Most migration literature focuses on large scale movements of people across country borders, while the internal migration trends of countries are commonly neglected, despite the fact that the understanding of internal migration trends is crucial for planning the future for a country. In Iraq a major reason for migration has been security a direct result of its turbulent history since the 1980’s...

This paper looks at examples of recent violence prevention initiatives in Australia and relates these to the situational prevention model. The situational prevention matrix is useful in classifying existing violence prevention approaches, pointing to new ones and providing a framework for understanding the factors relevant to violence and its prevention. Although there have been a range of effo...

In the problematic exploration of the narrative potential of videogames, one of the clearest aspects that bridge stories and games is space. This paper examines the different devices that videogames have used to incorporate stories through spatial design and what is known as environmental storytelling, focusing on the design elements that make the story directly relevant to gameplay beyond worl...

Traditionally, researchers have employed statistical methods to model crime. However, these approaches are limited by being unable to model individual actions and behaviour. Brantingham and Brantingham (1993) described that in their opinion a useful and productive model for simulating crime would have the ability to model the occurrence of crime and the motivations behind it both temporally and...

Objectives Using violent crime data from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania we investigate the performance of an “early warning system” (EWS) for starting/stopping police deployments to hot spots for crime prevention. We show that (1) even the hottest chronic hot spots are dynamic with months “on” and “off” and (2) temporary hot spots are also targets for prevention. We compare the performance of EWS to ...

Crime reduction remains a critical challenge in modern societies. Thus, identifying regions in a city with an elevated risk for future crimes is of high interest to plan prevention strategies. Attempts have been made to apply various statistical and machine learning techniques to predict crime, while computational methods such as agent-based modeling (ABM) can account for the offender and its i...

Governmental environmental protection is often implemented by specifying a standard value of pollution, measured or actual, not to be exceeded. We consider the standard for ozone in the United States, interpreting it using a hypothesis testing framework, and show (in a simplified setting) how a statistician could implement this standard. This implementation is contrasted to the implementation b...

Consumers voluntarily pay significant price premiums to acquire unobservable environmental attributes in green markets. This paper considers the performance of eco-certification policy under circumstances where consumers cannot discern environmental attributes in goods, but are able to form rational expectations regarding the extent of illicit activities in the green market. The main results ar...

This paper assesses how many children and youth have had exposure to programs aimed at preventing various kinds of violence perpetration and victimization. Based on a national sample of children 5-17, 65% had ever been exposed to a violence prevention program, 55% in the past year. Most respondents (71%) rated the programs as very or somewhat helpful. Younger children (5-9) who had been exposed...

Sustainability assessment is being increasingly viewed as an important tool to aid in the shift towards sustainability. However, this is a new and evolving concept and there remain very few examples of effective sustainability assessment processes implemented anywhere in the world. Sustainability assessment is often described as a process by which the implications of an initiative on sustainabi...