2007 Homicide Report: An Analysis of Homicides in Oakland from January through December, 2007

In past years Urban Strategies Council has produced quarterly or biannual reports on homicides in Oakland using detailed data provided by the Oakland Police Department's Homicide Section. Due to staffing shortages, the Oakland police Department is no longer able to provide this detailed data to the Council. As a result the 2007 Homicide Report uses data gleaned from public sources and some aggregated tables from the OPD's official report. From these data we have created this report on the characteristics of the 127 homicides that occurred in Oakland from January 1 through December 31, 2007. This report presents annual data from 2007 and shows how characteristics of homicides in Oakland changed from 2006 to 2007 and how 2007 homicides compare with the five -- year averages from 2003-2007.This report summarizes available information such as victim demographic characteristics (suspect details are less complete and less precise), locations and times of the incidents. Comparing 2007 data to a five-year average of homicides helps to provide a context for understanding whether there are emerging patterns that differ substantially from the patterns in prior years.This year sees the inclusion of some additional types of data relating to the nature of the homicides taking place in Oakland such as premises and types of weapons involved

Managing LTL properties in Event-B refinement

Refinement in Event-B supports the development of systems via proof based step-wise refinement of events. This refinement approach ensures safety properties are preserved, but additional reasoning is required in order to establish liveness and fairness properties. In this paper we present results which allow a closer integration of two formal methods, Event-B and linear temporal logic. In particular we show how a class of temporal logic properties can carry through a refinement chain of machines. Refinement steps can include introduction of new events, event renaming and event splitting. We also identify a general liveness property that holds for the events of the initial system of a refinement chain. The approach will aid developers in enabling them to verify linear temporal logic properties at early stages of a development, knowing they will be preserved at later stages. We illustrate the results via a simple case study

The Well-known Solution: neat, plausible and wrong

“Rethinking the Future: satisfying staff and students in times of diminishing resources and rising expectations” challenges us to ask and reflect on those unthinkable ‘what if...’ questions that frequently lead us into speculation, conjecture and disagreement. These ‘problem situations’ seem to be harder to deal with than everyday issues, and solutions are often elusive. Why is this? What can we learn from these problems, these situations, and how do we avoid falling into the trap that 100 years ago, H. L. Mencken identified: “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Rittel, Ackoff and Schön have classified these hard to solve problem as wicked, messes and swamps, and in various ways suggest that our approach to them needs to reflect the complex, dynamic and interconnected nature of the problem situation. Schön also claims that it is in these swampy lowlands that the truly interesting and valuable problems exist, and this is where we need to apply our effort in order to make a real difference. Against a backdrop of library strategic planning and a ‘Digital Adventure’, we will explore the messy, swampy world of wicked problems, their recognition, and ways in which we might improve our chances of solving, resolving or dissolving them

Exploring the affect of current trends and future expectations on the boundary of the academic librarian using Critical Systems Heuristics

This research is concerned with the professional, academic librarian of the future. Technological development alongside policy and funding change in UK Higher Education has made the past two decades one of the most turbulent periods in academic library services and for professional library practice. Within this context, we ask here how the role of the academic librarian has changed, and how we might expect it to change in the future. This information is central to ensuring that our current, and future, academic librarians are suitably equipped for their professional role.I take a Systems Thinking approach, using Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) to explore the changing boundary of the academic librarian’s professional work. In gathering data from practitioners, Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenology is called upon to effectively elicit and analyse librarians’ perceptions of being a librarian, and how the role of academic librarian is changing.Data was gathered from the academic and professional literature on higher education libraries and librarians, and five phenomenological interviews were carried out with academic librarians, from early career professionals to library directors. A hermeneutic phenomenological analysis extracted meanings and themes, providing the source material to map CSH’s ideal and descriptive reference systems. A process of boundary critique, through a comparison of the ideal and descriptive maps, show that while individual librarians continue to enrich the education of all their users and are willing to adapt to new ways of working, additional change is needed within the profession to accommodate technological, social and leadership challenges. The complexity and uncertainty of technological advances, the necessity of adopting professional marketing practices to mitigate communicatively disparate user groups, and an increasingly politico-ethical focus on the availability of information, all mean that the librarian of the future needs a better-structured panoply of leadership and training provision. The provision of better structured, post-qualification, professional development routes and strengthened professional bodies would benefit the profession in building the capacity to proactively manage the professional boundary of practice, rather than passively reacting to external pressure and change

How getting noticed helps getting on: successful attention capture doubles children's cooperative play

Cooperative social interaction is a complex skill that involves maintaining shared attention and continually negotiating a common frame of reference. Privileged in human evolution, cooperation provides support for the development of social-cognitive skills. We hypothesize that providing audio support for capturing playmates' attention will increase cooperative play in groups of young children. Attention capture was manipulated via an audio-augmented toy to boost children's attention bids. Study 1 (48 6- to 11-year-olds) showed that the augmented toy yielded significantly more cooperative play in triads compared to the same toy without augmentation. In Study 2 (33 7- to 9-year-olds) the augmented toy supported greater success of attention bids, which were associated with longer cooperative play, associated in turn with better group narratives. The results show how cooperation requires moment-by-moment coordination of attention and how we can manipulate environments to reveal and support mechanisms of social interaction. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of joint attention in the development of cooperative action and shared understanding