Routine activities and proactive police activity: a macro-scale analysis of police searches in London and New York City

This paper explored how city-level changes in routine activities were associated with changes in frequencies of police searches using six years of police records from the London Metropolitan Police Service and the New York City Police Department. Routine activities were operationalised through selecting events that potentially impacted on (a) the street population, (b) the frequency of crime or (c) the level of police activity. OLS regression results indicated that routine activity variables (e.g. day of the week, periods of high demand for police service) can explain a large proportion of the variance in search frequency throughout the year. A complex set of results emerged, revealing cross-national dissimilarities and the differential impact of certain activities (e.g. public holidays). Importantly, temporal frequencies in searches are not reducible to associations between searches and recorded street crime, nor changes in on-street population. Based on the routine activity approach, a theoretical police-action model is proposed

Willful Misconduct: How Bill Frist and the Drug Lobby Covertly Bagged a Liability Shield

Drug industry lobbyists conspired with the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) last year to craft a sweeping liability provision that shields the industry from lawsuits over products used to treat pandemic illnesses, even in cases of gross negligence or gross recklessness.This report relies on internal documents and e-mails of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) to illustrate the degree to which Frist's office deferred to drug industry demands and describes Frist's sleight of hand in securing passage of the provision. It underscores the enormous power of the drug industry and its lobbyists to steer a highly controversial provision into law.Frist inserted the shield provision into an already-completed conference report for the defense appropriations bill in the dead of night, with the aid of House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Many of the members of the conference committee had never seen the language, let alone approved it. Committee leaders explicitly assured Democrats, made wary by rumors circulating in the preceding days, that no attempt would be made to insert the liability measure into the spending bill.The shield is unnecessary because the government now can -- and does -- indemnify drug companies in contracts, using provisions saying that the government will cover costs in excess of the companies' insurance.The pharmaceutical industry used legions of influence-peddlers to push for the measure. The industry deployed at least 158 lobbyists to influence policies relating to vaccines and pandemic preparedness in 2004 and 2005, including 84 who were previously employed by the federal government. Of those, seven were former members of Congress, two were former top health care aides to Frist and another was the son of the speaker of the House

Virtual Advice Services

The chapter looks at the issues involved with implementing and running a chat enquiry service, from choosing an appropriate product to staff training and publicity. The experiences of a number of UK Higher Education Institutions currently offering chat enquiry services are discussed at various stages. Aspects of more advanced use, such as web ‘co-browsing’ and virtual advice by appointment are also included. The chapter closes by considering what the future holds for virtual advice services and the potential impact of the growth in mobile technologies

A comparison of univariate methods for forecasting electricity demand up to a day ahead

This empirical paper compares the accuracy of six univariate methods for short-term electricity demand forecasting for lead times up to a day ahead. The very short lead times are of particular interest as univariate methods are often replaced by multivariate methods for prediction beyond about six hours ahead. The methods considered include the recently proposed exponential smoothing method for double seasonality and a new method based on principal component analysis (PCA). The methods are compared using a time series of hourly demand for Rio de Janeiro and a series of half-hourly demand for England and Wales. The PCA method performed well, but, overall, the best results were achieved with the exponential smoothing method, leading us to conclude that simpler and more robust methods, which require little domain knowledge, can outperform more complex alternatives

Closure: A response to Miroslav Holub

A response to Miroslav Holub's essay on "Wisdom as a metaphor" related to the professional domain of engineering which concludes that experience and action are needed to transform metaphorical expressions of wisdom into literal tenets

Charles W. Peach, palaeobotany and Scotland

The move south from Wick to the city of Edinburgh in 1865, some four years after retirement from the Customs service, provided Charles W. Peach with new opportunities for fossil-collecting and scientific networking. Here he renewed and maintained his interest in natural history and made significant palaeobotanical collections from the Carboniferous of the Midland Valley of Scotland. These are distinguished by some interesting characteristics of their documentation which the following generations of fossil collectors and researchers would have done well to emulate. Many of his fossil plant specimens have not only the locality detail,but also the date, month and year of collection neatly handwritten on attached paper labels; as a result, we can follow Peach's collecting activities over a period of some 18 years or so. Comments and even illustrative sketches on the labels of some fossils give us first-hand insight into Peach's observations. Study of these collections now held in National Museums Scotland reveals a pattern of collecting heavily biased towards those localities readily accessible from the newly expanding railways which provided a relatively inexpensive and convenient means of exploring the geology of the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Charles W. Peach had a very 'hands-on' practical approach to scientific investigation which led him to construct novel glass plates with mounted Sphenopteris cuticle, removed intact from Lower Carboniferous shales and limestones originating in West Lothian. These resemble the herbarium sheets with which he was familiar from his parallel and highly significant work on extant flora including nearshore marine algae. He also prepared hand ground glass microscope slides,particularly of permineralised plant material from Pettycur in Fife, using whatever materials he had to hand at the time. Peach's collection raises questions about the evolution of accepted standards of documentation in private collections, in parallel with the evolution of collecting practices by the new professionals such as the workers of the Geological Survey. Its relatively rapid deposition in museums,compared to many private collections, may also have contributed to its apparently high rate of usage by contemporary workers

Spartan Daily, November 10, 2005

Volume 125, Issue 44https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10187/thumbnail.jp