Workplace Violence Against Government Employees, 1994-2011

[Excerpt] The higher rates of workplace violence in the government were partly due to the high rates of workplace violence attributed to law enforcement and security employees (figure 2). The rate of workplace violence for law enforcement and security employees was a high of 672.3 per 1,000 in 1994, declining to 109.3 in 2011. These law enforcement and security occupations accounted for over half of the violence committed against government workers and were concentrated most heavily in state, county, and local government. The estimates of nonfatal violent victimization in the workplace against government employees are based on data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects information on nonfatal crimes against persons age 12 or older, reported and not reported to the police, from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. In this report, nonfatal workplace violence includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault (serious violent offenses), and simple assault against employed persons age 16 or older that occurred while at work or on duty. Information on workplace homicide in this report was obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) (see Methodology). Workplace homicide includes the homicide of employed victims age 16 or older who were killed while at work or on duty and excludes death by accident. Trend estimates of nonfatal workplace violence are based on 2-year rolling averages centered on the most recent year. For example, estimates reported for 2011 represent the average estimates for 2010 and 2011. For some tables in this report, the focus is on the single 10-year aggregate period from 2002 through 2011. These approaches increase the reliability and stability of estimates, which facilitates comparisons over time and between subgroups. Trend estimates of workplace homicide are based on a single most recent year estimates. For example, estimates of workplace homicide for 2011 represent the estimate for 2011 only

Losing the Battle: The Challenges of Military Suicide

This report, by Dr. Margaret Harrell, CNAS Senior Fellow and Director of the Joining Forces Initiative, and Nancy Berglass, CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow, suggests that the health of the all-volunteer force is dependent on our nation's ability to take care of its service members and veterans.According to the report, "Suicide among service members and veterans challenges the health of America's all-volunteer force." From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of approximately one every 36 hours. This tragic phenomenon reached new extremes when the Army reported a record-high number of suicides in July 2011 with the deaths of 33 active and reserve component service members reported as suicides. Additionally, the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 18 veterans die by suicide each day. Yet the true number of veterans who die by suicide, as Harrell and Berglass point out, is unknown. As more American troops return home from war, this issue will require increasingly urgent attention. Harrell and Berglass present a number of concrete policy recommendations that will help reduce the number of service member and veteran suicides, including establishing an Army unit cohesion period; removing the congressional restriction on unit leaders discussing personally owned weapons with service members; and increasing coordination between the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to improve the analysis of veteran suicide data. Despite the efforts of the DOD and the VA to address military suicide, obstacles remain, and policymakers must bring a renewed urgency to their efforts if America is to both honor the sacrifices made by the all-volunteer force and protect its future health and ability to defend the nation

A 7.6m /25-ft/ extreme environments simulator

Stainless steel cylindrical simulation chamber permits testing equipment under extreme cold, high partial vacuums, and intense solar radiation. Applications include heat balance and temperature distribution studies, investigations of subsystem interactions, tests of attitude control equipment and sensors, and acceptance tests of complete systems

Universal inequalities for the eigenvalues of Schrodinger operators on submanifolds

We establish inequalities for the eigenvalues of Schr\"odinger operators on compact submanifolds (possibly with nonempty boundary) of Euclidean spaces, of spheres, and of real, complex and quaternionic projective spaces, which are related to inequalities for the Laplacian on Euclidean domains due to Payne, P\'olya, and Weinberger and to Yang, but which depend in an explicit way on the mean curvature. In later sections, we prove similar results for Schr\"odinger operators on homogeneous Riemannian spaces and, more generally, on any Riemannian manifold that admits an eigenmap into a sphere, as well as for the Kohn Laplacian on subdomains of the Heisenberg group. Among the consequences of this analysis are an extension of Reilly's inequality, bounding any eigenvalue of the Laplacian in terms of the mean curvature, and spectral criteria for the immersibility of manifolds in homogeneous spaces.Comment: A paraitre dans Transactions of the AM