Reigniting the fire: a contemporary research agenda for social,political and nonprofit marketing

The paper reports on the core challenges faced by the nonprofit, political and social marketing disciplinary areas and suggests a series of research agendas to develop theory and practice to meet these challenges.

• Social marketing's research agenda involves the continued adaptation of the new developments in commercial marketing, whilst building a base of social marketing theory and best practice benchmarks that can be used to identify, clarify and classify the boundaries of social marketing against social change techniques.
• Nonprofit marketing is pursuing the dual research agenda of developing the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship whilst seeking deeper consumer‐based research to understand motivations for charitable behaviour and gift giving.
• Political Marketing's research agenda looks for an increase in the level of background research, core data and market research to use as a basis for developing more advanced theoretical and practical models. In addition, as political marketing is being transferred internationally between a range of political and electoral systems, there is a need for comparative research into both the relevance and effectiveness of these techniques to isolate nation independent and nation dependent political marketing strategies and campaigns.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical classification of curvilinear structures for the identification of pistol barrels

This paper demonstrates a numerical pattern recognition method applied to curvilinear image structures. These structures are extracted from physical cross-sections of cast internal pistol barrel surfaces. Variations in structure arise from gun design and manufacturing method providing a basis for discrimination and identification. Binarised curvilinear land transition images are processed with fast Fourier transform on which principal component analysis is performed. One-way analysis of variance (95% confidence interval) concludes significant differentiation between 11 barrel manufacturers when calculating weighted Euclidean distance between any trio of land transitions and an average land transition for each barrel in the database. The proposed methodology is therefore a promising novel approach for the classification and identification of firearms.     

Having a Bad Month: General Versus Specific Effects of Stress on Crime

We examine whether particular types of stress are related to particular types of crime or whether all types of stress are related to all types of crime. Our estimates are based on analyses of within-individual change over a 36 month period among recently incarcerated offenders. We find that assault is most strongly related to family stress, suggesting that conflicts between family members lead to assault. Economic crimes (property crimes and selling illicit drugs) are most clearly related to financial stress, suggesting that these crimes often reflect attempts to resolve financial problems. On the other hand, crime is generally unrelated to stress from illness/injury, death, and work. The results support the idea that criminal behavior is a focused response to specific types of problems rather than a general response to stress. They are more consistent with explanations that focus on perceived rewards and costs (e.g., the rational-choice approach) than with explanations that portray negative affect as a generalized impetus toward violence or crime (e.g., frustration aggression approaches).     

Security-oriented cloud computing platform for critical infrastructures

The rise of virtualisation and cloud computing is one of the most significant features of computing in the last 10 years. However, despite its popularity, there are still a number of technical barriers that prevent it from becoming the truly ubiquitous service it has the potential to be. Central to this are the issues of data security and the lack of trust that users have in relying on cloud services to provide the foundation of their IT infrastructure. This is a highly complex issue, which covers multiple inter-related factors such as platform integrity, robust service guarantees, data and network security, and many others that have yet to be overcome in a meaningful way. This paper presents a concept for an innovative integrated platform to reinforce the integrity and security of cloud services and we apply this in the context of Critical Infrastructures to identify the core requirements, components and features of this infrastructure.     

The role of inspection sequence in compliance with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) standards: Interpretations and implications

We examined the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) inspections in the US to identify the effects of repeated inspections and the time between inspections on non-compliance. Our sample included 549,398 inspections conducted from 1972 through 2006 in manufacturing plants in the 29 states where federal OSHA enforces the law. We controlled for inspection type, industry, establishment size, and year. The number of total violations cited fell by 28%–48% from the first to the second inspection; after that, the numbers declined much more slowly. These effects were found in every one of the four sub-periods examined. The number of violations cited increased with each additional year since the prior inspection after controlling for other variables; however, the increases were small, totaling approximately 15% over five years. OSHA should probably give higher priority to first time inspections than to repeated inspections. The current requirement that at least two years elapse between planned inspections should probably be lengthened.