Oxford University Press's Blog, page 572

Talk is cheap: diverse dignities at the centre of mental disorder

It may be fairly easy to say that the dignity of a person in the domain of psychiatry should be respected. Justification is easy to find. For example, the South African Constitution proclaims ‘everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.’

When simply a pretence, this kind of talk is obviously cheap. But pretence isn’t the only reason behind such statements. Cheap talk presents as a gap between a principle and its practice. In paying lip-service to the principle, ‘respect’ becomes a mere token of respect rather than the real McCoy, with that being the action of holding the dignity of the person in high regard. And before prematurely thinking of course, I do that, recognise the taxing challenges in doing so.

I highlight here two major challenges in the practice of holding the dignity of a person in high regard: recognising the effects mental disorder has on one’s dignity, and accounting for the diversity of ways in which mental disorder is evaluated as dignified and undignified.

We can list a few potential but well-known effects of mental disorder on one’s dignity. When someone is depressed, that person usually undervalues his or her self-worth and dignity. A person in a manic episode often overvalues his or her worth and dignity, sometimes to a delusional extent. Some deeds in mania and psychosis such as sexual indiscretions, indiscriminate spending, and grossly disorganised behaviour bring the indignities of shame, embarrassment and humiliation for the family and the patient (sometimes only after recovery). Fears about the indignities of embarrassment and humiliation are at the core of social anxiety disorder/social phobia. Families and society do sometimes respond to the manifestations of mental disorder in undignifying ways – such as laughter, jokes, rejection, condescendence, etc. – even if merely trying to deal with the psychological threat of also being afflicted by mental disorder.

Presuming these effects on one’s dignity, even flagging some of them, might seem to undermine the very respect for dignity I’m advocating. One’s dignity is after all not necessarily affected when suffering from mental disorder. However, failing to recognise them when they are indeed present, is worse, for it precludes accounting for them in restoring dignity. The action of holding in high regard the dignity of a person suffering from mental disorder thus includes the pursuit of restoring dignity when so affected. Crucial in determining an appropriate course of action is to identify in whose view the dignity of the person is so affected: the patient, the family, the community, the practitioner, and/or the society at large.

The second major challenge I highlight in the practice of holding the dignity of a person in high regard is to account for the differences among people, families, and communities in evaluating what is dignified and undignified. Surely, we share values by which almost anyone would concur something is dignified or undignified. Holding the dignity of a person in high regard is itself a shared value. But ethically sound practice should also account for a range of diverse values in a given context. For example, an applicant to the High Court in South Africa argued a few months ago that he should be assisted by his physician to commit suicide, for the excruciating pain he was suffering was undignified, and therefore in breach of his constitutional right to dignity. Not everyone, however, considers the suffering of excruciating pain as undignified. Many people have attested to the dignity with which they have endured, or have seen others endure, suffering.

Accounting for both diverse and shared values in what counts as dignified and undignified goes some way, but to hold the dignity of a person in high regard in the domain of psychiatry requires that the values, shared and diverse, that are not principally about dignity, are accounted for too.

Featured image credit: Photo by Foundry. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The fate of foreign refugees, past and present

In 1812 Benjamin West completed his portrait of John Eardley Wilmot. The portrait was two paintings in one: it depicted its subject, Wilmot, lawyer and former Chief Justice of Common Pleas, at the foreground; in the background was a painting within a painting, a scene of American loyalists, including Native Americans, African slaves, women, and children. The refugees were met with the judicious relief of British magistrates, a process overseen by the allegorical Britannia herself, accompanied by guardian angels, even the Virgin Mary.

By 1812, when West finished his portrait, the British prided themselves on the welcome they had provided to refugees of all sorts. For the Wilmots, refugee relief was a family vocation. John Eardley Wilmot directed governmental relief efforts in the wake of the American Revolution. His son, John Wilmot, assisted with loyalist relief and went on to oversee official aid for French Catholic Clergy and Laity at the height of the Revolutionary Terror of the 1790s. British concern for the persecuted trumped divisions of race and of religion.

Few could have anticipated that the British would set aside deep-set confessional prejudices, let alone that they would go so far as to call the relief of French Catholic refugees a “national duty,” as famed novelist Frances Burney wrote of the campaign on their behalf. Until the late eighteenth century, stridently Protestant Britain saw refugee relief as part of a confessional battle. The Huguenots, Protestants banished from France by Louis XIV, found shelter in Britain and other Protestant countries and introduced the term “refugee” into the English language around 1685.

Benjamin West (1738-1820), John Eardley Wilmot, Oil on Canvas, 1812. Public domain via the Paul Mellon Collection at The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

That the British would admit, let alone celebrate, the protection of French Catholics represented a fundamental shift. Refuge would no longer be about religion, but about ideology, about a shared liberal vision of the world, one that transcended deep political divisions within Britain itself. At the time, Britain stood alone in her openness to foreign refugees. By the dawn of the twentieth century, humanitarians across the globe fought for the relief of refugees of all stripes. It is this shift from confession to politics, from particular to potentially universal, that we are now seeing reversed in the Islamophobic backlash against Syrian refugees. In a New York Magazine op-ed, Jonathan Chait pinpointed the conflation of jihadist terrorist and Muslim in Republican rhetoric even before Donald Trump took this scaremongering to an extreme. While Trump offers an extreme case, the fear he stokes has taken root in and outside of politics. The violent rhetoric has begun to incite anti-Muslim violence on both sides of the Atlantic. Mosques in the US have received threats. A London mosque was the target of an attempted arson attack last week.  As many dismayed foreign policy observers have remarked, Islamophobia plays into precisely the strident religious hostilities ISIS aims to foster. Islamophobia flies in the face of modern ethical norms which, since the end of the eighteenth century, form the basis by which we discern the boundaries between the persecuted and the perpetrators, providing what succor we can to the victims, our ideological allies.

The past is not, as many would claim, a foreign country. Fear of domestic and foreign terror was palpable in 1790s Britain, too. It was not a foregone conclusion that John Wilmot and his committee would be successful in efforts to nationalize concern for foreign refugees, French Catholics especially. How could the British be certain that the foreigners entering from France were not radical Jacobins, wolves in sheep’s clothing? In Parliament, conservative politicians crafted the first Aliens Bill in 1792 with the aim of better vetting in-coming foreigners. Edmund Burke, whose anxiety about the French Revolution predated the Terror, reportedly brandished a dagger to accentuate the dangers of the revolutionaries’ attack on traditional institutions.

Yet, this existential fear, real as it was for the British in a moment of domestic discontent and rising Irish nationalism, did not touch refugees. Proponents of the Aliens Bill argued that the policy would better enable the government to identify and aid refugees. Burke himself established a school for French refugee children. He was, from the first, a spokesperson for philanthropic efforts to aid these particular foreigners, a set of public responses that would ultimately coalesce around Wilmot’s committee, which disbursed funds from the Treasury.

Asylum in Britain was far from perfect. If the 1790s brought a break in the confessional mode, it did not put an end to popular anti-Catholicism. Fear of popular backlash meant that less illustrious émigré priests lived sequestered lives, housed in barracks the conditions of which were only marginally better than that of asylum-seeker detention centers today. Still, the question for officials and philanthropists in the 1790s was not whether to provide for Catholic refugees, but how to provide for Catholic refugees and to do so in a way that recognized their shared humanity. Relief for French Catholics would remain a source of intense national pride late in the nineteenth century, indicative of a moment when Britain, still imperfect, became modern.

To allow Islamophobia to redefine asylum as dependent on religious confession would be to return to the world of rampant anti-Catholicism of early modern Britain, a world still engulfed in the strife of the Reformation. The Rohingya ethnic group of Myanmar, the men, women, and children fleeing ISIS in Syria, those suffering at the hands of Boko-Haram in Nigeria—they, among millions of other persecuted peoples around the world, are our ideological comrades in a fight against terror just as tens of thousands of men, women, and children in France were when confronting the terror of Robespierre’s Jacobin government 220 years ago.

Image credit: “Blanche the Huguenot. A tale” by William Anderson, Public Domain via Flickr.

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Getting rid of Schrödinger’s immigrant

One of the best jokes circulating on social media today is a bogus announcement that Donald Trump is warning Americans about ‘Schrödinger’s immigrant’: a foreigner who lazes around on benefits while simultaneously stealing your job. A UK version of the gag circulated during the recent general election, also playing on the famous quantum physics paradox, in which a single particle that exists simultaneously in two opposite states theoretically causes a cat in a sealed box to be both dead and alive at the same time.

The joke is that both immigrant stereotypes can’t possibly be true at once. The serious point is that neither stereotype finds strong support in rigorous migration research. Unemployment rates among immigrants quickly settle to similar or lower levels than the rate among non-immigrants, and immigrants as a group typically contribute more in taxes than they consume in benefits. Meanwhile, the effect of immigration on native wages and unemployment, if any, is vanishingly small because immigrants tend to do different jobs, often the essential but unglamorous ones that native workers won’t do.

As well as stoking hostility among nations, unreasonable anti-immigrant attitudes are poisoning the global refugee system. When states shut their borders against refugees, they leave countries closest to conflicts to carry massive influxes. If these states buckle, conflicts can spread. Today, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey bear immense burdens while immigrant nations like the USA (and others) have taken quotas, despite their role in conflicts – and their wealth, built partly by previous refugees. In short, for both security and humanitarian reasons we need to distribute an increasing number of refugees globally, but we can’t because countries are obsessed with tragi-comical fears of Schrödinger’s immigrant.

Is there a way to defeat this false paradox? Here’s a new thought experiment. Imagine a mechanism allowing immigrants to support themselves economically and create jobs and infrastructure for others too. Imagine an institutional investment vehicle, like a pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund, pooled from the fees and investments of immigrants and refugees, and dedicated to public good projects in immigrants’ adopted countries, such as investing in job-creating business startups and sponsoring infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate newcomers. Such a fund could prove false both sides of the paradox of Schrödinger’s immigrant – simultaneously.

Intriguingly, such funds have a precedent. Katy Long highlights the so-called ‘Nansen Stamp Fund’, seeded by the visa fees of refugees after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Instead of languishing in camps and queuing for meager quotas, refugees simply bought ‘Nansen Passports‘ – essentially visas -much like those advocated both by Katy and fellow Migration Studies founder Alex Betts- holders of which could access both foreign territories (to save themselves immediately), and foreign labor markets (to help themselves over the longer term). They went where their labor was needed, and the fund from their visa fees made them self-supporting.

Could a modern version of the Nansen Fund get rid of Schrödinger’s Immigrant fallacy? It’s a question worth asking, not least because governments are experimenting with vehicles that resemble the Nansen Fund, albeit for reasons other than alleviating anti-immigrant sentiment or solving the refugee crisis.

Image credit: Rise of Immigrant Investor Programs by Alan Gamlen, Christopher Kutarna, and Ashby H.B. Monk via Re-thinking Immigrant Investment Funds. Used with permission.

The experimental vehicles in question are Immigrant Investment Funds: institutional investment funds seeded by Immigrant Investor Programs, through which governments monetize the charm and allure of their country by exchanging national membership rights in return for investment capital. Currently, there are 60 different Immigrant Investor Programs (IIPs) in 57 countries, most established in the last 20 years.

However, few governments have yet found the right recipe for a successful IIP. Most have failed to set, let alone monitor, meaningful program objectives, and instead just dissolving immigrant investments either into the private economy or into the government treasury. Either way, they lose any distinctive identity or capacity to be channeled toward a specific public good. Meanwhile, many argue that selling citizenship is both inherently corrupt, and a magnet for bad people and bad money: if you’re reduced to selling off your good name, you’re probably headed for a crash. With such intangible economic benefits alongside such obvious political downsides, IIPs often struggle to survive.

Still, we see the seed of a good idea in today’s Immigrant Investor Programs. To defeat unfounded anti-immigrant sentiments, the benefits of immigration need to be presented clearly. In a climate of sharply falling government budgets for urgent public investments, the benefits of using IIPs to import capital and engaged investor immigrants should not be too hard to demonstrate. However, it would be much easier if the proceeds from IIPs were pooled and managed separately to deliver both clear financial returns and clear public benefits. In other words, we think Immigrant Investor Programs stand the best chances of success when paired with some form of dedicated fund-management vehicle: an Immigrant Investment Fund.

Surprisingly few countries follow this approach, and those that do could draw more upon the body of principles and best practices emerging around Sovereign Development Funds – a successful species of institutional investment vehicle that also pursues a double bottom-line of commercial profit and public benefits. Sovereign Development Funds are funded by traditional sovereign wealth (e.g. oil or mineral reserves, or foreign exchange holdings). Immigrant Investment Funds are funded by sovereign wealth of an alternative kind: the country’s destination charm and allure. Otherwise, they are much the same.

IIPs may impact tens of thousands of migrants and billions of dollars of cross-border capital movements each year – and the lion’s share of these programs are in Europe, where the refugee system is under the most pressure. Perhaps if more of these IIPs followed the model of Sovereign Development Funds, more could simultaneously attract foreign capital to stimulate growth, shore up the struggling global refugee system, and show up the Schrödinger’s Immigrant population as the joke it is.

Featured image credit: London city England by chafleks. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Focus on concussions: why now?

Lately, not a day goes by when we don’t hear about which professional athlete has been sidelined or benched due to a concussion. Formerly the province of boxers, concussions, once called “the invisible injury,” are no longer invisible, as network TV and the movie industry have unveiled their presence across sports, whether football, ice hockey, soccer, rugby, NASCAR, and beyond.

Concussions are not new as a type of traumatic brain injury. However, the incidence and prevalence of concussions have increased not only in professional and college athletes, but at the youth sports level.

Why is that?

More athletic exposures increase the probability of injury. In comparison to previous generations, more youth are playing sports, and they are playing year-round in multiple sports, and starting at earlier ages. In addition, female athletes have grown in number over the past 20 years. Youth begin specializing earlier, another factor contributing to increased injury. And as TV reality shows such as Friday Night Tykes demonstrate, the importance of competition and winning is at an all-time high, perhaps fueled by our society’s glamorization of professional sports.
Improved identification and diagnosis. The growth in brain research has been exponential over the past few decades, especially with advances in neuroimaging and neuropsychological assessment techniques. Couple that fact with new concussion laws across all 50 United States and the District of Columbia. We are weathering a perfect storm of public education and awareness, and the development of healthcare guidelines by numerous medical organizations including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Media and Electronic Communication. Never have we been so in touch with the world around us. Information travels fast, whether televised or tweeted. The successes and tragedies of highly visible icons, such as many of our professional athletes, become common knowledge in a moment’s notice. Not surprisingly, the coverage of concussion in the news has made it one of the hottest topics around, as evidenced by “concussion count” websites popping up at all age levels of sport.
Equipment and Physical Fitness. Sports equipment has become bigger and better over the years, and so have the players. Improvements in sports equipment have increased protection from injuries in general. However, helmets cannot guarantee protection from concussions, although they can reduce fractures and more serious injury. The question is now whether bigger, better equipment just encourages harder, riskier play due to an aggrandized sense of invincibility. Also, players across all sports, even golf, now tend to be stronger, larger, and more physically fit than in previous generations (consider the young Gary Player vs. Tiger Woods), which may further contribute to tougher play in contact and collision sports.

So, what does this mean for the future of sports in America?

We are already seeing major changes limiting youth sports practices and physical contacts related to football tackling, ice hockey checking, and soccer heading. Game rules are being modified and new types of protective equipment and devices are being tested. Ultimately, sports are here to stay. Their value is clear in providing opportunities for physical fitness, skill development, social belonging, strategic thinking, and fun. There is inherent risk in life and in sport. It is now time for policymakers, legislators, researchers, clinicians, sports personnel and entrepreneurs, athletes, the media and the public to step up to the plate and make sports safer and, ultimately, more enjoyable for all.

Featured Image Credit: By Abigail Keenan. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Winter, as told in seven very short facts

Though the winter season in the northern hemisphere doesn’t officially begin until Monday, 21 December, many of us anticipate the joyful holidays and the not-so-joyful cold weather with bated breath. To get you prepped with some trivia arsenal for holiday parties, we’ve pulled some interesting facts about winter from our Very Short Introductions Online resource:

1. The eight-night festival of Chanukah (aka Hanukkah) that begins on the twenty-fifth of Kislev (the month of dreams in the Hebrew calendar, overlapping the Gregorian months of November/December) was once a thanksgiving of military victory and was eventually transformed into a celebration of triumph of light over darkness. (Taken from Judaism: A Very Short Introduction, Second Edition, by Norman Solomon).

2. During the time of industrial capitalism in Scotland, Robert Owen—owner of New Landmark mills—established a curfew of 10:30pm during the winter. The strict discipline was intended for employers to extend control over their employees (during a time when labor laws were virtually nonexistent) in order to keep productivity at one hundred percent. (Taken from Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction, by James Fulcher).

3. Despite the notion that the Inuit have many different words to refer to different types and conditions of what English speakers simply term “snow”, there are actually only two relevant lexical roots: ganik (referring to snow in the air) and aput (snow on the ground). From those two roots, many words are derived, much like the way English can produce “snowfall”, “snowflake”, and “snowball”. (Taken from Sociolinguistics: A Very Short Introduction, by John Edwards).

4. As an experiment, and partially for fun, Benjamin Franklin attempted to slaughter his Christmas turkey by electrocution but instead shocked himself. Through this, he was able to show that the Leyden jars he used stored their electrical charge on the surface of the glass, not in the water they contained. (Taken from Magnetism: A Very Short Introduction, by Stephen J. Blundell).

Leyden jars, an early form of capacitors. Photo by Setreset and Marco Angelucci. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

5. Ancient armies seldom campaigned for war in the winter, mainly due to the difficulty in securing fodder and in moving supplies, which was commonly done via sea travel. The reluctance was less due to shelter troops from bad weather. (Taken from Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction, by Harry Sidebottom).

6. Though angels and Christmas trees are commonly paired nowadays, Christianity likely borrowed the pagan symbol of the fairy—a representation of a tree’s spirit—and adapted it to their religious beliefs. (Taken from Angels: A Very Short Introduction, by David Albert Jones).

7. Kwanzaa, a festival celebrated by African Americans from 26 December to 1 January, is a secular celebration that is believed to be more consistent with the aspiration of freedom—returning to their cultural heritage in order to reclaim a more authentic African identity—than black Christianity. (Taken from African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.).

Featured image credit: Photo by Mikael Kristenson. CC0 Public domain via Unsplash.

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Place of the Year nominee spotlight: Dwarf planet Pluto

This July, a NASA space probe completed our set of images of the planets, at least as I knew them growing up. New Horizons, a probe that launched back in 2006, arrived at Pluto and its moons, and over a very brief encounter, started to send back thousands of images of this hitherto barely known place.

Pluto, a world smaller than our Moon, was discovered 85 years ago, during a search for an unseen object, the so-called Planet X, thought to be disturbing the outer planets. There was a precedent for this – in 1846, Neptune was found through its gravitational influence on Uranus and in the early 20th century astronomers thought they were seeing the same effect again.

Amateur astronomer turned professional researcher Clyde Tombaugh started work at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1929, where he searched for Planet X. He compared thousands of photographic images of the skies, looking for a shift from one night to the next in the positions of objects on the plates that would suggest a planet rather than a distant and apparently unmoving star.

On 18 February 1930 he looked at plates taken a few days apart in January, spotting a “star” that moved in the constellation of Gemini, but only a bit, suggesting it was a long way from the Sun. More analysis confirmed it to be a full 6 billion kilometres (3.8 billion miles) away, well beyond Neptune.

Pluto as viewed by New Horizons (color; July 13, 2015). Public domain via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

The discovery became public in March that year. Lowell Observatory had the right to , and in the end took the suggestion of an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, Venetia Burney (later Venetia Phair), who passed it to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner and then to Lowell. The new planet became Pluto on 1 May. (Venetia finally got to see Pluto for herself in 2008, saying “It’s not much to look at, is it!”)

For almost half a century, even the best telescopes in the world showed Pluto to be nothing more than a single starlike point. Though estimates for Pluto began with it around the same size and mass as the Earth, astronomers successively shrunk these values. Today’s measurements give Pluto’s mass as about 1/450th of our own world – rather smaller than our Moon – and a diameter of just 2,400 kilometres, meaning it would more or less fit on top of the contiguous United States.

In 1978 astronomer James Christy found the largest of Pluto’s moons, Charon, and in the 1980s Earth-based scientists watched the two worlds pass in front of each other. These occultation events led to a dip in the light coming from the system as each object was blocked in turn, and helped scientists to make crude maps of their surfaces. 1990 saw the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope which later in the same decade made the best – though still crude – maps yet, with obvious light and dark regions.

On the ground, instruments like the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii analysed Pluto’s light, revealing a thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, which at the time was thought to freeze out when the planet was furthest from the Sun, though more recent results suggest otherwise.

Since the late 1950s, space probes – robots of increasing sophistication – have explored the main planets of the Solar System, and visited comets and asteroids too. The Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions travelled beyond the asteroid belt – visiting the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – and giving us images and data that are simply impossible to get from a telescope here on Earth.

But Pluto was too far away to fit in neatly to those other itineraries, so it needed a separate plan. After an earlier mission was cancelled, New Horizons was built and sent to Pluto on a fast (though still nine year) journey. En route, its target was controversially demoted by the International Astronomical Union to a “dwarf planet”, and my school textbooks became even more out of date. During the journey, astronomers also found four new moons, making this tiny world a more intriguing target.

New Horizons made its closest approach on 14 July 2015, passing 12,500 kilometres from Pluto’s surface. So far from the Earth, the weak signal strength means a slow bandwidth for data transmission, significantly slower than dial-up home internet connections were in the late 1990s. This means that the probe sends preview images from its cameras, before the sharpest pictures arrive over the weeks and months that follow. As a result, the science team expect to be getting new pictures of Pluto until well into 2016.

It’s fair to say that no one was disappointed by the results from New Horizons. So far we’ve seen one of the most varied surfaces imaginable, with geology shaping a black, orange, and white landscape. Despite being cold (this far from the sun the temperature doesn’t get much above -220 degrees Celsius), Pluto shows signs of major – and recent – activity, with jagged 3,500 meter-high mountains of ice, smooth bright plains including the heart-shaped “Tombaugh Regio”, and glaciers.

New Horizons has completed our first survey of the (original) nine planets and turned the dot of my childhood into a real world. Like Mars, we can now imagine setting foot there some day. Future astronauts may one day get to look up at a piercingly bright point (our sun), see Charon hanging in the sky above their heads, and even make a bid to climb those mountains.

Featured image credit: Pluto’s Majestic Mountains, Frozen Plains and Foggy Hazes. Public domain via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

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Will we ever know for certain what killed Simón Bolívar?

When Simón Bolívar died on this day 185 years ago, tuberculosis was thought to have been the disease that killed him. An autopsy showing tubercles of different sizes in his lungs seemed to confirm the diagnosis, though neither microscopic examination nor bacterial cultures of his tissues were performed. And so, for nearly two centuries, galloping consumption was accepted as the disorder that took the life of the man who liberated most of South America from Spanish domination. Then, during a 2010 conference at the University of Maryland School of Medicine devoted to the mysterious illnesses of famous historical figures, Dr. Paul Auwaerter, an Infectious Diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins, shook up Bolívar “scholars,” not the least of whom was then Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, by diagnosing El Liberator’s fatal disorder as chronic arsenic intoxication. Although Auwaerter speculated that the likely source of the arsenic that killed Bolívar was a combination of arsenic-containing medication given for recurrent attacks of malaria and arsenic-contaminated water consumed while campaigning in the Andes Mountains, Chávez had other ideas.

“El Libertador SIMÓN BOLÍVAR” by Iamcharles66. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Having long argued that Bolívar did not succumb to disease but was murdered, Chávez declared that Colombian assassins were the source of the arsenic that killed his patron saint. In Auwaerter’s diagnosis–that of a master clinician affiliated with one of the world’s preeminent medical institutions–he had found vindication. Motivated in part by the diagnosis, Chávez and a team of soldiers, forensic specialists, and presidential aids entered the National Pantheon in Caracas shortly after midnight on 16 July 2010, unscrewed the lid of Bolívar’s casket, and removed several fragments of bone and some teeth for analysis at a newly inaugurate state forensic laboratory. The specimens first were to be used to verify the remains as those of El Liberator by comparing DNA retrieved from them with that extracted from the bones of Bolívar’s sisters, Juana and María Antonia. Next they were to be examined for arsenic, tuberculosis, and other agents possibly responsible for Bolívar’s death. Five years have since passed; Chávez has died, and there is still no word from the state forensic laboratory as to the results of the tests performed on Bolívar’s remains. If and when test results are revealed, disputes will almost certainly arise not just as to their meaning but also their validity, in which case we likely will be no closer to knowing what really killed Simón Bolívar than his contemporaries were at the time of his death.

Featured image credit: Simon Bolivar Statue by Cliff. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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The reality of DUI prevention laws [infographic]

Do DUI prevention laws actually deter driving under the influence? Authors Lorne Tepperman and Nicole Meredith argue that punishments like fines, imprisonment, and license suspension are not as effective as we like to think. They have found that people are more likely to be changed by constructive influences (e.g., alcohol counseling) and social taboos than they are by threats of punishment. It’s a tricky issue, but the solution may be one we have not been trying enough. Tepperman and Meredith have gathered information about this charged and controversial topic for the following infographic on what you need to know about DUI prevention laws.

Download infographic as JPG or PDF.

Image Credit: Drunk Driving by Steve Buissinne, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Cyber terrorism and piracy

As the analysis reaches deeper behind the recent Paris attacks, it has become clear that terrorism today is a widening series of global alliances often assisted and connected via cyber social media, and electronic propaganda.

Cyberspace is now becoming home to a digital revolution, where different types of computers are the new brainchild of our cognitive culture. Just as the mechanization of agriculture and production took over the muscles and bodies of our workers, so the computer has begun to replace our brains, machinery, and infrastructures.

These new electronic networks leave ‘exhaust’ data of the social activities and commercial transactions of network traders, political, and business collaborators. This data tells us much forensically about what happened with the data’s use.

Electronic data is increasingly becoming an open door to insecurity. In the early years of cyber we traded off these disadvantages, but for the last decade we have reached the cyber borders where we can assume that security constantly applies and requires a sophisticated and continual audit process. These systems require far more senior management understanding and involvement, and should not be left solely to the technologists.

Until Edward J. Snowden began leaking classified documents, billions of people relied on a more common type of security called Transport Layer Security or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to protect the transmission of sensitive data like passwords, financial details, intellectual property and personal information. That technology is familiar to many Web users through the ‘https’ and padlock symbol at the beginning of encrypted web addresses.

However, Snowden’s leaked NSA documents make it clear that the intelligence agencies are recording high volumes of encrypted Internet traffic and using it for analysis. More recently it has become clear to Western Intelligence – even outside the Five Eyes (US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand) – that this also occurs in countries such as Iran, North Korea, South Africa, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia,  all of whom store and monitor vast amounts of Internet traffic.

Recent analysis suggests that ninety percent of small and medium businesses in the US and EU do not have adequate cyber security protection.

If we look at how aspects of the cyber world have affected law enforcement and police response to cyber crime the results for many government police forces is not very positive. Indeed, in 2014 only three out of forty-three police forces in England and Wales had a comprehensive plan to deal with cyber crime, and less than 1% of cyber crime was investigated.

We can look at the history of our seas, which developed – albeit a couple of thousand years ago – in a similar way to the expansion of the Internet and our interaction with it. Just as the oceans and seas were increasingly used for trade and fishing, so too is cyberspace a modern-day platform for commerce and social networking. However, criminal activity, such as piracy, quickly proliferated in both areas. Piracy was also used by governments and commercial groups in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as part of their own operations. Pirates were covertly employed to attack and commandeer other government’s trading vessels, and the privateering government would simply duck responsibility as they had no visible association with pirates.

Commercial organisations of all types are now enduring an erratic series of cyber-attacks. Recently some have become headline news, with breaches at Sony, the International Monetary Fund, JP Morgan Chase and Symantec. Recent analysis suggests that ninety percent of small and medium businesses in the US and EU do not have adequate cyber security protection.

What about the rest of the world?

China’s electronic cyber capabilities are very well developed and they are more advanced than most in the cyber arena. Indeed, China has further increased its electronic and cyber effectiveness by collaborating with North Korea and Russia, signing a cyber-security agreement with the latter in May 2015 in which the two nations agreed not to launch cyber-attacks against the other. China has also recently attempted a similar agreement with the US.

Russia has also made use of cyber pirates and privateering methods. They have quietly engaged with cyber hackers and criminal groups while simultaneously denying their involvement in the attacks. Russia has also actively revealed its cyber-attack ability in relation to Georgia, the Ukraine, the US and Estonia.

As the Internet continues to expand and electronic infrastructures become more interconnected, links into the Dark Web, cyber-attacks, and electronic terrorism will also increase, becoming more complex and interdependent. Once again we may draw parallels with piracy (in its earliest form), where the attempts to control it only began with the Treaty of Paris agreement in 1856, almost a thousand years after the act of piracy first became evident.

For terrorists, electronic threats and attacks have distinct advantages over traditional crime and physical war as they can be controlled economically, secretly, and at a distance. Cyber-attacks do not require large financing of weapons and recruits, and the effects can be global, immediate, and devastating. However, agencies created to combat cyber crime are evolving in parallel to cyber terrorism, and efforts to safeguard information are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and efficient.

Featured image credit: code website html by lmonk72. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Top 10 Christmas carols countdown

Christmas is the busiest time of year by far for the Oxford Music Hire Library. Oxford University Press publishes most of the carols the world knows and loves – the one that has just popped into your head is probably one of ours – with newly-composed Christmas titles added every year. Carol orders come in as early as August and keep rolling in until worryingly close to the big day itself.

To help you get into the Christmas spirit, here’s a playlist of OUP’s 10 most-requested carols in 2015. Many of our most popular carols come from the much-loved Carols for Choirs series, and most of our top 10 can be found in the ever popular 100 Carols for Choirs.

10     Nativity carol


Arranged by John Rutter, from Carols for Choirs 2 and 100 Carols for Choirs

9     On Christmas Night


Arranged by Bob Chilcott

8     Star Carol


Arranged by John Rutter, from Carols for Choirs 3 and 100 Carols for Choirs

7     O little town of Bethlehem


Arranged by Vaughan Williams, from Carols for Choirs 1 and 100 Carols for Choirs

6     Candlelight Carol


Arranged by John Rutter, from Carols for Choirs 5

5     Once in royal David’s city


Arranged by Gauntlett, arr. David Willcocks, from Carols for Choirs 2 and 100 Carols for Choirs

4     Jingle bells


Arranged by Pierpont arr. David Willcocks, from 100 Carols for Choirs

3     The twelve days of Christmas


Arranged by John Rutter, from Carols for Choirs 2 and 100 Carols for Choirs

2     O come, all ye faithful


Arranged by David Willcocks, from Carols for Choirs 1 and 100 Carols for Choirs

1     Hark! the herald-angels sing


Mendelssohn, arr. David Willcocks, from Carols for Choirs 1 and 100 Carols for Choirs

Featured image courtesy of the Oxford Music Hire Library.

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