Peering through the Kaleidoscope: Variation and Validity in Data Collection on Terrorist Attacks

The nature of underreporting terrorism in developing countries is often acknowledged but poorly understood. Focusing on India, we triangulate terrorist attacks captured across three media-based datasets (GTD, SATP, WITS) against official police records from Andhra Pradesh. Results suggest that media-based datasets capture the geographic prevalence of terrorism yet severely underestimate the frequency of violence, biasing towards lethal bombings. Considerable variation is present for attacks targeting specific classes or types of actors. Similar to other crimes, the results suggest that existing terrorism databases represent a select version of violence in these countries, discounting the prevalence and regularity of non-lethal violent activity

Police Legitimacy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Is fairness in process and outcome a generalizable driver of police legitimacy? In many industrialized nations, studies have demonstrated that police legitimacy is largely a function of whether citizens perceive treatment as normatively fair and respectful. Questions remain whether this model holds in less-industrialized contexts, where corruption and security challenges favor instrumental preferences for effective crime control and prevention. Support for and against the normative model of legitimacy has been found in less-industrialized countries, yet few have simultaneously compared these models across multiple industrializing countries. Using a multilevel framework and data from respondents in 27 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (n~43,000), I find evidence for the presence of both instrumental and normative influences in shaping the perceptions of police legitimacy. More importantly, the internal consistency of legitimacy (defined as obligation to obey, moral alignment, and perceived legality of the police) varies considerably from country to country, suggesting that relationships between legality, morality, and obligation operate differently across contexts. Results are robust to a number of different modeling assumptions and alternative explanations. Overall, the results indicate that both fairness and effectiveness matter, not in all places, and in some cases contrary to theoretical expectations

Sampling Social Media: Supporting Information Retrieval from Microblog Data Resellers with Text, Network, and Spatial Analysis

This paper presents a computationally assisted method for scaling researcher expertise to large, online social media datasets in which access is constrained and costly. Developed collaboratively between social and computer science researchers, this method is designed to be flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and to reduce bias in data collection. Online response to six case studies covering elections and election-related violence in Sub-Saharan African countries are explored using Twitter, a popular online microblogging platform. Results show: 1) automated query expansion can mitigate researcher bias, 2) machine learning models combining textual, social, temporal, and geographic features in social media data perform well in filtering data unrelated to the target event, and 3) these results are achievable while minimizing fee-based queries by bootstrapping with readily-available Twitter samples

CCDC 948382: Experimental Crystal Structure Determination

Related Article: Michal Szostak, Brice Sautier, Malcolm Spain, Maike Behlendorf, David J. Procter|2013|Angew.Chem.,Int.Ed.|52|12559|doi:10.1002/anie.20130648

Radical-Based Epoxide Opening by Titanocenes

The binding of 2,2-diphenyloxirane to Cp₂TiCl is studied on the electronic level by magnetic resonance spectroscopy and quantum chemical calculations. The complexation of 2,2-diphenyloxirane is accompanied by dissociation of the chloride ligand, and thus, the epoxide binds to the cationic titanocene­(III) complex. The titanocene­(III)–epoxide species persists only for short periods of time (<5 min) even at 243 K, indicating that the ring-opening reaction is exothermic. A short-lived paramagnetic titanocene­(IV)–epoxide radical species has not been directly observed. However, by a combination of isotope labeling and spin-trapping, evidence for the existence of such a species has been unequivocally demonstrated. The observation of a titanocene­(III)–epoxide complex is unprecedented and provides direct evidence for inner-sphere electron transfer between epoxides and titanocenes, responsible for the high regioselectivity of ring-opening

Magnetic and NIR-spectroscopic studies on mixed-valent Fe(II)/Fe(III)- compounds

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