Preventing domestic violence and abuse: common themes and lessons learned from West Midlands' DHRs

This report is the result of a piece of commissioned research looking at Domestic Homicide Reviews in the West Midlands Police Force Area. Domestic Homicide Reviews were introduced in April 2011 with the aim of allowing and encouraging local areas to work together following a domestic homicide in order to focus on: future prevention, provision of relevant services, partnership and interagency working, justice outcomes, and risk reduction. Noting the lessons emanating from the Home Office (2013b) report looking at the usefulness of DHRs, the seven Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) across the West Midlands Police Force Area (WMPFA) believed there to be tangible benefits of understanding where the nationally identified themes are present across the WMPFA, and where a potential alteration of policy and practice across the region in response could identify domestic violence victims and reduce their vulnerability. As such, this report was commissioned by the seven CPGs across the WMPFA, and has been funded by the Police & Crime Commissioner. This report builds on the findings of the Home Office report (2013b) and the HMIC recommendations (HMIC, 2014) and tailors recommendations for the WMPFA with regards to strategies for tackling domestic violence, and specifically for addressing issues that may lead to domestic violence homicide

Women’s Open Space project evaluation: final report

This report presents findings from an evaluation of the Women's Open Spaces [WOS] project, carried out between July 2011 and March 2012. The evaluation sought to analyze the impact and efficacy of services offered to street-based sex workers by WOS and to look at the New Horizon Youth Centre [NHYC] model of engagement with young women at risk of sexual exploitation. This report will provide an analysis of service delivery and user-engagement with WOS and NHYC, and will highlight areas of best practice in engaging with street-based sex workers and with young women at risk of sexual exploitation

Biases in metallicity measurements from global galaxy spectra: the effects of flux-weighting and diffuse ionized gas contamination

Galaxy metallicity scaling relations provide a powerful tool for understanding galaxy evolution, but obtaining unbiased global galaxy gas-phase oxygen abundances requires proper treatment of the various line-emitting sources within spectroscopic apertures. We present a model framework that treats galaxies as ensembles of HII and diffuse ionized gas (DIG) regions of varying metallicities. These models are based upon empirical relations between line ratios and electron temperature for HII regions, and DIG strong-line ratio relations from SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU data. Flux-weighting effects and DIG contamination can significantly affect properties inferred from global galaxy spectra, biasing metallicity estimates by more than 0.3 dex in some cases. We use observationally-motivated inputs to construct a model matched to typical local star-forming galaxies, and quantify the biases in strong-line ratios, electron temperatures, and direct-method metallicities as inferred from global galaxy spectra relative to the median values of the HII region distributions in each galaxy. We also provide a generalized set of models that can be applied to individual galaxies or galaxy samples in atypical regions of parameter space. We use these models to correct for the effects of flux-weighting and DIG contamination in the local direct-method mass-metallicity and fundamental metallicity relations, and in the mass-metallicity relation based on strong-line metallicities. Future photoionization models of galaxy line emission need to include DIG emission and represent galaxies as ensembles of emitting regions with varying metallicity, instead of as single HII regions with effective properties, in order to obtain unbiased estimates of key underlying physical properties.Comment: 37 pages, 29 figures, 4 tables. Accepted to ApJ. See Figures 15-17 for typical global galaxy biases in strong-line ratios, electron temperatures, and direct-method metallicitie

Multiphoton Coincidence Spectroscopy

We extend the analysis of photon coincidence spectroscopy beyond bichromatic excitation and two-photon coincidence detection to include multichromatic excitation and multiphoton coincidence detection. Trichromatic excitation and three-photon coincidence spectroscopy are studied in detail, and we identify an observable signature of a triple resonance in an atom-cavity system.Comment: 6 page, REVTeXs, 6 Postscript figures. The abstract appeared in the Proceedings of ACOLS9

Decision Support System for Evaluating Rural Water Supply Infrastructure Scenarios

This paper seeks to develop a methodology that will be useful for rural water districts in assessing the future of their water systems infrastructure. In particular, the use of free water simulation software and publicly available data on population, roads, and terrain present rural water systems with the opportunity to analyze their existing distribution system and forecast where problems are likely to occur. This methodology will allow various alternatives (such as consolidation with a neighboring system, or pipe upgrades) to be evaluated and the costs of implementing these alternatives to be explored. Finally, different avenues for funding the associated costs can be summarized and presented to the community, including the steps needed to apply for popular grant and loan programsRural Water, Infrastructure, Simulation, EPANET, Community/Rural/Urban Development, R53, R58,

Evaluation of the Community Group Programme for Children & Young People: final report

The report presents findings from the evaluation of the Community Group Programme (CGP). The CGP is a 12-week psycho-educational, group work programme for children and young people who have experienced domestic violence. The Programme was developed in Canada and is being rolled out in England for the first time across 32 London boroughs. The programme is unique in working with children and their mothers concurrently and in a child-focused way. The study takes a theory-driven approach to evaluation. We employ a mixed method research strategy to answer questions of process (how does the CGP work?), impact (does the CGP make a difference and, if so, what sort of difference), salience (does the CGP matter to children and mothers and if so, in what ways?) and cost (what is the cost of CGP?). The final report presents findings from questionnaires, interviews and focus groups with children, mothers and professionals

Chandra Observations of ULIRGs: Extended Hot Gas Halos in Merging Galaxies

We study the properties of hot gaseous halos in 10 nearby ultraluminous IRAS galaxies observed with the ACIS instrument on board Chandra. For all sample galaxies, diffuse soft X-ray emissions are found within ~10 kpc of the central region; their spectra are well fitted by a MEKAL model plus emission lines from alpha-elements and other ions. The temperature of the hot gas is about 0.7 keV and metallicity is about 1 solar. Outside the central region, extended hot gaseous halos are found for nine out of the ten ULIRGs. Most spectra of these extended halos can be fitted with a MEKAL model with a temperature of about 0.6 keV and a low metallicity (~ 0.1 solar). We discuss the implications of our results on the origin of X-ray halos in elliptical galaxies and the feedback processes associated with starbursts.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figuers, ApJ in press, accepted versio

Occurrence of normal and anomalous diffusion in polygonal billiard channels

From extensive numerical simulations, we find that periodic polygonal billiard channels with angles which are irrational multiples of pi generically exhibit normal diffusion (linear growth of the mean squared displacement) when they have a finite horizon, i.e. when no particle can travel arbitrarily far without colliding. For the infinite horizon case we present numerical tests showing that the mean squared displacement instead grows asymptotically as t log t. When the unit cell contains accessible parallel scatterers, however, we always find anomalous super-diffusion, i.e. power-law growth with an exponent larger than 1. This behavior cannot be accounted for quantitatively by a simple continuous-time random walk model. Instead, we argue that anomalous diffusion correlates with the existence of families of propagating periodic orbits. Finally we show that when a configuration with parallel scatterers is approached there is a crossover from normal to anomalous diffusion, with the diffusion coefficient exhibiting a power-law divergence.Comment: 9 pages, 15 figures. Revised after referee reports: redrawn figures, additional comments. Some higher quality figures available at http://www.fis.unam.mx/~dsander