Policing and accountability: the working of police authorities

This article was published in the journal, Policing and Society [© Taylor & Francis] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2011.556734In recent times policing has attracted a good deal of controversy, such as the paramilitary tactics employed at demonstrations, the use of stop and search powers under the Terrorism Act 2000, and the manner in which police officers are deployed on day-to-day duties. This paper outlines the role and potential of police authorities to influence police policy and operations and also highlights the need to seek greater citizen participation in holding the police to account. The major part of the paper draws on ground-breaking research on police authorities using questionnaire and in-depth interview data to outline just how it is that police authority members approach their duties

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

Reservation and grouping stations for the IEEE 802.11 DCF

In this paper, we propose a novel contention-based protocol, called Reservation with Grouping Stations (RGS) for the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). In the proposed RGS scheme, stations are grouping into the active group, the ready group, and the idle group. Furthermore, stations announce the next frame's backoff counter beforehand. The proposed scheme is compared with the DCF and another scheme in the literature, and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is the best among these three schemes

The Roles of Stabilixation Policy and Wage Setting for Macroeconomic Stability : The Experiences of Economies with Centralized Bargaining

The paper discusses the roles of stabilization policy and wage setting for macroeconomic stability in economies with centralized wage setting such as in the Nordic countries, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany. because of their economy-wide character labout market organizations in these countries are forced to consider the macroeconomic effects of and likely government responses to their behavior. The paper gives aan account of how the allocations of responsibilities for various macroeconomic goals between the government and labour market organizations have developed during the post-war period with the emphasis on the responses to the recent supply shocks. The country experiences are used to draw conclusions on the advantages or disadvantages of various policy regimes and recent theoretical work on the behavior of trade unions is applied to explain the observed outcomes