The role of individual differences in understanding and predicting workplace safety

While U.S. colleges and universities ponder their mission, vision, values, and virtues, researchers at a large, urban, Catholic, patron-identity university actively engaged in empirical assessments of “who we say we are.” In this themed issue, faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students are a research team engaged in quantitative and qualitative analysis of their school's mission identity and mission-driven activities. Results from several sets of studies around student perceptions and impact of mission are presented and discussed. School administrators and those interested in community engagement impacts on students may find these articles useful and informative.     

Criminal Theory and Critical Theory: Husak in the Age of Abolition

Law and Philosophy - Political theorists imagine a world without government (“a state of nature”) in order to assess the legitimacy of existing states. Some thinkers, such as...     

Forensic implications of respiratory derived blood spatter distributions

The nature of blood aerosols produced in physiological studies of an upright subject expiring small volumes through straws, spitting and mouthing sounds, and a semi-prone subject spitting through a bloody mouth or snorting through a single nasal orifice and by a simplified physical model of the respiratory system were investigated. Each manoeuvre produced many hundreds of droplets of a range of size, the vast majority being less than 1mm diameter. Droplets under 1mm dia. travelled over 1m - much further than could be expected if their flight was ballistic, like that of impact spatter. Respired blood aerosol properties are explained in terms of established mechanics of airflow shear induced aerosol production and the fluid mechanics of exhaled air movement.     

A rapid wire-based sampling method for DNA profiling

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a commission to develop a field deployable rapid short tandem repeat (STR)‐based DNA profiling system to enable discrimination between tissues derived from a small number of individuals. Speed was achieved by truncation of sample preparation and field deployability by use of an Agilent 2100 Bioanalyser^TM. Human blood and tissues were stabbed with heated stainless steel wire and the resulting sample dehydrated with isopropanol prior to direct addition to a PCR. Choice of a polymerase tolerant of tissue residues and cycles of amplification appropriate for the amount of template expected yielded useful profiles with a custom‐designed quintuplex primer set suitable for use with the Bioanalyser^TM. Samples stored on wires remained amplifiable for months, allowing their transportation unrefrigerated from remote locations to a laboratory for analysis using AmpFlSTR^® Profiler Plus^® without further processing. The field system meets the requirements for discrimination of samples from small sets and retains access to full STR profiling when required.     

Benford's Law for Quality Assurance of Manner of Death Counts in Small and Large Databases

To assess if Benford's law, a mathematical law used for quality assurance in accounting, can be applied as a quality assurance measure for the manner of death determination. We examined a regional forensic pathology service's monthly manner of death counts (N = 2352) from 2011 to 2013, and provincial monthly and weekly death counts from 2009 to 2013 (N = 81,831). We tested whether each dataset's leading digit followed Benford's law via the chi‐square test. For each database, we assessed whether number 1 was the most common leading digit. The manner of death counts first digit followed Benford's law in all the three datasets. Two of the three datasets had 1 as the most frequent leading digit. The manner of death data in this study showed qualities consistent with Benford's law. The law has potential as a quality assurance metric in the manner of death determination for both small and large databases.