Perceptions Regarding Public Safety in Portland’s King Neighborhood

The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is partnering with Portland State University (PSU) and neighborhood groups to develop new strategies for improving police-community relations and reducing crime. Our most recent initiative seeks to provide residents with greater voice in where PPB officers work in their neighborhood and what steps the City takes there to address public safety concerns. The King neighborhood in Northeast Portland was chosen as the starting point for this work following a recent gang related shooting at King School Park. Officers from North Precinct had already begun outreach to the community and they wanted additional input from the residents on how to best address public safety issues in the area. In October and November (2015) all known households in the King neighborhood were mailed a letter inviting the adult occupants to participate in an online survey. The survey covered three main topics: First, residents were asked to identify their top public safety concerns and locate these concerns on a map of the King neighborhood. Second, residents were asked whether they supported or opposed various actions the city might take in responding to these issues. A third set of questions were asked to establish baseline measurements for PPB’s ongoing efforts to reduce the fear of crime and improve police-community relationships. This report provides the findings from the King survey. The results will be used by PPB and other agencies to develop tailored community safety initiatives for the neighborhood

What Can We Learn About Teaching Excellence from Our Students? Lessons from Six Years of Teaching Award Data

Teaching excellence in higher education can be defined and studied in different ways, but research efforts to date have often focused on institutional or instructor perspectives. This article uses a data set of over 500 open-ended comments submitted by Political Science undergraduates as part of a teaching award process to identify themes that matter most to students. We find that being supportive, bringing humor, enthusiasm, and passion to the classroom, and engaging students with relevant, challenging, and exciting activities are what defines teaching excellence from a student’s perspective. Building on these themes and using quotes to illustrate key concepts, we offer specific and concrete guidance to instructors about how to introduce these elements into their teaching

Un/Folding Form: A Unified Strategy for Making and Visualising in 3D

This thesis project “Un/Folding Form” is a design investigation that explores the transition between the virtual representation and physical fabrication of folded forms. Un/Folding Form refers to a unified strategy for making and visualising in 3D. Un/folding was a method used to explore the notions of form, space and structure and to develop an adaptable approach to mediate between the virtual and physical world. Designers who make and visualise in 3D need methods that allow for the prototyping of virtual designs in order to experience them physically. The development of a unified strategy that assists in closing the gaps between virtual representation and digital fabrication improves the designer’s understanding of the process of making, leading to more creative and resolved outcomes. This research suggests that there are methods that can transition seamlessly between the virtual representation and physical reality of folded forms. The final composition presented in this thesis is a demonstration of this notion of working towards a seamless digital process of making. The 3D Portal can be used to assess the ‘seams’ between the virtual and the physical and validate a methodology for making and visualising in 3D. In order to arrive at a unified strategy, the folding and unfolding of surface geometries was first explored through a series of physical experiments. These geometries were then 3D modelled and the surfaces manipulated digitally in order to create patterns for digital fabrication and physical reconstruction. The virtual representation of these folded designs was then investigated within a 3D stereoscopic projected environment. This involved the use of software to explore design interfaces to create immersive visual representations of physical forms. These series of experiments involved a process of moving back and forth between the virtual environment and physical form with the aim of moving closer towards a seamless transition between the two. This methodology was tested with the making of a final composition 3D Portal: a gateway to the virtual world and a play on the inter-relationship of 3D visualisation and its corresponding physical form. Thus, the focus of this thesis is twofold: to create an understanding of the process and evolution of design using folding as a technique; and to develop a methodology for designing a work using the folding technique

Public Perceptions Regarding the Use of Force by Police in Portland, Oregon

The current study sought to assess public perceptions regarding the frequency of force used by Portland police and determine whether these beliefs are consistent with officially recorded data on force used by officers in recent years

Public Perceptions of Crime Maps: Considering the Impact of Map Style on Perceptions of Safety

Presentation slides for a study that questions how people may interpret and understand the types of crime maps that are frequently publicly available. As public crime maps increase in use and distribution, researchers are beginning to explore the impacts of access

PRIDE: the proteomics identifications database.

The advent of high-throughput proteomics has enabled the identification of ever increasing numbers of proteins. Correspondingly, the number of publications centered on these protein identifications has increased dramatically. With the first results of the HUPO Plasma Proteome Project being analyzed and many other large-scale proteomics projects about to disseminate their data, this trend is not likely to flatten out any time soon. However, the publication mechanism of these identified proteins has lagged behind in technical terms. Often very long lists of identifications are either published directly with the article, resulting in both a voluminous and rather tedious read, or are included on the publisher's website as supplementary information. In either case, these lists are typically only provided as portable document format documents with a custom-made layout, making it practically impossible for computer programs to interpret them, let alone efficiently query them. Here we propose the proteomics identifications (PRIDE) database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride) as a means to finally turn publicly available data into publicly accessible data. PRIDE offers a web-based query interface, a user-friendly data upload facility, and a documented application programming interface for direct computational access. The complete PRIDE database, source code, data, and support tools are freely available for web access or download and local installation

KEYLINK: towards a more integrative soil representation for inclusion in ecosystem scale models. I. review and model concept

The relatively poor simulation of the below-ground processes is a severe drawback for many ecosystem models, especially when predicting responses to climate change and management. For a meaningful estimation of ecosystem production and the cycling of water, energy, nutrients and carbon, the integration of soil processes and the exchanges at the surface is crucial. It is increasingly recognized that soil biota play an important role in soil organic carbon and nutrient cycling, shaping soil structure and hydrological properties through their activity, and in water and nutrient uptake by plants through mycorrhizal processes. In this article, we review the main soil biological actors (microbiota, fauna and roots) and their effects on soil functioning. We review to what extent they have been included in soil models and propose which of them could be included in ecosystem models. We show that the model representation of the soil food web, the impact of soil ecosystem engineers on soil structure and the related effects on hydrology and soil organic matter (SOM) stabilization are key issues in improving ecosystem-scale soil representation in models. Finally, we describe a new core model concept (KEYLINK) that integrates insights from SOM models, structural models and food web models to simulate the living soil at an ecosystem scale

Deliverable 1.1 review document on the management of marine areas with particular regard on concepts, objectives, frameworks and tools to implement, monitor, and evaluate spatially managed areas

The main objectives if this document were to review the existing information on spatial management of marine areas, identifying the relevant policy objectives, to identify parameters linked to the success or failure of the various Spatially Managed marine Areas (SMAs) regimes, to report on methods and tools used in monitoring and evaluation of the state of SMAs, and to identify gaps and weaknesses in the existing frameworks in relation to the implementation, monitoring, evaluation and management of SMAs. The document is naturally divided in two sections: Section 1 reviews the concepts, objectives, drivers, policy and management framework, and extraneous factors related to the design, implementation and evaluation of SMAs; Section 2 reviews the tools and methods to monitor and evaluate seabed habitats and marine populations.peer-reviewe

qcML: an exchange format for quality control metrics from mass spectrometry experiments.

Quality control is increasingly recognized as a crucial aspect of mass spectrometry based proteomics. Several recent papers discuss relevant parameters for quality control and present applications to extract these from the instrumental raw data. What has been missing, however, is a standard data exchange format for reporting these performance metrics. We therefore developed the qcML format, an XML-based standard that follows the design principles of the related mzML, mzIdentML, mzQuantML, and TraML standards from the HUPO-PSI (Proteomics Standards Initiative). In addition to the XML format, we also provide tools for the calculation of a wide range of quality metrics as well as a database format and interconversion tools, so that existing LIMS systems can easily add relational storage of the quality control data to their existing schema. We here describe the qcML specification, along with possible use cases and an illustrative example of the subsequent analysis possibilities. All information about qcML is available at http://code.google.com/p/qcml