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

Cholera, nuisances and environmental management in Islington, 1830-55.

Abstract included in tex

Mixed tenure orthodoxy: practitioner reflections on policy effects

This article examines mixed tenure as a policy orthodoxy. It first sets out how mixed tenure may be considered to constitute an orthodoxy within planning, being generally accepted as a theory and practice even in the absence of supporting evidence. Five elements of this orthodoxy are identified, relating to (1) housing and the environment, (2) social change, (3) economic impacts, (4) sustainable communities, (5) and sociospatial integration. Interviews with practitioners involved with three social housing estates that have experienced mixed-tenure policy interventions are reported to consider why the implementation and effects of mixed tenure might not correspond with the orthodox understanding. It is argued that policy ambiguity and weaknesses in policy theory and specification, alongside practical constraints, lie behind incomplete and counterproductive policy implementation, but a belief in pursuing the policy orthodoxy persists nevertheless

Performance Sculpture--An Exploratory Collaboration between Sculpture and Dance

Kinetic sculpture suggests new visual possibilities when combined with dance. Wishing to explore such avenues of interaction for sculpture, this artist sought to develop pieces that could be incorporated into choreography. An artist and a choreographer wove their concepts and styles together to create a performance art piece that rose from the reciprocal influences of interactive sculpture and dance. The creative process included development of concepts, visual imagery, and movement as the artist and choreographer shared ideas. The choreography of the original dance influenced the form, structure, and conceptual elements of the sculpture, which was developed in reaction to the movements. The choreography was then readapted in reaction to the sculpture. The choreography inspired the sculpture’s form; the dance evolved in response to the sculpture. The sculpture created more than just an environment for the dancers; it created a new visual relationship in which the movement and form of both sculptures and dancers echoed each other. The result is a collaboration in which both dance and sculpture transcend their individual art forms to become a symbiotic performance piece. This presentation shares the stages of evolution in the creative process and reveals the final outcome of the piece

Sound propagation over uneven ground and irregular topography

Theoretical, computational, and experimental techniques for predicting the effects of irregular topography on long range sound propagation in the atmosphere was developed. Irregular topography here is understood to imply a ground surface that is not idealized as being perfectly flat or that is not idealized as having a constant specific acoustic impedance. The interest focuses on circumstances where the propagation is similar to what might be expected for noise from low altitude air vehicles flying over suburban or rural terrain, such that rays from the source arrive at angles close to grazing incidence

Vegetative States: Potatoes, Affordances, and Survival Ecologies

The potato has been critical to plant-human assemblages both in South America and in Europe. A study of the capacities, or affordances of this plant within diverse political economies highlights its mutability in some circumstances and vulnerability in others. The contrasts are stark. In South America, peasant agriculture took the potato across a large and diverse ecumene allowing its elaboration into many varieties and sustaining extensive state systems that taxed its production. Spanish colonialism repurposed the plant as the calorific basis for concentrations of coerced labor at silver mines. Back in Europe it was initially the resistance of the potato to state violence that encouraged peasants to turn over their fields to tuberous plant that ‘concealed’ its food underground. But its calorific productivity per acre again saw it repurposed as peasants were converted to proletarians, allowed to subsist on only the smallest plots while working for landlords on larger estates

Bootstrapping Monte Carlo Tree Search with an Imperfect Heuristic

We consider the problem of using a heuristic policy to improve the value approximation by the Upper Confidence Bound applied in Trees (UCT) algorithm in non-adversarial settings such as planning with large-state space Markov Decision Processes. Current improvements to UCT focus on either changing the action selection formula at the internal nodes or the rollout policy at the leaf nodes of the search tree. In this work, we propose to add an auxiliary arm to each of the internal nodes, and always use the heuristic policy to roll out simulations at the auxiliary arms. The method aims to get fast convergence to optimal values at states where the heuristic policy is optimal, while retaining similar approximation as the original UCT in other states. We show that bootstrapping with the proposed method in the new algorithm, UCT-Aux, performs better compared to the original UCT algorithm and its variants in two benchmark experiment settings. We also examine conditions under which UCT-Aux works well.Comment: 16 pages, accepted for presentation at ECML'1

Lunar mission performance evaluation procedure for orbit-launched nuclear vehicles

Lunar mission performance evaluation procedure for orbit-launched vehicles with nuclear propulsion syste