Tackling property damage: a guide for local commerce groups, councils and police

Introduction: Property damage is the intentional ‘destruction or defacement of public, commercial and private property’. This covers a range of different acts, including vandalism (eg smashing windows, knocking over letterboxes) and graffiti. Graffiti is the act of marking property with writing, symbols or graphics and is illegal when committed without the property owner’s consent. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Crime Victimisation Survey 2011–2012, malicious property damage was more common than any other property offence, with 7.5 percent of respondents reporting having been a victim in the previous 12 months. The cost of property damage to private property owners, local and state governments and businesses are significant, with an estimated cost of $1,522 per incident (in 2012 dollars) and a total cost to the Australian community of nearly$2 billion each year. Using the handbook This handbook forms part of a series of guides developed by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to support local commerce groups (ie representative groups for business owners and operators), local government and the police to implement evidence-based crime prevention strategies. This handbook has been developed to help guide project managers through the stages of planning, implementing and evaluating a crime prevention project to reduce property damage offences in their local community, particularly in and around commercial precincts. The handbook provides an overview of the three key stages that are involved in delivering a project to reduce property damage: Stage 1: Planning; Stage 2: Implementation; and Stage 3: Review. These steps do not necessarily need to be undertaken in order. Some steps may be undertaken concurrently or it may be necessary to revisit earlier steps. However, it is vital that some steps, such as consulting stakeholders and planning for evaluation, be undertaken early on in the project. Property damage is a very broad offence category. The choice of a particular intervention or interventions will depend largely on the nature of the local problem. Similarly, the successful implementation of a prevention strategy will often be heavily influenced by the characteristics of the local community. This needs to be considered throughout the life of a project

Comparing Before-and After-School Neurocognitive Performance in High School Athletes: Implications for Concussion Management

Abstract Background: Sport-related concussion (SRC) continues be a hot topic in sports medicine. Computerized Neurocognitive Testing (CNT) provides researchers and sports medicine professionals an objective way to manage SRC. Administering CNT comes at the convenience of the student athlete and the sports medicine professional working at the school, which usually results in CNT being administered in the afternoon, or after school. However, little is known how the cognitive fatigue of attending a full day of school influences CNT performance. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to compare before school CNT performance to after school CNT performance in a sample of non-concussed high school student athletes. An exploratory question was posed to evaluate the frequency of chronotypes in a sample of non-concussed high school athletes. Study Design: A posttest only, non-equivalent groups design was used for the study. Methods: There were 31 high school athletes who completed the computerized baseline neurocognitive test. Thirteen athletes completed the test in the morning (before school) and 18 athletes completed the test in the afternoon (after school). Means comparisons for neurocognitive performance were evaluated between the two groups. An independent samples t-test was used to compare the mean ImPACT scores of the two groups and a statistical significance was set at a Bonferroni-corrected p \u3c .05. The Morningness/Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ-SA) was administered to thirteen athletes in the morning (before school) testing session. A frequency table was constructed to compare athletes’ specific chronotypes in the morning testing session. Results: Results from an independent-samples t-test revealed similar performance on verbal memory (t(29) = -1.02, p = .31), visual memory (t(29) = 1.01, p = .32), motor processing speed (t(29) = 0.007, p = .994), reaction time (t(29) = -0.58, p = .57), or total symptom scores (t(29) = -1.53, p = .14) between the two groups. A frequency table was constructed to compare chronotypes in sample of non-concussed high school student athletes. Discussion: The results of this study suggest that completing a computerized neurocognitive test in the morning (before school) or in the afternoon (after school) does not influence performance

Inferences on Criminality Based on Appearance

In our research study, we tested whether people can tell if someone is a criminal or not based on a photograph of their face. The importance of the subject lies in the fact that many people are unfairly judged as criminals based on stereotypes such as race. In this study, we wished to eliminate race and see if any purely facial characteristics are stereotypically defined as criminal or if a person’s initial judgment is an accurate predictor of someone’s character. Extensive research has been dedicated to finding if people have facial features that portray some characteristic about them and this study will focus on criminality. Through the use of a face modulating program, neutral faced photographs were shown to participants with a question that asked if the person in the photograph is a criminal or not. The data gathered will be beneficial in either identifying facial features that are associated with criminals or that show the interesting phenomena of gut instinct

Limit sets and commensurability of Kleinian groups

In this paper, we obtain several results on the commensurability of two Kleinian groups and their limit sets. We prove that two finitely generated subgroups $G_1$ and $G_2$ of an infinite co-volume Kleinian group G \subset \Isom(\mathbf{H}^3) having $\Lambda(G_1) = \Lambda(G_2)$ are commensurable. In particular, it is proved that any finitely generated subgroup $H$ of a Kleinian group G \subset \Isom(\mathbf{H}^3) with $\Lambda(H) = \Lambda(G)$ is of finite index if and only if $H$ is not a virtually fiber subgroup.Comment: 9 page

Insulin direct pancreatic progenitor cell differentiation via Pdx1 regulation

poster abstractDifferentiation of early foregut endoderm into pancreatic endocrine and exocrine cells depends on a sequence of gene expression directed by various signals secreted from nearby tissue. Prior studies have shown that the pancreas is derived from Pdx1+ progenitor cells; however Pdx1 is turned off in pancreatic exocrine cells and α cells while maintained in β cells. Here, using zebrafish genetic knockdown, we showed that insulin secreted by early β cells can repress Pdx1 expression in pancreatic progenitor cells allowing them to differentiate to different pancreatic cell types. Knockdown of insulin gene severely impairs exocrine pancreas development. My results further demonstrate that inhibition of insulin signaling can induce pre-differentiation of Pdx1+ progenitor cells to β cells and Pdx1+ α cells. These Pdx1+ α cells can transdifferentiate to β cells following β cell ablation. Overall, these data represent the first in vivo evidence of local insulin signaling on pancreas development via regulation of Pdx1 expression

“It’ll be our own little Wales out there”: re-situating Bardsey Island for post-devolution Wales in Fflur Dafydd’s Twenty Thousand Saints

This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland […] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on Bardsey, a real small island off the coast of north Wales, the novel employs a multiple-character narrative to explore and critique the various ways in which Bardsey has been constructed in the Welsh cultural imagination. In particular, the novel explores the idea of the island as a queer space. It does so in a way that posits Bardsey in dialectical relation to an ongoing, politically dynamic Welsh mainland. The article suggests that the novel can be read as a mainland appropriation of the island in the post-devolution era. Yet this is simultaneously an enabling imaginative act that confirms the power of literature to create new imaginative geographies

Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently

Disturbed Fossil Group Galaxy NGC 1132

We have analyzed the Chandra archival data of NGC 1132, a well-known fossil group, i.e. a system expected to be old and relaxed long after the giant elliptical galaxy assembly. Instead, the Chandra data reveal that the hot gas morphology is disturbed and asymmetrical, with a cold front following a possible bow shock. We discuss possible origins of the disturbed hot halo, including sloshing by a nearby object, merger, ram pressure by external hotter gas and nuclear outburst. We consider that the first two mechanisms are likely explanations for the disturbed hot halo, with a slight preference for a minor merger with a low impact parameter because of the match with simulations and previous optical observations. In this case, NGC 1132 may be a rare example of unusual late mergers seen in recent simulations. Regardless of the origin of the disturbed hot halo, the paradigm of the fossil system needs to be reconsidered.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Common Cortical Loci Are Activated during Visuospatial Interpolation and Orientation Discrimination Judgements

There is a wealth of literature on the role of short-range interactions between low-level orientation-tuned filters in the perception of discontinuous contours. However, little is known about how spatial information is integrated across more distant regions of the visual field in the absence of explicit local orientation cues, a process referred to here as visuospatial interpolation (VSI). To examine the neural correlates of VSI high field functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to study brain activity while observers either judged the alignment of three Gabor patches by a process of interpolation or discriminated the local orientation of the individual patches. Relative to a fixation baseline the two tasks activated a largely over-lapping network of regions within the occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal and frontal cortices. Activated clusters specific to the orientation task (orientation>interpolation) included the caudal intraparietal sulcus, an area whose role in orientation encoding per se has been hotly disputed. Surprisingly, there were few task-specific activations associated with visuospatial interpolation (VSI>orientation) suggesting that largely common cortical loci were activated by the two experimental tasks. These data are consistent with previous studies that suggest higher level grouping processes -putatively involved in VSI- are automatically engaged when the spatial properties of a stimulus (e.g. size, orientation or relative position) are used to make a judgement

Polyamine biosynthesis is critical for growth and differentiation of the pancreas

The pancreas, in most studied vertebrates, is a compound organ with both exocrine and endocrine functions. The exocrine compartment makes and secretes digestive enzymes, while the endocrine compartment, organized into islets of Langerhans, produces hormones that regulate blood glucose. High concentrations of polyamines, which are aliphatic amines, are reported in exocrine and endocrine cells, with insulin-producing β cells showing the highest concentrations. We utilized zebrafish as a model organism, together with pharmacological inhibition or genetic manipulation, to determine how polyamine biosynthesis functions in pancreatic organogenesis. We identified that inhibition of polyamine biosynthesis reduces exocrine pancreas and β cell mass, and that these reductions are at the level of differentiation. Moreover, we demonstrate that inhibition of ornithine decarboxylase (ODC), the rate-limiting enzyme in polyamine biosynthesis, phenocopies inhibition or knockdown of the enzyme deoxyhypusine synthase (DHS). These data identify that the pancreatic requirement for polyamine biosynthesis is largely mediated through a requirement for spermidine for the downstream posttranslational modification of eIF5A by its enzymatic activator DHS, which in turn impacts mRNA translation. Altogether, we have uncovered a role for polyamine biosynthesis in pancreatic organogenesis and identified that it may be possible to exploit polyamine biosynthesis to manipulate pancreatic cell differentiation