Portable high‐resolution automated 3D imaging for footwear and tire impression capture

The forensic science community raised the need for improved evidence recognition, collection, and visualization analytical instrumentation for field and laboratory use. While the 3D optical techniques for imaging static objects have been extensively studied, there is still a major gap between current knowledge and collecting high‐quality footwear and tire impression evidence. Among optical means for 3D imaging, digital fringe projection (DFP) techniques reconstruct 3D shape from phase information, achieving camera‐pixel spatial resolution. This paper presents a high‐resolution 3D imaging technology using DFP techniques dedicated to footwear and tire impression capture. We developed fully automated software algorithms and a graphical user interface (GUI) that allow anyone without training to operate for high‐quality 3D data capture. We performed accuracy evaluations and comparisons comparing with the commercial high‐end 3D scanner and carried out qualitative tests for various impressions comparing with the current practices. Overall, our technology achieves similar levels of accuracy and resolution with a high‐end commercially available 3D scanner, while having the merits of being (1) more affordable; (2) much easier to operate; and (3) more robust. Compared with the current practice of casting, our technology demonstrates its superiority because it (1) is non‐destructive; (2) collects more evidence detail than casts, especially when an impression is fragile; (3) requires less time and money to collect each piece of evidence; and (4) results in a digital file that can easily be shared with other examiners.     

Government Communication Effectiveness and Satisfaction with Police Performance: A Large‐Scale Survey Study

For the last two decades, performance management theories and practices have focused on outcome‐oriented management but have paid little attention to the role of public communication. Using multiple large data sets from Kansas City, Missouri, for 2009–14, this research suggests that the perceived effectiveness of public communication has a more substantial impact on public satisfaction with police protection and crime prevention than neighborhood crime rates and broken windows factors and that perceived effectiveness moderates the negative impact of crime rates. After controlling for residents’ demographic characteristics, the authors find that the perceived effectiveness of communication is associated with public satisfaction with the content and quality of the city website and the government television channel. The implications for public safety management and police–citizen relations as well as directions for future research on public communication strategies and public performance management are presented.     

Sino-South Korean economic cooperation: An analysis of domestic and foreign entanglements

One of the most explicit manifestations of post-Mao China’s pragmatic foreign policy has been the significant shift in Beijing’s position vis-à-vis Seoul from a “non-policy” todefacto economic diplomacy. Despite the extent of cooperative endeavors, Sino-South Korean economic relations have been circumscribed by various domestic and external factors. While a further intensification of the cooperative relationship is projected for the second decade of Sino-South Korean economic diplomacy, the actual materialization of such prospects depends on how China and South Korea are going to maintain economic complementarity. More importantly, it also depends on when and how China is going to accommodate politically its economic relations with South Korea by resolving the issue of “two Koreas,” thus maximizing the potential benefits from its ties with Seoul and simultaneously minimizing the negative effects from the entanglements of various domestic and foreign factors.     

The effect of child support on welfare exits and re‐entries

Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipient characteristics and state‐level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979‐1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examines whether child support affects the likelihood of leaving and re‐entering welfare. The results indicate that strong child support enforcement is important in helping young mothers exit and stay off welfare. Women with $1000 child support payments in the previous year were 18 percent more likely to exit welfare and 12 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. Compared with women in states that pursued child support least vigorously, women in states that had passed extensive child support enforcement legislation and that spent more money on child support enforcement were 79 percent more likely to exit welfare and about 60 percent less likely to re‐enter welfare. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Reinventing Local Governments and the E-Government Initiative

The Internet provides a powerful tool for reinventing local governments. It encourages transformation from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm, which emphasizes standardization, departmentalization, and operational cost-efficiency, to the "e-government" paradigm, which emphasizes coordinated network building, external collaboration, and customer services. Based on a content analysis of city Web sites and a survey of Web development officials, this article shows that many cities are already moving toward this new paradigm. These cities have adopted "onestop shopping" and customer-oriented principles in Web design, and they emphasize external collaboration and networking in the development process rather than technocracy. The article also analyzes the socioeconomic and organizational factors that are related to cities' progressiveness in Web development and highlights future challenges in reinventing government through Internet technology.     

Policy of decentralization and changing governance of higher education in post‐Mao China

Unlike the Mao era when educational development was entirely directed by the central government, there has been a strong trend to diversification and decentralization of education in the post‐Mao period. This article, being set in this context, examines how the policy of decentralization has affected the governance modes of higher education in Mainland China. More specifically, the article focuses on three major aspects of education governance, namely, financing, provision and regulation in education, with special attention given to examining the changing relations between the state, local governments and other agents in education delivery. One very significant consequence of the change is that the public‐good functions of education, of which the state has taken the primary role of a reliable guarantor, have diminished. Nonetheless, the state's role as a regulator and overall service coordinator has been strengthened rather than weakened under the policy of decentralization. These recent developments in China's higher education also reflect the global trend of decentralization in educational governance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Correlation of methamphetamine results and concentrations between head, axillary, and pubic hair

This study was designed to compare the qualitative results and concentrations of methamphetamine (MA) and its metabolite amphetamine (AP) in head hair and hair collected from different parts of the body (axillae and pubis). Hair from subjects (N = 14) suspected MA users was simultaneously collected. Hair preparation involved washing step, fine cutting, overnight extraction, derivatization by the trifluoroacetic anhydride, and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) using selective ion monitoring. In this study, we found a good correlation of the qualitative results for MA between head hair and hair on other parts of the body, but there were some differences in concentrations of MA and AP. Namely, the concentrations of MA and AP were higher in axillary and pubic hair than in head hair.     

Genetic analysis of 18 X-linked short tandem repeat markers in Korean population

The population genetic data of 18 X-chromosomal short tandem repeat (STR) markers DXS6807, DXS8378, DXS9895, DXS9902, DXS6810, DXS7132, DXS981, DXS6800, DXS9898, DXS6789, DXS101, DXS6797, GATA172D05, GATA165B12, HPRTB, GATA31E08, DXS8377, and DXS7423 were analyzed in samples of unrelated 220 males and 181 females from Korean population. The exact test for genotype distribution of the markers showed no significant deviation from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Allele frequencies between male and female samples were not significantly different in all examined markers. All examined males and females showed different hemizygotic haplotype and combined genotypes, respectively. Four cases of mutation were found in GATA172D05, GATA31E08, DXS7132, and HPRTB from the analysis of 95 father-child-mother trios. Details of X chromosomal STRs in Koreans would be useful in paternity tests and forensic purposes as well as whole X-chromosomal mapping studies.     

The prevalence of MDMA/MDA in both hair and urine in drug users

The prevalence and age distribution of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and 3,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) in hair samples by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) were studied. The recoveries obtained from hair were 97% and 99% for MDMA and MDA, respectively. The inter- and intra-assay precision and accuracy were determined. Out of 791 hair samples, 44 (5.6 %) contained MDMA and/or MDA. Out of these 44 subjects, urinalyses from 35 were negative for both MDMA and MDA, while only 9 were positive. We also evaluated concentrations of MDMA and MDA, and the metabolite-to-parent drug ratios. This study showed that the abuse of MDMA or MDA was found principally among young adults and male abusers. We found the epidemiology of ecstasy users in Korea between March 2002 and April 2003.