Where There Is Connectivity,There Is Surveillance

In 2013, NPQ editor Nathan Gardels spoke with Google's executive chairman ERIC SCHMIDT , and the director of the Google Ideas think tank, JARED COHEN , about their new book, The Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.     

EXTENDING SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION THEORY: A MULTILEVEL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF VIOLENCE AMONG PERSONS WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES*

Prior studies of violence among individuals with mental illnesses have focused almost exclusively on individual‐level characteristics. In this study, I examine whether the structural correlates of neighborhood social disorganization also explain variation in violence. I use data on 270 psychiatric patients who were treated and discharged from an acute inpatient facility combined with tract‐level data from the 1990 U.S. Census. I find that living in a socially disorganized neighborhood increased the probability of violence among the sample, an effect that was not mediated by self‐reported social supports. Implications for future research in the areas of violence and mental illness are discussed.     

A REAPPRAISAL OF THE OVERLAP OF VIOLENT OFFENDERS AND VICTIMS*

Because research shows a close association between offending and victimization, recent work has argued that theories that account for crime should explain victimization as well. The current study uses a new approach to examine the extent of the overlap between offenders who commit violent crime and victims of violence to determine whether it is worthwhile to pursue separate theories to account for these phenomena. Specifically, we take the statistical approach that Osgood and Schreck (2007) developed for analyzing specialization in violent versus property offending and apply it to analyzing tendencies to gravitate toward violent offending versus victimization. In doing so, we treat the differentiation into victim and offender roles as an individual‐level latent variable while controlling for confounding between the likelihood that individuals will take either role in violent acts and their overall numbers of encounters with violence (as either offender or victim). Our purpose is to examine 1) whether significant differentiation can be observed between the tendency to be an offender versus the tendency to be a victim, 2) whether any such differential tendency is stable over time, and 3) if it is possible to predict whether individuals will tend toward violent offending versus victimization. Using two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to explore these objectives, we find significant and stable levels of differentiation between offenders and victims. Moreover, this differentiation is predictable with explanatory variables.     

Growing Strong in the Practice of ＂Going Global＂--An Interview with Ren Xiaojian,CEO of the Creat Group

REN Xiaojian, CEO and director of the board of the Creat Group, concluded after analyzing the challenges and opportunities for Chinese private enterprises in the global financial crisis, ＂The capital support represented by the RMB 4 trillion government stimulus package is basically a feast for large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises. The government＇s resource allocation policy is basically inclined towards state-owned enterprises, and the enterprises in monopolistic industries are basically all state-owned. In contrast, most private enterprises are engaged in highly competitive industries. Seen from this perspective, as the global financial crisis spreads from the virtual to real economy, the private economy has been most vulnerable to damage.＂