Past Encounters Research Articles

SCARLET LETTERS AND RECIDIVISM: DOES AN OLD CRIMINAL RECORD PREDICT FUTURE OFFENDING?*

Research Summary:This research explores the issue of old prior records and their ability to predict future offending. In particular, we are interested in the question of whether, after a given period of time, the risk of recidivism for a person who has been arrested in the distant past is ever indistinguishable from that of a population of persons with no prior arrests. Two well‐documented empirical facts guide our investigation: (1) Individuals who have offended in the past are relatively more likely to offend in the future, and (2) the risk of recidivism declines as the time since the last criminal act increases. We find that immediately after an arrest, the knowledge of this prior record does significantly differentiate this population from a population of nonoffenders. However, these differences weaken dramatically and quickly over time so that the risk of new offenses among those who last offended six or seven years ago begins to approximate (but not match) the risk of new offenses among persons with no criminal record.Policy Implications:Individuals with official records of past offending behavior encounter a barrier when they try to obtain employment, even if a person's most recent offense occurred in the distant past. There are many reasons for such obstacles, but they are at least partially premised on the concern that individuals with arrest records—even from the distant past—are more likely to offend in the future than persons with no criminal history. Our analysis questions the logic of such practices and suggests that after a given period of remaining crime free, it may be prudent to wash away the brand of “offender” and open up more legitimate opportunities to this population.

I Is Someone Else (review)

Reviewed by: I Is Someone Else Loretta Gaffney Cooper, Patrick I Is Someone Else. Delacorte, 2006 [304p] Library ed. ISBN 0-385-90286-7$18.99 Trade ed. ISBN 0-385-73269-4$16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 Fifteen-year-old Stephen doesn't have a clue about what happened to his older brother, Rob, who has been missing for months; whatever happened, Stephen can't believe (as his parents do) that Rob is dead. En route from his native England to a summer program in France in 1966, Stephen meets Jerry and Astrid, hippies who happen to know Rob, rumored to have been traveling to Istanbul. Convinced by Jerry and Astrid to accompany them in a van headed east, Stephen abandons his program, sends a letter to his parents, and begins a journey in every sense of the word. Along the way, he encounters sometimes exotic, sometimes terrifying foreign settings, experiments with drugs, falls in love, and is nearly stoned by a mob in Iran. Though Stephen is supposedly searching for his brother, it quickly becomes clear that he is searching for himself, and ultimately he must own up to the truth about a traumatic past sexual encounter with one of his former teachers. The episodic plot structure of this British import mirrors traditional quest narratives, but the journey itself is a pleasurably wild ride glazed in a feverish jumble of hashish, poetry, some genuinely frightening brushes with Turkish authorities, and graphic descriptions of dysentery. Orientalist clichés abound, though Stephen's dewy-eyed romance with the East is appropriate given his naïve and poetic sensibilities. However, Jerry's uncanny knack for rescuing Stephen at the last minute is a crude plot device, especially his final intervention; Stephen's near breakdown is too quickly averted, and his return to England to confront his teacher is disconcertingly abrupt. Nonetheless, readers with a taste for foreign adventure and a curiosity about the 1960s will enjoy Stephen's long, strange trip. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Islam in Europe

Islam in Europe, by Jack Goody (Oxford: Polity P., 2004; pp. 178. £45; pb. £14.99). Although this book contains a wealth of information about the past, it is not really a work of history. Nor, despite the fact that the author is Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, is its principal focus ethnographic. Convinced that religious differences play a much greater role in conflicts than most social scientists recognise, Goody sets out ‘to show something of the nature of the interactions between Islam and Europe, taking seriously the actors’ view of the situation'. More than half the book is devoted to ‘Past Encounters’. In this initial chapter, which grew out of a lecture to the Socialist History Group in London, Goody chronicles the Arab-Berber invasions of the Iberian Peninsula, southern France and southern Italy; the Ottoman invasions of Greece, the Balkans and eastern Europe; and the Mongol invasions from the north. He then deals in turn with Islamic cultural influences, trade, values, and contemporary immigration. Chapter 2, ‘Bitter Icons and Ethnic Cleansing’, was published in 2002 as an article in History and Anthropology. An earlier draft appeared in The New Left Review the previous year. Here Goody first offers his reflections on the deep-seated human ambivalence towards the very process of representation as evinced by the abrupt changes in style of ancient Greek pottery and the iconoclasm inherent in the Ottoman transformation of Nicosia's cathedral into a mosque. He suggests that this ambivalence is one of the factors that divide Cyprus's Muslims and Christians. He then turns to the subject of ethnic cleansing, arguing that it is more often religious than ethnic and that Hobsbawm, Gellner and Giddens have underestimated the role of religious ideologies in nationalism. In Chapter 3, ‘Islam and Terrorism’, which is a revised version of another article published in History and Anthropology, also in 2002, the ‘actors’ whose views he takes seriously are those whom most Europeans currently consider terrorists. For example, he offers what amounts to a militant Arab perspective on Israel (pp. 133ff.) and tells us that for some in the East the massacre in Bali was ‘comparable to God's punishment of the Sodomites’ (p. 137). With the final chapter, ‘The Taliban, the Bamiyan and Us—the Islamic Other’, Goody returns to the subject of iconoclasm. He gives Christian and Buddhist examples of the alternation between representation and its absence, and reminds us that the founders of the French Revolution were opposed to representation. Most of the information that Goody relays is accurate, although he is slightly confused about the Reconquista: he seems unaware that Spain was largely under Christian control long before the fall of Granada in 1492 (p. 34) and elsewhere he even gets the date of that wrong (p. 125). More importantly, however, he sometimes oversimplifies the issues. The Palestinians have undoubtedly had a very raw deal, but to attribute the founding of Israel to ‘Jewish terrorists’ supported by the USA (p. 134) is to disregard both the history of anti-Semitism and the motives of the Zionists. Similarly, to assert that after 1948 the Muslims became ‘the new terrorists’ simply because they ‘had lost control of the country’ (ibid.), is to oversimplify. I share Goody's conviction that, over the centuries, Muslims have made many positive contributions to Europe, and, like him, I am concerned that since September 2001 Muslims have been demonised. Nevertheless, we should not be blind to the fact that some of the Islamic organisations that are rapidly gaining influence in Europe are skilled at exploiting liberal values in order to further a far from liberal agenda, and that these organisations have little in common with the high culture of the Spanish Umayyads or the Ottomans.

A Local Group Polar Ring Galaxy: NGC 6822

Star counts, obtained from a 2 x 2 degree area centered on NGC 6822 have revealed an optical image of this galaxy composed of two components: in addition to the well-known HI disk with its young stellar component, there is a spheroidal stellar structure as extensive as its HI disk but with its major axis at roughly right angles to it which we traced to at least 36 arcmin. Radial velocities of over 100 intermediate-age carbon stars found within this structure display kinematics contrasting strongly with those of the HI disk. These C stars belong to the spheroid. Although devoid of gas, the spheroid rotation is consistent with the I-band Tully-Fisher relation. The orientation of the rotation axis which minimizes the stellar velocity dispersion coincides with the minor axis of the stellar population ellipsoid, lying very nearly in the plane of the HI disk. We conclude: that the HI disk is a polar ring and the spheroidal component an erstwhile disk, a fossil remainder of a past close encounter episode.

The H I content of the recently discovered field dwarf galaxy APPLES 1

We present observations in a search for neutral hydrogen associated with the recently detected field dwarf galaxy APPLES 1, performed with the Parkes radiotelescope. The observed radio spectrum shows no evident (> 3 sigma rms) line emission indicating an upper limit for the HI content of the galaxy of similar to 10(6) M-circle dot and providing an upper value for the M-HI/L-B ratio equal to 2.4 M-circle dot/L-circle dot. The low value of the HI content suggested by the observations, together with the galaxy optical morphology, might indicate that APPLES 1 is a dwarf spheroidal. This indication is in contrast with the evidence of recent star formation, which is typical for dwarf irregular galaxies. This may suggest that APPLES 1 belongs to the class of mixed dwarf irregular/spheroidal transition-type galaxies. We also conclude that the relatively low neutral gas mass in APPLES 1 can be explained by an extended and inefficient star formation process, without the need for a dramatic event such as enhanced star formation or a past encounter with a massive galaxy or galaxy group.

The risks of eating and drinking.

Life is full of risk—everyday we encounter all sorts of hazards, some of which are unavoidable. Eating and drinking are paramount to maintaining life, but unfortunately, are also coupled with a multitude of potential and sometimes fatal health risks. These risks are not to be taken lightly, which is highlighted by the current increase in obesity and related diseases in the developed world, a trend that has the World Health Organization worrying about a growing epidemic of obesity (WHO/FAO, 2003). Similarly, public health officials are increasingly concerned about a dramatic increase in diabetes and coronary heart diseases that are caused by an inappropriate and ultimately hazardous diet. But food holds many more health risks, and recognizing these would greatly benefit human health. > …obesity has become a leading cause of death in the USA, second only to smoking The extent to which consumers identify and appreciate food‐related risks, and allow this knowledge to direct their eating and drinking behaviour, is therefore of great research interest. In this article, we first detail the most significant sources of food and drink health risks and discuss the implications of consumers’ perceptions of these hazards. This discussion touches on generic research on how people perceive risks and considers the reasons behind apparent ‘misperceptions’ of risks. We also want to emphasize that, in the face of limited scientific knowledge, consumer concerns may be well grounded, and that scientists and policy makers would do well to consider the basis for consumer beliefs in order to preempt future food‐ and drink‐related health and policy crises. ![][1] A comprehensive list of all hazards associated with eating and drinking would clearly be beyond the scope of this article. Furthermore, the nature and degree of the different food and drink hazards is often specific for both time and culture. For instance, the … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science, and Governance (review)

Reviewed by: Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science, and Governance Joseph Tse-Hei Lee (bio) Wang Gungwu . Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science, and Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 202 pp. Paperback $22.00, ISBN 0-521-53413-5. Wang Gungwu, one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese studies, draws on his lifelong research as well as the works of other scholars to give us a lucid, concise, and absorbing account of the Anglo-Chinese encounters since 1800. This book, based on the Smuts Commonwealth Lectures that Wang gave at the University of Cambridge in 1996-1997, explores the complex interactions between China and Britain and evaluates the impact of these past encounters on China today. The book is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 begins with a brief account of Wang's personal association with the British Commonwealth. Born in the Dutch East Indies to a Chinese literati family, Wang was educated in Britain; then he taught at various universities in Malaya and Australia, and spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore. This personal dimension and the depth of his scholarship inform the descriptions, generalizations, and interpretations that are lucidly presented in the book. Thematically, Wang conceptualizes Arthur Waley's four words "convert, trade, rule or fight" as being at the core of the history of Anglo-Chinese interaction. By exploring the military, commercial, religious, cultural, technological, and political facets of their encounters, Wang addresses the transmission, acceptance, and reproduction of British naval technology, entrepreneurial practices, scientific culture, and modern form of governance in China. He concludes by focusing on the consequences of China's first defeat by Britain in the Opium War in 1842 . Chapter 2 examines the change in Chinese strategic thinking in the late nineteenth century. He asserts that the military defeat in the Opium War completely changed the Chinese perception of the threat of danger from outside. Chinese leaders became alarmed and saw the necessity of rebuilding China as a maritime power. For China, this was the most significant outcome of the War. The fact that [End Page 486] the naval forces of the foreign powers—first the British, then the Japanese in the 1930s, and after 1949 the Americans—were able to sail along the China coast with impunity later persuaded the People's Republic of China to develop a deep-water navy in order to protect its maritime frontier. In chapter 3, Wang argues that there was a similar change of attitude among the Chinese elite over the importance of trade. Whereas until the nineteenth century trade had been looked down upon, the Chinese eventually realized that in fact it was an important key to China's national development. The literati became considerably impressed by the amounts of wealth that Chinese overseas business enterprises could produce. They began to reconsider the status of merchants in Chinese society and to reevaluate the role that these merchants could play in assisting China in a new policy of rapid modernization. As the Chinese came to accept trade as a critical component of modernization, they embraced the importance of science and technology, which is the focus of chapter 4. A nationwide conversion to science and technology took place in dramatic fashion from 1901 to 1910, marking another critical step in China's search for modernity. In contrast, the acceptance of Christianity proceeded slowly, for it was the technological aspects of British culture that impressed the Chinese most. Science remained a symbol of modernity in China throughout the twentieth century. English literature was another significant cultural influence. Writers such as Xu Zhimo, Zhu Guangqian, and Xiao Qian were so fascinated by English literature that they began to appropriate European romantic and spiritual elements and incorporate them in their writings. There was even a "reverse conversion" phenomenon in which Anglicized Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming and Lim Boon Keng revived and promoted Chinese culture in the English language. The Chinese experience of British rule in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia is the main theme of chapter 5. There was a noticeable difference between Chinese merchants and Chinese nationalists in their responses to the British form of governance. The merchants appreciated the British...

The Enlightenment and its discontents

Capitalism, religion and science (including calculative sciences such as accounting) have a long and turbulent relationship that, today, is manifest in the “War on Terror”. As social ideologies, religion and science have played a sometimes decisive influence in the history of capitalism. What can one learn from these past encounters to better understand their relationship today? This paper explores the historical origins of this relationship as a struggle over the ideals of the Enlightenment: – as decline of the modern and the rise of the postmodern. The paper begins by tracing the evolution of Christianities and their different potentials in both resisting and accommodating the extant social order. Islam, in contrast, has,until recently, enjoyed a relatively sheltered existence from capitalism, and today, some factions present a militant stance against the market and the liberal democratic state. Overall, the Enlightenment and modernist projects are judged to be jeopardy – a condition fostered by orthodox economics and accounting ideology, where it is now de rigueur to divide the secular from the non‐secular, the normative from the positive, and the ethical from the pragmatic or realist. Finally, the mechanisms behind this Enlightenment regression are examined here using literary analysis, as a modest prelude to developing a new politics for a progressive accounting; one that seeks to restore the integrity and probity of the Enlightenment Ideal.

Immunological memory to viral infection: Commentary

Immunological memory is defined by the ability of a host to remember a past encounter with a specific pathogen and to respond to it in an effective manner upon re-exposure. How long immunological memory can be maintained in the absence of re-infection continues to be a subject of great controversy. Recent studies on immunity following smallpox vaccination demonstrate that T-cell memory declines steadily with a half-life of 8–15 years, whereas antiviral antibody responses are maintained for up to 75 years without appreciable decline. By combining recent advances in quantitative immunology with historical accounts of protection against smallpox dating back to the time of Edward Jenner, we are gaining a better understanding of the duration and magnitude of immunological memory and how it relates to protective immunity.

Racial Profiling

Racial Profiling

Encounters with Islam: The Medieval Mediterranean Experience Art, Material Culture, and Cultural Interchange

In an age of pluralism and increasing globalism, histor ical interactions can be enormously instructive, particularly between peoples of different religions and ethnicities. Current discussions of cultural and religious identity may be illumi nated by past encounters, just as our understanding of the his torical past is usually motivated by present investments, whether acknowledged or not. For example, the rhetoric in spired by recent terrorist acts, as well as by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, reflects long-standing historical preju dices and embedded attitudes. At the close of the twentieth

Conspecific familiarity and shoaling preferences in a wild guppy population

In nature, social groups of animals are typically nonrandom associations of individuals. Such group associations may in part be based on social familiarity among individuals, acquired through repeated past encounters and behavioural experiences with each other. The factors that potentially affect the tendency to associate with familiar individuals remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated whether shoaling preferences based on presumed familiarity occur in wild adult guppies (Poecilia reticulata) originating from a Trinidadian population that experiences relatively low predation intensity from fishes and whether any such preferences differ between the sexes. When tested shortly after being collected in the field, neither males nor females clearly preferred to shoal with familiar same-sex conspecifics (collected from the same pool in the river) over unfamiliar ones (from different pools). Importantly, our results differ from those previously reported for guppies originating from the same population as ours and for a high predation risk population in Trinidad, suggesting that the development of social familiarity and its role in the formation of shoals in nature vary both within and among populations in the guppy. We provide plausible explanations for these observed populational differences in shoaling preferences in the guppy and discuss certain ecological factors that may affect the development and expression of shoaling preferences based on familiarity in nature.

Taking the profit out of crime ‐ Sri Lankan style

Reviews Sri Lanka’s long past encounters with terrorism, including the suicide bombing of 1996 which killed thousands and left the economy in a shambles. Outlines the Sri Lankan Code of Criminal Procedure, concluding that it falls far short of UK law in preventing terrorist financiers enjoy the profits of their crimes. Moves on to civil enforcement; Sri Lankan Common Law is based on Roman Dutch rather than English law. Gives examples of legal cases involving restitution, plus a list of eight situations where restitution will be available despite the illegal nature of the transaction, and concludes that civil enforcement law is highly inadequate against contemporary criminal activity. Moves on to the draft Money Laundering bill, which has been debated since 1995 and makes money laundering an offence; despite the long gestation, the bill should able to meet the challenges posed by profitable criminal activity.

Exploring Violence Exposure, Stress, Protective Factors and Behavioral Problems Among Inner‐City Youth

This study examined relationships between violence exposure, other stressors, family support, and self-concept on self-reported behavioral problems among 320 urban adolescents (aged 11-18) referred for mental health treatment. Overall, participants reported high levels of violence exposure, with a median of six past encounters with violence as a witness, victim, or through the experiences of associates. All forms of violence exposure (witnessing, being a victim, knowing of victims) were correlated with internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems for males and females. Total violence exposure predicted behavioral problems among participants, even after controlling for the effects of other risk, demographic and protective factors. Family support and self-concept moderated the influence of life stress and cumulative risk on problem behavior outcomes, but these protective variables did not significantly moderate violence exposure.

Clinical user interfaces that learn from experience

Clinical data entry is one key to success in health information systems that is not a matter of technology alone, but of appropriateness and usability of design. We review the technology of adaptive user interfaces and learning agents. In these technologies we see the potential to improve the usability of general practice clinical workstations through machine-learnt adaptation to the user, the patient and the specific situation. Use of intelligent split menus that adapt based on past clinical encounters is one specific adaptive interface method that has shown potential by simulation. We are undertaking research in 'expert in the loop' use of data mining for iterative refinement of clinical workstation adaptation with an eye to significantly improving general practice data entry quality.

Simple Adaptive Strategy Wins the Prisoner's Dilemma

The prisoner's dilemma has become the leading paradigm to explain the evolution of cooperation among selfish individuals. Here, we present an adaptive strategy that implements new mechanisms to process information about past encounters. The history of moves is summarized in an internal state which then determines the subsequent move. This enables the strategy to adjust its decisions to the character of the current opponent and to adapt the most promising strategic behavior. For this reason, we call such strategies Adaptor. Through evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that the concept of Adaptor leads to strategical patterns that are (a) highly cooperative when playing against kin, (b) stable in a sense that goes far beyond the concept of evolutionary stability, (c) robust to environmental changes, i.e. variations of the parameter values and finally (d) superior in performance to the most prominent strategies in the literature.

Dust Trails of 8P/Tuttle and the Unusual Outbursts of the Ursid Shower

We calculate the position of dust trails from comet 8P/Tuttle, in an effort to explain unusual Ursid meteor shower outbursts that were seen when the comet was near aphelion. Comet 8P/Tuttle is a Halley-type comet in a 13.6-year orbit, passing just outside of Earth's orbit. We find that the meteoroids tend to be trapped in the 12:14 mean motion resonance with Jupiter, while the comet librates in a slightly shorter period orbit around the 13:15 resonance. It takes 6 centuries to decrease the perihelion of the meteoroid orbits enough to intersect Earth's orbit, during which time the meteoroids and comet separate in mean anomaly by 6 years, thus explaining the 6-year lag between the comet's return and Ursid outbursts. The resonances also prevent dispersion along the comet orbit and limit viewing to only one year in each return. We identified past dust trail encounters with dust trails from 1392 (Dec. 1945) and 1378 (Dec. 1986) and predicted another outburst on 2000 December 22 at around 7:29 and 8:35 UT, respectively, from dust trails dating to the 1405 and 1392 returns. This event was observed from California using video and photographic techniques. At the same time, five Global-MS-Net stations in Finland, Japan, and Belgium counted meteors using forward meteor scatter. The outburst peaked at 8:06±07 UT, December 22, at zenith hourly rate ∼90 per hour, and the Ursid rates were above half peak intensity during 4.2 h. We find that most Ursid orbits do scatter around the anticipated positions, confirming the link with comet 8P/Tuttle and the epoch of ejection. The 1405 and 1392 dust trails appear to have contributed similar amounts to the activity profile. Some orbits provide a hint of much older debris being present as well. This work is the strongest evidence yet for the relevance of mean motion resonances in Halley-type comet dust trail evolution.

Another search for the hot cognitions: Appraisal, irrational beliefs, attributions, and their relation to emotion

One study examined the hypothesized status of appraisal and irrational beliefs relative to attributions, as proximal antecedents of emotion. In our study, which looked at 4 pairs of functional and dysfunctional negative emotions (i.e., concern/anxiety, sadness/depression, remorse/guilt, annoyance/anger), undergraduates (N = 120) reported on their attributions, appraisal, irrational beliefs, and emotions during past encounters associated with various negative events. Congruent with both Smith and Lazarus' (1993) appraisal theory and Ellis' (1994) cognitive theory of emotion, the results of this study indicate that the emotions (both functional and dysfunctional negative emotions) were more directly associated with appraisal and with irrational beliefs (dysfunctional negative emotions only) than they were with attributions. Also, irrational beliefs were strongly associated with appraisal; while demandingness (DEM) was associated more with primary appraisal, awfulizing/catastrophizing, low frustration tolerance, and global evaluation of human worth (including self-downing) were associated more with secondary appraisal. Dysfunctional emotions seem to involve primary appraisal associated with DEM while functional emotions involve primary appraisal associated with preferences. These findings lend to support the status of appraisal and irrational beliefs as the proximal cognitive antecedents of emotion and the status of irrational beliefs as a differencing factor between functional and dysfunctional emotions.

Stellar encounters with the solar system

We continue our search, based on Hipparcos data, for stars which have encountered or will encounter the solar system (Garc a-S anchez et al. 1999). Hipparcos parallax and proper motion data are combined with ground-based radial velocity measurements to obtain the trajectories of stars relative to the solar system. We have integrated all trajectories using three dierent models of the galactic potential: a local potential model, a global potential model, and a perturbative potential model. The agreement between the models is generally very good. The time period over which our search for close passages is valid is about10 Myr. Based on the Hipparcos data, we nd a frequency of stellar encounters within one parsec of the Sun of 2:3 0:2 per Myr. However, we also nd that the Hipparcos data is observationally incomplete. By comparing the Hipparcos observations with the stellar luminosity function for star systems within 50 pc of the Sun, we estimate that only about one-fth of the stars or star systems were detected by Hipparcos. Correcting for this incompleteness, we obtain a value of 11:7 1:3 stellar encounters per Myr within one pc of the Sun. We examine the ability of two future missions, FAME and GAIA, to extend the search for past and future stellar encounters with the Sun.

Evolution of cooperation without reciprocity.

A long-standing problem in biological and social sciences is to understand the conditions required for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in evolving populations. For many situations, kin selection is an adequate explanation, although kin-recognition may still be a problem. Explanations of cooperation between non-kin include continuing interactions that provide a shadow of the future (that is, the expectation of an ongoing relationship) that can sustain reciprocity, possibly supported by mechanisms to bias interactions such as embedding the agents in a two-dimensional space or other context-preserving networks. Another explanation, indirect reciprocity, applies when benevolence to one agent increases the chance of receiving help from others. Here we use computer simulations to show that cooperation can arise when agents donate to others who are sufficiently similar to themselves in some arbitrary characteristic. Such a characteristic, or 'tag', can be a marking, display, or other observable trait. Tag-based donation can lead to the emergence of cooperation among agents who have only rudimentary ability to detect environmental signals and, unlike models of direct or indirect reciprocity, no memory of past encounters is required.