Chengdu Impression

Most of my high school experience wasspent studying Chinese on my own and working toward my ultimate goal of mastering a language and through this learn more about my own and others as well. First, it is important to understand a background of my senior year in high school when I went abroad to China.I arrived in Chengdu, capital city     

Temporal Order and Causal Inference

Measures of change in pairs of attitudinal variables can provideimportant insights into the structure of the political beliefsystems of mass publics. Panel data reveal evidence of the greatercentrality of some idea elements rather than others in the contextof short-term dynamic constraint. Specification of the theoreticallyrelevant voter attributes makes it possible to test for expectedstructural differences connecting policy related predispositionsand policy preferences; specification also makes it possibleto test propositions involving the reciprocal effects of attitudesand emerging vote preferences. Some of the more helpful specificationsdisclose the extent to which population heterogeneity producesa blurred image of relationships when analysis is based on thetotal electorate rather than limited to voters or subsets ofvoters specified by theoretical criteria.     

Detecting Feigned Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Current Methods and Future Directions

Feigned attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults is a significant issue in clinical settings, particularly regarding academic accommodations and access to controlled substances by university students. This article discusses the definitions, base rates, external incentives, psychometric detection strategies, and ethical implications of feigned ADHD. ADHD is characterized by a pattern of developmentally inappropriate inattentive, overactivity, and/or impulsivity, often persisting into adulthood. Estimates of the prevalence of non-credible ADHD in university settings range from 25 to 50%. Feigned ADHD may be detected with symptom and performance validity measures. The existing empirical research has failed to produce a clear psychometric solution to this important differential diagnosis. Identifying feigned ADHD is a difficult task, possibly because of the highly transparent, face-valid diagnostic criteria, and an atypical malingering strategy that evades established detection methods. Performance validity tests remain the best available method for identifying non-credible presentation during psychological evaluations of ADHD. Future practice recommendations should consider educational policy, diagnostic criteria, and psychometric research, including the development of self-report measures that reliably differentiate between genuine and feigned ADHD.     

Small‐Group Dynamics,Ideology, and Decision Making on the US Courts of Appeals

There is some evidence that judges who specialize in particular legal areas vote in more ideologically consistent ways than do nonspecialists. Upon replicating those individual results across multiple legal areas in the US courts of appeals, we assess how this increasing reliance on ideology by specialists affects decision making by others on a three‐judge panel. We find that judges who serve with a specialist are especially likely to vote in a manner consistent with the ideological position of the specialist with whom they serve. These results suggest that specialization has the potential to facilitate panel effects across numerous legal policy areas.     

Predictive Crime Mapping: Arbitrary Grids or Street Networks?

Objectives

Decades of empirical research demonstrate that crime is concentrated at a range of spatial scales, including street segments. Further, the degree of clustering at particular geographic units remains noticeably stable and consistent; a finding that Weisburd (Criminology 53:133–157, 2015) has recently termed the ‘law of crime concentration at places’. Such findings suggest that the future locations of crime should—to some extent at least—be predictable. To date, methods of forecasting where crime is most likely to next occur have focused either on area-level or grid-based predictions. No studies of which we are aware have developed and tested the accuracy of methods for predicting the future risk of crime at the street segment level. This is surprising given that it is at this level of place that many crimes are committed and policing resources are deployed.

Methods

Using data for property crimes for a large UK metropolitan police force area, we introduce and calibrate a network-based version of prospective crime mapping [e.g. Bowers et al. (Br J Criminol 44:641–658, 2004)], and compare its performance against grid-based alternatives. We also examine how measures of predictive accuracy can be translated to the network context, and show how differences in performance between the two cases can be quantified and tested.

Results

Findings demonstrate that the calibrated network-based model substantially outperforms a grid-based alternative in terms of predictive accuracy, with, for example, approximately 20 % more crime identified at a coverage level of 5 %. The improvement in accuracy is highly statistically significant at all coverage levels tested (from 1 to 10 %).

Conclusions

This study suggests that, for property crime at least, network-based methods of crime forecasting are likely to outperform grid-based alternatives, and hence should be used in operational policing. More sophisticated variations of the model tested are possible and should be developed and tested in future research.