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Violence against the police represents an ongoing and serious problem in the USA. In 2014, over 48,000 law enforcement officers assaulted while on duty. Although over one in four of these resulted in injury, little is known about the conditions under which injury is likely to occur. The purpose of this paper is to provide an assessment of the individual and situational factors that predict injurious assaults against law enforcement.

Using logistic regression, the current study analyzes data from the 2012 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) on all assaults against the police (n=8,987) in order to understand, within a routine activities theoretical framework, how individual-level characteristics (i.e. officer and offender characteristics) and situational influences (i.e. assignment type, activity type, and location) predict the likelihood that an assault will result in injury.

Overall, findings suggest support for a routine activities theory of violence against the police. Initiating an arrest, one-officer vehicle type, and incidents occurring on highways/roads were all more likely to result in injurious assaults against the police. Other predictors of injury include officer and offender demographics as well as the time the incident took place.

This research was unable to control for some factors that may influence the likelihood of injury such as wearing body armor. Additionally, NIBRS data are not nationally representative, which limits the generalizability of the findings.

This is one of the first papers to use national data to examine the individual and situational factors that predict injurious assaults against law enforcement.

Clinicians in chronic pain services are facing the need to develop meaningful and methodologically adequate measures, not only to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and to assure quality, but also to support the continued funding and future development of such services. Explores the problems inherent in assessing outcomes in chronic pain. These include the complexity of the chronic pain syndrome itself, the multidimensional nature of interventions and the challenges of defining outcomes in the chronic illness syndrome. The complexity and challenges of assessing outcomes may lead to some reticence in facing the challenges but it is the responsibility of the clinicians to continue developing measures and to communicate to purchasers and other stakeholders the complexity of assessing outcomes in chronic pain.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the challenges faced by leaders who have demonstrated excellence in integrating technology into teaching and learning in P-12 schools in the United States.

This case study of technology savvy P-12 school principals provides insights into how building leaders overcome digital technology innovation challenges. In the summer of 2017, the authors interviewed 12 of the 18 recipients of the NASSP Digital Principal Award. These principals serve as examples of how to lead schools in the digital age.

Using Bolman and Deal's (2013) conceptual framework, the authors analyzed the data around the four frames (i.e., political, structural, human resources, and symbolic) to understand the challenges of being a digital principal. Bolman and Deal posited leaders who function predominantly in a single frame may miss essential organizational change elements.

The authors recognize several limitations in this study. First, the nominating process for the NASSP Digital Principals award involves an application process. Thus, while these principals were recognized for meeting these criteria, it is possible that these awardees were selected based on their nomination materials rather than on actual longitudinal evidence. Second, this study's data were gathered through interviews. The authors did not gather data through student work samples, teacher and staff interviews, or other data points, but rather the single data point of principal perspectives through interviews.

One silver lining from the pandemic is that leading schools cannot be detangled from the digital needs of diverse stakeholders. As such, digital principalship has become the new norm where the principal leads on a screen, teachers teach on a screen, and students learn on a screen. The award-winning digital principals in this study played an integral role in how they message their school's story, how they navigate and design structures, how they overcome political realities, and how they invest in addressing the needs of individuals.

This paper aims to present a multi-axis additive robot manufacturing system (ARMS) and demonstrate its beneficial capabilities.

ARMS was constructed around two robot arms and a fused filament fabrication (FFF) extruder. Quantitative experiments are conducted to investigate the effect of printing at different orientations with respect to gravity, the effect of dynamically changing build orientation with respect to the build tray when printing overhanging features, the effect of printing curved parts using curved, conformal layers. These capabilities are combined to print an integrated demonstrator showing potential practical benefits of the system.

Orientation with respect to gravity has no effect on print quality; dynamically changing build orientation allows overhangs up to 90° to be cleanly printed without support structures; printing an arch with conformal layers significantly increases its strength compared to conventional printing.

The challenge of automatic slicing algorithms has not been addressed for multi-axis printing. It is shown that ARMS could eventually enable printing of fully-functional prototypes with embedded components.

This work is the first to prove that the surface roughness of an FFF part is independent of print orientation with respect to gravity. The use of two arms creates a novel system with more degrees of freedom than existing multi-axis printers, enabling studies on printing orientation relationships and printing around inserts. It also adds to the emerging body of multi-axis literature by verifying that curved layers improve the strength of an arch which is steeply curved and printed with the nozzle remaining normal to the curvature.

The aim of the Game On project is to adapt and create highly engaging and motivating serious games to teach employment skills to prisoners, ex‐offenders and those at risk of offending (termed offenders). The target audience first trialled existing serious games with work‐based educational content to identify their limitations and to highlight gaps in provision. From this, a development plan evolved for the adaptation of these materials and the creation of new materials using 3D games mods' to teach induction information to prisoners in an accessible format. Games features include an ability to personalise educational content, locale detection for use in a variety of countries, accessibility features including signing tracks and closed captions and accompanying activities for a blended learning approach. Retrial of these serious games and games mods' with trainers and offenders found that they provided positive measures of engagement and effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to help improve a higher education institution’s research profile by using existing resources and existing research outputs.

This study was based on quantitative data extracted manually from QS University Rankings-Asia 2016, the 2015 Ranking of Pakistani higher education institutions (HEI) and ResearchGate (RG). Resultant data were loaded into Excel and analyzed in SPSS version 21.

The results of this study indicate that, while there is no direct correlation between an institution’s national/international ranking and its respective RG score, there is a tendency for lower-ranked institutions to have a lower RG score.

This study was limited to data extracted from RG; however, it would be useful to apply the same methodology to other relevant academic scholarly network sites (ASNS).

This paper has suggested strategies which may be of relevance to those institutions in other countries which are aspiring to lift their national ranking through improved research profiles. Libraries are important contributors to the support of institutional research goals.

There have been no previous published research studies on either the potential for ASNS to contribute to enhancing research outcomes for Pakistani HEI or the role that libraries could play in supporting these outcomes.

Looks at the problems of logistics in military operations and today’s commercial businesses. Traces the development of logistics management from a subordinate activity within a product producing entity to its performance by a separate entity which specializes in this area and requires a strategic alliance. Looks at this issue from the perspective of the outsourcing company and the logistical company. Considers what happens when this process is reversed and provides implications for the future.

Criminology has produced more than a century of informative research on the social correlates of criminal behavior. Recently, a growing body of theoretical and empirical work has begun to apply evolutionary principles, particularly from life history theory (LHT), to the study of crime. As this body of research continues to grow, it is important that work in this area synthesizes evolutionary principles with the decades of sociological research on the correlates of crime. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The current paper reviews the brief history of research applying life history concepts to criminology, providing an overview of the underlying framework, exploring examples of empirically testable and tested hypotheses that have been derived from the theory, discussing cautions and criticisms of life history research, and discussing how this area of research can be further integrated with existing theory.

A growing body of research has, with relative consistency, associated indicators of a faster life history strategy with aggression and violence in humans and across the animal kingdom. Research into these associations is still vulnerable to genetic confounding and more research with genetically sensitive designs is needed. The use of hypotheses informed by evolutionary insight and tested with genetically sensitive designs provides the best option for understanding how environmental factors can have an impact on violent and criminal behavior.

The current paper provides an updated review of the growing application of LHT to the study of human behavior and acknowledges criticisms and areas of concern that need to be considered when forming hypotheses for research.

This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs.

The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies.

The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest.

This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur.

This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories.

This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.

This is an exploratory and qualitative study to consider approaches to capture, analyse and monitor perceptions from big data, to inform and contribute to place management research and practice of botanic gardens (BGs). This paper aims to address the ongoing significant threat to BGs due to funding being cut and the need to inform and develop sustainable revenue streams for their survival.

Guiding research questions for this study were: ‘What are the perceived strengths and areas for development for 2 BGs via a Leximancer Automatic Content Analysis (ACA) of TripAdvisor online reviews; and do they match BGs purpose of scientific research, conservation, display and education?’ A content analysis of 582 online reviews from 2007 to 2017 follows qualitative methodology techniques using a combination of manual and automatic text analysis (Leximancer text mining software). These approaches enabled a comparison of online TripAdvisor reviews with Likert-type or rating scale items of 1 to 5 stars.

Insights revealed the use of Leximancer and TripAdvisor (or similar innovations) as tools for potential place management, place marketing communications and monitoring purposes. Predominant perceptions extracted from reviews are not concerned with documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific discovery, conservation, display and education. Reviews clearly focus more upon aesthetics, facilities and services, which support previous studies. Overall, reviews highlighted positive sentiments towards the BGs.

Limitations link to limited data across two BGs, synthesis and meaning of complex perceptions, matters of subjectivity and time needed to interpret information. Implications enable insights into BG “place” gleaned from big data in the form of user-generated content and electronic Word-Of-Mouth using Leximancer; viewed as a measure alongside management action plans. Future studies could strengthen debate and action regarding the use of Leximancer, and also public perception of BGs’ core functions, importance and value. The research supports potential to monitor and transform perceptions, values and beliefs. Outcomes could eventually inform policy and generate a much-needed shift in funds and resources for BGs by highlighting their relevance and value to society.

An empirical and methodological contribution via peer reviewed studies of visitor perceptions via online reviews of Britain’s BGs “place” and “space” analysed with Leximancer have never been published. This study critically explores potential visitor and place management needs of BGs. Managers can make better use of big data from social media platforms/digital channels, using a novel type of data analytical software like Leximancer for strategic planning; with more informed approaches to place management, innovation and development. A key contribution of this study is this ACA methodological approach for place management.