Criminal neighbourhoods: does the density of prior offenders encourage others to commit crime?

Using crime data over a period of a decade for Glasgow, this paper explores whether the density of prior offenders in a neighbourhoods has an influence on the propensity of others to (re)commence offending. The study shows that the number of ‘newly active’ offenders in a neighbourhood in the current quarter is positively associated with the density of prior offenders for both violent and property crime from the previous two years. In the case of ‘newly active’ property offenders, the relationship with active prior offenders is only apparent when prior offender counts exceed the median. The paper postulates that intraneighbourhood social mechanisms may be at work to create these effects. The results suggest that policies which concentrate offenders in particular neighbourhoods may increase the number of ‘newly active’ offenders, and point to evidence of a threshold at which these effects take place

Smoking and intention to quit in deprived areas of Glasgow: is it related to housing improvements and neighbourhood regeneration because of improved mental health?

Background: People living in areas of multiple deprivation are more likely to smoke and less likely to quit smoking. This study examines the effect on smoking and intention to quit smoking for those who have experienced housing improvements (HI) in deprived areas of Glasgow, UK, and investigates whether such effects can be explained by improved mental health. Methods: Quasi-experimental, 2-year longitudinal study, comparing residents’ smoking and intention to quit smoking for HI group (n=545) with non-HI group (n=517), adjusting for baseline (2006) sociodemographic factors and smoking status. SF-12 mental health scores were used to assess mental health, along with self-reported experience of, and General Practitioner (GP) consultations for, anxiety and depression in the last 12 months. Results: There was no relationship between smoking and HI, adjusting for baseline rates (OR=0.97, 95% CI 0.57 to 1.67, p=0.918). We found an association between intention to quit and HI, which remained significant after adjusting for sociodemographics and previous intention to quit (OR 2.16, 95% CI 1.12 to 4.16, p=0.022). We found no consistent evidence that this association was attenuated by improvement in our three mental health measures. Conclusions: Providing residents in disadvantaged areas with better housing may prompt them to consider quitting smoking. However, few people actually quit, indicating that residential improvements or changes to the physical environment may not be sufficient drivers of personal behavioural change. It would make sense to link health services to housing regeneration projects to support changes in health behaviours at a time when environmental change appears to make behavioural change more likely

Is It Terrorism?: Public Perceptions, Media, and Labeling the Las Vegas Shooting

When a mass casualty event occurs, why do some people label it terrorism while others do not? People are more likely to consider an attack to be terrorism when the perpetrator is Muslim, yet it is unclear what other factors influence perceptions of mass violence. Using data collected from a national sample of U.S. adults shortly after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, we examine how media consumption and social identity influence views of the attack. Media consumption and individual-level factors—Islamophobia, political ideology, and other participant demographics—influence how people view the attack and how confident people are in their assessments

A randomised, controlled, double blind, non-inferiority trial of ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block vs. spinal morphine for analgesia after primary hip arthroplasty

We performed a single centre, double blind, randomised, controlled, non-inferiority study comparing ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block with spinal morphine for the primary outcome of 24-h postoperative morphine consumption in patients undergoing primary total hip arthroplasty under spinal anaesthesia with levobupivacaine. One hundred and eight patients were randomly allocated to receive either ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block with 2 mg.kg−1 levobupivacaine (fascia iliaca group) or spinal morphine 100 μg plus a sham ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block using saline (spinal morphine group). The pre-defined non-inferiority margin was a median difference between the groups of 10 mg in cumulative intravenous morphine use in the first 24 h postoperatively. Patients in the fascia iliaca group received 25 mg more intravenous morphine than patients in the spinal morphine group (95% CI 9.0–30.5 mg, p < 0.001). Ultrasound-guided fascia iliaca block was significantly worse than spinal morphine in the provision of analgesia in the first 24 h after total hip arthroplasty. No increase in side-effects was noted in the spinal morphine group but the study was not powered to investigate all secondary outcomes

Notorious places: image, reputation, stigma: the role of newspapers in area reputations for social housing estates

This paper reviews work in several disciplines to distinguish between image, reputation and stigma. It also shows that there has been little research on the process by which area reputations are established and sustained through transmission processes. This paper reports on research into the portrayal of two social housing estates in the printed media over an extended period of time (14 years). It was found that negative and mixed coverage of the estates dominated, with the amount of positive coverage being very small. By examining the way in which dominant themes were used by newspapers in respect of each estate, questions are raised about the mode of operation of the press and the communities' collective right to challenge this. By identifying the way regeneration stories are covered and the nature of the content of positive stories, lessons are drawn for programmes of area transformation. The need for social regeneration activities is identified as an important ingredient for changing deprived-area reputations

Concept For Enhancing The Tracking Of Military Unit Status & Readiness Issues, By Improving The Utility Of Unit Identification Codes (UICs) & Unit Type Codes (UTCs)

Report on study of the contents and structure of unclassified unit identification codes databases and unit type codes databases which are used by the U.S. government as a means to access and exploit the databases by non-technical and non-traditional users in a manner generally intuitive to senior enlisted members or field grade officer members of the armed forces

Optimising Bowel Cancer Screening Phase 1: Optimising the cost effectiveness of repeated FIT screening and screening strategies combining bowel scope and FIT screening

ScHARR has been commissioned by the UK National Screening Committee (NSC) to consider the costeffectiveness and endoscopy capacity requirements of a variety of different screening options incorporating faecal immunochemical testing (FIT) and bowel scope (BS) within the Bowel Cancer Screening Programme (BCSP). An existing cost-effectiveness model was used. The model was refined considerably, new data included and model validation was undertaken. All FIT thresholds between 20 and 180 µg/ml were modelled. Analyses were undertaken to determine which screening strategies involving repeated FIT screening and/or bowel scope are most cost-effective given endoscopy constraints. Note that the conclusions reached are based on optimising cost-effectiveness where effectiveness is measured in terms of QALYs gained. If the aim was to optimise QALY gains or CRC incidence/mortality reduction then conclusions would be different. The analysis without endoscopy constraints indicates that the most cost effective screening strategy is the one which delivers the most intensive screening. Regardless of capacity constraints the current screening strategies (gFOBT 2-yearly 60-74 with or without bowel scope age 55) are dominated by a FIT screening strategy (i.e. a FIT strategy exists which is more effective and less expensive). For repeated FIT screening it is recommended that the screening interval is kept to 2-yearly screening. However, increased benefits may be obtained by re-inviting non-attenders after a 1 year interval. The optimal starting age for a repeated FIT screening strategy is 50 or 51 hence it is suggested that the screening start age is reduced compared to what is currently used in the BCSP. The optimal upper screening age varies between 65 and 74, depending on the capacity constraint used. The optimal FIT threshold depends on the available capacity for screening referral colonoscopies. With 50,000 screening referral colonoscopies (current capacity) then we recommend a strategy of 2-yearly, age 51-65, FIT161 (8 screens). With 70,000 screening referral colonoscopies (current capacity) then we recommend a strategy of: 2-yearly, age 50-70, FIT153 (11 screens). If 90,000 screening referral colonoscopies is considered feasible to achieve in the future then we recommend a strategy of 2-yearly, age 50-74, FIT124 (13 screens). In terms of bowel scope screening the model found uncertainty in whether it is cost effective to replace one FIT screen with a one-off bowel scope at age 58/59. However, a repeated FIT screening strategy requiring 125k screening referral colonoscopies annually would be far more effective and cost effective than a one-off bowel scope at age 59. Such strategies could be considered to have equivalent ‘endoscopy capacity’ (assuming that 10 bowel scopes and 4 screening referral colonoscopies are equivalent ).Hence, if bowel scope capacity could be used for undertaking screening referral colonoscopies this would result in higher effectiveness and cost-effectiveness

Living IoT: A Flying Wireless Platform on Live Insects

Sensor networks with devices capable of moving could enable applications ranging from precision irrigation to environmental sensing. Using mechanical drones to move sensors, however, severely limits operation time since flight time is limited by the energy density of current battery technology. We explore an alternative, biology-based solution: integrate sensing, computing and communication functionalities onto live flying insects to create a mobile IoT platform. Such an approach takes advantage of these tiny, highly efficient biological insects which are ubiquitous in many outdoor ecosystems, to essentially provide mobility for free. Doing so however requires addressing key technical challenges of power, size, weight and self-localization in order for the insects to perform location-dependent sensing operations as they carry our IoT payload through the environment. We develop and deploy our platform on bumblebees which includes backscatter communication, low-power self-localization hardware, sensors, and a power source. We show that our platform is capable of sensing, backscattering data at 1 kbps when the insects are back at the hive, and localizing itself up to distances of 80 m from the access points, all within a total weight budget of 102 mg.Comment: Co-primary authors: Vikram Iyer, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Anran Wang, In Proceedings of Mobicom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages, 201

Strategic network formation with attach and immunization

Strategic network formation arises in settings where agents receive some benefit from their connectedness to other agents, but also incur costs for forming these links. We consider a new network formation game that incorporates an adversarial attack, as well as immunization or protection against the attack. An agent’s network benefit is the expected size of her connected component post-attack, and agents may also choose to immunize themselves from attack at some additional cost. Our framework can be viewed as a stylized model of settings where reachability rather than centrality is the primary interest (as in many technological networks such as the Internet), and vertices may be vulnerable to attacks (such as viruses), but may also reduce risk via potentially costly measures (such as an anti-virus software). Our main theoretical contributions include a strong bound on the edge density at equilibrium. In particular, we show that under a very mild assumption on the adversary’s attack model, every equilibrium network contains at most only 2n−4 edges for n ≥ 4, where n denotes the number of agents and this upper bound is tight. We also show that social welfare does not significantly erode: every non-trivial equilibrium with respect to several adversarial attack models asymptotically has social welfare at least as that of any equilibrium in the original attack-free model. We complement our sharp theoretical results by a behavioral experiment on our game with over 100 participants, where despite the complexity of the game, the resulting network was surprisingly close to equilibrium

Order-Revealing Encryption and the Hardness of Private Learning

An order-revealing encryption scheme gives a public procedure by which two ciphertexts can be compared to reveal the ordering of their underlying plaintexts. We show how to use order-revealing encryption to separate computationally efficient PAC learning from efficient $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially private PAC learning. That is, we construct a concept class that is efficiently PAC learnable, but for which every efficient learner fails to be differentially private. This answers a question of Kasiviswanathan et al. (FOCS '08, SIAM J. Comput. '11). To prove our result, we give a generic transformation from an order-revealing encryption scheme into one with strongly correct comparison, which enables the consistent comparison of ciphertexts that are not obtained as the valid encryption of any message. We believe this construction may be of independent interest.Comment: 28 page