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The Beast with Two BacksToday, the comparison of male homosexuality to bestiality is unfortunately too well-known from homophobic polemics. Yet this comparison has a history in the Anglophone world, and it emerged in the early European Middle Ages seemingly not in order to dehumanize men who had sex with men but in order to make bestiality appear serious by comparing it to male-male sexual acts. The eighth-century Paenitentiale Theodori—which collects the judgments of the Byzantine-born Archbishop Theodore—is the earliest extant English text to connect male-male sexual acts with bestiality. This comparison does not occur in the previous penitentials, but, after its appearance in the Paenitentiale, this comparison traveled throughout Western Europe. No scholarship to date examines the global origins of such a comparison. This paper argues that later medieval views of bestiality as perverse and as a serious sexual offense emerged from bestiality’s early comparison to same-sex acts (rather than vice-versa). Prior to the Paenitentiale Theodori, European theologians described bestiality as a minor sin akin to masturbation. Theodore borrowed the comparison of bestiality and male-male sex acts from a Latin mistranslation of the 314 Greek Council of Ancyra and from the Byzantine theologian St. Basil the Great. Since the early penitentials accorded male-male sexual acts some of the most serious penances, the comparison of bestiality to these acts elevated bestiality for the first time in Western Europe to the status of a serious and unnatural sin. Through connection to effeminizing male-male sexual acts, bestiality gained a reputation as a serious, boundary-violating sin in its own right.
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Body-worn cameras: Technological frames and project abandonmentThis case study examines the technological frames of administrators and users regarding the implementation of body-worn cameras at the Pennybridge Police Department, a mid-sized police organization (<300) in the Mid-Western United States. Using semi-structured interviews, a patrol survey, and ride-along observations; we found that different actors based on their hierarchy and function framed body-worn cameras differently over time. Administrators implemented body-cameras to protect officers from frivolous complaints while at the same time holding them accountable for their behavior. Users felt, for the most part, that the technology had become a “gotcha mechanism” as body camera footage was used to placate the public, monitor officer behavior, and charge them with minor infractions. Adding to their frustrations, users felt increasingly dispirited by the technical shortcomings of the cameras and the backend storage system provided by the vendor. At the same time, administrators were vexed by the financial and logistical burden of the program, ultimately leading to project abandonment and a search for a new system. Our findings have important implications for policymakers and future research.
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The Pennybridge pioneers: understanding internal stakeholder perceptions of body-worn camera implementationSince body-worn cameras (BWCs) were catapulted into mainstream discourse, they have diffused rapidly across police agencies in the United States. Research followed swiftly, providing a wealth of information about how the police and citizens make sense of these technologies. Moreover, we have learned how these technologies have impacted important policing outcomes, such as citizen complaints and the use of coercive force during citizen encounters. However, despite the growing body of research, very little is known about how police stakeholders make sense of the implementation of BWCs and about their decision-making throughout the implementation process. Therefore, this research examines the decision to implement BWCs in one mid-sized municipal police department in the United States through the lens of Rogers (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theoretical framework. We rely on semi-structured interviews and observations with 17 stakeholders to address this question. Our findings show that BWC technology generally posed little uncertainty for stakeholders in terms of what it could offer conceptually. However, because the agency was an early adopter, decision-makers were confronted with significant uncertainty about practical matters such as the financial and logistical costs of implementing the technology, in addition to policy creation. These findings have important implications for scholars and practitioners.
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Body-Worn Cameras and Internal Accountability at a Police AgencyExisting research on body-worn cameras have primarily focused on certain policing outcomes (e.g., citizen complaints and use-of-force), however, only a handful of research to date has considered how the implementation of body-worn cameras have impacted internal organizational processes at police departments. Using semi-structured interviews, a survey, and ride-along observations, we examined how body-worn cameras impacted the way police officers were held or felt accountable for their behavior. The study was conducted at the Sunnyvale Police Department (pseudonym), a small city agency in the United States that had been using cameras for two and a half years. Particularly, we describe how body-worn cameras impacted accountability at Sunnyvale within different organizational contexts that included reporting, citizen interactions, training, and supervision. Consistent with the hopes of reformers, body-worn cameras did seem to raise the general sense of accountability as they became a part of training, citizen encounters, reporting, and supervision. However, these changes were not like reformers would have imagined, as the department did not intently use cameras in a way to hold officers any more accountable for their conduct and performance on the street.
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The effects of body-worn cameras on police organisation and practice: a theory-based analysisThis study applies the technical/rational model of organisations to help explain the effects of body-worn cameras on police organisation and practice in a single police agency in the United States. Consistent with the technical/rational model, cameras had enhanced those people processing and environment-changing features of the police organisation which had tangible goals and well understood means for their accomplishment. In comparison, body-worn cameras were less successful in changing supervision and training, which were not well developed technically. We posit that improvements in these people changing aspects of police work will likely require public pressure for higher levels of police professionalism, rigorous evidence on how these cameras can make training and supervision more effective, and police agencies willing to experiment with their strategic implementation.
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“As Black as They Were Before”: The History of Skin Colour and the History of the Holy Rood-TreeA twelfth-century manuscript preserves an English homily known as the History of the Holy Rood-Tree. In it, the three Rods of Moses perform a number of miracles, including turning the skin of several Ethiopian men and their sons white. The Ethiopian mothers, however, remain Black. The History is perhaps the earliest surviving English text to create a hierarchy of skin colour, and to explicitly state that white skin is more beautiful than black skin. This article frames the History as an early chapter in the history of European depictions of Blackness. The Ethiopians know and respect God, and the History represents their Blackness as abject yet affording insight into God that white characters do not have. At the same time, they implicitly desire whiteness, in an uncanny precursor to the internalized feelings of inferiority that Frantz Fanon described for modern Black people. The History reminds us of the truth of Fanon’s claims that the European past holds modern Black people prisoner, and that it is important to write long histories of race and anti-Blackness.
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Supporting First-Gens in the Library ClassroomAs librarian instructors our goal is to ensure that students have the tools they need to successfully navigate the research process. In this session, I present some strategies I use to create a more productive and inclusive library classroom. Session attendees will come away with enhanced skills for engaging with and empowering first-generation (and other) college students in their library instruction sessions to become better researchers and more confident members of the college community.
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Face-to-Face with Social Media: One Archivist's Approach to EngagementInspired by the findings in Julianna Maiorano’s thesis “Engagement Levels on Social Media: A Case Study of Sojourner Truth Library’s Instagram”, the College Archivist Librarian at SUNY Oswego followed recommendations to increase engagement with distinct communities (internal campus members and external researchers) through the official social media accounts of Penfield Library. Julianna’s primary findings showed posts that including faces in photographs on social media indeed increase engagement, and that libraries should increase featuring faces in social media posts to increase engagement with patrons. Posts on Twitter and Instagram created by the College Archivist Librarian during 2021 were tracked, statistics were pulled from the respective platforms, and means were established to measure two groups (face/no face, human/no human) against the total post average. Poster information includes engagement strategies, data from the social media platforms, and low-to-no cost recommendations for increasing the social media presence of an archive.
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Multi-Level Message Sequence Charts to Validate the Collaborative Automotive Cyber-Physical SystemsAutonomous driving and e-mobility are swiftly becoming not only the work of science fiction or popular science, but a reality. A key focus of manufacturers and suppliers in the automotive domain is of course to specify systems that implement this reality. Often, scenarios at type-level are used throughout the development process to specify system behavior and interaction within the car, as scenario models are comparatively easy to understand and can easily be subjected to manual validation. However, autonomous driving and e-mobility require interaction not just of systems within the same car, but collaboration between multiple cars as well as between cars and miscellaneous road infrastructure (e.g., smart road signs). The car becomes a Cyber-Physical System that dynamically forms collaborating networks at runtime with other Cyber-Physical System to create functionality that goes beyond the scope of the individual vehicle (e.g., resolve a traffic jam). Consequently, a plethora of possible compositions of such a network exist and must be specified and validated completely to assure their adequate and safe execution at runtime. Doing this at type-level with scenario models becomes prohibitively tedious, error prone, and likely results in unrealistic development cost. To combat this issue, we investigate the use of multi-level Message Sequence Charts to allow for specifying interaction scenarios between collaborative Cyber-Physical System in a network of collaborating automotive Cyber-Physical System. To assist the developer in systematically defining multi-level Message Sequence Charts, we propose two processes. The resulting diagrams use a mixture of type and instance-level abstractions within one conceptual diagram. This allows reducing the required effort to manually validate the adequacy of scenarios to a manageable amount because information within the scenarios can be validated in batches. At the same time, instance-level defects become more obvious. Evaluation results from a controlled experiment show that multi-level Message Sequence Charts contribute to effectiveness and efficiency of manual validation for collaborative automotive Cyber-Physical System.
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Context modeling for cyber‐physical systemsWhen developing cyber-physical systems (CPS), the context is of vital importance. CPS interact with the world not only through sensing the environment and acting upon it (like embedded systems) but also by communicating with other CPS (like systems in the Internet of Things [IoT]). This means that the context interactions CPS must deal with are much greater than regular embedded or IoT systems: On the one hand, external systems and human users constrain the specific interaction among them. On the other hand, properties of these external systems, human users, and laws, regulations, or standards constrain the way the CPS must be developed. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive, ontologically grounded context modeling framework to systematically explore the problem space in which a CPS under development will operate. This allows for the systematic elicitation of requirements for the CPS, early validation and verification of its properties, and safety assessment of its context interactions at runtime.
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A systematic literature review of requirements engineering educationRequirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or budget-overspending of software development projects. It is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. To this date, there exists no central concept of what RE education shall comprise. To lay a foundation, we report on a systematic literature review of the feld and provide a systematic map describing the current state of RE education. Doing so allows us to describe how the educational landscape has changed over the last decade. Results show that only a few established author collaborations exist and that RE education research is predominantly published in venues other than the top RE research venues (i.e., in venues other than the RE conference and journal). Key trends in RE instruction of the past decade include involvement of real or realistic stakeholders, teaching predominantly elicitation as an RE activity, and increasing student factors such as motivation or communication skills. Finally, we discuss open opportunities in RE education, such as training for security requirements and supply chain risk management, as well as developing a pedagogical foundation grounded in evidence of efective instructional approaches.
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Art as Advocacy: Protecting the US-Mexico Border Environment in Amanda Keller Konya’s “Specimens”Amanda Keller-Konya's multilayered photographic image construction in "Specimens" from North America's Most Polluted River" helps the viewer perceive the magnitude of the damage sustained by US-Mexico's border area residents in California's Imperial Valley and the effort necessary to clean the area's New River. The river originates in Mexicali city, capital of Baja California, northwestern Mexico, crosses the border, flows north through California's Imperial Valley, and empties into the Salton Sea, the state's largest and most contaminated lake. A sustainable environment is crucial to the health of the valley's residents and farms that supply most of the nation's winter produce. Recovery of the area's ecosystem requires solving the impact of agricultural runoff and toxic dust as less water flows into the Salton Sea, a body of water vital for the wellbeing of Southern Californians, the fish, and the migratory birds that depend on it for survival.
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Singquandles, psyquandles, and singular knots: A surveyIn this short survey, we review recent results dealing with algebraic structures (quandles, psyquandles, and singquandles) related to singular knot theory. We first explore the singquandles counting invariant and then consider several recent enhancements to this invariant. These enhancements include a singquandle cocycle invariant and several polynomial invariants of singular knots obtained from the singquandle structure. We then explore psyquandles which can be thought of as generalizations of oriented singquandles, and review recent developments regarding invariants of singular knots obtained from psyquandles.
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Polynomial invariants of singular knots and linksWe generalize the notion of the quandle polynomial to the case of singquandles. We show that the singquandle polynomial is an invariant of finite singquandles. We also construct a singular link invariant from the singquandle polynomial and show that this new singular link invariant generalizes the singquandle counting invariant. In particular, using the new polynomial invariant, we can distinguish singular links with the same singquandle counting invariant.
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Singquandle shadows and singular knot invariantsWe introduce shadow structures for singular knot theory. Precisely, we define two invari- ants of singular knots and links. First, we introduce a notion of action of a singquandle on a set to define a shadow counting invariant of singular links which generalize the classical shadow colorings of knots by quandles. We then define a shadow polynomial invariant for shadow structures. Lastly, we enhance the shadow counting invariant by combining both the shadow counting invariant and the shadow polynomial invariant. Explicit examples of computations are given.
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Cocycle Invariants and Oriented Singular KnotsWe extend the quandle cocycle invariant to oriented singular knots and links using algebraic structures called oriented singquandles and assigning weight functions at both regular and singular crossings. This invariant coincides with the classical cocycle invariant for classical knots, but provides extra information about singular knots and links. The new invariant distinguishes the singular granny knot from the singular square knot.
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Accessibility as a Foundation for an Equitable Digital Civic Engagement InfrastructureIndividuals and organizations in both higher education and civic engagement have become increasingly aware of their obligation to foster a sense of belonging among students and to support historically underrepresented populations within their work. As part of this effort, the authors argue that the civic engagement infrastructure (CEI)—a term they use to capture the full range of organizations and associated resources directed toward improving civic engagement within higher education which stems from actors both on and off campus—must pay more attention to digital accessibility. The authors document this need by establishing the degree to which higher education institutions rely on off-campus organizations and resources in civic engagement programming, as well as campus’s legal and ethical obligations to provide accessible digital content to students. To assess the current status of digital accessibility within the CEI, the authors performed accessibility audits on the websites of 11 organizations that contribute in various ways to voter mobilization efforts on college campuses. The findings revealed accessibility barriers embedded in the content and in the page templates used for these sites. The authors close with a discussion of the responsibility that content creators, content sharers, and decision makers have in meeting accessibility standards and how on- and off-campus actors fit into these roles. They also offer guidance on how to move forward with this work.
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Students Achievement and Interest in Elementary Structural Design: The Fixed Vs Floating Facilitator Approaches of Problem Based LearningThe purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of fixed vs floating facilitator approaches of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on students’ achievement and interest in Elementary Structural Design (ESD). The design was quasi-experimental with a pretest-posttest nonequivalent 2 × 2 factorial design. The participants (78) were randomized to treatment conditions. The researchers conducted a repeated-measures analysis of variance and univariate analysis of variance to compare changes across the treatment groups. Results show that using the fixed facilitator model of PBL approaches is more effective in improving students’ achievement, while both models increase students’ interest in elementary structural design (ESD). Also, the study revealed that there was no influence attributable to gender on students’ achievement and interest in ESD. Hence, the fixed facilitator instructional model was advocated for technical teachers to foster students’ achievement and interest in ESD in Nigeria.
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Procedural and Distributive Justice in Sexual Harassment Arbitrations: Evolution of Decisions in the Union ContextWe examine the evolution of labor arbitration decisions between 1988 and 2018 in which a union-represented employee was alleged to have committed sexual harassment. We find that management punished sexual harassment more stringently over time and that arbitrators became more sensitive to whether or not good procedure was followed by management over time. Distributive justice was also a major concern for arbitrators. The results suggest that it is essential for management to exercise procedural justice in disciplining employees, but that it is just as important for management to consider distributive justice when it comes to imposing discipline for inappropriate behavior.
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The reception of Malthus’s Essay on Population in the United StatesThe American Declaration of Independence reflects the same Enlightenment ideals that led William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet to argue for the possibility of the perfectibility of humanity through institutional reform, so Malthus’s Essay on Population also serves as a rebuke to Americans who, believing that European poverty was due to European institutions, sought to build a new society that would provide freedom, equality and general prosperity. But there were competing visions. Nationalist supporters of government promotion of manufacturing argued that Malthusian misery and vice were not inevitable because, in the absence of oppressive European institutions, productivity increases as population increases. Southern defenders of slavery, on the other hand, viewed Malthus as a symbol of the horrific so-called ‘free labour system’, under which wage workers, who could be exploited and discarded, were worse off than slaves because of the slave owners’ interest in the well-being of their property
