… there’s no real difference. If it’s irrational at any point it is fundamentally irrational. The answer depends on what a market is and what rationality/irrationality are. In trade terms a market is irrational if it departs persistently from its real valuation. If a market is defined solely as the place of exchange then it …
We are well into the era of advanced, generation 2.0 types of malware. Adware, ransomware, cryptocurrency miners and others use social engineering and complex value chains with multiple functions being coordinated through them. Threats to industrial control systems, other backbone processes, and threats that use the internet of things remove the human from the victim loop. Malware …
Lovely discussion with students in my not-quite criminology classes about imagery of crime using Europol’s SOCTA 2017. The report crisply and directly illustrates Europol’s assessment of major threats in the field of drug trafficking, human trafficking and cybercrime. Not surprisingly for a report subtitled ‘Crime in the Age of Technology’ the emphasis is on payment …
… structured, rigorous curiosity Also guess who’s convening the Research Design course come the semester start. A challenge in teaching or being taught research design is talking directly about what research design is as a general topic. We can point to specific design types (experiment, ethnography, etc) but it is harder to talk about design as …
The Gift by Marcel Mauss is one of the most profound essays in sociology and anthropology. Mauss was interested in what happened between people, as that is where the social can be found. The structured obligation of the gift is a recurring act. Seen ‘in totality’ as Mass put it, the gift affirms and reproduces …
In what sense is crime a coherent action category? There is the positivist sense that there is a state defined category of human action that justifies coercive control and we can leave it at that. That approach leads us up some blind alleys as key terms such as human trafficking are then left undefined, or …
Ontology and epistemology are two dimensions of research that are easily despatched in a sentence yet which give every research a lifetime of heartache. Ontology is the theory of the nature of reality, and epistemology of the acquisition and evaluation of knowledge about it. Both are facets of understanding. It is the most opaque and …
Our first autonomous robot arrived in the house last week. It is a wee fellow, hugging the ground as if cowering in the presence of its true master, the iPhone. A round plastic body, a sensor cluster, wheels and a vacuum are set off with a cheery burble. It is black, so the manufacturer has coded …
Street encounters and digital encounters are hybrids. Trying to understand them separately will trip the ethnographer up (Lane, 2018). Lane elaborates the digital element to street encounters and the reverse using a multi-sited ethnography which traces encounters through street and digital domains. Doing so means he avoids assuming the meaning of what’s online. In one …
… the heat is on the bottom level It has been a norm that in the UK we expect public figures to be held to a higher standard than us schmoes. Ordinary folk can make daft statements, fool around, run over the family dog and still be invited to the family barbecue. Public figures are …
