Investigative decision making: missing people and sexual offences, crossroads to an uncertain future

In recent years detective competence and particularly investigative decision making has been subject to serious criticism and a number of high profile reviews. Concerns around investigative competence do not just focus around decisions made on the ground but police attitudes to certain crimes. This paper examines police decision making in the context of missing people and sexual violence and identifies challenges in the development of investigative competence in the context of police budget cuts and substantial reform

Mutual recognition of national military airworthiness authorities: A streamlined assessment process

The Air and Space Interoperability Council (ASIC) has adopted the European Defence Agency (EDA) process for interregulatory military airworthiness authority recognition. However, there are gaps in the application of this process to nations outside of the European Union. This paper proposes a model that can effectively map diverse technical airworthiness regulatory frameworks. This model, referred to as the Product-Behaviour-Process (PBP) Bow-Tie model, provides the systematic structure needed to represent and compare regulatory frameworks. The PBP Bow-Tie model identifies key points of difference that need to be addressed, during inter-agency recognition between the two regulatory authorities. With the intention to adopt global use of the EDA process, the proposed PBP Bow-Tie model can be used as a basis for the successful recognition of regulatory frameworks outside of the European Union. Iris plots produced from the implementation of this model are presented, and proposed as a suitable means of illustrating the outcome of an assessment, and of supporting the comparisons of results. A comparative analysis of the Australian Defence Force and New Zealand Defence Force airworthiness regulatory frameworks is used as a case study. The case study clearly illustrates the effectiveness of the model in discerning regulatory framework differences; moreover, it has offered an opportunity to explore the limitations of the Iris plot

“Basically... porn is everywhere”: a rapid evidence assessment on the effects that access and exposure to pornography has on children and young people

This Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) was commissioned by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner (OCC) as part of its Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups (CSEGG). It was conducted by a consortium led by Middlesex University, to explore the effects that exposure and access to pornography have on children and young people. The CSEGG Inquiry was launched in October 2011 to better understand the scale, scope, extent and nature of child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups. An emergent issue was whether accessing and viewing pornography can have an impact on children and young people’s expectations and attitudes towards sexual activity and relationships. Despite limited recourse to previous evidence, professionals interviewed over the course of the CSEGG Inquiry raised concerns about the impact of pornography at 43 per cent of site visits and 48 per cent of evidence hearings (Berelowitz et al., 2012). Professionals from many agencies reported particular concerns about the effects of pornography involving high levels of degradation, violence and humiliation, which they believe to be prevalent in material freely available online. Police case files that were reviewed cited instances of boys and young men referring to pornography during sexual assaults (Berelowitz et al., 2012). This REA was therefore commissioned to inform the CSEGG Inquiry Chair, Panel and Project Team, enabling them to add depth to their ultimate recommendations regarding child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups

Scalable Mining of Common Routes in Mobile Communication Network Traffic Data

A probabilistic method for inferring common routes from mobile communication network traffic data is presented. Besides providing mobility information, valuable in a multitude of application areas, the method has the dual purpose of enabling efficient coarse-graining as well as anonymisation by mapping individual sequences onto common routes. The approach is to represent spatial trajectories by Cell ID sequences that are grouped into routes using locality-sensitive hashing and graph clustering. The method is demonstrated to be scalable, and to accurately group sequences using an evaluation set of GPS tagged data

‘It’s not what it looks like. I’m Santa’: connecting community through film

The lived experiences of young people are becoming increasingly marginalised within the narrowly defined curricula of neoliberal contexts. Many young people are also cast within the media according to deficit discourses of youth, which contributes to the fragmentation of communities and the limitation of interaction between generations. This article describes a film project in which young people living in an ex-mining community in the Midlands of England worked in and with their community to create a representation of where they live. As part of the process, the young filmmakers did more than connect to other people’s memories as repositories of information; both as process and as product, their film can be seen to connect shared narratives of people and place, across time and space. We argue that this project offers a timely opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which we understand learning in and out of English classrooms

Matroids and Quantum Secret Sharing Schemes

A secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic protocol to distribute a secret state in an encoded form among a group of players such that only authorized subsets of the players can reconstruct the secret. Classically, efficient secret sharing schemes have been shown to be induced by matroids. Furthermore, access structures of such schemes can be characterized by an excluded minor relation. No such relations are known for quantum secret sharing schemes. In this paper we take the first steps toward a matroidal characterization of quantum secret sharing schemes. In addition to providing a new perspective on quantum secret sharing schemes, this characterization has important benefits. While previous work has shown how to construct quantum secret sharing schemes for general access structures, these schemes are not claimed to be efficient. In this context the present results prove to be useful; they enable us to construct efficient quantum secret sharing schemes for many general access structures. More precisely, we show that an identically self-dual matroid that is representable over a finite field induces a pure state quantum secret sharing scheme with information rate one

The Sparsest Clusters With O Stars

There is much debate on how high-mass star formation varies with environment, and whether the sparsest star-forming environments are capable of forming massive stars. To address this issue, we have observed eight apparently isolated OB stars in the SMC using HST's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Five of these objects appear as isolated stars, two of which are confirmed to be runaways. The remaining three objects are found to exist in sparse clusters, with <10 companion stars revealed, having masses of 1-4 solar mass. Stochastic effects dominate in these sparse clusters, so we perform Monte Carlo simulations to explore how our observations fit within the framework of empirical, galactic cluster properties. We generate clusters using a simplistic -2 power-law distribution for either the number of stars per cluster (N_*) or cluster mass (M_cl). These clusters are then populated with stars randomly chosen from a Kroupa IMF. We find that simulations with cluster lower-mass limits of M_cl,lo >20 solar mass and N_*,lo >40 match best with observations of SMC and Galactic OB star populations. We examine the mass ratio of the second-most massive and most massive stars (m_max,2/m_max), finding that our observations all exist below the 20th percentile of our simulated clusters. However, all of our observed clusters lie within the parameter space spanned by the simulated clusters, although some are in the lowest 5th percentile frequency. These results suggest that clusters are built stochastically by randomly sampling stars from a universal IMF with a fixed stellar upper-mass limit. In particular, we see no evidence to suggest a m_max - M_cl relation. Our results may be more consistent with core accretion models of star formation than with competitive accretion models, and they are inconsistent with the proposed steepening of the integrated galaxy IMF (IGIMF).Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

‘You can’t just be a Muslim in outer space’:young people making sense of religion at local places in the city

This paper demonstrates how young people make sense of religion through local places in the urban context while moving from youth to young adulthood. We draw on in-depth interviews–including a mental map-making exercise–with twenty-four young Muslims (18–30) from a wide range of cultural backgrounds living in Metro Vancouver (Canada). Their narratives reveal young people ‘live’ religion in various local places and how spatialities of lived religion change over time. We highlight how making sense of religion is reflected in the changing meaning of the mosque and relates to the increased salience of places shared with young Muslims in which our participants negotiate religion in the context of their everyday lives in the city. While many studies on Muslim identities have established the complexities and dynamics of negotiating religion at specific local places, we argue for a focus on relations between lived religion at various local places over time. These spatiotemporal complexities are able to capture how making sense of religion is spatially and fluidly manifested in the urban context of Metro Vancouver

Spitzer SAGE Infrared Photometry of Massive Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud

We present a catalog of 1750 massive stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, with accurate spectral types compiled from the literature, and a photometric catalog for a subset of 1268 of these stars, with the goal of exploring their infrared properties. The photometric catalog consists of stars with infrared counterparts in the Spitzer SAGE survey database, for which we present uniform photometry from 0.3-24 microns in the UBVIJHKs+IRAC+MIPS24 bands. The resulting infrared color-magnitude diagrams illustrate that the supergiant B[e], red supergiant and luminous blue variable (LBV) stars are among the brightest infrared point sources in the Large Magellanic Cloud, due to their intrinsic brightness, and at longer wavelengths, due to dust. We detect infrared excesses due to free-free emission among ~900 OB stars, which correlate with luminosity class. We confirm the presence of dust around 10 supergiant B[e] stars, finding the shape of their spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to be very similar, in contrast to the variety of SED shapes among the spectrally variable LBVs. The similar luminosities of B[e] supergiants (log L/Lo>=4) and the rare, dusty progenitors of the new class of optical transients (e.g. SN 2008S and NGC 300 OT), plus the fact that dust is present in both types of objects, suggests a common origin for them. We find the infrared colors for Wolf-Rayet stars to be independent of spectral type and their SEDs to be flatter than what models predict. The results of this study provide the first comprehensive roadmap for interpreting luminous, massive, resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies at infrared wavelengths.Comment: 57 pages, 19 figures, 5 tables, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal (v3 corrects typos