A GraveMisfire?

<正>A"deaf review"of Jiang Wen’s much maligned latest film Gone With the Bullets It was hard to go anywhere in Beijing in December 2014 without being assailed by posters advertising Chinese auteur Jiang Wen’s latest movie Gone With the Bullets.I was drawn to the film’s beautiful promotional material showing Jiang’s character with one of the film’s female leads adversarially juxtaposed against Ge you’s character and another female     

Spuriousness or mediation? Broken windows according to Sampson and Raudenbush (1999)

In 1999, Sampson and Raudenbush published an influential article in the American Sociological Review on the link between disorder and crime in urban neighborhoods. The present article offers a reinterpretation of their 1999 article based on the contentions that: (1) their interpretation of the broken windows thesis is imprecise, and (2) there is an alternative interpretation of their findings that was not considered. Based on these contentions, and contrary to Sampson and Raudenbush's (1999) assertions, the authors conclude that the results of Sampson and Raudenbush's study are not inconsistent with the broken windows thesis and therefore should not be used as empirical evidence against it.     

The trouble with (supply-side) counts: the potential and limitations of counting sites,vendors or products as a metric for threat trends on the Dark Web

Many national security threats now originate on the Dark Web. As a result of the anonymity of these networks, researchers and policymakers often use supply-side data (i.e. the number of sites) as a threat metric. However, the utility of these data depends upon the underlying distribution of users. Users could be distributed uniformly, normally or in a power law across Dark Web content. The utility of supply-side counts varies predictably based upon the underlying distribution of users. Yet, the likelihood of each distribution type varies inversely with its utility: uniform distributions are most useful for intelligence purposes but least likely and power law distributions are least useful but occur most commonly. Complementing supply-side counts with demand-side measures can improve Dark Web threat analysis, thereby helping to combat terrorism, criminality and cyberattacks.     

Mental and physical health symptoms of family court intimate partner violence petitioners

This paper explores the impact of intimate partner violence on victim health and proposes interdisciplinary coordination between legal and mental health services as a means to assist victims. Data was collected from 95 female petitioners at an upstate New York Domestic Violence Intensive Intervention Court (DVIIC). Study participants completed surveys on physical health, mental health, and social functioning. Survey results demonstrated decreased mental health and social functioning as well as a strong willingness to utilize court-based mental health services if offered. Findings from this study support court-based settings as appropriate sites for addressing mental health needs through collaborative efforts between legal and mental health professionals.     

Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification

The current study investigated the effects of change blindness and crime severity on eyewitness identification accuracy. This research, involving 717 subjects, examined change blindness during a simulated criminal act and its effects on subjects' accuracy for identifying the perpetrator in a photospread. Subjects who viewed videos designed to induce change blindness were more likely to falsely identify the innocent actor relative to those who viewed control videos. Crime severity did not influence detection of change; however, it did have an effect on eyewitness accuracy. Subjects who viewed a more severe crime ($500 theft) made fewer errors in perpetrator identification than those who viewed a less severe crime ($5 theft). This research has theoretical implications for our understanding of change blindness and practical implications for the real‐world problem of faulty eyewitness testimony.     

Developing and Testing a Theoretical Framework for Computer‐Mediated Transparency of Local Governments

This article contributes to the emerging literature on transparency by developing and empirically testing a theoretical framework that explains the determinants of local government Web site transparency. It aims to answer the following central question: What institutional factors determine the different dimensions of government transparency? The framework distinguishes three dimensions of transparency—decision making transparency, policy information transparency, and policy outcome transparency—and hypothesizes three explanations for each: organizational capacity, political influence, and group influence on government. Results indicate that each dimension of transparency is associated with different factors. Decision‐making transparency is associated with political influence; when left‐wing parties are strong in the local council, local government tends to be more transparent. Policy information transparency is associated with media attention and external group pressure, and policy outcome transparency is associated with both external group pressure and the organizational capacity. The authors discuss the implications for policy and administration.