The history of forensic firearms examination was evaluated to determine how the field has developed during the past 200 years; especially within the past 100 years. As aresult of this evaluation, some related issues were identified for study. The economic and general uses of firearms reference collections were considered as the collections represent potential security considerations within forensic laboratories. A survey was conducted to determine how firearms examiners used their collections, as well as their receptivity to augmenting the collections with modem technology such as photographs and CD-ROM's. A world-wide survey resulted in responses from 110 forensic laboratories. Examiners stated that the collections were used for training, repairing damaged evidence firearms, and demonstration purposes, and whilst they were prepared to accept modem techriology to augment their collection, stated that such augmentation could not replace the actual collection. Research was conducted to partially answer some legal issues, such as Daubert, et al., by test firing bullets from consecutively rifled barrels to obtain best known 'match' and 'non-match' bullets. To date, some 201 examiners from several countries have evaluated the bullet test sets with no errors. Further research was conducted by test firing four cartridges from 617 similar 9mm Glock pistols and microscopically evaluating the fired cartridge casings to determine if they were identifiable to themselves and not the other casings. All of the casings were identifiable to themselves and not to the other 616 casings. Advances in technology have allowed the development of automated ballistics imaging systems. Research, using the previously cited test bullets and cartridge casings, was conducted to evaluate the capability of the various systems, in conjunction with the abilities offirearms examiners. Three different automated systems were used to evaluate the bullets from the l0-barrel test results. One automated system was used to evaluate the 617 cartridge casings, again with excellent results.

Honors Project (B.A.) -- Carson-Newman College, 2010. / Project advisor: Dr. Kara Stooksbury.

This thesis concerns the invention, improvisation, and right to ownership of the punk patent and questions the contention, put by the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, and other commentators, that the Sex Pistols and English punk were a Situationist prank. This challenge to what, in the majority of punk literature, has become an ‘accepted truth’ was first raised by McLaren’s nemesis, the band’s lead singer, John Lydon. McLaren and Lydon did agree that the London punk movement took its inspiration from the anarchic and chaotic energies of the eighteenth–century London mob. This common crowd could switch instantly and unpredictably from a passive state to an anarchic, violent and destructive mob, or ‘King Mob’: one that turned all authority on its head in concerted, but undirected, acts of misrule. Through his own improvisation with punk tropes, Lydon came to embody English punk and functioned, on the one hand, as a natural mob leader; and on the other, as a focus for the mob’s anger. I argue that, in following McLaren’s reduction of the Sex Pistols to a Situationistinspired prank, one of the earliest and most influential analyses of the punk phenomenon, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, misunderstood how fundamental the culture and semiotics of the London mob was to McLaren, Lydon, the Sex Pistols and the performance of London punk. I take seriously, then, the idea that the cultural signifiers the Sex Pistols drew upon to make their punk performances, and which accounted in no small way for their ability to ‘outrage’, were exclusively British and unique to London’s cultural topography and the culture of the London crowd. After the implosion of the Sex Pistols on their 1978 American tour, with Lydon quitting in disgust, McLaren attempted to take ownership of the punk legacy: both actually, through attempting to assert his copyright over the Sex Pistols’ brand; and symbolically through re-writing the Sex Pistols’ story in his 1980 movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Curiously, and most notably, the mob is foregrounded in the film through its opening sequence, which draws heavily from the events of the Gordon Riots in 1780. This thesis contests the paradigm put in place by McLaren’s version of events as portrayed in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and reconsiders punk as a cultural object trouve. In particular, I consider literary influences on its protagonists: Graham Greene on John Lydon and Charles Dickens and J. M. Barrie on Malcolm McLaren. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2008. / A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Communication Arts, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliography.

No description available.

Den här uppsatsen undersöker punken och några aspekter av dess visuella identitet. Genom att söka några av dess konsthistoriska rötter finner man att situationism och dadaism ofta nämns som konströrelser med ett uttryck som punken bygger vidare på. Det kan förklaras genom bland annat att Malcom McClaren och Jamie Reid, som låg bakom lanseringen av Sex Pistols, hade en situationistisk bakgrund. Reids arbete med till exempel skivomslag åt Pistols har också lagt grunden för föreställningen om vad punkestetik är. Med analyser av God Save The Queen 1977 och Nowhere Buses 1972 har jag sökt att ge en förklaring till hur de bilderna kan tänkas fungera utifrån en mottagarkontext av frustrerade, arbetslösa ungdomar i slutet av 70-talet. Säkerhetsnålen som en symbol inom punken kan förstås som en kritik av konsumtionssamhället. Den tvetydiga användningen av svastikan på kläder och flygblad är mer svårtolkad, den kan ses utifrån sitt rent provocerande värde eller som att den tillhör en gammal värld och därför är utan betydelse. Från detta har jag följt punkens förgreningar mot en politiskt medveten subkultur där aktivism, anarkistisk teori och D.I.Y.-filosofi är rådande. D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) är en viktig aspekt av punkens utveckling. Punken påverkar även andra konstnärliga uttryck som syns hos till exempel den samhällskritiske konstnären Banksy. Det går också att se ett kulturhistoriskt intresse för den ursprungliga punken, som nu blivit en del av kulturarvet. Utifrån bland annat den ideologiska förförståelsen som framträder i min undersökning har jag analyserar två verk av den svenska konstnären, och punkmusikern, Ella Tillema. På verket Mitt Hjärta Är En Bomb 2009 har jag lagt en feministisk blick och Den Postapokalyptiska Skapelseberättelsen (Partyt är Över) 2011 har analyserats utifrån en mottagarkontext med förståelse för anarkistisk aktivism, djurrättsfrågor och dess symboler. Punken som subkultur kan förstås som en motkultur och punkestetik som en motestetik. En slutsats som min undersökning leder till är att punkestetik kan ses både som förhållningssätt och som stil, D.I.Y.-aspekten är betydelsefull i båda avseenden. Som förhållningssätt handlar det bland annat om att inte vara en passiv konsument, utan vara delaktig och det blir i sin praktik till en slags samhällskritik. Identitet och tillhörighet är en viktig del av för att förstå punkestetik som stil. Stilen skapas dels utifrån bilder som haft stort genomslag inom subkulturen, till exempel Reids. Dels utifrån en teknisk amatörism, i vissa fall skenbar, som markerar D.I.Y.-praktiken där alla har möjlighet att vara delaktiga. Det är dock min mening att stil och förhållningssätt inte kan särskiljas om man vill förstå vad punkestetik är.

Cette thèse a pour contexte la combinatoire énumérative et décrit la construction de plusieurs bijections entre modèles combinatoires connus ou nouveaux de suites d'entiers et polynômes, plus particulièrement celle des nombres de Genocchi (et de leurs extensions, les polynômes de Gandhi) qui interviennent dans diverses branches des mathématiques et dont les propriétés combinatoires sont de ce fait activement étudiées, et celles de polynômes q-eulériens associés aux quatre statistiques fondamentales de MacMahon sur les permutations ainsi qu'à des statistiques analogues. On commence par définir les permutations de Dumont normalisées, un modèle combinatoire des nombres de Genocchi médians normalisés q-étendus, notés ¯cn(q) et définis par Han et Zeng, puis l'on construit une première bijection entre ce modèle et l'ensemble des configurations de Dellac, autre interprétation combinatoire de ¯cn(q) mise en évidence par Feigin dans le contexte de la géométrie des grassmanniennes de carquois. En s'appuyant sur la théorie des fractions continues de Flajolet, on en construit finalement un troisième modèle combinatoire à travers les histoires de Dellac, que l'on relie aux premiers modèles sus-cités au moyen d'une seconde bijection. On s'intéresse ensuite à la classe combinatoire des k-formes irréductibles définies par Hivert et Mallet dans l'étude des k-fonctions de Schur, et qui faisaient l'objet d'une conjecture supposant que les polynômes de Gandhi sont générés par les k-formes irréductibles selon la statistique des k-sites libres. On construit une bijection entre les k-formes irréductibles et les pistolets surjectifs de hauteur k − 1 (connus pour générer les polynômes de Gandhi selon la statistique des points fixes) envoyant les k-sites libres des premières sur les points fixes des seconds, démontrant de ce fait la conjecture. Enfin, on établit une nouvelle identité combinatoire entre deux polynômes q-eulériens définis par des statistiques eulériennes et mahoniennes sur l'ensemble des permutations d'un ensemble fini, au moyen d'une dernière bijection sur les permutations, qui envoie une suite finie de statistiques sur une autre / This work is set in the context of enumerative combinatorics and constructs several statistic-preserving bijections between known or new combinatorial models of sequences of integers or polynomials, espacially the sequence of Genocchi numbers (and their extensions, the Gandhi polynomials) which appear in numerous mathematical theories and whose combinatorial properties are consequently intensively studied, and two sequences of q-Eulerian polynomials associated with the four fundamental statistics on permutations studied by MacMahon, and with analog statistics. First of all, we define normalized Dumont permutations, a combinatorial model of the q-extended normalized median Genocchi numbers ¯cn(q) introduced by Han and Zeng, and we build a bijection between the latter model and the set of Dellac configurations, which have been proved by Feigin to generate ¯cn(q) by using the geometry of quiver Grassmannians. Then, in order to answer a question raised by the theory of continued fractions of Flajolet, we define a new combinatorial model of ¯cn(q), the set of Dellac histories, and we relate them with the previous combinatorial models through a second statistic-preserving bijection. Afterwards, we study the set of irreducible k-shapes defined by Hivert and Mallet in the topic of k-Schur functions, which have been conjectured to generate the Gandhi polynomials with respect to the statistic of free ksites. We construct a statistic-preserving bijection between the irreducible k-shapes and the surjective pistols of height k−1 (well-known combinatorial interpretation of the Gandhi polynomials with respect to the fixed points statistic) mapping the free k-sites to the fixed points, thence proving the conjecture. Finally, we prove a new combinatorial identity between two eulerian polynomials defined on the set of permutations thanks to Eulerian and Mahonian statistics, by constructing a bijection on the permutations, which maps a finite sequence of statistics on another

The following thesis investigates the British punk movement of the mid-late seventies and suggests that, by performing acts of imaginative re-identification, we may gain greater insights into both the phenomenon of punk and aspects of Jesus’ life, ministry, and teaching despite their axiomatic and sometimes problematic differences. To do this we explore the power of the sartorial creations that the movement adopted and the way in which they conveyed an oppositional protest message and stance. We explore punk graphics and the way in which they could offer a targeted critique of the nation. We look at punk performances and how they confrontationally engaged with their audiences and what they wanted to elicit in return. We reflect on women in punk, punk in Northern Ireland and the relationship between punk and the black community and the degree to which punk exhibited a counter-cultural attitude to relationships. Concluding our look at punk we investigate how society, the authorities and commerce reacted to the movement, before investigating punk as a trans-historical essence. Having explored punk and established imaginative connections we then revisit aspects of Jesus’ life and consider him as a subversive who negated some of the national symbols of Israel, collided with Jewish national authority and reversed many of the nation’s perspectives. We look at the more confrontational nature of Jesus, his use of symbolic physical statements and his interaction with women, teaching on enemies and the way he related to the outcast. We then conclude by showing the degree to which the present-day church has been absorbed into the surrounding culture and explore two instances in post-war theology where there has been a recovery of the more seditious pattern within Jesus’ life before seeing whether there is anything that the church may learn from imaginatively identifying with punk.