Journal articles on the topic 'Infraction continuée'

L’auteure désire susciter la réflexion du juriste sur un aspect particulier de la nouvelle loi fédérale traitant des infractions imputées aux adolescents. Il s’agit d’une question qui, bien qu’elle revête une grande importance, a été presque complètement passée sous silence : la qualification d’une infraction, selon qu’elle est sans violence ou avec violence. C’est que le législateur a choisi de mettre de côté la définition de ces expressions, tout en décidant de continuer de s’y référer. Or, il en découle d’importantes répercussions pour les adolescents sur deux plans. D’abord, selon qu’il est déterminé que l’infraction imputée aux adolescents est comprise au sens de l’un ou l’autre de ces vocables, il est présumé que la prise de mesures extrajudiciaires sera suffisante pour faire répondre les adolescents de leurs actes délictueux ou, a contrario, qu’elle sera insuffisante. Ensuite, le tribunal pour adolescents est autorisé à imposer une peine comportant le placement sous garde de l’adolescent qui a notamment été reconnu coupable d’une infraction commise avec violence. Ainsi, la qualification de l’infraction comporte des enjeux de taille, car elle ouvre (ou non) la porte aux mesures extrajudiciaires plutôt que de recourir au tribunal et elle autorise (ou non) le placement sous garde. Inévitablement, la nouvelle loi amènera avec elle son lot d’incertitudes pour la prochaine décennie. Il reste à espérer que ce ne seront pas les adolescents qui en feront les frais.

Idiopathic forefoot pain, often termed metatarsalgia, is a common complaint among running athletes. Whereas several causes are often included in the differential diagnosis, Freiberg’s infraction is rarely considered. The signs and symptoms present with Freiberg’s infraction however, can mimic those present with more common forefoot injuries. The article presents the case of a female Division-I college soccer player who developed and was successfully treated for bilateral Freiberg’s infraction. Her initial complaint of unilateral forefoot pain, induced only by vigorous running, progressed to intolerable bilateral forefoot pain with light exercise. Conservative treatment was unsuccessful, and therefore surgery was required to enable her continued athletic participation. As with all weight-bearing joints, clinicians need to be aware of the potential for progressive degenerative changes at the metatarsal heads and the steps used in the evaluation and subsequent treatment of Freiberg’s infraction

Perioperative myocardial infarction is one of the most important predictors of short and long term morbidity and mortality associated with noncardiac surgery. Myocardial infraction occurs whenever myocardial oxygen supply does not match myocardial oxygen demand. Intraoperative ischemia can be precipitated by increase in myocardial oxygen demand caused by tachycardia, hypertension, anaemia, stress, sympathomimatic drugs or discontinuation of beta blocker. Clinical predictors of perioperative cardiac morbidity are acute myocardial infraction or recent myocardial infraction, unstable or severe angina, decompensated heart failure, severe valvular disease, mild angina pectoris, previous myocardial infraction, diabetic mellitus etc. The preoperative history is meant to elicit the severity, progression and functional limitations imposed by ischemic heart disease. Limited exercise tolerance in the absence of significant lung disease is very good evidence of decreased cardiac reserve. The basic challenges during induction and maintenance of anaesthesia in patients with ischemic heart disease are prevent myocardial infraction by increasing myocardial O2 supply and reducing myocardial O2 demand and monitor for ischemia and to treat ischemia if it develops. There are no one best myocardial protective agents or technique. Maintenance of balance between myocardial oxygen supply and demand is more important than the specific technique or drugs selected to produce anaesthesia and muscle relaxation. Potential benefits of a regional anaesthetic include excellent pain control, a decreased incidence of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in some patients and the opportunity to continue the block into the postoperative period. The postoperative period appears to present the highest risk for cardiac morbidity. It is during this period where 67% of the ischemic events occur. Effective pain management is essential to prevent these adverse outcomes. Successful perioperative evaluation and treatment of cardiac patients undergoing noncardiac surgery requires careful teamwork and communication between patient, anaesthesiologist and surgeon. Ibrahim Cardiac Med J 2014; 4(2): 56-60

The disciplinary process in the Military Police of Paraná (PMPR) plays a crucial role in maintaining the discipline and proper conduct of the military police. It is instituted when there are indications of disciplinary infractions and aims to investigate the facts, apply the appropriate sanctions and preserve institutional integrity. During the disciplinary process, it is possible that the military police officer expresses his intention to present a request for dismissal, requesting his dismissal from the corporation. However, the request for dismissal does not interrupt the disciplinary process, which may continue even after its submission, depending on the seriousness of the infractions. Considering the guidelines established by Law 20.656/2021 for disciplinary administrative processes within the scope of the State of Paraná, this work aims to enable, through exploratory research, the initial understanding about the applicability of article 105 of the aforementioned law within the scope of the disciplinary process of the PMPR.

A 50-year-old male with a history of hemodialysis dependent chronic kidney disease presented to our emergency department with acute midsternal crushing chest pain. Patient was diagnosed with acute anterolateral wall Myocardial Infraction due to the presence of corresponding ST segment elevations in EKG and underwent emergent cardiac catheterization which revealed normal patent coronaries without any disease. He continued to have chest pain for which CT of the chest was done which revealed pneumomediastinum with mediastinal hematoma, due to the recent attempted thrombectomy for thrombus in his right brachiocephalic vein.

Students with learning disabilities are suspended at disproportionate rates in schools. Although research has shown the ineffectiveness of suspension as a disciplinary tool, school administrators continue to use it to combat behavior infractions. This column presents a review of the literature on suspension for students with learning disabilities, its impact on their academic achievement, and sociodemographic factors that put students with learning disabilities at risk for suspension. Implications are discussed and further areas of research are suggested.

African American and Hispanic students receive more punitive school discipline than White students even when students of color commit similar infractions as Whites. Similarly, students with a disability status are more likely to experience harsher discipline in schools compared to their counterparts without a disability label. This study examines whether these discrepancies are a result of a difference in the number of infractions students of different racial/ethnic groups and disability categories commit. Using secondary educational data from a state educational agency in the United States, we demonstrate that African American and Hispanic students and students with an emotional behavioral disorder status receive more severe sanctions than White students and students without a disability label at their first discipline encounter. This racial disparity in discipline severity continues through six sanctions and is eliminated at the 13th sanction. The disability disparity in discipline severity dissipates after 10 sanctions for students with emotional behavioral disorder and intellectual disability. Implications for school personnel and future directions are discussed.

The limits of pollution authorized by law are constantly being exceeded in Quebec and throughout Canada, as evidenced by acid rain, the disposal of dangerous refuse in nature and the uncontrolled use of pesticides. The criminal law on the environment exists, to be sure, but its application is highly relative. In principle, certain infractions under the Criminal Code can be used against polluters but the State rarely makes use of them. As to the statutory criminal law -the main subject of this article - the author notes that it suffers from a lack of clarity and precision. Complex and unorganized, it is characterized by a multitude of infractions and a disparity of sanctions. However, the fact is that the public administration very seldom resorts to the provisions of this law to have industrial activities conform to the laws and regulations. When it does do so, very often the courts hesitate to impose sanctions of a truly deterrent nature. In spite of all this, the fact is that the main obstacle to the criminal law on the environment is the lack of firm determination on the part of the legislators and public administrations to use severe measures against polluters. As long as this political will is lacking, notes the author, certain major industrials will continue to contaminate the environment with impunity.

Justice! Ce mot, fort de symboles, incarne l’aspiration de la victime d’une infraction qui souhaite légitimement être entendue dans sa volonté de voir punir le coupable que celle de la personne injustement mise en cause qui attend de la société qu’elle reconnaisse son innocence. Le processus pénal doit alors assurer l’équilibre entre les « deux intérêts également opposés, puissants et sacrés » qui veulent à la fois être protégés. En équilibre, la preuve pénale en forme le « gage ». Les enregistrements et vidéos servent aujourd’hui des preuves indiscutables en droit français; le droit congolais les n’en donne pas autant d’importance. Face à cette évidence, devrons-nous continués toujours à mettre de côté cette catégorie des preuves devenues irréversibles et redoutables face à la forte évolution de la technologie au Congo? C’estpourquoi cet article plaide pour une modification rapide du code de procédure pénale congolaise afin que soient intégrés ses armes redoutables.

Smart parking systems that use AI, data analytics, and IoT are a result of urbanization and rising automobile utilization. These systems are designed to enhance user experience, shorten search times, and make the most of available space. AI analyzes real-time data, proposes open places, and projects demand in the future. Infrastructure costs, stakeholder cooperation, and system compatibility continue to be issues, nevertheless. To maintain user confidence, privacy, and ethical usage in the study of smart parking systems, in-depth literature reviews are essential. The systematic literature review (SLR) method was used to examine AI-based smart parking solutions, such as wireless sensor networks, ultrasonic sensor nodes, reservation-based systems, intelligent parking guidance, IoT-based on-street infraction monitoring, central parking management systems, and energy-efficient automated solutions. Budgetary restrictions, stakeholder participation, interoperability concerns, data privacy, security, and moral ambiguities are all problems. To test scenarios, understand rules, processes, and algorithms in limited contexts, researchers need to develop reliable outdoor sensor and data technologies for outside application.

In this journal we discuss the relevant security threats, vulnerabilities and prominent techniques to securing data lake. Over the last few years, Big Data solutions to data processing have made remarkable strides in the how we interpret data. Because of its ubiquitous nature and ability to handle various data types, it has become a valuable tool and asset to many other fields including bioinformatics solutions, marketing solutions, and social media. Ethical infractions also play a role in data processing and because of this, it is critical that comprehensive security solutions are determined and enforced under the appropriate conditions. Although modern security techniques are well developed, they still leave room for scrutiny as vulnerabilities continue to unfold. In this paper, we will examine and compare modern ethical exploit techniques as well ass techniques to promote greater authentication and overall perimeter security. The scrutinization of the current methods met through exploitation, be it physical or conceptive, is imperative in defining the understanding and verification of definite secure solutions. Â

La régulation de la manifestation par le droit prend de nombreux visages : injonctions, règlements municipaux relatifs aux troubles de la paix et de l’ordre public, lois sur la circulation routière, infractions criminelles, etc. La multiplication des normes juridiques applicables à la manifestation, jumelée à un durcissement des pratiques policières lors d’événements de ce type, entraîne depuis une vingtaine d’années une judiciarisation accrue des manifestants et des manifestantes au Canada, phénomène auquel cet article s’attarde. L’auteur entend démontrer que, malgré le recours de plus en plus fréquent au droit pénal réglementaire, le droit criminel continue d’occuper une place de choix dans l’arsenal législatif à la disposition des forces de l’ordre. C’est particulièrement le cas de l’infraction d’avoir participé à un attroupement illégal. Or, un examen de la définition contemporaine de cette notion séculaire révèle de nombreuses tensions avec certains principes censés être au coeur du droit criminel moderne, à savoir le principe de légalité, l’idée de faute individuelle et celle d’un droit tourné vers le passé.

A.H.M. Jones, the great British historian of the later Roman Empire, was once asked what difference conversion to Christianity made to Rome. His answer: None. Brutal gladiatorial contests continued to be held, slavery was not abolished, and cruel penalties were laid down for seemingly minor moral infractions. Thus, Jones reasoned, the actual impact of Christianity on secular Roman society is difficult to see. Jones's view, however, has not been universally shared, particularly when it comes to the Roman legal system. Biondo Biondi saw Christianity as bringing about “un profundo rivolgimento” in late Roman law, which had ramifications in many different areas. As a religion, Christianity differed in unmistakable ways from its pagan competitors, and it would be quite surprising if these differences did not have some impact on Roman law and society when Christianity was adopted as the official state religion. The late Roman era offers a fertile testing ground for the impact a nascent religion might have on a society and its legal institutions.

La Ley 769 de 2003, es la encargada de la regular el debido proceso en las actuaciones administrativas de Tránsito y Transporte y donde claramente especifica en su artículo 135 el procedimiento que debería continuar cualquier persona cuando sea contraventor de las normas de tránsito y le sea impuesta una orden de comparendo. Por lo tanto, la relevancia de esta orden es una notificación para empezar un proceso especial donde el infractor puede ejercitar sus derechos y controvertir dichas disposiciones. A su vez en el proceso investigativo y al aplicar los instrumentos (encuestas) estos reflejaron que no existe la aplicación de lo fijado por la Ley y lo más importante, es que los actores del proceso no desconocen el procedimiento a seguir.

This paper examines private prosecutions as a tool to challenge the state’s inadequate enforcement of employment standards. In Ontario, poor enforcement of employment standards means that there are no costs for non-compliance, that orders to pay wages are typically not fully paid and that vulnerable workers are left unprotected. Private prosecutions are one tool that could be used by private actors to fight these problems. Historically, private prosecutions have been used where there is a gap in government enforcement, most recently to bring environmental offenders to justice. Privately prosecuting employment standards violations would continue that tradition and would promote compliance through the stigma of criminal proceedings, and by conveying the message that employment standards violations are crimes. This paper discusses the gaps in the enforcement of employment standards in Ontario (section II), explains how private prosecutions can help and how this fits with the historic use of private prosecutions (section III), and describes how private prosecutions of employment standards could be easily implemented (section IV).Cet article examine la question de poursuites privées comme outil pour contester la mise en application inadéquate des normes d’emploi par l’état. En Ontario, les faiblesses dans la mise en application des normes d’emploi font que leur inobservation n’entraîne aucuns coûts, que, typiquement, les ordonnances de payer des gages ne sont pas totalement observées et que les travailleurs vulnérables demeurent sans protection. Les poursuites privées sont un outil que pourraient utiliser des acteurs privés pour combattre ces problèmes. Historiquement, on a utilisé les poursuites privées où il y a lacune dans la mise en application de lois par le gouvernement, le plus récemment pour traduire en justice les contrevenants par rapport à l’environnement. Les poursuites privées en cas d’infractions contre les normes d’emploi continueraient cette tradition et favoriseraient l’observation des lois par la stigmatisation associée aux instances criminelles et en communiquant le message que les infractions contre les normes d’emploi sont des crimes. Cet article discute les lacunes dans la mise en application des normes d’emploi en Ontario (section II), explique la façon dont les poursuites privées peuvent aider et comment cela cadre avec leur utilisation historique (section III), et décrit comment on pourrait facilement mettre en pratique les poursuites privées pour infractions des normes d’emploi (section IV).

On 16 October 1996, a malfunction at the Swan Hills Special Waste Treatment Center (SHSWTC) in Alberta, Canada, released an undetermined quantity of persistent organic pollutants to the atmosphere. An ecologically based, staged health risk assessment was conducted to evaluate the human health risk, the findings of which are presented in Part 2, on Ecotoxicology and Human Health Risk. The incident resulted in the largest fine for an environmental infraction in Alberta history up to that time. Despite the incident, the province of Alberta has continued to subsidize the facility and has kept it in operation, with changes in management. The policy rationale is that if the facility were not available, accumulation and possible diversion of hazardous waste into illegal disposal alternatives would threaten the environment much more than operation of the plant. This case study illustrates an ecological approach to risk assessment and an attempted culturally sensitive approach to risk management. Incidents in which people are exposed to toxic substances do not occur in a social vacuum. Risk management strategies must be adapted to groups with different cultural values and expectations. Community and individual responses to such incidents, and the development of health advisory messages, may depend on presenting information on exposure and risk in terms consistent with cultural patterns among subpopulations in the community.

Abstract Introduction. Stroke is one of the main reasons for acquired disability, and the past 2 years have demonstrated that COVID-19 is a major cause of thromboembolic accidents, which usually determine cardio-pulmonary infraction, as it has a higher incidence on larger blood vessels, but there are also numerous cases reported of stroke in patients after or, more rarely, during COVID-19 active infection. Material and Methods. We present the case of a 52 year old man diagnosed with stroke during hospitalisation for a moderate type of COVID-19(Coronavirus 2019), which after several days from admittance, was found with left hemiplegia in his chamber. A comprehensive sensitive-motor rehabilitation program has been established after two and a half months after discharge, as the deficit did not regress. Results and discussion. The evolution of the patient was favorable, with an improvement of the symptoms after treatment, especially the pain syndrome, but also on improved muscle tonus and slight muscle strength increase and improved disability scores The patient rehabilitation should continue for a longer period of time, as new cerebral pathways take time to be established. Conclusions. In patients with stroke, independent of the mechanism of occurring, complex sensitive-motor rehabilitation should be started as soon as possible, in good condition, so that the benefits outbalance the risks. Extra precautions should be taken in regards to patients with COVID-19 related stroke, as they are more inclined to have a thrombotic related development, even after fully medically recovering from the disease.

AbstractJUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND SOCIAL REACTIONThe object of this research is to define the process of social reaction to juvenile delinquency, as well as the criteria used by the agencies of social control in deciding what factors brand the adolescent a delinquent. Starting with self-reported delinquency, we follow its course within the system of social regulations practised by the public, the police and the courts.The data concern self-reported delinquency (measured by the questionnaire of Nye and Short on self-reported delinquency), delinquency officially known to the police, and the decisions taken by the police and judges with regard to delinquent acts. These data were gathered in five districts in Montreal, representing five social strata.The analysis of the stigma of delinquency showed that there is more chance of working-class subjects entering the juvenile justice system, above all where acquisitive and rebellious delinquency is concerned, especially in relation to the community, the family and sex. Among the middle and upper classes the stigma of delinquency is attached more to aggression and rebellion connected with automobiles and vandalism.As to the origins of social reaction ¦— the way in which an adolescent is admitted to the juvenile justice system .— the citizen reports offences against his person and property, while the police record offences against public order and morals.At the police level, the adolescent is returned to his home if it is a question of rebellion committed by a group between the ages of 12 and 15, whereas he is taken to court if his offence, reported by the citizen, is repeated and of a more serious nature. In the case of those taken to court, the adolescent is detained if he is a recidivist, and receives a summons if it is his first offence.The judges favor special measures in the case of rebelliousness, and no action at all (postponement sine die) in the case of aggression or theft by adolescents of the working class. A recidivist will be institutionalized for a serious infraction and treated within the community in the case of a less serious offence. Re-education in the community is given if the adolescent has been detained, and a fine if he has received a summons.The results clearly show that the characteristics of the delinquent acts are more important than the socioeconomic milieu in determining whatdecisions are taken. However, the socioeconomic milieu does influence admission into the juvenile justice system, as well as judicial reaction. Working-class subjects are given less attention than those from the middle and upper classes, postponement sine die is more often used in the working-class milieu, and fines, re-education within the community and institu-tionalization are more often applied to subjects of the middle and upper classes. Moreover, the margin of discretionary powers in decision making is, on the whole, rather narrow, which means that in the majority of cases, decisions can be explained by no other factors than the characteristics of the delinquent acts. This discretionary margin in decision making is narrow, both at the police and judicial levels, when a choice between particular measures must be made ; on the other hand, there is some leeway, since the judge must choose between postponement sine die and a particular measure. Finally, the course of the offence within the juvenile justice system reinforces the previous decisions through a process of amplification, which, as a consequence, penalizes working-class subjects to some extent.In short, delinquency is an adolescent phenomenon in general, but only a minority of infractions enter and continue to circulate within the juvenile justice system. The criteria for decision making are indeed socio-economic, but more often relate to the past history of the delinquent and the nature of his offence.

Background There are few and conflicting data regarding the prognostic role of continued smoking in very young survivors of acute myocardial infraction (AMI) after the event. Design We conducted a prospective study to evaluate the impact of smoking habits on long-term outcome in individuals who sustained AMI at the age of ≤ 35 years. Methods We recruited 147 consecutive patients who had survived their first AMI at the age of ≤ 35 years. Patients were followed up for up to 10 years. Clinical end points were: readmission for acute coronary syndrome, cardiac death or coronary revascularization because of clinical deterioration. Results The most prevalent risk factor at presentation was smoking (94.8%). Follow-up data were obtained by 135 patients (32 ± 3 yeas old, 115 men). During follow-up 75 (55.6%) patients reported continuation of smoking. Forty-four (32.6%) patients presented cardiac events (three cardiac deaths, 30 acute coronary syndromes, and 11 revascularizations). Multivariate data analysis showed that persistence of smoking (relative risk = 2.35, 95% confidence interval 1.5–5.25, P = 0.03) and ejection fraction at presentation (relative risk = 0.95, 95% confidence interval 0.91–0.98, P= 0.008) were the only significant predictors of cardiac events after adjusting for various confounding factors. In addition, continuation of smoking was the most significant predictor of cardiac events during follow-up in our sample (i.e. had the lowest log-likelihood ratio as compared with ejection fraction or other covariates). Conclusion Persistence of smoking is the most powerful predictor for the recurrence of cardiac events in patients with premature AMI.

Established in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1991 (International Tribunal) has steadily become more active in its quest to fulfil its mandate, moving from the establishment stage to the working stage most notably over the past two years. The trial of Dusko Tadić, the first full scale trial before the International Tribunal, was held from 7 May 1996 through 28 November 1996 and the final judgment was rendered on 7 May 1997. Pursuant to a guilty plea, the accused Drazen Erdemović was sentenced on 29 November 1996. In addition, two trials, one of which is based on the Celebići indictment against four accused, Esad Landžo, Zenjil Delalić, Zdravko Mucić, and Hazim Delić, and began on 10 March 1997, and one against Tihomir Blaskić, are currently underway. The motions submitted and arguments that have been and will be made during these proceedings have, and will continue to, force the trial and appellate chambers of the International Tribunal to apply and interpret for the first time many of the International Tribunal's Rules of Procedure and Evidence (Rules). One of the issues that is no doubt relevant for the judges of the trial chambers as they deliberate the final judgments in these cases is the modicum of proof necessary to find the accused guilty of the infractions of international humanitarian law charged in the relevant indictment.

"This article approaches a sensitive topic for the Romanian society: the difference between the notion of „consent” in the economy of rape versus sexual act with a minor (statutory rape). After a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in M.G.C. c. Romania and an evaluation report from the Judiciary Inspection, a legislative initiative is trying to fix the current system. Is it able to solve all the issues related to the legal qualification of acts against minors as rape or sexual act with a minor? Does it correctly identify the legislative or jurisprudential issue? These are the questions I will try to answer in the present study. Starting with the problems identified and legislative solutions from other legal systems, after analyzing the notion of „consent” in the internal structure of rape and statutory rape, I will propose a simpler, suppler legislative alternative that is easier to use by the courts. This text is not a comparison between the two infractions and is not dedicated to their minute analysis. It is rather a first step in the study of the notion of „consent” in the economy of crimes against sexual freedom. The wish of this author is for this debate to continue, since this material cannot, by itself, answer all the questions regarding a minor’s consent in the case of crimes against sexual freedom. However, I will show that the legislative project cannot attain this objective either."

A 72-year old woman had revision unipolar hemiarthroplasty for AMA loosening with vertical split fracture of greater trochanter. This was complicated by PJI, treated with staged arthroplasty with articulated antibiotic loaded cement spacer. Revision of antibiotic loaded cement spacer for dislocation and cable plate fixation of greater trochanter was done. Then the tissue specimen grew Candida ablicans. Fluconazole was given. Repeated debridement and exchange of antibiotic loaded cement spacer was done twice again with amphoteric B and vancomycin added to the cement. Unfortunately, the frozen section was still positive despite the CRP was returned to normal for 1 month. Oral fluconazole was continued. Finally, revision total hip replacement was done 14 months after the initial insertion of antibiotic loaded cement spacer. The patient could manage to walk with frame indoor with no hip pain at 3 year follow-up. Another 80-year old woman had removal of AMA, debridement and antibiotics loaded cement spacer was done for PJI. This was complicated by breakage of the articulated cemented spacer during reduction and later hip dislocation despite of cemented acetabular liner. A total of 3 debridement and antibiotics loaded cement spacer were done. Besides Candida albicans, tissue also grew Enterobacter cloacae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Exchange of cement space loaded with gentamicin and voriconazole was done as the 4th reoperation 22 weeks after the debridement and antibiotics loaded cement spacer insertion. Intraoperatively, the patient developed haemorrhagic shock and complicated with myocardial infraction and pneumonia postoperatively and eventually succumbed 12 days after the last operation. The control rate of fungal PJI of only 36% was reported in the literature. The use of systemic and local antifungal agents, surgical treatment strategy and outcomes will be reviewed.

Audits are an essential component of every organization, particularly those involving software development. In addition to several testing cycles, software auditing has become an essential software development milestone. Software auditing is a continual activity that enables a business to remain ahead of the curve and predict potential software problems. Audits, whether undertaken in-house or by external auditors, entail a significant amount of time and work. Consistent audits provide financial and economic benefits, as well as legal benefits. The most essential advantage of audits is safeguarding your system from internal and external assaults. Audit logs serve a crucial role in the auditing process; they typically capture all system operations and occurrences. They are used as evidence providers during an inquiry and by auditors to monitor the privacy and security of information and systems. Auditors confirm the accuracy of data pertaining to businesses and their activities. To determine if these acts exceed the limitations established by organizations, governments, and other parties, dependable information is essential. Infractions of such rules or corporate standards may be indicative of fraud, malpractice, risk, or inefficiency. Despite the existence of automated audit tools, audit policy, and audit logs, many audit frauds are reported on a daily basis. To make the audit process transparent and secure, this research proposes a blockchain-enabled framework SSFTA to aid software auditors in conducting a transparent and effective audit process. The proposed framework is evaluated using a case study. The findings demonstrated that the suggested framework makes the auditing process simple and transparent.

P91 Kappa ( K ) opioid receptors have been implicated in neuroprotection from ischemic neuronal injury. We tested the effects of a selective and specific K -opioid receptor agonist, BRL 52537 and antagonist, norBNI on infarction volume following transient focal ischemia in the rat. Under controlled conditions of normoxia, normocarbia and normothermia, halothane (1–2%)-anesthetized male Wistar rats (250–300 g) were subjected to 2 hr of middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) by the intraluminal occlusion-technique using laser Doppler perfusion to assess intensity of ischemia. In a blinded randomized fashion, rats were treated with either vehicle (saline) or 1 mg/Kg/hr BRL 52537 with continuous iv infusion starting 15 min prior to MCAO. In a second set of experiments, rats were treated with vehicle (saline), 1 mg/Kg/hr BRL 52537 , 1 or 5 mg/Kg/hr norBNI starting at onset of reperfusion. All infusions were at a rate of 0.5 ml/hr and continued until the end of the experiment. Infarction volume was assessed by triphenyltetrazolium chloride (TTC) staining at 22 hr of reperfusion in all rats. TTC-determined infarction volume of ipsilateral caudoputamen (CP) complex in rats pretreated with BRL 52537 (N=7; 29±11 mm 3 ; p<0.05) (mean±SEM) and cortex (61±32 mm 3 ; p<0.05) was smaller than in rats treated with saline (N=7;72±4 mm3 and 174 ±24 mm 3 , respectively). Similarly, rats treated with BRL 52537 at the onset of reperfusion had smaller infarction volume in CP complex (N=10;35±9 mm 3 ) and cortex (73±32 mm 3 ) compared to saline (N=10;64±5 mm 3 and 148±23 mm 3 , respectively). Rats treated with norBNI (N=10) at the onset of reperfusion had similar infraction volumes in the CP complex and the cortex as compared to saline controls. These data demonstrate that K -opioid receptor agonist provides significant neuroprotection when given as a pretreatment as well as following 2 hr of transient focal ischemia.

Since the start of the COVID–19 pandemic, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”) has, for the first time in history, placed tens of thousands of inmates onto home confinement. Likely due to the unprecedented nature and rapid release of inmates to contain the virus, the BOP failed to timely update their policies and procedures surrounding the disciplinary system of inmates on home confinement. This failure to update resulted in the BOP removing inmates from home confinement and placing them back in prison for minor violations. Furthermore, when the BOP chose to remove an inmate from home confinement, it did so without any proceeding, hearing, or even an explanation. The lack of due process occurred because the BOP continued to use its Inmate Discipline Program Statement—procedures for addressing infractions in prison—as a model for remanding inmates on home confinement back to prison. Instead, the BOP should be following the two-step due process procedures the Supreme Court has outlined for those inmates on parole—a program that is nearly indistinguishable from home confinement. Inmates on home confinement are entitled to the constitutional protections of this two-step process because they have a liberty interest in remaining on home confinement. To ensure the BOP protects the due process rights of inmates on home confinement, this Comment proposes a change in the BOP’s disciplinary system. This Comment first proposes that the BOP promulgate the Morrissey procedural due process rights for inmates on home confinement into the Code of Federal Regulations. This Comment secondly proposes that the BOP revises its Inmate Discipline Program Statement to reflect the prohibited acts and available sanctions that uniquely apply to inmates on home confinement. Collectively, this new regulatory scheme will afford inmates on home confinement the constitutional protections guaranteed to them by the Fifth Amendment, and it will provide clarity to courts when determining the constitutionality of remanding inmates to prison.

e17605 Background: Metastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) is a lethal disease, often preceded by nonmetastatic, castration-resistant phase. Recently, three androgen receptor (AR) antagonists — apalutamide, enzalutamide, and darolutamide — have been approved for nonmetastatic, castration-resistant prostate cancer (nmCRPC). AR-antagonists have been associated with increased risk of hypertension (HTN) and major cardiovascular (CV) events. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the published phase 3 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to determine the relative risk of HTN and major CV events associated with use of AR-antagonists for nmCRPC. Methods: We conducted a systematic search at PUBMED, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and meeting abstracts from inception until November 2019. Published phase 3 RCTs using AR-antagonists in the study arm for nmCRPC and reporting the number of events of HTN and major CV events were included in the analyses. We used Mantel-Haenszel (MH) method and random effects model to calculate the estimated pooled risk ratio (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI). Heterogeneity was tested with I2 value and Cochran’s Q-test. Results: Three phase 3 RCTs (ARAMIS, PROSPER, and SPARTAN) randomizing 2687 patients in the AR-antagonist arms and 1417 patients in the control arms were included in the final analysis for HTN. SPARTAN did not include data for major CV events; hence, other two studies comprising 2903 patients were analyzed for major CV events. Major CV events included myocardial infraction/coronary artery disease, ischemic/hemorrhagic cerebrovascular events, and heart failure. AR-antagonists used in the study arms were — ARAMIS: darolutamide, PROSPER: enzalutamide, and SPARTAN: apalutamide. Placebo was used in the control arms. All patients continued androgen deprivation therapy. Randomization was 2:1 in all studies. The pooled RR of any-grade HTN is 1.5 (95% CI: 1.03 – 2.18, p = 0.03, I2 = 70%); and, the pooled RR of grade ≥3 HTN is 1.39 (95% CI: 1.03 – 1.88, p = 0.03, I2 = 13%). The pooled RR of any-grade major CV events is 1.49 (95% CI: 1.05 – 2.13, p = 0.03, I2 = 0%); and, the pooled RR of grade ≥3 major CV events is 1.80 (95% CI: 1.11 – 2.92, p = 0.02, I2 = 0%). Conclusions: Our meta-analysis demonstrated use of AR-antagonists for nmCRPC is associated with increased risk of HTN and major CV events. A careful selection of patients and aggressive management of the CV risk factors are crucial to enhance safety and proper utilization of these promising drugs.

Context Girls of Color are overrepresented in school disciplinary actions based on subjectively judged, minor infractions. Studies have consistently shown that this exclusionary discipline has long-lasting impact on Girls of Color and their educational outcomes, including increased risk for pushout and involvement in the criminal legal system. Focus of Study We sought to uncover the processes that animate the statistics of overrepre-sentation of Girls of Color in disciplinary actions. Said differently, we sought to understand where, how, and why Girls of Color were being disciplined in schools. Using a Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) lens and centering the voices of Girls’ of Color, this empirical study was guided by the question, What mechanisms propel and dispel disciplinary inequities for Girls of Color? Research Design The qualitative research took place in a suburban school district in the Midwestern United States marked by increasing racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This was part of a larger two-year study that centered the voices of more than 50 Girls of Color, their families (11), and their teachers (11), exploring understandings of and experiences with school discipline disparities for Girls of Color. Data sources for the full project included interviews with Girls of Color (32), families (10), and teachers (8); focus groups (Girls of Color = 17; families = 3; teachers = 3); classroom and district event observations, Education Journey Mapping (21); and a Cartographer's Clinic. Data for this study focus on the interviews and focus groups with Girls of Color, working to center them as knowledge generators. Conclusions/Recommendations Our analysis revealed the ways in which discipline disparities were animated by inequitable academic and behavioral responses of teachers to classroom interactions, which we name debilitating practices. Further, Girls of Color embodied repositioning as ways of maintaining their integrity and individuality when experiencing academic and behavioral injustices. We conclude with major implications for school personnel: (a) academically, educators must reflect on how ability is distributed and withheld in the classroom along racialized and gendered lines, and (b) behaviorally, positive behavior supports should be imagined and implemented through a race and gender conscious lens. Though we focus on classroom interactions, we also understand that public schools, schools of education, and society all have a role to play in dismantling the school–prison nexus. However, classroom interactions continue to be identified as the source of disciplinary disparities in both quantitative and qualitative studies. Consequently, teachers have an opportunity to change their classroom practices to academically and behaviorally support Girls of Color.

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo principal el poner de manifiesto cómo la modernización del Derecho Penal lleva consigo la indiscutible consideración de corrientes más humanitarias propias de la Justicia Restaurativa. Como es sabido, la posible cabida de soluciones extrajudiciales o distintas a las vías convencionales ofertadas por la Administración se convierten en un recurso con múltiples ventajas, ya sea la propia agilización del Sistema de Justicia, como la misma consideración de una salida más resocializadora para el infractor. Ahora bien, pese a ello, lo que no debe perderse de vista es que la principal protagonista dentro de estos procedimientos es la víctima, siendo imprescindible garantizar sus derechos a lo largo de todo el proceso para no llegar a desvirtuar la propia esencia de los modelos restaurativos. Para ello, se comienza haciendo una breve conceptualización y un encuadre legislativo, internacional y nacional, de lo que compete a las medidas alternativas de resolución de conflictos, para proseguir con aquellos aspectos que atañen a los menores de edad como sujetos de especial vulnerabilidad. Finalmente, destacan los aspectos más prácticos de la citada temática, esto es, lo relativo a los programas de actuación y medidas de prevención de futuros conflictos a través de la aplicación específica de la mediación penal y de la mediación penitenciaria. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the modernization of Criminal Law entails the unquestionable consideration of a more humanitarian perspectives proper to the Restorative Justice. by the Administration becomes a resource with multiple advantages, either the fact of making a Justice System more dynamic, as the consideration of a more re-socializing ways for the offender. Despite that, the aspect that should be always present is that the main protagonist in these procedures is the victim, being essential to guarantee their rights throughout the process in order to not distort the essence of restorative models. For this, this article begins making a brief conceptualization and a legislative framework, both international and national, of all the aspects that define the alternative measures of conflict resolution, to continue with those aspects that concern to minors as subjects of special vulnerability. Finally, it will be stand out the most practical aspects of this topic, that is, what concerns to action programs and measures to prevent future conflicts through the specific application of criminal mediation and prison mediation.

Restorative justice challenges the traditional outcomes and processes of the criminal justice system. While as a unified theory of punishment restorative justice is notably problematic, elements of it have been incorporated within sentencing regimes around the world. Responding to increasing incarceration rates and disproportionate Aboriginal incarceration rates and in articulating the fundamental purpose and principles of sentencing, Parliament included principles of restorative justice, thanks in part to a belief in its particular application to Aboriginal offenders. The Canadian approach to restorative justice is focused entirely on securing non-custodial outcomes. However, other principles of sentencing, Canadian appellate jurisprudence, further legislative amendment, and the growth of penal populism demonstrate that the Canadian sentencing regime, taken as a whole, precludes this very goal. The author demonstrates that the statutory adoption of restorative justice through the Criminal Code has not had its intended effect: Aboriginal offenders are just as likely to face a term in custody as they were prior to the 1996 amendments. That said, there remains a role for restorative justice. The author argues for a shift to restorative processes. This shift would allow for a continued commitment to restorative justice while alleviating the obstacles associated with an outcome-centered approach. Importantly, it reflects the recognition that the Aboriginal offender can benefit from actively participating in the determination of how best to address his offending. Finally, this approach recognizes that there is a disconnect between the criminal justice system and traditional Aboriginal justice, and reflects factors shown to increase voluntary compliance with the law.La justice réparatrice met en question les résultats et les processus traditionnels du système de justice pénale. Quoique en tant que théorie unifiée de châtiment, la justice réparatrice est notamment problématique, certains de ses éléments ont été incorporés aux systèmes de détermination des peines partout au monde. En réaction aux taux croissants d’incarcération et des taux disproportionnés d’incarcération d’autochtones et en énonçant le but fondamental et les principes de la détermination des peines, le Parlement a inclus des principes de justice réparatrice, en partie à cause de la croyance en son application particulière aux contrevenants autochtones. L’approche canadienne à la justice réparatrice porte entièrement sur l’obtention de résultats sans privation de liberté. Toutefois, d’autres principes de détermination des peines, la jurisprudence des cours d’appel, de nouveaux amendements législatifs et la croissance du sentiment populaire par rapport aux peines démontrent que le système canadien de détermination des peines, dans son ensemble, empêche justement l’atteinte de cet objectif. L’auteur fait voir que l’adoption statutaire de la justice réparatrice dans le Code criminel n’a pas eu l’effet voulu : les contrevenants autochtones ont les mêmes chances de se voir imposer une période de détention qu’ils avaient avant les amendements de 1996. Cela dit, un rôle demeure pour la justice réparatrice. L’auteur argumente en faveur d’un virage vers les processus réparateurs. Ce virage permettrait de maintenir l’engagement envers la justice réparatrice tout en allégeant les obstacles associés à l’approche centrée sur les résultats. Il importe de noter que cela reflète la reconnaissance que le contrevenant autochtone peut bénéficier de participer activement à la détermination de la meilleure façon de traiter de son infraction. Finalement, cette approche reconnaît la discordance entre le système de justice pénale et la justice autochtone traditionnelle, et reflète des facteurs qui ont manifestement augmenté le respect volontaire de la loi.

The disparities inherent in various national privacy laws have come into sharper contrast as access to information grows and formerly domestic markets become international. Information flow does not adhere to national boundary lines. Increasingly, laws that seek to protect informational privacy do not either. The European Union took a bold approach by limiting access to its markets for those who failed to observe its strict law designed to protect personal information. The 1995 Directive (and 2014 Regulatory Amendment) embody this approach as they: (1) broadly define personal information; (2) broadly define those who process and control personal information; (3) restrict transfer of personal information to those who cannot demonstrate compliance. Tellingly, the Directive does not limit its scope to certain industries or practices, but requires privacy controls across the board, regardless of whether the processor is a healthcare provider, pastry chef or girl scout. To many, the Directive has failed. While the global trend toward adopting laws similar to the Directive suggests that many States value privacy rights, commentators and empirical studies reveal significant shortcomings. The Directive outlaws harmless activities while allowing exceptions that threaten to swallow the rule. It is simultaneously over-inclusive and under-inclusive. National governments enjoy wide latitude to collect and use personal information under the guise of national security. Perhaps more concerning, technology continues to leapfrog. Information privacy is made continually more difficult with each new “app” and innovation. The Internet of Things is more probable than speculative. Radio-frequency identification is a predicate to computer identification and assimilation of everyday physical objects, enabling the use of these objects to be monitored and inventoried by computers. Tagging and monitoring objects could similarly be accomplished by other technologies like near field communication, barcodes, QR codes and digital watermarking, raising the legitimate argument that informational privacy—at least as envisioned in the 1995 Directive’s absolute terms—is impossible. Informational privacy cannot be accomplished by declaring it a fundamental right and outlawing all processing of personal information. To legally realise and enforce a privacy right in personal information, incremental, graduated, and practical legislation better achieve the goal than sweeping proclamations that have applications to actions unrelated to the harms associated with the absence of the right. With information privacy in particular, a capacious claim of right to all personal information undermines legal enforcement because the harms attending lack of privacy are too often ill-defined and misunderstood. As a result, legal realization of a claimed privacy right in the Age of Information should proceed incrementally and begin with the industries, practices, and processes that cause the most harm by flouting informational privacy. Data mining and data aggregation industries, for example, collect, aggregate and resell personal information without express consent. A targeted prohibition of this industry would reduce financial incentives of the most conspicuous violators and alleviate some of the most egregious privacy infractions. A graduated legal scheme also reduces undue and overbroad Internet regulation. While the right to privacy has been recognised and legally supported in one way or another for centuries, it has not faced the emerging and countervailing Age of Information until now. Current omnibus international legislation reflects the impossibility of legally protecting all privacy in the Age of Information; it also illustrates the need for a refined and practical legal scheme that gradually and directly targets the harms associated with privacy violations.

Abstract:PEDAGOGICAL MEDIATION PROCESS IN ADOLESCENTS OFFENDERS OF LAW: TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM IN EDUCATIONToday, school and culture are configured as social territories in permanent dispute and tension, due to the heterogeneity of its members, the impact of globalization and the neoliberal system that installs hegemonic practices not only of domination, but also resistance and subversion. We also note from the Industrial Revolution, the school adopts and reproduces asymmetrical and hierarchical relationships among its members, from a logical instructional teaching that limits the potential for development of students, and especially for adolescents who are in conflict with the law. Thus, the school has been and continues to be, a highly normative space that conveys very different codes that has an adolescent offender bill that also does not allow that chance, creativity, autonomy and improvisation fulfill their educational role. Thus, we dream of developing a perspective that enables us psicosocioeducativa interpret and explain the propensity to learn from private juvenile offenders law of liberty, in the processes of pedagogical mediation becoming interested while discovering criteria that allow pedagogical action overcome the crisis of school model, through a critical and democratic pedagogy that is able to integrate processes of social transformation, as antidotes to hopelessness and social exclusion. These reflections, recognize the complexity of educational phenomena and reinforce the need to consider schools as democratic public spheres, as an essential step in an emancipatory critical pedagogy.Keywords: Culture, Learning, Theories of Resistance in Education, Adolescence, Propensity to Learn.Resumen:En la actualidad, la escuela y la cultura se configuran como territorios sociales en permanente disputa y tensión, debido a la heterogeneidad de sus integrantes, la incidencia de la globalización y el sistema neoliberal que instala prácticas hegemónicas no sólo de dominación, sino también de resistencia y subversión. Asimismo, observamos desde la Revolución Industrial, que la escuela adopta y reproduce relaciones asimétricas y jerárquicas entre sus miembros, desde una lógica de enseñanza instruccional que coarta las posibilidades de desarrollo del estudiante, y mayormente de aquellos adolescentes que entran en conflicto con la justicia. Así, la escuela ha sido y continúa siendo, un espacio eminentemente normativo, que transmite códigos muy diferentes a los que posee un adolescente infractor de ley, y que además, no permite que el azar, la creatividad, la autonomía y la improvisación cumplan su rol educativo. Por ende, soñamos con el desarrollo de una perspectiva psicosocioeducativa que nos posibilite interpretar y explicar la propensión a aprender de los adolescentes infractores de ley privados de libertad, en los procesos de mediación pedagógica; interesándonos al mismo tiempo, descubrir criterios de acción pedagógica que permitan superar la crisis del modelo escolar, a través de una pedagogía crítica y democrática que sea capaz de integrarse a procesos de transformación social, como antídotos contra la desesperanza y la exclusión social. Estas reflexiones, reconocen la complejidad de los fenómenos educativos y refuerzan la necesidad de contemplar a las escuelas como esferas públicas democráticas, como un paso esencial para una pedagogía crítica emancipadora.Palabras claves: Cultura, Aprendizaje, Teorías de la Resistencia, Adolescencia, Propensión a Aprender

Abstract Background Individuals who commit acts of violence in prisons are often placed in highly controlled environments called restrictive housing (i.e., solitary confinement), which can have severe physical and mental health consequences and does not reduce violence. As such, North Carolina prisons have introduced the rehabilitative diversion unit (RDU) to reduce the use of restrictive housing and reduce violence in prison. Methods We evaluated the effect of the RDU on prison infractions. We compared rates of infractions by type (including violent infractions) among men enrolled in the RDU and men who were eligible for the RDU but placed in restrictive housing for control purposes (RHCP). We also evaluated sustained program impacts by comparing the hazard of first infraction among these same two groups of men after program completion, when they had returned to the general prison population. Finally, we compared the hazard of first promotion to a less restrictive custody level (medium custody) when these men had returned to the general prison population. Results The primary analytic cohort was made up of 3128 men contributing 897,822 person-days. Adjusted rates of violent infractions were lower in the RDU than in RHCP (adjusted rate ratio: 0.6; 95% CI: 0.4, 1.1). All other categories of infractions, including drug-related infractions, occurred at higher rates during RDU, as compared to RHCP. In analyses of sustained program impacts, for most categories of infractions, there were no differences in the hazard of first infraction post-RDU and post-RHCP. However, the hazard of violent infraction post-RDU was higher (adjusted hazard ratio: 2.1; 95% CI: 1.1, 4.0) than post-RHCP. The hazard of promotion to a less restrictive custody level was higher post-RDU (adjusted hazard ratio: 17.4; 95% CI: 7.2, 42.2) than post-RHCP. Conclusions We found the RDU program may be effective in reducing violence for men enrolled in the program, but that these benefits were not sustained. Continued programming may be a useful tool to transition men from the programmatically intensive environment of the RDU to the general prison population. Additionally, we recommend the expansion of evidence-based treatment for substance use disorder.

On July 14th, 2020, ProPublica published “A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention”, a story about “Grace”, a fifteen-year-old who was sent to a detention center for remote learning infractions. While the larger story involves injustices of the legal system often experienced by minoritized students, there is also a smaller indictment. The surveillance technologies embedded in educational technology tools that allowed learning to continue during the onslaught of COVID-19 can have disproportionately negative effects for minoritized students. Using Grace’s story, I examine the connection between surveillance and racial capitalism in relation to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, implications of the converged state of pandemic learning and possible solutions are discussed.

This audit was performed to check whether all patients suffering from myocardial infarction have received aspirin in dose of 160 - 325 mg during their stay in the medical ward in Mayo hospital Lahore. Objectives: The audit was performed to assess the application of ACC/AHA guidelines for management of patients with acute MI regarding administration of aspirin in a dose of 160-325 mg daily during their stay in the hospital. Criteria of audit: A dose of 160-325 mg of aspirin should be continued indefinitely daily after an attack of MI7. Standard of audit: All patients who have been diagnosed to have acute myocardial infarction should receive 160- 325 mg of aspirin daily during hospital stay and continuously thereafter. Material and methods: A retrospective audit was conducted in medical ward in Mayo hospital, Lahore in which notes of patients who were admitted with a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction from 1st Jan 2005 to 31st August 2005 were studied. Results: We found that patients included in this audit had a mean age of 56 years +/- 13.55 out of which 45 patients 84% were discharged, 2% were discharged on request, 4 % were shifted to CCU, 6% left against medical advice and 2% expired. We found out that out of 45 cases only 24.4 % of cases were given aspirin in the recommended dose of 160- 325 mg daily, 40 % of patients received only 75 mg aspirin daily, while 33.3 % of them got 150mg daily and 2.2 % of patients did not receive aspirin during their stay in the hospital.

Following the collapse of the Delahoyde and Lucett joint enterprise, James Lucett resumed practice on his own account. He continued to implement his ‘process’, promoting it as a unique cure for intractable cases of insanity. For two decades he pursued his activities, with varying success, at different locations in the London area. He maintained his public profile by extensive advertising, letters to newspapers and published pamphlets, extolling his unique ‘discovery’ and recounting claims of successful cures achieved. Accusations of quackery persisted along with other hostile criticism, particularly from medical men, which Lucett strongly challenged. Periodically he faced more serious difficulties due to legal infractions or financial hardships, but somehow Lucett survived most of these and persevered with his endeavours.

ABSTRACT This article suggests that the ongoing denial by the USA federal government of historical human rights infractions against African Americans and people of African descent led to a proliferation of local transitional justice efforts. Drawing from a university-driven transitional justice project, this article offers an analysis of local initiatives and highlights one of its six transitional justice collaborations. The university project sought to decolonize its structure and approach, drawing on methods of cultural humility, desire-based research and deep listening. This article responds to the success and challenges of decolonizing a transitional justice project within academia. Findings suggested that local initiatives face obstacles due to enduring legacies of harms and silenced histories, necessitating communities to substantiate their claims. Capacity issues and funding are challenged due to centuries of disinvestment. The article offers lessons learned for potential ally organizations who seek to advance transitional justice where government-sponsored redress continues to be denied.

Abstract Backround Cardiovascular patients who quit smoking reduce their risk for future disease and mortality by 1/3 after 2 years. Despite this, more than half of all cardiac patients continue to smoke after being discharged from the hospital. Fagerstrom score is a validated marker of nicotine addiction in smokers. Purpose The aim of this study is to investigate the predictive value of the Fargestrom score (F.Sc) as a smoking cessation tool in patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) at 3 and 6 months after discharge. Methods We investigated a) the predictive value of F.Sc for the smoking status in patients early after AMI and b) the effectiveness of medically assisted smoking cessation programs in the prevention of relapsing to smoking post discharge. In 103 smokers (58±12 years,79.6% males) we assessed F.Sc during hospitalization for AMI. Patients filled a questionnaire during a face-to-face interview were followed-up at 3 and 6 months. The questionnaire was divided into the following sections: demographics, habits related to smoking, knowledge of smoking risks to health and methods to quit smoking. We recorded the type of MI, number and type of diseased coronary vessels, peak cardiac enzymes levels, left ventricular ejection fraction by echocardiography, intervention during hospitalization, previous medical history. The hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) were used to assess the patient’s mental health condition. For the evaluation of nicotine addiction, we use F.Sc. Results 59 people were hospitalized for STEMI and 44 for NSTEMI. The peak levels of high-sensitivity (hs)-troponin T during hospitalization were 3843.2 [991.3–9338.8] ng/mL. 100 AMI patients underwent PCI and 3 received thrombolysis. All patients were smoking conventional cigarettes before admission for AMI. 29 (28.2%) οf participants had a previous diagnosis of CAD, 55 (53.4%) had hypertension, 49 (47.6%) had hyperlipidemia. The mean HADS-D value was 7.4 ± 1.6, and only 20/103 (19.41%) participants had HADS-D score equal or greater than 10. 28 patients (27.2%) did not quit smoking throughout the 6 months of follow-up (F.Sc: 8.1±1.6), 39 patients (37.8%) ceased smoking at 3 months but relapsed to smoking at 6 months (score:6.8±2.1) and only 34 (33%) had ceased smoking for 6 consecutive months (F.Sc:5.2±2 P&lt;0.05 for all comparisons between subgroups). Out of 73 patients that abstained from smoking the first 3 months post-AMI, those who participated in a smoking cessation program displayed lower rate of relapsing to smoking compared with those who opted to cease smoking without any support(33.3% vs 61.8% p=0.012). Conclusion Fagerstrom score was found to be a valid quantitative predictor of smoking cessation in the period of 6-months follow-up AMI. Patients who participated in a smoking cessation program displayed lower relapse rates suggesting the effectiveness of these programs for smoking cessation in AMI patients.F.Sc and different smoking behaviorsAssociation of F.Sc with smoking status

BackgroundAdolescents who use alcohol and other drugs on school campuses are at heightened risk for adverse consequences to their health and wellbeing. Schools have historically turned to punitive approaches as a first-line response to substance use. However, punishment is an ineffective deterrent for substance use and may cause harm and increase inequities. iDECIDE (Drug Education Curriculum: Intervention, Diversion, and Empowerment) was developed as a scalable and youth-centered drug education and diversion program that can be used as a skills-based alternative to punishment. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of the iDECIDE curriculum as an alternative to punishment (ATP) for school-based substance use infractions in the context of a large pragmatic clinical effectiveness study.MethodsWe will conduct a Type 1, hybrid effectiveness-implementation trial. Using a stepped wedge design with approximately 90 middle and high schools in Massachusetts, we will randomly allocate the timing of implementation of the iDECIDE curriculum compared to standard disciplinary response over approximately 36 months. We will test the overarching hypothesis that student-level outcomes (knowledge of drug effects and attitudes about substance use; frequency of substance use; school connectedness) improve over time as schools transition from a standard disciplinary response to having access to iDECIDE. The secondary aims of this trial are to (1) explore whether change in student-level outcomes vary according to baseline substance use, number of peers who use alcohol or other drugs, age, gender, and school urbanicity, and (2) determine the acceptability and feasibility of the iDECIDE curriculum through qualitative stakeholder interviews.DiscussionSubstance use continues to be a major and rapidly evolving problem in schools. The importance of moving away from punishment to more restorative approaches is widely accepted; however, scalable alternatives have not yet been identified. This will be the first study to our knowledge to systematically evaluate an ATP for students who violate the school substance use policy and is well poised to have important implications for policy making.

The current situation in the worldwide society is paradoxical, as it is characterized by a scarcity in addressing the demand for food. Hence, the garbage predicament in Indonesia remains an environmental concern that necessitates resolution, in conjunction with the challenge of importing waste from industrialized nations to Indonesia. This practice came into existence. Habits of Indonesian individuals who continue to dispose of garbage negligently. This practice of mishandling waste will lead to the emergence of other issues. The issue of waste importation is further compounded by the unreliability of Indonesian waste sorting as a supply source. As one of the developing nations in Southeast Asia that receives waste imports, Indonesia experiences substantial consequences due to this phenomenon. Hence, this paper seeks to examine the issue of trash imports in Indonesia from a political-ecological standpoint, encompassing the social and economic dimensions and the environmental consequences. Furthermore, the article above, which examined the issue of trash imports in Indonesia, has also been conducted. Further investigation is required to explore political ecology, social and economic dimensions, and environmental ramifications. In addition, this article provides an overview of the relevant legislative requirements for the trash importation process in Indonesia. This paper employed the literature review approach to gather research material about waste imports and policies in Indonesia during the past five years. The research information was sourced from multiple studies utilizing the SLR 7P technique. The study findings indicate that trash imports in Indonesia can be understood as a manifestation of ecological politics, wherein the environmental issues are significantly shaped by political factors (namely ego-sectoral features) and economic components within them. The primary objective of the environmental interests outlined in the Basel Convention, which was subsequently translated into laws and regulations in Indonesia, has yet to safeguard environmental and human well-being from the adverse effects of imported trash. In addition, it is essential to comprehensively evaluate Indonesia's trash import policy to clarify its requirements. Furthermore, the issue of enforcing laws effectively in cases of infractions will also be addressed.

The death of the young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, on September 16, 2022 following her arrest by Iran's now-suspended Gasht-i Irshad (guidance patrol or morality police) for apparent lax conformity to the Islamic dress code ignited protests across Iran. The protests, known as Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Azadi) quickly spread to Iranian diaspora communities across North America, Europe, and Australia. Initially, diasporic Iranians organized their protests to support and amplify their compatriots’ calls for justice. As the protests continued in Iran and the demands for change grew louder, some members of the Iranian diaspora shifted their focus from the Islamic Republic to the public shaming of Iranians living outside Iran for their purported support of the Iranian regime. Some of the tactics employed by those engaged in public humiliations of suspected regime supporters recalled Gasht-i Irshad's methods of trapping and accosting individuals for perceived infractions. These public confrontations were aimed at isolating, shaming, and silencing perceived allies of the Islamic Republic and, by extension, denouncing the regime for its abrogation of women's and human rights. I refer to this phenomenon among diasporic Iranians as gasht-i intiqām, roving avengers, which reflects a frustration with the absence of justice in Iran and targets purported proxies for the regime. There have been many instances and types of denunciations aimed at silencing and ostracizing individuals, academics, and institutions. As Daniel Block points out in his analysis, “The attacks overwhelmingly target women, most notably in North America and Europe. The victims include gender equality activists, journalists, foreign policy analysts and a historian, each of whom has been accused of colluding with the authoritarian Islamist regime in Tehran.” Block further points out that many of the attacks are anonymous or originate from fake social media accounts. The common denominator he finds among those who target individuals is opposition to “Western-Iranian diplomacy or reporting information that adds subtlety to the debate over how the United States and its allies should handle the Islamic Republic.”1 Often those deemed regime collaborators are Iranian American individuals, journalists, or institutions that supported the 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the nuclear deal.

Abstract Context This narrative review article explores research integrity and the implications of scholarly work in medical education. The paper describes how the current landscape of medical education emphasizes research and scholarly activity for medical students, resident physicians, and faculty physician educators. There is a gap in the existing literature that fully explores research integrity, the challenges surrounding the significant pressure to perform scholarly activity, and the potential for ethical lapses by those involved in medical education. Objectives The objectives of this review article are to provide a background on authorship and publication safeguards, outline common types of research misconduct, describe the implications of publication in medical education, discuss the consequences of ethical breaches, and outline possible solutions to promote research integrity in academic medicine. Methods To complete this narrative review, the authors explored the current literature utilizing multiple databases beginning in June of 2021, and they completed the literature review in January of 2023. To capture the wide scope of the review, numerous searches were performed. A number of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms were utilized to identify relevant articles. The MeSH terms included “scientific misconduct,” “research misconduct,” “authorship,” “plagiarism,” “biomedical research/ethics,” “faculty, medical,” “fellowships and scholarships,” and “internship and residency.” Additional references were accessed to include medical school and residency accreditation standards, residency match statistics, regulatory guidelines, and standard definitions. Results Within the realm of academic medicine, research misconduct and misrepresentation continue to occur without clear solutions. There is a wide range of severity in breaches of research integrity, ranging from minor infractions to fraud. Throughout the medical education system in the United States, there is pressure to publish research and scholarly work. Higher rates of publications are associated with a successful residency match for students and academic promotion for faculty physicians. For those who participate in research misconduct, there is a multitude of potential adverse consequences. Potential solutions to ensure research integrity exist but are not without barriers to implementation. Conclusions Pressure in the world of academic medicine to publish contributes to the potential for research misconduct and authorship misrepresentation. Lapses in research integrity can result in a wide range of potentially adverse consequences for the offender, their institution, the scientific community, and the public. If adopted, universal research integrity policies and procedures could make major strides in eliminating research misconduct in the realm of academic medicine.

Abstract Solitary confinement is a widespread practice in US correctional facilities. Long-standing concerns about the physical and mental health effects of solitary confinement have led to litigation, legislation, and community activism resulting in many prison systems introducing policies or implementing legal mandates to reduce or eliminate its use. Yet little is known about the nature and effectiveness of policies that states have adopted to reduce their use of solitary confinement and exactly how various reforms have actually impacted the lives of people living and working in the prisons where these reforms have taken place. Methods We conducted an embedded case study, analyzing changes in policies and procedures, administrative data, and focus groups and interviews with incarcerated persons and staff, to describe the circumstances that led to changes in solitary confinement policies and practices in the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (ND DOCR) and the perceived impact of these changes on incarcerated persons and prison staff. Results North Dakota’s correctional officials and staff members attributed the impetus to change their solitary confinement policies to their participation in a program that directly exposed them to the Norwegian Correctional Service’s philosophy, policies, and practices in 2015. The ensuing policy changes made by North Dakota officials were swift and resulted in a 74.28% reduction in the use of solitary confinement between 2016 and 2020. Additionally, placements in any form of restrictive housing decreased markedly for incarcerated persons with serious mental illness. In the two prisons that had solitary confinement units, rule infractions involving violence decreased at one prison overall and it decreased within the units at both prisons that were previously used for solitary confinement. Although fights and assaults between incarcerated people increased in one of the prison’s general population units, during the initial months of reforms, these events continued to decline compared to years before reform. Moreover, incarcerated people and staff attributed the rise to a concomitant worsening of conditions in the general population due to overcrowding, idleness, and double bunking. Both incarcerated persons and staff members reported improvements in their health and well-being, enhanced interactions with one another, and less exposure to violence following the reforms. Conclusions Immersing correctional leaders in the Norwegian Correctional Service’s public health and human rights principles motivated and guided the ND DOCR to pursue policy changes to decrease the use of solitary confinement in their prisons. Ensuing reductions in solitary confinement were experienced as beneficial to the health and wellness of incarcerated persons and staff alike. This case-study describes these policy changes and the perspectives of staff and incarcerated persons about the reforms that were undertaken. Findings have implications for stakeholders seeking to reduce their use of solitary confinement and limit its harmful consequences and underscore the need for research to describe and assess the impact of solitary confinement reforms.

IntroductionAccounts of criminals, their victims, and their pursuers have become entrenched within the sphere of popular culture; most obviously in the genres of true crime and crime fiction. The centrality of the pursuer in the form of the detective, within these stories, dates back to the nineteenth century. This, often highly-stylised and regularly humanised protagonist, is now a firm feature of both factual and fictional accounts of crime narratives that, today, regularly focus on the energies of the detective in solving a variety of cases. So familiar is the figure of the detective, it seems that these men and women—amateurs and professionals—have always had an important role to play in the pursuit and punishment of the wrongdoer. Yet, the first detectives were forced to overcome significant resistance from a suspicious public. Some early efforts to reimagine punishment and to laud the detective include articles written by Charles Dickens; pieces on public hangings and policing that reflect the great Victorian novelist’s commitment to shed light on, through written commentaries, a range of important social issues. This article explores some of Dickens’s lesser-known pieces, that—appearing in daily newspapers and in one of his own publications Household Words—helped to change some common perceptions of punishment and policing. Image 1: Harper's Magazine 7 December 1867 (Charles Dickens Reading, by Charles A. Barry). Image credit: United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. A Reliance on the Scaffold: Early Law Enforcement in EnglandCrime control in 1720s England was dependent upon an inconsistent, and by extension ineffective, network of constables and night watchmen. It would be almost another three decades before Henry Fielding established the Bow Street Foot Patrol, or Bow Street Runners, in 1749, “six men in blue coats, patrolling the area within six miles of Charing Cross” (Worsley 35). A large-scale, formalised police force was attempted by Pitt the Younger in 1785 with his “Bill for the Further prevention of Crime and for the more Speedy Detection and Punishment of Offenders against the Peace” (Lyman 144). The proposed legislation was withdrawn due to fierce opposition that was underpinned by fears, held by officials, of a divestment of power to a new body of law enforcers (Lyman 144).The type of force offered in 1785 would not be realised until the next century, when the work of Robert Peel saw the passing of the Metropolitan Police Act 1829. The Police Act, which “constituted a revolution in traditional methods of law enforcement” (Lyman 141), was focused on the prevention of crime, “to reassure the lawful and discourage the wrongdoer” (Hitchens 51). Until these changes were implemented violent punishment, through the Waltham Black Act 1723, remained firmly in place (Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill 359) as part of the state’s arsenal against crime (Pepper 473).The Black Act, legislation often referred to as the ‘Bloody Code’ as it took the number of capital felonies to over 350 (Pepper 473), served in lieu of consistency and cooperation, across the country, in relation to the safekeeping of the citizenry. This situation inevitably led to anxieties about crime and crime control. In 1797 Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate, published A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis in which he estimated that, out of a city population of just under 1 million, 115,000 men and women supported themselves “in and near the Metropolis by pursuits either criminal-illegal-or immoral” (Lyman 144). Andrew Pepper highlights tensions between “crime, governance and economics” as well as “rampant petty criminality [… and] widespread political corruption” (474). He also notes a range of critical responses to crime and how, “a particular kind of writing about crime in the 1720s demonstrated, perhaps for the first time, an awareness of, or self-consciousness about, this tension between competing visions of the state and state power” (Pepper 474), a tension that remains visible today in modern works of true crime and crime fiction. In Dickens’s day, crime and its consequences were serious legal, moral, and social issues (as, indeed, they are today). An increase in the crime rate, an aggressive state, the lack of formal policing, the growth of the printing industry, and writers offering diverse opinions—from the sympathetic to the retributive—on crime changed crime writing. The public wanted to know about the criminal who had disturbed society and wanted to engage with opinions on how the criminal should be stopped and punished. The public also wanted to be updated on changes to the judicial system such as the passing of the Judgement of Death Act 1823 which drastically reduced the number of capital crimes (Worsley 122) and how the Gaols Act, also of 1823, “moved tentatively towards national prison reform” (Gattrell 579). Crimes continued to be committed and alongside the wrongdoers were readers that wanted to be diverted from everyday events by, but also had a genuine need to be informed about, crime. A demand for true crime tales demonstrating a broader social need for crimes, even the most minor infractions, to be publicly punished: first on the scaffold and then in print. Some cases were presented as sensationalised true crime tales; others would be fictionalised in short stories and novels. Standing Witness: Dickens at the ScaffoldIt is interesting to note that Dickens witnessed at least four executions in his lifetime (Simpson 126). The first was the hanging of a counterfeiter, more specifically a coiner, which in the 1800s was still a form of high treason. The last person executed for coining in England was in early 1829; as Dickens arrived in London at the end of 1822, aged just 10-years-old (Simpson 126-27) he would have been a boy when he joined the crowds around the scaffold. Many journalists and writers who have documented executions have been “criticised for using this spectacle as a source for generating sensational copy” (Simpson 127). Dickens also wrote about public hangings. His most significant commentaries on the issue being two sets of letters: one set published in The Daily News (1846) and a second set published in The Times (1849) (Brandwood 3). Yet, he was immune from the criticism directed at so many other writers, in large part, due to his reputation as a liberal, “social reformer moved by compassion, but also by an antipathy toward waste, bureaucratic incompetence, and above all toward exploitation and injustice” (Simpson 127). As Anthony Simpson points out, Dickens did not sympathise with the condemned: “He wrote as a realist and not a moralist and his lack of sympathy for the criminal was clear, explicit and stated often” (128). Simpson also notes that Dickens’s letters on execution written in 1846 were “strongly supportive of total abolition” while later letters, written in 1849, presented arguments against public executions rather than the practice of execution. In 1859 Dickens argued against pardoning a poisoner. While in 1864 he supported the execution of the railway carriage murderer Franz Müller, explaining he would be glad to abolish both public executions and capital punishment, “if I knew what to do with the Savages of civilisation. As I do not, I would rid Society of them, when they shed blood, in a very solemn manner” (in Simpson 138-39) that is, executions should proceed but should take place in private.Importantly, Dickens was consistently concerned about society’s fascination with the scaffold. In his second letter to The Daily News, Dickens asks: round what other punishment does the like interest gather? We read of the trials of persons who have rendered themselves liable to transportation for life, and we read of their sentences, and, in some few notorious instances, of their departure from this country, and arrival beyond the sea; but they are never followed into their cells, and tracked from day to day, and night to night; they are never reproduced in their false letters, flippant conversations, theological disquisitions with visitors, lay and clerical […]. They are tried, found guilty, punished; and there an end. (“To the Editors of The Daily News” 6)In this passage, Dickens describes an overt curiosity with those criminals destined for the most awful of punishments. A curiosity that was put on vile display when a mob gathered on the concourse to watch a hanging; a sight which Dickens readily admitted “made [his] blood run cold” (“Letter to the Editor” 4).Dickens’s novels are grand stories, many of which feature criminals and criminal sub-plots. There are, for example, numerous criminals, including the infamous Fagin in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1838); several rioters are condemned to hang in Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty (1841); there is murder in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844); and murder, too, in Bleak House (1853). Yet, Dickens never wavered in his revulsion for the public display of the execution as revealed in his “refusal to portray the scene at the scaffold [which] was principled and heartfelt. He came, reluctantly to support capital punishment, but he would never use its application for dramatic effect” (Simpson 141).The Police Detective: A Public Relations ExerciseBy the mid-1700s the crime story was one of “sin to crime and then the gallows” (Rawlings online): “Crimes of every defcription (sic) have their origin in the vicious and immoral habits of the people” (Colquhoun 32). As Philip Rawlings notes, “once sin had been embarked upon, capture and punishment followed” (online). The origins of this can be found in the formula relied upon by Samuel Smith in the seventeenth century. Smith was the Ordinary of Newgate, or prison chaplain (1676–1698), who published Accounts of criminals and their gruesome ends. The outputs swelled the ranks of the already burgeoning market of broadsides, handbills and pamphlets. Accounts included: 1) the sermon delivered as the prisoner awaited execution; 2) a brief overview of the crimes for which the prisoner was being punished; and 3) a reporting of the events that surrounded the execution (Gladfelder 52–53), including the prisoner’s behaviour upon the scaffold and any last words spoken. For modern readers, the detective and the investigation is conspicuously absent. These popular Accounts (1676–1772)—over 400 editions offering over 2,500 criminal biographies—were only a few pence a copy. With print runs in the thousands, the Ordinary earnt up to £200 per year for his efforts (Emsley, Hitchcock, and Shoemaker online). For:penitence and profit made comfortable bedfellows, ensuring true crime writing became a firm feature of the business of publishing. That victims and villains suffered was regrettable but no horror was so terrible anyone forgot there was money to be made. (Franks, “Stealing Stories” 7)As the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution were having their full impact, many were looking for answers, and certainty, in a period of radical social transformation. Sin as a central motif in crime stories was insufficient: the detective was becoming essential (Franks, “True Crime” 239). “In the nineteenth century, the role of the newly-fashioned detective as an agent of consolation or security is both commercially and ideologically central to the subsequent project of popular crime writing” (Bell 8). This was supported by an “increasing professionalism and proficiency of policemen, detectives, and prosecutors, new understandings about psychology, and advances in forensic science and detection techniques” (Murley 10). Elements now included in most crime narratives. Dickens insisted that the detective was a crucial component of the justice system—a figure to be celebrated, one to take centre stage in the crime story—reflecting his staunch support “of the London Metropolitan Police” (Simpson 140). Indeed, while Dickens is known principally for exposing wretched poverty, he was also interested in a range of legal issues as can be evinced from his writings for Household Words. Image 2: Household Words 27 July 1850 (Front Page). Image credit: Dickens Journals Online. W.H. Wills argued for the acceptance of the superiority of the detective when, in 1850, he outlined the “difference between a regular and a detective policeman” (368). The detective must, he wrote: “counteract every sort of rascal whose only means of existence it avowed rascality, but to clear up mysteries, the investigation of which demands the utmost delicacy and tact” (368). The detective is also extraordinarily efficient; cases are solved quickly, in one example a matter is settled in just “ten minutes” (369).Dickens’s pro-police pieces, included a blatantly promotional, two-part work “A Detective Police Party” (1850). The narrative begins with open criticism of the Bow Street Runners contrasting these “men of very indifferent character” to the Detective Force which is “so well chosen and trained, proceeds so systematically and quietly, does its business in such a workman-like manner, and is always so calmly and steadily engaged in the service of the public” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). The “party” is just that: a gathering of detectives and editorial staff. Men in a “magnificent chamber”, seated at “a round table […] with some glasses and cigars arranged upon it; and the editorial sofa elegantly hemmed in between that stately piece of furniture and the wall” (“Police Party, Part I” 409). Two inspectors and five sergeants are present. Each man prepared to share some of their experiences in the service of Londoners:they are, [Dickens tells us] one and all, respectable-looking men; of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation, and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. (“Police Party, Part I” 410) Dickens goes to great lengths to reinforce the superiority of the police detective. These men, “in a glance, immediately takes an inventory of the furniture and an accurate sketch of the editorial presence” and speak “very concisely, and in well-chosen language” and who present as an “amicable brotherhood” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). They are also adaptable and constantly working to refine their craft, through apeculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circumstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! (“Police Party, Part II” 459)These detectives are also, in some ways, familiar. Dickens’s offerings include: a “shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman – in appearance not at all unlike a very acute, thoroughly-trained schoolmaster”; a man “with a ruddy face and a high sun-burnt forehead, [who] has the air of one who has been a Sergeant in the army” (“Police Party, Part I” 409-10); and another man who slips easily into the role of the “greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, un-suspicious, and confiding young butcher” (“Police Party, Part II” 457). These descriptions are more than just attempts to flesh out a story; words on a page reminding us that the author is not just another journalist but one of the great voices of the Victorian era. These profiles are, it is argued here, a deliberate strategy to reassure readers.In summary, police detectives are only to be feared by those residing on the wrong side of the law. For those without criminal intent; detectives are, in some ways, like us. They are people we already know and trust. The stern but well-meaning, intelligent school teacher; the brave and loyal soldier defending the Empire; and the local merchant, a person we see every day. Dickens provides, too, concrete examples for how everyone can contribute to a safer society by assisting these detectives. This, is perfect public relations. Thus, almost singlehandedly, he builds a professional profile for a new type of police officer. The problem (crime) and its solution (the detective) neatly packaged, with step-by-step instructions for citizens to openly support this new-style of constabulary and so achieve a better, less crime-ridden community. This is a theme pursued in “Three Detective Anecdotes” (1850) where Dickens continued to successfully merge “solid lower-middle-class respectability with an intimate knowledge of the criminal world” (Priestman 177); so, proffering the ideal police detective. A threat to the criminal but not to the hard-working and honest men, women, and children of the city.The Detective: As Fact and as FictionThese writings are also a precursor to one of the greatest fictional detectives of the English-speaking world. Dickens observes that, for these new-style police detectives: “Nothing is so common or deceptive as such appearances at first” (“Police Party, Part I” 410). In 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle would write that: “There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact” (78). Dickens had prepared readers for the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes: who was smarter, more observant and who had more determination to take on criminals than the average person. The readers of Dickens were, in many respects, positioned as prototypes of Dr John Watson: a hardworking, loyal Englishman. Smart. But not as smart as those who would seek to do harm. Watson needed Holmes to make the world a better place; the subscriber to Household Words needed the police detective.Another article, “On Duty with Inspector Field” (1851), profiled the “well-known hand” responsible for bringing numerous offenders to justice and sending them, “inexorably, to New South Wales” (Dickens 266). Critically this true crime narrative would be converted into a crime fiction story as Inspector Field is transformed (it is widely believed) into the imagined Inspector Bucket. The 1860s have been identified as “a period of awakening for the detective novel” (Ashley x), a predictor of which is the significant sub-plot of murder in Dickens’s Bleak House. In this novel, a murder is committed with the case taken on, and competently solved by, Bucket who is a man of “skill and integrity” a man presented as an “ideal servant” though one working for a “flawed legal system” (Walton 458). Mr Snagsby, of Bleak House, observes Bucket as a man whoseems in some indefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply at the very last moment [… He] notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger, or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt. (278) This passage, it is argued here, places Bucket alongside the men at the detective police party in Household Words. He is simultaneously superhuman in mind and manner, though rather ordinary in dress. Like the real-life detectives of Dickens’s articles; he is a man committed to keeping the city safe while posing no threat to law-abiding citizens. ConclusionThis article has explored, briefly, the contributions of the highly-regarded Victorian author, Charles Dickens, to factual and fictional crime writing. The story of Dickens as a social commentator is one that is familiar to many; what is less well-known is the connection of Dickens to important conversations around capital punishment and the rise of the detective in crime-focused narratives; particularly how he assisted in building the professional profile of the police detective. In this way, through fact and fiction, Dickens performed great (if under-acknowledged) public services around punishment and law enforcement: he contributed to debates on the death penalty and he helped to build trust in the radical social project that established modern-day policing.AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to the New South Wales Dickens Society, Simon Dwyer, and Peter Kirkpatrick. The author is also grateful to the reviewers of this article for their thoughtful comments and valuable suggestions. ReferencesAshley, Mike. “Introduction: Seeking the Evidence.” The Notting Hill Mystery. Author. Charles Warren Adams. London: The British Library, 2012. xxi-iv. Bell, Ian A. “Eighteenth-Century Crime Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003/2006. 7-17.Brandwood, Katherine. “The Dark and Dreadful Interest”: Charles Dickens, Public Death and the Amusements of the People. MA Thesis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University, 2013. 19 Feb. 2017 <https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/558266/Brandwood_georgetown_0076M_12287.pdf;sequence=1>.Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. London: Macmillan & Co, 1964.Cruickshanks, Eveline, and Howard Erskine-Hill. “The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism.” Journal of British Studies 24.3 (1985): 358-65.Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. London: Richard Bentley,1838.———. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty. London: Chapman & Hall, 1841. ———. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman & Hall, 1844.———. “To the Editors of The Daily News.” The Daily News 28 Feb. 1846: 6. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 141–149.)———. “Letter to the Editor.” The Times 14 Nov. 1849: 4. (Reprinted in Antony E. Simpson. Witnesses to the Scaffold. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008. 149-51.)———. “A Detective Police Party, Part I.” Household Words 1.18 (1850): 409-14.———. “A Detective Police Party, Part II.” Household Words 1.20 (1850): 457-60.———. “Three Detective Anecdotes.” Household Words 1.25 (1850): 577-80.———. “On Duty with Inspector Field.” Household Words 3.64 (1851): 265-70.———. Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853/n.d.Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin, 1892/1981. 74–99.Emsley, Clive, Tim Hitchcock, and Robert Shoemaker. “The Proceedings: Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, n.d. 4 Feb. 2017 <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Ordinarys-accounts.jsp>. Franks, Rachel. “True Crime: The Regular Reinvention of a Genre.” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture 1.2 (2016): 239-54. ———. “Stealing Stories: Punishment, Profit and the Ordinary of Newgate.” Refereed Proceedings of the 21st Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs: Authorised Theft. Eds. Niloofar Fanaiyan, Rachel Franks, and Jessica Seymour. 2016. 1-11. 20 Mar. 2017 <http://www.aawp.org.au/publications/the-authorised-theft-papers/>.Gatrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Gladfelder, Hal. Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Hitchens, Peter. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003.Lyman, J.L. “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829.” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science 55.1 (1964): 141-54.Murley, Jean. The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture. Westport: Praeger, 2008.Pepper, Andrew. “Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wilde, Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London.” Textual Practice 25.3 (2011): 473-91. Priestman, Martin. “Post-War British Crime Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 173-89.Rawlings, Philip. “True Crime.” The British Criminology Conferences: Selected Proceedings, Volume 1: Emerging Themes in Criminology. Eds. Jon Vagg and Tim Newburn. London: British Society of Criminology (1998). 4 Feb. 2017 <http://www.britsoccrim.org/volume1/010.pdf>.Simpson, Antony E. Witnesses to the Scaffold: English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions. Lambertville: True Bill P, 2008.Walton, James. “Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.4 (1969): 446-62.Wills, William Henry. “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking.” Household Words 1.16 (1850): 368-72.Worsley, Lucy. A Very British Murder: The Curious Story of How Crime Was Turned into Art. London: BBC Books, 2013/2014.

The ontological equality and material vitality of all things, and efforts to remove “the human” from its apical position in a hierarchy of being, are Object-Oriented Ontology theory (OOO) concepts. These axioms are useful in a discussion of the aesthetics of augmented robotic art, alongside speculations regarding any interagency between the human/non-human and possible co-evolutionary relationships. In addition, they help to wash out the sticky habits of conventional art writing, such as removed critique or an authoritative expert voice. This article aims to address the robotic work Accomplice by Sydney-based artists Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders as a means of interrogating the independence and agency of robots as non-human species, and as a mode of investigating how we see these relationships changing for the futureFor Accomplice, an artwork exhibited at Artspace, Sydney, in 2013, Gemeinboeck and Saunders built robots, strategised properties, and programmed their performative actions. Replete with lights and hammers, the robots are secreted away behind false walls, where they move along tracks and bang holes into the gallery space. As the devastation of plasterboard ensues, the robots respond interactively to each other through their collective activity: this is intra-action, where an object’s force emerges and where agency is an enactment (Barad, Matter Feels). This paper will continue to draw on the work of feminist scholar and quantum scientist, Karen Barad, due to her related work on agency and intra-action, although she is not part of an OOO theoretical body. Gemeinboeck and Saunders build unstable environments for their robots to perform as embodied inhabitants (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 2). Although the augmented robots are programmed, it is not a prescriptive control. Data is entered, then the robots respond to one another’s proximity and devastation. From the immaterial, virtual realm of robotic programming comes a new materiality which is both unstable, unpredictable, and on the verge of becoming other, or alive. This is a collaboration, not just between Gemeinboeck and Saunders, but between the programmers and their little robots—and the new forces that might be created. Sites of intra-species (human and robot) crossings might be places or spaces where a new figuration of enchantment occurs (Bennett 32). Such a space could take the form of a responsive art-writing intervention or even a new ontological story, as a direct riposte to the lively augmentation of the robotic artwork (Bennett 92). As ficto-critical theorist and ethnographer, Stephen Muecke says, “Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation” (Muecke Motorcycles 2). Figure 1: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Writing Forces When things disappear then reappear, there is a point where force is unleashed. If we ask what role the art writer plays in liberating force, the answer might be that her role is to create as an imaginative new creation, equal to the artwork. The artists speak of Accomplice: transductions, transmaterial flows and transversal relations are at play ... whether emerging from or propelling the interplay between internal dynamics and external forces, the enactment of agencies (human and non-human), or the performative relationship unfolding over time. (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 3) When new energetic force is created and the artwork takes on new life, the audience’s imaginative thought is stimulated. This new force might cause an effect of a trans-fictional flow. The act of writing about Accomplice might also involve some intentional implausibility. For instance, whilst in the exhibition gallery space, witnessing Accomplice, I decided to write a note to one of the robots. I could see it, just visible beyond the violently hammered hole in the wall. Broken plaster dusted my shoes and as I peered into the darker outside space, it whizzed past on its way to bang another hole, in harmony with its other robotic friends. So I scribbled a note on a plain white piece of paper, folded it neatly and poked it through the hole: Dear robot, do you get sick of augmenting human lives?Do you get on well with your robotic friends?Yours sincerely, Prue. I waited a few minutes and then my very same piece of paper was thrust back through the hole. It was not folded but was crumpled up. I opened it and noticed a smudged mark in the corner. It looked like an ancient symbol, a strange elliptical script of rounded shapes, but was too small to read. An intergalactic message, a signal from an alien presence perhaps? So I borrowed a magnifying glass from the Artspace gallery attendant. It read: I love opera. Robot Two must die. This was unexpected! As I pondered the robot’s reply, I noticed the robots did indeed make strange bird-like noises to one another; their tapping was like rhythmic woodpeckers. Their hammering was a kind of operatic symphony; it was not far-fetched that these robots were appreciative of the sound patterns they made. In other words, they were responding to stimuli in the environment, and acting in response. They had agency beyond the immaterial computational programming their creators had embedded. It wasn’t difficult to suspend disbelief to allow the possibility that interaction between the robots might occur, or that one might have gone rogue. An acceptance of the possibility of inter-agency would allow the fantastical reality of a human becoming short-term pen pals with an augmented machine. Karen Barad might endorse such an unexpected intra-action act. She discourages conventional critique as, “a tool that keeps getting used out of habit” (Matter Feels). Art writing, in an era of robots and awareness of other non-human sentient life-forms can be speculative invention, have a Barad-like imaginative materiality (Matter Feels), and sense of suspended disbelief. Figure 2: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) The Final Onto-Story Straw Gemeinboeck and Saunders say the space where their robots perform is a questionable one: “the fidelity of the space as a shared experience is thus brought into question: how can a shared virtual experience be trusted when it is constructed from such intangible and malleable stuff as streams of binary digits” (7). The answer might be that it is not to be trusted, particularly in an OOO aesthetic approach that allows divergent and contingent fictive possibilities. Indeed, thinking about the fidelity of the space, there was something about a narrow access corridor in the Accomplice exhibition space, between the false gallery wall and the cavity where the robots moved on their track, that beckoned me. I glanced over my shoulder to check that the Artspace attendant wasn’t watching and slipped behind the wall. I took a few tentative steps, not wanting to get knocked on the nose by a zooming robot. I saw that one robot had turned away from the wall and was attacking another with its hammer. By the time I arrived, the second robot (could it be Robot Two?) had been badly pummeled. Not only did Robot One attack Robot Two but I witnessed it using its extended hammer to absorb metal parts: the light and the hammer. It was adapting, like Philip K. Dick’s robots in his short story ‘Preserving Machine’ (See Gray 228-33). It was becoming more augmented. It now had two lights and two hammers and seemed to move at double speed. Figure 3: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)My observance of this scene might be explained by Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s comment regarding Philip K. Dick-style interference and instability, which they actively apply to their work. They say, “The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials” (18). An audience response is a colliding material. A fictional aside is a colliding material. A suspension of disbelief must also be considered a colliding material. This is the politics of the para-human, where regulations and policies are in their infancy. Fears of artificial intelligence seem absurd, when we consider how startled we become when the boundaries between fiction/truth become as flimsy and slippery as the boundaries between human/non-human. Art writing that resists truth complements Gemeinboeck/Saunders point that, “different agential forces not only co-evolve but perform together” (18).The DisappearanceBefore we are able to distinguish any unexpected or enchanted ontological outcomes, the robots must first appear, but for things to truly appear to us, they must first disappear. The robots disappear from view, behind the false walls. Slowly, through the enactment of an agented force (the action of their hammers upon the wall), they beat a path into the viewer’s visual reality. Their emergence signals a performative augmentation. Stronger, better, smarter, longer: these creatures are more-than-human. Yet despite the robot’s augmented technological improvement upon human ability, their being (here, meaning their independent autonomy) is under threat in a human-centred world environment. First they are threatened by the human habit of reducing them to anthropomorphic characteristics: they can be seen as cute little versions of humans. Secondly, they are threatened by human perception that they are under the control of the programmers. Both points are arguable: these robots are undoubtedly non-human, and there are unexpected and unplanned outcomes, once they are activated. These might be speculative or contestable outcomes, which are not demonstrably an epitome of truth (Bennett 161). Figure 4: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Gemeinboeck’s robotic creatures, with their apparent work/play and civil disobedience, appeared to exhibit human traits. An OOO approach would discourage these anthropomorphic tendencies: by seeing human qualities in inanimate objects, we are only falling back into correlational habits—where nature and culture are separate dyads and can never comprehend each other, and where humankind is mistakenly privileged over all other entities (Meillassoux 5). This only serves to inhibit any access to a reality outside the human-centred view. This kind of objectivity, where we see ourselves as nature, does no more than hold up a mirror to our inescapably human selves (Barad, Matter Feels). In an object-oriented approach the unpredictable outcomes of the robots’s performance is brought to attention. OOO proponent and digital media theorist Ian Bogost, has a background in computational media, especially video and social media games, and says, “computers are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers” (9). This is a non-life description, hovering in the liminal space between being and not being. Bogost’s view is that a strange world stirs within machinic devices (9). A question to ask: what’s it like to be a robot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between what it does and how we see it. It is difficult not to think of twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis theory when writing of Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s work because Heidegger, and OOO scholar Graham Harman after him, uses the hammer as his paradigmatic tool. In his analysis, things are only present-at-hand (consciously perceived without utility) once they break (Harman, Heidegger Explained 63). However, Gemeinboeck and Saunders’s installation Accomplice straddles Heidegger’s dual present-at-hand and read-at-hand (the utility of the thing) because art raises the possibility that we might experience these divergent qualities of the robotic entities, simultaneously. The augmented robot, existing in its performative exhibition ecology, is the bridge between sentient life and utility. Robotic Agency In relation to the agency of robots, Ian Bogost refers to the Tableau Machine which was a non-human actor system created by researchers at Georgia Tech in 1998 (Bogost 106). It was a house fitted with cameras, screens, interfaces, and sensors. This was an experimental investigation into ambient intelligence. The researchers’s term for the computational agency was ‘alien presence,’ suggesting a life outside human comprehension. The data-collator sensed and interpreted the house and its occupants, and re-created that recorded data as abstract art, by projecting images on its own plasma screens. The implication was that the home was alive, vital, and autonomously active, in that it took on a sentient life, beyond human control. This kind of vital presence, an aliveness outside human programming, is there in the Accomplice robots. Their agency becomes materialized, as they violate the polite gallery-viewing world. Karen Barad’s concept of agency works within a relational ontology. Agency resists being granted, but rather is an enactment, and creates new possibilities (Barad, Matter Feels). Agency is entangled amongst “intra-acting human and non-human practices” (6). In Toward an Enchanted Materialism, Jane Bennett describes primordia (atoms) as “not animate with divine spirit, and yet they are quite animated - this matter is not dead at all” (81). This then is an agency that is not spiritual, nor is there any divine purpose. It is a matter of material force, a subversive action performed by robotic entities, not for any greater good, in fact, for no reason at all. This unpredictability is OOO contingency, whereby physical laws remain indifferent to whether an event occurs or not (Meillassoux 39). Figure 5: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) A Post-Human Ethic The concept of a post-human state of being raises ethical concerns. Ethics is a human construct, a criteria of standards fixed within human social systems. How should humans respond, without moral panic, to robots that might have life and sentient power outside human control? If an OOO approach is undertaken, the implication is that all things exist equally and ethics, as fixed standards, might need to be dismantled and replaced with a more democratic set of guidelines. A flat ontology, argued for by Bogost, Levi Bryant and other OOO advocates, follows that all entities have equal potential for independent energy and agency (although OOO theorists disagree on many small technical issues). The disruption of the conventional hierarchical model of being is replaced by a flat field of equality. This might cause the effect of a more ethical, ontological ecology. Quentin Meillassoux, an influential figure in the field of Speculative Realism, from which OOO is an offshoot, finds philosophical/mathematical solutions to the problems of human subjectivity. His eschewing of Kantian divisions between object/subject and human/world, is accompanied by a removal from Kantian and Cartesian critique (Meillassoux 30). This turn from critique, and its related didactic authority and removed judgment, marks an important point in the culture of philosophy, but also in the culture of art writing. If we can escape the shackles of divisive critique, then the pleasures of narrative might be given space. Bogost endorses collapsing the hierarchical model of being and converting conventional academic writing (89). He says, “for the computers to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they “experience” (Bogost 10)? This view is complementary to an OOO view of anti-subjectivity, an awareness of things that might exist irrespective of human life, from both inside and outside the mind (Harman 143). Figure 6: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) New Materiality In addition to her views on human/non-human agency, Karen Barad develops a parallel argument for materiality. She says, “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.” Barad’s agential realism is predicated on an awareness of the immanence of matter, with materiality that subverts conventions of transcendence or human-centredness. She says, “On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity - its iterative intra-activity.” Barad sees matter, all matter, as entangled parts of phenomena that extend across time and space (Nature’s Queer Performativity 125). Barad argues against the position that acts against nature are moral crimes, which occur when the nature/culture divide is breached. She questions the individuated categorizations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ inherent in arguments like these (Nature’s Queer Performativity, 123-5). Likewise, in robotic and machinic aesthetics, it could be seen as an ethical breach to consider the robots as alive, sentient, and experiential. This confounds previous cultural separations, however, object-oriented theory is a reexamination of these infractions and offers an openness to discourse of different causal outcomes. Figure 7: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) Co-Evolution Artists Gemeinboeck/Saunders are artists and scholarly researchers investigating new notions of co-evolution. If we ascribe human characteristics to robots, might they ascribe machinic properties to us? It is possible to argue that co-evolution is already apparent in the world. Titanium knees, artificial arteries, plastic hips, pacemakers, metallic vertebrae pins: human medicine is a step ahead. Gemeinboeck/Saunders in turn make a claim for the evolving desires of their robots (11). Could there be performative interchangeability between species: human and robot? Barad asks us not to presume what the distinctions are between human and non-human and not to make post-humanist blurrings, but to understand the materializing effects of the boundaries between humans and nonhumans (Nature’s Queer Performativity 123). Vital matter emerges from acts of reappearance, re-performance, and interspecies interaction. Ian Bogost begins his Alien Phenomenology by analysing Alan Turing’s essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and deduces that it is an approach inextricably linked to human understanding (Bogost 14). Bogost seeks to avoid distinctions between things or a slippage into an over-determination of systems operations, and instead he adopts an OOO view where all things are treated equally, even cheeky little robots (Bogost 17).Figure 8: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, installation view, Artspace, Sydney. (Photo: silversalt photography) Intra-Active ReappearanceIf Barad describes intra-action as enacting an agential cut or separation of object from subject, she does not mean a distinction between object and subject but instead devises an intra-active cutting of things together-apart (Nature’s Queer Performativity 124). This is useful for two reasons. First it allows confusion between inside and outside, between real and unreal, and between past and future. In other words it defies the human/world correlates, which OOO’s are actively attempting to flee. Secondly it makes sense of an idea of disappearance as being a re-appearance too. If robots, and all other species, start to disappear, from our consciousness, from reality, from life (that is, becoming extinct), this disappearance causes or enacts a new appearance (the robotic action), and this action has its own vitality and immanence. If virtuality (an aesthetic of being that grew from technology, information, and digital advancements) meant that the body was left or abandoned for an immaterial space, then robots and robotic artwork are a means of re-inhabiting the body in a re-materialized mode. This new body, electronic and robotic in nature, might be mastered by a human hand (computer programming) but its differential is its new agency which is one shared between human and non-human. Barad warns, however, against a basic inversion of humanism (Nature’s Queer Performativity 126). Co-evolution is not the removal of the human. While an OOO approach may not have achieved the impossible task of creating a reality beyond the human-centric, it is a mode of becoming cautious of an invested anthropocentric view, which robotics and diminished non-human species bring to attention. The autonomy and agency of robotic life challenges human understanding of ontological being and of how human and non-human entities relate.References Barad, Karen. "Nature’s Queer Performativity." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 121-158. ———. Interview. In Rick Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; Open Humanities Press, 2012. ———. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. University of Michigan Publishing: Open Humanities Press, 2011. ———, N. Srnicek, and GHarman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re:press, 2011. Gemeinboeck, Petra, and Rob Saunders. “Other Ways of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete.” Fibreculture Journal 18 (2011). ‹http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-120-other-ways-of-knowing-embodied-investigations-of-the-unstable-slippery-and-incomplete/›. Gray, Nathan. "L’object sonore undead." In A. Barikin and H. Hughes. Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction. Melbourne: Surpllus, 2013. 228-233. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester UK: Zero Books, 2011. ———. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. ———. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Continuum, 2008. Muecke, Stephen. "The Fall: Ficto-Critical Writing." Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108-112. ———. "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgment." Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40-58. ———. “The Writing Laboratory: Political Ecology, Labour, Experiment.” Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 15-20. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Photo by Jeremy Wong on Unsplash ABSTRACT In response to the threat of COVID-19, CMS issued unprecedented restrictions severely limiting the liberty of older adults residing in long-term care. Older adults are identified as at a high risk of becoming infected through exposure to SARS-Cov-2 and of suffering the most severe morbidity and mortality. While protecting the individual from disease, the restrictions also had a determinantal effect. The restrictions exacerbated social isolation and loneliness, two pervasive public health concerns within the older adult population. Legally, the restrictions pass constitutional muster. The ethical analysis presents more questions and debates. Initially, the restrictions to protect the older adult were grounded in public health ethics and bioethics principles. However, the ethical lines become blurred as the risk of harm secondary to isolation increased over the time that the restrictions remained in effect. The ethical point of view becomes more divergent considering the restrictions also preserved medical resources for the greater good of society, arguably diverting them to serve younger people. We have a moral obligation to reduce social isolation and recognize the older adult as a valuable member of society with equal worth and dignity. INTRODUCTION In response to the threat of COVID-19, CMS issued unprecedented restrictions severely limiting the liberty of older adults residing in long-term care. Older adults are identified as at a high risk of becoming infected from exposure to SARS-Cov-2 and from suffering the most severe morbidity and mortality. While protecting the individual from disease, the restrictions also had a determinantal effect. The restrictions exacerbated social isolation and loneliness, two pervasive public health concerns within the older adult population. Legally, the restrictions pass Constitutional muster. The ethical analysis presents more questions and debates. Initially, the restrictions to protect the older adult were grounded in public health ethics and bioethics principles. However, the ethical lines become blurred as the risk of harm secondary to isolation increased over the time that the restrictions remained in effect. The devastation of COVID-19 within the older adult population extends beyond the immediate risk and harm of infection. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts determined that older adults, especially those living in long-term care, were at a greater risk of becoming infected and depleting scarce medical resources. Two days after WHO declared the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) followed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommendations and announced mitigation measures that required long-term care facilities to (1) restrict volunteers and nonessential personnel from entering the facility; (2) cancel all group activities and communal dining; (3) screen residents and health care personnel for fever and respiratory symptoms; and (4) encourage residents to stay in their rooms. The social isolation resulting from the mitigation measures posed a credible threat to five core domains of healthy aging: (1) promoting health; preventing injury and managing chronic conditions; (2) cognitive health; (3) physical health; (4) mental health; and (5) facilitating social engagement.[1] l. Social Isolation and Loneliness COVID-19 highlighted two pervasive public health concerns confronting older adults—social isolation and loneliness. Social isolation is an objective deficit in the number of relationships and the frequency of contact with family, friends, and the community.[2] Social Isolation is a risk factor for loneliness. Loneliness is the subjective perception of a lack of meaningful relationships.[3] Loneliness has three dimensions: (1) absence of a significant person to provide emotional support and affirm one’s value as a person; (2) absence of a small group of people seen regularly, such as a card group; and (3) absence of a larger network group of people who provide support by being together as a group, for example, church services or rotary meetings.[4] COVID-19 restrictions affected all three dimensions. Social isolation can be as dangerous as smoking fifteen cigarettes per day, earning its designation as a public health priority.[5] Isolation increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, anxiety, and depression. Loneliness can lead to depression, alcoholism, and suicidal thoughts.[6] Some studies found that loneliness is also a factor in cognitive decline. For example, caregivers reported that 63 percent of older adults with cognitive impairment experienced cognitive decline during the COVID-19 pandemic.[7] In 2017, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) reported that social isolation accounted for $6.7 billion in additional Medicare spending although only 14 percent of older adults in the US reported being socially isolated.[8] Approximately 24 percent of community-dwelling older adults in the US are socially isolated. Forty-three percent of adults aged 60 and older report feeling lonely. Those living in long-term care report loneliness at a rate of at least double of community-dwelling older adults.[9] WHO defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”[10] A broad definition of health highlights the detriment of social isolation in older adults. There is a moral obligation to mitigate the effect of isolation.[11] The additional Medicare spending costs attributable to the effects of social isolation secondary to COVID-19 will be extraordinary. Providing social support will directly benefit older adults and indirectly benefit society by reducing Medicare spending associated with the effects of social isolation. Combating the pervasiveness of social isolation requires immediate collaborative community action. Many long-term care residents who depend on visits from family and friends to socialize increasingly felt lonely, abandoned, and despondent,[12] increasing the risk of feeling grief and loss, including individual and collective trauma reactions.[13] Also, normally social opportunities, medical, and legal appointments defaulted to telephone or virtual appointments. The cessation of in-person medical appointments interfered with optimal management of chronic conditions and preventive care. Some older adults lack access to the technology, are unfamiliar with technology, or cannot use technology for other reasons. At least one study supports the potential for older adults to benefit from technology and suggests that training could promote long-term benefits in older adults aged 80 years and over.[14] Focusing on technological advances specific to older adults with input from older adults should be a priority. When communal dining abruptly stopped, residents had to eat all their meals alone in their rooms. Older adults often mention the difficulty of eating meals alone, especially if recently divorced, widowed, or otherwise separated from a spouse or partner. Closure of the exercise facilities limited the ability of an older adult to stay physically active. Reduced physical activity creates long-term adverse health effects.[15] ll. Measures to Mitigate Isolation To facilitate some contact, long-term care facilities devised window visits. The resident remained safely inside the locked facility, standing or seated in front of a window. Visitors stood outside in the grass or parking lot. Any conversation took place over the telephone. To simulate physical contact, residents and visitors pressed their palms together, separated by the glass barrier. The window visits recall the prison visits depicted in movies and television. In late June 2020, CMS relaxed the restrictions and advised that long-term care facilities could resume some communal activities and permit outdoor visits. Although CMS eased the restrictions, interpersonal contact remained minimal. Outdoor visits required scheduling an appointment during limited hours of availability. The facilities limited the visits per week and the duration of each visit to thirty minutes. In addition, the staff enforced wearing personal protective equipment and maintaining physical distancing. Several impracticalities diminished the optimism of the relaxed restrictions. Residents could leave their rooms for meals but remained physically separated at a distance that prevented any meaningful interaction. Similarly, the limitations on the in-person visits presented problems. Non-resident spouses with mobility challenges found the outdoor access difficult, if not impossible. Residents or spouses with hearing and vision losses experienced challenges in communicating while sitting outside, six feet apart, and wearing masks.[16] lll. Legal Precedent for Emergency Measures The primary legal issue stems from the conflict between individual liberty and the public good or health. Jacobson v. Massachusetts provides a framework for balancing individual liberty rights and the public good during a pandemic.[17] Jacobson clarified an essential point of law - the rights and liberties secured by the US Constitution are not absolute.[18] Faced with a pandemic, a community has the right to protect members of the community.[19] Jacobson outlines four standards for imposing public health mandates during a pandemic. First, the State overreaches when it uses public health powers unnecessarily.[20] Second, the state must use the least restrictive means to prevent harm.[21] Third, the state must use reasonable means expected to prevent or ameliorate a health threat.[22] Finally, the intervention must not pose an undue risk.[23] The guidelines in Jacobson, established during the smallpox pandemic, apply to COVID-19. In response to the threat of COVID-19, public health authorities enacted mandates to protect the public, especially older adults, against the highly contagious and virulent virus. The CMS restrictions specifically addressed older adults living in long-term care facilities. While the CMS directives obstructed residents’ liberties, they also contradicted the Assisted Living Facility social model, which places autonomy and independence at the forefront. Given the gravity of harm and the uncertainties in the early phases of the pandemic, the restrictions were arguably the least restrictive means to manage the immediate threat. The effectiveness varied from facility to facility, with many deaths throughout the US in long-term care facilities. While valuable early in the pandemic, at some point the continuation of the mitigation measures increased social isolation and its associated risks. In Jew Ho v. Williamson, the Supreme Court overturned a quarantine order to contain the bubonic plague.[24] The officials enforced the order only against a targeted ethnic population which did not present an identified risk.[25] In reaching its decision, the Court determined that the quarantine order was not a reasonable regulation to prevent the spread of the bubonic plague. Rather, it was racially motivated. The Court ruled that the government cannot impose public health orders in a racially invidious manner.[26] There are similarities between Jew Ho and the CMS restrictions. Like the quarantine order in Jew Ho, the restrictions targeted a specific population. But with COVID-19 older adults were an identified high-risk population because of their susceptibility to infection and severe illness. During the early phases of the pandemic, the directives were reasonable to accomplish the purpose of preventing the spread in the identified high-risk population. They were not discriminatory according to the rule of law in Jew Ho. The argument supporting the constitutionality of the CMS restrictions wanes as the length of the safety precautions increased. lV. Ethical Analysis of the Lengthy Social Isolation The CMS restrictions require the ethical analysis of harm, proportionality, reciprocity, and transparency. As well as analysis under the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. a. Harm and Proportionality As previously discussed, older adult long-term care residents were more susceptible to COVID-19 and to severe physical effects requiring hospitalization. In addition, older adults are more likely to die from COVID-19. Based on a totality of the circumstances and what we knew about the virus in the early phases of the pandemic, the restrictions were the least restrictive means to protect this high-risk population. But the question of proportionality requires ongoing assessment and re-evaluation. While the initial uncertainty and chaos justified the restrictions, as the pandemic continued and the risk of harm from the restrictions increased, the pendulum began to swing. At some point, upon proof or likelihood of safety, less restrictive alternatives should have been adopted. b. Reciprocity The concept of reciprocity is a core principle of public health and requires the balancing of the benefits and burdens of the social cooperation.[27] When individuals sacrifice their liberty for the benefit of others, they should not be penalized as a result of making the sacrifice, and thus society owes a reciprocal obligation to the individuals, such as providing individuals support and not discriminating against them.[28] Residents did not have any input or choice when CMS and the administrators stripped away their autonomy and liberties. While the restrictions protected the individual resident from the direct harm of infection, the restrictions also protected society from the indirect harm of the depletion of scarce medical resources. Public health officials identified long-term care residents as most likely to require significant medical resources. One talking point repeatedly broadcast was the need to prevent the depletion of hospital beds, ventilators, medications, and supplies. Most assisted-living facilities are for-profit, and residents pay for their food, shelter, and personal needs. What does society owe these long-term care residents in return for the liberty they sacrificed for the benefit of society at large? At the very least, I suggest we owe these individuals the commitment to conduct research exploring and addressing the effects of the restrictions. c. Transparency by Government, the Media, and the Long-Term care Facilities The communications from government and public health officials about the pandemic and the restrictions were opaque, leaving unanswered questions, doubts, and speculation. Some facilities provided families with basic information communicated through robocall messaging, with words of encouragement, painting rosy pictures of the residents' sequestered daily lives. Public health officials assert the common good and protecting the public’s safety and health justify paternalism and compulsory powers.[29] One counterargument is that the compulsory interventions or restrictions push paternalism to new levels.[30] The COVID-19 pandemic and the mitigation interventions highlight this tension between libertarian and epidemiological models based on (1) shortages that triggered rationing and prioritization; and (2) measures that safeguarded public health but infringed on individual rights.[31] d. Autonomy, Beneficence, and Non-Maleficence Through a bioethical lens, we immediately see the clash between the CMS restrictions and the long-term care residents’ autonomy. However, autonomy is not absolute. There was a benefit for the individual resident: the protection from a deadly virus. Thus, I argue that the initial restrictions were beneficent. Yet I also point to the deleterious secondary physical and emotional effects of the isolation and assert that the restrictions should have been safely modified as new information on viral spread and safety came about. We can accept the beneficence of protecting the high-risk resident from a deadly disease while acknowledging the associated harm. However, at some point, we must also ask if the harm experienced due to prolonged severe restrictions reached a level that exceeded the boundaries of beneficence and became maleficent. Perceiving the long-term care resident as a passive recipient of care is paternalistic and antithetical to autonomy and a person-centered approach.[32] Instead, society must recognize older adults as essential stakeholders in policymaking. The direct and active involvement of older adults allows the individual to retain agency rather than becoming a passive recipient of care.[33] Prioritization of the older adult as an autonomous active participant counters ageism and promotes autonomy. e. Justice Justice calls for analysis of several discrepancies. First, the special protection of long-term care residents seems justifiable due to their special vulnerability. CMS treated long-term care facilities alike. Most community-dwelling older adults could decide whether to adhere to stay-at-home restrictions and were not subject to the same level of enforcement that existed within long-term care facilities. The restrictions were far more oppressive for long-term care residents. In response to the assertion that selective lockdown discriminates against older adults, the same arguments discussed above demonstrate the morally relevant justification: older adults are more likely to require hospitalization and die from COVID-19.[34] One convincing argument against restrictions on older adults echoing Kant’s categorical imperative argues that selectively restricting older adults for the good of other people amounts to treating older adults as a means to an end for others.[35] While the restrictions imposed on the individual might slow the spread of the disease within the specific long-term care facility, which protects that individual resident, they also impose on the individual resident to serve the greater good: the preservation of scarce medical resources. The second application pushes the restrictive measures closer to violating Kant’s categorical imperative by treating the older adult as a means to the end of others. That is, younger people and those living outside of long-term care would have more hospital resources available to them if long-term care residents were more severely isolated keeping them from needing hospitalization. From a Kantian perspective, the categorical imperative demands respecting the dignity of persons—Kant’s supreme (formal) principle.[36] When we consider the restrictions, I suggest that we must also consider the impact on dignity. It has been suggested that dignity is the “overarching principle of bioethics.”[37] In the context of an analysis of the socially isolating COVID-19 mitigation measures on older adults in long-term care facilities, we should consider the relational aspect of dignity, recognizing the adult as having value and equal worth. The protracted imposed isolation of older adults to preserve medical resources devalues older adults. Ongoing COVID-19 restrictions should be analyzed for their unjustified harms. A second justice concern outside the scope here is that long-term care facilities are resourced differently, and had different results due to quality of care, number of staff, infection control protocols, and previous health infraction records. CONCLUSION The myopic focus on mortality ignores the risks of morbidity secondary to the devastating effects of social isolation on the older adult’s health and quality of life. The paternalistic prevention eclipsed the resident’s autonomy. At some point, the attention and priority must shift. When formulating policies, we must figure out at what point or in which situations the negative impact of restrictions outweighs the protective benefits. Although the restrictions may have slowed the spread of COVID-19, we must not discount the negative consequences, which may be long-term. From an ethical perspective, we must acknowledge the harm that has occurred within this population and accept the responsibility to redress the harm and prevent repeating the mistakes. The prolonged restrictions stretched legal and ethical boundaries. The mixed purpose of the restrictions (protecting the individual resident and preserving healthcare resources) makes the ethical analysis more challenging. Yet doing something for someone’s own good is still paternalistic and problematic. The public health justification includes the collective. We must confront the tough questions about the efficacy of pandemic mitigation measures and the mitigation measures’ adverse consequences. Leaving the doors to long-term care facilities open during the pandemic would have exposed every resident and staff member to a contagion that presented a significant risk of morbidity and mortality. But locking the doors exacerbated social isolation and loneliness, increasing the risk of morbidity and mortality. Julian Savulescu may be correct that there was no desirable solution. We must still work to find better solutions that will reduce social isolation and recognize the older adult as a valuable member of society with equal worth and dignity. [1] Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Nursing Homes & Long-term care Facilities. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html. [2]Escalante, E., Golden, R. L., & Mason, D. J. (2020). Social Isolation and Loneliness: Imperatives for Health Care in a Post-COVID World. JAMA Health Forum, 1(12),e201597. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2020.1597. [3] D'cruz, M., & Banerjee, D. (2020). ‘An invisible human rights crisis’: The marginalization of older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic – An advocacy review. Psychiatry Research, 292, 113369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113369. [4] Simard, J., & Volicer, L. (2020). Loneliness and Isolation in Long-term care and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 21(7), 966–967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2020.05.006. [5] Escalante, E., Golden, R. L., & Mason, D. J. (2020). Social Isolation and Loneliness: Imperatives for Health Care in a Post-COVID World. JAMA Health Forum, 1(12). https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2020.1597. [6] Simard, J., & Volicer, L. (2020). Loneliness and Isolation in Long-term care and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 21(7), 966–967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2020.05.006. [7] Batsis, J. A., Daniel, K., Eckstrom, E., Goldlist, K., Kusz, H., Lane, D., … Friedman, S. M. (2021, January 26). Promoting Healthy Aging During COVID‐19. American Geriatrics Society. https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jgs.17035. [8] Escalante, E., Golden, R. L., & Mason, D. J. (2020). Social Isolation and Loneliness: Imperatives for Health Care in a Post-COVID World. JAMA Health Forum, 1(12), e201597. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2020.1597. [9] Simard, J., & Volicer, L. (2020). Loneliness and Isolation in Long-term care and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 21(7), 966–967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2020.05.006. [10] World Health Organization. Frequently Asked Questions. https://www.who.int/about/frequently-asked-questions. [11] Chu, C. H., Donato‐Woodger, S., & Dainton, C. J. (2020). Competing crises: COVID‐19 countermeasures and social isolation among older adults in long‐term care. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 76(10), 2456–2459. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14467. [12] Gardner, W., States, D., & Bagley, N. (n.d.). The Coronavirus and the Risks to the Elderly in Long-term care. Journal of aging & social policy. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32245346/. [13] Campbell, A. D. (2020). Practical Implications of Physical Distancing, Social Isolation, and Reduced Physicality for Older Adults in Response to COVID-19. Journal of Gerontological Social Work, 63(6-7), 668–670. https://doi.org/10.1080/01634372.2020.1772933. [14] Radwan, E., Radwan, A., & Radwan, W. (2020). Challenges Facing Older Adults during the COVID-19 Outbreak. European Journal of Environment and Public Health, 5(1), em0059. https://doi.org/10.29333/ejeph/8457. [15] Plagg, B., Engl, A., Piccoliori, G., & Eisendle, K. (2020). Prolonged social isolation of the elderly during COVID-19: Between benefit and damage. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 89, 104086. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archger.2020.104086 . [16] Chu, C. H., Donato‐Woodger, S., & Dainton, C. J. (2020). Competing crises: COVID‐19 countermeasures and social isolation among older adults in long‐term care. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 76(10), 2456–2459. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.14467. [17] Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905). [18] Jacobson. [19] Jacobson. [20] Jacobson. [21] Jacobson. [22] Jacobson. [23] Jacobson. [24] Jew Ho v. Williamson, 103 F.10 (C.C.N.D. Cal., 1900). [25] Jew Ho v. Williamson . [26] Jew Ho v. Williamson. [27] Viens, A. M. (2008). Public Health, Ethical Behavior and Reciprocity. The American Journal of Bioethics, 8(5), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160802180059. [28] Upshur, R. (2003, November 1). The Ethics of Quarantine. Retrieved from https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/ethics-quarantine/2003-11. [29] Kamweri, J. M. M. (2013). The Ethical Balance Between Individual and Population Health Interests To Effectively Manage Pandemics and Epidemics (dissertation). [30] Argued by Ken Wing Professor Emeritus, Seattle University School of Law. Kamweri, J. M. M. (2013). The Ethical Balance Between Individual and Population Health Interests To Effectively Manage Pandemics and Epidemics (dissertation). [31] Interests To Effectively Manage Pandemics and Epidemics (dissertation). [32] Chu, p. 2457. [33] D'cruz, p.7. [34] Savulescu, J., & Cameron, J. (2020). Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong. Journal of Medical Ethics, 46(11), 717–721. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106336. [35] Hugh McLachlan, Professor Emeritus of Applied Philosophy, [36] Heinrichs, B. (2010). Single-Principle Versus Multi-Principles Approaches in Bioethics. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 27(1), 72-83. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00474.x. [37] Gedge, E. by impact ethics · in C. E. (2015, July 27). What Is Dignity and Does Bioethics Need to Talk About It? Impact Ethics. https://impactethics.ca/2015/07/27/what-is-dignity-and-does-bioethics-need-to-talk-about-it/, citing, The 2005 UNESCO Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights https://en.unesco.org/themes/ethics-science-and-technology/bioethics-and-human-rights.