facts (not just cultural constructions) and reading three novels—Sharona Muir's Invisible Beasts (2014), Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam's Love in the Anthropocene (2015), and Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013)—whose recentness, puzzlingly, is apparently no obstacle to their ability to represent "literatures of the Anthropocene 1750-present" (224). This capacious approach may reassure a Victorian studies increasingly concerned about its islanded procedures. Gagnier's book joins recent efforts to diversify or undiscipline the field by making it more international and multilingual, less hermetically historicist. Embracing these revisionary mandates, Gagnier projects a Victorian studies in which "international relations, rather than an island's literature," take pride of place (3); scholarship moves beyond the merely anglophone to become a project of "translation on a grand scale"; and the confines of historical period give way to a view of objects not according to birthdate but...

Not so much rational but rationalizing: Humans evolved as coherence-seeking, fiction-making animals.

The evidence for biased perceptions and judgments in humans coupled with evidence for ecological rationality in nonhuman animals suggest that the claim that humans are the rational animal may be overstated. We instead propose that discussions of human psychology may benefit from viewing ourselves not so much as rational animals but rather as the rationalizing animal. The current article provides evidence that rationalization is unique to humans and argues that rationalization processes (e.g., cognitive dissonance reduction, post hoc justification of choices, confabulation of reasons for moral positions) are aimed at creating the fictions we prefer to believe and maintaining the impression that we are psychologically coherent and rational. Coherence appears to be prioritized at the expense of veridicality, suggesting that distorted perceptions and appraisals can be adaptive for humans-under certain circumstances, we are better off understanding ourselves and reality not so accurately. Rationalization also underlies the various shared beliefs, religions, norms, and ideologies that have enabled humans to organize and coordinate their actions on a grand scale, for better or worse. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this unique human psychological trait. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).