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Year: 2017

Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology

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Abstract

The origins of ‘Offender Profiling’ in the advice given by police medical advisors and other experts to criminal investigations are briefly outlined. The spread of such advice to police inquiries across the United States in the early 1970s, culminating in its uptake by Special Agents of the FBI in the mid-1970s and the widespread promotion of their services through the fictional writings of Thomas Harris and others is noted. The development beyond the early application to serial killer investigations, and the focus on psychopathological explanations, to cover the full gamut of crime from, for instance, arson and burglary to terrorism, is briefly reviewed. The consideration of the social psychological processes inherent in criminality as well as the characteristics of individual offenders also broadens out the concerns of the field. The linking of crimes to a common offender as well as predicting their future actions further widens the range of issues to be dealt with. The many psychological and practical questions raised by these ‘profiling’activities are

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Investigative Psychology

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ABSTRACT

In the last decade, structural properties of several naturally arising networks (the Internet, social networks, the web graph, etc.) have been studied intensively with a view to understanding their evolution. In recent empirical work, Leskovec, Kleinberg, and Faloutsos identify two new and surprising properties of the evolution of many real-world networks: densification (the ratio of edges to vertices grows over time), and shrinking diameter (the diameter reduces over time to a constant). These properties run counter to conventional wisdom, and are certainly inconsistent with graph models prior to their work. In this paper, we present the first model that provides a simple, realistic, and mathematically tractable generative model that intrinsically explains all the well-known properties of the social networks, as well as densification and shrinking diameter. Our model is based on ideas studied empirically in the social sciences, primarily on the groundbreaking work of Breiger (1973) on bipartite models of social networks that capture the affiliation of agents to societies....

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Stratigraphic Concepts

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Abstract

The sequence as an unconformity-bounded stratal unit was proposed by Sloss in 1948 (Sloss et al., 1949;Sloss, 1950, 1963). Sloss (1963) pointed out, "The sequence concept is not new and was already old when it was enunciated by the writer and his colleagues in1948. The concept and practice is as old as organized stratigraphy." Nonetheless, Sloss deservedly is given credit for developing the unconformity-bounded sequence as a stratigraphic tool. Sloss (1963) recognized six packages of strata bounded by interregional unconformities on the North American craton between latest Precambrian and Holocene deposits. He called these stratal packages "sequences" and gave them native American names to emphasize their North American derivation (Sloss, 1988). Sloss (1988) used these cratonic sequences as operational units for practical tasks such as facies mapping, although he felt that these sequences" have no necessary applications to the rock stratigraphy and time stratigraphy of extra cratonic or extracontinental areas" (Sloss, 1963). Although the concept of the cratonic sequence provided the foundation for sequence stratigraphy,

Additional Resource: Previous Stratigraphic Concepts and Terminology

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