Monthly Archives: November 2018

When scholarship is turned into practice: a product counterfeiting research project now codified in an international standard

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A new International Standards Organization (ISO) publication on product counterfeiting and fraud is featuring two articles published in the Crime Science journal. Dr. John Spink tells us more about this great example of research transferred into an international consensus-based, government-endorsed system, and why it’s critical the research is available open access.

Open Accesss Social Science

Why we should care about the language we use in science

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Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at the Synthetic Biology Research Centre at the University of Nottingham have given ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ a new twist, by focusing on responsible language use. As everybody knows by now, words matter in politics as well as in science. Here is a brief account of how this new focus came about and how it led up to a new thematic series now fully published in Life Sciences, Society and Policy.

Biology Social Science Technology

Conceiving of technologies as autonomous agents takes responsibility away from the people who are using them

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Recent news reports predict that CRISPR-Cas9 and other technologies of synthetic biology will alter the genetic destiny of our species. But what does it mean when we metaphorically envision biotechnology as an autonomous agent with the power to alter the human germline? A new paper in Life Sciences, Society and Policy investigates the rise of a new rhetoric suggesting this technological determinism.

Biology Medicine Social Science Technology

A model to predict Airbnb distribution in cities

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The distribution of Airbnb listings has been the topic of much discussion among citizens and policy-makers, particularly in major cities. In an article published in EPJ Data Science, Giovanni Quattrone and colleagues looked into the many factors determining the spacial penetration of Airbnb in urban centers and developed a model that aims to predict this distribution in other cities. Among others, the presence of creative communities emerges as an important factor in the adoption of the housing plaftform.

Social Science

Problem oriented policing and the Stockholm Prize in Criminology

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The 2018 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, the ‘Nobel Prize’ for criminologists, was awarded to Professor Herman Goldstein. Crime Science published the edited versions of both the lecture given by Professor Goldstein and the 2018 Jerry Lee lecture, given by Professor Malcolm Sparrow. Both accounts fit neatly together to set an agenda for problem-oriented policing as a relevant and effective tool in modern crime prevention.

Social Science

Listening to the changes in the urban rhythm

Cities evolve and undergo constant re-organisation as their population grow. This evolving process makes cities resilient and adaptive but also poses a challenge to analyse urban phenomena. For a long time, there has been evidence that suggests temporal and spatial regularities in crime, but so far studies about this have been based on the assumption that cities are static. A new study published in EPJ Data Science takes these factors into consideration and analyses spatio-temporal variation in criminal occurrences.   

Social Science