From doldrums to progressing knowledge: Identifying stifling issues in criminological theory building and testing

In the explanation of crime, although each social science has a primary focus of theoretical development, there are a number of areas where disciplines unwittingly parallel one another. Such parallel development promotes unnecessary competition among theories and prevents them from progressing knowledge. Additionally, theorists often discard related concepts presented by other disciplines, if they considered at all, which is indicative of an imbalance in the disciplinary frame of reference (e.g., psychology over sociology). Such imbalance and lack of cross-referencing impedes the ability of theories to adequately explain and understand criminality. This paper revisits how the theorizing of crime may benefit from such cross-referencing through what we refer to as a reciprocating perspective. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, we present a conceptual approach that can aid in strengthening theoretical development. Aiming to create an interdisciplinary bridge, we address key pitfalls in criminological theory development through four main elements: (1) concept formalization, (2) multi-level conceptualization, (3) causality, and (4) application. We also outline problems caused by such imbalance, and the progress made possible by the approach

Neutrino Geophysics at Baksan I: Possible Detection of Georeactor Antineutrinos

J.M. Herndon in 90-s proposed a natural nuclear fission georeactor at the center of the Earth with a power output of 3-10 TW as an energy source to sustain the Earth magnetic field. R.S. Raghavan in 2002 y. pointed out that under certain condition antineutrinos generated in georeactor can be detected using massive scintillation detectors. We consider the underground Baksan Neutrino Observatory (4800 m.w.e.) as a possible site for developments in Geoneutrino physics. Here the intrinsic background level of less than one event/year in a liquid scintillation ~1000 target ton detector can be achieved and the main source of background is the antineutrino flux from power reactors. We find that this flux is ~10 times lower than at KamLAND detector site and two times lower than at Gran Sasso laboratory and thus at Baksan the georeactor hypothesis can be conclusively tested. We also discuss possible search for composition of georector burning nuclear fuel by analysis of the antineutrino energy spectrum.Comment: 7 pages in LaTeX, 3 PS figures, Submitted to Physics of Atomic Nucle

Les organisations internationales au cœur des crises

Conflits armés, catastrophes naturelles, crises financières, effondrements étatiques… Les « crises » aux formes diverses (et souvent contestées), infranationales, nationales ou internationales, sont aujourd’hui l’objet d’interventions croissantes d’organisations internationales. ONU, HCR, OTAN, FMI, FAO, UE, OSCE, PNUD, BM, G8, AIEA, UA… La liste serait bien longue, et l’on pourrait y ajouter tous les dispositifs ad hoc (Groupes de contact, Quartet, etc.), créés le temps d’une crise, pour la ..

Les organisations internationales au cœur des crises: Configurations empiriques et jeux d'acteurs

Conflits armés, catastrophes naturelles, crises financières, effondrements étatiques... Les "crises" aux formes diverses (et souvent contestées), infranationales, nationales ou internationales, sont aujourd'hui l'objet d'interventions croissantes d'organisations internationales. Pourquoi ces organisations diverses investissent-elles de telles "crises" ? Comment se saisissent-elles d'enjeux nouveaux pour consolider ou étendre leurs champs d'action respectifs ? En vertu de quelles ressources légitimatrices ? Avec quelles contraintes politiques et symboliques ? Ce numéro de Cultures & Conflits entend restituer les résultats de travaux empiriques fondés sur une observation attentive de ces organisations internationales, et des façons dont elles se saisissent de cette catégorie pratique qu'est la « crise ». A travers des situations aussi différentes que les catastrophes naturelles, les conflits armés et la croissance rapide du chômage, les auteurs de ce dossier contribuent à une sociologie des acteurs engagés dans l'expertise et la négociation au sein des organisations internationales, en s'intéressant à leurs routines, à leurs logiques de division du travail entre organisations et entre catégories de professionnels, à leurs stratégies de mobilisation de leurs pairs. Ils contribuent, ce faisant, à questionner - de façon inductive plus que déductive - les effets d'une telle bureaucratisation internationale sur la composition des acteurs en présence dans les domaines concernés, et sur la nature des relations de pouvoir entre ces acteurs

A Decision Tree Approach to Predicting Recidivism in Domestic Violence

Domestic violence (DV) is a global social and public health issue that is highly gendered. Being able to accurately predict DV recidivism, i.e., re-offending of a previously convicted offender, can speed up and improve risk assessment procedures for police and front-line agencies, better protect victims of DV, and potentially prevent future re-occurrences of DV. Previous work in DV recidivism has employed different classification techniques, including decision tree (DT) induction and logistic regression, where the main focus was on achieving high prediction accuracy. As a result, even the diagrams of trained DTs were often too difficult to interpret due to their size and complexity, making decision-making challenging. Given there is often a trade-off between model accuracy and interpretability, in this work our aim is to employ DT induction to obtain both interpretable trees as well as high prediction accuracy. Specifically, we implement and evaluate different approaches to deal with class imbalance as well as feature selection. Compared to previous work in DV recidivism prediction that employed logistic regression, our approach can achieve comparable area under the ROC curve results by using only 3 of 11 available features and generating understandable decision trees that contain only 4 leaf nodes.Comment: 12 pages; Accepted at The 2018 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD

The Oklo bound on the time variation of the fine-structure constant revisited

It has been pointed out by Shlyakhter that data from the natural fission reactors which operated about two billion years ago at Oklo (Gabon) had the potential of providing an extremely tight bound on the variability of the fine-structure constant alpha. We revisit the derivation of such a bound by: (i) reanalyzing a large selection of published rare-earth data from Oklo, (ii) critically taking into account the very large uncertainty of the temperature at which the reactors operated, and (iii) connecting in a new way (using isotope shift measurements) the Oklo-derived constraint on a possible shift of thermal neutron-capture resonances with a bound on the time variation of alpha. Our final (95% C.L.) results are: -0.9 \times 10^{-7} <(alpha^{Oklo} - alpha^{now})/alpha <1.2\times 10^{-7} and -6.7 \times 10^{-17} {yr}^{-1} < {\dot alpha}^{averaged}/alpha <5.0\times10^{-17} {yr}^{-1}$.Comment: 23 pages, Latex, submitted to Nucl.Phys.

Confirmación analítica de carbofuran en dos perros intoxicados, manejo, tratamiento y evolución

Debido a que algunas intoxicaciones pueden causar enfermedad o aún la muerte dentro de solo minutos a horas después de la exposición, el acceso inmediato a información confiable sobre el diagnóstico y tratamiento es esencial. La mayoría de los casos de intoxicación en animales de compañía resulta de la exposición a insecticidas, especialmente fosforados, si bien los rodenticidas poseen un riesgo significativo. Las intoxicaciones con herbicidas, metales, productos del hogar y drogas de uso veterinario y humano son de presentación esporádica

Inhibición de butirilcolinesterasa en dos perros intoxicados y confirmación analítica de carbofuran como agente causal

Ferré, D.M.; Saldeña, E.L.; Albarracín, L.; Neuilly, V.; Gorla, N.B.: Inhibición de butirilcolinesterasa en dos perros intoxicados y confirmación analítica de carbofuran como agente causal. Rev. vet. 26: 1, 43-48, 2015

Natural Nuclear Reactor Oklo and Variation of Fundamental Constants Part 1: Computation of Neutronics of Fresh Core

Using modern methods of reactor physics we have performed full-scale calculations of the natural reactor Oklo. For reliability we have used recent version of two Monte Carlo codes: Russian code MCU REA and world wide known code MCNP (USA). Both codes produce similar results. We have constructed a computer model of the reactor Oklo zone RZ2 which takes into account all details of design and composition. The calculations were performed for three fresh cores with different uranium contents. Multiplication factors, reactivities and neutron fluxes were calculated. We have estimated also the temperature and void effects for the fresh core. As would be expected, we have found for the fresh core a significant difference between reactor and Maxwell spectra, which was used before for averaging cross sections in the Oklo reactor. The averaged cross section of Sm-149 and its dependence on the shift of resonance position (due to variation of fundamental constants) are significantly different from previous results. Contrary to results of some previous papers we find no evidence for the change of the fine structure constant in the past and obtain new, most accurate limits on its variation with time: -4 10^{-17}year^{-1} < d alpha/dt/alpha < 3 10^{-17} year^{-1} A further improvement in the accuracy of the limits can be achieved by taking account of the core burnup. These calculations are in progress.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures, 12 tables, minor corrections, typos correcte