A Brief History of SPIDR on its 25th Anniversary

Negotiation Journal -     

A conceptual framework for police functions and services

Police functions and services are currently based on three implicit basic conceptual units: the person, the process, and the product. Each one of these was the fundamental assumption for one of the three historical models of police science: the Personal Qualities Model, the Community Relations Model, and the Scientific Management Model. Although none of these models has ever been implemented in a pure form, modern police science is implicitly based on their three basic conceptual units which are applied to different but specific areas of police functions and services. However, these conceptual units have never been explicitly reconciled with each other, thus at times resulting in contradictory proposals. A comprehensive theory of police functions and services requires a conceptual framework for explicitly relating the person, the process, and the product. A two-dimensional framework is proposed based on a psychological and a sociological level of analysis.     

Dietary health does affect histological age assessment: an evaluation of the Stout and Paine (1992) age estimation equation using secondary osteons from the rib

An age at death estimation equation that uses rib histological variables presented by Stout and Paine was used to evaluate a skeletal population of individuals with a known age at death and cause of death from either malnutrition or the niacin deficiency disease pellagra. The sample was comprised of 26 autopsied black South Africans. Histological analysis of mounted thin sections involved the microscopic measurement of cortical area and a count of the number of intact and fragmentary secondary osteons for the entire cross-section of the rib. Rib osteon population density values were then calculated for each case. It was found that this equation under-aged individuals on average by 29.2 years. Overall, secondary osteon size and Haversian canals tended to be larger than expected, while cortical bone area was less when compared with a control population. The implications of these findings are critical given that many of the skeletal remains examined by forensic anthropologists come from marginalized backgrounds, including malnutrition. This research suggests that measurements based on healthy cases may not be useful in an analysis of individuals with poor diet and health. It is argued that new standards for histological age assessment methods need to be created that account for variation in the health status of individuals examined by forensic anthropologists.     

Debt and Deception: How States Avoid Making Hard Fiscal Decisions

Government borrowing occurs whenever the government forgoes control over some future flow of resources or benefits in order to acquire resources for current use. Based on this definition, the authors identify several ways that state governments borrow, which include widely recognized forms of debt as well as types of actions that are less transparent. Case studies for Connecticut, Illinois, and New York document the large amounts of future commitments that these states have taken on to cover operating deficits over the last decade. The authors conclude by evaluating the usefulness of current financial statements for assessing the amount of borrowing that states have done to support current services and suggest areas for which additional information is needed.     

Where Does Location Affordability Drive Residential Mobility? An Analysis of Origin and Destination Communities

Abstract

Despite an overall decrease in residential mobility after the 2007 housing crisis, many households, particularly those that are low income, continue to move in pursuit of a better life. Traditional theories of residential mobility suggest that mobility will occur when housing and transportation costs are cumulatively greater than the cost of moving to a new location. At the same time, the influence of these factors is not likely to be uniform across geographic contexts or for moves up or down the metropolitan hierarchy. Our analysis examines how well affordability measures explain patterns of county-level residential mobility. Specifically, we contrast conventional measures of affordability focused on the ratio of income to housing expense with measures of location affordability that factor in both housing and transportation costs. We find that whereas households tend to move from lower to higher cost locations, transit affordability at the destination plays an important role in mobility decisions.