Lost Person Research Articles

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

First Successful Rescue of a Lost Person Using the Human Detection System: A Case Study from Beskid Niski (SE Poland)

Recent advances in search and rescue methods include the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), to carry out aerial monitoring of terrains to spot lost individuals. To date, such searches have been conducted by human observers who view UAV-acquired videos or images. Alternatively, lost persons may be detected by automated algorithms. Although some algorithms are implemented in software to support search and rescue activities, no successful rescue case using automated human detectors has been reported on thus far in the scientific literature. This paper presents a report from a search and rescue mission carried out by Bieszczady Mountain Rescue Service near the village of Cergowa in SE Poland, where a 65-year-old man was rescued after being detected via use of SARUAV software. This software uses convolutional neural networks to automatically locate people in close-range nadir aerial images. The missing man, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease (as well as a stroke the previous day) spent more than 24 h in open terrain. SARUAV software was allocated to support the search, and its task was to process 782 nadir and near-nadir JPG images collected during four photogrammetric flights. After 4 h 31 min of the analysis, the system successfully detected the missing person and provided his coordinates (uploading 121 photos from a flight over a lost person; image processing and verification of hits lasted 5 min 48 s). The presented case study proves that the use of an UAV assisted by SARUAV software may quicken the search mission.

Lost Person Search Area Prediction Based on Regression and Transfer Learning Models

In this paper, we propose a methodology and algorithms for search and rescue mission planning. These algorithms construct optimal areas for lost person search having in mind the initial point of planning and features of the surrounding area. The algorithms are trained on previous search and rescue missions data collected from three stations of the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service. The training was performed in two training phases and having two data sets. The first phase was the construction of a regression model of the speed of walking. This model predicts the speed of walking of a rescuer who is considered a well-trained and motivated person since the model is fitted on a dataset made of GPS tracking data collected from Mountain Rescue Service rescuers. The second phase is the calibration of the model for lost person speed of walking prediction with transfer learning on lost person data. The model is used in the simulation of walking in all directions to predict the maximum area where a person can be located. The performance of the algorithms was analysed with respect to a small dataset of archive data of real search and rescue missions that was available and results are discussed.

Lost Person Behavior – Statistics from Iceland

To be able to find the missing person you must search in the right place. The faster you can pinpoint the correct search location, the faster you will find the missing person. By analysing previous searches, planners can predict what others will do in similar situation. Since 2010 the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue (ICE-SAR) has recorded searches according to ISRID standards and though the records are not continuous, the ICE-SAR database has 189 incidents. At the Rescue 2018 conference held by ICE-SAR, the following statistics from ICE-SAR database were presented.

Enhancements to Statistical Probability of Area Models based upon updated ISRID data collection for Autistic Spectrum Disorders and Typically Developing Children

Both Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) individuals and Typically Developing (TD) children are associated with Search and Rescue incidents. Though they are in the same age range, these two groups are typically placed into different subject categories in lost person behavior profiles. This work compares these two age similar profiles to critically examine what statistical differences do exist. In addition, a new geo-spatial statistical point model is introduced, potentially applicable to all lost person subject profiles. Retrospective data from the updated International Search & Rescue Incident Database (ISRID2) was used to examine both spatial and incident characteristics of individuals with ASD (n=338) and TD children (n=2335) who were reported missing and then were the subject of a search. The updated version of ISRID now contains 145,000 incidents. Those with ASD are 3-4 times more likely to require a search effort (P << .0001). ASD children (age 1-15) were not found to be statistically significant than ASD adults. The new point model and watershed model for ASD is introduced. Survivability curves are now reported out to the 5% chance of survival with findings of 7 days for ASD and 11 days for TD Children. Search incidents for missing ASD and TD children demonstrate significant differences but also have some common features. Both adults and children with ASD share the same geo-spatial outcomes. Keywords: ISRID, Missing Persons, GIS, Lost Person Behavior, Models

Nostalgia as a means to overcome trauma: the case of Yoshimoto Banana’s “Sweet Hereafter”

The natsukashisa (nostalgia) is a common key to interpretation of novels written by the Japanese author Yoshimoto Banana. Considered as the desire for a replay of life, nostalgia is evaluated as a solution for the sensation of emptiness and solitude attributed to modern life; a gap that can be bridged by memory, recollection and flash-backs of the protagonists in Yoshimoto’s novels. As a representation for something gone, the objects of this nostalgic feeling assume different forms in Yoshimoto’s works: a faraway house, a lost person, a feeling perceived and then missed; dreams, hallucinations, images and paintings: everything is transformed by the author in a vehicle to allow the reader to sympathize with the protagonists and share the same nostalgic feeling. Author’s attempt is to encourage the young readers to keep on seeking the lost self in the past in order to not betray one’s identity. This is the main topic one can also recognise in her novel called Sweet Hereafter, a publication in which nostalgia for a self lost in a car accident is compared to the one felt by the hisaisha of Tōhoku region who lost everything after the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on 11th March 2011. Here Yoshimoto suggests natsukashisa as the possible way to overcome the traumatic experience of witnessing Japanese Daishinsai. This brief investigation proposes a literary case study that highlights the relations between trauma and memory, with a particular focus on nostalgia considered as a positive means for overcoming traumatic experience.

Characteristic Modeling of TOA Ranging Error in Rotating Anchor-Based Relative Positioning

In this paper, we describe a rotating anchor-based positioning method using time of arrival (TOA) measurements to obtain the relative positional relationship between two locators, which can help a rescuer to efficiently determine the direction to a trapped person or help a lost person to find the direction to an exit in first responder applications. Since the TOA ranging error of this special scenario cannot be modeled by the distributions proposed for traditional fixed anchor-based indoor geolocation, a new characteristic model based on the $\alpha $ -stable distribution is presented for rotating anchor-based relative positioning. The model is verified by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov hypothesis and Akaike weights and compared with the traditional distributions. Moreover, the parameters of the model are used to improve the direction identification accuracy, further reflecting the value of the model.

Analysis of last statements prior to execution: methods, themes and future directions.

Worldwide, over 1000 people were executed in 2016 and over 3000 sentenced to death. Death row prisoners have high rates of mental illness, often combined with neurological impairment. Prolonged confinement has further negative effects on psychological function. There is a growing literature examining key themes and psychological constructs in death row prisoners immediately prior to execution. To date, this literature centres largely but not exclusively on last statements from death row in Texas, owing to ease of availability. The most common themes in last statements are love, spirituality and apology or regret. The most common psychological constructs are 'identification-egression' (e.g. attachment to a lost person or ideal, such as freedom), unbearable psychological pain and rejection-aggression. This is still a relatively new area of research and new techniques, such as computerised quantitative text analysis, are likely to complement rather than replace more traditional forms of thematic and textual analysis. For the future, it is essential that studies in this field continue to specify precisely, which last statements they use, so that overlap can be identified, and that more countries are studied (if possible). It would also be useful to expand the research frame to relate the content of last statements to additional variables relating to prisoners' offences, physical health, mental health, family structure and broader circumstances. Finally, ethical issues require continued consideration in this complex, fascinating, growing field.

System for Detecting Potential Lost Person based on Conditional Random Field

Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has been used widely in transsportation industry to help company in managing taxis. The most popular GPS utilization for taxi company is to identify the position of taxis and monitor theirs the mobility. Nowdays, data collected from GPS tracker is combined with data from taxi meter are analyzed to provide region information regarding potential passengers. Zicheng Liao’s proposed a system based on GPS taxi data to detect anomalous area/region which was then interpreted as region with to predict rare passengers. The system was developed based on conditional random field (CRF) method and features position, velocity, passenger loading information. Our research was aimed to develop tool based on GPS data to detect potential lost person. We motivated by Liao research and modified the algorithms and features of CRF. Our experiments showed that the system has precision of 98.86% and recall of 87.478%.

Your Phone as a Personal Emergency Beacon: A Portable GSM Base Station to Locate Lost Persons

Access to emergency numbers such as 911 or 112 is generally universally available to cell phone users. Nevertheless, emergencies may occur in areas without cell phone coverage, for example, in remote areas frequented by climbers or hikers. In this article, we describe the design, development, and evaluation of a global system for mobile communications (GSM) base station that can be placed in a vehicle (car, plane, helicopter, etc.) to locate a lost person with an active GSM phone. The system includes the resources to provide a good estimation of the location of the phone, allowing the rescue team to significantly narrow its search and to establish communication with the person where possible, as the system also provides GSM coverage.

The application of recognition-primed decision theory to decisions made in an outdoor education context

Introduction Outdoor leaders take people into the outdoors in a myriad of ways. Included are activities such as rock-climbing, kayaking and mountain biking, through diverse domains such as outdoor education, adventure tourism, and club trips. Much of the learning and welfare of group members are in the leader's hands. There is widespread agreement that outdoor programme implementation relies on effective decision making (DM) (Martin, Cashel, Wagstaff & Breunig, 2006; Shooter & Furman, 2011). It is well recognised that the outdoors is a complex and dynamic decision-making environment (Galloway, 2002; Martin, Schmid & Parker, 2009; Tozer, Fazey & Fazey, 2007). The natural environment has intrinsic elements of risk and uncontrolled variables presented by elements such as weather, height, water and speed (New Zealand Department of Labour, 2010). Adding to this complexity is the uniqueness of individuals and the dynamics of groups. Decision circumstances for outdoor leaders vary greatly, with some situations pressured and changeable and others stable and consistent. The dynamic interactions between and among participants, leaders and the environment means that leaders of outdoor activities make countless decisions during an excursion. Examples of outdoor decisions include: (a) place (e.g., where to camp); (b) time (e.g., when to stop for lunch); (c) the needs of individuals (e.g., comfort, safety); and (d) the group process (e.g., is everyone happy). Depending on context, these could be simple or complex decision situations that affect the quality of an adventure experience and the safety of participants (e.g., to cross a river or not, and if so, where, how and when). Consequently, the importance of leader decisions varies from inconsequential to paramount. Drury, Bonney, Berman and Wagstaff (2005) proposed a classification of decisions on a continuum from simple to complex (see also Martin et al, 2006). Here, decisions could be classified depending on a combination of contextual factors including degrees of challenge, uncertainty, predictability of outcome, time pressure, threat, emotionality and situational understanding. Consideration of these arrays appears in several text books (see Drury et al., 2005; Martin et al., 2006; Priest & Gass, 2005). Some empirical research has been conducted to explore different outdoor decision situations. These include: outdoor pursuits leaders (Beare & Lynch, 2005); outdoor education leaders (Boyes & O'Hare, 2003); medical decision making by Outward Bound staff (Galloway, 2007); and outdoor leaders on a Wilderness Education Association course (Martin et al., 2009). Their decision problems include emergency situations such as hypothermia, a lost person, and a spinal injury, as well as whether to cross an alpine pass and a river. Also included are decisions about extending a cross country ski trip to increase the level of challenge. Despite the universality of decisions, researchers have yet to develop a taxonomy of outdoor leadership decisions based on empirical evidence. A deeper understanding would be useful as a basis for understanding more about how different contexts and levels of complexity influence decision processes. The implications of this approach may be useful to inform the education of new and existing leaders and contribute to better practice. The present research explores the range of decisions made by six highly experienced outdoor leaders and presents their data in taxonomies. Some of their key decisions are then explored through the lens of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM). Naturalistic decision making Hitherto, a modest amount of empirical research investigates outdoor leader decision making and a comprehensive understanding has yet to be agreed upon (Furman, Shooter & Schumann, 2010). Some researchers have focussed on classical DM models where multiple options for action are generated, whereby in a rational, comparative process, the best perceived solution is chosen and implemented (e. …

Cognition in the woods: Biases in probability judgments by search and rescue planners

AbstractA type of emergency decision-making which has not received research attention is the police search for a lost person in a rural or wilderness area. For many such incidents, decisions concerning where to search for the lost subject are made by a planning team, each member of which assigns probabilities to the various hypotheses about where the subject might be located, including the residual hypothesis that the subject is somewhere else entirely, that is, outside of the designated search area. In the current study, 32 adult males with search planning experience were asked to assign probabilities to a fictional lost person incident. It was hypothesized, according to support theory (Tversky & Koehler, 1994), that subjects who first considered the five possible scenarios accounting for how the subject could have left the search area—i.e., unpacked the residual hypothesis—would subsequently increase their probability estimate of the global hypothesis that the missing subject was not in the designated search area, compared to those subjects who unpacked the focal hypothesis. This hypothesis was confirmed. We also found considerable evidence for subadditivity, as most subjects estimated higher summed probabilities for the individual scenarios accounting for the focal and residual hypotheses, respectively. The potential negative consequences of such unpacking effects during a lost person incident were discussed, and possible means of mitigating such effects were described.

Interparietal bone in forensic practice: Case report

In forensic autopsy, pathologists pay attention to skull fracture lines. They are not much interested in the anatomical morphological variations of the skull bones, as long as the variations are not present. The interparietal bone is one of the anatomical variations that could be of interest for forensic pathologists. We present a case of a 54-year-old man who, after a fall overlived a head injury for six weeks. By chance, autopsy revealed an undivided interparietal bone. Its lateral sutures were fused with parietal bones and unrecognizable from the anterior skull bones, while the sutura mendosa was clearly visible. The forensic pathologist should be able to recognize anatomic morphological variations, including those of skull bones. The interparietal bone could be interpreted wrongly as belonging to the fractured occipital bone, i.e. as a broken fragment. This is of particular significance in the cases, for example, of murder or child abuse. Its inferior suture can be seen by X-ray and possibly wrongly interpreted as a fracture line. The presence of this variation may be occasionally useful in the identification of an unknown or lost person.

“The Altar of the Dead”: James’s Grammar of Grieving

“THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD” : JAMES’S GRAMMAR OF GRIEVING KAREN SMYTHE U n iv ersity o f R egin a Tzvetan Todorov notes that James’s tales are often about the “presence of absence” (165). A critical revision of this claim is that many tales are about the writing of absence. Krishna Baldev Vaid groups thematically “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Jolly Corner” as “a triptych depicting man in quest of his [absent] Self” (214). But in these tales, James is not merely writing about the past, present, or future; he is writing about writing about them. For example, “The Altar of the Dead” is, on one level, a story about how to write and read an elegy. In this “allegory of elegy,” George Stransom (one of the elegists in the tale) is what Jacques Derrida would call a “master of writing, numbers and calculation [who] does not merely write down the weight of dead souls; he first counts out the days of life, enumerates history” (Dissemination 92). James uses a life-to-death continuum as a model not only for the history of a subject (autobiography), but also for the subject of history itself; in other words, life becomes a text, and texts — both historical and aesthetic — are given life.1 By thematizing the passage through life in textual terms (in figurative language), James provides a conceptual passage from aesthetics to history. That is, the elegiac genre allows James to explore this connection between the thematics of aestheticism (where death is the occasion for creation), and the linguistic or rhetorical techniques involved in the representation of the past, or history. Generally, elegiac literature is occasional, written in memory of a dead or lost person (or thing) in order to describe the relationship and the grief involved, and in order to find some consolation for the loss. The tradition includes an apostrophe or address to the dead, and the elegist performs verbal rites or repetitions just as the “mourner” performs grieving rituals. The speaker’s rites include a focus on the self as survivor (for the purpose of self-recovery), meditations (such as Stransom’s “plunges” into the past [106]), and artistic self-consciousness in the search for consolation.2 “The Altar of the Dead” is clearly elegiac on the thematic level — An­ drzej Warminski calls it a “tale of erosion” (264), and S. Gorley Putt calls it a “fable of human grief” (394). Warminski criticizes Putt for this statement, English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 3 , September 19 9 0 and though it is admittedly a limited and somewhat misplaced reading, Putt provides an accurate thematic description of the tale. R.P. Blackmur makes a similar comment on the theme and form of “The Altar,” suggesting that it is a “fable of the dead” (340) that “can be thought of with Lycidas and In Memoriam and Adonais, and without their particularity of reference” (338). Though Blackmur does not offer an explicit generic description of James’s tale, he does situate it in the elegiac tradition. Vaid agrees with Blackmur’s grouping of “The Altar” among canonical English requiems, as well as with the distinction he makes between it and them. He writes that there is a meaning behind this meaning: the “altar” is a symbolic bridge between the living and the dead, and the fable exemplifies the point that this bridge is never complete, aesthetically or spiritually, so long as there is even the last vestige of egotism in the devotee. Stransom must give up his self to gain his Self. This metaphysical pun, I believe, is also embedded in the tale. (222) Clearly, Milton, Tennyson, and Shelley had different agendas for their ver­ sions of elegy. But Vaid’s insightful interpretation is, again, a thematic one. On a more subtle rhetorical level, however, James uses the symbolic bridge as a symbol itself. That is, the theme of uniting the living with the dead is indeed a motive of elegy, a motive that James figures in the symbolic altar as text. The fable of how to write an elegy therefore provides a “nexus between [James...