The general plan was that all six gangs commenced0 work on the main central road of the city and worked outwards towards the edge. There is no doubt that the great majority of the rats escape poisoning by migrating; it is for this reason most important that the rats should be driven outwards, and much care was given to keeping a steadily advancing periphery to the area freed of rats. The work c...

Social disorganization theories and systemic reformulations provide some of the most compelling and enduring explanations for the development, persistence, and geographic distribution of gang behaviors. Since Thrasher’s (1927) seminal study, generations of researchers have conceived of gangs and gang behaviors as the product of social dislocations associated with urban life, including poverty, ...

Dynamic activity involving social networks often has distinctive temporal patterns that can be exploited in situations involving incomplete information. Gang rivalry networks in particular show a high degree of temporal clustering of activity associated with retaliatory behavior. A recent study of a Los Angeles gang network shows that known gang activity between rivals can be modeled as a self-...

Because youth gangs tend to cluster in disadvantaged neighborhoods, adolescents living in such neighborhoods are more likely to encounter opportunities to join youth gangs. However, in the face of these opportunities, not all adolescents respond in the same manner. Those with preexisting psychopathic tendencies might be especially likely to join. In this study, we tested whether a combination o...

In this paper, we set out to explore some of the many ways in which Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be applied to the field of security. In particular, we investigate what information someone (e.g., an attacker) could infer if they were able to gather data on a person’s friend-groups or device communications (e.g., email interactions) and whether this could be used to predict the “hierarchica...

Life within a gang includes two endemic features: violence and alcohol. Yet, to date, most researchers studying gang behavior have focused on violence and its relationship to illicit drugs, largely neglecting the importance of alcohol in gang life. Because alcohol is an integral and regular part of socializing within gang life, drinking works as a social lubricant, or social glue, to maintain n...

Open Source Software (OSS) has received wide attention from the research community, analyzing both the innovation process of software development by distributed and unrelated teams, and the market dynamics at play between “free” and proprietary software. Up until now, OSS adoption has been irregular, although it seems to be breaking the dominance of existing players in some market segments. In ...