火车票实名制后打击倒票的实践与思考

铁路全面推行火车票实名制和电话订票、网络购票等一系列便民利民措施后，倒票人员开始利用“95105105订票电话”和“12306购票网站”等以更加隐蔽的手段从事倒票活动。北京铁路公安局在打击倒票“猎鹰-2013”战役中，充分发挥信息研判作用，加强电话订票、网络购票后台数据的全面分析，实施“一案一档三表一反馈”制度，精确指导“猎鹰”小分队破获了一批利用电话和网络倒票的案件。     

Another look at anti-scalping laws: Theory and evidence

This paper investigates the impact of anti-scalping laws on the face value of tickets in professional football and baseball. Previous theoretical models have suggested that scalpers might cause an increase in prices at the ticket window because they represent an increase in demand. This paper provides a model in which ticket scalping has an ambiguous impact on ticket window prices, making the actual impact an empirical question. Empirical analysis suggest that in cities with anti-scalping laws average per-game season ticket prices are approximately $2 greater in baseball and $10 greater in football. Anti-scalping laws actually increase team revenues, as the laws have no adverse effect on attendance. Thus, event promoters might have sufficient pecuniary incentive to tacitly or explicitly support anti-scalping legislation.     

倒卖火车票案件的分析与法律适用

春运是我国人民春节前后人员流动最为集中的一段时间,而在多种交通方式中,铁路运输成为人们更多的选择。为了缓解"一票难求"的情况,我国铁路部门一直在改进售票机制和加大打击票贩子倒票行为的力度。目前倒卖车票的违法方式大体有两类:一是利用各种方式抢购车票并加价倒卖,二是非法制售假票。面对倒票活动在手段和技术上的升级,铁路警方也应在侦破手段和侦办思路方面做出改进,加强网络监察手段和网络信息技术的应用。     

关于佛山代购火车票案定性的思考

佛山代购火车票案中钟某夫妻二人的行为不构成倒卖车票罪和非法经营罪。钟某夫妻二人的行为是一种民事代理行为,每张火车票加收10元手续费是委托合同双方事先约定的服务费。其行为既没有使铁路部门受到损失,也没有损害委托人的利益,故不应当以犯罪论处。     

Electoral behaviour in a two-vote system: Incentives for ticket splitting in German Bundestag elections

Abstract. The ballot structure of German Bundestag elections allows two votes: one for a constituency candidate and the second for a party list. About one-fifth of the voters usually split their ticket. Several hypotheses are derived about incentives for ticket splitting and tested with survey data from a 1998 pre-election poll. We argue that an explanation of split tickets in the German system has to take into account both party rankings and coalition preferences. One of the most important incentives is a preference or top ranking of a minor party like the FDP or Greens, if it is combined with a preference for a coalition with either the CDU/CSU or SPD. Contrary to this finding, the hypothesis of threshold insurance voting of CDU/CSU or SPD supporters choosing the party list of their prospective minor coalition partner is rejected for the 1998 election.     

火车票实名制之我见

由于我们国家铁路在运能矛盾和运输管理方面的原因 ,造成倒卖火车票等扰乱社会市场经济秩序 ,侵害旅客合法权利的现象严重存在。另外 ,铁路是特殊的流动的社会构成 ,人、财、物高度聚集 ,各种违法犯罪分子也混迹其中作案 ,危害社会。由于铁路区域内的人员流动性特别大 ,如果没有严密的社会管理手段 ,会给各种在铁路上作案的违法犯罪分子很多便利 ,令广大旅客和铁路部门防不胜防 ,铁路的秩序和社会的安全缺乏保障。火车票实名制是指公民在购买火车票和乘坐火车时必须登记、查验个人的真实身份的一项社会制度。火车票实名制是防治倒卖火车票 ,预防、控制和打击铁路站车上的旅客财物被盗、抢劫、杀人、爆炸、贩毒等违法犯罪的重要措施。铁路和全社会都应该认识到建立火车票实名制制度的重要性 ,积极稳妥地推进有关立法、科技投入、改革铁路客运机制等方面工作 ,使之早日变为现实的铁路和社会管理制度。     

The role of East Timor's security institutions in national integration – and disintegration

Abstract

This article examines the interplay between security sector developments and national unity in East Timor since the Indonesian occupation ended in 1999. Particular attention is paid to the regional distinction between Loromonu and Lorosae – people from the west and east of East Timor, respectively. In 2006, East Timor experienced a crisis that saw the disintegration of the military and police forces, and widespread violence that led to massive internal displacement. It was during this crisis that the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction first emerged as a major societal cleavage. The article argues that the independence cause and the guerrilla force Falintil had been an important focus of East Timorese national unity in 1999. In the years that followed, however, the implementation of flawed security policies led to new military and police forces that were politicized, factionalized and lacking in cohesion. Prior to the 2006 crisis, the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction was primarily an issue within the army. As the crisis escalated, however, the violence was to a large extent framed by the east–west dimension, and popular perceptions of the military as ‘eastern’ and the police as ‘western’ hardened. A year after the crisis, little if any progress had been made towards reducing the increased salience of the Loromonu–Lorosae distinction in society. The main internal security challenges – gang activity, the unresolved issue of the so-called ‘petitioners’, and the destabilizing role played by fugitive former head of military police Alfredo Reinado – all had an east–west dimension. The article also finds that new initiatives aimed at reforming East Timor's military and police forces appeared to be lacking in both depth and relevance for addressing the country's new level of internal division, and its immediate, internal security challenges.     

Semiotising the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education

This article presents a semiotic analysis of the student perception of learning outcomes in British higher education. It centres on three annotated images in Frank Furedi’s article “The Unhappiness Principles”, published in Times Higher Education in 2012. Drawing upon Peircean semiosis and iconicity, it provides a rhetoric-infused interpretation of the word–image complementarity exhibited in student participants’ written commentaries on the three images. This leads to a dialectical view of formative and summative assessment, in which process and product create each other through the same continuum of learning and teaching. In highlighting intellectualism as central to the ethnography of university life, this article argues that learner autonomy and the potential for transformation is deemed essential to the student experience in higher education.     

Power,norms and theory. A meta-political inquiry

Realism criticizes the idea, central to what may be called ‘the priority view’, that philosophy has the task of imposing from the outside general norms of morality or standards of reasonableness on politics understood as the domain of power. According to realism, political philosophy must reveal the specific standards internal to the political practice of handling power appropriately and as it develops in actual circumstances. Framed in those terms, the debate evokes the idea that political power itself is lacking normativity until such time as norms are devised that govern its use. In contrast, this essay identifies a normative dimension internal to (the conquest and exercise of) power. Power depends on recognition and support in the form of belief. This dependence explains how an interest in power introduces a responsiveness to normative considerations into the domain of politics.     

The theory of value and the value of theory — a reply to Cutler et al.

Abstract

Serving as a pledge against a future promise, collateral has traditionally been understood as a ‘back office’ technicality that reduces the risk of default. Yet in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the erosion of faith among market participants in the credit quality of large banks, collateral is playing an increasingly important epistemic role within finance, as an anchor that underpins the valuation of a growing number of financial instruments. This paper explores the increasing importance of collateral to the modelling practices used by ‘quants’ to value ‘over-the-counter’ interest rate derivatives since the 2008 financial crisis, and how the inclusion of collateral expertise into quants’ own modelling practices has affected these markets. This historical episode suggests that while the inclusion of collateral expertise into banks’ front office modelling practices has made banks’ pricing models less abstract and more aligned to the traditionally overlooked legal practices that underpin derivatives trading, it has also led to an explosion of complexity in the valuation of these instruments that now threatens the future existence of these markets.     

彩票市场政府监管体制的国际比较

世界各国的彩票市场都处于政府的严格监管之下,英国、美国和法国的彩票监管体制是最有代表性的三种监管模式.通过对三种代表性监管模式的比较分析,本文认为,一个国家的彩票市场结构必须符合彩票市场技术经济特征,但彩票监管机构的设置与监管权力的配置主要是政府选择的结果,与该国的行政管理体制密切相关;而彩票公益金的使用方向则直接取决于彩票发行的目的.     

Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable and constrain meaning-making, may transform social practices. By incorporating Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. London: Oxford University Press] framework for the critical analysis of discourse and social practice, the model extends the social semiotic approach developed in recent critical multimodal studies of software such as PowerPoint to social media, which function primarily to provide platforms for and commodify social practices, rather than to offer rich arrays of semiotic resources for creating multimodal texts and artefacts. Using the academic social network site ResearchGate and the practice of research peer review, we illustrate the model’s capacity to account for the ways the design of social media platforms – through the semiotic resources they make available and the ways these are presented – enables and constrains their users’ ability to perform key social practices and has the potential to transform these practices.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issue. The Travails of Opposition
MARK GARNETT The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, by Tim Bale. Labour's travails
Richard Briand Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party, by Martin Pugh. Anti‐social behaviour? Dial 101
Paul Michael Garrett The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics, by Stuart Waiton. Surviving nukes in one's back garden
Victoria Honeyman After the Bomb; Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain 1945–68, by Matthew Grant. Israel's foundation myths
Richard Kuper The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand, (trans. Yael Lotan). Political science mission statement
Gianfranco Pasquino The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, edited by Robert E. Goodin. Sir Ian Blair: the Burkean top cop
Ian Loader Policing Controversy, by Ian Blair. To intervene or not to intervene?
Daniele Archibugi Humanitarian Intervention, by Michael Newman. A phenomenal trade unionist
Geoffrey Goodman Arthur Horner: A Political Biography. Vol. 1: 1918–1944; Vol. 2: 1944–1968, by Nina Fishman.     

The Guardian and Press Reform: a Wheel Come Full Circle

In the decade 2008–18, between the eruption of the phone hacking scandal and the cancellation of part two of the Leveson Inquiry, the editorial position of The Guardian on press regulation went from indifference to demanding wholesale reform, and then back to indifference and even active opposition to change. Inevitably, this entailed reversals and contradictions, yet these were not acknowledged to the newspaper’s readers, who are left with a misleading impression of continuity. This study, by an academic and journalist who campaigned for regulatory reform throughout this period, aims to shed light on The Guardian’s 360‐degree progression by reference to its editorials and other published statements.     

Public Managers in Integrated Services Collaboratives: What Works Is Workarounds

Public managers in local integrated services collaboratives find that commitment to local partnership goals sometimes requires evading policy directives that are imposed by legislation or bureaucratic superiors. Using data that reveal what is often concealed, the author finds that these workarounds can be defined and identified and that they often revolve around central features of policy rather than marginal details. Workarounds emerge in the space created by certain managerial strategies and dispositions: treating directives as starting points for negotiation, using performance to justify discretion and manage risk, establishing local collaborative goals as an alternative locus of accountability, and distinguishing front‐door services from back‐door accounting. By aggregating data from clusters of workaround stories, researchers and practitioners can (1) identify policy flaws in need of repair, (2) illuminate tensions in the integrated service ideal, and (3) inform the enduring normative debate over administrative discretion and public accountability.     

From book to stage to screen: semiotic transformations of Gothic horror genre conventions

ABSTRACT

This paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach for exploring the semiotic changes involved in the transformation of a novel into stage and screen productions. It examines how semiotic resources are deployed in each medium through elements of mise-en-scène, such as speech, music, sound, lighting, props, staging, and cinematographic techniques, and the viewing perspectives that are thus established for audiences. The genre of Gothic horror is selected for this purpose, given how this form of performance has transfixed audiences for centuries and has been adapted for both the stage and the screen. In order to demonstrate how each performance medium has produced its own unique set of foregrounding devices to enthral and captivate audiences, a comparative analysis of excerpts from the novel The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, a videotaped theatrical performance, and the 1989 British television film of the same name is undertaken. The paper discusses the implications of the multimodal semiotic approach for developing a better understanding of the semiotic transformations that horror genre conventions undergo in different media and the viewership positions that are thus re-drawn for audiences. The paper concludes with a view of multimodal recontextualisation processes which form the underlying basis of human sociocultural life.     

Ararat and the politics of ‘preserving’ denial

ABSTRACT

Daldal analyses Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) in terms of its ‘truth claims’ and its ostensible critique of the politics of denial of the Turkish authorities. Her essay is not an apologia for Turkish attitudes but claims that, while searching for the ‘truth’ amid denial and deception, the film creates its own ‘official history’, which is presented as the history, mostly based on nostalgia and ‘post-memory’. The Armenian diaspora still relies heavily on the genocide in order to build consciousness and cohesion, and Ararat contributes further to the need for sacred codes, sacred lands and sacred myths. Although the Turkish denial of the genocide is unacceptable, by demonizing the Turks and Turkey, the film contributes to the preservation of that denial, which has been helpful in the creation of diasporic Armenian identity.     

“Un nodo avviluppato”. Rossini’s La Cenerentola as a prototype of multimodal resemiotisation

ABSTRACT

Since its early beginnings in Italy in the sixteenth century, opera has always been a multimodal text, integrating verbal, musical, and stage resources. Verbal resources can be unpacked in lyric verse for vocal pieces in closed form, narrative verse or prose for recitative, and stage directions; musical resources include instrumental and vocal music, whereas stage resources incorporate stage design, singers’ and dancers’ kinesics, and set and costume arrangements. However, opera has been rarely studied in multimodal terms, as it has been mainly explored from musicological standpoints, hence prioritising music and barely taking into account the interplay of other resources. As a case study, epitomising the Golden Age of opera, La Cenerentola by Rossini has been selected, as it exemplifies how the theatrical and compositional conventions of the genre work concurrently with its metatextual components. Stage adaptations will be also analysed in two film operas, that is, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s La Cenerentola (Germany, 1981) and Carlo Verdone’s Cenerentola, Una favola in diretta (Italy, 2014). Opera will be interpreted as a prototype of multi-level resemiotisation, also in a critical light, as the libretto is resemiotised (1) as a musical composition; (2) as a mise-en-scène, and (3) as a film opera.