Comparing public attitudes on EU membership in candidate countries: the cases of Croatia,Macedonia and Turkey from 2004 to 2011

Past enlargements of the European Union (EU) have demonstrated that public attitudes on European integration can influence the course of accession processes. Beyond the literature on public EU support in member states and former candidates, the dynamics that shape public attitudes on EU membership within recent candidate countries have not been systematically examined. Analysing nine Eurobarometer (EB) surveys from 2004 to 2011, we argue that evaluations of EU membership in Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey are shaped by utilitarian considerations, belief in various political institutions as well as the fear of losing national identity. The economic crisis of 2008 has changed public opinion towards EU membership in all three countries, but Turkey appears to have been affected the most compared to Croatia and Macedonia.     

Parental Abuse Towards Their Children with ADHD in Iran

This study assesses whether or not the three different forms of child abuse, parental “Nonviolence discipline”, “psychological abuse” and “physical abuse”, are associated with ADHD symptoms. The parents of a clinical sample of 108 ADHD children and 102 mothers of school children reported their behaviors using Parent–child Conflict Tactics Scales (CTSPC). The age range of children was from 6 to 15 years old. The mean scores of all the three types of abuse in the ADHD group were statistically higher than those in the comparison group. Inattentiveness and hyperactivity/impulsivity scores are not associated with the scores of abuse in ADHD children. Parental abuse occurs in a cluster of different types of abuse. Mental health professionals can be involved for all the three types of prevention of parental abuse.     

Restorative Justice,Policing and Insurgency: Learning from Pakistan

Pakistan state law and Taliban rule of Sharia law are at different ends of a politico‐legal spectrum. They share advocacy of one system of law and attraction to eradication of alternatives. Muslahathi Committees in Pakistan are used to explore legal pluralism, hybrid institutions that allow deliberative democracy to seek workable responses to injustice. Formal and traditional systems can show mutual respect and check each other. On the basis of purely qualitative evidence, it is argued that Muslahathi Committees are restorative justice programs that sustainably reduce revenge violence, make a contribution to preventing Pakistan from spiraling into civil war, and assist a police force with low legitimacy to become somewhat more accountable to local civil society. These contributions are limited, but could be more significant with modest investment in human rights and gender awareness training to control abuses and increase accountability. The ruthless, murderous, divisive politics of policing and restorative justice in Pakistan seems a least likely case for deliberative democracy to work. In limited ways it does.     

Comparative and development public administration 2000: introduction to the symposium

The twin fields of comparative and development administration have been major components of public administration, both theoretically and practically. Their development as fields of study has proliferated since World War II, and reached a peak during the 1960s with the Comparative Administration Group (CAG). Despite major achievements, comparative and development administration experienced a major decline in the 1970s. However, a resurgence of interest in both subfields of public administration has emerged since the 1980s, and the number of scholarly works in these areas is impressively increasing. This trend will continue with significant contributions to the knowledge in the field by the year 2000. This special symposium addresses a number of trends, developments, and issues that will contribute to, and characterize, the growth of comparative and development administration in the future. The articles that follow make significant original contributions to our knowledge in public administration at a global level. Various models and paradigms are discussed as the possible models to be tried out in the developing nations and for the comparative study of public administration.     

Exploratory spatial analysis of crimes against property in Turkey

Turkey, a rapidly developing country, is a junction point between Asia and Europe in terms of its social and economic structure. Turkey is both the most advanced economy in the Turkish-speaking world and the largest economy in the Muslim world. In the last few years, with the development of Turkey’s economic and social structure, the level of criminality in the country has attracted attention. Consequently, we aimed to explore potential spatial associations of crimes against property rates across the 81 provinces of Turkey (NUTS3) from 1997 to 2009. Geographical information systems and explorative methods of spatial data analysis were employed in the analyses of crime rates. Since crime is a phenomenon that arises from the interaction between social, economic, psychological circumstances and, especially, geographical factors, this study attempts to rectify the possible deficiencies of traditional statistical analyses of geography. Because of the very different population sizes in each province, comparing the volume of crimes makes a major impact on the stability of the crime rates; therefore in this study an empirical Bayes smoothing method was used to interpret the crime rates correctly. Global spatial autocorrelation indices were used to test the spatial dependence of the distribution of the crime rates. Besides the excess risk rates, local spatial autocorrelation methods were used to detect and interpret the clustering of crime rates. In order to model the crime rates, a set of socioeconomic parameters (migration rates by province, gross national product according to purchasing power parity by province, registered number of touristic facilities and number of rooms by province, electricity consumption statistics, provincial unemployment rates and urbanisation index values were handled with geographically weighted regression. According to the results, criminal activities were non-random in terms of time and space. Property crime, except for smuggling, is densely clustered in the west and south-west of Turkey. The present study demonstrates the utility of spatial analysis and geographically weighted regression to detect some important geographical dimensions and crucial geographical aspects of property crimes in Turkey.     

Forensic Investigation of Cooperative Storage Cloud Service: Symform as a Case Study

Researchers envisioned Storage as a Service (StaaS) as an effective solution to the distributed management of digital data. Cooperative storage cloud forensic is relatively new and is an under‐explored area of research. Using Symform as a case study, we seek to determine the data remnants from the use of cooperative cloud storage services. In particular, we consider both mobile devices and personal computers running various popular operating systems, namely Windows 8.1, Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.5, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, iOS 7.1.2, and Android KitKat 4.4.4. Potential artefacts recovered during the research include data relating to the installation and uninstallation of the cloud applications, log‐in to and log‐out from Symform account using the client application, file synchronization as well as their time stamp information. This research contributes to an in‐depth understanding of the types of terrestrial artifacts that are likely to remain after the use of cooperative storage cloud on client devices.     

Facial Age Synthesis Using Sparse Partial Least Squares (The Case of Ben Needham)

Automatic facial age progression (AFAP) has been an active area of research in recent years. This is due to its numerous applications which include searching for missing. This study presents a new method of AFAP. Here, we use an active appearance model (AAM) to extract facial features from available images. An aging function is then modelled using sparse partial least squares regression (sPLS). Thereafter, the aging function is used to render new faces at different ages. To test the accuracy of our algorithm, extensive evaluation is conducted using a database of 500 face images with known ages. Furthermore, the algorithm is used to progress Ben Needham's facial image that was taken when he was 21 months old to the ages of 6, 14, and 22 years. The algorithm presented in this study could potentially be used to enhance the search for missing people worldwide.     

Developing a scale to measure the presence of possible prejudicial stereotyping in police interviews with suspects: The Minhas Investigative Interviewing Prejudicial Stereotyping Scale (MIIPSS)

If police interviewers’ hold negative feelings towards certain groups, this may affect how they interview them (either as victims, witnesses or suspects) in that they may not obtain reliable accounts, being the aim of such interviews. The Minhas Investigative Interviewing Prejudicial Stereotyping Scale (MIIPSS) has been developed to assess the level of any investigative interviewers’ prejudicial stereotyping towards suspects. The current exploratory study involved semi-structured interviews with twenty people, who had previously been interviewed as suspects in England and also eight very experienced lawyers. Both their views were measured using the MIIPSS before being subjected to a Guttman analysis. Statistical analyses showed that MIIPSS satisfies the criteria for classification as a valid unidimensional and cumulative scale. Therefore, researchers could use MIIPSS as a tool to measure prejudicial stereotyping in investigative interviews. Interviewers could also use MIIPSS to monitor their own attitudes towards certain groups or individuals suspected of different types of crimes.     

Forensic investigation of cross platform massively multiplayer online games: Minecraft as a case study

Minecraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), has reportedly millions of players from different age groups worldwide. With Minecraft being so popular, particularly with younger audiences, it is no surprise that the interactive nature of Minecraft has facilitated the commission of criminal activities such as denial of service attacks against gamers, cyberbullying, swatting, sexual communication, and online child grooming. In this research, there is a simulated scenario of a typical Minecraft setting, using a Linux Ubuntu 16.04.3 machine (acting as the MMOG server) and Windows client devices running Minecraft. Server and client devices are then examined to reveal the type and extent of evidential artefacts that can be extracted.     

Female student athletes’ perceptions of acceptability and the occurrence of sexual-related behaviour by their coaches in India

The current study assessed the perceptions of acceptable sexual behaviour of coaches and the occurrence of sexual harassment among female student in India. A sample of 180 Indian female student-athletes at intercollegiate and inter-university levels with male coaches participated in this study. A questionnaire on sport-specific Touch and Behaviour versus Unwanted Intimacy from coaches (Vanden Auweele et al., 2008), consisting of 41 items on a 5-point rating scale was used. The participants were asked to indicate the acceptability of specific coaching behaviour as well as the occurrence of the behaviour represented in each item. The acceptability of the behaviour was determined by means and standard deviations, while the occurrence was determined by frequencies. Factor analysis was performed to determine the structure of the coaches’ behaviour and athletes’ acceptability thereof, which yielded four factors. Cronbach’s alpha was used to determine the internal consistency of the extracted items on each factor. Two factors, namely, unwanted sexual behaviour and inappropriate verbal and physical sexual behaviour, were regarded by athletes as very serious and unacceptable coach behaviour, while a third factor represented context-dependent suspicious behaviour (a grey area in which athletes differ in their opinion) and was perceived to be serious and unacceptable. A fourth factor represented acceptable behaviour. The occurrence of very serious and unacceptable behaviour was reported by 31% of the female athletes.