The ombudsman and e-government in Canada

Abstract: In a 1966 issue of this journal, Sir Guy Powles drew on John Milton's 1644 book Areopagitica to remind us of the importance to democracy of the right to seek redress of grievances. Based on this premise, Powles introduced, described and justified the office of the ombudsman as a specialized institution for handling the public's administrative grievances that had become so commonplace in the modern administrative state of the mid-twentieth century. By logical extension, this article examines how the ten provincial and territorial ombudsman offices have adopted electronic communication technology in the early years of the twenty-first century to settle more effectively administrative grievances. Specific focus is on the contrast and analysis of the web sites of the ten provincial ombudsman offices to see if they fulfil the potential of this new technology.     

The Relationship between Human Needs and Criminogenic Needs

Abstract

Precipitators are personal attributes enhancing a person's likelihood of becoming criminally victimized. The present experiment focuses on walking style synchrony as a nonverbal determinant of differential perceptions. Findings suggest that walking styles associated with a lack of interactional synchrony - a lack of organized movement, a lack of ‘wholeness’, a lack of flowing motion - result in higher ratings of robbery potential and in lower ratings of perceived self-confidence of a target relative to more synchronous walking styles. Analyses also suggest that high criminal involvement is associated with more easily construing situations as ‘opportunistic’. Some implications for assertiveness and self-defense training programs are discussed.     

Research Note: Purchaser-Provider – Are the Purchasers Ready for It?

New Public Management (NPM) is correctly seen as a multifaceted set of changes, with different emphases in the many countries in which programs of reform have been implemented (Hood 1995). In Australia and New Zealand, and to a significant extent in the UK, the replacement of hierarchical with contractual or quasi-contractual relations lies at the heart of NPM (Boston et al. 1996; Laffin 1997; Walsh 1995).     

Measuring the validity and reliability of forensic likelihood-ratio systems

There has been a great deal of concern recently about validity and reliability in forensic science. This paper reviews for a broad target audience metrics of validity and reliability (accuracy and precision) which have been applied in forensic voice comparison and which are potentially applicable in other branches of forensic science. The metric of validity is the log likelihood-ratio cost (C_llr), and the metric of reliability is an empirical estimate of credible intervals. A revised procedure for the calculation of credible intervals is introduced.