Routine Crime in Exceptional Times: The Impact of the 2002 Winter Olympics on Citizen Demand for Police Services

Despite their rich theoretical and practical importance, criminologists have paid scant attention to the patterns of crime and the responses to crime during exceptional events. Throughout the world large-scale political, social, economic, cultural, and sporting events have become commonplace. Natural disasters such as blackouts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis present similar opportunities. Such events often tax the capacities of jurisdictions to provide safety and security in response to the exceptional event, as well as to meet the “routine” public safety needs. This article examines “routine” crime as measured by calls for police service, official crime reports, and police arrests in Salt Lake City before, during, and after the 2002 Olympic Games. The analyses suggest that while a rather benign demographic among attendees and the presence of large numbers of social control agents might have been expected to decrease calls for police service for minor crime, it actually increased in Salt Lake during this period. The implications of these findings are considered for theories of routine activities, as well as systems capacity

Experimental Testing of Burglar Resistance of Fenestration

Currently, windows and glass facades are increasingly being used as a building envelope. These are elements that are functional and aesthetic, but there is a need to focus on their safety. Windows as a part of protection system are one of the most vulnerable assets, so they need to be addressed. The paper is focused on the experimental investigation of two types of windows that are commonly used in buildings. The subjects of the interests are wooden frame windows and PVC frame windows. In the experiment, burglar resistance was investigate, carried out by dynamic tests with different weights of steel balls dropped from various heights. Results of the experimental measurement pointed to the limit energy glass panels were broken. Windows with safety film were also tested. The measured results were further evaluate

Risk Criteria for Approving or Rejecting Field Tests of High-Performance Weapons

Because details are classified and participation by affected populations is limited, military test ranges impose difficult challenges on those responsible for their safety. Here, the authors catalog some of those challenges and suggest ways to address them

Vulnerability analysis of three remote voting methods

This article analyses three methods of remote voting in an uncontrolled environment: postal voting, internet voting and hybrid voting. It breaks down the voting process into different stages and compares their vulnerabilities considering criteria that must be respected in any democratic vote: confidentiality, anonymity, transparency, vote unicity and authenticity. Whether for safety or reliability, each vulnerability is quantified by three parameters: size, visibility and difficulty to achieve. The study concludes that the automatisation of treatments combined with the dematerialisation of the objects used during an election tends to substitute visible vulnerabilities of a lesser magnitude by invisible and widespread vulnerabilities.Comment: 15 page

Detmold Conference Week 2017

Since 2000 (in the beginning 21st Century) climate change and globalisation have influenced the actual world and all societies tremendously and the have also affected the way we are building. Safety and security requirements are increasing and are consequently influencing the design of the building envelope. ‘Resilience’ describes the function and ability of buildings and their facades to to recover from or adjust easily to change. “Resilience” addresses the impacts of climate change and globalization and of safety and security requirements on the building envelope. The first edition of the Detmold Conference Week 2017 connects education and research, scholars and professionals in different events and formats: a master workshop and two conferences will discuss the approaches of resilient design and construction for buildings and facades. The direct way to specific stresses forced by water, wind, fire, explosion or earthquake but also in an indirect way seen as a general ability of adaptivity to different changes will be discussed at the facade2017 conference on Friday 24th November 2017 from different academic and professional perspectives. The 1st RMB Conference on Thursday 23rd November 2017 is organized by the consortium of the ERASMUS+ project “RMB: Reuse of Modernist Buildings. Design Tools for Sustainable Transformations”. There representatives of the consortium as well as international guest will debate in particular issues of Resilience of Modern Movement Buildings and Neighborhoods. During the conference we will discuss new design and educational concepts for the reuse of modern postwar buildings for housing and other purposes – resilience through reuse. Scholars, PhD and master students present and discuss selected papers and posters

Safeguards Envelope Methodology

Nuclear safeguards are intrinsic and extrinsic features of a facility which reduce probability of the successful acquisition of special nuclear material (SNM) by hostile actors. Future bulk handling facilities in the United States will include both domestic and international safeguards as part of a voluntary agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. A new framework for safeguards, the Safeguards Envelope Methodology, is presented. A safeguards envelope is a set of operational and safeguards parameters that define a range, or “envelope,” of operating conditions that increases confidence as to the location and assay of nuclear material without increasing costs from security or safety. Facilities operating within safeguards envelopes developed by this methodology will operate with a higher confidence, a lower false alarm rate, and reduced safeguards impact on the operator. Creating a safeguards envelope requires bringing together security, safety, and safeguards best practices. This methodology is applied to an example facility, the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant. An example diversion scenario in the front-end of this nuclear reprocessing facility, using actual operating data, shows that the diversion could have been detected more easily by changing operational parameters, and these changed operational parameters would not sacrifice the operational efficiency of the facility, introduce security vulnerabilities, or create a safety hazard

The vulnerability of rules in complex work environments: dynamism and uncertainty pose problems for cognition

Many complex work environments rely heavily on cognitive operators using rules. Operators sometimes fail to implement rules, with catastrophic human, social and economic costs. Rule-based error is widely reported, yet the mechanisms of rule vulnerability have received less attention. This paper examines rule vulnerability in the complex setting of airline transport operations. We examined ‘the stable approach criteria rule’, which acts as a system defence during the approach to land. The study experimentally tested whether system state complexity influenced rule failure. The results showed increased uncertainty and dynamism led to increased likelihood of rule failure. There was also an interaction effect, indicating complexity from different sources can combine to further constrain rule-based response. We discuss the results in relation to recent aircraft accidents and suggest that ‘rule-based error’ could be progressed to embrace rule vulnerability, fragility and failure. This better reflects the influence that system behaviour and cognitive variety have on rule-based response. Practitioner Summary: In this study, we examined mechanisms of rule vulnerability in the complex setting of airline transport operations. The results suggest work scenarios featuring high uncertainty and dynamism constrain rule-based response, leading to rules becoming vulnerable, fragile or failing completely. This has significant implications for rule-intensive, safety critical work environments

Validating a Web Service Security Abstraction by Typing

An XML web service is, to a first approximation, an RPC service in which requests and responses are encoded in XML as SOAP envelopes, and transported over HTTP. We consider the problem of authenticating requests and responses at the SOAP-level, rather than relying on transport-level security. We propose a security abstraction, inspired by earlier work on secure RPC, in which the methods exported by a web service are annotated with one of three security levels: none, authenticated, or both authenticated and encrypted. We model our abstraction as an object calculus with primitives for defining and calling web services. We describe the semantics of our object calculus by translating to a lower-level language with primitives for message passing and cryptography. To validate our semantics, we embed correspondence assertions that specify the correct authentication of requests and responses. By appeal to the type theory for cryptographic protocols of Gordon and Jeffrey's Cryptyc, we verify the correspondence assertions simply by typing. Finally, we describe an implementation of our semantics via custom SOAP headers.Comment: 44 pages. A preliminary version appears in the Proceedings of the Workshop on XML Security 2002, pp. 18-29, November 200