‘It's their word against mine’: young people's attitudes to the police complaints procedure in Northern Ireland

One of the central aims of the police reform process in Northern Ireland has been to increase the legitimacy of the policing structures and police officers amongst those who are served and policed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). To meet this aim, structures have been created to ensure that the PSNI is accountable to all sections of the community for its strategy and performance, and in monitoring the attitudes and behaviour of its officers. To that end, the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), the Northern Ireland Policing Board and 26 District Policing Partnerships have been created. This paper aims to break ground by looking in some detail at young people's attitudes to and experiences of the workings of one of those new bodies, the Police Ombudsman, and to explore issues related to young people's willingness to engage with the PONI.     

Working children: the health and safety issue

Recent evidence has emerged that in Britain, like the US, many children below the official minimum school leaving age, are working. In many cases, the work is illegal. Research in the US suggests that many working children risk accidents and other hazards to health. Evidence from Britain on the health and safety aspects of child labour is of a more fragmentary nature, but enough exists to suggest a need for greater vigilance.     

Action,Technology, and the Homogenisation of Place: Why Climate Change is Antithetical to Political Action

According to Hannah Arendt, the concept of ‘political action’ is a fundamental component of the human condition because it encapsulates how the uniqueness of each human being intersects to create unpredictable political initiatives and effects. Recently, despite being one of the most daunting political challenges ever faced by humanity, there has been a noted collective action failure, or inaction, concerning the global threat of anthropogenic climate change. Why? This article seeks to explain this political inaction in a new way: by examining the metaphysical role that technology plays in disclosing the climate as a thinkable and global object. After applying the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to the complex mathematical general circulation models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this article details how the metaphysics underlying GCMs manifests the perceivable world by ‘enframing’ it, or by implicitly representing subjects, objects, and Nature itself, as a predictable, calculable, and orderable relation of static forces. When this metaphysical and mathematical uniformity constructs the climate as a calculable object that is globalised through the IPCC, it is ultimately found to be contradictory to the distinctness and unpredictability necessary for distinct human action to occur. Paradoxically, therefore, political action is argued to be metaphysically antithetical to the technologically enframed science, politics, and discourse, of global climate change itself. The importance of distinct and plural human places, when filtered through GCMs, becomes subsumed by the climate as a homogenous, calculative, and politically inactive, global object.     

Incorporating Time‐Dose‐Response into Legionella Outbreak Models

A novel method was used to incorporate in vivo host–pathogen dynamics into a new robust outbreak model for legionellosis. Dose‐response and time‐dose‐response (TDR) models were generated for Legionella longbeachae exposure to mice via the intratracheal route using a maximum likelihood estimation approach. The best‐fit TDR model was then incorporated into two L. pneumophila outbreak models: an outbreak that occurred at a spa in Japan, and one that occurred in a Melbourne aquarium. The best‐fit TDR from the murine dosing study was the beta‐Poisson with exponential‐reciprocal dependency model, which had a minimized deviance of 32.9. This model was tested against other incubation distributions in the Japan outbreak, and performed consistently well, with reported deviances ranging from 32 to 35. In the case of the Melbourne outbreak, the exponential model with exponential dependency was tested against non‐time‐dependent distributions to explore the performance of the time‐dependent model with the lowest number of parameters. This model reported low minimized deviances around 8 for the Weibull, gamma, and lognormal exposure distribution cases. This work shows that the incorporation of a time factor into outbreak distributions provides models with acceptable fits that can provide insight into the in vivo dynamics of the host‐pathogen system.     

The experience of sole mothers balancing paid work with care for a child with a disability

There are increasing numbers of families in Australia headed by sole parents, but little is known about the experiences of those who also care for a child with a disability. Additional caring responsibilities have previously been shown to impact on the work participation of parents. This study involved qualitative analyses of interview data conducted with sole mothers with school‐aged children with disability (N = 11). Thematic analysis revealed four themes that enabled and supported participation in the workforce: social support; managing appointments; characteristics of the workplace; and the role of the school. Results suggest the importance of practical help from family and friends in facilitating participation in paid employment. Additionally, the importance of flexible appointment scheduling on the part of service providers was highlighted, as well as the importance of workplace flexibility and supportive workplace cultures. Such factors were important in supporting sole mothers to balance work with care, with important implications for personal and family wellbeing.     

Preference for realistic art predicts support for Brexit

Following the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016, there has been considerable interest from scholars in understanding the characteristics that differentiate Leave supporters from Remain supporters. Since Leave supporters score higher on conscientiousness but lower on neuroticism and openness, and given their general proclivity toward conservatism, we hypothesized that preference for realistic art would predict support for Brexit. Data on a large nationally representative sample of the British population were obtained, and preference for realistic art was measured using a four‐item binary choice test. Controlling for a range of personal characteristics, we found that respondents who preferred all four realistic paintings were 15–20 percentage points more likely to support Leave than those who preferred zero or one realistic paintings. This effect was comparable to the difference in support between those with a degree and those with no education, and was robust to controlling for the respondent’s party identity.