Universal Vulnerability Research Articles

Exploring the possible effects of social vulnerability components on terrorism

ABSTRACT Although many studies on social vulnerability focus on mitigating negative effects and crisis management in terms of the physical, economic, structural, and non-structural resilience of countries we found limited research on the effects of these indicators on terrorism that has a great unfavourable footprint on human, global, and environmental security. Furthermore, despite the differing outlooks of the various countries, the last three factors; the physical indicator is the preeminent threat multiplier worldwide. Climate change further exacerbates this vulnerability for all. In this study, we aimed to visualize the four components of “The Commonwealth Universal Vulnerability Index (UVI)” and the “Global Terrorism Index (GTI)” and revealed the effects of independent variables on dependent variable. To actualize this, we obtained valid data of these variables concerning 109 countries covering the term of 2010–2018 and analyzed using Logarithmic Multiple Linear Regression (LMLR). We found that while climate change aggravates terrorism in one way, economy, and non-structural resilience affect terrorism in a negative direction at the 95% confidence interval. However, we did not encounter a statistically meaningful relationship between terrorism and structural resilience, which enables robust human development, market connectivity, and demographic structure.

Erratum to: Red Alarm for Pre-trained Models: Universal Vulnerability to Neuron-level Backdoor Attacks

Erratum to: Red Alarm for Pre-trained Models: Universal Vulnerability to Neuron-level Backdoor Attacks

Contributions to inclusive and impactful development and psychopathology science: interrogating ecology-linked vulnerability and resilience opportunities.

Since its launch in a 1984 Special Issue of Child Development, significant contributions and insights have followed that have expanded our understanding of psychopathology and normal human growth and development. Despite these efforts, there are persistent and under-analyzed skewed patterns of vulnerability across and within groups. The persistence of a motivated forgetfulness to acknowledge citizens' uneven access to resources and supports, or as stated elsewhere, "inequality presence denial," is, at minimum, a policy, social and health practice problem. This article will examine some of these issues from the standpoint of a universal human vulnerability perspective. It also investigates sources of resistance to acknowledging and responding to the scholarship production problem of uneven representations of basic human development research versus psychopathology preoccupations by race. Collectively, findings suggest interesting "patchwork" patterns of particular cultural repertoires as ordinary social and scholarly traditions.

Social infrastructures and older adults' webs of care: COVID‐19 as spatial breach

AbstractThis paper argues that the spatial restrictions and social distancing measures which older adults experienced during COVID‐19 can be interpreted as a spatial breach in their webs of care, impacting their ability to connect socially with others through formal and informal social infrastructures. Drawing on a qualitative study of 50 older adults in Singapore (which is part of a wider mixed‐methods project consisting of 1199 participants), the paper shows how spatial breaches manifest as tension points in the older adults' webs of care. The paper highlights the paradoxical and ageist impacts of vulnerability tropes that emphasise the alleged universal vulnerability of older adults to the coronavirus. It provides further insights on why some tension points in the older adults' webs of care become resolved through adjustments while others remain unresolved. This analysis furthers our understanding of how older adults cope with the social disconnection that may happen during spatial breaches, especially when it is due to the choices of others to withdraw socially. Conceptually, the paper demonstrates how care assemblages and social infrastructures work in tandem to modulate the older adults' webs of care dynamically. The paper situates social infrastructures as key resource components in the webs of care of older adults, functioning as formal or informal platforms through which they access material, financial or emotional resources. Importantly, the paper shows how particular social infrastructures may become prominent or recede in one's webs of care as the person's care assemblages dynamically adjust to personal circumstances and relationships. In doing so, the paper bridges hitherto distinct literatures on how social infrastructures and assemblages are used to understand social life.

Defending Black-Box Skeleton-Based Human Activity Classifiers

Skeletal motions have been heavily relied upon for human activity recognition (HAR). Recently, a universal vulnerability of skeleton-based HAR has been identified across a variety of classifiers and data, calling for mitigation. To this end, we propose the first black-box defense method for skeleton-based HAR to our best knowledge. Our method is featured by full Bayesian treatments of the clean data, the adversaries and the classifier, leading to (1) a new Bayesian Energy-based formulation of robust discriminative classifiers, (2) a new adversary sampling scheme based on natural motion manifolds, and (3) a new post-train Bayesian strategy for black-box defense. We name our framework Bayesian Energy-based Adversarial Training or BEAT. BEAT is straightforward but elegant, which turns vulnerable black-box classifiers into robust ones without sacrificing accuracy. It demonstrates surprising and universal effectiveness across a wide range of skeletal HAR classifiers and datasets, under various attacks. Appendix and code are available.

Fineman Speaks to Dobbs

It is an honor to comment on the scholarship of the preeminent legal theorist Martha Fineman. Throughout her pioneering career, she has challenged liberal feminist ideals grounded in anti-discrimination principles. She shows how sex neutrality and formal equality in law and policy fail to realize justice for women and children. In the last few decades, she has broadened her analysis to a critique of autonomy as a foundational ideal in law. In its place, she offers an account of the state’s obligation to respond to universal human vulnerability. As an entirety, I have found Fineman’s scholarship important to my own work because it offers a formidable normative argument for affirmative entitlements for caregivers and caretaking. Her specific analyses have ranged across diverse socio-legal arenas from divorce law and child custody, to the structure of the workplace, to public assistance and welfare policies.
 In this Essay, I explore the import of Fineman’s ideas for a pressing feminist issue upon which neither of us have focused in our scholarship: abortion. Given her longstanding focus on the social debt owed to mothers (including men who perform the labor of mothering), it is interesting that Fineman has not specifically spoken to the importance of women’s freedom from motherhood. In this Essay, however, I argue her ideas offer a critique of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and a theoretical foundation for abortion access. I hope this nascent exploration offers new insight into both the range and power of Fineman’s scholarship and productive paths forward for the reproductive justice movement.

Response to Professor Dinner

I want to thank the Texas A&M Law Review for including my work in this special Issue and express my appreciation to Professor Dinner for her thoughtful comments concerning the evolution of my scholarship. Professor Dinner raises the question of whether that earlier work is relevant to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion, specifically, and to broader issues of reproductive justice, more generally. For me, Dobbs illustrates—once again—how our American obsession with both individual rights and Supreme Court jurisprudence can distort our sense of the possibilities for achieving social (or reproductive) justice. I see my work as an attempt to argue for a different perspective, one that might have the ability to alter or redirect that obsession. I also believe that the universal vulnerability approach has the potential to expand, and perhaps even refine, debates about reproductive justice.

Red Alarm for Pre-trained Models: Universal Vulnerability to Neuron-level Backdoor Attacks

The pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm has been widely used in deep learning. Due to the huge computation cost for pre-training, practitioners usually download pre-trained models from the Internet and fine-tune them on downstream datasets, while the downloaded models may suffer backdoor attacks. Different from previous attacks aiming at a target task, we show that a backdoored pre-trained model can behave maliciously in various downstream tasks without foreknowing task information. Attackers can restrict the output representations (the values of output neurons) of trigger-embedded samples to arbitrary predefined values through additional training, namely neuron-level backdoor attack (NeuBA). Since fine-tuning has little effect on model parameters, the fine-tuned model will retain the backdoor functionality and predict a specific label for the samples embedded with the same trigger. To provoke multiple labels in a specific task, attackers can introduce several triggers with predefined contrastive values. In the experiments of both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), we show that NeuBA can well control the predictions for trigger-embedded instances with different trigger designs. Our findings sound a red alarm for the wide use of pre-trained models. Finally, we apply several defense methods to NeuBA and find that model pruning is a promising technique to resist NeuBA by omitting backdoored neurons.

The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot

Reviewed by: The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot Phill Provance (bio) the ministry of flowers Andrea Witzke Slot Valley Press https://www.valleypressuk.com/book/146/the_ministry_of_flowers 104 pages; Print, $12.52 What does it mean to be human in an uncaring world? For me, one answer has come in the form of Andrea Witzke Slot's latest collection, The Ministry of Flowers, which evinces an awareness singularly apt for our times. It is, however, not a collection intent upon pat answers, reciprocating the world's mysteries with mystery in kind. In other words, it is a book that achieves the difficult ends of inspiring childlike wonderment in adults by reintroducing us to the world—as if, for want of a more recent analogy, her speakers are the characters of Lewis Padgett's classic short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," attempting to teach us how to rethink our common reality in non-Euclidian terms. Thus, Slot refreshes our perspective, showing us newly discovered aspects of our surroundings we previously failed to notice, and consequently conveying a hint of salvation through her work. Perhaps the most obvious expression of this is felt in Slot's employing a wide variety of forms. If, per Raymond Williams's seminal Marxism and Literature (1977), "There is a … tendency in the analysis of art to look … [for] fully articulate and systematic expressions of … ideology in the content (base-superstructure) or form (homology) of actual works," what we encounter in The Ministry of Flowers is a mind willing to give a wide variety of ideologies a fair hearing. For Slot's is a creative consciousness ostensibly as comfortable with couplets as with prose poetry, with the long, short, and dropped line alike. As a result, at times we confront entirely filled pages, while at others our eyes alight on utter minimalism. And yet, from Slot this seems less an intention to exhibit poetic prowess as to establish an overarching sense of ebb and flow. Surely this is by design, and yet, though readily apparent, it augments, rather than detracts from, the collection's content—which provides these forms an equally powerful and cohesive counterweight. For instance, beginning with the collection's title, we [End Page 144] are deeply anchored in tradition with an allusion to Dickinson's "Between My Country—and the Others": Between My Country—and the Others—There is a Sea—But Flowers—negotiate between us—As Ministry. In other words, from the reader's very first glance, The Ministry of Flowers announces its primary themes of connectivity, framework, and communication, for doesn't a ministry inherently entail attending to place and others? Clearly, this is why the collection begins with the prose poem "Panoply": Some days the rigid silhouette of all we are is revealed in plates of glass. Some days we might touch the strange mesh of armor that keeps us upright and steady and wonder at how little keeps us from flopping into heaps on the floor like the billowing collapse of a circus tent as stakes are pulled from the ground. One may wonder, of course, whether we can trust this first poem as indicative of the collection's overall theme and mood, but reading on, we realize that what it establishes is the assumption of human fragility underpinning the themes of its sequels. Subsequently, vulnerability looms large—and not just that of humanity but of the world around us: the environment, our fellow creatures, the newborn in an incubator as well as the truck driver awaiting a shower at a truckstop. Consequently, the collection seems to interrogate the universe as to the ontological necessity for this state of affairs; why exactly, we might imagine the poems' speakers asking, must we endure universal vulnerability—and, granting that we must, how do we do so? Certainly, if we are to concur with Slot's own assertion that "there are two kinds of poets" we might infer from the collection's thrust that these two types comprise those who make statements and those who ask questions, classing Slot among the latter. And yet, the correlative question then becomes what answers The Ministry of Flowers might offer, whether these answers seem...

Comparison of projected rice blast epidemics in the Korean Peninsula between the CMIP5 and CMIP6 scenarios

Recently, the International Panel for Climate Change released the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) climate change scenarios with shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). The SSP scenarios result in significant changes to climate variables in climate projections compared to their predecessor, the representative concentration pathways from the CMIP5. Therefore, it is necessary to examine whether the CMIP6 scenarios differentially impact plant–disease ecosystems compared to the CMIP5 scenarios. In this study, we used the EPIRICE-LB model to simulate and compare projected rice blast disease epidemics in the Korean Peninsula using five selected family global climate models (GCMs) of the CMIP5 and CMIP6 for two forcing scenarios. We found a similar decrease in rice blast epidemics in both CMIP scenarios; however, this decrease was greater in the CMIP6 scenarios. In addition, distinctive epidemic trends were found in North Korea, where the rice blast epidemics increase until the mid-2040s but decrease thereafter until 2100, with different spatial patterns of varying magnitudes. Controlling devastating rice blast diseases will remain important during the next decades in North Korea, where appropriate chemical controls are unavailable due to chronic economic and political issues. Overall, our analyses using the new CMIP6 scenarios reemphasized the importance of developing effective control measures against rice blast for specific high-risk areas and the need for a universal impact and vulnerability assessment platform for plant–disease ecosystems that can be used with new climate change scenarios in the future.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-022-03410-2.

Jonathan Herring, Law and the Relational Self

In Law and The Relational Self (LARS), Jonathan Herring seeks to provide answers to several conceptual questions: Who are we? What is important to us? What makes us who we are?1 This investigation into the necessary properties of ‘the self’ demonstrates the depth of the subject matter in LARS. Herring’s answers also provide clarity in understanding the relationship between the self and the concept of law.2LARS analyses the conception3 of the relational self, and the impact of using the relational self in family law, criminal law, and medical law. Herring reconceptualises the purpose of law if the relational self is taken seriously. Herring notes: [i]t would be a law which saw the sustenance, support and reward for caring relationships as a central goal. It would be law which recognised that we cannot consider the rights and interests of individuals separately from each other, but needs to focus on enabling caring relationships to develop. A law which would recognise our deep universal vulnerability.4

Geographical patterns in food availability from pollinator-dependent crops: Towards a Pollinator Threat Index of food security

The discussion of food availability has expanded beyond staple foods to foods required for healthy diets. These include fruits, tree nuts, pulses, and some vegetables. Traditional metrics such as production, supply, and trade are being contextualized by an understanding of the link to land use, specifically as it relates to biodiversity, climate change, and ecosystem services. Pollinator-dependent crops provide significant proportions of many key nutrients to humans. To examine the dependence of crop production on pollinators, we develop a worst-case scenario of complete pollinator decline and apply it to FAO crop production data for 182 countries. We then use FAO trade and agri-environmental data to develop a Pollinator Threat Index for 121 countries which considers fluctuations in temperature, non-practice of organic agriculture, pesticide use, and beehive trade. Findings illustrate that there is universal vulnerability to crop production for citrus fruits, fruit, pulses, tree nuts, and vegetables. The greatest losses would occur in fruit (northern hemisphere) and tree nuts (southern hemisphere). Many highly populated countries, along with much of the northern hemisphere, experience the greatest threats to their pollinator populations. Results suggest geographical inequities in access to food for healthy diets might be compounded by losses of pollinator-dependent crops.

Reasoning From the Body: Universal Vulnerability and Social Justice

Reasoning From the Body: Universal Vulnerability and Social Justice

데비 터커 그린의 random에 나타난 인종과 애도의 윤리

A wide range of critical perspectives on debbie tucker green from cosmopolitanism to feminism, reflect the open, flexible nature of her plays that embrace even a conflict of interpretations. However, race has always been one of her main concerns and her plays have resonated in the larger context of the development of Black British drama since the 2000s, particularly in response to the contradictory position of Black drama in mainstream contexts and the ever-changing racial discourses around British racism and identity politics. With a focus on the destructive aspects of Black masculinity, contemporary Black British drama on the mainstream stage has reinforced the stereotypical biases against Black experience and culture. green has been aware of these dilemmas of Black drama in mainstream contexts. random, her 2008 monodrama on Black youth criminality abandons social realism, the predominant form of Black drama, and attempts to build an empathic relationship with the mainstream white audience rather than appealing to their liberal conscience.<BR> Centering on random, this paper evaluates green’s attempt to explore the contemporary issues of race with the ethics of vulnerability as the universal human condition. In random, the concrete social realities of racial conflict are not buried in the dogma of identity politics, and correspond to the precarious state of human rights. Race as a social entity is consistently evoked through the dramatic techniques mobilizing and subverting the audience’s prejudices, and furthermore intersects with the markers of the universal human vulnerability such as the mortal body, death and grief. green’s audiences, the racialized subjects, are encouraged to respond to the pain and sufferings of the Other through mourning. Racial prejudices contextualize the human vulnerability whereas the experience of grief provides the audience with ethics of empathy and responsibility. Chapter II examines the racial discourses in the early 21<SUP>st</SUP> century with a focus on Tony Blair’s 2007 Cardiff speech and the limitations of contemporary Black drama in mainstream contexts. Chapter III and IV explore how random transforms the largely white mainstream audience into the ethical subjects, focusing respectively on the audience’s confrontation with their own racial biases and the communal experience of grief.

Techniques To Exploit Vulnerabilities: Persuasion And Education In Chinese Police Interrogations

AbstractDrawing upon in-depth interviews with frontline police officers, this article examines persuasion and education as a psychological interrogation method routinely applied in Chinese police questioning. It analyses the three tactics employed by the interrogators in inducing the suspect to confess, including utilization of suspects’ personal relationships, their hope for the uncertain future and memories of past experiences. These mechanisms correspond to the three forms of universal vulnerability shared by human beings, namely the individuals’ susceptibility to human dependency, the predicament of irreversibility and uncertainty about the future. This article analyses the ways in which vulnerability as a universal human condition can be exploited by state coercion, and how this coercion produces the moral vulnerability of police.

The jurisprudence of universal subjectivity: COVID-19, vulnerability and housing

Drawing upon Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory, the paper argues that the legal claims of homeless appellants before and during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate our universal vulnerability which stems from the essential, life-sustaining activities flowing from the ontological status of the human body. By recognizing that housing availability has constitutional significance because it provides for life-sustaining activities such as sleeping, eating and lying down, I argue that the legal rationale reviewed in the paper underscores the empirical, ontological reality of the body as the basis for a jurisprudence of universal vulnerability. By tracing the constitutional basis of this jurisprudence from Right to Travel to Eighth Amendment grounds during COVID-19, the paper outlines a distinct legal paradigm for understanding vulnerability in its universal, constant and essential form – one of the central premises of vulnerability theory.

Ekphrasis and Ways of Seeing in DeLillo’s Zero K

ABSTRACT By taking further the celebrated reading of the disaster video clips in DeLillo’s Zero K as part of the sales pitch designed by the Convergence to convert nonbelievers, I examine the unforeseen inspiration and comfort afforded by these video clips in light of Mitchell’s notion of ekphrasis. Jeffrey’s ekphrastic efforts enable him to understand the entanglement of the real and the fictive, and more importantly, to see through the fictive and reach the hidden truth – a universal vulnerability that makes people disoriented, if not overwrought. Jeffrey is, without exception, under threat of the looming personal and collective demise. However, instead of pinning all his hope on an elusive future, he makes serious efforts to keep his feet on the ground – the quotidian, and eventually secures himself a firm foothold to inch toward whatever is awaiting.

A vulnerability inspired Universal Design of Justice

The US criminal justice system is built on the notion of the liberal, autonomous subject who chooses to engage in criminal activity, rather than one that addresses the underlying factors that lead to crime. I argue that by combining Vulnerability Theory, a feminist legal theory focused on universal human vulnerability, and Universal Design, a disability approach aimed at creating access for the widest range of bodies and minds, we can create a system that necessitates an analysis of how social institutions are related to risk for criminal justice involvement to reduce the harms perpetuated by criminal justice involvement. Applied to criminal justice reform together, I develop a Vulnerability Inspired Universal Design of Justice that identifies important areas of reform throughout our social institutions in order to reduce the harms of the criminal justice system.

Nanoparticles presenting clusters of CD4 expose a universal vulnerability of HIV-1 by mimicking target cells

CD4-based decoy approaches against HIV-1 are attractive options for long-term viral control, but initial designs, including soluble CD4 (sCD4) and CD4-Ig, were ineffective. To evaluate a therapeutic that more accurately mimics HIV-1 target cells compared with monomeric sCD4 and dimeric CD4-Ig, we generated virus-like nanoparticles that present clusters of membrane-associated CD4 (CD4-VLPs) to permit high-avidity binding of trimeric HIV-1 envelope spikes. In neutralization assays, CD4-VLPs were >12,000-fold more potent than sCD4 and CD4-Ig and >100-fold more potent than the broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) 3BNC117, with >12,000-fold improvements against strains poorly neutralized by 3BNC117. CD4-VLPs also neutralized patient-derived viral isolates that were resistant to 3BNC117 and other bNAbs. Intraperitoneal injections of CD4-CCR5-VLP produced only subneutralizing plasma concentrations in HIV-1-infected humanized mice but elicited CD4-binding site mutations that reduced viral fitness. All mutant viruses showed reduced sensitivity to sCD4 and CD4-Ig but remained sensitive to neutralization by CD4-VLPs in vitro. In vitro evolution studies demonstrated that CD4-VLPs effectively controlled HIV-1 replication at neutralizing concentrations, and viral escape was not observed. Moreover, CD4-VLPs potently neutralized viral swarms that were completely resistant to CD4-Ig, suggesting that escape pathways that confer resistance against conventional CD4-based inhibitors are ineffective against CD4-VLPs. These findings suggest that therapeutics that mimic HIV-1 target cells could prevent viral escape by exposing a universal vulnerability of HIV-1: the requirement to bind CD4 on a target cell. We propose that therapeutic and delivery strategies that ensure durable bioavailability need to be developed to translate this concept into a clinically feasible functional cure therapy.

THE THREE FACES OF VULNERABILITY

Recent work by emerging “vulnerability theorists” has imbued the concept of vulnerability with new meaning that promises novel theoretical and social insights; however, these insights remain threatened by the innate ambiguity of the notion of vulnerability. The negative connotation of this term, namely the propensity to experience wounding, pain and marginalization, coexists with its positive connotation of an openness to love, care and the creation of solidarity. In this paper, we argue that this ambiguity calls for a clarification in order for the newly established positivity to be properly channeled to imagining new forms of inter-human relations. Specifically, we adopt the phenomenological lens of “exposedness,” drawn from Emmanuel Levinas, placing the notion of vulnerability at the horizon of the relatedness and dynamics among the triad of the “I,” the other, and the third. My vulnerability to the other as an exposedness to excessive responsibility is the pre-original signifyingness of inter-human relations, that is, as “for the other” before “for oneself.” The vulnerability of the other in the form of the relation of Eros will be differentiated from the vulnerability of the other as immediacy. The vulnerability of the third will be discussed from a socio-political perspective, where we will engage with Martha Fineman’s idea of universal vulnerability as a tool for social-political criticism, and further show how a Levinasian perspective on the third can address potential problems with Fineman’s proposals.