Creating a Vision for XYZ Research Corporation: A Case Study

A strategic analysis was developed for XYZ Research Corporation (the true company's name is disguised). The strategic analysis involved a series of visits to the company to conduct focus groups with its employees and management. Five focus groups were carried out at XYZ Research Corporation. This method proved to be effective and valuable when aiming to gather detailed information on the specifics of a firm's operation. Information and insights on the company and its business that would not become evident through any kind of meticulous financial or economic analysis of the company's and industry's numbers - which in fact were unavailable or scarce - was efficiently obtained by personal communication from the employees in the interviews. The focus group and interview method is recommended as a valid alternative to gathering detailed data and information when facing limited availability of reliable quantitative economic data on sales, size, and other information on the industry. The amount and quality of person-to-person information gathered in the interviews made the questionnaire a more powerful tool versus the alternative of simply mailing it. In the process of developing a strategic plan for XYZ, data and information used to write an undergraduate level teaching case study was gathered. The focus group method allowed for digging out intricate functional relationships within the company and between the company and the industry, which allowed for writing a more complete and educationally interesting case study.Focus Groups, Strategic Analysis, Food Safety, Outsourcing, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, A22, C99, L21, M10,

Computerized crime linkage systems: A critical review and research agenda

Computerized crime linkage systems are meant to assist the police in determining whether crimes have been committed by the same offender. In this article, the authors assess these systems critically and identify four assumptions that affect the effectiveness of these systems. These assumptions are that (a) data in the systems can be coded reliably, (b) data in the systems are accurate, (c) violent serial offenders exhibit consistent but distinctive patterns of behavior, and (d) analysts have the ability to use the data in the systems to link crimes accurately. The authors argue that there is no compelling empirical support for any of the four assumptions, and they outline a research agenda for testing each assumption. Until evidence supporting these assumptions becomes available, the value of linkage systems will remain open to debate

Speech Communication

Contains a report on a research project.National Science Foundation (Grant G-16526)United States Air Force, Electronic Systems Division (Contract AF19(604)-6102

Developing a Crime Harm Index for Western Australia: the WACHI

RESEARCH QUESTION Can a reliable measure of precise harm levels for the 100 most harmful and frequently occurring offences be developed in Western Australia (WA) based on analysis of actual court penalties for first-time offenders? DATA Criminal and traffic court sentences in 2.2 million records over 6.5 years were analysed to extract the number of days of imprisonment actually imposed in sentencing decisions for approximately 52,000 first-time offenders (see House 2017). METHODS Sentences for all first offenders in a sample of the 102 most common offence categories were analysed to compute for the median number of days of imprisonment to which each first offender was sentenced in each of the categories. Monetary penalties and conditional community sentences were converted to equivalent ‘prison days’ and added to the computation of the median of days of imprisonment per offence category. The number of reported offences in WA in the study period for each of the 102 categories was then multiplied by the median prison days sentenced per category. The sum of the products of median prison days times offence count was then tallied across all offence categories to form a weighted index of crime harm, which we define as the Western Australian Crime Harm Index (WACHI). Applying a minimum requirement of at least five separate court cases for each crime category, a total of 88 offence categories survived the reliability threshold for inclusion in the index. FINDINGS The 88 offence categories in the WACHI contain both high-harm and highvolume offences, permitting 95% of all offences reported for over 5 years to be assessed for WACHI scores. The counts for these offences moved in different directions from the WACHI total in two of the four year-to-year comparisons. Changes in WACHI were shown to have been highly sensitive to increased reporting of historical sex crimes, isolated in one district each of both Metropolitan Perth and one Regional centre. CONCLUSIONS Carefully implemented use of the West Australian CHI could improve both public safety and policing by adding precision to resource allocation decisions, assessments of priorities and evaluations of policing initiatives. The WACHI would be even more reflective of the changing level of harm to victims if all crime trends were to be based on crimes that occurred in the year under analysis, with separate reporting of crimes that happened many years ago. With that key adjustment, police professionals, department of justice officials, citizens and local governments can use a WACHI to make better decisions about how to prioritise policing in a wide range of contexts

Investigating the feedbacks between CO2, vegetation and the AMOC in a coupled climate model

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is an important component of the climate system, however its sensitivity to the terrestrial biosphere has been largely overlooked. Here the HadCM3 coupled climate model is run for millennial timescales to investigate the feedbacks between vegetation and the AMOC at increasing CO2. The impact of agricultural conversion (termed land-use change; LUC) and the role of the simulated 'background' vegetation (termed land cover change; LCC) are investigated. LUC cools climate in regions of high crop fraction due to increased albedo. LCC is shown to evolve at higher CO2, with a northward migration of the tree line in the Northern Hemisphere and dieback of the Amazon. This generally acts to enhance the impact of climate change primarily due to albedo changes. Density in the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian (GIN) Seas is crucial in driving the AMOC. Increasing CO2 decreases regional sea surface density, reducing convection and weakening the AMOC. The inclusion of LCC is shown to be responsible for a significant proportion of this weakening; reflecting the amplification effect it has on climate change. This acts to decrease the surface density in the GIN Seas. At elevated CO2 (1400 ppm) the inclusion of dynamic vegetation is shown to drive a reduction in AMOC strength from 6 to 20%. Despite the cooling effect of LUC, the impact on the AMOC is shown to be small reflecting minimal impact it has on GIN Sea density. These results indicate the importance of including dynamic vegetation in future AMOC studies using HadCM3, but LUC may be insignificant. In the context of other climate models however, the importance of vegetation is likely to be overshadowed by other systemic model biases.Peer reviewe