Group and intergroup parameters of gang activities: An introduction and research agenda.

In introducing this Special Issue on gangs, we overview the thrust of its papers, demonstrating how they assist in plugging research gaps from the dearth of psychological attention to gangs. The papers therein raise important theoretical considerations of group process effects, social identity, and communication influences in gangs. Also included are empirical examinations of how attitudes to formal organized crime groups may nurture progang views, how social networks bridge gang divides, the dehumanization and social dominance association with gang membership, and how membership longevity associates with gang members’ attitudes to their group. We conclude with theoretical prospects and empirical vistas for future work. For instance, vitality theory may help explain members’ immersion in gangs, discursive strategies could explain how youth are enticed into gangs, and examinations of community and law enforcement attitudes to gangs may provide insight into how oppositional attitudes are fostered on both sides of the gang divide

A Graphical Adversarial Risk Analysis Model for Oil and Gas Drilling Cybersecurity

Oil and gas drilling is based, increasingly, on operational technology, whose cybersecurity is complicated by several challenges. We propose a graphical model for cybersecurity risk assessment based on Adversarial Risk Analysis to face those challenges. We also provide an example of the model in the context of an offshore drilling rig. The proposed model provides a more formal and comprehensive analysis of risks, still using the standard business language based on decisions, risks, and value.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163

Children of prisoners: exploring the impact of families' reappraisal of the role and status of the imprisoned parent on children's coping strategies

Qualitative data from a larger study on the impact of parental imprisonment in four countries found that children of prisoners face fundamentally similar psychological and social challenges. The ways that children cope, however, are influenced by the interpretative frame adopted by the adults around them, and by how issues of parental imprisonment are talked about in their families. This article argues that families have to reappraise their view of the imprisoned parent and then decide on their policy for how to deal with this publicly. Their approach may be based on openness and honesty or may emphasise privacy and secrecy, or a combination of these. Children are likely to be influenced by their parents'/carers' views, although these may cause conflict for them. Where parents/carers retain a positive view of the imprisoned parent, children are likely to benefit; where parents/carers feel issues of shame and stigma acutely, this is likely to be transmitted to their children. This is important for social workers and practitioners involved in supporting prisoners' families and for parenting programmes

Narration in judiciary fact-finding : a probabilistic explication

Legal probabilism is the view that juridical fact-finding should be modeled using Bayesian methods. One of the alternatives to it is the narration view, according to which instead we should conceptualize the process in terms of competing narrations of what (allegedly) happened. The goal of this paper is to develop a reconciliatory account, on which the narration view is construed from the Bayesian perspective within the framework of formal Bayesian epistemology

The power of creative thinking in situations of uncertainties: the almost impossible task of protecting critical infrastructures

A good and scientific analysis starts with a closer look at the conceptualisation at hand. The definition of CIP is not easy because of its wide range. This paper examines infrastructures that are critical and need protection. Each word entails a specific connotation and is characterized by several components

RESILIENT ROTHERHAM?

The notion of community resilience is complicated in part because both terms have many aspects. We have distinguished three types of community: of purpose, such as a political association, of culture, such as religion and of locality, such as a neighbourhood. Our primary interest in this report is with communities of locality. We have suggested a three-faceted model of resilience in which it is described as: of something, to something (a stressor), to an endpoint. Thus (local) community resilience is: of a neighbourhood or locality, to a stressor, such as an earthquake, to an endpoint, such as back-to-normal. The stressors faced by a community can be acute, such as an earthquake or the shutdown of a local employer, or chronic, such as long-term poverty and unemployment. Community resilience is most easily seen in relation to acute stressors in part because both the stressor and endpoint are fairly clear. It is less clear with chronic stressors mainly because the endpoint cannot be back-to-normal. We therefore suggested a distinction between as-you-were and as-you-should-be endpoints. An example of as-you-should-be resilience is where someone becomes a well-functioning adult despite abuse as a child. In relation to communities of locality, the as-you-should-be endpoint is roughly that they will provide places which enable rather than impede their members to live well, to flourish and to be happy. A local community is resilient to the extent that it does this in the face of stressors, such as poverty. Resilient communities can be identified by combining measures of individual wellbeing, such as quality of life and health, with indicators of stressors, such as deprivation. A resilient community is one that is deprived but in which people do better than average in regard to these measures. This method of identifying resilient communities is an outlier method; it depends on finding those better than average. One problem with this is that it does not give an objective measure of resilience; we could use it only to show that one community has become more resilient in relation to another, not that it has become more resilient per se. Final v7 23 This problem links to a more general problem with the literature on measuring, characterising and enhancing community resilience. This is that insufficient distinction is made between measures of how well people within a community are doing, i.e. their wellbeing, and of how resilient they are, i.e. their wellbeing given particular stressors. Thus most of the measures we identified in the literature as possible contributors to resilience were more like contributors to wellbeing. For example, measures to improve the built environment or social networks are better characterised as enhancing social capital and wellbeing rather than resilience. In practice, there seems likely to be a link between resilience and wellbeing. An individual or community without resilience to likely challenges would have precarious wellbeing