queer sex in the metropolis? place,subjectivity and the Second World War

The strong links between cities and queer culture and its expression have occupied numerous scholars, including Henning Bech and Matt Houlbrook. Indeed, London has been viewed as a focal point of British queer urban culture for over 200 years and, as this article demonstrates, the advent of the Second World War did not preclude this centrality but ensured that the city became a focal point for service personnel on leave. Yet, the emphasis placed on the metropolises in analysing space and queer expression has rendered invisible the use of more transient spaces outside of the city. This article seeks to examine these ‘alternative’ or opportunistic sites of expression, using oral testimony from queer men who served with the British Armed Forces during the Second World War. The memories of these servicemen and the significance they place on space/locations demonstrate the need to engage with subjective sites or ‘geographies’ of queerness both inside and outside of the city between 1939 and 1945.     

A cognitive model of firearms policing

The performance of police firearms teams must be efficient and accurate—anything else could result in the death of the officers or those they are tasked with protecting. However, there are a wide range of cognitive factors that impact the way in which these officers perform, many of which are not taken into account while planning tactical operations or during the investigations that follow. This paper considers the role of these cognitive factors in firearms policing, looking at their impacts on officer actions/reactions and the ways in which these effects may be counteracted. Author’s Note: Dr. Kavanagh is a psychology consultant specializing in the psychology of high risk policing operations. Her areas of interest include public order, hostage negotiation, and body recovery work; her primary focus is on the psychological components of the police use of firearms. She works with a number of police forces throughout the UK and provides training to officers and command staff on the psychological aspects of their role.     

Progress Toward the Determination of Correct Classification Rates in Fire Debris Analysis,,

Principal components analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) were used to develop a multistep classification procedure for determining the presence of ignitable liquid residue in fire debris and assigning any ignitable liquid residue present into the classes defined under the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) E 1618‐10 standard method. A multistep classification procedure was tested by cross‐validation based on model data sets comprised of the time‐averaged mass spectra (also referred to as total ion spectra) of commercial ignitable liquids and pyrolysis products from common building materials and household furnishings (referred to simply as substrates). Fire debris samples from laboratory‐scale and field test burns were also used to test the model. The optimal model's true‐positive rate was 81.3% for cross‐validation samples and 70.9% for fire debris samples. The false‐positive rate was 9.9% for cross‐validation samples and 8.9% for fire debris samples.     

Detecting deception in suspects: verbal cues as a function of interview strategy

Research on deception has consistently shown that people are poor at detecting deception, partly due to lack of consistent cues to deception. This research focuses on eliciting verbal cues to deception when questioning suspects who deny crime and how such cues differ due to type of questioning. An experiment examined verbal differences between innocent and guilty mock suspects (N=96) as a function of veracity and interview style (Free recall, Probes, or Free recall plus Probes). Guilty (vs innocent) suspects omitted more crime-relevant information and their statements were more likely to contradict the evidence, showing that statement–evidence inconsistency was a cue to deception. This cue to deception was more pronounced when the interview contained probes. Lie-catchers (N=192) obtained an accuracy rate higher than chance (61.5%) for detecting deceptive denials. Implications for further research on verbal cues to deception are discussed.     

The Self-Administered Interview: a means of improving children's eyewitness performance?

Abstract

In order to obtain the most informative and correct statements, witnesses should be heard as soon as possible after the incident. However, this is not always possible. This experimental study investigated whether completing a Self-Administered Interview form (SAI) immediately after a critical event could enhance children's witness performance at a later stage. Children (N = 194, age 11–12) reported their memory of an event in a structured SAI, an open SAI, or did not report their memory (control). Two weeks later, the children were interviewed about the event. Before the interview, half of the children were subjected to social influence from a co-witness. Children's free recall of the event was enhanced by the SAI. More precisely, children in the SAI-Structured condition reported more details about the event than children in the SAI-Open condition and the control condition, without a loss of accuracy. The SAI manipulation did not, however, reduce children's vulnerability to social influence. The results suggest that the use of a SAI might prove a simple and yet effective way of increasing the quality of statements from child witnesses in some situations.